John Oliver: encryption

Convincing, isn't it? You know what surprises me the most? That I agree with Lindsey Graham about something!

Hmm,... maybe it's two things. After all, he did compare Donald Trump and Ted Cruz to the choice between "being shot or poisoned." (Admittedly, he didn't acknowledge his own role in bringing those choices into being.)

NIAC - from science fiction to science fact

Another inspiring video ...

John F. Kennedy: Because it is there

"We choose to go to the Moon…not because it is easy, but because it is hard." You've heard that line. Have you heard the rest of the speech?

Actually, this isn't the full speech, either. Heh, heh. But this excerpt is great, isn't it?

We won!

(wn.com)

Sometimes, the good guys win:

Senior Republicans conceded on Tuesday that the grueling fight with President Obama over the regulation of Internet service appears over, with the president and an army of Internet activists victorious.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected on Thursday to approve regulating Internet service like a public utility, prohibiting companies from paying for faster lanes on the Internet. While the two Democratic commissioners are negotiating over technical details, they are widely expected to side with the Democratic chairman, Tom Wheeler, against the two Republican commissioners. ...

The F.C.C. plan would let the agency regulate Internet access as if it is a public good. It would follow the concept known as net neutrality or an open Internet, banning so-called paid prioritization — or fast lanes — for willing Internet content providers.

In addition, it would ban the intentional slowing of the Internet for companies that refuse to pay broadband providers. The plan would also give the F.C.C. the power to step in if unforeseen impediments are thrown up by the handful of giant companies that run many of the country’s broadband and wireless networks.

We couldn't have done this without President Obama, and no win is permanent:

The new F.C.C. rules are still likely to be tied up in a protracted court fight with the cable companies and Internet service providers that oppose it, and they could be overturned in the future by a Republican-leaning commission. But for now, Congress’s hands appear to be tied.

After decades of  Republican presidents, the Supreme Court is still controlled, 5 to 4, by right-wing zealots. After deciding that corporations are 'people' with their own religious beliefs and that buying politicians with untraceable money doesn't even give the appearance of corruption, it's really hard to tell what crazy thing they might come up with next.

And, of course, there will be other elections. If we don't actually get out and vote, we may well end up with a president who'll make George W. Bush look intelligent, and a Congress which will fall all over itself in an attempt to be crazy enough. As I say, no win is permanent. We can't ever think that.

But this is still very definitely a win, a huge win, for the good guys. We should be celebrating.

Buycott App

You've probably heard of the Buycott App, haven't you? In case you haven't, this was in Forbes:

In her keynote speech at last year’s annual Netroots Nation gathering, Darcy Burner pitched a seemingly simple idea to the thousands of bloggers and web developers in the audience. The former Microsoft programmer and congressional candidate proposed a smartphone app allowing shoppers to swipe barcodes to check whether conservative billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch were behind a product on the shelves.

Burner figured the average supermarket shopper had no idea that buying Brawny paper towels, Angel Soft toilet paper or Dixie cups meant contributing cash to Koch Industries through its subsidiary Georgia-Pacific. Similarly, purchasing a pair of yoga pants containing Lycra or a Stainmaster carpet meant indirectly handing the Kochs your money (Koch Industries bought Invista, the world’s largest fiber and textiles company, in 2004 from DuPont). ...

She wasn’t aware that as she delivered her Netroots speech, a group of developers was hard at work on Buycott, an even more sophisticated version of the app she proposed. ...

You can scan the barcode on any product and the free app will trace its ownership all the way to its top corporate parent company, including conglomerates like Koch Industries.

Once you’ve scanned an item, Buycott will show you its corporate family tree on your phone screen. Scan a box of Splenda sweetener, for instance, and you’ll see its parent, McNeil Nutritionals, is a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.

Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies.

Here are some examples of those user-created campaigns.

Now, personally, I'd go to great lengths to avoid products connected with the Koch brothers,... but how do you know? Did you know enough to avoid buying Brawny paper towels or Dixie cups? I didn't.

But there's more to it than that, much more. Corporations - and the wealthy people who control them - have grabbed control of our political system, and that's only gotten worse since Citizens United. We need a way to fight back. We need a way to discourage corporations from politics.

So I don't really care what your own concern might be. After all, there might be corporate behavior I like which you don't. Or vice versa. But if enough people start using the Buycott App, or find other ways to vote with their grocery money, maybe corporations will start to worry about losing customers when they buy politicians.

Or maybe they'll just put more of their money in 501(c)4's, which don't have to disclose donors, I don't know. Certainly one of the worst things about rulings like Citizens United was how they help keep corruption a secret. Corporations don't have to tell their customers or even their shareholders which politicians they're buying, or why (likely, just to get lower taxes for the CEO).

But hey, it's a start, right? It won't be easy to take our country back, but we have to start somewhere.

So much for progress...

(Jesus and Mo)

Hey, if God hadn't wanted me to blog, He wouldn't have created the Internet.

SawStop

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Maybe I should have let my brother post this, since the only thing I know about home improvement is that I want nothing to do with it. I hated it when I helped my father build our homes, and I still hate it now.

I do know that SawStop adds to the cost of a table saw (although I suspect it would cost a lot less if all new saws were required to have a safety feature like this). And there's concern about ruining the blade when a saw stops suddenly like that.

But... just think about what you're saying. Are you more concerned about the blade than your fingers? Blades can be replaced!

OK, I know there are other objections. Wet wood can cause a false stop, apparently. Well, should you really be sawing wet wood in the first place? Hey, don't ask me. I'll admit that I don't know anything about it, and I don't particularly want to know. This isn't my area of interest, not at all.

But I've worked places where people took guards off chain gears, moving blades, and other dangerous pieces of equipment, because they didn't want to be bothered with them. Hey, they were going to careful. And they were men, not pussies - men missing some of their fingers, often enough.

And those were the minor accidents. No one ever thinks that it's going to happen to him, but it happens all the time. There's no give in steel machinery. There's no hesitation. There are no second-thoughts. When you put human flesh up against steel, steel wins. Always! Every time.

I'm no expert in this. I freely admit that. If you have more knowledge than I do (and you could hardly know less), feel free to comment. However, I do know that there's never been a safety measure that didn't face opposition.

From the very beginning of factory work, when belt-driven machinery was all-too-frequently lubricated with blood, there was opposition to even the most basic, common sense precautions, like putting simple guards on fast-moving parts which would grab a loose item of clothing and drag a man to his death.

No matter how simple, no matter how obvious, no matter how cheap, these things always face opposition. I don't understand it, but it's true. That doesn't mean this particular safety measure is a good idea, of course. But it looks pretty good to me.

So why not? Please, educate me.

Defending our freedom to share

Note that this clip is also available on YouTube here.

This is an interesting talk. SOPA and PIPA were pushed as anti-piracy measures, and that might seem reasonable. Certainly, copyright holders are being ripped off by organized criminal operations, usually based in China or elsewhere overseas, that often sell movies and games even before the legitimate products are available.

But these bills won't do anything about that. In fact, from what I can tell, so far nothing has had much of an effect on piracy. This is the excuse for these bills, but is that the real reason? In this TED talk, Clay Shirky explains why we should doubt that.

Do you ever watch YouTube videos? YouTube makes it very easy to create and share your own videos. But every amateur video clip you watch on YouTube is time you could have spent watching a commercial television show or movie.

Is that what really has Hollywood running scared? Most of that amateur content isn't very good, but there's a lot of it. At the very least, it's a real time-waster. And some of it is pretty good. Either way, it's competition that big media companies don't want.

At the very least, it's competition for your time. As Shirky says, it used to be that television networks had only two other shows as competition in each time slot. Sure, you could do other things, rather than watch TV at all. But you didn't have the internet, with a pretty much unlimited amount of content available.

This reminds me of Digital Rights Management (DRM) in computer games. That's also claimed to be an anti-piracy measure. Mainstream game developers, huge multinational corporations which spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing a computer game, want to protect their investment.

That seems reasonable enough. And piracy is rampant. But DRM doesn't work on pirates, since they always crack the code pretty much immediately. Generally, what it does is cause lots of problems for legitimate users, the people who actually purchased the game. How is that a good thing?

But there's something else it does. When you buy a game these days, you don't actually own it. You can't sell it to someone else when you get tired of it, or if it turns out you don't like the game. All you're buying is the right to play the game for awhile. How long? Well, as long as the game developer wants you to play it.

Now me, I often play old games. These are games I bought years ago, games which don't have DRM. I do own those games. But when I'm happily playing an old game, that means I'm not buying a new one. And game developers, reasonably enough, want us to buy new games.

So, is DRM really about piracy, as they say? If so, it's completely ineffective. Or is it about planned obsolescence? Is it about making sure that no one can keep playing old games, that we have to buy new ones, instead? After all, as soon as a company stops supporting that DRM, the game is useless. (Unless you'd bought a pirated copy, of course.)

I don't know. Maybe that's just a crazy conspiracy theory. Maybe these multinational corporations are so inept that they keep using DRM for piracy, just as they say, despite the fact that it doesn't work. I don't know. All this is pretty new, so we'll just have to see how it plays out.

When it comes to SOPA and PIPA, those bills have been pulled from consideration, at least for now. Internet users organized a mass protest, a flood of complaints to their senators and their congressmen, that was very effective. But this issue isn't going to go away.

Big media companies have a lot of money to throw around, and Citizens United has basically made it legal to buy politicians. Corporations, after all, are just people, too, right? Thanks to that ruling, money is more powerful politically than it's ever been before.

The people still have the final say, but we're going to have to watch this. And we're going to have to contact our representatives, when necessary. Apathy isn't going to cut it.

The blue screen of near-death

(Savage Chickens)

Yeah, I wish!

More computer problems

I can't imagine how we managed without computers, but sometimes, I just want to take an axe to mine.

About three weeks ago, I lost my internet access for a few days. But that was only a bad modem. I had to wait for a new one to be shipped to me, but it wasn't a big problem or a huge expense. At the very least, the problem was relatively easy to diagnose, at least with the help of my ISP.

Then this week, on Tuesday, my uninterruptible power supply crapped out. But that was obvious. I don't know why - or even what, exactly, happened - but it was easy enough to buy a new UPS, so I was back up within hours.

Yeah, I didn't like the extra expense, but the hardest part of these things is usually just discovering which piece of hardware or software is causing the problem. (The howling alarm from the UPS, combined with the complete lack of power coming from it, was a pretty good clue this time.)

The rest of the afternoon, and all evening, my computer worked fine. But the next morning, I got the dreaded "blue screen of death" when I started the computer. And although I got it running a few times, and even ran a successful checkdisk, I kept getting that BSoD every 20 minutes or so.

So on Wednesday, I took the computer to the repair shop. Late in the day, I got the news: a bad motherboard. But wasn't that still under warranty? After all, this was the second time they'd diagnosed a bad motherboard. (Last time, when I just had an intermittent problem, it took them five weeks to finally repair my computer, and they installed a new hard drive first - without actually curing anything.)

"Oh, no," I was told. "I'm sure we didn't install this motherboard. I would have remembered ordering a board like this."  I was really sure that they had installed it, so I made him check his records. "No, I don't see it."

Well, I needed to think about what I wanted to do, anyway. But after I hung up, I checked my records. Yup, they'd installed the motherboard in December, 2009, so surely it was still under warranty. I called back and told them I had the invoice right in front of me. They'd definitely installed that motherboard only about a year and a half ago.

So OK, they found their records then, but there was a new problem. It was going to take up to two months to get the motherboard repaired or replaced under warranty. Now I was getting a little bit pissed. I didn't blame them for the faulty hardware. But on the other hand, I didn't buy the motherboard myself. I didn't even choose that brand (the computer had come with a different brand of motherboard).

I'd taken my computer to the repair shop a year and a half ago, and they'd diagnosed the problem and ordered a replacement motherboard they'd thought was of comparable quality. Maybe I was being unreasonable here, but I expected them to stand behind their choice.

To their credit, they agreed pretty readily to install a temporary motherboard - a cheaper one - while mine was being repaired or replaced. And although I had to pay for it, I'll get the cost of the motherboard back when they remove it again in a few weeks.

I'm still spending a couple of hundred dollars for labor, but even this lower-end motherboard would add a hundred to that. And I'm not going to be missing a computer for up to two months, either. So I'm quite happy with the deal...

...Especially since this does seem to have fixed the problem. My computer seems to be working fine, so apparently it was the motherboard. But what's going to go bad next?

This is like repairing a used car. How much money do you want to put into a used car before you finally decide to buy a new one? OK, maybe it's not quite like that. This was a high-end gaming computer when I bought it, but that was five years ago. And since then, I've had to replace everything but the case and the DVD burner (the power supply, the monitor, and the motherboard twice now).

Oh, well. I'd love to get a new computer, but I really don't need one. This one still does everything I want. And I've had major construction work done on my house twice so far this summer (not to mention needing a new furnace last winter). And given the way the stock market has been crashing, maybe I should be saving my pennies right now, huh?

I'm basically just bitching. If you can't gripe on your own blog, where can you? I seem to have computer problems about every six months or so, on average. And even when the parts are still under warranty, there's an expense. And the aggravation factor.

Really, it's hard to do without a computer these days. I've got my old Windows 98 machine, but as of three weeks ago, with this new modem, I can no longer use it to access the internet. I can still play games - old games, at least (but those are often what I'm playing, anyway) - but that's not the main reason why I need a computer.

It's amazing how quickly computers have become indispensable, isn't it?

3D printer

Neat, isn't it?

The filter bubble

All of these TED talks are interesting, but I thought this one by Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, was particularly important.

And it's interesting that he got a standing ovation from the VIPs at the talk, including some of the top executives from Google, Facebook, and the other internet gatekeepers he criticizes.

What, me worry?

Ed Stein's commentary:

It’s becoming increasingly clear that global warming is real, and that human activity does have a profound effect on the global environment. Remember the recent dustup over the veracity of climate change experts, in which emails seemed to show that some scientists were doctoring the results? Two independent analyses have absolved them completely, and confirmed that the scientific findings of accelerated global warming are indeed accurate. The only people left who still believe that climate change is a hoax are those who don’t want to pay the price of cleaning up their businesses and their political allies (and the gullible citizens they continue to manipulate). Yet we dither, as the damage mounts, and reaches a point at which it is irreversible. We continue to believe that new technologies will somehow bail us out at the eleventh hour.  We also believed that the space shuttle wouldn’t fail. And that our understanding of the economy, aided by number-crunching super computers, had become so sophisticated that the markets were immune to risk. And we believed that oil drilling was safe, that the technology was so advanced that something like the disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico was highly improbable, if not impossible.

OK, there's no bigger fan of science and technology than me, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use our brains. Generally, this "What, me worry?" attitude doesn't really come from people who value science or know anything about it. It's just an excuse for doing nothing. In fact, it's an attempt to cover up greed, laziness, and short-term thinking. These people want to leave their problems for someone else to fix, while grabbing any short-term value for themselves.

We mine the oceans for cheap seafood and leave the resulting devastation for our descendants to worry about. We keep fossil fuels cheap and dump massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and let our children and grandchildren cope with a planet short of energy and less hospitable to human life. We clear-cut forests for cheap lumber. We blow up mountains for cheap coal. We shrug as millions of species go extinct from our actions and also while man-made chemicals accumulate in our own bodies.

Right now, we could be living in the peak years of human civilization. It's not inevitable, not at all. But it's certainly possible. After this, overpopulation, resource depletion, pollution, and energy shortages could lead us into a spiral of decay. Does this make you feel good, knowing that you yourself lucked out? Not me. I appreciate my luck in being born when and where I was, but I'm embarrassed as hell at what we're doing with all our advantages.

All you ever wanted to know about sewage treatment

(free clip art from CoolClips.com)

Seriously, this is a fascinating account of sewage treatment in Scientific American. Ten pages long, but in a light, entertaining style, it covers the history of sewage disposal, the complexity of the problem in large cities, the continual maintenance required, and the actual process of sewage treatment.

Sure, this is a problem we'd prefer to flush and forget, but it's a serious health issue. And with more than six billion people on the planet, the poop really adds up. We can ignore it ourselves, but only if we've got skilled people doing what must be done. An article like this - which really is very entertaining - helps to remind us that we live in a complex, interrelated society that requires careful planning and some esoteric knowledge.

Give it a try. You might be surprised.

PS. My continued apologies for the slowdown here. I've got lots to discuss, just little time for it right now. So you might have to make do with cartoons and videos, rather than my usual long-winded monologues. (Hmm,... that might not be such a sacrifice after all.)

Shock absorbers generate electricity

(photo by Zachary Anderson from the NY Times)

Here's an article in the New York Times (registration required, though it's free) about a new invention, shock absorbers that generate electricity when you hit a pothole:

A new type of shock absorber under development by the Levant Power Corporation converts the bumps and jolts of vehicles on rough roads into usable electricity.

Usually, shock absorbers dissipate the energy of bouncing vehicles as heat. But the new shocks can use the kinetic energy of bounces to generate watts, putting the electricity to use running the vehicle’s windshield wipers, fans or dashboard lights, for example.

The devices, called GenShocks, can be installed both in ordinary and hybrid vehicles, lowering fuel consumption by 1 to 6 percent, depending on the vehicle and road conditions,...

Neat, huh? It's clever thinking like this that keeps us increasing fuel economy. At the same time, the increasing cost of fuel makes these kinds of inventions practical. If we'd been smart, we would have greatly increased the tax on fossil fuels years ago, when they were still cheap - using the proceeds to pay off the deficit, lower income taxes, and fund alternate energy research.

Of course, that might have been difficult politically. And not all of the money would have been spent wisely (a large pool of money being irresistible to politicians). But it would have been far better than sending America's wealth to Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other oil-rich, but despotic, nations.

The Arab Oil Embargo of 1973 should have been a wake-up call for America. Instead, we foolishly frittered away the time, completely wasting the opportunity. As a nation, we just weren't very smart...

Technological leadership

The above video is in Mandarin Chinese, but this website describes what's going on. It's a technological innovation allowing passengers to get on and off a high-speed bullet train, without the train ever stopping. Neat, huh?

Arriving passengers board that connector cabin before the bullet train arrives. Then, when the train zooms through the station, it picks up the cabin (which slides along the roof of the train) while simultaneously dropping off a similar cabin containing departing passengers. Passengers move between the cabin and the train, through the roof of the train, while the train is speeding between stations.

This is really cool, but it's happening in China, not the U.S.  Don't get me wrong, it's great that technology is advancing worldwide. But it's China that seems to be taking the lead on all of this stuff these days, and as an American, I'm jealous. Also, China is a dictatorship, with no respect for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or any rights of minorities. That may change someday, but until it does, they're certainly not suited to lead the world.

But while we Americans are timidly refusing to move into the 21st Century, China is spending billions on alternate energy research, determined to control the market for advanced technology and lessen their reliance on foreign oil. While we're struggling to fill potholes because of our never-ending quest for lower taxes, China is building futuristic bullet trains. While many American cities have high school graduation rates below 50%, China has 6 million university students and almost 400 million Internet users (more than the entire population of the U.S.).

In America, politicians proudly proclaim their disbelief in evolution, and school boards work to replace science with religion. Republican leaders complain about studying fruit flies (in complete ignorance of how useful that's been to basic research) and even about monitoring volcanoes. They eagerly proclaim that global warming is just a scam, some massive conspiracy (for no logical reason) from climatologists. They leap to fund abstinence-only sex education, which doesn't work, but use political tricks to stop funding for basic scientific research, which does.

In the media, scientists are portrayed either as laughably-inept geeks or madmen eager to "play God." The hero's gut feeling is always right, not the hard work of professional scientists. In a nation which has led the world in science and technology (to our immense prosperity), only military research now gets any respect at all. At the end of World War II, the G.I. Bill led to the best-educated labor force in the world. Now, education is for "liberal elites." Regular Joes just want lower taxes for the rich, like God intended.

It's not just that China is taking the technological lead from America, but that we seem to be eager to abandon it to them. We're not even interested in competing. No, we've unilaterally surrendered. In the most advanced nation on Earth, we no longer seem to see any value in science and technology. If we just pray often enough, we'll get all that we want, right? And whatever happens, God must have wanted it that way. Meanwhile, it's TV celebrities and sports stars who are the real heroes, and what did book-larnin' ever do for them?

OK, there are still a few people in America who think science is important and who aren't threatened by higher education, but it seems to be an increasingly small minority. And many of those are children of immigrants, whose parents - unlike native-born Americans - still see a value in such things. Unfortunately, with the current anti-immigrant fervor, I wonder if we're moving towards shutting down even that source of skilled people.

Well, to show that all is not lost, here's another great video, this one from the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab at the University of Southern California:



Obviously, we're still doing neat stuff in America (actually, in collaboration with scientists around the world, which is how science should be done.) But although it's cool, it's not nearly as bold as going to the Moon, or even building bullet trains. We apparently don't have the money or even the will for bold efforts these days. And research into robots has military applications (both of these were funded by DARPA), which is probably why we do it. Just as prisons now seem to be the only civilian growth industry in America, so too does the military seem to be the only ready source of research money, at least for cutting edge technology.

But come on! Do Republicans really think we can continue to have the most advanced military in the world if we're passed up in civilian science and technology? Military power is based on economic power. Without a highly-educated workforce, high-tech industries, and heavy research into basic science, we'll eventually be forced to buy weapons from other countries - when they're willing to sell them (i.e. probably not while they're still cutting-edge).

I don't want to give the wrong impression here. I want to be absolutely clear that we can compete with China. As I say, I get the feeling that a lot of Americans have already just given up (those who can be bothered to think about this at all). Remember in the 1980's when Japan was the unstoppable economic juggernaut? America just could not compete, so why even try? Except that we could, and we did.

It's the same way now. I've seen us taking the wrong path for decades now, but it doesn't have to be that way. Although we've gotten a terrible start to the 21st Century, suffering for eight years under the worst presidential administration in U.S. history, we're still the high-tech leader of the world, we've still got the world's most powerful economy, and we've still got a diverse society united in a tradition of innovation and risk-taking, with personal freedom that's essential for a unfettered marketplace of ideas.

If every nation on Earth were free and democratic (majority rules/minority rights: two sides of the same coin), I suppose it wouldn't matter much which nation led the world in science and technology. But right now, it does. And if we continue as we are now, as we have been for some time, we won't lead anyone much longer.

Content-Aware Photoshop

A sneak peak at the new Photoshop. Amazing, isn't it? Actually, there are a lot of YouTube videos about using Photoshop. We've long since passed the point where we could trust photos as evidence, haven't we?

The Final Frontier

I'm not a Trekkie, but this is still neat. It's the space ship Enterprise from Star Trek, fabricated in one-billionth scale. That's apparently about one-tenth the width of a human hair.

Thanks to Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, where I got the link.