Uncategorized | Science Addiction

July 28, 2006

Awkward Answers to the Songwriter’s Guild

The “Songwriters Guild”:http://www.songwritersguild.com President Rick Carnes recently wrote to the EFF, seemingly in response to their “Frequently Awkward Questions for for the Entertainment Industry”:http://www.eff.org/IP/faq/.

Rick Carnes has a point- and for the most part I agree with him. The trouble is that for the most part, the EFF agrees with him too! It is unfortunate that his frustration is directed at the EFF. If EFF upholds free speech and someone slanders you, do you fault the EFF for allowing slander or do you go after the person who you believe has wronged you? Fred von Lohmann of the EFF has “posted a response”:http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004857.php which touches on the issues at hand without directly answering the questions. While Fred may not want to get in to an internet brawl over semantics, I have no such qualms.

In any case, I am not against a lot of what Rick Carnes has written.

Carnes’ questions are titled (the typo is his): Aways Awkward questions for the EFF

And here are my responses. I do not claim to speak for the EFF- in fact, in some cases, my opinions may not coincide with theirs. I will answer these as though they were addressed to me. Also- *I am not a lawyer*, never claimed to be one and I may not know what I am talking about. But this is what I believe. Read the rest of this entry »

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July 13, 2006

To Bombay

Bombay

Bombay. A most fascinating place.

We may be told- ad nauseum- that it was formerly called Bombay. It is still Bombay to me when I speak (or write) English, and Mumbai when I speak Gujarati or Hindi. It is what it is- official name changes change nothing.

And it has been bombed. Seven times within the half hour. Again.

“Amardeep Singh”:http://www.lehigh.edu/~amsp/2006/07/bombay-blasts.html has some great links about that provide perspective and links to take action now.

“Suketu Mehta”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/07/11/DI2006071100620.html talks about the issues at hand at the Washington Post. He is the author of “Maximum City”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0375703403/galaxyfaraway/ which is the second greatest book I have read on Bombay. The best, of course, is “Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140132708/galaxyfaraway/102-8769303-4742567.

And the Washington Post asks just the right question: “How Much can India Endure?”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/11/AR2006071101205.html

But — and here’s the crux of the matter — how long can India, Indians and the Singh government withstand the constant pressure from militant groups before they have to react? By any measure of international diplomacy, they’ve already been extraordinarily patient; compare their restraint with Israel’s response to the kidnapping of its soldier or to the U.S. and Japanese responses to North Korea’s missile tests.

My friend Rahul, at his blog writes in outrage, at the lack of anything but empty words from the people in power.

And I write this and quote poetry.

The people yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
You can’t laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
“I earn my living.
I make enough to get by
and it takes all my time.
If I had more time
I could do more for myself
and maybe for others.
I could read and study
and talk things over
and find out about things.
It takes time.
I wish I had the time.”

The people is a tragic and comic two-face: hero and hoodlum:
phantom and gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
“They buy me and sell me…it’s a game…sometime I’ll break loose…”

– *Carl Sandburg* from *The People, Yes*

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June 26, 2006

The Trouble with Diebold and Electronic Voting

First, take a look at this “graphic at Washington Post”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2006/03/16/GR2006031600213.html sensationally titled *How to Steal an Election*. It compares Nevada laws regarding slot machines with state and federal laws regulating electronic voting machines. The comparison is stark and eye-opening. For example, the Nevada Gaming Commission has access to all software for gaming electronics but the voting machine code is a _trade secret_. Yes, and so are the inner government workings of China.

And then there is the most famous of the voting machine manufacturers, “Diebold”:http://www.diebold.com. In addition to being a closed system that even the government is not allowed to know about, it is a company that fundamentally misunderstands electronic voting in particular and security in general.

For example, “this came from a Diebold spokesman”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/12/us/12vote.html?ex=1305086400&en=5b3554a76aad524a&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss [via Schneier]

“For there to be a problem here, you’re basically assuming a premise where you have some evil and nefarious election officials who would sneak in and introduce a piece of software,” he said. “I don’t believe these evil elections people exist.”

Ah yes, the head-in-the-sand form of security. I hear it is very popular in the real world and effective in utopian societies.

The fun and games do not end there. A “major vulnerability”:http://www.insidebayarea.com/ci_3805089 was found in the voting machines:

This newspaper is withholding some details of the vulnerability at the request of several elections officials and scientists, partly because exploiting it is so simple and the tools for doing so are widely available.

Of course, the “report appeared later on”:http://www.blackboxvoting.org/BBVtsxstudy.pdf with parts redacted, and it is tremendous.

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June 9, 2006

GreenFuel: Algae That Eats Your Pollution

By way of “Radio Open Source”:http://www.radioopensource.org/global-warming-a-sputnik-moment/ I discovered this cool new company called “GreenFuel”:http://www.greenfuelonline.com/.

GreenFuel has algae that consumes CO2 and converts in to a biofuel. The idea is that their algae would consume emissions from smokestacks and become algae biomass. Algae biomass can be used as ethanol, biodiesel, and other stuff. The first bioreactor was attached at MIT and more have been installed elsewhere since. This one is being funded by a “VC”:http://www.polarisventures.com/ run by Robert Metcalfe, the guy who invented Ethernet at Xerox PARC. That’s right, Ethernet.

Profitable venture-capital backed companies that can spin the current system on its head- that is, making it cool and profitable to turn your emissions clean- are fantastic ideas to urge a transition from our present system to a better one. Of course, lower government mandated emissions standards or credits for lower emissions would make this technology a lot more lucrative.

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June 7, 2006

From Environmental Skeptic to Global Warming Believer

“Scientific American”:http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000B557A-71ED-146C-ADB783414B7F0000&colID=13 has an interesting article by Michael Shermer on how he has been _flipped_ from being a skeptic- that is, not entirely trusting the environmentalist’s take on global warming- to becoming a believer based on overwhelming and undisputable facts.

Nevertheless, data trump politics, and a convergence of evidence from numerous sources has led me to make a cognitive switch on the subject of anthropogenic global warming. My attention was piqued on February 8 when 86 leading evangelical Christians–the last cohort I expected to get on the environmental bandwagon–issued the Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for “national legislation requiring sufficient economy-wide reductions” in carbon emissions.

Then I attended the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conference in Monterey, Calif., where former vice president Al Gore delivered the single finest summation of the evidence for global warming I have ever heard, based on the recent documentary film about his work in this area, An Inconvenient Truth. The striking before-and-after photographs showing the disappearance of glaciers around the world shocked me out of my doubting stance.

I saw _An Inconvenient Truth_ last weekend and it is a fantastic film. It is a powerful film and has the urgency that this tragedy demands.

If you do doubt that global warming is real, then let me put it to you this way: even if it was not true, would you rather not be prepared for the chance that it is? Are you so convinced that it is not true, that you would bet the future of the planet on it?

On a related note, “TreeHugger”:http://www.treehugger.com/files/2006/06/4_stages_denial.php has a great piece on the four stages of global warming denial- from _theory not fact_ to _what about the bottom-line_. Well put together.

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June 6, 2006

How to Reduce Junk Mail

While junk email is harder to deal with, the much older problems of junk mail are slightly more within our control in the US. While the steps below will not reduce your junk mail load to zero, it will make a difference. It has for me and the “Federal Trade Commission recommends them”:http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/prescreen.htm as well.

* If you receive tons of unsolicited credit card offers in the post, the trouble is that the credit reporting agencies have sold your information to whoever would pay. The government has had them set up a “web site to opt out”:https://www.optoutprescreen.com/ of all such offers forever (or opt-in, if you have lost your mind). The strange thing is that the agencies actually “commissioned a study [pdf]”:https://www.optoutprescreen.com/UnsolicitedCreditOffers2004.pdf – for the benefit of the FTC and consumers, I suppose- that demonstrates that the unsolicited offers are actually _beneficial to consumers_ and more importantly, _beneficial to corporations_. If you are skeptical of giving your information to that web site- and you should be- know this: the “FTC recommends it”:http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/prescreen.htm and make sure the URL says ‘optoutscreen.com’ and has ‘https://’ preceding it instead of a regular ‘http://’.
* The rest of the junk mail is trickier. While it is impossible to stop it all, you can make a dent. Among the direct mail marketing companies, some of them have chosen to self-regulate themselves; probably in fear of government intervention. The have formed the Direct Marketing Association and allow you to opt out of all direct post _that is sent by their members_. This is clearly not all junk mail, but a significant amount. So, you can “go to the DMA web site”:http://www.dmaconsumers.org/cgi/offmailinglist and get yourself off the list. Except, there is a catch. You have to do it by post, if you want to do it for free. If you want to do it online, _they charge you $5_. Outrageous, but at least it is possible to do it at all.
Enjoy! [thanks to Get Rich Slowly]

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June 6, 2006

The Energy Blog

I just added “The Energy Blog”:http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/ to my Blogroll in the sidebar. This is a great blog run by James Fraser, a veteran of the energy industry and energy-related arms of the government. The emphasis of his blog is on technologies that can replace oil. Unlike many on the Internet, he knows his subject matter extremely well. In his own words, _The Energy Revolution has begun and will change your lifestyle_.

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June 5, 2006

Mentos and Diet Coke Fountains

This is one of the great videos in the history of Internet viral videos- “the fountains of Bellagio recreated using Diet Coke and Mentos mints”:http://eepybird.com/dcm1.html (required Quicktime).

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June 5, 2006

O’Reilly, CMP and the Web 2.0 Service Mark

The controversy started- for those not paying attention- when CMP served a cease-and-desist letter to an Irish non-profit for using the term “Web 2.0” in the name of their conference. Bad move- the blogosphere went in to attack mode and O’Reilly (who runs the conference and is associated with CMP) will never have quite the same reputation again. Before the blogosphere outrage over “CMP’s claim of Web 2.0 as a service mark for conferences”:http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/controversy_about_our_web_20_s.html dies down, I have a few things to say. Read the rest of this entry »

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