Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

Banned books week

The last week of September was Banned Books Week. This blog managed to miss it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some interesting news coverage to link. This blog has a piece on why the week matters. Philip Pullman also has an article on it in The Guardian.

Google also has a page listing books that have been banned at various places and times. To those with a bit of spare time, I recommend reading a couple. It is an excellent way to celebrate the fact of living in a society with a limited capacity to suppress thought.

A few Apple complaints

Last night, after the Bluetooth connection failed for the hundredth unexplained time, I switched back from my Apple wireless Mighty Mouse to my old Microsoft optical scrollmouse. I must say, the change is for the best. The old mouse is lighter, smaller, and more comfortable. It is possible to press both buttons at once, and press the middle button without accidentally scrolling. Most importantly, the scroll wheel itself is much less finicky – it may not be able to scroll horizontally, and it lacks the Might’s Mouse’s useless ‘squeeze’ buttons – but it seems the superior device overall, despite the need for it to be tethered to my computer.

In general, I think Apple does a magnificent job of making computer gear and software. If I had to make two complaints, the first would be about the way they sometimes privilege form over functionality. Alongside the Mighty Mouse (and the infamous prior hockey puck mouse), there is the interface of Time Machine, which is pretty but probably less useful than it could be. My other complaint is their willingness to change things after the fact in ways that cannot be reversed and that people might not like. For example, there was when they locked iTunes so that only three people per boot session could access your library over the network (a real pain in university residence), or when they limited the volume on my iPod Shuffle through a software update.

Passchendaele and glory in warfare

Before several recent films, I have seen the trailer for Passchendaele – a film that seems to provide a heroic and pro-Canada take on this WWI battle. If anything, this actual history of Passchendaele demonstrates that war is rarely heroic, and that many narratives of heroism are self-serving for those that generate them. Both sides were fighting in defence of imperialism. Furthermore, the battle served little strategic purpose. After being taken at huge cost of lives – nearly one million killed, wounded, or captured on both sides – the terrain was abandoned so the Allies could respond more effectively to the German Lys Offensive.

Of course, Passchendaele joins a large collection of films of dubious historical quality. While I have yet to see it, the trailer is guilty of mindless patriotism, historical revisionism, and perhaps the Aragorn Fallacy. It would behoove us to remember a few key things about WWI: that the war was hugely costly in lives and suffering, that none of the major powers participating got the outcome they wanted at the outset, and that it ultimately did nothing to address the imbalances in Europe caused by the unification of Germany. Of course, films that highlight such things are unlikely to be blockbuster smash hits.

Unreliable Sylvania

The two selling features of compact fluorescent bulbs are higher efficiency (more light produced per unit energy) and longer lifespan, when compared to incandescent bulbs. We have already established that the first isn’t a concern for people actively heating their homes. My recent experience with the second is also rather negative. I recently replaced as many bulbs in my house as possible with fluorescents. In the month and a half that followed, four of the bulbs failed: those in my kitchen, on my back porch, and in my front hallway.

I have never had incandescent lights fail so quickly. It’s not clear what caused these ones to die so abruptly (A manufacturing defect? Problems with my power supply?), but it will definitely prevent me from buying Sylvania brand bulbs in the future.

Frustrated with Spore

There are aspects of Spore which are excellent, but far too much effort needs to be expended to keep the game from being absurdly frustrating.

When you visit other empires, you see things much as they ought to be. They have large numbers of attack and defense fleets, consisting of mother ships and fighters. These fleets will attack you if you enter their space. They will leave their space to attack nearby enemy colonies and thus capture or destroy them.

By contrast, regardless of the size of your empire, you will always be the only competent ship in it. Allied empires will provide one ship each, but these will behave like missile magnets, die almost immediately, and lead to the friendly empire blaming you for the loss of their ship. As such, it is up to you to personally defend your entire territory, as well as personally attack other systems (basically the only way to end wars once they start). Indeed, ending wars is a very tricky thing to do, especially considering that you can start one when your ship automatically returns fire on a ship that attacked you in an enemy system. Ending wars either requires conquering so many planets that the enemy sues for peace (only some races do this) or waging a genocidal campaign across their entire empire, which can easily take hours. Of course, whenever you are at war, you will be constantly attacked and obliged to manually defend whichever system(s) they have chosen to target.

There are also pirate attacks. These should ideally be ignored, since they are almost as much of a pain to fight off as attacks from rival empires and ignoring them has only a trifling consequence. Unfortunately, the only way to know for sure if it is money-stealing pirates or civilization destroying enemies attacking is by flying across the galaxy to check manually.

Even more maddening are ‘ecological disasters.’ In these, a random planet somewhere within your empire or those of your allies gets five sick animals of a particular type somewhere on it. Even if your empire consists of hundreds of interconnected worlds, you are the only being that can kill these animals. Fail to do so, and the ecosystem on the planet gets destabilized, eventually destroying your colonies. Also, killing too many of the healthy animals moving in herds with the sick ones causes the extinction and makes you start over, hunting sick animals of a different kind.

Overall, the game was billed as a big universe that you could explore and experiment with however you like. Unfortunately, the frustrations built into the game make that very challenging. Implementing the following suggestions would significantly improve things:

  1. After five ‘ecological disasters,’ you win a badge. Having this badge means that your colonies have learned to deal with these things on their own. At the most, they should ask for some money with which to fund the five animal cull.
  2. If you accidentally start a war by firing upon a ship, you should have the chance to apologize diplomatically and pay compensation to avoid full-scale fighting.
  3. It should always be clear whether pirates or an enemy empire are attacking you.
  4. Enemy empires should be more willing to end wars.
  5. Your colonies should be more capable of defending themselves.
  6. Alternatively, much more powerful weapons should be available late in the game, so as to diminish the frustration of destroying fleet after identical fleet.
  7. Multiple AI modes should exist for escorts. In at least one, they should flee when near death.
  8. The game should make the status of ongoing battles clearer. At present, there is no easy way to tell when you have actually lost control of a star system.
  9. One option to consider is giving colonies two options for wealth production. In one mode, they behave as in the current game: they produce ‘spice’ which you need to personally fly around to collect and sell. In another mode, they produce spice which is sold automatically through intermediaries. You get about 30% of the profits.

Reducing the degree to which the player needs to micomanage the galaxy would probably do the most to improve this game. Hopefully, future patches will shift things somewhat in this direction.

$700 billion ‘debt rescue plan’

In response to the subprime mortgage crisis, President Bush has called for an $700 billion bailout: buying toxic debt from the firms that now hold it. That’s about $2000 for every American citizen, being used to buy assets that may end up being worth far less than the price the government is paying.

The whole thing is disturbing for a number of reasons. There is the constant moral hazard problem that emerges when government bails out people who behave in risky ways and lose. Then there is the degree to which this will further worsen the overall economic position of the American government: already badly strained by costs associated with wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as tax cuts that were never matched with reductions in spending.

If there is any justice in the world, the bonuses paid to the current and former executives who ran the financial firms at the centre of all this will be clawed back in one way or another. This whole thing started because of financial instruments that let the top tranches of the riskiest loans be sold as low-risk assets; of course, the inevitable downside of bundling the safest portions of those loans was causing the riskiest portions to accumulate elsewhere. It remains to be seen what the full and final effects of all that uber-toxic debt will be.

Confused about climate

I have a Google Alert set up that forwards news stories including the terms “Canada” and “Climate Change.” Every day, it provides a few very misleading items, usually published on personal blogs or the canada.com network: a group of publications including the Vancouver Sun, Province, and Chilliwack Times. A piece in the latter caught my attention the other day, written by Jack Carradice. It seems worth examining in some detail. It reads like a grab-bag version of grist.org’s collection of invalid ‘sceptical’ arguments.

Complexity and uncertainty:

One aspect becoming very clear is that the science of climate change is much more complex than many seem to believe and much of the science involved is not well understood. In fact, it is beginning to appear that we know little if anything about some of the factors related to climate change.”

This is true but misleading. As discussed here before, the core facts about climate change are now beyond dispute. The biggest uncertainties have to do with feedback loops, the timing of impacts, and specific higher-order outcomes arising from human-induced temperature change.

Carbon dioxide not the cause:

The notion that man-caused carbon dioxide emissions are the sole cause of “global warming” and that man can control climate change in any meaningful way has pretty much been proven as nonsense.

While it is true that CO2 emissions are not the sole cause of climate change, this statement is simply false. The Fourth Assessment of the IPCC – the most authoritative scientific assessment of climate science – concludes that “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” It states further that “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” Non-CO2 factors that influence climate change include emissions of nitrous oxide and methane, as well as deforestation. The fact that there are non-CO2 contributions in no way diminishes our certainty that human carbon dioxide emissions cause the planet to warm.

The role of water vapour:

Some of the basic facts the public have not been made aware of are that water vapour is the primary greenhouse gas accounting for up to 90 per cent of the greenhouse effect.

Nobody denies that water vapour is the greenhouse gas with the largest effect. What one needs to remember is that the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere is determined by the temperature (just like how you can stir more sugar into hot water than cold). As such, water vapour magnifies the effect of CO2 emissions.

Natural emissions are larger:

Also that 90 per cent of annual carbon dioxide emissions come from natural sources and have nothing to do with the burning of fossil fuels.

Gross natural emissions are larger than human emissions, but they are balanced by natural absorption. Human beings add about 29 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year through the burning of fossil fuels. Some gets absorbed into the deep oceans, but much endures in the atmosphere to cause warming.

Necessity of CO2:

It is not generally publicized that carbon dioxide is essential for plant life and without it we would all die of starvation.

Nobody denies this either, and you would need to be thick-headed to believe that climate scientists advocate the elimination of all CO2. As Carradice correctly points out, the natural greenhouse effect is essential for maintaining an appropriate temperature for life on earth. Of course, it is incorrect to say “Some CO2 is necessary, therefore the more of it around the better.” The lesson from one hundred years of ever-more-detailed climatic science is that there is good reason to fear the consequences of anthropogenic climate change.

Solar radiation changes:

The effects of changes in solar radiation also seem to be overlooked by many observers.

Not by the IPCC. The Fourth Assessment Report concludes that changes in solar irradiance produce 0.12 watts per cubic metre of radiative forcing. CO2 produces 1.66 watts per cubic metre, while methane, nitrous oxide, and halocarbons produce 0.48, 0.16, and 0.34 respectively.

Methane from Indian cows:

Methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide… By some calculations if India reduced their population of sacred cows by 25 per cent it would reduce the amount of greenhouse gas going into the atmosphere by the same amount as taking every car and truck in Canada off the road.

These assertions oddly contradict others above. They acknowledge that both methane and CO2 are greenhouse gasses and that emitting them warms the planet. I couldn’t tell you off the top of my head whether livestock emissions in India are bigger than automotive emissions in Canada, but making the comparison requires accepting the basics of climate physics.

Climate has always been changing:

Forget the climate change hysteria. Climate has always been changing.

True. Indeed, if humans were suddenly dropped into many of the states the world has experienced, we would have a tough time surviving. There is every reason to think that long-term natural climate change might eventually produce conditions adverse for human beings. What anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are doing is accelerating those dangers enormously. Whereas the natural carbon cycle is largely a matter of geology, subduction, and volcanoes, we are liberating the carbon in fossil fuels at a break-neck pace.

In short, Jack Carradice’s piece is an orrery of errors: rife with every form of misunderstanding and misinformation. It is hard to imagine a ‘news’ story that would do a worse job of informing readers about the realities of climate and climate science. Some of the points are entirely valid, but they are woven into an incoherent tapestry alongside errors and distortions. The article says simultaneously that climate change isn’t caused by human activities and that it is, that more CO2 would be bad and that it would be good, that concern about climate change is misplaced and that it is valid.

Hopefully, readers of the Chilliwack Times will be discerning enough to reject Carradice’s muddled position and read something both accessible and accurate on climatic science, such as Andrew Weaver’s “Keeping Our Cool,” Richard Alley’s “The Two Mile Time Machine,” or Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.”

Plug-in hybrids, GM, and sunspots

The good news: General Motors is releasing a plug-in hybrid called the Volt. Plug-ins have the potential to seriously reduce emissions associated with urban transport.

The bad news: GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz doesn’t believe carbon dioxide causes climate change. Apparently, is a fan of the utterly discredited “it’s caused by sunspots” theory of global warming.

Plug-in hybrids powered by renewable electricity are a green option, at least in comparison to conventional automobiles. It’s unfortunate that buying this one will help fund a company with a history of funding the bogus ‘debate’ about the causes of climate change.

Spore and DRM

One of the most talked about aspects of the computer game Spore is the digital rights management (DRM) software being used to prevent unauthorized copying. The SecureROM software restricts each copy to being installed on a maximum of 3 computers. Beyond that, you can call Electronic Arts and beg them to let you install it more times. Given that hardware upgrades can make your computer count as a ‘new’ one, this might happen to a lot of people.

As DRM software goes, this really isn’t that bad. It doesn’t run an annoying program in the background, like the awful Steam system that accompanied Half Life 2. It also lets you play the game without the DVD inserted.

Arguably, the key to this issue is the following: somebody is always going to crack the DRM and release pirated copies of the game without it online. As such, DRM does not stop unauthorized copying, but does inconvenience the people who actually shell out the money for the game. As such, DRM is both useless and unfair to legitimate customers. As the Sony DRM debacle demonstrates, it can also open massive security holes on the computers of those who run it.

P.S. I will write a full review of Spore once I finish it. My first impressions are quite positive. One major suggestion to anyone trying it: play a very aggressive species for the first four stages (basically winning by killing everyone). Then, start a new game at the space stage with a blank state species. If you bring your hyper-aggressive species out into the galaxy, you will spend all of your time manually defending each of your planets from attack. It is infinitely less frustrating to build an empire based on trade and teraforming, earn lots of badges, make alliances, buy some awesome weapons, and then start busting people up if desired.