Two Favourite Phrases

Graphic interpretation of the test that resulted in the first
Higgs Boson detection at CERN LHC.

"I hate being right."

A day or two ago, CERN announced that further tests and analysis confirmed that their observation of a Higgs Boson several months previously was, in fact, the Higgs Boson, behaving in the way it was supposed to.

Secretly, scientists are always a little disappointed to be right - it's exciting enough to know that Higgs Bosons actually exist, since the math doesn't work without them existing, but it would have been much more exciting if it did something wierd in the process.

"Wierd" is one of the best possible reactions your brain can have to an observation, because it means that pursuing it will almost always mean learning something new about the world in which you live - knowledge being its own reward, of course.

Core structure of Penicillin

"Because I can."

The X-Ray was pretty good; so was penicillin. Neither were discovered with a practical objective in mind.

Science is a machine for discovery. There is rarely a practical reason, in this day and age, to ask "why". Some of our most important discoveries, from the tectonic to the prosaic, came by accident.

Penicillin is a favourite of mine - in spite of wide-spread allergies to the damn stuff, and the (predictably!) rising resistance of biotics to traditional antibiotics, Penicillin pretty much curbed the spread of a number of common diseases at the time. But it wasn't the only one. Radar technicians came up with the idea for the microwave oven - ivory soap was a result of over-mixing, post-its were a failed attempt at adhesive design by 3M. X-Rays, in particular, were recovered completely accidentally but are now one of the most commonly-used diagnostic tools in medicine. 

Relatively Stupid

If you're going to deny one of physics most fundamental principals and the theory that explains it, you'd better be packing some serious heat. I won't pretend to be a physicist, but since it's my second favourite of the hard sciences, I felt like this particular page was a big, fat, slow ball over home plate.

I am going to do a point-by-point refutation of Conservapedia's "Counterexamples to Relativity" page, ignoring the political screed at the top, which is nonsense on the face and requires none of my art to be discredited. I think a refutation of their "45 counterexamples; any one [of which] shows that the theory is incorrect" will suffice.

Conservatives: Warrantless Internet Wiretaps "Necessary"

Vic Towes, Conservative MP for Provencher, and the Minister of Public Safety, says that we need a law allowing the police to track our internet usage without a warrant, saying that, without this legislation "child pornographers and organized crime will be allowed to flourish".

As the CBC points out, the only mention of children or child predators is in the title. They also point out some of the effects of the bill (copy-pasted here for clarity/minimal distortion):

• Require telecommunications and internet providers to give subscriber data to police, national security agencies and the Competition Bureau without a warrant, including names, phone numbers and IP addresses.
• Force internet providers and other makers of technology to provide a "back door" to make communications accessible to police.
• Allow police to get warrants to obtain information transmitted over the internet and data related to its transmission, including locations of individuals and transactions.
• Allow courts to compel other parties to preserve electronic evidence.

Child Pornography is a heinous crime, sure, and organized crime has been a problem since there were laws to break. Ignoring the clear invasion of privacy this bill represents (the Competition Bureau? really?), this bill demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of how internet traffic works. Services like Tor would make it so that a user's browsing habits are revealed only if all of the proxies are on the same ISP, and I happen to know that Tor uses servers in multiple countries to do their proxy-hopping.

No need for this bill has been clearly demonstrated, nor do I think the Conservatives are ever likely to do so. I'm going to let this sink in for my readers for a few hours, while I work on my analysis of the NDP leadership candidates. For those of you playing the home game from abroad, don't be tempted to think that your fiscal conservativism will ally you with the Conservative Party. They aren't. Nor are they socially conservative. They're plain, militant reactionary.

Passwords and Encryption, in Light of Children

People who know me personally know that I am a bit of a cryptography buff. One of the first things I ever did with logic programs in Excel was to build a very stunted and useless One-Time Pad calculator. I routinely change passwords according to a set of predetermined rules. Hell, I even pre-encrypt backups and key files, many of which never leave the hard-drive on my computer. If my position statement on PIPA/SOPA and related legislation wasn't enough of a clue, I value privacy, and in a digital age, that means maintaining strict control of systems and files, never mind the much more complex issue of social networking.

Locking down data tables is so easy that a child could do it... and they often do. I usually had my account on the computer pass-locked and put passwords and sometimes even full encryption on files I wanted to keep private, going back to my first year in high school. If I wasn't such a homebody, my parents would have been hard-pressed to keep any sort of track of my activities... and now that's even more true than ever before.

The question, then, is how much privacy to allow children on the computer, and what you do about it when they circumvent your stated rules. When I used to tool around on CAF, I used to get any of a number of responses. Some parents said that they used software web blocking tools (such as those often used by schools and offices) to block websites with varying levels of strictness, up to and including one father who allowed only white-listed sites... those he specifically approved. Other parents installed keystroke recording software -- commonly called "Keyloggers" -- or even hardware, to record every input their child made to the computer. Keystroke logging, especially on the hardware side, really is the 'nuclear option' when it comes to keeping track of what your kids are doing. You'll have every URL typed, every line of text, every manually-typed password.

In the end, though, however you go about it, there's always flaws to any net-guardianship scheme. For one thing, children are often more computer-literate than parents, and if you were a real computer nut like I was, you took pride in getting around any obstacle placed between you and total computational freedom. Then, there's the human factor: nobody likes to think their parents don't trust them. Hard as it may seem to believe, kids don't like to feel like their parents are always watching them. That problem gets even worse when the child owns the computer in question. (ProTip: Your teen daughter might own her laptop, but you own the power and internet coming into the house.)

Me? Well, I don't have kids. If I did, though, I'd be honest. It's not them I don't trust. It's the internet. And if you want to use a computer connected to my network, you best believe I'm going to be sure your computer is safe... both in terms of net security, but also in terms of your life.

This Isn't Over: The Cold War in the 21st Century

The Cold War was widely considered to have ended, by many historians, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 - within my life time, as a matter of fact. In the years of falling action since, the threat of nuclear war is considered to have fallen by the wayside in both the political and practical worlds. Perestroika and Glasnost have rendered the new Russian Federation and the United States of America friends. Tensions between the countries of the "nuclear club" are at a low unprecedented since the advent of the weapon.

But every now and then something happens and for a brief, glorious moment, I'm living in 1967. That's how I felt about the way everyone reacted to the news a few years back that Russia had claimed the seabed below the north pole as national territory, and planted a titanium flag. That's how I still feel every time someone mutters "Communist" under their breath when they hear about improving relations with China (or the use of the word "socialist" as a political slur).

Tensions in the world are, to some degree, on the rise. Canada builds up her Arctic fleet in anticipation of a need to police Arctic shipping channels at some ill-defined future point when oil drilling and shipping north of the Circle will be economically viable, while Russia and America both claim jurisdiction (without claiming jurisdiction, of course).

And then, late last week, a Canadian Naval Intelligence Officer was arrested and charged with espionage, including something to the affect of passing sensitive information to a "foreign entity". CBC, CTV, and Telegraph Journal all immediately jumped on speculation that the foreign entity was Russia, without saying it actually was.

I do believe we are still responding viscerally to Russia, our generational monster-under-the-bed. Whether that is merited or not is trivial... the Cold War still plays out in the minds of many, including those who are pushing harder and harder for bolstering military presence in the Arctic. Only one enemy could invade us from the North... and that would be Russia.

The Nuclear Problem

The climate debate is as hot as its been since I've been alive these days, and regardless of which side you come down on on the question of climate change itself, people are generally optimistic about opportunities to reduce carbon (as long as it doesn't cost them anything!). I've heard a lot of talk of Nuclear Power on both "sides" of the issue (those who support the idea of AGW and those who are opposed), both in favour of adopting further Nuclear Power and abolishing its use. Much of this talk happened after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan early last year and the subsequent meltdown of the Fukishima Dai-Ichi plant. There has been plenty of discussion of FDI since then, and an autopsy of the event isn't the focus of this little blog; I aim to discuss the larger issue.

Copyright Protections, Peer-to-Peer, and Government Overreach

There's a lot of talk lately about net neutrality, with the SOPA Bill in the United States passed or passing through their legislative system, similar overtures here at home, and other such activities abroad. There are those who feel that SOPA opens up all sorts of "fun" abuses of its authority to government, and I can't comment on that, not having read the bill myself. The stated goal, of course, is in the name: Stop On-line Piracy Act.

Piracy is nothing new: my dad used to tell me about recasting records back during the vinyl days, or recording songs from the radio to casette. People like me, who aren't old enough to remember much about the 90s besides the sudden emergence of anime onto North American cable TV, are more likely to think of software and media piracy through Peer-to-Peer protocols like Bittorrent and the ten or fifteen thousand different clients that run the protocol. I'll even go so far as to admit that I used to download videos and music when I was still in my teens, and probably more than my fair share of software as well. To be fair, and in the interest of full disclosure, I have a folder on my computer containing all of the 3.5 Edition Dungeons and Dragons books from Wizards of the Coast, which, to be fair, were no longer in print at the time a friend downloaded them. Go a little further back, and just about everyone can remember a time when stealing software was as easy as installing it from a friend's disk, or simply copying the disk.