Geek stuff – Page 84 – a sibilant intake of breath

Google’s new malware notifications

In a welcome move, Google will now be sending detailed information to people whose websites have been infected with malware. This occurs frequently when people use old versions of content management systems like WordPress or Joomla. Attackers use known security flaws to add their own code to vulnerable sites: spreading viruses, stealing information, manipulating search engines, and so on.

Given how many blogs get started and abandoned – and how many bloggers lack the technical savvy to identify and remove infections themselves – this should help make the web a bit safer.

Half the world with mobile phones

The Economist recently published an interesting survey on mobile phones and telecommunications in emerging markets. One fact that is a bit startling is that, of the world’s estimated 6.8 billion people, 3.6 billion (53%) are estimated to own cellular phones. As one of the articles argues, a luxury item has become a tool of global development.

It will certainly be interesting to see what happens as smartphones begin to make the same transition. As the internet turns ubiquitous, it seems likely to change in ways more profound and unexpected than simply being available anywhere. As my own experience with smartphones demonstrates, the formfactor of these devices makes them less-than-ideal tools for browsing the conventional web.

Comment to win a Wave invitation

In the spirit of the comments for photography contest, I have another. I’ve been invited to participate in the invitation-only trial of Google Wave. I was given eight invitations, seven of which I have sent off to people I thought it might be useful to share Wave with. I will award the last one to a random person who leaves a comment on this site, during the next week. All eligible comments posted before 2:47pm Ottawa time on Tuesday October 20th will be entered into the random draw. The rules are the same as those for the previous contest.

Note that invitations aren’t processed instantly. As Google explains: “Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.”

What does the internet know about you?

Through my friend Antonia, I discovered the Personas project over at MIT. The creators claim that it is “a critique of data mining, revealing the computer’s uncanny insights and inadvertent errors.” Putting in my name yields lots of results, though less information than a simple Google search. Indeed, it is probably what Google turns up when we enter our names that should concern us most. The MIT project is more about nice visuals than about providing a comprehensive precis on someone, based on publicly accessible information.

Even so, it’s a neat little thing to try out, especially if you have a rare or unique name.

Electric cars in British Columbia

In 2011, Nissan is planning to launch their LEAF electric vehicle in B.C. The cars have a 160 kilometre range and can be charged to 80% of capacity in 1/2 hour. Unlike a plug-in hybrid, all-electric vehicles like the LEAF are powered entirely by electricity from the grid and cannot use gasoline to extend their range when their batteries give out. This limits their inter-city potential, but could be perfectly compatible with an urban lifestyle, especially as batteries improve and charging stations become more common.

The Nissan-Renault partnership behind the vehicles is the same one that is planning to roll out a fleet in Israel, complete with rapid battery switching stations. From what I have read, it isn’t clear whether the B.C. launch will involve a ‘subscription’ system in the same way as the Israeli one will.

My personal sense is that electric cars will play a major role in future urban transportation. Much as I would like to see private cars pushed out of city centres entirely, the prospects of that happening in most places are poor. Given that, the best we can hope for is making them into lower-carbon entities. Given the many problems associated with large-scale biofuel cultivation, my guess is that their use will be restricted to air travel and niche applications, leaving the bulk of ground transport powered by battery-driven electric motors. Of course, it is key to ensure that those batteries are being charged by low-carbon means like concentrating solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear power.

Pondering smartphones II

At the end of June, I pondered smartphones for the first time and decided on the Nokia E71 (preliminary review here). Since then, I have witnessed mine sicken and die, getting progressively buggier. Bugs aside, I have also found the phone much less useful than I expected before getting it. The web browsing experience is poor; blogging from it is impossible; the audio quality is lower than with my cheap old phone; and the email capabilities that were my primary motivation for buying it were always finicky, awkward, and temperamental. The media capabilities were never a major concern of mine, but it is fair to note that the media player and camera are both rather poor.

Today, my dead phone was revived by the Fido store in Ottawa’s ByWard Market – eliminating all my saved notes to myself (foolish to save anything in local memory!), settings, and applications. The generic OS they installed lacks some of what my phone came with initially, and it still won’t pair with Bluetooth devices. The people at the shop say that the matter of any further repairs is between me and Nokia, and I should be glad that they didn’t charge me for flashing the phone.

As such, I see myself with three options:

Give the E71 another try, in hopes that the bugs are mostly gone and I will learn to live with its limitations as a device.
Get an iPhone, with the annoyance of a three year contract.
Abandon smartphones altogether and get a basic GSM phone with the capability of making calls and sending text messages only.

The choice is complicated by the apparent defectiveness of the E71. It wouldn’t really be ethical to sell it to someone else in this state. Given that, and my displeasure at the prospect of an exclusive contract and locked phone (or spending $700 on an unlocked iPhone), option two is basically out for now.

In some ways, option three is actually the most appealing right now. Smartphones may simply be more trouble (and expense) than they are worth. Perhaps waiting for a few more generations of devices to pass by makes the most sense. That said, given that I have a phone that I cannot really sell, I will probably continue with option one.

If I could send advice back in time to myself in June, I would probably say: “Wait a few more years before going for a smartphone, and if you must get one now, go with Apple’s offering.”

Our flawed retinas

In one of the later chapters of Richard Dawkins’ The Greatest Show on Earth, he discusses a couple of curious characteristics of the sort of spherical lensed eyes that humans and other animals possess. Specifically, he describes how the human retina is essentially ‘backwards,’ with the light sensing components at the back and the nerves conveying the information in front of them. Because the nerves are in front, they need to assemble somehow and get through the retina, which they do by means of the blind spot (mentioned before). It would surely be more sensible to have the light sensors at the front, with an unimpeded view and the data-carrying nerves behind. The problems associated with the reversed arrangement are largely compensated for by the ways in which our brains process the information from our eyes; among other things, you need to use a test like the one in the post linked above to be able to see that you even have them.

Dawkins is pretty convincing in arguing that this is not the sort of ‘intelligent design’ we might expect if the spherical lensed eye was something consciously created by an intelligent being. Rather, the roundabout organization is the product of sexual selection and chance mutations. Like the corrections made to the flawed mirror on the Hubble Space Telescope, the ‘software’ processing of human vision allows for some of the problems associated with the physiology of our eyes to be mitigated.

When it comes to blind spots, cephalopods like squid, octopodes, and cuttlefish are one up on us. Their eyes have no blind spots (since the photo receptors are in the front), and are also sensitive to the polarization of light. Perhaps one day people will splice squid genes into their children, in exchange for improved vision.

Now a historical authority

People talk about how the internet and Wikipedia have made the collection and categorization of information more democratic, but the point is really driven home when one of your blog posts gets used as a reference by the Hungarian version of Wikipedia.

I don’t know what the Hungarian text says, but there must surely be a more authoratative source than my blog regarding how George de Hevesy hid the Nobel Prize medals of James Franck and Max von Laue by dissolving them in aqua regia.

This page on the Nobel Prize website discusses the events in question.

Today’s low-carbon cities

What does it take to produce a low-carbon city? First, it should be compact. The average resident of Barcelona emits about a tonne a year of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e), while a New Yorker emits about one and a half and someone from Denver emits well over six. Torontonians emit about 4 tonnes of CO2e per year, from ground transport. This suggests that high-density urban planning might be a realistic component in climate change mitigation plans.

Secondly, it helps to be located in a temperate climate and to rely on low-carbon forms of electricity, such as hydro and nuclear. The worst thing to be is spread out, located in a very cold or very hot climate, and powered by coal. Phasing out coal globally should probably be our #1 climate priority.

Of course, tomorrow’s low-carbon cities will need to do dramatically better. Those annual ground transportation emissions are higher than the acceptable level for total emissions per capita by 2050.

CO2 and the formation of the Antarctic ice sheet

Research published in Nature explores the origins of the Antarctic ice sheet during the Oligocene transition, 33.5 to 34 million years ago. The formation of the sheet was apparently triggered by a drop in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) below a critical level. The researchers were able to estimate CO2 levels in this time period by examining boron isotope rations in fossils from Tanzania, an approach that was necessary since it is not possible to go so far back on the basis of data from ice core samples. The researchers estimate that the CO2 concentration during this transition period was about 760 parts per million (ppm). That is about twice the level of current atmospheric CO2 concentrations. If the world carries along on its current trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will be above 1000ppm by 2100.

The operation of the global climate is highly complex, with many significant inputs and internal feedbacks. The researchers specify that the ice sheet displays “a nonlinear response to climate forcing during melting.” Nonetheless, it is worrisome to think that we are on track to exceed the atmospheric CO2 concentration at which the Antarctic ice sheet started to form, and do so well before the end of this century. That being said, even if we do push the climate into a state where the serious or total melting of Antarctica becomes an inevitability, the process may take hundreds or thousands of years to occur. Such long-term impacts seriously complicate economical and ethical analysis of climate change.