Geek stuff – Page 40 – a sibilant intake of breath

A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI

Graham Chapman, one of the Monty Python gang, drank himself to death at 48, having already been an alcoholic for 23 years when he was 37. He died exactly 20 years after the first recording of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A Liar’s Autobiography: Volume VI was published nine years earlier, written by Chapman, his long-time romantic partner David Sherlock, Alex Martin, David Yallop, and Douglas Adams. As you might expect from the autobiography of a man who quite knowingly drank himself to death (he was a doctor, after all), the book is pretty depressing in places. Despite that, I thought it conveyed an honest and intimate perspective of a man who was generous and humanitarian but who often struggled with life.

I am not sure what to make of a self-confessed “liar’s autobiography”. The whole concept of autobiography is that a person uses a reasonably honest re-telling of their life events to share their experiences and personality with you. When you don’t know which (if any) experiences are genuine, it makes it difficult to know what Chapman and his cabal of co-authors were really trying to convey. If the general thrust of the anecdotes is reasonably accurate, it seems fair to conclude that it was easy to be drunk nearly all the time and have a great deal of casual gay sex in England at the time when Monty Python was performing and making films. The book includes quite a few rather terrifying and tragic stories, including hangings, physical assaults, aggressive police questioning, and perilous mountain climbing accidents.

A Liar’s Autobiography is also a reminder of how all fame is fleeting, and perhaps provincial as well. Chapman is constantly name-dropping, but the names he uses to try to impress readers are virtually all totally unknown to me. The book is aggressively non-linear, and features relatively little discussion of how Monty Python worked. There is more, all told, on the many sufferings associated with alcoholism, from the chronic liver damage that accompanies ongoing drinking to the agonies of withdrawal after a high level of dependence has been reached.

In an epilogue, fellow Python Eric Idle calls Chapman “the only true anarchist in Monty Python”. Chapman himself explains that he is “against any large organization, communist, capitalist or religious, that pretends to know best”. Chapman expresses a libertarian view of how the state should let people use their own bodies how they like:

I’ve always believed that people should be allowed to do what they want with their bodies. After all, it’s all they’ve got. I agree with that law that it is wrong for everyone to go round poking other people with sharp pointed sticks, but if someone wants to poke himself with a sharp pointed stick, that’s fine by me. They can go and batter themselves to death with huge lumps of poisoned granite for all I care.

This seems somewhat linked to Chapman’s rather mechanistic view of life itself. People, he says, are “tubes – hollow cylinders of flesh”.

Eric Idle’s epilogue summarizes this book better than I can: “What shines through in this book is the staggering honesty – the brilliance of truth that only a self-proclaimed liar could achieve. Facts and stories that we would have murdered our grandmothers to conceal are cheerfully paraded for our edification. This is life viewed as comedy, that only a doctor faced constantly with the physical comedy of our bodies can see”.

Advice to supervillains – killing your own scientists

One classic mistake made by cartoon supervillains concerns the complicated piece of machinery that is inevitably at the heart of their secret plan. It might be a time travel device of some sort, or a machine that strips the opposing superhero of their power, or a key part of a world domination scheme.

As a way of illustrating just how evil and ruthless they really are, supervillains will often kill the whole team of scientists who built the thing, perhaps by having them all drink poisoned champagne. This does make a certain measure of sense. Killing the scientists keeps them from going off and telling people about what they did, which could cause problems for you.

That being said, I strongly object to the timing that is frequently used for these killings. The supervillain will kill off the science team right before testing the device for the first time. As anyone who has worked on anything remotely technical and complex can tell you, this is the worst possible time to kill off all the people involved. Chances are, the machine will not work properly on the first try and that the only people who can figure out what went wrong are the people who designed and built the machine.

By all means, kill the science team once you are confident that you have a machine that will do what you want. Build it, test it, build an improved model, build a backup copy or two, and then hand out the glasses of killer champagne.

Where Macs come from

This week’s episode of This American Life is powerful and thought- provoking. It’s about manufacturing in China, the ten million person city of Shenzhen, and how most of our computers and phones and miscellaneous gadgets are made by hand by millions of workers working at least twelve hours a day.

Apple has been conducting its own investigations of labour practices among its suppliers and has been publishing annual reports about them since 2007.

—
Posted from my iPhone

[Update: 25 March 2012] This American Life discovered that the episode they broadcast on Apple factories contained a number of fabrications. They have retracted the episode and released another detailing what went wrong in their fact checking process: “We’ve discovered that one of our most popular episodes contained numerous fabrications. This week, we detail the errors in Mike Daisey’s story about visiting Foxconn, which makes iPads and other products for Apple in China. Marketplace’s China correspondent Rob Schmitz discovered the fabrications.”

Tagging explosives

On a television show I was watching, they mentioned that C-4 explosive is tagged in a way that aids the tracing of its origin if it is used in an illicit way like in a terrorist attack.

Possible method of tagging

I have no idea if that is true, but an idea did occur to me about how it could be done if an organization wanted to. What you need is a collection of chemicals that are stable – that can survive an explosion – and which are rare and can be detected individually. Say you have a set of six such chemicals: A, B, C, D, E, and F.

Each is essentially one bit of data: a zero if absent in the explosive in question and a one if it is present. With six bits of data, you could then label 64 different batches with a unique combination of those chemicals. They would range from 000000 to 111111.

As the number of chemicals used increases, the number of distinct batches you can tag increases rapidly, according to the formula 2^x, where x is the number of different chemicals used.

After undetonated explosives or an explosion is found, tests could be administered to detect the presence or absence of the marker chemicals. Based on the combination of chemicals present, the marker could be read.

Uses of tagging

If you had a couple of dozen distinct chemicals, you could label a huge number of distinct batches. You could have factories making the stuff identify whether it was sold for civilian use or military use, where it was to be initially sold, etc. You would then have a forensic ability to trace back the explosive to the point of manufacture and maybe identify who was the final user.

This could be especially useful if you suspect a legitimate customer is illicitly trafficking in explosives. Say you suspect a mining company of providing explosives to paramilitary groups, or you suspect an allied country of providing explosives to armed rebels in another country. You could make sure to provide the suspect entity with a specially tagged batch, and then you could take samples at sites of suspected use and look for the markers.

Of course, you could also get caught in the act yourself if you got careless. Someone could work out your marker system for themselves or buy information about it from someone who knows. Then, they might be able to find cases where you were redistributing explosives yourselves through illicit channels.

Also, there will always be some homemade explosives like triacetone triperoxide (TATP) that groups will have access to, but denying them the ability to make covert use of explosives manufactured for legal military purposes or commercial use could nonetheless be valuable.

Nuclear power and passive safety

One thing all the world’s nuclear reactors have in common is that – unless they are constantly cooled with large volumes of water – they will eventually explode. This is because even after nuclear fission has been stopped, the decay heat from the fuel rods is sufficient to melt them and prompt dangerous interactions between water and their zircaloy cladding.

It seems highly likely that many more nuclear reactors will be built around the world, prompted by factors including concern about climate change, worries about fossil fuel availability, and the enthusiasm of states for nuclear technology. Today’s reactor designs suffer from the risks mentioned above. I don’t know how feasible it would be to design reactors which are passively safe (and which will automatically enter a safe state, without human action, after a major accident), but it seems worth investigating seriously. It seems much more prudent to build machines that slow down and cool off when left alone, rather than those that heat up unstoppably until their liquified contents melt through the containment around them and poison the nearby environment.

Inside Canadian Intelligence

Edited by Dwight Hamilton, Inside Canadian Intelligence: Exposing the New Realities of Espionage and International Terrorism is an interesting read, though I would say that there are some important counterarguments to the main ideological positions adopted by the various authors.

The book describes Canada’s various present and historical intelligence services, including the intelligence branch of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), military intelligence, and others. There are chapters on counterintelligence, on the Air India attack and subsequent investigations, on special forces (including JTF-2), and on various other topics connected to matters of Canadian security and intelligence. For those wanting to get a better understanding of the history and present operations of these organizations, it is probably a worthwhile read. There is also some interesting information on technical capabilities and techniques, such as some information on the RADAR and infrared data fed into NORAD, how internal government security screenings are conducted, automated facial recognition, how some information from human sources is validated, and voice recognition in mass surveillance of telecommunication.

Most books written by people closely linked to intelligence organizations have a tendency to represent the officers of those organizations as heroes who can do no wrong, opposed by inhuman monsters, and hampered by meddling politicians and judges (for example). What this ignores is the dangers posed to the general public by intelligence services themselves, as well as the willingness they sometimes demonstrate to protect their own interests at the expense of the general public. Oversight may occasionally prevent good things from being done, but it surely prevents abuses as well.

Another assumption I question is that it is appropriate to categorize counterterrorism efforts as a ‘war’. First, I don’t think that is accurate. Terrorism is a tactic, not an entity that can be defeated. Secondly, I think it causes problems when we describe the fight against terrorism as a war. It justifies a lack of oversight, and can be used to justify human rights violations. It also creates the misleading impression that the ‘War on Terror’ could end. In reality, as long as there are people willing to use violence for political purposes, there will be terrorism. It can no more be ended than tax evasion or petty crime.

Above all, what this book lacks is a sense of perspective. Terrorism really isn’t such a huge problem. It kills far fewer people than chronic or infectious diseases, war, or accidents. It’s a mistake to turn our society upside down or spend an excessive amount of money trying to stop people from using certain violent tactics. We need to remain aware of the importance of other priorities, as well as the ways in which ‘being at war’ corrodes the integrity of democratic states. One example of such corrosion is the dangerous tendency of states to spy on everybody, in hopes of catching the few people who may be up to no good. Because it is so powerful, and has so many abilities to hide its mistakes and abuses, the state is far more dangerous than any terrorist cell, and it is critical to human freedom that the power of states be kept in check.

By all means, we should be grateful for the good work done by the security services, but we must also recognize the danger that they will go too far and become violators of rights, as well as the much greater importance of other governmental undertakings. Dealing with cancer and providing a better education for children are far more important to the welfare of Canadians than stopping terrorist attacks. It’s a shame that we are continuing to spend billions on the latter, while government is cutting back on virtually everything else.

Stratfor hacked

A few times before, I have mentioned the website Stratfor. They normally provide a very ‘realist‘ take on global politics. They have interesting sources of information and arguments, and I have found them to be worth reading.

Unfortunately, their entire database of past and present subscribers has been stolen by hackers and released online. If you have ever given them your credit card number, you should probably contact your credit card company immediately to cancel it and have a new card issued with an updated number.

It’s probably a good idea to change your credit card number every few years, regardless. The people at MasterCard said that website hacks like this happen all the time. So often, in fact, that they didn’t want to hear any details about it at all. There are probably a lot of websites that would not notify their users in the event of a breach like the one Stratfor has suffered.

As a side note, this hack demonstrates a couple of things about security. First, the more you hold yourself up as being an expert about security, the more alluring a target you risk making yourself for hackers driven by prestige. This is why the websites of people like the CIA are targeted so often (though such hacks probably aren’t indicative of significant security breaches). Second, there are reputational risks associated with having lax security, especially if you represent yourself as a security expert. I have no doubt that Stratfor’s business will suffer at least a bit because of this.

Space tourism is pointless and damaging

Henry Shue has written convincingly about the moral importance of the rich giving up luxuries for the sake of fighting climate change, before the poor are asked to give up necessities. As he explains it, even in an emergency you sell the jewelry before you sell the blankets.

The ultimate example of luxury emissions is probably private spaceflight, as described in Nature recently. All that fuel gets burned so that a few really rich people can get to a high altitude and gawk for a while before returning to Earth.

Surely, our climate policies should curb such behaviours.

Precision and avoiding error

It is fundamental to the nature of truth as accessed by human beings that there is a trade-off between how precise a view we express about a particular subject and how certain we can be of avoiding error.

This can be expressed in a basic way by thinking about estimation. If we are asked to guess how many years Genghis Khan lived for, it is safe to say ‘between 1 and 1000’. It’s not very precise, but the real figure is in there somewhere. Every time we specify a narrower band, we increase the risk of missing the target.There is an inescapable connection between providing a more precise answer and running a greater risk of excluding the answer that is true.

This remains true when it comes to questions that are much more complex and abstract, such as “what is likely to happen in Afghanistan after NATO leaves” or “what are the likely consequences of climate change on international security”. In responding to complex questions, we probably need to acknowledge the limits of what is really knowable. We have limited information, and often a limited span of time in which to make choices. Dealing with that probably requires an awareness of the precision/certainty trade-off, along with a willingness to keep all possibilities in mind, even if they are unproven.

Quite possibly, we should be more willing to err on the side of caution when the level of uncertainty is high and at least some large credible risks seem to exist. When a nuclear reactor may be melting down, it may be a good idea to inject the core with seawater. Doing so ruins the reactor for future electricity generation, but reduces the risk of a terrible outcome in which a meltdown is coupled with a large-scale containment failure. Excluding the worst possibilities usually involves real costs of various sorts, but it is probably better to accept the certainty of a known loss to significantly reduce the probability of an unknown but potentially much worse outcome. In short, it pays to play it safe on important matters.

Encouraging re-gifting

I don’t think it is appropriate that our society has a general stigma against ‘re-gifting‘: the practice of giving away something that was itself received as a gift.

In many ways, re-gifting is a rational response to the fundamental problem of gift-giving, namely that gift-givers are not necessarily able to pick things that gift-recipients will want. Very often, the cost to the giver will substantially exceed the benefit to the recipient. For example, you might get an inferior version of something you already own, and which nobody needs more than one of. There are also clothes that don’t fit or do not fit your style, books you will never read, foods you do not enjoy, and so on.

Allowing the recipient to give the gift to somebody who may like it more reduces the odds that it will sit unused and unappreciated in a corner or a closet somewhere.

I wonder if there is any concrete way in which the tolerance for re-gifting within society can be increased. Perhaps there should be a designated day, sometime after Christmas, on which people are encouraged to re-gift. In particular, they should be encouraged to give away anything that has little or no value to them, but which they know will be valued by somebody else.

For the record, as a utilitarian I encourage people to re-gift unwanted things that I have given to them at various times. I can’t promise that I won’t be a bit disappointed to learn that I have chosen something for you that has no value, but I will be glad at least that it is going to somebody who will have a use for it.