Category: Geek stuff

If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.

Why we cannot wait for climate science to be completely settled

To those who say that we should just wait and see how the climate changes, without taking action to reduce our emissions, I offer the following analogy:

To assume the best possible outcome, and to make plans only on that basis, is akin to the United States assuming they would be ‘greeted as liberators’ in Iraq. Even if things had unfolded that way, it would have been irresponsible to make plans only on that basis. If they had drawn up contingency plans, and taken pre-emptive actions, on the grounds that serious opposition was possible, nobody would have thought that behaviour inappropriate, even if the outcome ended up being better than feared.

Arguing that we should wait for the science to be completely settled means waiting until climate change has actually taken place. Given the complexity of the climate system, and the fact that we only have one planet to work with, there is no way we can ever be 100% confident that our models and projections are correct. Therefore, to delay action until we have certainty is to delay action until it can no longer have any effect. It is akin to starting your contingency planning long after the war has ended.

The Invention of Lying

The film Ricky Gervais film The Invention of Lying is based around a fascinating central conceit, but ultimately fails to explore it in an interesting way. The film imagines a world in which people are simply incapable of telling falsehoods, and in which they automatically accept any statement from another person as true. While bits of the film are very funny, it is disappointing that the protagonist who learns how to lie uses it for such uninspired things as cheating at casinos and manipulating the affections of the pretty but dull female lead. Indeed, beyond her appearance there is never any indication of why she is an especially desirable partner. You would think someone with truly awesome powers to manipulate all of humanity might dream up some grander projects than getting rich and rearing children with the woman he happened to meet just before his discovery.

One awkward issue is that people frequently provide bad information for reasons other than deceit. They provide old information, misunderstand things, get bad readings from equipment, and so on. In any functional world, people would need to be able to realize that these sorts of errors occur. Furthermore, this kind of basic scrutiny seems absolutely necessary for the development of science and technology. It is hard to see how people could be capable of parsing out bad information that others provide by accident, while simultaneously being unable to imagine that someone might intentionally tell them something incorrect. As such, Gervais’ world would either be seriously lacking in scientific or technological sophistication or simply be very improbable.

I also think a world without lying would be dramatically different from ours in ways that go beyond dialogue, the procedures at banks, and the kind of films that are made. I doubt that the basic political and social structures in such a world would so closely resemble ours, given the extent to which falsehood and misinformation are fundamental to our political and economic systems, and even our day-to-day interactions. The film never shows much of the world beyond the first world town in which it is set. You have to wonder what the world at large would resemble. For instance, it seems unlikely that dictators could emerge or endure in a world where they needed to be entirely truthful. It is also interesting to imagine what the world of international relations and diplomacy would look like.

The actual invention of lying is what security researchers would call a ‘class break’ – a discovery that renders an entire system vulnerable by creating new sorts of attacks. For instance, while learning the combination to one lock could permit a security breach, realizing that all padlocks of a certain type can be opened with a shim is a class break. Being able to lie to people who would automatically accept anything you claimed as true would be an overwhelming instance of this effect. Indeed, it seems impossible that in a world governed by natural selection, the ability to be deceitful would not spread rapidly, completely eliminating the trusting world that existed before, and which was in an unstable state as soon as lying became possible. You would eventually expect a new equilibrium to arise with key features present in our own world: from mental scrutiny to background checks to legal systems designed to minimize the damage caused by malicious individuals.

In any event, the film prompts some interesting thinking, even if it sticks to a rather conventional romantic comedy structure (complete with the nasty bad guy competing for the trophy woman in question). I suppose the film’s value lies more in the comedy than in really exploring the central concept. Some of the explicitly truthful dialogue is certainly quite amusing, particularly when it occurs in places where we expect white lies, rather than malicious falsehoods, to be told. For instance, the first date between the male and female lead, set in a somewhat fancy restaurant, is perhaps the best part of the film. It is when the most trivial lies are avoided that the most amusement results.

Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…

In their attempt to express how important philosophical ideas relate to jokes, Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein are largely successful. Indeed, their hypothesis that there is a relationship between the philosophical and the joking mentality ends up seeming like a plausible one, as jokes are used to illustrate issues in metaphysics, logic, epistemology, ethics, the philosophy of religion, existentialism, the philosophy of language, social and political philosophy, relativity, and meta-philosophy.

Some of the jokes in Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar: Understanding Philosophy Through Jokes do feel a touch dated – with a strong emphasis on somewhat off-colour jokes based around traditional attitudes towards sexuality. Still, the book is a fun, quick read and worth a look if you are looking for some light-hearted yet academic contemplation.

Bright-Sided

From Oprah to New Age philosophy, ‘positive thinking’ has become a hugely influential movement in business circles, the religious sphere, in pop medicine, and elsewhere. In Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, Barbara Ehrenreich makes the case that the movement is poorly thought out and damaging. Her arguments are convincing, especially when it comes to situations where positive thinking is used to blame the victim when they suffer as the result of developments beyond their control: be it the movement towards corporate downsizing (which corresponded with the rise of motivational speakers in the workplace) or the unjustified assertion that cancer patients are responsible for their own worsening or recovery, on the basis of the mental attitudes they maintain.

Ehrenreich highlights how relentless optimism leads to dangerous groupthink, in which risks are downplayed and those who raise legitimate worries are sidelined. She provides ample evidence that these factors played a role in the inflation of the global house price bubble, and have continued to have important economic and political effects. These include the weird state of deluded isolation in which society’s richest people now reside. She also spends considerable time discussing the warped theology in which god is seen as a sort of mail-order service, happy to send you whatever good things (houses, cars, promotions) you are able to ‘manifest’ for yourself, simply by fervently desiring them.

Positive thinking involves a weird reversal, when it comes to dealing with risks. They cease to be external (concern that your company might fire you to improve their short-term profitability) and become entirely internal (fears about what your state of mind might do to you). It is also tied fundamentally to the notion that happiness is not most important in itself, but rather insofar as it influences events: “Nothing underscores the lingering Calvinism of positive psychology more than this need to put happiness to work – as a means to health and achievement, or what the positive thinkers call ‘success.'” The former tendency puts people in danger of worrying about the wrong things, while the latter strategy puts them at risk of seeking to achieve particular outcomes in nonsensical ways. That is especially dangerous when it comes to making big purchases on credit, firm in your belief that the universe will provide you with the means of dealing with it later.

Ehrenreich’s points are well-taken, though the book can be a bit tedious to read at times. There are also some partial contradictions. It is repeatedly asserted that there is no medical evidence that thinking positively improves health outcomes, yet it is taken as plausible that George Beecher was able to speed his demise through negative thinking. In the course of her analysis on the medical evidence, Ehrenreich claims to be “not in a position to evaluate” evidence that those with a positive outlook may have some protection against heart disease, but is seemingly happy to evaluate research on other illnesses that confirms her hypothesis.

All told, Ehrenreich makes important points about the poisonous institutional culture that accompanies an excessive focus on positivism – and the view that individuals are almost entirely responsible for what happens to them. Her concluding call for ‘realistic’ thinking is certainly appropriate enough, though perhaps she does not go far enough in suggesting how the empire of positive thinking she has mapped the outlines of might be deconstructed. As the world continues to grapple with real problems, magical thinking cannot be a substitute for dispassionate analysis, risk management, and contingency planning. How we get from our world to one more like that, however, remains mysterious.

LIDAR for wind turbines

This is a neat idea: wind turbines that use LIDAR (akin to RADAR, using light) to anticipate the strength of wind, and prepare for it in advance:

Dr Mikkelsen and his colleagues worked out that they could use lidar to scan incoming wind and determine how it was behaving before it struck the turbine. To try this idea out, they first placed lidar devices at the base of 120-metre-tall wind turbines at Hovsore, the Danish test site for such devices. The lidars scanned the approaching winds with a laser that produced infra-red light with a wavelength of 1.55 microns. Reflected light was detected by a device so sensitive that it could pick up one returning photon (the quantum-mechanical particles of which light is composed) out of every thousand billion fired by the laser. The device measured wind movement at 40, 60, 80, and 100 metres above the ground, and 100-200 metres in front of the turbine. The data it collected were then compared with wind measurements taken by cup anemometers (the sort that spin when struck by wind, to record its speed) in order to calibrate the lidar. That done, the computer which analyses the lidar data can be connected to the motors that adjust the pitch of the turbine blades, in order to maximise energy production and reduce damage.

Such technologies could help deal with minute-to-minute changes in wind speed, improving the reliability of wind farm output.

Four instruments, to understand aerosols

One of the enduring uncertainties about climate change is the importance of aerosols. Their chemistry and effect on the climate is complex. Some of them reflect sunlight immediately back into space, having a net cooling effect on the planet; others (like black carbon have a warming effect. Some aerosols interact with one another, and with other chemicals in the atmosphere, in ways that affect the climate. All of this ought to be better understood, if we want to understand how human activities (and natural phenomena) are affecting the climate, and so that we can prioritize on what sorts of emissions to reduce.

I was surprised to learn, from James Hansen’s recent book, Storms of My Grandchildren, that we have known since the 1970s what sort of instruments would be necessary to understand how aerosols affect the climate system, including whether their net effect is a warming or a cooling one. We need:

  1. A polarimeter, measuring the polarization of sunlight reflected off of aerosols
  2. An interferometer, measuring the infrared radiation being emitted by the Earth
  3. An instrument to measure the sun’s irradiance
  4. An instrument to measure aerosols and gases in the highest layers of Earth’s atmosphere, by observing the sun shining through them at sunlight and sunset.

The first two would have to be on the same small satellite. The other two would be on small satellites of their own. Together, these would allow us to determine the total forcing effect of aerosols on the climate.

The fact that we apparently aren’t rushing to get these devices built and launched has to be considered a massive failure of intelligence, far beyond the WMD-tomfoolery that preceded the Iraq war. These four instruments could be producing key data to let us understand our climate, at a time when we are running a dangerous global experiment on how it responds to our pollution.

Getting this data must become an international priority.

Fight censorship, join TOR

Google’s decision to challenge the Chinese government on their censorship policy is a bold one. It remains to be seen whether it will end up doing more harm or good. In the mean time, there is at least one thing that ordinary computer users can do in order to fight censorship around the world: set up a TOR relay. TOR is a project that allows for anonymous internet browsing through a system called onion routing. It is maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

By setting up a relay, you allow people whose internet access is censored by their governments to access sites that would otherwise be blocked; you also facilitate important democratic processes, such as the actions of whistleblowers. The process of installation is relatively simple, and you can easily cap how much of your bandwidth is given over to the TOR network. By sharing a bit of your bandwidth, you could be helping out human rights activists in China or Myanmar, or just helping some ordinary computer user circumvent annoying restrictions imposed from above. Systems like TOR help the internet to retain some of its vast potential, even in the face of fearful governments that want to control it or shut it down.

One thing to watch out for is that acting as a webserver may be forbidden by your internet service provider (ISP). I checked with mine (TekSavvy), and they have no objections to customers running any kind of webserver, provided they stay within their bandwidth limits.

People interested in this sort of thing may also want to learn about Project Honeypot – a distributed mechanism for fighting spammers.

LORAN being shut down

The ground-based LORAN network has been aiding navigation since WWII. Now, it is being shut down to save money, based on the thinking that the GPS system has made it obsolete. I had direct experience with the Pacific LORAN array and its coordinate system during the LIFEboat Flotillas. Most of the LORAN stations will go offline on February 8th, with the rest shutting down in the fall.

It is probably fair enough to say that LORAN is antiquated and redundant, though GPS is not without problems. It may eventually get a backup, if the EU finishes building their Galileo navigation satellite system by 2013, as planned.

Both LORAN and GPS function on the same basic principle: that if you know where certain radio transmitters are, and how far you are from each, you can sort out where you are located. GPS has the virtue of being global and increasingly ubiquitous, as more and more devices become capable of locating themselves using the system.

My fantasy climate change policy

Even once you have reached agreement that there must be a cost associated with dumping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, there are countless ways in which you can choose to do so. Many different instruments could be combined in many different ways.

Some argue that the simplest policy that corrects for the market failure is the best. I think there are multiple interlinked market failures, which require multiple policies to correct them.

If I had the power to dictate a climate policy for a developed state, it would look something like this:

1) Ban coal

Coal has no place in our energy future, given the terrible climatic effects that would result from burning the world’s massive reserves of the stuff. As such, no new coal-fired facilities should be allowed. Existing facilities should be subjected to the same carbon pricing mechanism as the rest of the economy, with no refunds, exemptions, or special treatment.

If someone wants to build a coal-fired facility that captures and stores its greenhouse gas emissions, they can be free to do so, provided:

  1. The firm pays the full cost for the equipment;
  2. They demonstrate that the technology is safe and environmentally effective;
  3. They continue to pay the market price for any greenhouse gas emissions not captured.

In practical terms, the demand for subsidies may be impossible to resist. At the very least, they should be directed towards research and demonstration projects, not towards commercial ventures.

2) Set a hard cap

This could be done in either of two ways. You could calculate the quantity of emissions likely to be produced by burning a unit of any particular fuel, then cap how much can be extracted or imported. Alternatively, you could require permits for the emission of greenhouse gases and only sell a set number.

Some intermediate system could also be possible: with fuels capped upstream and certain emission-generating activities capped at the point of emission (such as cement production). The important thing is that the cap should include all activities that occur within a country, and which lead to greenhouse gas emissions. This would also include things like land use changes, as well as the emissions embedded in imports. The latter should be addressed with a carbon tariff applied at the border. This could be waived in the case of imports from states that have robust carbon pricing systems of their own.

To get the level for the cap, you would start by choosing an overall temperature target (such as keeping the increase to less than 2°C), then work out a fair way to distribute the global cap that generates between nations. Some kind of contraction and convergence approach would likely be the most fair, with emissions in rich states falling soonest and fastest, but with everyone eventually reaching carbon neutrality.

3) Auction all permits

The revenue from the production/import/emission permits should be used in several ways. Firstly, some should be recycled back to taxpayers. In the event that refunds are granted for children, the level of the benefit should be capped at two per family, as an incentive to constrain population growth in emissions-intensive societies.

Some of the income should be used for basic research into low-carbon technologies, including renewable forms of energy, air capture of greenhouse gases, etc. Some could also be used for feed-in tariffs, to encourage the deployment of zero-carbon forms of energy.

4) Establish rising floor prices for transportation fuels

Fossil fuels were never going to last forever, and volatility in their prices leads to inefficiency and other problems.

As such, the government should set minimum prices for transportation fuels including diesel and gasoline. These should rise predictably over time. In the event that market prices are above the minimum, market prices would prevail. If those fall below the mandated minimum, the government would collect the difference.

The funds that accumulated would go into a fund from which payments would be made to all citizens, without ever drawing down the principle. That way, future generations will benefit from the bounty of fossil fuels, even if they live long after we’ve stopped using them.

5) Coordinate with other policies

Even all together, these approaches might not be sufficient to drive society aggressively in the direction of carbon neutrality. They could be supplemented with additional policies, as the effect of those already enacted becomes clearer. Also, the rate at which the overall cap is tightened could be increased or decreased, as necessitated by improved understanding of climate science or economics. Other policies and incentive schemes may well be necessary to ensure that the costs of complying with the declining cap do not become excessive. These would include support for research and international cooperation on zero-carbon energy projects.

Other existing policies that promote high emissions should be scrapped, such as subsidies to fossil fuel producers or emissions-intensive industries. Climate change must also be taken into account when making policy in areas like urban and transportation planning.

It would also be appropriate to participate in international efforts in areas like climate change adaptation and preventing deforestation.

Pro-photography protest in London

Yesterday’s pro-photography protest in London was rather encouraging. Amateur and professional photographers came together to protest the restrictions and harassment of photographers that has developed in response to concerns about terrorism. The protest follows a European Court of Human Rights ruling that police don’t have the right to indiscriminately search people, just because they are taking photos. The “I’m a photographer, not a terrorist” campaign has objected specifically to police using Section 44 of the UK’s Terrorism Act to harass photographers. High-profile recent incidents include “7 armed police detaining an award winning architectural photographer in the City of London, the arrest of a press photographer covering campaigning santas at City Airport and the stop and search of a BBC photographer at St Paul’s Cathedral and many others.”

In addition to creating art and a historical record, photography has an important role to play in keeping security entities accountable for their actions. As I have said before, photography is an important mechanism for maintaining oversight over the police and private security forces. Restrictions on photograpy allow for power to be used with less oversight, probably leading to more incidents of abuse and fewer cases in which abusers are punished. Indeed, it has been shown repeatedly that only photo or video evidence is sufficient to produce convictions for police brutality. In short, restricting photography makes us less safe.

Both casual photographers and those with a more substantial connection to the practice should be aware of their rights as photographers, and be willing to stand up when people try to bully them out of taking pictures. The British campaign has produced a pocket sized card outlining what rights individuals have when stopped by a police officer. I have been meaning to print off and laminate a card with the relevant sections of Canadian law, for use next time someone insists that taking photos in public spaces is forbidden.