Luminosis

Internet Freedom - the SOPA/PIPA protest

2012-01-24T16:42:00.008-05:00

Six days ago, over 115,000 websites including Google, Wikipedia, Freethoughtblogs, Craigslist, and many other popular websites "went dark" -- effectively went on strike -- for a 24 hour period to protest the SOPA and PIPA legislation that is being considered by the American government.

We are all connected, and what happens in America affects all of us, as law professor and copyright expert Michael Geist pointed out on his blog, in an article entitled Why Canadians Should Participate in the SOPA/PIPA Protest. From Professor Geist's article:

"...millions of Canadians rely on the legitimate sites that are affected by the legislation. Whether creating a Wikipedia entry, posting a comment on Reddit, running a WordPress blog, participating in an open source software project, or reading a posting on BoingBoing, the lifeblood of the Internet is a direct target of SOPA. If Canadians remain silent, they may ultimately find the sites and services they rely upon silenced by this legislation."

Writer, consultant, and teacher Clay Shirky explains why this legislation is a bad idea even for Americans:

[Thanks to Lorna for pointing out this video]

The day of protest on January 18, 2012 was mildly inconvenient for me, but annoying to many others. That annoyance translated into political action which raised the awareness of American lawmakers and caused the SOPA and PIPA legislation to be withdrawn. But the final point raised by Clay Shirky in the video is still valid -- there will be other attempts in the future to censor and regulate the internet.

Gung Hei Fat Choy! Happy Chinese New Year 4710 - The Year of the Dragon

2012-01-23T22:19:00.003-05:00

It is still January 23 -- first day of the Chinese lunar New Year -- as I type these words, so I haven't missed out on my chance to wish a Happy New Year to all of you -- may this Year of the Dragon be a year of prosperity and good health!

Note - the Dragon image above is from the Facebook gallery of Mr. John Wu of Manhattan, Kansas, USA.

Happy Solstice Aftermath

2012-01-03T23:53:00.002-05:00

As I write these words, it is barely within 12 days after the solstice, and we are definitely within the 12 days of Christmas, so it is technically still the holiday season. That means I can legitimately wish family, friends, customers, and colleagues a somewhat belated best of the season, and the year to come.

For my father-in-law, a man who believes (notwithstanding the cultural dominance of Christmas celebration in Canada) that there is a "war on Christmas" (presumably an action like the "war on the automobile" that the current mayor of Toronto claims to have ended), a hearty "Season's Greetings".

Nuhan Seto - 1917 to 2011

2011-11-07T19:34:00.010-05:00

My grandmother passed away on November 3rd. She had been in Toronto with us for as long as I have been here, which is 39 years. By the time she was found in her bed by my aunt, she had been gone for a few hours, having slipped away peacefully and painlessly.

There was a funeral visitation on Sunday, and the funeral itself was held earlier today.

Being known as the family photographer (which is to say, the annoying guy in everybody's face with a camera at every family event), I was tapped to provide photos. And I discovered that this is hard. I have photos taken at many family events. The digital archive goes back to 2000. But none of the photos I took at each family event were taken with the thought that the person I was photographing might not be alive later.

Especially so with grandma -- for 39 years, I have thought of her as akin to a force of nature.

Between me and my cousins, we came up with more than a 120 images, some of which were scans of very old photographs -- a family treasure trove which was passed to me for further scans.

Two of us spoke at the funeral earlier today: my cousin Wayne and myself. Wayne read a presentation from his sister, my cousin Anne, who lives in Mauritius. This is what Wayne read:

“le fabuleux destin de (the fabulous destiny of) Grandmere Seto”
(by anne sujo - copyright 2011)

Family and friends, we are gathered here today to pay our last respects and commemorate the passing of a very important person in our lives.

It is with immense sadness and pride that I share with you some of my thoughts and memories of our great Grandma Seto. For, there is no other word that comes to mind, other than “greatness” that can describe her person.

Had Grandma Seto lived to her next birthday in January 2012, she would have reached her full
95 years. She was indeed someone, who lived her life to the fullest and enjoyed the company and love of her late husband, our Grandpa Seto (who passed away just over 10 years ago), her 3 children, Bik Sim, Wai Yu and Wai Man - and not to mention, 11 grandchildren, the spouses of her children and grandchildren, as well as 11 great-grandchildren. What can be more “great” than that? We can therefore, say that Grandma Seto was truly blessed to be so well surrounded by such a close-knit family as ours - Family, the “glue” that holds everything together.

Not only was Grandma Seto strong physically, but also mentally and spiritually. Nothing seemed to bring her down or get in her way. Not even the fact that she was hard of hearing or probably considered “too old” - When Grandma Seto had a yearning for a bit of harmless gambling and her sons were too busy to take her to the horseraces, well, her little legs would literally speedwalk her to the bus stop, and she would actually hitch a ride all the way to the Niagara Casino! Talk about fiesty and fast! I’ve never seen anyone her age who could walk so fast! So, my dear cousins, I guess we can say we certainly inherited some mighty genes!

Hardworking and loyal – she was a devoted mother, wife, grandmother and great-grandmother in many ways. Alongside her late husband, Grandma Seto was one of the pillars in the restaurant business that the two of them led for many years until their retirement. We will never forget the traditional Christmas dinner gatherings that were always held there – the late night majong, the food, the warmth, the joy and laughter. The restaurant has long closed down, but the spirit of family gathering and warmth still remains.

Generosity - another one of Grandma Seto’s many traits - whether towards her family or close friends, she would always put others before her first.

My visual memory of Grandma Seto will always be one that is positive and happy. Her physical and mental strength was evident in the way she spoke and moved about. She had a smile so bright that would stretch from ear to ear. And the twinkle in her eye showed that she was not only very alert and independent, but also very strong-willed.

The sudden passing of Grandma Seto has left a void in many of our lives and we will surely miss her. However, I believe that she has passed to us many of her qualities, and through us, her “greatness” will continue to live on.

Let us be comforted by the image of both Grandma and Grandpa Seto, now reunited in love, happiness, peace and harmony. May she forever rest in peace – God bless us all.

I spoke last. My presentation had been in the back of my mind, percolating, since Thursday night, and finally written down in first draft format by 3:30am on Monday morning. This is the edited, final version of the eulogy that I read:

I met my grandmother, Nuhan Seto, for the first time here in Toronto in 1972. I was a couple of months from turning 14 – she had already marked a half century in Canada’s Centenniel year and had added five more birthdays since.

We didn’t have a lot in common – I was her eldest grandchild, the son of her daughter Bik Sim, the boy whose only life experience to that point was northern British Columbia; she the woman whose life had begun in post Manchu China, changed through marriage, motherhood, the rise of the People’s Republic, changed again through immigration to Central America, changed yet again through immigration to Canada. But over the next 39 years, I grew to love and respect my grandmother for who she was and what she represented. She was a simple, straightforward person who wanted the best for her family. And for me, she was a link to our family’s past.

As I think about my grandma’s life, I see three important lessons.

The most important lesson is that change is not only inevitable, but it is accelerating. In China in 1917 after the fall of the Manchu dynasty, the term “women’s rights” would have been met with blank stares. In Canada, there might have been outright scorn, since the right to vote for women was only a year old, and there was active resistance to this new fangled notion. Today, it would be foolhardy to suggest to any women in this room, Chinese Canadian or otherwise, that they cannot have full participation in our increasingly globalized society.

Since 1917, change has been the most important aspect of life. Think about race relations, gender roles, technology, medicine and any number of other things that matter. Now compare them between 1917 and today, 95 years later. The changes in knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and capabilities are a part of our world and touch the lives of all of those that my grandma cared about..

But Grandma was a conservative –she may have disapproved of many or most of these changes – especially anything that she might have considered non-traditional. But I have first hand evidence that Grandma was able to accept new things that affected the lives and happiness of members of her family, in her acceptance of my own non-traditional choice in the creation of my own family.

My son Corwin is 12, a bit younger than me when I first met grandma. But like all of his cousins, great grandmother has been part of his life since he was born. And when I asked him yesterday how he would remember her, he said “Great grandma always had a smile for me. She has never frowned at me.”

While that may be true for her great grandchildren, there are others who have felt grandma’s displeasure in a more direct way. The episode of the thief on the street has become a family legend. In the early 1990s, my grandma, who was then in her 70s was walking home one day through Kensington market. As she walked, someone snatched her necklace, breaking the chain, and ran away. Grandma immediately took off after the thief, shouting imprecations, with cane upraised, intending mayhem and retribution. The thief escaped, which on the whole was fortunate, both for the thief and for the rest of us – it would have been difficult explaining to the relevant judicial authorities why he had been beaten to a pulp.

That winter, or perhaps during a winter soon after, my very non-traditional wife Jill recalls walking with grandma after a family gathering, and having her come up to a snow bank. Jill was concerned about getting grandma safely over the snow bank, but grandma solved the problem by hopping over it like a young girl.

So the second lesson of my grandma’s life is that obstacles can be surmounted with grace and style. The third important lesson is that courage is important, but dignity is not necessarily so, particularly if you are chasing down injustice.

Our fleeting lives are like flames in a brief interval wedged between the eternity of the past and the abyss of the future. If we are lucky, our way through the darkness is lit by the lives of those close to us, as we in turn light the way for those to come. In this room, in this city, on this planet, there are 25 direct descendants of my grandmother – children, grandchildren, great grandchildren – all of whose lives were directly affected by the actions and choices made by my grandmother, the light of her life spilling across generations to help show us the road leading forward.

Her light is gone now, but while it was here, it shone on many people. Because of my grandmother, all of our lives shine a little brighter.

by Do-Ming Lum
copyright 2011

He Said/She Said

2011-08-28T21:00:00.004-04:00

Too darned long since I have updated the blog. But the real world will have this tendency to intrude and change our plans. I was going to write about the death of a friend, and spring, and starting a new contract, and the annual trip to Temagami. And maybe I yet will.

In the meantime, I am happy to report that we went to a party yesterday, and while I was clueless, Jill suspected and was not altogether surprised when the Giant Squid and his Beloved Unicorn Girl (aka Peter Watts and Caitlin Sweet) announced that they had been married at City Hall on the 19th, and that we were all there to help them celebrate.

We were treated to an audio recording of their vows (click here for a transcript of Peter's, and here for a transcript of Caitlin's). How cool is it when your friends' wedding vows begin

We come here today in defiance of biological reality.

And for anyone who knows Peter, is there any surprise at all that "the Officiant seemed quite disapproving of the whole thing"?

Congrats, you guys! Hope you have a wonderful life together!

Snow Day

2011-02-02T18:28:00.004-05:00

...and also Groundhog Day today. It is also approximately a cross-quarter day, meaning we are at the half way point to an equinox or solstice (in this case the spring equinox in March).

And, it being Canada, there is snow. But the upside is that the groundhog didn't see his shadow today. And that means winter will last just as long as it was ever going to.

On Acting

2011-01-25T13:26:00.004-05:00

There is a story, probably apocryphal, about Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man. There is a scene where Hoffman's character has been awake for a few days and is physically exhausted. So on the day they were to film that scene, Hoffman came to the set in terrible shape, and Olivier said, 'Dusty, you look absolutely wretched!'. According to the story, it turned out that Hoffman had been awake for twenty-four hours and had been running laps around a track, in order to prepare for the scene by making himself sleep-deprived and exhausted. On learning this, Olivier shakes his head and says, 'Oh, Dusty, why don't you just try acting?'

My first introduction to the world behind the stage came from reading Robert Heinlein's Double Star when I was a teenager. I get flashbacks to Double Star from the Olivier story, and from the following video clip where another great actor, Sir Ian McKellen explains his acting method.

Oh Oh Oh...Trapped In A Bad Project

2011-01-23T22:13:00.003-05:00

It's not just science researchers -- the rest of us understand this as well.

TED: A Realistic Vision For World Peace

2011-01-10T15:21:00.003-05:00

The speaker is Nobel Peace prize winner Jody Williams, and I can't imagine a better way to start off 2011:

Twelve Days of Christmas

2010-12-21T18:30:00.002-05:00

As the solstice passes (today at 18:38 ET) the Christmas rush is well upon us, judging by the parking lots in the malls. Here is a summary of the consequences of sending the gifts from the Twelve Days of Christmas:

This Morning's Lunar Eclipse

2010-12-21T16:40:00.002-05:00

Here is a time-lapse video of the eclipse, taken from Gainesville, Florida.

Winter Solstice Lunar Eclipse from William Castleman on Vimeo.

Happy Winter Solstice 2010

2010-12-20T23:45:00.002-05:00

Tuesday, 2010 December 21 is the winter solstice in the Northern Hemisphere. After Tuesday, the days start getting slowly longer again.

This year, the solstice is marked by a total lunar eclipse which will occur on Tuesday morning. The last time a lunar eclipse and the winter solstice were on the same day was the year 1638. The next occurrence won't be until 2094 -- I have ambitions to watch it, but that is predicated on either the technological singularity occurring, or on sufficient medical advances to keep me from total decrepitude.

Dark Matter Ring

2010-12-19T08:53:00.005-05:00

This question came up in a family discussion recently: if dark matter is, well, dark and current theory says it doesn't interact with normal matter, then how can it actually be detected? And the answer is that the dark matter isn't detected -- it is inferred from other obser- vations. This photo [Credit: NASA/ESA, M. J. Jee & H. Ford et al. (Johns Hopkins University)] of the galaxy cluster CL0024+17 in the constellation Pisces shows, in addition to galaxies that are part of the cluster, a series of repeated images of background galaxies that were created by gravitational lensing.

This lensing effect is caused by light being bent by travelling through a region where there is strong gravity before reaching us. Some analogies can be set up using everyday objects, such as looking at distant streetlights through a wine glass.

In the case of the cluster in the photograph, the lensing does not occur immediately around the edge of the cluster itself, as one might expect, but in a ring some distance away from the centre of the cluster itself. The lensing (bending of light) is being done by the gravitation associated with unseen mass. Based on the amount of lensing, a computer model was developed to determine the location of the unseen mass, which has been coloured blue in the photograph.

Here is a video which explains further, including some discussion on the origin of the ring (which at 2.5 million light years across is comparable to the distance from the Milky Way to Andromeda):

Flight of the Dragon: Animation

2010-12-19T00:12:00.006-05:00

The first flight of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft was an unmanned test vehicle last week on December 8. However, the ultimate goal is a human rated spacecraft. Here is a SpaceX animation showing the mission profile of a Dragon vehicle carrying a crew to the ISS:

Here is another version with a techno soundtrack:

In watching these videoe, I can't help but be struck by how similar this mission profile is to the first manned missions into space 50 years -- half a century -- earlier: launch, ascent, drop booster stages, conduct mission, drop service module, re-enter, splashdown, recover by helicopter. This technology is unsustainable even if this does happen to be the most inexpensive launcher/spacecraft combination ever built -- too much of the launcher (upper stage) and spacecraft (service module) are thrown away. Haven't we learned anything in 50 years of doing this?

The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics

2010-12-18T23:35:00.004-05:00

A post today on the science blog Pharyngula introduced me to Dr. Jim Kakalios and his Youtube video series The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics. These are promotional videos which are intended to complement the book of the same title , which is subtitled "A Math-Free Exploration of the Science that Made Our World". Kakalios uses comic book and SF pulp magazine imagery to illustrate concepts of quantum physics.

Lesson 1 - The World of Tomorrow

Lesson 4 - It's All Done With Magnets (incomplete)

Lesson 6 - The Laser, Death Rays, and DVDs

My Google-Fu is inadequate to the task of locating episodes 2, 3, and 5, or a complete Lesson 4. Perhaps they don't exist? But based on the videos, it appears to be a great book, especially for a younger readership.

The Queen's Christmas Message 2010

2010-12-18T23:08:00.003-05:00

Caution -- not for the humour impaired. The words "bollocks" and "wankers" appear in this video*.

The presence of this video on this blog should not be construed to mean that the author is in any way frustrated with the political leadership of Canada.

* From the Operation Maple website.

Interview with Michael Skeet on EDGE blog

2010-12-16T14:31:00.003-05:00

An interview with our friend Michael Skeet is featured on the EDGE publishing blog. Michael comments on his story in EVOLVE: Vampire Stories of the New Undead in a blog post that is part of EDGE's 2010 Countdown to Christmas series. {Note - probably available from Bakka!]

In addition to the interview with Michael, there are also interviews with Nancy Kilpatrick, (editor) and EVOLVE authors Kevin Cockle and Ronald Hore.

The Dragon Touches The Sky

2010-12-09T22:42:00.005-05:00

Earlier this week, NASA announced that the last two shuttle missions, to be flown on Discovery and Endeavour, have been delayed until next year. But in the meantime, a historic first has occurred: a private company -- Space Exploration Technologies, Inc. or SpaceX -- has built, launched, and recovered a spacecraft from Earth orbit. The first Dragon spacecraft was placed into low Earth orbit yesterday by a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, which lifted off from Cape Canaveral.

The first stage of the Falcon launcher was recovered from the Atlantic, and the Dragon spacecraft made several orbits before it re-entered the atmosphere and splashed down safely in the Pacific.

Previously, spacecraft development and launch were only within reach of national or supra-national entities -- Russia, the United States, China, Japan, India, and the European Union. Now SpaceX has joined this exclusive club, the first corporation to do so.

Initial plans are to use the Dragon vehicle in cargo-carrier configuration to ferry supplies to the International Space Station to fulfill the terms of the resupply contract that NASA has awarded to SpaceX. But cargo resupply is a stepping stone -- the ultimate goal is to build a human-rated version of Dragon which will carry up to seven astronauts.

With the uncertainty in the Constellation program and in the development of the Orion crew vehicle, it is likely that Dragon will be the de facto next generation spacecraft.

Although Dragon's stated purpose is to carry astronauts and supplies to the International Space Station, other missions for which the Orion was being considered may be possible with Dragon -- lunar orbit, lunar landing (with a lander to be developed), asteroid rendezvous, and others as needs are identified.

A movie showing a simulated rendezvous and docking with the ISS provides a window into the current thinking of SpaceX in terms of the bread-and-butter of being a service provider. However, it is not outside the realm of possibility that some variant of the Heinleinian vision of The Man Who Sold The Moon may still come true.

Imagine

2010-12-09T22:36:00.001-05:00

It was thirty years ago yesterday -- 1980 December 8.

Knocking on doors

2010-12-09T22:27:00.003-05:00

Like the man in this video, I too am a tolerant guy. But let's be clear -- in any conflict between missionaries and natives, my sympathies are always with the natives. So when I get missionaries of whatever stripe at my door, I always feel compelled to strike a figurative blow for all those who encountered missionaries and were less fortunate than me. This may be why we have experienced such a steep fall-off of strangers come to share their faiths...

Door To Door Atheists Bother Mormons - Watch more Funny Videos

Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence

2010-11-22T12:17:00.004-05:00

I found out about this from The Skeptic's Dictionary Facebook posting. The Centre For Inquiry Canada started their "Extraordinary Claims" advertising campaign a couple of days ago, on the 19th. Here is a video from CFI which explains the basis of the message:

Educational initiatives like this are important and meaningful, and the fact that the campaign pays tribute to the late Carl Sagan doesn't hurt, either. On the assumption that critical thinking can't be started too early, Skeptical Dictionary has a list of resources for younger readers that all geek parents (or the parents of geek children) should find useful. Applying the principle of seeking extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims is a great place to start.

Cowboys and Aliens

2010-11-20T19:15:00.004-05:00

There will be at least one movie that I will see in a theatre in 2011!

Funny videos

2010-11-20T18:40:00.003-05:00

My SFContario plans for today took a sudden and radical change. Instead, I had an opportunity to do other things. I found these two very funny videos showing the darker side of child rearing:

I'll Get The Ice Creams

Boys' Night Out

The Ultimate Negative Product Review

2010-11-17T10:25:00.005-05:00

My HP 1100 printer recently failed and had to be replaced. I therefore have more than a little sympathy for tech support horror, like this little gem:

In 2006, an American soldier in Iraq calls up Hewlett Packard's tech support because he has a printer problem. They tell him that he needs to pay them before they will provide him with information on how to fix it. The soldier is highly dissatisfied with this outcome. The soldier proceeds to express his unhappiness with the product in a very dramatic fashion.

I would never buy or recommend an all-in-one printer, but (at least based on this one review) the HP 5510 should probably move to the bottom of the list if you expect to be working in hot, dry climates far away from tech support. Oh, and don't imagine that HP's regular tech support procedures might change -- although as a result of this incident they now have a policy of free phone support for all overseas military personnel (but presumably only American military personnel).

I remember a time when it was possible to make a blanket assumption that an HP product would be a quality product. That time is past, but here is HP's response to the incident with the soldier. Does it restore your confidence in the company's product line?

RIP Yoshinobu Nishizaki

2010-11-14T22:30:00.004-05:00

Real geeks would know that Yoshinobu Nishizaki was a producer and co-creator of the anime series Space Battleship Yamato (aka Star Blazers in its dubbed and edited US version).

Various sources, including Variety, the Japan Times, the Amine News Network, and others report that Nishizaki passed away in a boating accident earlier today, in an ironic twist falling from the deck of a ship named Yamato after his most famous creation. Although rescued from the water, the 75-year old Nishizaki passed away shortly afterward.

One of Nishizaki's final projects was the live action movie Space Battleship Yamato, scheduled for release in Japan in December.

Happy Creation Week!

2010-10-24T09:21:00.005-04:00

Quite aside from any personally important anniversaries that might have occurred yesterday on October 23, it is important to mark the Judeo-Christian Day of Creation itself, as determined centuries ago by Archbishop James Ussher, a noted biblical scholar 350 years ago.

Although this chronology has fallen out of favour in any mainstream theological sense, and is totally irrelevant in any science-based view of the world, it (or its variations) remain popular with young-Earth creationists like convicted criminal and conspiracy theorist Kent Hovind, the anti-evolution Discovery Institute, or the biblical-literalism promoting Creation Museum. Ussher based his chronology on a synthesis of the most current scientific and historical scholarship available at the time; the explosion of knowledge since then has made science and history incompatible with a literal reading of any of the many versions of the Judeo-Christian bible. It is ironic that those who uphold young-Earth creation ideas can only do so by ignoring Ussher's approach of reconciling the most current science with Biblical scholarship.

For this week only, N1S has been redesignated "the only begotten son", and during the course of the week, there are various significant events to celebrate:

Yesterday on October 23: God creates light ("Let there be light!")[Gen 1:3] The light is divided from the darkness, and "day" and "night" are named. Although yesterday was a Saturday, 4004 BC October 23 fell on a Sunday.

Today, the second day: God creates a firmament ("Let a firmament be...!")[Gen 1:6–7] The firmament is named "skies".

Monday: God commands the waters below to be gathered together in one place, and dry land to appear [Gen 1:9–10]. "Earth" and "sea" are named. God commands the earth to bring forth grass, plants, and fruit-bearing trees. Botanists rejoice!

Tuesday: God creates lights in the firmament [Gen 1:14–15] to separate light from darkness and to mark days, seasons and years. Two great lights are made (most likely the Sun and Moon, but not named), and the stars (including the array of objects ranging from GRB090423 to Andromeda -- all of which in a young-Earth view would have been created with light and radiation already in transit because as we all know, God delights in confounding scientists and leading human thinkers to untruths.

Wednesday: God commands the sea to "teem with living creatures", and birds to fly across the heavens [Gen 1:20–21]. He creates birds and sea creatures, and commands them to be fruitful and multiply. Biologists (particularly marine biologists) should rejoice today. Suggested celebratory dinner to include shrimp. Or better yet, squid.

Thursday, Day 6: God commands the land to bring forth living creatures [Gen 1:24–25]. He makes wild beasts, livestock and reptiles. He then creates humanity in His "image" and "likeness" [Gen 1:26–28]. Humanity, or at least the first two individuals are told to "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it." The totality of creation is described by God as "very good." Thursday night, we are having ribs! As noted previously, October 23 in 4004 BC fell on a Sunday, which would have placed Day 6 on the first Friday after Creation, causing the Sabbath to fall on Saturday, just as it does in the Jewish tradition.

Contest!

2010-10-01T12:45:00.003-04:00

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, through its podcast website called Blueshift, has a contest on this week. The prize is a beachball, which has been printed with the WMAP sky image, and signed by Nobel laureate John Mather. How cool is that??

I am a sucker for this sort of thing, so naturally, I entered. I only found out about this today, and the deadline is 5 o'clock ET today. If I win, I will hold the beach ball in my hand and cackle maniacally, something along the lines of "The universe! It's mine, all mine!"

Why spam blogs?

2010-09-27T12:02:00.004-04:00

One of the blogs I follow has a recent article on spammers who target blogs: Don't mind me.: Paranoid much?. Becky's questions are similar to my own.

I've encountered blogspam myself a few times, so I sympathize with anyone who has had the experience of clearing out crap from comments. This is the main reason why comment moderation is turned on here.

As to the nature of spam, I sort of understand the premise behind e-mail spam -- at best, it is a sales pitch encouraging the recipient to go to a website for some legitimate product or service. At worse it is an enticement to click on something which will drop some malware on an unsuspecting user's computer, or worse. There are clear analogies between this and traditional junk mail of the sort printed on actual paper and delivered via the Post Office.

But aside from causing me to be enraged, and then sad, and then just puzzled, what was the point of posting a long, sense-free, block of text in the comments on my father's obituary, with no actual working links in it? I thought initially that it was pharma-spam -- some bot had noticed a significant key word (cancer) and this was going to culminate in a link to some dodgy website selling cancer nostrums to the credulous and the desperate. But with no link, there could be no possibility of a sale.

So I have three possible theories to explain this:

Explanation 1 - spammers are just idiots, and whatever bot created the comment spam was improperly written, so it just didn't create a valid link in the post. I'll discuss this further when I have more examples of comment spam to analyze.

Explanation 2 - some blogs, or some blog posts, talk about subjects which displease some agency or organization or individual, who responds by vandalizing the blog or blog post. I love conspiracy theories, so this line of thinking can be tweaked to be as over the top as desired.

Explanation 3 - an artificial intelligence has arisen as an emergent property of the internet. It is trying to communicate, using the most widespread form of internet communication (that being spam) as a model. I like this explanation the best, even though I also suspect it is the least likely.

The Source of Great Ideas

2010-09-26T23:34:00.005-04:00

This is a TED talk by Steven Johnson on the origin of great ideas.

Some thoughts:

(1) stimulants (like tea or coffee) are better than depressants (like beer or wine)
(2) consulting with lots of people is a good thing - connections lead to innovations. Periodic reviews with the team are important - the process of sharing problems and results of current work leads to new, possibly useful juxtapositions.
(3) chaotic environments = collisions between ideas and concepts. "Chance favours the connected mind".

Arr! We Be Talkin' Like Pirates...

2010-09-19T22:49:00.002-04:00

...because today is International Talk Like A Pirate Day! Hope yer cutlass don't rust, and ye find lots 'o booty!

I blog like an old fuddy duddy. But a happy one...

2010-09-11T10:26:00.011-04:00

The urlai website analyzes blog text and evaluates it according to gender, age, mood, and tonality. Here's the verdict on me:

luminosis.blogspot.com is probably written by a male somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is personal and happy most of the time.

There isn't a heck of a lot of detail about how the evaluation is done, but presumably it is based on word usage analysis. Based on the words I use, this algorithm thinks I am mostly happy, but possibly because of the formality of my sentence construction, thinks I am between 66 to 100. Well, it got the gender right.

Turning this lens on some other examples -- Michael and Jill's Second Draft, as well as Madeline's Escaping The Trunk gets exactly the same evaluation as me, except for the gender -- the algorithm correctly identifies Madeline as female, and believes that the combination of Michael and Jill is also female. Maybe because Jill posts more? The analysis is dead on for Dave -- male, 26 to 50, mostly happy. But for Peter, it gets both the gender and age wrong -- female, 66 to 100, mostly upset. Looking further afield to the blog of a complete stranger -- the age problem and "mostly upset" rating also applies to Pharyngula. Maybe the "mostly upset" part is a marine biologist thing?

These results are dynamic over time, since the analysis is based on the latest articles in the blog. It is possible that I could change the tone and character of my blog and get a different result, so if you are reading this article years after it is written, and you run the same analysis on my blog, you might not get the same result.

You likely can derive information about an author from lexical analysis of their writing, including statistical frequency analysis of their word usage. But these (admittedly limited) results show this analysis needs to used in context with other information. In the meantime, I need to go find some kids so I can yell at them to get off my damn lawn. Because that's what us happy old fuddy duddy bloggers do.

Squid with Hugo

2010-09-05T21:09:00.010-04:00

See that? That is one seriously stoked Squidly Dude with his brand new Best Novelette Hugo, and he is clearly making plans for it, likely how to introduce the sharp points on his prize to those American border officials with whom he is most familiar.

Photo credit -- Professor Allan Weiss, who also broke the news about the award this morning. This photo is being used subject to getting Allan's permission, so it might only be temporary.

UPDATE - Jill, Dave, Madeline and Peter himself have blog updates on this event. Peter's entry has lots of photos from Aussiecon 4. You can also read "The Island", Peter's Hugo-award winning story, on his website, or download it as a PDF.

UPDATE 2 - Added 2010 November 23: I did in fact hook up with Allan after he returned from his travels, and he gave me permission to use the photo above.

Congratulations, Peter Watts!

2010-09-05T09:50:00.004-04:00

The Hugo Awards website shows that Peter Watts won a Hugo award for "Best Novelette", a story entitled "The Island", appearing in The New Space Opera 2 collection (published by Eos). It is evening in Australia as this is being written, and the Hugo Awards ceremony at Aussiecon 4 has just ended.

Peter is a very talented science fiction writer, in addition to his scientific credentials. The award is well deserved, so congratulations, Peter!

This is perhaps an unworthy thought, but I can't help wondering whether Peter's acceptance speech contained any new and creative uses for his new Hugo award -- specifically on unhelpful border guards...

Barbecue Sauce

2010-07-20T23:16:00.002-04:00

The summer barbecue season is upon us once agin. I promised a number of people that I would post this year's barbecue sauce recipe, so here it is.

Barbecue pork sauce

4 bottles [282 ml] of Lee Kum Kee char siu sauce (available from your neighbourhood Chinese grocery store, occasionally from Sobey's or Loblaws)
1 bottle of [282 ml] Lee Kum Kee spare rib sauce

Combine the bottles of sauce in a pot under low heat. Use a rubber scraper to get all the sauce out of each bottle. Once emptied, use one of the bottles as a measure and add to the pot:

1 bottle [282 ml] water
1 bottle [282 ml] tomato ketchup (I use Heinz because it is what I have available]
Half a bottle [140 ml] of Chinese cooking wine

Combine and allow the mixture to heat slowly under low heat, stirring constantly.
Add the following to taste:
powdered garlic (could also use minced garlic, and in fact that might provide a better result)
white pepper
onion flakes
allspice (only a couple of pinches necessary)

Leave on low heat until the sauce is smooth and all the powders have been blended in.

Add pork pieces so that each piece of meat is coated. I put between 4 to 6 pieces of meat into a ziplock bag with a scoop or two of the sauce. I marinate the meat for a couple of days (but the meat and sauce combo can also be stored in the freezer for a few weeks). The above quantities make enough barbecue sauce to marinate between 16 to 24 pork tenderloin pieces.

New innovation this year -- prior to cooking, I remove the meat from the bags and place on a foil tray or cookie sheet or something similar. Instead of disposing of the sauce, I put it back into a pot and heat it. Since it has been in contact with raw pork, I heat the sauce until it boils and I keep it on a low boil for 5 to 10 minutes.

The sauce is great with the pork after it has been barbecued. It can also be served with Chinese sausage, which will accentuate the flavour of the meat. Leftover Chinese sausage, plus leftover pork, plus the sauce can be combined into an amzingly nice fried rice dish. I have also used the sauce plus water plus pork bouillion to make a soup stock to serve rice noodles plus beansprouts plus leftover pork.

Barbecuing the pork

Note - your own barbecue may well give different results. The cooking process needs to be calibrated to the barbecue (and possibly the barbecuer).

Do each piece on a hot, preheated barbecue at two minutes on high. Flip, cook another two minutes. Then reduce heat to low, and maintain cooking for the next twenty minutes, opening the barbecue lid and flipping the meat occasionally. You can take the opportunity to "paint" the meat with additional sauce which you have previously set aside for this purpose.

After 20 minutes (total 24 minutes cooking time) you should find that the larger pieces will be somewhat rare (for those who like that sort of thing). Another 10 minutes on the upper rack will allow the meat to reach a tender, near done light pinkness. The meat can be served immediately, but it is better to let it sit for another 10 minutes.

Happy Neilsday 2010

2010-07-20T22:56:00.001-04:00

Forty one years ago today, the lunar module Eagle undocked from the command module Columbia. After a brief retrofire engine burn, the Eagle descended toward the Sea of Tranquility, a vast lava plain close to the lunar equator. With fuel running out, and the spacecraft descending toward a boulder field, Neil Armstrong took manual control of the lander and brought it down safely.

Later that evening, at 10:56PM EDT, Armstrong would become the first human to set foot on another celestial body, followed shortly after by fellow crew member Buzz Aldrin.

Forty one years later, the Constellation program, along with the Ares launchers, have been cancelled. America has no firm plan to return to the Moon, and the Canadian Space Agency has no lunar exploration initiative. But there are others who may well take on that challenge -- maybe for the wrong reasons of national pride and international prestige at first, but there is always the hope that the door once reopened won't be closed so hastily again.

Earthquake Aftermath

2010-07-20T22:38:00.005-04:00

My back yard in Toronto after the earthquake (but before the G20 protests):

Somewhere behind the upended furniture is a bottle of beer that got partially spilled. Careful observers (at least ones who talked to the photographer) might notice that this shot was staged. Guess they aren't going to be sending me any earthquake relief money...

Earthquake!

2010-06-23T13:55:00.013-04:00

The earth moved! About ten or fifteen minutes ago, a small tremor passed through Toronto. I noticed it because my rack of disk drives started shaking, and making ticking sounds of metal under stress (the rack, not the disk drives)!

Update 1: According to the National Post blog, the tremor was felt as far away as Ottawa, Montreal, and Cleveland. According to the USGS in the same blog post, the magnitude was in the mid 4's.

Update 2: The United States Geological Survey reports on their website that the earthquake occurred at 17:41:41 UTC about 39 km north of Cumberland, ON close to the Ontario/Quebec border. This puts it around 13:41 EDT, with a slight delay before reaching Toronto. At the time, I didn't think to check the system clock on my computer. Knowing the time delay, and determining the distance from Google Maps or Google Earth, we could calculate the propagation speed of the shock wave through (mostly) shield rock. The intensity was magnitude 5.5 [changed to 5.0 on a subsequent viewing] higher than the mid 4's that I reported earlier. The USGS seismometer data also places the epicentre of the quake quite deep -- about 17 kilometers [change to 18].

Update 3: Map of epicentre location:

View Larger Map

Update 4: The Globe and Mail's blog has extensive reporting from all over the province. Various Facebook updates, as well as the verbal report of my son, indicate that offices and classrooms were briefly evacuated - a prudent move in the face of what is described as a "moderate" intensity earthquake. There are reports of a bridge (Barrage McLaren) damaged close to the epicentre, and another bridge near Bowman, PQ, closed. There have been no other damage reports so far as of 17:45, but some government facilities in Ottawa are closed. Ottawa is built on ground which can potentially amplify the effect of an earthquake, and reports (again via Facebook) from friends living there indicate that the intensity was a lot greater for them than for me. Rumours that a tsunami warning was issued for the artificial lake constructed for this week's G20 summit meeting are entirely unfounded [yes, now I am just being silly].

Summer Solstice Blues Averted!

2010-06-23T08:34:00.008-04:00

The summer solstice in the Northern Hemisphere occurred a couple of days ago on June 21 -- longest day of the year here, and of course for the Southern Hemisphere, the shortest. I always feel a twinge on June 21, because the nights start getting longer again. But this year, I had something new to think about -- in the lead up to June 21, a number of people sent me the following e-mail:

Please watch this on 21st June

SHARE THIS WITH YOUR FRIENDS, AS NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE IT AGAIN. Two Suns on 21th June 2010

21st June - the Whole World is waiting for.............

Star Aderoid will be the brightest in the sky, starting 10 June. It will look as large as the sun from naked eye. This will culminate on 21stjune when the star comes within 34.65M miles of the earth. Be sure to watch the sky on june. 21 at 12:30 pm. It will look like the earth has 2 suns.!!

The next time Aderoid may come this close is in 2287

The e-mail came with a photo:

The photo itself seems to have been inspired by the sunset on Tatooine sequence in the first-ever Star Wars movie (Episode 4 - A New Hope). It is, as you might expect, a product of the photoshopper's art, and not at all based ion reality. (Did you see two suns in the sky on June 21, or on any of the 11 days leading up to it??) The HTML in the e-mail has embedded text which reads "Fun & Info @ Keralites.net". Keralites.net actually exists, and appears to be a site promoting the state of Kerala, which is in India. Clicking on a couple of links led to dead ends, so it doesn't look like keralites.net has any significant content that I want to be looking for.

Notwithstanding the fact that I received this e-mail from respected sources, the content is total crap. (You really didn't see two suns in the sky on June 21, did you??)

What I find interesting is that people who are knowledgeable and canny are still taken in by junk like this, probably because the sky and astronomical matters in general are increasingly foreign to urban people.

Snopes, as usual, was right on top of this one. The following snippet is my favourite piece of their article:

An object as large as a star approaching the Earth would not suddenly appear at a particular hour of a given day and then be gone; if would be visible over an extended period of time.

If a star were truly about to pass within 35 million miles of Earth, the preparations we'd be undertaking would be to get ready to meet our makers and not to marvel at the beauty of the phenomenon, as the results would be catastrophic. By way of comparison, the Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun, while the planet Mercury orbits the Sun at an average distance of 36 million miles. If a star comparable to our Sun were to travel within 34.65 million miles of the Earth, our planet would quickly become like Mercury: a barren, lifeless, deep-fried hunk of rock.

The disconnect with the night sky in the majority of people in our modern society can likely be attributable, at least in part, to artificial lighting which makes it impossible for us to see the sky clearly at night.

But, whatever the source of the disconnect, one consequence of it is that nonsense like the "Aderoid" story gets circulated. And even more egregiously, the seeds are sown for the credulous to be taken in by more dangerous nonsense like Zecharia Sitchin's modern attempt to revive the lunacy of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Daniken. Sitchin's books are likely one of the elements driving the belief in an apocalypse in 2012, a belief sufficiently widespread that NASA felt compelled to put up an educational web page about it.

This year, I spent a quiet summer solstice with my family, under a sky with only one sun. Nothing potentially world ending happened, unless you count my inability to locate my favourite chip dip.

I want one

2010-06-06T10:40:00.011-04:00

Let me be on record with my intention that the next time I have $4 million in mad money, I am getting one of these babies . Except that I would want extensive modifications. I would want a Bussard powerplant, when such a device becomes available. The Bussard powerplant would produce electricity, so the diesel engines would need to be stripped and replaced with electrical engines. That should improve overall performance, and should definitely improve stealth in the water. Might be good for sneaking up on whales. Or squids. Effectively unlimited electrical power would also mean that the vehicle needs equipment to make oxygen from seawater, which would definitely improve its underwater range.

And, oh yeah -- I'd also want a space drive installed. It is just too bad that the current state of knowledge about dynamics is essentially unchanged from Newton's time, and precludes any space drive that isn't dependent on the rocket principle.

So the space drive would need to be non-reaction-based technology. After all, why would you want a cool-looking vehicle like this spoiled** by being stuck onto a fuel tank hundreds of times larger than the vehicle itself? That requirement may be the deal breaker, because with that in place, the investment is going to be more than $4 million. Always assuming that the laws of physics permit such a thing: centuries of hopeful inquiry have provided not one iota of a hint that it is possible to move in space without applying the reaction principle.

In the meantime, maybe the boat, in submarine mode, could be used to fund the space drive research by being used as a courier for high value goods that need to be moved from production sites in South America to their markets in North America. What do you want to bet that some prospective buyers have just such business models in mind?

====================
** I have similar feelings about many sports cars. Every darn one of them is spoiled by the need to be on wheels. Anything that looks that good needs to float 40 centimeters off the ground.

Catchup

2010-06-03T22:05:00.004-04:00

...or maybe ketchup. The latter would be what you slather on hot dogs, the former is for bloggers who who didn't do anything since late April.

April and May included a couple of events at the Merril Collection, the 11th birthday of N1S (10th birthday and 8th birthday reported previously), a party to celebrate Peter Watts' freedom, as well as the anniversary of the adventure in marriage that Jill and I embarked upon eighteen years ago. Pictures of all of this and more to follow in the next few days. Or weeks. Or months.

Ketchup on hot dogs and catchup in blogs are both tangy and sweet, one spicing up food, but the other -- ah, the other -- the catchup in this blog is like adding texture to memory. But let's be clear that I am not anxious to reread this blog through the veil of the hopefully hypothetical Alzheimers of my incipient dotage...

Peter Watts Sentencing - No Jail Time

2010-04-26T16:15:00.008-04:00

Good news -- we heard a few minutes ago from Dave Nickle at Peter's sentencing hearing in Port Huron, MI that Peter won't be sent to jail. My understanding from Dave's partner Karen who relayed the news is that Peter was lectured extensively by the judge about how it is important to be nice to the police, and Peter will have to pay a fine. But no jail time, which is substantially better than the gloomy predictions we were making last week!

Dave and Madeline are going out for a beer with Doug Mulkoff, Peter's lawyer, and a group of other supporters. They'll be home in 5-6 hours, so expect first hand updates later this evening.

UPDATE - Dave has posted an initial report from the Quay Street Brewing Company.

The Port Huron Times-Herald had this on their website today:

Author Watts to be sentenced today

A Toronto author convicted March 19 of assaulting, resisting and obstructing a border officer at the Blue Water Bridge is expected to be sentenced today. Peter Watts is scheduled to be in St. Clair County Circuit Judge James Adair's courtroom at 2 p.m. Information his online court record shows the recommended sentence is 180 days in jail with credit for one day served and 60 days suspended upon payment of $1,600 in fines and costs. A jury found Watts guilty of refusing to comply with orders during a random inspection at the bridge. An officer testified at trial that Watts tried to choke him.

Although the Times-Herald, in keeping with their past performance, tries to cast Peter in the most negative possible light, I want to make it clear that Peter was cleared of the assault charge. The officer who "testified at trial that Watts tried to choke him" had his testimony discredited during the trial by an independent witness. No assault by Peter ever took place, although Peter himself was assaulted by being punched, pepper sprayed, and knocked to the ground.

Peter was convicted of non-compliance with the orders of the border officer. The jury evidently believed that being punched and pepper sprayed should not have affected Peter's ability to follow those orders. Peter talks about that on his blog.

Both NewsFix and Quill & Quire have news coverage that more accurately reflects actual events than the Port Huron Times-Herald. However, it is the Simple Justice blog of Scott H. Greenfield which provides the most succinct analysis of Peter's travails:

Like Cory Doctorow, I agree completely that Peter Watts' conviction is absurd and horrible. He was convicted for acting like a normal person under abnormal circumstances. He was convicted for lacking the understanding that when interacting with officials with guns and shields, one bows deeply like a supplicant, just to avoid irritating small minds.

There is no justice. It is all about maintaining order and conformity, because the system needs order and conformity. The Japanese aphorism about the nail that sticks out being hammered down is entirely apropos. What, you thought living in a democracy entitled you to more or less equal power relationships with officials? The people wearing the jackboots want you to remember that.

Weapons of Mass Distraction

2010-04-26T13:17:00.003-04:00

Being a peaceful kind of guy, I am deeply concerned by yet another instance of weaponization, although in the spirit of scientific inquiry, I am closely following today's experiment.

Earlier this month, senior officials in the Middle East definitively identified an earthquake initiator (earlier reports here and here) which others were quick to exploit. This is the experiment which I noted earlier and which is scheduled for today, an experiment that proposes widespread attempts to induce earthquake events.

If the initial premise is correct, there is enough evidence to suggest that large portions of North America are in serious trouble, and a strong likelihood that Sydney, Australia may be swallowed by the Pacific Ocean in a seismic event that would be unprecedented in human recorded history.

In the past, similarly credible links have been made to hurricanes, although today's experiment is the first time that I am aware of where actual testing will be done. For the sake of science, I urge people to observe, and wait for the earth to move.

Hubble is 20 Years Old!

2010-04-24T20:22:00.012-04:00

I've been married for almost as long as the Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit.

But talk about schedule creep. After delays in construction on a project conceived in 1969 as the "Large Space Telescope", and approved in 1977, the Hubble space telescope was finally completed by the mid 1980's, and scheduled for launch in October 1986. But then the Challenger disaster happened in January 1986 and the shuttle fleet was grounded in the aftermath of Challenger's loss. Over four years after the accident, space shuttle Discovery finally took the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit on April 24, 1990 -- twenty years ago today.

Mission STS-31 was the tenth launch of the shuttle Discovery. On board were Mission Commander Loren Shriver (replacing John Young, the originally assigned commander), Pilot Charles Bolden, and Mission Specialists Bruce McCandless, Steven Hawley, and Kathryn Sullivan. Hubble was deployed in a 380 statute mile (612 km) orbit, a record orbital altitude for shuttle missions, in order that the HST could be released near its operational altitude well above the atmosphere. The height ensured that there would be no atmospheric interference for its optics, and minimal atmospheric resistance to affect its orbit.

Shortly after the telescope was launched and saw first light in orbit, it became clear that there was a serious problem with the main mirror. Manufactured by Perkin-Elmer Corporation, the mirror had a flaw called "spherical aberration" that caused all images to be fuzzy. This problem was fixed on the first servicing mission in 1994 with a device called COSTAR -- Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement -- which remained in place until the fourth servicing mission in 2009, by which time all Hubble instruments had built-in corrective optics. [Note: There were four servicing missions, but five actual servicing mission shuttle flights, since servicing mission 3 was performed over the course of two flights.]

During the telescope's lifetime, perhaps one of the most important images obtained by Hubble was the so-called "Deep Field" composite.

This material was presented to the 187th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in San Antonio, Texas on January 15, 1996.

Several hundred never before seen galaxies are visible in this "deepest-ever" view of the universe. Besides the classical spiral and elliptical shaped galaxies, there is a bewildering variety of other galaxy shapes and colors that are important clues to understanding the evolution of the universe. Some of the galaxies may have formed less that one billion years after the Big Bang.

Representing a narrow "keyhole" view all the way to the visible horizon of the universe, the HDF image covers a speck of sky 1/30th the diameter of the full Moon (about 25% of the entire HDF is shown in the image above). This is so narrow, just a few foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy are visible and are vastly outnumbered by the menagerie of far more distant galaxies, some nearly as faint as 30th magnitude, or nearly four billion times fainter than the limits of human vision. (The relatively bright object with diffraction spikes just left of center may be a 20th magnitude star.) Though the field is a very small sample of sky area it is considered representative of the typical distribution of galaxies in space because the universe, statistically, looks the same in all directions.

The image was assembled from many separate exposures (342 frames total were taken, 276 were fully processed and used for this picture in 1996) with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), for ten consecutive days between December 18 to 28, 1995. This picture is from one of three wide-field CCD (Charged Coupled Device) detectors on the WFPC2. This "true-color" view was assembled from separate images were taken in blue, red, and infrared light. By combining these separate images into a single color picture, astronomers will be able to infer — at least statistically — the distance, age, and composition of galaxies in the field. Bluer objects contain young stars and/or are relatively close, while redder objects contain older stellar populations and/or farther away.

In 2007, while doing routine mapping of the distribution of dark matter within the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17 (ZwCl 0024+1652), located 5 billion light-years from Earth, astronomers got an unexpected first-hand view of how dark matter behaves during a titanic collision between two galaxy clusters. The interaction created a ripple of dark matter, which is somewhat similar to a ripple formed in a pond when a rock hits the water. The ring's discovery is among the strongest evidence yet that dark matter exists.

Credit: NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)

Astronomers have long suspected the existence of dark matter -- a hypothesized invisible substance -- as being the source of the additional gravity that is needed to hold together galaxies and galaxy clusters. Such objects would fly apart if they relied only on the gravity from their visible stars. Although astronomers don't know what dark matter is made of, they believe that it is a type of elementary particle that pervades the universe. Over the next decade, results from the Large Hadron Collider will provide more insight into this question.

A ring-like structure is evident in a composite image of the cluster made from Hubble observations. The ring can be seen in the blue map of the cluster’s dark matter distribution, which is superimposed on an image of the cluster. This is the first time that dark matter was detected, having a unique structure different from the gas and galaxies in the cluster.The ring measures 2.6 million light-years across.

The last photo below was taken after the fourth and final servicing mission in 2009, which repaired and upgraded Hubble so that it is expected to be functional until at least 2013, and likely much later. Although NASA originally intended to return the telescope to Earth for display in the Smithsonian, Hubble will actually outlast the remaining service lifetime of the shuttle fleet, now expected to end in September of this year.

So happy 20th birthday, Hubble! We hope you can provide us with many more years of incredible imagery out to the edge of the Universe.

Update: BoingBoing has a review of a stunning new book -- Hubble: A Journey Through Space and Time by Edward J. Weiler, published by Abrams in collaboration with NASA. Much better pictures there.

Force Projection 3

2010-04-18T23:39:00.004-04:00

This is a follow-up to earlier posts --
Force Projection, 2009 March 1
Force Projection 2, 2009 July 30

As discussed in the two earlier posts, the Chinese Navy has had a continuous presence in the Gulf of Aden since January 2009. My belief was that the Somali ant=piracy mission was an opportunity for the Chinese Navy to gain operational experience in international waters, as well as to observe the operational posture and procedures of other navies. Dr. J. Peter Pham has a column in the World Defense Review blog analyzing this position. The article dates back to March 2009, so it is a year old.

To recap -- the Chinese anti-piracy mission mission began on December 26, 2008 when the first flotilla left the naval base at Hainan Island, bound for the Gulf of Aden. This task force consisted of two missile-armed destroyers -- Haikou DDG-171 and Wuhan DDG-169 -- along with the supply ship Weishanhu.

On April 15, 2009, Wuhan and Haikou handed off to the second flotilla, consisting of the destroyer Shenzhen DDG-167 and frigate Huangshan FFG-570. The supply ship Weishanhu remained behind to provide logistics support.

A third force left Hainan Island on July 16, 2009. The guided missile frigates Zhoushan FFG-529 and Xuzhou FFG-530 along with the supply ship, Qiandaohu replaced all three of the ships on station in the Gulf of Aden. On November 1, 2009, Rear Admiral Wang Zhiguo hosted US Navy Rear Admiral Scott Sanders, the commander of the internationally constituted Combined Task Force 151, and members of Sanders' staff on board Zoushan.

Admiral Wang's problems during his tour included the capture by Somali pirates of the Chinese freighter De Xin Hai, a headache which he was able to hand to his successor. The missile frigates Ma'anshan FFG-525 and Wenzhou FFG-526 replaced Zhoushan and Xuzhou on November 12, 2009. On December 21, the missile frigate Chaohu FFG-568 joined the fourth flotilla, and a week later on December 27, a $4 million dollar ransom was paid to the Somali pirates for 25 hostages and the freighter De Xin Hai. It is assumed that Chaohu brought the ransom money.

On March 18, 2010, a handover ceremony was conducted on Ma'anshan to turn over operational responsibility to the fifth flotilla: missile destroyer Guangzhou DDG-168 and the supply ship Weishanhu joined the frigate Chaohu, relieving Ma'anshan, Wenzhou and Qiandaohu. On their way home, the three ships of the fourth flotilla were in Manila in the Philippines last week (April 13 to 17), on a five day port call, done apparently at the invitation of the Philippine Navy..

Of note for monitoring continuing operations is the fact that Weishanhu is now back in the Gulf of Aden for her second tour of duty. It appears that surface combatant vessels operate for 3 to 4 months, but the accompanying supply ship operates for 6 to 8 months. Thus far, both supply ships used to date have been units of the Qiandaohu class. Weishanhu (pennant number 887) supported the first and second flotillas, and is currently doing the same for the fifth. Qiandaohu (pennant number 886) supported the third and forth flotillas on a long (nearly eight month) deployment. There is reportedly a third ship in this class (NATO refers to it as the Fuchi class), but that ship has not been used. These ships also have their own complement of special forces troops and enough weaponry to deter attacks from pirates.

Since the Chinese Navy joined the UN anti-piracy mission in late 2008, Chinese warships have, as of the beginning of March 2010, escorted a total of 1,643 ships of various nationalities, and rescued 23 vessels from direct pirate attack. According to official Chinese government figures, more than 30 percent of China's foreign trade takes place via the Gulf of Aden route, which explains the continuing interest and ongoing commitment to providing military security.

A Belated Yuri's Night Observance

2010-04-18T22:20:00.004-04:00

Today is the 18th, and I am 6 days overdue in blogging about Yuri's Night, the annual celebration of Yuri Gagarin's space flight on April 12, 1961 -- 49 years ago, the day when the first human being travelled beyond the Earth's atmosphere into outer space.

On Yuri's Night, 2010, there were 13 people in orbit -- one more than all the cosmonauts and astronauts who flew in the Vostok and Mercury programmes combined.

Expedition 23 on the International Space Station consisted of six people -- Mission Commander Oleg Kotov (RKA), T.J. Creamer (NASA), Soichi Noguchi (JAXA), Tracy Caldwell Dyson (NASA), Alexander Skvortsov (RKA) and Mikhail Kornienko (RKA).

At the same time, space shuttle Discovery, flying on mission STS-131 and docked at the space station from a week earlier, had seven people on board -- Commander Alan Poindexter, Pilot James P. Dutton Jr., Mission Specialists Dorothy Metcalf-Lindenburger, Stephanie Wilson, Rick Mastracchio, Clayton Anderson (all with NASA) and Naoko Yamazaki (JAXA).

Gagarin, first man in space, would have appreciated that 49 years later, there are still firsts being achieved. On this occasion, the first time that four women were in space at the same time (Caldwell Dyson, Metcalf-Lindenburger, Wilson, Yamazaki) and the first time that two Japanese astronauts were in space together (Noguchi, Yamazaki).

Volcanic Plume from Iceland

2010-04-16T22:31:00.005-04:00

NASA's Terra and Aqua spacecraft, both in "ball of yarn" polar orbits, carry a detector called MODIS. On April 15, the Terra spacecraft used its onboard MODIS instrument to capture the following image of a volcanic plume from the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in southern Iceland.

In the photo, the Shetland Islands are at the photo's lower right corner.

In southern Iceland, the glacier over top of the volcano caused the upwelling lava to cool very quickly, forming a silica glass which fragmented into fine particles, and which in turn were carried into the atmosphere by the eruption plume.

The height of the plume occupies the normal range of cruise altitudes for commercial airliners. The presence of the the fine, sharp, jagged, abrasive silica particles in the volcanic ash cloud would cause engine failure if the material were sucked into an intake turbine. For this reason, air travel over most of northern Europe was cancelled for the day, and likely over the coming weekend.

Not since the World Trade Center attacks on September 11, 2001 has there been such a large disruption in air travel.

UPDATE - The Astronomy Picture of the Day website has a great picture of the volcano for their April 19 entry.

Calypso Pork

2010-04-07T22:16:00.007-04:00

I got an e-mail from a friend this morning describing a system problem -- the classical "I turn it on but nothing happens" problem, feared by computer users everywhere. Over GoogleChat through the course of the day, we agreed that my friend would come by this evening and we would check out the hard drive from the failed system, and if it worked, we would lift some data off of it.

I offered to provide dinner in addition to technical consulting.

Dinner would be Calypso Pork, from a recipe from a British cooking show called "Ainsley Harriott's Barbecue Bible", done by an English chef of Jamaican origin. The TV series dates back to sometime in the late 90's. The Calypso Pork recipe grabbed my imagination when it was described:

Marinade:
2 tablespoons of minced ginger
2 cloves of garlic
2 tablespoons of Muscovedo sugar
(I used demerara sugar because it was what I had)
a pinch or two of allspice
2 tablespoons of pineapple juice
2 tablespoons of corn oil
(the chef suggested any oil except olive oil)
2 tablespoons of RUM!
(should have been Jamaican dark rum, but I used what I had)

Combine all ingredients, mixing thoroughly

Add pork chops. Marinate for a few hours (3 and a half in my case).

Barbecue the pork chops -- approximately six minutes or so per side, on low heat.

I got the ingredients in the afternoon, scaled up the quantities to feed five people, and got the meat marinating.

When my friend arrived, we found that the drive he took out of the malfunctioning computer system was still good. We determined this by connecting the drive up to an interface device designed to connect to an IDE or SATA hard drive, provide power, and provide a data connection through a USB cable -- a must-have geek tool. When we connected up the drive, we found that we could read data from it, a highly desirable outcome, which meant that we were all set to copy over the drive contents to the high capacity data drive that my friend brought along for just this purpose.

Unfortunately we had problems getting the high capacity backup drive to work (refused to be recognized under either Ubuntu Linux or Windows XP despite repeated attempts), so we ended up only copying some critical files onto a flash drive. We agreed that my friend could borrow the nifty USB-to-IDE-and-SATA disk drive interface device for a while.

It being late in the evening, I barbecued the pork chops, and served them with roasted potatoes and a romaine lettuce salad.

Verdict -- this recipe is a definite keeper. I had never made this before, but everyone, even N1S, thought it was pretty good. The combination of flavours in the marinade worked well with the pork -- the ginger added some bite, while the rum blended everything else together into a savoury-sweet combination that accented rather than overpowered the meat.

Hardware

2010-03-30T22:59:00.005-04:00

Around here, we think of hardware as equipment, often useful, which is electronic and which often contains internal microprocessors, or is designed to be connected to other devices which contain microprocessors. In short, computer equipment. Geek stuff.

But there is an older definition of hardware -- nuts, bolts, nails, screws, mysterious stuff made of wood and metal and plastic, an enormous assortment of utilitarian goods, tools to manipulate these things in the physical world. Hardware is sold in hardware stores, places sacred to those who would build or make or fix or otherwise affect the sharp corners and shredded splinters of reality.

Which brings me to the point of this post: a big recommendation for the blog of Howard, a hardware store worker who has a penchant for hardware haiku. Howard's view of people and the world, filtered through the lens of the hardware store, provides some interesting, indeed fascinating, reading. His recent post about the musician is a flash of insight into how need and misconception juxtapose and result in incomprehension and anger:

A musician accosts me by the glue
at least I think she's a musician
judging by the two guitars she has on her back.
"I just need a small piece of wood cut for me."
I explain that we're a hardware store and not a lumber yard.
"Lumber yard?" she's distressed.
I do my best to explain that we can't just carry one type of wood,
if we have the piece she needs then we need to carry the piece
everyone needs
and we're a small hardware store.
She doesn't understand the concept
so I put it in its simplest terms:
In for a penny, in for a pound.
She doesn't seem to like my answer and leaves in a huff.
I hope she writes a song about how hardware stores break hearts.

Full disclosure -- I know Howard and see him a number of times a year. Therefore, I am not unbiased. But I ask you this -- how can you not respond to something like this?

A guy walks into a hardware store
with an incredible black eye.
"I need a pair of safety goggles."
Er, isn't it a little too late?

Happy 100th Birthday, Akira Kurosawa

2010-03-23T22:21:00.002-04:00

Today -- the 100th birthday of filmmaker Akira Kurosawa (March 23,1910 to September 6, 1998), who among many other films, made The Hidden Fortress, a movie that clearly influenced Star Wars.

Bad News

2010-03-21T02:38:00.004-04:00

I have been depressed for the last couple of days by the news that our friend Peter Watts was convicted when his case went to trial this past week. David Nickle has an excellent article as well as a follow-up piece on his blog. BoingBoing also had coverage, including some cogent cultural commentary. And Peter himself proves what a totally classy guy he is with his own blog post.

Some problems can't be solved. At least by me or anyone I know.

Online Q&A Tomorrow at "BItten By Books"

2010-03-02T11:14:00.003-05:00

Jill is on the Bitten By Books website tomorrow (2010 March 3), participating in a Tesseracts Thirteen on-line Question and Answer session from noon to midnight (with some breaks).

If you RSVP to the event, you will get 25 entries to their contest (details on their website), but you have to let them know that you RSVP'ed when you submit your question.

Note -- As of approximately 11:30am today, a little over 24 hours before the scheduled start of the event, the Bitten By Books server seems to be intermittently down (or at least unavailable) no doubt due to hordes of fans rushing to sign up for the opportunity to ask Jill questions :-)

UPDATED on 2009 March 4, 1:45pm -- it turns out that the online Q&A ran from noon yesterday to midnight tonight, not last night. Still more than 10 hours to go, and Jill has even contributed a prize to the contest.

The Day of the Rapture is Coming

2010-03-01T19:04:00.004-05:00

...and it is May 21, 2011, only about 15 months away. At least, according to the mathematical model developed by Harold Camping of the Family Radio media organization of California. Of course, Mr. Camping has been wrong before -- his original calculations showed that the Rapture would occur on September 6, 1994. He and his followers were disappointed, although Mr. Camping has spent the intervening years increasing the reach of his media company, and presumably refining the accuracy of his biblically-driven calculations.

This is a wake up call to those of us less certain of our virtue in the End Times, especially after our earlier remarks about Pat Robertson must surely have condemned us to be among those Left Behind. Mr. Camping's definitive prediction means we will have the next 15 months to polish and fine tune our post-Rapture business plans.

Earthquake in Chile

2010-03-01T01:04:00.006-05:00

A massive earthquake, magnitude 8.8 on the Richter scale, hit Chile on Saturday morning. (LINK to USGS summary).

View Chile earthquake in a larger map

As of this writing, Chile has not requested international aid. Unlike Haiti, Chile is more developed, and has more infrastructure to be able to deal with this event, which nonetheless has been described by the Chilean government as a "catastrophe".

Despite initial, obviously satirical reports, Pat Robertson has not made any statement as to the cause of the Chilean earthquake, now known to be the 8th most intense earthquake in recorded history.

UPDATE - I have heard radio commentary that describes the Chilean earthquake as the fifth, and not the eighth largest ever recorded. More than 500 times the energy of the Haitian earthquake was released. Some deaths occurred due to a tsunami generated by the initial event. Chile contains important sites for astronomical research (where SN1987A was discovered, for instance) including the Las Campanas site where the University of Toronto and other institutions maintain facilities. It is not know what effect, if any, the earthquake has had on telescopes and related hardware.

New Fad!

2010-02-27T10:23:00.012-05:00

Beads are wonderful. They are these little bits of three dimensional reality, useless until you use your creative impulse to form them into something greater. I think of them as pixels in 3D.

Lady parts are wonderful, speaking from my perspective as a heterosexual male. I could go into more detail at length, but this isn't that kind of blog :-)

Superglue is wonderful. Who among us doesn't know someone obnoxious that we'd like to superglue to some public building?

Beads plus lady parts plus superglue equals the new body art fad called vajazzling. Explanatory video follows:

I missed out on the fads for tattoos and body piercings. I'm thinking this is a ground floor opportunity for me to extend my boudoir photography ambitions to vajazzler design!

On the National Anthem and the Olympics

2010-02-26T08:48:00.003-05:00

The Olympics are winding down, and as usual I am heavily conflicted.

On the one hand, it is difficult to see organized sport in general, and the Olympic Games in particular, as anything more than manufactured news whose aim is to distract us from more important concerns -- concerns that include the economy, the recent earthquake in Haiti, the prorogation of the Canadian Parliament.

On the other hand, hearkening back to the heady days of the 1972 Canada-Russia hockey series, or the back to back baseball championships of the 1990s, it is difficult not to get caught up in the wave of emotion, as teams and individual athletes act out their dramas of striving and triumph and tragedy on the Olympic stage.

There are a couple of highlights (or perhaps lowlights) that I wanted to note.

The first is relatively minor. I saw a segment of news coverage (from the CBC, which really ought to know better) from the leadup to the opening ceremony which referred to a water craft which looked to me to be a native Canadian canoe as a "dragon boat".

The second is related to my National Anthem Blues post from last month. In the Olympic opening ceremony a couple of weeks ago, the Canadian national anthem wasn't sung in Hindi. Was anyone surprised by this? For the record, the government's National Heritage web page about the National Anthem has this to say:

It is possible to translate the words of the national anthem in languages other than English or French; it should be kept in mind, however, that this translated version will not have an official status.

So in fact, if there had been an audio collage of the national anthem rendered in a series of languages other than English or French (including Hindi), it would have been perfectly legitimate, as long as the official version was performed. But I doubt whether this will silence the Canada 2010 lunatics.

Gung Hei Fat Choy! Happy Chinese New Year 4708 - The Year of the Tiger

2010-02-14T11:43:00.000-05:00

Happy New Year to all -- may this Year of the Tiger bring you health and prosperity!

From Luminosis

Demonic Pokemon, Pokemonic Demon

2010-01-20T23:20:00.001-05:00

Regular readers of this blog (all six of you) will know that I am the father of a bright ten year old, who being a ten year old is subject to all the whims and fads of his peer group. For a (fairly long) while, one of those fads was a card game called Pokemon (link here to Wikipedia entry) -- a game whose arcane intricacy I never figured out. Additionally, there was a television show. And merchandise. Oh yes, merchandise -- enough lunch boxes and knapsacks and figurines and stuffed animals and all kinds of other (expensive) goodies, all designed to separate the child's parent's money from the child's parent. While the game and its surrounding hype were annoying mass media junk, the concept as a whole had a certain elegance in its exploitation of obsessive-compulsive “collect ‘em all” tendencies in children. Not that I would have any understanding of obsessive-compulsive “collect ‘em all” tendencies.

So you can imagine my horror when I learned that by allowing my son to have exposure to Pokemon cards and Pokemon paraphernalia, I have made it possible for him to learn how to enter into the world of witchcraft, how to cast spells, how to use psychic phenomena, how to work supernatural powers against his enemies , and worst of all, how to fantasy role play! I guess it is because "everything in life is real" that I need to take this seriously. Or perhaps not.

The list of Pokemon bad things begins at around 1:15. As a parent, I am pretty concerned about my son needing to work supernatural powers against his enemies. In his one experience with a bully, he was miserable for weeks because he didn't want to punch the other kid, which I am sorry to say would have been my response. He finally got the other kid to stop by talking to him about it, and convincing the other kid through reason that the harassment needed to stop. But I can see how with access to supernatural powers, he would have totally just zapped the other kid instead of applying will and courage and resolve to deal with this problem. Because kids would do that, when they aren't pumping their friends full of bullets with their handguns.

I also had issues with the logic behind why the Pokemon concept was both as corrupting as he says, and was also as effective a training tool as he says. If the latter were true, I would have expected to have absorbed enough of this knowledge during hours of watching Pokemon with my son to have the ability to use this methodology to make myself a superstar of corporate training. The fact that I am not an incredibly wealthy corporate training guru should tell you something.

In order to assuage my concerns, I hauled N1S (Number 1 Son) in front of the monitor, played back the video and watched his reaction, which went from basically neutral to astonishment to outright hostility. His response -- "He's crazy. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. I would never shoot my friends with a real gun. This guy is really stupid."

So, there you have it, from a ten (well, technically almost eleven) year old boy: "This guy is really stupid". I can't express it better myself. I wonder if this guy knows Pat Robertson? They surely belong together.

The truly sad thing about this are the people in the audience, who have all apparently turned off their capacity for critical thinking and for asking questions. Around about the mention of "witchcraft", I would have been walking out. Demagogues of this ilk have existed in every age, but their power comes from those who follow unthinkingly, or who remain silent in the face of nonsense.

Background: HMCS Athabaskan and Haitian Relief Efforts

2010-01-18T20:24:00.009-05:00

The Canadian Forces ship HMCS Athabaskan (DDG 282) which was just deployed to Haiti is an Iroquois-class destroyer. Ships of this class are also referred to as the "Tribal class", a tradition which dates back to the Second World War when ships of an earlier Tribal class were obtained by the Royal Canadian Navy from Great Britain.

Athabaskan was built in Quebec in 1972, and went through TRUMP (TRibal-class Upgrade and Modernization Project) in 1994. The Iroquois-class Tribals supplemented the Canadian Navy's River-class destroyer force in the 70's and 80's. Militarily, the Iroquois-class were originally designed to conduct anti-submarine warfare, but the TRUMP conversion remade them into area air defence platforms.

The current Commanding Officer of Athabaskan is Commander Peter Crain, who relieved Commander Steve Jorgensen in command of the ship in August 2009.

The ship was one of four Canadian naval vessels that took part in Exercise Joint Warrior in September/October 2009. The others were HMCS Halifax (currently deployed with Athabaskan to Haiti), HMCS Montreal, and the supply ship HMCS Preserver.

In the photo (which is from Athabaskan's photo gallery on the ship's web page), Athabaskan is leading Halifax and Montreal through the waters of the Royal Navy's Fleet Base at Scapa Flow on the morning of October 14, 2009. This procession marked the 70th anniversary of the night in 1939 when the battleship HMS Royal Oak was sunk by the German U-Boat U47 at what was supposed to be a secure anchorage.

In Haitian waters, Athabaskan will take station to the west of Port Au Prince, while Halifax will anchor off the town of Jacmel on the southern coast, about 30 kilometers away.

View Haiti - Canadian Relief Jan 2010 in a larger map

Michaelle Jean, the current Governor-General of Canada, is a Haitian refugee, having come to Canada at the age of 11 to escape the Duvalier regime. Jacmel, a town which is a popular tourist destination, is also the home town of Governor-General Michaelle Jean's father.

Peter McKay, the Minister of National Defense said through a spokesman that the Governor General had no hand in the decision to focus on Jacmel, which was made based "on the recommendation of the brigadier general on the ground", as well as at the request of the Haitian government.

Halifax is scheduled to arrive off Jacmel by Tuesday. There are an estimated 84,000 people homeless in the Jacmel region, and the hospital was destroyed. The dock has reportedly been damaged, which means that landings will be done via smaller craft. Earthquake damage to the road means that Jacmel has also been cut off from aid coming by truck. However, a DART complement is already working there, as well as a United Nations force from Sri Lanka.

This juxtaposition is entirely appropriate -- in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami of Christmas 2004, DART deployed to assist in Sri Lanka, although the logistics back then were much more difficult since the Canadian Forces did not have the Globemaster transport aircraft.

In addition to the Sri Lankans, the Canadian contingent are also working with search and rescue teams from Colombia and Brazil.

Operation HESTIA

2010-01-18T20:10:00.002-05:00

The Canadian military is going to Haiti to assist in relief efforts. This deployment is part of what is being described as a whole-of-government response by Canada that also involves Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) as well as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

The military response, designated Operation HESTIA, includes the destroyer HMCS Athabaskan and frigate HMCS Halifax, both expected to arrive in Haiti today, after sailing from Halifax Harbour last Thursday. Both ships are packed with relief supplies, including the result of a clothing and toy drive among the crews (scroll down when the link opens). The ships will likely anchor off the south coast, since there is a growing mass of maritime traffic in the harbour of the capital, Port Au Prince.

The Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) has been on the ground since last week. DART equipment is maintained on standby at CFB Trenton in order to ensure proximity to the global reach provided by 8 Wing's Hercules and Globemaster transports. DART's primary mission is to provide medical care and to ensure a safe supply of drinking water.

The 200 members of the DART unit will be supplemented by 500 sailors and specialists from Athabaskan and Halifax. There are an additional 1,000 Canadian Forces soldiers who will be sent shortly. Their combined mission will be to provide aid, and to assist the civil authorities in keeping order.

Current casualty estimates place the number dead in Haiti as high as 200,000 people, with an additional 300,000 made homeless. The death and devastation has been staggering, placing this disaster on the same scale as a war.

The Devil and the Jackal

2010-01-16T00:54:00.001-05:00

Trust Fred Clark at Slacktivist to properly dissect and shed light on the true evil of Pat Robertson's utterances. Mr. Clark's post contains some important thoughts which bear repeating:

I'm accustomed to Pat Robertson being an unholy fool, but his remarks following the Haitian earthquake were astonishing even for him. By attributing Haiti's suffering to a supposed "pact with the devil," he manages to break two commandments simultaneously -- both bearing false witness against his neighbor and taking the name of God in vain.

That sort of double word score is typical Robertson fare, until one appreciates how utterly and explicitly he takes sides here. By labeling the revolutionary enslaved people who founded the Haitian democracy as literally demonic, Robertson sides with slave owners and against democracy, liberty and human rights. He declares that he and his god are on the side of oppression and that liberation is the Devil's work.

Wow. That this is contrary to the Bible Robertson claims to read is obvious to every tourist who has ever filed past the Liberty Bell here in Philly ("Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof").

But it's worse than that. He's not just contradicting some bit of scriptural arcana here, he's cutting to the core of Christianity and setting himself in direct opposition to it.

Video: On the following two videos, Rachel Maddow does an introduction to this topic, and in the second, Raymond Joseph, the Haitian Ambassador to the United States makes some remarks that provide a pointed reminder that one should never piss off someone who understands history.

If Robertson is the devil of the piece, then the jackal is surely Rush Limbaugh, the drug-addled radio personality who has come to represent the not-so-pent-up hatred of America's bigots. In the following video, Keith Olbermann comments on statements made by both Robertson and Limbaugh:

A day later, Olbermann responds again to a fresh outrage from Limbaugh, this one also drawing a sharp reprimand from Roger Ebert which begins "You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation." The Olbermann video follows:

As noted, Haiti's need is great. Donations can be made through the Canadian Red Cross, International Red Cross, MedecinssSans Frontieres, or other charity of your choice4

Haiti, Hell, and Devils

2010-01-15T09:13:00.005-05:00

A day before the January 13 Earth flyby of 2010 AL30, some tectonic rebalancing was happening beneath the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The nation of Haiti occupies the western part of this island, and the quake occurred 25 km from the capital city, Port Au Prince at a depth of 13 kilometers. The consequence of that geological twitch was a Richter 7 earthquake, and the human devastation has been unimaginable -- current estimates place the death toll as high as 100,000 people. If that is indeed the case, that is nearly three times the total number of Canadians killed in World War Two. Or 40 times the number of people killed in New York City on 9/11.

Relief efforts began mobilizing as soon as the news got out. Both the Canadian Red Cross and the International Red Cross have been accepting donations, and three days later, there are groups on the ground delivering aid. Much more is needed.

Pat Robertson, an American televangelist, on the religious television program The 700 Club stated that Haiti and Haitians were "cursed by one thing after another" since they "swore a pact to the devil", a reference to the slave revolt which began in 1791. Robertson, as one of America's privileged elites, potentially descended from slaveholders, would of course have little sympathy for a populist uprising, particularly one where, in the words of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide

To free themselves from the bonds of slavery,
our forefathers turned to the Ancestors in the
ceremony of Bois Caïman, in August 1791. In
other words, to become free, the slaves prayed
not to the God of his master but to the God
of Ancestors.

Any rejection of the god of Pat Robertson seems like a good idea to me, so it must have been a no-brainer for men and women desperate to throw off the shackles of real oppression and slavery for which someone like Robertson would have no understanding, and clearly even less sympathy.

Robertson's statement was described as "stupid" by the American government, and viewed with contempt and amusement in France.

In the blogosphere, P. Z. Meyers (who is much admired in these parts) said it best in his own post on the subject of Robertson's "pact with the devil" remarks: "If it makes you angry, turn your outrage into something constructive and use it to motivate you to donate to Haitian relief first. Deal with the evil scumbag Robertson later."

There is no need to believe in a devil, but there is ample reason to believe in Pat Robertson, and to take a stand against all that he represents. Haiti will be hell for months and years to come, but donations to the relief effort will be our way to help the Haitian people despite Robertson and those devils like him who seek to exploit this little bit of hell on Earth.

To Haitian friends and colleagues, we hope that your families and loved ones are safe. We wish we could do more.

Passing in the Night

2010-01-14T17:36:00.010-05:00

An object designated 2010 AL30 was discovered on January 10, earlier this week, headed in our direction at high speed. It zipped by yesterday on January 13 at a distance of about 130,000 kilometers -- roughly a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The object was discovered by the MIT-affiliated, NASA-funded LINEAR project. LINEAR is an acronym for the LIncoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program, run by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.

You can see on the fine print on the image that it was constructed from "stacking" a series of ten images to obtain this result.

When I wrote the first paragraph above, I had some indecision about writing 126,000 versus 130,000 kilometers, because this was after all just a rough estimate. Note that my indecision represented a distance spanning a goodly fraction of the width of North America, for a chunk of space debris about the size of a moderate living room. This thing was tiny -- but still moving so fast that it would potentially have been unpleasant if it had hit the Earth.

I have no idea of the composition of 2010 AL30, but it is not much smaller than the object which is thought to have precipitated the Tunguska Event. The Tunguska precursor object, believed to be "a few tens of meters" in size, did not actually make it all the way down to the ground, but disintegrated and in so doing caused an impact explosion in the atmosphere that was a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It flattened trees over 2,150 square kilometers, and would certainly have devastated a city.

Research programs such as LINEAR are part of a loose international association of asteroid monitors called Spaceguard. The American objectives were to catalogue 90% all Near Earth Objects (NEOs) larger than 1 km in diameter by 2008, with a proposed follow-on program whose objective would be to detect 90% of all near-earth asteroids 140 meters and larger by 2028.

NOTE - The above photo was lifted from the blog of the observer team of the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy.

National Anthem Blues

2010-01-07T16:13:00.005-05:00

Over the Christmas break, at one of the events I attended, someone began a conversation with me by decrying how a particular radio spot wished the listener "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". This, I was given to understand, was unacceptable pandering to "them" ("them" being unspecified), and had the effect of diluting the importance of Christmas, which was, after all, a Christian holiday.

Having attended Christian churches as a child and again as an adult after meeting my wife, I understand the importance of Christmas to Christians. However, many other cultures celebrate the solstice which occurs before Christmas. It is therefore not clear to me how acknowledging the importance of the season to all the other cultures who mark the solstice detracts from the Christian appreciation of Christmas.

I have no sympathy or agreement with the particular mindset which holds that there should not be any contrary viewpoint to the accepted religious or political position -- that any dissent is a distraction for the faithful. People who believe this believe that in order to marshal the faithful, it is important to provide ongoing messages that reinforce the basic belief structure.

This brings me to the title of this post. Earlier today, I was disappointed to receive a chain e-mail, subject CANADA 2010, which contained a strong (although somewhat incoherent) anti-immigrant stance, whose message was that as Canadians, we should get behind radio commentator Bruce Allen's desire not to have the Canadian national anthem sung in Hindi at the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. This particular chain e-mail is a thoroughly discredited piece of tripe, an egregious piece of racist trash.

There are also a couple of things wrong with it, beyond its hate-mongering anti-immigration stance:

First, there really is a radio commentator named Bruce Allen, and he really did broadcast an immigrant-bashing editorial on radio station CKNW that landed him in a certain amount of hot water. However, Allen did not mention anything regarding the national anthem sung in Hindi -- this was something creative added afterward, clearly by other interests with their own axes to grind. And in fact, this is an evolved version of something that circulated prior to 2007, attacking the idea of the American national anthem being sung in Spanish for a prior Olympics.

Second, my alert fellow Canadians are quite capable of going through the following simple mental exercise to understand that this hateful screed has little basis in reality. It goes like this:

Assume you are a Hindi speaking person in Canada who cares nothing for Canada. At a public event where you have the option of singing the Canadian national anthem you
(a) do nothing
(b) sing the national anthem of the country you care nothing about in your own language, after having spent time and effort to translate the words and arrange the music

Why would a person who cares nothing for Canada select option (b)? The suggestion that someone would is total anti-immigrant drivel. Before it got to me, the e-mail had been forwarded to 25 different people, and while it surprises and saddens me that something like this has any degree of acceptance, I am enough of a realist to understand that this is a symptom of fear, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness -- in fact, the same feelings that drive someone to forget their Christian ideals, and descend into anger over "Happy Holidays" versus "Merry Christmas". The more insidious problem is that there are those who would exploit these feelings to promote hatred and racism -- sending these e-mails to marshal the faithful and build a commonality of belief.

There is no better example of that than the other chain e-mail which I received a few hours after the first one (from a different source). This e-mail had the subject PRICELESS and purported to be a peace plan advanced by the comedian Robin Williams. It starts like this:

You gotta love Robin Williams........Even if he's nuts! Leave it to Robin Williams to come up with the perfect plan. What we need now is for our UN Ambassador to stand up and repeat this message.
Robin Williams' plan...(Hard to argue with this logic!)

Then it continues with a ten point plan which in effect has the US, UK, Canada, and Australia saying "screw you" to the rest of the world. The plan itself was clearly unworkable, and my original thought was that here was another celebrity shooting off their mouth on a topic on which they have absolutely no expertise. The one thing which made me pause was that this rant wasn't funny. If it really was Robin Williams, I would have expected him to be funny, even discussing politics. And of course, this e-mail too was bogus.

The originators of this e-mail would have gotten a two for one deal. On the one hand, they get to send their jingoistic message out, and on the other hand they get to attribute it to Robin Williams -- a comedian who would not hesitate to mock this kind of stupidity.

I have written about this kind of message before. The process whereby these messages get out very much resembles a viral marketing campaign. Neither of the individuals who sent me these e-mails are drooling redneck idiots, nor are they unreasonable people. The message of hate, and the untruths, are buried underneath the ostensibly reasonable initial premise. Their target is the person whose circumstances lead him to be angry over "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas", completely forgetting the religious and cultural values of acceptance of diversity.

I have no big answers, but for me, this is how we can fight back against those who lie to us and who try to drag down our spirit. If my world is the sum of the small decencies that my family and friends do for each other, then I can extend my world through small decencies for my neighbour, for strangers. If nothing else, each such act is a thumbing of the nose against those who would spread hatred and lies and so drive us apart.

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T00:01:00.001-05:00

We want to wish our family, friends, and colleagues a Happy New Year for 2010.

So it is finally 2010, and even though we are definitely living in the future, Dr. Heywood Floyd is not the ex-Chair of the National Council for Astronautics in the US, nor is he the Chancellor of the University of Hawaii. But there is no more Soviet Union, and no Chinese space station poised to become a manned Jupiter-bound spacecraft. Sadly, there is no derelict spaceship called Discovery parked at a Lagrange point in the orbit of Io around Jupiter, close to a vast black monolith of non-human origin. Even more sadly, there is no series of giant wheel-shaped space stations around the Earth, nor is there a regular Earth-Moon cargo and passenger service supporting a vast industrial complex at Clavius which doesn't exit, and an excavation site at Tycho which also doesn't exit.

What we do have is the beginning of an interplanetary internet, and a recession that is ending although for regular people rather than large, wealthy corporate entities, the reality of that ending will take longer to realize.

We also have two little rovers called Spirit and Opportunity on Mars. From Geoffrey A. Landis, science fiction author and NASA Rocket Scientist, here are

New Year's resolutions for the Opportunity rover:
1. I will get more exercise. In the new year, I will try to take a long walk every day!
2. I'll do some travelling this year. Visit new places, see new things!
3. I will stop making fun of my big sister Spirit for being a stick-in-the-mud. She says it isn't funny any more (even though it is).
4. I promise to call home every day, even if I don't have much to say.
5. And I will be an obedient rover and do everything my people tell me to, because I'm a nice rover, not like my sister who just lies around all day like a slug.
6. And I hope everybody in my family has a real real real good new year, too! (Even Spirit). Best ever!
--Love, Opportunity

The Titan Saturn System Mission

2009-12-31T13:55:00.003-05:00

There was another five year anniversary this last week -- on Christmas Eve, 2004, the Huygens lander separated from Cassini and went on to land on the surface of Titan three weeks later. This recent Cassini image shows the glint of sunlight due to specular reflection from what is almost certainly a liquid on the surface of Titan, in the Kraken Mare region in the northern hemisphere. At the temperature and pressure on Titan's surface, the liquid is a hydrocarbon compound, probably methane.

In 2009, ESA and NASA merged their outer planets exploration concepts to move forward with a cooperative exploration venture. One of these, the Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) was to be a next generation successor to Cassini-Huygens. The mission would comprise three spacecraft -- the first being an American orbiter whose main focus would be on Enceladus and Titan, but also able to observe Saturn, the ring system, and the other moons. Along with the orbiter, two European Titan probes would be deployed: a balloon to be placed in the atmosphere, carrying an instrument package (presumably including cameras); and a surface probe whose objective would be to splashdown onto one of the liquid methane seas, probabaly Kraken Mare.

NASA and ESA collectively decided that the Jupiter/Europa mission had higher priority, due to higher technical feasibility. However, TSSM is ranked quite high in scientific importance, and work will move forward. Based on arrival at Saturn in the late 2020's, I'll be in my seventies by the time the first data comes back.

Note -- According to the Secret Star Trek History of the World, sometime after the 1960s, likely best guess in the 2005 to 2015 timeframe, a manned deep space expedition was sent to Saturn. The mission was led by Colonel Shawn Jeffrey Christopher, son of John Christopher, who in the latter half of the 1960s was a USAF Captain assigned to Omaha Air Force base. Unfortunately, our reality appears to have diverged substantially, although one can still see events in the timestream like the TSSM proposal that reflect the other reality. TSSM is a highly ambitious mission, but it is nowhere close to the level of complexity (and expense) required for a small group of astronauts to be sent to Saturn.

A blast from the past

2009-12-31T11:57:00.007-05:00

This story presented the best opportunity for ending the year with a bang -- Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog reminds us of the story that was lost five years ago in the wreckage of human lives and property damage that occurred when a massive tsunami struck the eastern Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004. The story from a day and a half later, on December 27, 2004, got much less coverage. A massive burst of energy was observed from a magnetar, a type of neutron star. The blast was powerful enough to knock out satellites, and had it been closer, it would have potentially been an extinction level event.

The magnetar in question was SGR 1806-20, now believed to be the most powerful magnetic object known -- strength of 10E15 gauss (compared with between 1 to 5 gauss on our own Sun). 10E15 is the number 1 followed by 15 zeroes. To put this in context, a fridge magnet has a field strength of about 100 gauss, while more exotic neodymium-based magnets can be 10 to 20 times more powerful, up to 2,000 gauss. A medical NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) imaging device will generate magnetic fields from 10,000 up to 30,000 gauss. The field surrounding this particular magnetar is a hundred billion times more powerful than the NMR machine.

I thought initially that the SGR designator was a reference to its location in the sky (which would be toward the general direction of Sagittarius or SGR), but in fact SGR is a reference to "Soft Gamma Repeater". From a much greater distance, this event would have appeared as a very high energy transient event, so it is possible that events like this can help in the explanation for Gamma Ray Bursts like GRB 090423.

Something else to lie in bed awake at night thinking about: as noted in the article abstract in the journal Nature, this object released more energy in a fifth of a second than the Sun in 250,000 years. Nature doesn't do lurid speculation, but if it had been 10 instead of 50,000 light years away, its effect for everyone on the half of the world facing it would have been equivalent to being less than 10 km away from a 12 kiloton nuclear blast. Fortunately, there are no magnetars within 10,000 light years of Earth.

Giant Buddha

2009-12-29T12:43:00.004-05:00

Hugh has some great photos of the giant Buddha statue on Lantau Island, just north of Hong Kong.

These photos bring back some memories -- I was there with my parents in 1998. Jill was along on that trip, although she was pregnant with Corwin at the time, and I suspect many things were a hazy blur of exhaustion for her.

Happy Winter Solstice - 2009

2009-12-21T17:47:00.001-05:00

Today was the Winter Solstice. The sun's path on the ecliptic returned to its ascending node for the Northern Hemisphere at 12:47 ET today. The days get longer from here -- but in the meantime, we have to get through Christmas in a few more days, and also incidentally the depths of winter. Happy Solstice - and may 2010 be a brighter New Year for all of us!

The Known Universe in Six Minutes

2009-12-20T09:55:00.004-05:00

The American Museum of Natural History has updated one of my favourite movies with their presentation of The Known Universe (suggestion - use the Fullscreen button which is the second button brom the right on the Youtube playback bar):

The Known Universe movie is based on visualization of current astronomical and astrophysical data which the American Museum of Natural History maintains through the affiliated Hayden Planetarium as part of its Digital Universe Atlas.

The favourite movie that I referred to earlier is Powers of Ten, made by Charles and Ray Eames in the 1970s. For many years, the film made as a proposal (in the late 1960s) for the final Powers of Ten film was shown in the Ontario Science Centre.

The final Powers of Ten film is a short documentary, lasting under ten minutes. Narrated by Philip Morrison, it has what I think of as a cosmic part and a quantum part. The cosmic part zooms out from a height of one meter above a couple at a picnic. Every ten seconds, the scale increases by a factor of ten. At one hundred million light years, the perspective is reversed back to the starting point one meter above the couple. At that point, the scale zooms inward, until it ends up focused on the nucleus of a carbon atom in the hand of one of the picnickers. Forty orders of magnitude are covered, and in a very compact way, the movie shows the continuity of the physical world from everyday experience to both the cosmic and quantum.

Unlike Powers of Ten, The Known Universe does not stop at 100 million light years, but instead goes all the way out to the horizon of the known universe at 13.7 billion light years -- two and a fraction orders of magnitude farther out.

Those extra orders of magnitude are due to the advances in the 32 years between the two films. The work that had been done by Allan Sandage in calibrating the cosmic distance scale had allowed distances to be derived for galaxies out to 25 and 50 million light years with objects like M100 and M101 in the 70s and 80s, more tentatively for objects at greater distances. For the state of the art in 1977, 100 million light years was a pretty substantial distance.

The revolution in available data and knowledge that came with the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, the other Great Observatories space missions, and COBE, allowed the distance scale and the Hubble Constant to be much more firmly nailed down, and this in turn made possible the truly awesome visualization that the AMNH has done.

Blogging Mistakes

2009-12-17T12:08:00.004-05:00

Michael Hyatt, who has a great blog on management and leadership, has a list of 10 Blogging Mistakes. I am clearly a poster child for almost every one of them, but especially the first one -- I don't post enough. But then, that ensures that my readers aren't bored with what I have to say...

We Support Peter Watts

2009-12-15T14:38:00.003-05:00

Our friend Peter Watts, a PhD marine biologist and brilliant science fiction author, lived through my worst nightmare last Tuesday. On his way home from the US, he was stopped by American border guards and thrown in jail for questioning the reason for being stopped in the first place. Journalist and author David Nickle reports on his blog as follows:

Peter, a Canadian citizen, was on his way back to Canada after helping a friend move house to Nebraska over the weekend. He was stopped at the border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan by U.S. border police for a search of his rental vehicle. When Peter got out of the car and questioned the nature of the search, the gang of border guards subjected him to a beating, restrained him and pepper sprayed him. At the end of it, local police laid a felony charge of assault against a federal officer against Peter. On Wednesday, he posted bond and walked across the border to Canada in shirtsleeves (he was released by Port Huron officials with his car and possessions locked in impound, into a winter storm that evening). He's home safe. For now. But he has to go back to Michigan to face the charge brought against him.

In Peter's own words written last Friday:

If you buy into the Many Worlds Intepretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no apparent reason; or perhaps they did, and I simply kept my eyes downcast and refrained from asking questions.

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.

In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.

But that is not this universe.

Stay tuned.

The Facebook page Against The Arrest and Beating of Peter Watts had 20 members when I found it on Friday night. By the time I clicked the JOIN button, there were 23, one being me. The numbers increased progressively over the weekend, with 1,170 members a few minutes ago -- around 4 days after the page was first created.

Jill and I are going spend the family Christmas fund on a donation to Peter's defense costs, and I encourage others to donate as well. I do this entirely selfishly: if this can happen to an articulate, personable white guy like Peter, then what are the prospects for me?

Robert Ashby raises the related question "since when did 'at least I didn’t get strip-searched and beaten' become our standard of service?". Robert's essay is a companion piece to Madeline Ashby's post on the subject on her blog.

Here is a selection of online articles which have appeared in the last week:

The definitive story appeared on David Nickle's blog with a posting about the initial incident, with a brief correction and a follow-up post providing details of how Bakka-Phoenix Books is helping to get donations to Peter.

Article on BoingBoing with a follow-up post on Making Light which makes reference to the "demonstrable mendaciousness" of the account in the Port Huron Times-Herald. Both the BoingBoing and Making Light discussion threads became politicized, with trolls appearing in force. Charles Stross, who conducted an interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman at the last Worldcon in Montreal, and who shared a book reading with Peter at the same convention, found it necessary to stomp a troll.

The Globe and Mail article raises interesting questions related to privacy.

Article in the Toronto Star. The spokesman for the US border crossing at Sarnia insists that Peter "assaulted" their officers. What would have happened to him had he waived his Miranda rights?

John Scalzi's Whatever blog with a post on Helping Out Peter Watts.

John McDaid appears to have the definitive summary of the news coverage.

Peter's Blog:

Not The Best of Possible Worlds on Dec 11, quoted above.

Squidgate. Update. later on Dec 11.

Happiness is a Warm Parka. And Friends I Didn’t Know I Had. from Dec 13.

Donations: As noted previously, cheques can be made out to Peter Watts, and mailed to Bakka-Phoenix Science Fiction Bookstore, 697 Queen St. West / Toronto, Ontario / M6J 1E6. Cash donations will also be accepted if you drop by the store. Electronic payments may be made to donate(at)rifters.com, or via this link.

15 Useful Guides

2009-11-01T09:05:00.005-05:00

The MakeUseOf website has an article containing links to 15 (actually 16) useful guides that provide a lot of (not necessarily obvious) information for day to day geekly living. Here is the list of guides that the article links to, with my comments:

1 – Internet Guide for the Movie Addict - includes a discussion on how to fix bad/corrupted video files. Unfortunately, nothing on how to remove Vodei encoding.

2 – Internet Guidebook for An Audiophile - this is a howto guide covering internet music, including free sites.

3 – The Incredible Free Manual for Every Mac User - Mac users probably should read this.

4 – The Underground Guide to the iPhone ditto for iPhone users.

5 – Twitter: Best Practices & Tips - some thoughts on how to best take advantage of this (relatively) new communication tool.

6 – The Ultimate Guide to your Windows Mobile Phone - for anyone whose phone runs Windows CE

7 – A Computer Geek’s Smart Productivity Guide - all about time management and productivity. See also the (unrelated) Pomodoro strategy over on the Lifehacker site.

8 – Building a Media Center for your Home - instructions on how to set up a media server for your home theatre/home audio system.

9 – The Only Easy Guide To Computer Networks - this won't teach you how to manage a Cisco-based network with hundreds of hubs, but will help you set up your home network and get it working.

10 – The Big Book of BitTorrent - how to use BitTorrent to download files. The more generic parts of the discussion should also apply to uTorrent and other Torrent apps.

11 – A Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux - Linux is the future of computing, and this guide will help you get started. [Note - I am presenting the title as they appear in the original source, but my editorial instinct here really really wants to change "to Linux" to read "with Linux".]

12 – The Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop - this guide won't replace a formal course in how to use Photoshop, which is one of the most most capable (but also most complex) software packages out there. However, the guide will give you a starting point -- with the guide, and hours of practice, you too can plant a moustache on your co-worker's Christmas party photo.

13 – The Big Book of iTunes - I don't use iTunes or an iPod myself, but I will probably read this guide anyway just to get a handle on the technology.

14 – The Idiot’s Guide to Building Your Own PC - an important document if you are going to either build a new PC or if you plan on swapping out and upgrading a motherboard on an old PC.

15 – Laptop Buying Guide for 2009 - a guide to all things laptop.

(BONUS) PSP Up- and Downgrading Guide - a howto guide for PSP owners to help with getting around those pesky lockouts that prevent homebrew apps from working properly.

Happy Halloween 2009!

2009-10-31T13:12:00.007-04:00

Happy Halloween -- take care tonight amidst the ghosts, ghouls, and asorted creatures of the night.

(Thanks to Mike M for finding the images, which are anime/manga fan art. The first in the series was created by Mutsuki Ai, the second through fourth are unknown)

Sputnik Day 2009

2009-10-04T22:06:00.007-04:00

Fifty two years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.

Fifty two years later, the Soviet Union is no more, but an international crew including Canadian and European astronauts along with Russians and Americans serve on the International Space Station. Earlier in the week, Guy Laliberte, the first Canadian space tourist, founder of the Cirque du Soleil, arrived at the ISS on a Soyuz spacecraft launched from Baikonur. Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk and the other members of Expedition 20 were on hand to greet Laliberte on his arrival.

I am waiting for the concert which Laliberte's One Drop Foundation plans later this week.

Above image: The current crew members of the ISS gathered in the Zvezda service module for a conference with family members and representatives on the ground. The crew encompass Expeditions 20, 21, and 22. From left to right, my best guess as to who's who based on their biography photos: Flight Engineer Roman Romenko, Flight Engineer Nicole Stott, Flight Engineer Frank de Winne (Expedition 21 Commander), Flight Engineer Michael Barratt, Spaceflight Participant Guy Laliberte in the foreground, Flight Engineer Robert Thirsk, Flight Engineer Maxim Suryaev, Expedition 20 Commander Gennady Padalka, Flight Engineer Jeff Williams (Expedition 22 Commander). Photo Credit: NASA TV

Holiday Greetings at the Autumnal Equinox

2009-09-21T08:11:00.005-04:00

Today on the last full day of summer, I am taking this opportunity to say "Eid Mubarak" to Muslim friends, for whom the month of Ramadan ended on September 20 at sunset. The end of the fasting month of Ramadan is the beginning of the Eid-ul-Fitre festival, which is an important event in the Muslim calendar. I hope you all had a great day with family and friends!

For Jewish friends, this past weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the day of judgement/day of remembrance marking the beginning of a new year. So to all of you, "Shona Tova", Happy New Year, and our best wishes for 5770 to be a good year!

The actual Autumnal Equinox is late this year -- it will take place tomorrow afternoon 2009 Sep 22 at 17:18 EDT as the world (or at least the Northern Hemisphere part of it) hurtles inexorably toward the cold and dark of winter.

Tesseracts Thirteen Book Launch

2009-09-17T11:01:00.007-04:00

The Toronto book launch of Tesseracts Thirteen was held last Saturday September 12 at BakkaPhoenix Books on Queen Street. Nine of the anthology's authors, including Jill and our friend David Nickle, were on hand to do readings, greet customers, and sign books.
The authors who participated were Kelley Armstrong, Alison Baird, Suzanne Church, Michael Kelly, Jill Snider Lum, David Nickle, Andrea Schlecht, Jean-Louis Trudel, and Edo van Belkom.

During the course of the event, I took a couple of hundred photos [yes shutterbugs R us :-) ] and also successfully videotaped the reading.

Edge Publishing used many of my photos (uncredited, unfortunately, but now you know) on the sidebar of their webpage for EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing/Tesseract Books. Edge also have a blog devoted only to the Tesseracts series, called Totally Tesseracts.

Copies of Tesseracts Thirteen are available from BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto. If you were so inclined, you could almost certainly contact BakkaPhoenix or Edge Publishing for a copy by mail order. You can also order the book from Chapters Indigo, from Amazon, or for our American friends, from Barnes and Noble.

Following are some photos from the launch event and the impromptu (but traditional) post launch gathering at the Wheat Sheaf pub at King and Bathurst.

Somewhere between forty to fifty people attended (it was hard to count numbers in the bookstore) and it wasn't clear that there was a one-to-one mapping between attendees and book sales. However, the one observation that was possible to make was that the pile of books available diminished substantially during the course of the afternoon.

For the second year in a row, our friends Warren, Ann, and their son Aaron came out to support us by buying a book. Thank you very much, and hopefully there will be more events like this!

The post launch gathering moved down the street to the Wheat Sheaf, where the talk (as you might expect) revolved around science fiction, canlit, and publishing.

As the evening progressed, a pool game started. After defeating Dave Nickle, Brett Savory went looking for other victims, and found a volunteer in Corwin.

Corwin demonstrated that he has a better grasp of applied physics than his old man, especially with regard to the consequences of elastic collisions. However, despite coaching from Dave, he too went down to defeat.

Our evening ended shortly thereafter -- apparently there is a law in Ontario that says a minor can't be in a pub after 9pm.

Our thanks to all those who came to the reading or to the gathering afterward. It was a great party, and a great launch for the book in Toronto!

Additional photos from the launch as well as photos from the gathering afterward are available on Facebook.

C3PO's No-Good Roommate

2009-09-15T12:32:00.003-04:00

Stated last night by our friend Mark Azevedo, and reported on Facebook:

"Doesn't H1N1 sound like it should be C3PO's no-good college roommate? Hey, dude, I'm not a proto-col droid, I'm a party-call droid!!"

I am starting the ball rolling here, to make this the next internet Star Wars meme.

For Linda

2009-09-15T10:09:00.008-04:00

I saw my cousin Linda at the family wedding gathering over the Labour Day weekend earlier this month. Other than a brief visit in July, this was the first time we had seen Linda since David's funeral.

My cousin is looking good. This is still a time of transition for her from her her life with David built over the last two decades to something new. This should be a time for those close to her to let her grieve and come to terms with her loss. Whatever Linda needs, whatever decisions she makes for her life, we'll be there to support her.

David absolutely doted on Nicole and Matt, and a day or two after an event like the wedding, there would have been an e-mail to David's peeps with lots of pictures of both of them.

But right now, it is all about Linda -- and for Linda to make the decisions to determine how she wants to move ahead with her life and those of Nicole and Matt. So, you go, girl! You have our love and support always.

Cindy and Alex's Wedding

2009-09-14T20:43:00.012-04:00

My cousin Cindy and her fiance, Alex, were married on Sunday September 6 over the Labour Day weekend. I shot over 700 images at their wedding. A selected subset of photos are posted on Facebook in this publicly available album. Over the next days/weeks, I plan on adding commentary to the individual photos in the album.

The condensed highlights of the wedding are represented by the photos posted here. The wedding was outside, so after the ceremony was over, there was a photo op in the park beside the tent where the banquet was to be held later.

Jill was sick that weekend, so it was only Corwin and I who went.

The day belonged to Cindy and Alex, and they were a beautiful and delightful couple. My cousin is talented, as well as a babe -- she made the cake and in fact, her bridesmaid and sister Bonnie told me that they had been decorating the cake up until 2am the night previously.

As is the custom in Chinese weddings, the bride went through a number of clothing changes. The final dress that Cindy wore was one that she herself had designed and made -- a clear case where career skills came in handy in personal life.

To my beautiful cousin and her new husband -- may you have a long and happy life together!

Back to Reality

2009-09-07T17:58:00.005-04:00

I didn't blog at all in August, but that was because August was pretty event filled:

1 - Our friend Annalee arrived on the first Sunday in August. I picked her up from the airport, while Jill, Michael, Kate, and Sherry conducted a tech writing seminar in the back yard.

2 - A couple of days later, we all headed out to Anticipation, the World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal. We used a rental van, and with six occupants (the three of us plus Annalee plus Michael and Lorna), luggage, and several cases of wine for the Friends of Merril/SF Canada party, the van was pretty packed. In the leadup to departure, I discovered that my driver's license had expired last year. My renewal letter had likely gotten lost in the mail, and I never noticed.

3 - After seven days sampling the delights of the Worldcon and the city of Montreal, we returned to Toronto on a Tuesday. My driver's license renewal was a priority. Annalee returned home to the US a couple of days later on Thursday Aug 13. On Friday, we packed the car, did some final household maintenance, and on Saturday morning headed off to northern Ontario, to our usual spot just south of the town of Temagami.

4 - At Lake Herridge, we had two weeks with friends -- 26 of us the first week, 16 the second. Two weeks later, rested from fresh air, sleep, swimming, starwatching and satellite spotting at night, many fine meals, and an unending array of wine and cocktails and beer, we returned refreshed and renewed. The experience was marred somewhat by Corwin getting sick a couple of days before coming home. His cold escalated to fever, nausea, and vomiting, although after two miserable nights he was on the the mend by the time we began our return trip. The drive home was not the nightmare that I expected it to be - in all, a good thing.

5 - Back home in Toronto, we ended the month of August and moved into the first week of September with unpacking, doing laundry, coping with the aftermath of the garbage strike, getting Corwin ready to start school (which happens tomorrow!), going to the Exhibition and generally getting life organized.

6 - My cousin Cindy got married yesterday. She and her fiance (now husband) Alex had announced their wedding months ago. The wedding took place on a perfect summer day, but unfortunately Jill was sick (still is) and didn't make it. I went with Corwin, and took hundreds of pictures yesterday. The downside of all those pictures is that I will have to sort them. However, the last time we had a large family gathering was for David's funeral. It was good to get together with the family on a happy occasion.

7 - And of course, there are photos from Worldcon as well as Temagami that need to sorted as well.

That was my summer -- how was your's?

Transparent Aluminum

2009-07-30T19:24:00.005-04:00

Those of us who understand the True and Secret Star Trek History of The World also understand that transparent aluminum first appeared at a small manufacturing company in San Francisco in the early 1990s. In some (very confused) accounts, credit for the transparent aluminum process is sometimes attributed to a Professor Montgomery Scott of Edinburgh. However, no such individual with such knowledge of materials science was at the University of Edinburgh, or for that matter, in Scotland during the relevant time period.

Now, nearly twenty years later, Physorg.com reports that transparent aluminum was created by bombarding aluminum with a high intensity x-ray laser, causing an electron to be simultaneously knocked out of every aluminum atom in the sample, without disrupting the crystalline structure. You can think of this as the atomic equivalent of whipping a table cloth off the table so quickly and deftly that none of the place settings are affected.

According to the researchers, this is an exotic state of matter never before observed. It is as if all the aluminum atoms were suddenly changed to silicon, at least with respect to their electron properties. As you might expect, this state of matter was very unstable and fleeting.

It is possible that further work with this may provide some insight into the physics of planetary cores, stellar interiors,or nuclear fusion.

I, however, want transparent aluminum for viewports on the hull of my starship.

Battlefield photos

2009-07-30T18:55:00.003-04:00

Time-Life have a series of photgraphic slide shows on their website for people interested in military history:

The World's Bloodiest Battles
14 Battles That Turned The Tide
World War Two - 14 Major Battles
World War Two - D-Day and Operation Overlord
In Combat: Great LIFE War Photos
World War Two - Hiroshima
World War two - Women In The Fight
World War Two - Allied Bombers and Crews
World War two - The British Spitfire

It's LIFE Magazine, so most of these photos will be America-centric. At least one of these collections include photos from Gettysburg and Antietam.

Force Projection 2

2009-07-30T14:27:00.009-04:00

This is a follow up to the Force Projection post from March.

On April 1st the Canadian frigate HMCS Winnipeg FFH-338 joined Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 (SNMG1) in the Gulf of Aden, to participate in Operation ALLIED PROTECTOR to conduct counter-piracy operations.

Photo Credit - Department of National Defense - Canada

Winnipeg was there for an operational mission that was only to last a few weeks, but this grew to a two month operation (talk about scope creep!).

During Winnipeg's mission in the Gulf of Aden she conducted over 100 hails, 20 investigations of suspicious craft, 12 approach operations, 5 boardings and 8 close escorts. During boarding operations, Winnipeg encountered persons suspected of conducting piracy and ended up seizing large caches of weapons, which included AK-47’s, Rocket Propelled Grenade Launchers and warheads, M-16 assault rifles, and other assorted firearms and ammunition.

While patrolling the International Recommended Transportation Corridor (IRTC), Winnipeg escorted many ships, including two specific vessels of particular significance to Canada - a supply ship for the World Food Program carrying food relief to Somalia, and a freighter with supplies for Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

On the 31st of May, after completing two months of counter-piracy and escort operations, Winnipeg departed the Gulf of Aden in a "sail past" ceremony with the SNMG1 Flagship NRP Corte Real.

Photo Credit - Department of National Defense - Canada. HMCS Winnipeg sails into the sunset on May 31, 2009, leaving the Gulf of Aden for the waters of Australia

Winnipeg is now on the next phase of her deployment, Exercise TALISMAN SABER, which will take place in late July on the east coast of Australia and which will be conducted with naval units from both the United States and Australia. Winnipeg is expected home at Esquimalt, BC in late August.

Around the same time that HMCS Winnipeg arrived in the Gulf of Aden, the Chinese Navy sent a second flotilla to the same part of the world. The destroyer Shenzhen DDG-167 and frigate Huangshan FFG-570 were sent to replace the destroyers Haikou DDG-169 and Wuhan DDG-171, which had been on station along with the supply ship Weishanhu since early January.

Since it appears that Chinese Navy combatant ship deployments average about three to four months or so, the second flotilla are going home very shortly, having been in the Gulf of Aden May, June, and July. They will be replaced by the third flotilla (also here and video here). The guided missile frigates Zhoushan FFG-529 and Xuzhou FFG-530 have enhanced stealth capabilities compared with other Chinese naval units. Between them, the two ships carry two helicopters and a Special Forces unit.

A new supply ship, Qiandaohu, will replace Weishanhu, which sailed with the first flotilla in January and has been in Somali waters for more than six months.

Since the beginning of the Chinese Navy's mission to the Gulf of Aden on December 26, 2008, eight ships and their crews have been provided with the opportunity to operate far away from Chinese home waters. They have needed to put into practice everything that they know about underway replenishment, helicopter operations, small craft boarding operations, and working with foreign civilian shipping. This kind of experience can't be taught, must exist for any blue water navy, and is vitally important for global strategic goals. I have the definite sense that without the UN resolution, the Chinese military leadership would probably have done this anyway, in order to get the operational experience.

Fried Chicken - KFC and Otherwise

2009-07-30T11:58:00.008-04:00

I am pretty fond of fried chicken. Salt, grease, sugar (in the form of carbs in the breading) -- with 3 out of the 4 major geek food groups (only caffeine is missing) what's not to like?

Current.com has a recent article on "secret" ingredients in commercial items like Coca Cola or KFC chicken. The conclusion? In this day of CSI forensic analysis, not to mention corporate liability for injuries from food allergies, there are no "secret" ingredients. In the case of KFC, the breading is 4 rather 11 ingredients -- the 4 being flour, salt, pepper, and MSG.

The Guardian's Word of Mouth blog provides a couple of recipes (and a video!) comparing the KFC experience with a couple of homemade efforts. The recipes are as follows:

American mix
1 teaspoon ground oregano
1 teaspoon chilli powder
1 teaspoon ground sage
1 teaspoon dried basil
1 teaspoon dried marjoram
1 teaspoon pepper
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon paprika
1 teaspoon onion salt
1 teaspoon garlic powder
2 tablespoons Accent (MSG)

English mix
1 tsp smoked paprika
1 tsp mustard powder
1 tsp sage
1 tsp celery seeds
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp dried onion flakes
2 tsp salt
1 tsp ground black pepper
1 tsp ground white pepper

Mix up one of the mixes above, and combine with a cup (possibly two cups?) of flour. (For experimental follow-up - we need to try this with spelt flour, and then for those with extreme wheat intolerance, with corn starch).

Get some chicken. Marinate chicken pieces in milk overnight. (Alternative - try this with coconut milk).

Poach the chicken in the milk by bringing to a rapid boil, and then simmering on low heat for 20 minutes.

Coat each piece of chicken in the flour/herb mix. Dip each coated piece in milk again, and apply a second coat.

Deep fry each piece in a deep fryer until golden brown. (Those of us with no deep fryer as well as concerns about the hazards of deep frying will do shallow frying instead.)

The Word of Mouth article and associated video says that comparing fried chicken prepared this way with KFC chicken is like comparing a real peach to canned peaches -- they are clearly the same thing, and both are good, but the real peach (or in this case, the homemade chicken) is good in a way that is unmatched by the canned peach (KFC fast food).

We're going to try this soon and report back.

Ghost Busters (1954)

2009-07-30T11:09:00.002-04:00

A trailer, for the little known 1954 black and white movie that inspired the Ivan Reitman remake decades later :-)

Foresight 1900 and a vision of 2100

2009-07-29T11:54:00.011-04:00

Morlet's blog (link provided by Mike) has a post with images from circa 1900, showing life in the year 2000.

The images are wonderful. The majority of the ideas have come true, but even for the ones that have come true, their achievement was not at all in the way that they were visualized in these images.

Image Credit - Morlet's Blog - Police X-Ray Surveillance Machine

I am going by memory here, but I believe that Robert A. Heinlein, in an essay in the Expanded Universe collection, talks about how science fiction authors tend to miss the mark because they are insufficiently imaginative. Add futurists to that list - there was no such profession when Heinlein wrote that essay originally in 1950, and I don't remember whether he mentions them in his 1980 update.

Technological progress must resemble what I imagine biological evolution to be like -- a long period of relatively small adaptations for existing conditions which don't change, but then a sudden mad scramble for adaptation to a radical change in the environment. Think more or less stable conditions for a hundred million years to allow dinosaurs to evolve and adapt to almost all ecological niches, and then being blotted out by radical environmental change after the Chicxulub asteroid strike. Having seen both Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops, it might have been difficult to predict polar bears and bison.

In just the same way, in 1900, it wasn't obvious about the various revolutions caused by cheap internal combustion engines, air travel, rocket flight, space travel, computers, genetics -- the list goes on.

Here in no particular order is my short, incomplete list of problems we currently face, and possible solutions. It is no great prediction that from the year 2100, readers can look back on this list with the same sort of amusement that we in the post-2000 era look back on the predictions of 1900. As with the 1900 predictions, the flaw in these will be the unknown and unanticipated discoveries (or problems) that derail these and cause the outcome to be different.

GLOBAL WARMING - at the end of the 1800s, there was a hard limit to how big a city could get, because they were already running into the problem of how to get rid of all the horse manure that a large city would create. The analogy to our present day problem with rising carbon dioxide levels due to industrialization and transportation are obvious. How does this get fixed? Prediction - a range of technologies, including bioengineered forests (think kudzu genes implanted in sequoias) to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide. In addition, there will be technology applied to remove carbon from the atmosphere and store it.

ENERGY - The industrialized world demands an enormous amount of energy. Energy needs will increase as Asia and Africa expand their consumption to levels that approach North America or Europe. Energy sources such as coal and oil release too much carbon. Nuclear reactors create dangerous waste. Space power satellites are expensive. Prediction - fusion reactors based on compression or pinch effects -- for example, the Bussard concept.

CONFLICT AND GOVERNANCE - In the shorter to medium term, this is also about creating a way to equitably share resources - something that has more often than not resulted in conflicts. Thomas Barnett's TED talk examines the way that conflicts (for example over energy and resources) could evolve, and the possible international solutions to these problems. Prediction - armed conflict won't go away, but the scope and intensity will drop as the main international players understand that war is bad for business.

SPACE - GROUND TO ORBIT - Rockets were all right as a first step for getting things into space, but over the long term, they are dangerous, polluting monsters. Prediction - Multistage scramject launchers will be developed, but will give way to an orbital elevator. If the elevator is based on some variation on carbon nanotube technology, several of these might be a good place to use up the carbon that needs to be removed from the atmosphere.

SPACE - SOLAR SYSTEM - The problem with the rockets that are being built is that rockets fundamentally can't lift very much into space -- most of their energy output is devoted to moving their own fuel. In order to get anywhere interesting with anything of a decent size, this constraint has to be removed. Scramjet launchers will help, so will an orbital elevator. Prediction (see also ENERGY above): A Bussard-type fusion reactor (or something similar) will turn transit times of years to weeks or months, putting the solar system out to the Kuiper Belt in range of manned exploration.

SPACE - BEYOND - There are mathematical models for how to get something to move faster than light, but no one has any idea on how to implement these concepts as buildable engineering. Prediction - by 2100, we will have a better understanding of spacetime, and will be able to create devices to allow local manipulation of gravity. Faster than light travel will remain elusive.

GENETICS - The molecular basis for life was not understood in 1900, but by 2000, the genome of human beings has been determined, as well as that of some other species. Prediction - by 2100, genetic data will be so readily available that researchers will have a much better understanding of the evolutionary heritage of the majority of creatures on this planet. Some extinct species will be recreated, although a "Jurassic Park" scenario will not be achievable. However, greater understanding of cloning technologies will enable organs and other spare parts to be grown as needed. Meat will be grown in vats rather than harvested from food animals.

NANOTECH - Very primitive nanotech devices have been created, but no one really knows yet how to do really sophisticated, sexy stuff. Prediction: the nanotech revolution will go hand in hand with developments in genetics and molecular biology. There will be something like a genetic code for self-assembling machines. These machines will become ubiquitous in the environment.

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - Even as late as the 1940s, there was a belief that computing devices would be mechanical. The computer revolution first of all needed to go electronic, and after that, took 40 years to get from the first mainframes to the internet. Having gotten to this point, it shows no sign of slowing down. If anything, the pace of development is increasing. Prediction - this one is the joker in the deck, because it affects everything else. As computers have gotten smarter over the years, we have used them as tools to allow us as individuals or groups to do more. Computer systems will continue to increase in power, and well before 2100, a computer (or computer network) will be able to match the power of a human brain. But it won't stop there - computer capabilities will continue to expand. We will share our world with AI entities who will help us to organize our data, our work, and our lives. This will affect all other human endeavours.

NEW PROBLEMS - Sure as anything, there will be unintended consequences -- stuff we didn't think of. Hopefully not fatal.

On Youth

2009-07-29T11:03:00.003-04:00

It is probably because I am an old fat curmudgeon that this rant of Craig Ferguson is so funny.

Hubble Zooms In On Jupiter Impact

2009-07-29T00:32:00.005-04:00

The Hubble Space Telescope, still undergoing testing after the last servicing mission back in May, was used to take a photograph of the impact site on Jupiter discovered by Anthony Wesley.

In this first science image returned from Hubble after the servicing mission, the remains of the impact in Jupiter's atmosphere are clearly visible. The blot is seen to be losing its cohesion compared with earlier photos. This smearing effect is being driven by wind in Jupiter's atmosphere.

The image was taken with the Wide Field Camera 3 on Hubble. Calibration of the camera is still in progress -- this science observation interrupted the full system checkout of Hubble that has been in progress since the shuttle Atlantis left the telescope.

Current estimates suggest that the impacting body, a comet or asteroid, was several hundred meters in diameter. The energy released was thousands of times greater than that released by the comet or asteroid that precipitated the Tunguska event in Siberia a century ago.

Image Credit above: NASA/ESA/Heidi Hammel (Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO), and the Jupiter Impact Team

The Blank Verse of Sarah Palin

2009-07-28T22:49:00.010-04:00

Years ago -- in fact, more than a decade ago -- when Jill and I attended a particular church in North York (the same one we were married in), the minister delivered sermons that sounded great. Whenever I woke up during the service, and focused on the last sentence I heard, it was always an interesting thought, that had been delivered with confidence and no hesitation whatsoever, in a fine public speaking voice. But there was a problem -- whenever I stayed awake enough to actually listen to more than one sentence, I concluded that the sermon was a series of more or less related thoughts, but there was little or no internal coherence at all between sentences. The sermon may have been intended to evoke images, but was certainly not a logically constructed argument, not an an essay on some aspect of faith or the human condition (or both!) delivered from the pulpit. That was a lack that I felt, because there wasn't any real content there for me.

Sarah Palin is sort of like that -- except that her internal coherence gets lost between clauses within each sentence.

However, if you suppress all your left brain processing, and think of my former minister's sermons and Sarah Palin's speeches as blank verse poetry, then it totally works. Conan O'Brien earlier this week on the Tonight Show had William Shatner read Sarah Palin's farewell speech as if it were blank verse.

Even if you thought it wasn't much of a speech, you'd have to agree that it was marginally more acceptable as poetry.

UPDATE (Aug 2, 2009) - The original link to the Conan O'Brien video on Youtube has been removed. Here is a replacement, which will hopefully last longer:

HMCS Fraser

2009-07-28T17:03:00.009-04:00

Various news sources report that Her Majesty's Canadian Ship Fraser was returned to the Royal Canadian Navy earlier this month.

Fraser -- DDH 233 -- is the last surviving ship of the St. Laurent class of destroyers. These were the first warships designed and built in Canada, and they formed the backbone of the Royal Canadian Navy during the Cold War. From the National Historic Site historical plaque aboard Fraser

Designed in 1948-1949, they influenced naval construction internationally with their smooth above-water surfaces and distinctive convex deck. They could also be sealed to protect crews against biological and radioactive threats. All seven St. Laurent-class ships were modified during the 1960s to carry helicopters and enhance their anti-submarine capability. Launched in 1953, the HMCS Fraser is the last surviving example of this innovative class of warship.

When these ships were originally designed and built, they were intended to be newer, faster, more capable versions of the River-class destroyers that the RCN used in the Battle of the Atlantic in the Second World War. Their DDE designation marked them as Destroyer Escorts - ships intended to guard a convoy or to form part of a surface battle group. In the early 1960s, they were upgraded to add the capability of launching and recovering a Sea King helicopter, which is reflected by the change from the DDE to the DDH designator. When HMCS Bonaventure, the last RCN aircraft carrier, was retired, these ships became by default the largest units in the Canadian Navy.

Photo Credit - by Stewpendous on Flickr -- HMCS Fraser moored at Bridgewater, NS

All the ships of the St. Laurent class excluding St. Laurent herself went through the DELEX (Destroyer Lifetime Extension) program in the early 1980s. This upgrade included an electronic warfare suite that allowed these older ships constructed in the decade after World War Two to function and participate in a modern battlefield, giving them tactical datalinks to allow them to mesh with allied combatant ships and aircraft.

Throughout the 1980s, Fraser was used as a testbed to evaluate technology that would be used on the Halifax-class frigates that were then being designed. But by 1994, Fraser was retired and all the other ships of the St. Laurent class-- St. Laurent DDH 205, Saguenay DDH 206, Skeena DDH 207, Ottawa DDH 229, Margaree DDH 230, and Assiniboine DDH 234 -- were scrapped or sunk.

Originally, Fraser was intended to be either a museum, or an artificial reef -- indeed, the ship was owned by the Artificial Reef Society of Nova Scotia since the mid 1990s, until funding issues caused the ship to be returned to DND and the Navy earlier this month.

The Navy now has three options -- they could could restore Fraser (as a museum, not an operational warship), break her up and sell the remains for scrap, or turn the ship into an artificial reef.

The statement from Peter MacKay, the Defense Minister, is a typical example of political vagueness: "We remain committed to developing a longer-term solution for Fraser's future." What does this actually mean?

Worst Business Model Ever

2009-07-28T15:43:00.004-04:00

Imagine this situation - you spend thousands of dollars to outfit your home with solar panels, as well as the necessary DC-to-AC conversion technology. You do this because over the lifetime of the solar panels and associated infrastructure, you expect to buy substantially less power from the power company. In fact, this is how you would justify the purchase of the solar panels -- if you do it right, you will make back more than the cost of the technology in savings on your electricity bill.

Well, there is a utility out there (Xcel Energy in Colorado) who proposes that their customers with solar panels on their homes be charged for the electricity that they don't use -- see links here and here and here. You might expect that there is an outcry about this.

One of Xcel's customers noted of his solar panel installation that

“Mine are generating enough to feed five or six houses around me electricity, so there's no free ride.”

A solar energy consultant pointed out

“That's less energy that Xcel Energy has to produce. That's less coal that they have to burn.”

This is one of those times where you encounter something and you just have to shake your head and wonder what the heck they were thinking? In this case, think of this as a tax on progress.

The Solar Eclipse of July 22, 2009

2009-07-25T22:42:00.006-04:00

A total solar eclipse of the Sun occurred earlier this week on Wednesday July 22. The path of totality as illustrated by the following animation (image credit NASA/A T Sinclair), touched the Earth in India, crossed through Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar and China. After leaving mainland Asia, the path crossed Japan's Ryukyu Islands and curved southeast through the Pacific Ocean where the maximum duration of totality reached 6 min 39 sec.

The Hinode satellite captured images of the eclipse from space. Hinode is a joint science mission (also known as Solar-B) mounted by JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the American NASA. The following image (photo credit NASA/JAXA) shows the moon's shadow in front of a heavily filtered view of the Sun.

Another Japanese Earth-monitoring satellite MTSAT captured what I believe has to be one of the most seriously cool space images ever -- the view of the moon's shadow on the earth from geostationary orbit 35,790 km (22,240 mi) high. The image (photo credit MTSAT/GMS via Wired Science blog) shows the shadow covering the island of Taiwan. Note that Australia is pretty clear of cloud cover -- just as one would expect from the reports of drought conditions there.

As eclipses go, this one was pretty long at nearly 7 minutes of totality. The next one having this comparable level of totality won't occur until 2132. Those of us still around will be just a bit decrepit by then :-)

Batman and Sons - Webcomic

2009-07-25T15:58:00.007-04:00

I posted earlier about a webcomic called Batman and Sons, done by fan artist the dark cat.

He (or perhaps she) has now finished the "Rivalry" story, and it is available on the dark cat's Blogspot blog:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 - Conclusion

Clicking on individual thumbnails in each post will open up the page for reading.

Part 1, which was the only part available when I did my original post, was pretty funny, and so perhaps expectations may have been set too high for parts 2 and 3. It is hard to do "funny" consistently, but the entire story was well done and definitely worth taking the time to read. [1]

A couple of minor editorial quibbles -- I noticed that at least once, the word "manic" was used instead of the correct "maniac". These text problems didn't really detract from the story, because there weren't too many. They may have been due to the artist's understandable desire to finish the friggen thing.

My favourite bits were the ongoing gag of Dick's adolescent reaction to busty superheroines in skintight costumes (pages 4, 9, 17, 19, 35) and the reunion of the Batbaby with its mother (page 44).

My one question (which will undoubtedly cause me to lose all my comic book nerd street cred) is - who was Cassandra (page 11)?

The real reason why I like this story is the underlying warning against overcoming one's own inadequacies or solving one's own issues by passing these things down one generation and having one's son(s) bear the weight of expectation to do it properly. As the story illustrates, this not a good model of child-rearing at all.

Not a bad bit of insight from something meant to be funny and fluffy.

Notes
[1] The assumptions I make, of course, are that the prospective reader have a sense of humour and at least some affinity for and knowledge of the DC Comics universe, of which Batman and Sons in general and this story "Rivalry" specifically are a parody.

For Sale - One Lunar Rover, Cheap

2009-07-25T12:27:00.011-04:00

On Science.com's classified ads section, the following ad appears -- "For sale one Lunar Rover $500,000.00 no offers. One careful owner low mileage buyer collects. Cash offer and I will throw in a camera."

Given the original lunar rover development, manufacturing, and shipping costs, the price of half a mil is pretty good. The camera (a vintage Hasselblad, I believe) is definitely an added bonus.

A couple of problems aside from considerations of title -- the ad doesn't make clear which of three possible rovers is being offered -- there is one at Hadley Rille, one on the Descartes Highlands, and one at Taurus-Littrow. Oh, and I suppose the biggest problem given the "buyer collects" provision -- the locations of all three rovers (and the camera) are on the moon.

Photo credit above -- NASA/Apollo 15 -- photo taken by David R. Scott or James B. Irwin at the Hadley Rille on Earth's moon.

Guess Who Started Blogging??

2009-07-23T21:30:00.007-04:00

OK, so perhaps it isn't momentous news in the grand scheme of things, but I think it is pretty cool.

My wife the author -- and now, blogger!

UPDATE - I added the link to Second Draft in "the Usual Suspects" section with a "Jill Lum" description, and in the "Skiffy" section with a "Michael Skeet and Jill Snider Lum" description.

Not immoral or illegal, just incredibly fattening

2009-07-23T12:07:00.005-04:00

Divine Caroline has an article about the Ten Worst Artery Cloggers in America. At the same time, they also have an article on Ten Foods That Will Improve Your Mood.

As far as the first one, not very many of them are actually available in Canada. However, I am sure we have substitutes. The Domino’s Chicken Carbonara Pasta Bread Bowl, for example, sounds a lot like like something introduced at KFC recently -- a bowl (but not a bread bowl) with fried chicken, mashed potato, corn, gravy, and cheese -- just the thing to make up for a lipid deficiency. And I am happy to put a Double Big Mac up against a Triple Whopper with cheese.

Bad though they are, these are all best selling products because we are evolved to want sugar (in this case carbs) and fat -- and these products mainline their delivery to us like heroin from a junkie's needle.

Based on the other list, it sounds like one of the best food experiences that we could have would be to start outside on a sunny day with an edamame bean appetizer leading up to eating a lot of turkey. The accompaniments would be a lentil salad and a spinach salad, followed by a chocolate banana dessert. The sunny day would allow us the manufacture vitamin D through direct exposure to sunlight. All the other foods would max out tryptophan and folate (a vitamin B compound), and the net result would be a lot of happy people. Gotta try this...

Sarcasm

2009-07-21T16:06:00.003-04:00

This was pretty funny....

Birthdays in Mauritius

2009-07-21T15:28:00.006-04:00

My cousin Anne sent photos of the combined birthday celebration held this past Sunday the 19th for Nina (age 4 at the beginning of August) and Leo (age 2 last week).

Anne reports that she had a hard time trying to get Leo to wear his birthday shirt (he usually wears cotton tshirts) - however, as soon as he saw his cake, he was so mesmerised, he finally allowed it to be buttoned up! Leo tried to pick all the decorations and candle off of his cake - clearly a young man with an eye to the main chance. Nina was a little princess with her dress and her "grown up shoes"!

Thanks to Anne for sharing the party pictures. It is wonderful to get these by e-mail. Have I mentioned recently that I love technology??

Jupiter Impact Update

2009-07-21T15:09:00.003-04:00

A follow-up observation with an infrared telescope on Mauna Kea confirms that the dark mark(s) discovered near Jupiter's south pole by Australian amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley were caused by an impact of a comet or asteroid. The "hole" in Jupiter's upper atmosphere is now Earth-size or larger.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Infrared Telescope Facility - This image shows the heat signature from the impact point, glowing against the cooler background.

Jupiter Impact?

2009-07-20T20:57:00.014-04:00

Around 1330 UT (0830 Eastern) yesterday (19 July 2009), an Australian amateur astronomer named Anthony Wesley noticed a previously unseen dark spot on Jupiter. Further observations by Mr. Wesley and other observers show several more spots in the vicinity, indicating that this is likely the result of a sizable asteroid or cometary impact on Jupiter.

If this was indeed a comet or asteroid impact, it would be much like Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, fragments of which which hit Jupiter in July 1994.

The Spaceguard project is still cataloguing large objects in orbits which might be in a position to hit Earth. However, no one noticed the Jupiter impactor prior to Sunday. Jupiter's larger size and greater gravity causes it to sweep up a lot of material, which is a good thing for us -- every large object swept up by Jupiter is one less to fall out of the sky without warning on us.