Geek stuff – Page 97 – a sibilant intake of breath

Air travel and appreciation

This video clip of Canadian comedian Louis C.K. on the Conan O’Brien show is quite amusing. He is talking about how people take air travel, and technology generally, for granted. He has an amusing way of turning around the common gripes people have about air travel:

‘And then, we get on the plane and they made us sit there on the runway, for 40 minutes. We had to sit there.’ Oh? Really? What happened next? Did you fly through the air, incredibly, like a bird? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight, you non-contributing zero?

It’s true that people fail to appreciate the immense effort and skill reflected in things like computers, pharmaceuticals, global communications, as so forth. At one level, that is simply a lack of curiosity. On another, I think it’s a kind of defence mechanism: people are completely dependent on these technologies, and yet few understand them at all. Most people probably couldn’t even explain how an airplane wing produces lift. That general point is especially well made by James Burke. He chooses an even more banal technology example than air travel, elevators. In the first episode of his series, he demonstrates how our attitude towards them demonstrates our dependence, ignorance, and vulnerability.

Rebuild the Orbiting Carbon Observatory

A week ago, NASA’s carbon dioxide (CO2) tracking satellite was destroyed en route to space by a faulty booster. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) was intended to produce large numbers of measurements of the concentration of carbon dioxide in different parts of the atmosphere. In so doing, it would have helped to identify major CO2 sources and sinks – deepening our understanding of the carbon cycle under human influence. Given the destruction of the original instrument, I think the only sensible course of action is to rebuild it as quickly as can be managed and place it into orbit.

The original mission cost about US$280 million and took about nine years to reach a launch attempt. That being said, it stands to reason that building a second unit would cost less, given that the design and concept testing has already been done. We might also hope that a second unit could be assembled, tested, and launched more quickly. Even if a replacement would cost as much as the original, it would be less than $1 per American, far less per human being, and some tiny fraction of the cost of wars and bank bailouts.

As IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri has said: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.” Satellite images of the ozone hole helped to propel international action to restrict the emission of CFCs. There is reason to hope that similar data on greenhouse gasses might generate an equivalent political push. Even if it doesn’t, and the data from the OCO remains under the exclusive scrutiny of geeks, it should give us a deeper understanding of how the basic chemical, physical, and biological systems of the planet function – and how human beings are researching them. That is information worth $280 million.

One could do as some have and point to the US$$400 million that NASA was granted in the American stimulus package, specifically for climate change research. One could also point to the fundamental wastefulness and irrelevance of manned spaceflight, given our current problems. Either way, the United States should scrape together the cash for a new satellite, and put it on a more reliable rocket this time.

Morton on the end of the carbon cycle

Among many other things, Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun discusses the carbon cycle across extremely long timespans. It highlights the existence of positive and negative feedbacks, which have historically constrained atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide to a particular range: with a high point established though increased emissions from volcanoes, and a low point established through the absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide through the weathering of rocks.

The book predicts that, on the basis of astronomical and geological factors, this see-saw will eventually come to rest about a billion years from now: with the victory of erosion, and the permanent elimination of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. As a consequence, photosynthesis will cease – for lack of building material – and the energy system that supports all complex life will collapse. Morton dubs this ‘the end of plants’ and the explanation of why it is to occur is difficult to compress into a blog post. It’s one of many reasons for which the book is worthwhile reading.

It’s a sobering perspective: akin to the knowledge that our sun will eventually fail, or that the Second Law of Thermodynamics and a universe expanding without end would combine to produce ‘heat death’ and an end to all chemical reactions everywhere.

That being said, it is essentially impossible for our minds to appreciate the meaning of a billion years, or anticipate how life (and humanity) would change across that span. Long, long before this final descent in the carbon cycle could be approached, we would have ceased to resemble our present forms; indeed, our current forms and future forms might not even be able to comprehend one another. After all, the Cambrian explosion, in which complex life forms like molluscs and crustaceans emerged, happened ‘only’ 530 million years ago.

Of course, even starting to approach that post-human future requires surviving the all-too-human threats we have created for ourselves, with climate change foremost among them. The billion-year carbon bust offers no prospect of avoiding the warming we are creating at the level of years and centuries. What Morton’s long-term perspective does offer, however, is a fairly strong assurance that life can adapt to most any set of climatic circumstances we might be able to create. Of course, ‘life’ writ large is far more adaptable and resilient than our present form of civilization, which may be quite impossible to propagate in a world where temperatures are more than 5˚C higher, on average, glaciers and icecaps are gone, the oceans are acid, and precipitation patterns have changed dramatically.

It is both startling and entirely possible that human civilization, for all its accomplishments, will prove less adept at responding to large-scale changes in climate than ancient sharks or turtles have done.

Climate change on the Globe and Mail wiki

The Globe and Mail has an initiative called Policy Wiki, in which they are trying to foster web discussions on public policy issues of interest to Canadians. The third topic they have selected is climate change. The site includes a briefing note by Mark Jaccard, of the Pembina Institute, and an analysis and proposal by David Suzuki.

Some of the sub-questions to be discussed include:

How closely should Canada’s policies be linked to the US?
Should our focus be bilateral or multilateral?
What position should Canada adopt at the Copenhagen conference?
How does the economic crisis impact actions on climate change?
How will this impact Canadian industry?
How many green jobs can Canada create?
What added responsibility does Canada have as an energy superpower?

Most frequent commenters on this site are quite concerned with Canadian climate policy. As such, this might be an opportunity to discuss the issue with a broader audience. I personally plan to contribute, and would be pleased to see readers doing so as well.

The Man Who Loved China

Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China is a competent and sometimes compelling biography of the scientist and sinologist Joseph Needham: a man who started off as a Cambridge biochemist and later devoted his life to documenting the scientific history of China. While it contains a lot of interesting narrative and information, it does sometimes feel more like a catalogue of achievements, written by an admirer, than a substantive examination of either Chinese scientific history or Needham’s own work.

The book is essentially divided into two phases: one describing Needham’s life and explorations within China, in the period of the Second World War, and a second describing the process of writing his masterwork: Science and Civilization in China. More accurately, it must be said that he began his masterwork, as he was only able to produce the overall plan and the first few volumes before dying as an elderly man. During the first section, Needham is serving as a kind of official scientific liaison between the British government and the Chinese nationalist government during the period of Japanese occupation. During the second, he is principally installed in Cambridge as an academic, though he did return to China to lead an easily-duped team of weapons inspectors, investigating claims that the United States had used biological weapons during the Korean War.

The book is a somewhat odd one to read at this point in history. Needham’s work was published long enough ago to have become the mainstream understanding: namely, that a great many critical inventions and discoveries happened earlier in China than elsewhere. Most members of the public are probably able to identify gunpowder and the compass as Chinese inventions. Those with knowledge in other fields – from engineering to nautics – are probably similarly familiar with early Chinese contributions. By not providing much evidence about the prevailing view beforehand, the book makes it a bit awkward to assess Needham’s own contribution, aside from the indirect evidence provided by all of his subsequent academic recognition.

The book does a fairly comprehensive job of expressing Needham’s curious personal characteristics: his polyamory (spending most of his life within reach of both wife and mistress, both well aware of one another), his socialism, his love of trains and boats, and his overwhelming dedication to China. The strength of the latter is revealed through his inability to appreciate the problems with Mao’s revolution, at least, nor until the man himself had been dead for some time. Needham is portrayed as quite a dashing figure: scientist, activist, diplomat, and adventurer. In terms of the sheer number and variety of experiences, his life is one that must be envied by anyone who is curious about the world.

The so-called ‘Needham question’ of why scientific innovation in China stalled, prior to exploding in the West, gets surprisingly brief and superficial treatment in this volume – just a few pages in the epilogue. This is a curious way for a biographer to treat the central subject of his subject’s fascination. It would have been interesting to see various hypotheses discussed more thoroughly, with a focus on the evidence supporting and challenging them that arose from Needham’s investigations and subsequent scholarship.

For me, this book didn’t manage to be as compelling as Winchester’s history of the Oxford English Dictionary. Nonetheless, it would probably be of interest to those who enjoy reading about people who lived notable and unusual lives. It certainly tends towards inspiring a person to wonder what more exotic and worthwhile things they might be doing themselves.

Creative Commons ‘zero’ license

It says something about the current climate of intellectual property law that Creative Commons has released a new ‘zero’ license, which strives to do everything legally possible to put a work into the public domain. The new license is meant to be an improvement over their previous public domain dedication service:

The CC0 system works better internationally, is likely more legally valid (since one can not dedicate their works into the public domain in many countries and there are questions about doing so in the U.S.) and, if the icon and meaning becomes recognizable enough, more clear.

It seems a bit remarkable that it is so difficult to choose to give intellectual property away. I can understand the importance of legal protections to ensure that people don’t do so by accident (particularly children), but it does seem as though there should be a straightforward legal mechanism to waive all rights as the creator of a work.

The contents of this site are under a Creative Commons license: specifically, one that allows anyone to copy, distribute and transmit the work, as well as produce adaptations. It requires that the work be attributed to me, that any derivative works be subject to the same rules, and does not grant these rights automatically for commercial purposes. That is to say, if someone wants to use one of my images on a personal site, with attribution, that’s fine; if Visa wants to use it in a commercial, I expect them to pay for the usage rights.

Creative Commons licenses are very valuable because they allow creators of content to establish such regimes without needing to hire lawyers or spend a lot of time and money.

The Kindle and electronic books

In a recent article about Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader, The Economist declared that:

It seems likely that, eventually, only books that have value as souvenirs, gifts or artefacts will remain bound in paper.

Despite being a big fan of electronic content delivery systems, I wholeheartedly disagree with this assessment. There are considerable advantages to having a personal library of physical books, and there are big disadvantages to taking your books in electronic format.

Physical books possess the many advantages of immediacy. One can display them and quickly glance through the whole collection. One can take notes in them, mark pages, stack them, pass them to others, and so forth. Collections of books are also physical representations of the reading a person has done. I often find that, when I first find myself in someone’s house, flat, or bedroom, their collection of books is the first thing I scrutinize. There is a reason why the personal libraries of intellectuals and political leaders are objects of interest, and I don’t think they would retain the same importance if they consisted of a bunch of PDF or text files.

Electronic books have the same disadvantages as other electronic media: you can’t be confident that they will be intact and accessible decades from now. Furthermore, they are often hobbled with digital rights management (DRM), which means you can never be sure that you can use them on future devices, or in various ways you might wish to. A library stored on a small device may be easier to transport, but it is a lot less trustworthy, durable, and reliable than one that you need to cart around in a heavy collection of boxes.

Electronic books can certainly complement physical ones. It would, for instance, be very valuable to be able to search electronic copies of books you own. A custom search engine, containing all the books in one’s library and that one has borrowed, would be excellent for tracking down particular passages or conducting general research. Partly for these synergistic reasons, and partly for the reasons listed above, I don’t think physical books are ever likely to become rare.

I do see much more promise for electronic periodicals. Hardly anybody wants to keep physical copies of their newspaper or magazine subscriptions on hand: especially when they are available in an easily searchable form online. If I got a Kindle, it would be for the wireless newspaper and Wikipedia access, not for the $10 book downloads.

Free lectures from top American schools online

As described in this Slate article, a new site called Academic Earth has brought together a large numbers of lecture videos and made them available online for free. Right now, it includes lecturers from Berkeley, Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.

There is a six lecture series on Understanding the Financial Crisis.

Legal guide for bloggers

For those who are serious about their blogging, or simply concerned about the legal ramifications of the practice, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has a Bloggers’ Legal Guide available.

While it is focused on American law, the general principles and issues discussed are likely to be relevant elsewhere. Issues covered include intellectual property, defamation, the legal status of bloggers as journalists, and more. It also includes a page specifically for students.

People living in countries that have weaker protections for free speech might be better served by the BBC’s guide: How to avoid libel and defamation. On a side note, I certainly hope that British law evolves away from requiring the author to prove their comments were justified and towards requiring the person or organization alleging libel or defamation to prove that such things took place. The current approach encourages frivolous lawsuits and drives journalists to bury or tone down stories without due cause.

The ‘SSL strip’ exploit

The Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is one of the world’s most important forms of commercial encryption. It is the public key system generally employed by e-commerce websites like Amazon, in order to prevent payment details from being intercepted by third parties. At this week’s Black Hat security conference in Washington, details were released on an exploit that takes advantage of the weak way in which SSL is implemented in secure (HTTPS) websites.

The tool – called ‘SSL strip’ – is based around a man-in-the-middle attack, where the system for redirecting people from the insecure to the secure version of a web page is abused. By acting as a man-in-the-middle, the attacker can compromise any information sent between the user and the supposedly secure webpage. The author of the exploit claims to have used it to steal data from PayPal, GMail, Tickermaster, and Facebook – including sixteen credit card numbers and control of more than 100 email accounts.

This kind of vulnerability has always existed with SSL because it is difficult to be certain about where the endpoints of communication lie. Rather than having a secure end-to-end connection between Amazon and you, there might be a secure connection between you and an attacker (who can read everything you do in the clear), and then a second secure connection between the attacker and Amazon.

To some extent, the problem can be mitigated through technical means (as described in the linked article). Beyond that, the question arises of what constitutes adequate precautions, from both a legal and a personal standpoint, and who should pay the costs associated with data breaches and fraud.

[Update: 23 February 2009] The slides from the original presentation about SSL Strip are available here and here. Both servers are under a fair bit of strain, due to all the popular interest about this topic, so it may be tricky to access them during the next few days.

[Update: 25 February 2009] SSL Strip can actually be downloaded on Marlinspike’s website.

[Update: 5 November 2009] One thing I think these SSL exploits (and others described in comments below) demonstrate is that we cannot rely completely on technical means to avoid fraud and theft online. There is also a role to be played by laws on liability and other means.