Geek stuff – Page 61 – a sibilant intake of breath

Abusing the word ‘green’

I have written before about how the word ‘sustainable’ is frequently abused. People often refer to anything done with the slightest bit of environmental awareness as ‘sustainable’. Thus, it is ‘sustainable’ to bring your own mug to Starbucks or turn off the lights when you leave the room. In reality, a sustainable process or situation is one that can be carried on indefinitely. Sustainable electricity generation must be based on renewable sources of energy, and sustainable agriculture must have no non-renewable inputs.

If anything, the word ‘green’ is even more abused than the word ‘sustainable’. The U.S. Air Force claims that its synthetic jet fuel is ‘green’ even though it is made with fossil fuels. Any time there is a marginal improvement in a dirty process, it is heralded as a ‘green’ accomplishment.

None of this is to say that small improvements don’t matter. The global energy system needs to be reformed from the ground up, in big ways as well as small. What I am arguing is that we should not allow the definition of words like ‘green’ and ‘sustainable’ to be diluted to the point where they are just public relations tools. A green initiative or innovation is one that contributes meaningfully to the kind of sustainable world we need to build. It is not just something that can be marketed to those who find it chic to care about the environment.

Signals intelligence and historiography

In intelligence, the protection of sources and methods is vitally important to continued success. There are few pieces of evidence more convincing than an target’s own encrypted communication, but making it plain that it has been intercepted and decoded is likely to drive the target to tighten security and change up their systems. As such, there is always a balance to be struck between providing authoratative information in the present and retaining the capacity to do so in the future. For example, when Neville Chamberlain read out decrypted Russian telegrams in Parliament in 1927, it led to them switching up their cipher systems and making broader use of one time pads.

All this has consequences for the writing and understanding of history. Roughly, historiography refers to the history and methodology of history. Of particular importance is the history of the lessons drawn from historical events. For instance, the lessons drawn from the two world wars. Very frequently, politicians, historians, and members of the general public draw conclusions without the benefit of access to classified materials, such as intercepted and decrypted military and diplomatic communication.

An example is the Dieppe raid of 1942. In Richard Aldrich’s GCHQ: The Uncensored Story of Britain’s Most Secret Intelligence Agency, the author describes how poor cipher security on the part of the British meant that the Germans had five days warning before the supposed surprise attack. I don’t know when that information became publicly available, but it is a fair bet that it was not until well after many of those involved in the raid had made their private judgments about why it failed.

Arguably, all this is an important reason for continuing to study historical events that are fairly long-past. It might seem questionable what utility there is in studying the Russo-Japanese War in 2010, but one good answer might be how the decreased political sensitivity means that formerly closely-guarded documents are now accessible to scholars. We will probably be waiting many decades before some of the most important documents relating to contemporary international events become open to scrutiny.

Change card

Change is annoying. Whenever I get anything smaller than a $1 coin, I dump it as soon as possible into either a big jar at home or a big jar at work. My pockets have enough holes in them already, without carrying around thin-edged metal objects.

It is no surprise that there are companies that make machines that eat change and spit out a credit for groceries, taking a fairly large commission. The other night, an idea along similar lines occurred to me: a contactless ‘change card’.

It would use the same RFID technology that credit cards are now adding. When you paid for something in cash, you would get back bills and perhaps $1 and $2 coins. The rest of the balance would get wirelessly added to your card. If they were privately deployed, the issuer would probably take some commission, but perhaps it would be worth having governments do in order to save them most of the expense and bother of making coins.

The cards would not be registered or tracked, but they would have a $10 limit. When you accumulated a balance at that level, you would need to buy small things like newspapers, coffee, or sandwiches to bring the balance down. This would be to reduce the risk of them being used for money laundering or other nefarious purposes.

The question – I suppose – is why not go whole-hog and use an entirely electronic payment system? That option is certainly already open to people, and for various reasons many people keep using cash. Giving people the opportunity to use cash without messing around with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters seems like a good idea.

Your Money: The Missing Manual

J.D. Roth’s Your Money: The Missing Manual is a sensible and accessible guide to personal finance. It covers the psychology of money and happiness, goal-setting, budgeting, managing debt, frugality, banking, credit, taxes, investing, and more. While at least some of the contents are likely to be familiar to any reader, before the pick up the book, I found it valuable as a kind of checklist. It helped to identify areas in which I didn’t know as much as I should, and helped me come up with a half-dozen financial tasks I should undertake.

The book places particular emphasis on the importance of cashflow: getting into a situation where income each month is serving sufficiently to cover basic needs, work toward reducing debt, set resources aside for emergencies, and advance long-term financial plans like home ownership and retirement. The book isn’t shy about giving advice. For instance, it expresses the view that actively managed mutual funds are an exploitative industry from the perspective of investors, and endorsing regular contributions to index funds as the best long-term investment strategy.

Two flaws with the book, from my perspective, were an inconsistent level of detail and a U.S. focus. I cannot legitimately complain about the latter, since that is the target audience. Still, Canadians should know that some of the content on insurance, retirement, and taxes is not appropriate to them.

One nice little thing about the book is that it is printed on unusually good paper, with a pleasantly robust cover for a paperback. The author points out how getting value for money doesn’t mean going for the cheapest option, but rather for the one that serves your needs best relative to its price. The book’s philosophy is reflected in its construction.

Science and politics in Canada

I think it’s fair to say that political conservatives have long had a rocky relationship with science. While they approve of the chain from basic science to technology to economic growth, science has also repeatedly brought to light facts that undermine conservative ideologies and religious perspectives. With that in mind, this is an interesting development:

Today, the union that represents federal government scientists launches a campaign to put the spotlight on science for the public good.

“Federal government scientists work hard to protect Canadians, preserve their environment and ensure our country’s prosperity but they face dwindling resources and confusing policy decisions,” says Gary Corbett, president of the Institute.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada is a national union. Among its 59,000 federal and provincial members are 23,000 professionals who deliver, among other knowledge products, scientific research, testing and advice for sound policy-making.

The recent decision to end the mandatory long form census is the latest step in a worrying trend away from evidence-based policy making. Restrictive rules are curtailing media and public access to scientists, while cutbacks to research and monitoring limit Canada’s ability to deal with serious threats and potential opportunities.

This follows an editorial in Nature criticizing the Canadian government:

Concerns can only be enhanced by the government’s manifest disregard for science. Since prime minister Stephen Harper came to power, his government has been sceptical of the science on climate change and has backed away from Canada’s Kyoto commitment. In January, it muzzled Environment Canada’s scientists, ordering them to route all media enquires through Ottawa to control the agency’s media message. Last week, the prime minister and members of the cabinet failed to attend a ceremony to honour the Canadian scientists who contributed to the international climate-change report that won a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

While factual claims about the nature of the universe do have political ramifications – think of the reality of climate change, or evolution – that doesn’t mean that the expression of factual information is a political act. Further, society has an enormous interest in the dissemination of accurate information, and the formulation of policy on the basis of such information. As such, it is encouraging to see scientists asserting their right to express their expert opinions, even when doing so is politically challenging for the government.

Sharpie pens

I am particular about my pens. I want them to work reliably, produce nice looking text, and not bleed through pages. For several years, I used Pilot’s excellent line of G2 pens. Unfortunately, these have become harder and harder to find. In fact, they seem to have been displaced by imitators that resemble them, such as the Zebra Sarasa.

I have been reduced to stocking up on G2s when visiting friends and family in the United States (especially the green and red models, which seem to be totally unavailable in Canada). When visiting Vermont a few months ago, I cleaned out a Staples location of their entire stock of four-colour packages of G2s. I only really needed the green ones (for taking notes in books and magazines), but they are only available along with the rest.

Given that awkwardness, I decided to take Emily’s suggestion and try the new Sharpie pens. I have been using the blue and black models for a couple of weeks and am generally very happy with them. They have fine points and ink that dries quickly. They don’t bleed through even thin Moleskine pages, and seem to write well on a variety of surfaces. The only downside I have discovered is that the ink from the blue model looks rather thin and translucent compared with the Pilot G2 blue.

In any event, it’s worth spending $4 to give a couple of Sharpie pens a try.

The IPv6 transition

Internet protocol is the principle communication protocol used to transmit packets of information across the internet. All devices that are connected to the internet are assigned internet protocol addresses (IP addresses) which consists of a 32-bit number. That may have been adequate when the most widely used version of internet protocol was deployed in 1981 (IPv4), but it only allows 4,294,967,296 possible IP addresses. As an increasing number of phones, computers, appliances, vehicles, and more get connected to the internet, the number of addresses available through IPv4 is rapidly dwindling. The Number Resources Organization expects them to be used up in a few months.

IPv6 is the successor to IPv4, and it has been in the works for over a decade. It supports addresses of 128 bits: providing enormously more than IPv4. Unfortunately, there are major barriers to making the transition. Every single device between the endpoints of any IPv6 communication needs to be IPv6 compatible. As a result, the transition will be ugly and difficult.

What’s going to happen? One possible bridging approach, while we are waiting for IPv6 to be fully implemented, is Network Address Translation (NAT). This is what your router at home does. From the perspective of your internet service provider (ISP), your whole house has one IP address. The router splits up that address between all the devices you use, making sure the connections from each to outside devices are properly managed. Faced with a shortage of IP addresses, it is likely that some organizations will move this process ‘upstream’ and create situations where groups of households share single IP addresses.

It’s hard to anticipate what consequences will arise from all of this, but it’s something worth keeping an eye on, at least for the geekier and more internet-dependent members of the populace.

Articles v. blog posts

Over on Slate, Farhad Manjoo has an article up on the convergent trends between blogs and magazines online: magazines are sometimes adopting the reverse-chronological format once definitively linked with blogs, while some blogs are aiming to look more like magazines.

While the distinction between ‘articles’ and ‘blog posts’ can probably never be expressed in a definitive way, there is something to the distinction drawn by Anna Holmes, founding editor of Jezebel:

Pieces that are primarily “reactions to something that already existed in the media or on the Internet”—the bulk of Jezebel content in its early days—are “blog posts.” But Jezebel also publishes many essays that are not riffs on outside material. These weightier, original pieces aren’t set off in any special graphical way on the site, but Holmes still thinks of them as articles, not blog posts.

It’s definitely easier to post a brief reaction to something interesting on another site (as this post does…) than it is to generate something substantive and original.

Bedbug irradiation services

Travelers and buyers of used furniture now need to add a costly bedbug infestation to the set of problems they can bring home with them. Coming home from a trip on which you got bitten generates the fear that your clothes, bags, and personal effects have been infested with bugs or eggs. Since the bugs can live for months without food, the danger is a persistent one.

Conventional advice is to wash clothes in hot water and dry them on hot, then freeze everything else for a few weeks. That can be slow and impractical, however. The anxiety of a friend of mine made me think about better options, and I think I have one. Somebody should open a shop where your possessions can be exposed to gamma radiation from cobalt-60, at a level sufficient to kill bedbugs and their eggs. The service would be akin to a laundromat, but entirely focused on bedbug decontamination services.

Cobalt-60 is already used to irradiate food. Apparently, hundreds of animal feeding studies have been conducted on the safety of irradiated food, and the risks associated with having bags and clothing irradiated seem likely to be less than any associated with irradiating food that is then eaten.

While consumers are wary of irradiated food, the prospect of killing bedbugs using ionizing radiation might actually carry a kind of cruel appeal. They are about the most despised animals on the planet, after all.

Testing BuryCoal

As discussed recently, there seem to be a few key ideas about climate change that aren’t yet widely recognized or discussed, much less accepted. The major purpose of BuryCoal.com is to help spread these: arguing that we don’t need to burn all the world’s fossil fuels;that doing so would be extremely dangerous; and that we can choose to leave the carbon embedded in these reserves safely underground forever.

I have personally spent much of the past five years reading and writing about climate change issues. As such, there are a lot of ideas (and a lot of terminology) which is already very familiar to me, where it might not be to most educated people.

If readers are willing, I would really appreciate if they would have a look at BuryCoal.com and the ‘Why bury coal?’ page and identify elements that are confusing, too technical, or otherwise problematic. It doesn’t have much value if is simply serves as a forum for those who agree with the message. It needs to be able to speak to those who have different views, as well.

As always, the site is also looking for contributors.