An anti-Rudd cornucopia

I am happy to admit that I was completely unmoved by Rudd’s farewell press conference, which many people have called “emotional” and “hard to watch”.  As I had long decided that there was a high level of artificiality in his public persona, it was simply a curiosity to me that he does seem to have a nice supporting family, which I can only assume he treats very differently to how he reportedly treats co-workers and underlings. 

And to justify my feelings about Rudd, it’s good to read the stories that many people now feel freer to talk about since his departure.     The Australian has put together a long article full of  anti-Rudd anecdotes.  Good reading.

Steganography appears before our eyes

There’s an interesting report here in the Christian Science Monitor about those (alleged) Russian spies arrested in America using steganography:

The alleged Russian spies recently arrested by the FBI are accused of encoding messages into otherwise innocuous pictures, marking the first confirmed use of this high-tech form of data concealment in real life, experts say.

The accused spies posted the seemingly mundane photos on publicly accessible websites, but then extracted coded messages from the computer data of the pictures, according to the criminal complaint filed by the FBI. Although computer scientists have theorized about the existence of this communication technique for over a decade, this is the first publicly acknowledged use of the technique.

A good explanation of the technique follows:

To generate the picture on a computer screen, the computer assigns every pixel three numeric values that correspond to the amount of red, green or blue in the color the pixel displays. By changing those values ever so slightly, the spies could hide the 1’s and 0’s of computer language in the picture’s pixel numbers, but without altering the picture’s appearance to the human eye, Bellovin said.

When this was first widely discussed a decade or so ago, it did strike me as a particularly clever idea, and the growth in online photo sharing sites since then must make the number of places coded photos could be sitting there waiting to be read by the right person ridiculously large.

What’s more, it’s not as if the software to do it is particularly hard to find.  If you search Sourceforge, quite a few different open source programs for it are available.

It’s all so James Bond, I only wish I had a dire secret and someone to share it with.

Most unusual

Found via Tigerhawk, here’s something I don’t recall ever seeing before in a political ad:  good natured humour.  What an innovation!

Why does this man get paid to direct?

“This man” being M. Night Shyamalan, a one hit wonder whose career success rate can’t take any steeper trend downwards; it’s been in freefall for a few years already.

Latest evidence:  “The Last Airbender”, with Roger Ebert opening his review with:

"The Last Airbender" is an agonizing experience in every category I can think of and others still waiting to be invented. The laws of chance suggest that something should have gone right. Not here.

and ends with:

I close with the hope that the title proves prophetic.

Amusing.  In the WSJ review, we get this bit about the lead actor:

According to Mr. Ringer's understandably slim curriculum vitae, he holds a first-degree black belt in taekwondo. To judge from an informal interview posted on YouTube, he is extremely personable, lively and humorous when he's off screen. On screen, alas, he is none of those things, thanks to the reverse wizardry of his director. (No one else can be blamed when an actor has had no professional experience.)

The review then ends with the exactly the same key question I started with (I only realised this after I started the post):

All of which brings us back to the question of expectations, and how Mr. Shyamalan keeps getting work. Eleven years ago he electrified the movie world with the emotional power and dramatic surprise of "The Sixth Sense." He followed up with two flawed but intriguing features, "Unbreakable" and "Signs." In the past eight years, though, his oeuvre has gone from bad ("The Village") to worse ("Lady in the Water") to worst ("The Happening.") Purists might argue that his last film was less dreadful than his penultimate one, but the hallmarks were the same: stilted language, robotized acting, glacial pace, ponderous style, dramatic ineptitude and negligible energy. I never meant to make this review an exercise in career assassination, but I can't help thinking of all the lavishly talented filmmakers who have earned and never gotten a shot at big-budget success. What's the secret of this guy's failure?

Not great news

Per-Capita Emissions Rising in China

Carbon dioxide emissions per person in China reached the same level as those in France last year, the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency said Thursday.

The Dutch agency said that per capita emissions were 6.1 tons in China in 2009, up from only 2.2 tons in 1990. Among the French, emissions were 6 tons per person last year, said Jos Olivier, a senior scientist at the Dutch agency.

Per capita emissions in France tend to be lower than in some other industrialized countries because of the country’s heavy reliance on nuclear plants to generate electricity rather than fossil fuels. Per capita emissions in 15 nations of the European Union were 7.9 tons in 2009, down from 9.1 tons in 1990, the study said. In the United States, the figure was 17.2 tons in 2009, down from 19.5 tons in 1990.

Over all the Dutch agency found that global emissions of carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas, were unchanged last year. That came as a surprise: Because of the onset of the worst economic crisis in decades, other bodies like the International Energy Agency had predicted a significant decline in 2009, the report said.

But the hefty increase in emissions from fast-developing parts of the world like China and India had the effect of canceling out the sharp decline in emissions elsewhere. Emissions from China and India “completely nullified CO2 emission reductions in the industrialized world,” the report said.

Bye bye Mel

I never cared for his work anyway, but I think we can safely say that if these recordings are true, Mel Gibson will never likely “do lunch” in Hollywood again.  At least, not with anyone who matters.

Nice blog

Well, that's handy. I've added to the blogroll James' Empty Blog, which has the pretty unique feature of covering my interests in both climate change and life in Japan. (James Anann is a climate scientist living there, and lovely photos of the country - usually taken by his wife I think - are a frequent feature.)

There is also an interesting post on marriage in Japan, and how the ceremony has no legal significance at all.

One for me, please

This is a product that does address an actual problem which has bothered me many times: fitting all those different plugs and transformers in the one power board. I hope it is coming to Australia:

Holy digital fraud!

I have to admit to a certain admiration for the chutzpah of the mix of the religious and the scientific in this fraud from Korea:

A South Korean medical professor who invented a digital device he claimed could transform tap water into holy water is facing fraud charges, Seoul police say.

Authorities say the professor claimed to have digitally captured the supposed curative powers of holy water on devices he sold to more than 5,000 people for a total profit of nearly 1.7 billion won ($1.7 million)….

Police say the 53-year-old professor claimed he obtained holy water from the shrine to the Virgin Mary at Lourdes - a world-famous Catholic pilgrimage site in France - and preserved its supposed healing powers in digital form.

He claimed to be able to digitally transfer those powers onto ceramic and paper filters and plastic cards used in water purifiers.

He and his associates allegedly told customers that different devices cured different illnesses including diabetes and tumours.

The professor sold the ceramic filters, which cost 1,500 won ($1.50) in stores, for 40,000 won ($39).

 

Movie "meh"

I came home the other night to find my son watching Avatar on DVD. I watched 10 minutes or so of alien action, and came away not so impressed with their realism. They felt only marginally better than the completely computer created aliens of the last Star Wars trilogy, I thought. Yes, the faces had overcome some of the "uncanny valley" that fully digital humans still have, but the motion of entire bodies looked completely convincing only sometimes. I assume some of the figures were created by digitising film of actors running, jumping etc, and some not.

The sense of gravity acting completely realistically on digitally created bodies always seems to me to be the weakest point in these movies. They just don't seem to fall or jump in quite the right way.

And anyway, as I have written before, I am pretty much over any movie where the digitally created nature of certain scenes with hundreds or thousands of figures is inherently obvious.

So, maybe I'll devote more time to watching Avatar before I give it a verdict, but my initial reaction is a big "meh".

Nurse!

Greg Sheridan thinks this:

JULIA should have made Kevin foreign minister already.

Well, I hope some of the Tony Abbott mental health money has been earmarked for journalists who have completely lost touch with reality.

Paris by Griff, and memories best forgotten

Griff Rhys Jones' series "The Greatest Cities in the World" has done New York and London, and I thought they were a little dull. The material was a touch too familiar, and Griff mugs a touch too much for the camera.

But the third one on Paris was very enjoyable. You can still catch it on ABC iView.

There was one long section in which he goes exploring under the city in the catacombs created by quarrying, and it made me realise I must still be capable of claustrophobia.

I once had a moderate attack of it while on a tour of some caves near Canberra. One section involved a narrow corkscrew type staircase, where the head height was pretty low, and it was while in this tight corner that the line of people ahead of me stopped, presumably while some goose ahead was admiring a particularly nice stalactite or something. There were people backed up behind me too, and it was this feeling of being stuck and being unable to move forward or backward in a space so confined that I couldn't even stand straight that suddenly made me feel panicky. I don't think I said anything, or maybe I did ask the people ahead of me if they could keep moving, but my heartbeat definitely rose and it felt a like a sinking feeling in the stomach. The line did start to move again soon enough, and I was able to complete the tour, as the cave opened up again a short time later. But I really wanted to get out as quickly as I could without making a scene.

This all came as a bit of a surprise to me, and for a couple of years later I was a little worried that it might come again in some other context. Would a aircraft make me feel like I have to rush to the door to open it at 30,000 feet? I did get a little worried on a couple of flights, but maybe it was worry about what would happen if I did get the claustrophobic feeling, rather than claustrophobia itself. Fortunately, that passed pretty soon, and long haul flights have not worried me since.

It made me feel a bit disappointed that maybe I was never cut out to be an astronaut after all, as per my childhood daydreams. (All capsules prior to the shuttle were an incredibly tight squeeze, and claustrophobia is something for which the astronauts are still definitely tested *.)

Anyhow, years later I did visit the Jenolan Caves, which I had been to as a boy with no trouble. I took a couple of tours and was OK; as long as there is plenty of headroom, I can get through it.

But last night, watching Griff wriggle down a hole that was the link between two underground tunnels gave me an instant reminder of the sensation of claustrophobia. It's been a while since I have felt that, but I think some other shows about cave explorers have reignited the feeling too.

For the same reason, I don't like to imaginatively put myself in the position of those Beaconsfield miners who survived the mine collapse in such a small space. Not that you would ever find me seeking work as a miner underground, but re-visiting in your mind a claustrophobic feeling is almost certainly not a good way to hope to avoid the feeling in the real world again..

For those who have worse attacks of it than me, it must feel very bad indeed.

* One site talking about being an astronaut as a career writes:

Astronauts-in-training participate in scenarios that simulate weightlessness, heavy gravity (excessive G-forces) and navigate nature's call in an unbroachable interstellar suit. Intensive psychological screening, required of all applicants, is supposed to weed out those with claustrophobia, but one or two are discovered annually in the program and dismissed.

Another article, talking about civilians who may be taking flights into space, writes this:

Jeff Feige, CEO of Orbital Outfitters, a commercial spacesuit developer, said that the training they envision for the use of their suits will range from basic classroom familiarization to simulated pressurization of suit and emergency egress from the vehicle while wearing the suit. Something as simple as testing putting on the suit can be useful for identifying people who have claustrophobia, he said. “A lot of people don’t realize they’re claustrophobic until that helmet is locked and they’re told they can’t take if off. And then all of a sudden they realize they are feeling a little uncomfortable and this isn’t exactly what they had expected.”

Aggressive agnosticism

The rise of the new agnostics. - By Ron Rosenbaum - Slate Magazine

I really like this article in which Rosenbaum argues that the New Atheism is too much like the old Theism, and that it's time that agnosticism re-asserted itself as the true home of intellectual honesty.

All quite correct, in my opinion.

Don't tell the Japanese

Humpback survey indicates growing population

A recent humpback whale count indicates a recovery in the population of animals migrating along the mid-north coast of New South Wales.

In five hours last Saturday, 109 humpbacks were spotted off Tacking Point near Port Macquarie.

Sue Phillips from the local National Parks office says that is a 10 per cent increase on last year....

"Recent DNA testing has shown that after the whaling years it seems as if the humpback whale population in eastern Australia got down to around about 115 individuals," she said.

"Now we think it's back up over the 10,000 mark."

First the good news…

All very large asteroids at risk of hitting Earth should be identified fairly soon:

"In a few more years, we'll be able to say that there's nothing out there to cause a global catastrophe,” said David Morrison, director of the NASA Lunar Science Institute and senior scientist for Astrobiology at NASA's Ames Research Center.

Then the bad news:

“But, there'll be a million that will be big enough to wipe out an entire city. It'll take a long time, if ever, to find them and figure out their orbits. The bottom line is, we could be hit by one of those small ones at any time, with no warning at all. Right now, I can say almost nothing about the probability of one of those small objects hitting us, because we simply haven't found all of them."

The article also notes that some scientists still think a nuclear bomb would be the best way of dealing with a large, threatening, asteroid.

Sensitive region

A new temperature estimate going back a few million years comes up with this conclusion:

"Our findings indicate that CO₂ levels of approximately 400 parts per million are sufficient to produce mean annual temperatures in the High Arctic of approximately 0 degrees Celsius (32 degrees F)," Ballantyne said. "As temperatures approach 0 degrees Celsius, it becomes exceedingly difficult to maintain permanent sea and glacial ice in the Arctic. Thus current levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere of approximately 390 parts per million may be approaching a tipping point for irreversible ice-free conditions in the Arctic."

But they taste good

Someone has written a book about how introducing rainbow trout to its non-native rivers around the world has (allegedly) been an ecological disaster. 

I am not entirely convinced; they taste good, look nice, and don’t muddy the water.

Don’t do it Julia

Julia Gillard is undecided as to whether she will have a Twitter account.  Please don’t.

Rounding up the porn

This is just about the silliest thing I have heard a Christian lobby argue:

The pornography industry and the Christian conservative lobby have united in opposition to a proposal to create a new domain name catering specifically for pornography on the internet….

Australian Christian Lobby spokesman Lyle Shelton says the group opposes the new domain because it sees it as further legitimising the pornography industry.

"Anything which further mainstreams and legitimises the porn trade is obviously not a healthy thing for children," he said.

"It is not a healthy thing for the wider society because it just continues to take us down this path where profiting off naked young women continues to gather acceptance in our society and of course we are seeing the pornification of culture seeping into our everyday lives."

Further legitimising the porn industry! I would have thought having porn sites spread across all possible domains gives it an ease of access which should be much more of a concern for them than any alleged “legitimacy” rounding it up into one domain would create. In fact, the porn industry agrees with this lobby but for entirely the opposite reason: it doesn’t what an internet porn “ghetto” created, because people might be able to avoid it easier.

The porn industry also fears that conservative politicians, especially in the US, will seek to force all current porn into the new domain.

Well, I fail to see what the problem with that would be, apart from porn producers facing loss of revenue because it would make voluntarily filtering access to it much, much easier. In fact, now that I think of it, surely a lot of their revenue comes from people paying for access to the “quality” material, and how much of that goes on at work or in any place other than a guy’s house, late at night? In other words, maybe the feared loss of revenue is greatly exaggerated. And besides which, is there some reason I should be concerned that this industry might lose money?

I don’t see it should at all be a significant concern that different governments could have different standards for what they would want in .xxx. Surely it would be a major improvement even if only explicit sex was required to go there. I don’t see street protests going on about why XXX Adult bookshop material is not allowed into the front of the local newsagent. If a country tries to force too much into .xxx, its a matter for renewed debate about censorship and classification, and this is often a topic of some debate for movies and other material, for example. That it may become a debate in relation to internet content, big deal.

It’s not about preventing access to porn to any adult who wants it; its about making it much easier to prevent access to it in places it undoubted should not be, such as workplaces and the kid’s bedroom.

As for loss of value in existing .com porn address, whereby people could argue that they have lost an asset overnight, couldn’t that be partially addressed by having the .com name become a simple referral page to the new .xxx address for the same enterprise? Those who want to get to formerly .com material can still find it, just by one more click.

Unless there is some vital technical aspect to this I am missing, round it up, I say.

Clean energy blues

A few items of interest about clean energy:

* Technology Review has a pretty balanced report on the German experiment in boosting solar power generation by generous "feed in" tariffs for your domestic solar cells. On the one hand:

The German grid now gets more than 16 percent of its electricity from these sources, and the government has raised its target for 2020 from 20 percent to 30 percent. The country avoided pumping about 74 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2009. The German environment ministry also touts a side benefit: nearly 300,000 new jobs in clean power.

But on the other hand, some say:

..the German policy is a government boondoggle. "It's not surprising that if you throw enough money at a certain technology, people will use it," says Severin Borenstein, codirector of the Energy Institute at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Yes, the incentives triggered a frenzy of renewable-power installations, but at "very high prices," says Henry Lee, director of the Environment and Natural Resources Program at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. The spending on photovoltaics has been especially cost-inefficient in terms of producing power, Lee adds, because "Germany is the cloudiest country in Europe." Despite the weather, Germany now accounts for half the world's 20 gigawatts of installed solar capacity. "What that gets you," says Lee, "is high prices for electricity, locked in for 20 years, from technology that will be out of date within three years." Concludes ­Borenstein: "That's a failure of public policy."

I do find it particularly odd that cloudy old (northern) Europe is the part of the world really going for solar. I remain sceptical of the wisdom of the program, although I presume it would all make more sense in places like the top half of Australia.

* Technology Review also has a long article about Zhengrong Shi, the Chinese businessman (but Australian citizen) and his hopes for improved solar cell efficiency in the not so distant future. Still no real talk in the article about how you store the electricity once the sun goes down, though.

* The 7.30 Report featured a story about an Australian company which is going off to Europe to build its ceramic fuel cells. These seem very promising, yet are getting little support from the Australian government because they run on natural gas. This seems pretty silly to me, especially if these claims are true:

Ceramic Fuel Cells claims its Blue Gen unit is much more efficient than the current power grid where up to 80 per cent of the energy can be lost in transmission and it says the unit produces two thirds less carbon dioxide emissions than coal fired generators.

Interestingly, the Greens think fuel cells should get feed in tariffs, and Senator Nick Xenophon points out that if the government is going to not pay feed in tariff for energy from natural gas, why do they pay renewable energy money on heat pump hot water systems, which run on electricity from coal? Fair point, and it certainly seems true that no single party has all the answers to sensible clean energy policy in Australia.

I first mentioned this Australian company here 2 years ago. Seems that they are moving slowing towards large scale production.