It seems that astronomers and astrologers have in recent years started pronouncing the name of the planet Uranus as "you're a nus" instead of "your anus" as it was before. I believe this is the first time that the pronunciation of the name of a planet has changed for this reason.
Watch out because you're next, Mars ("m'arse").
Is my karma going to hell because I hang up on charities that phone me asking for money? I always feel a little bit bad for doing so (which happens about once a weekend), but I logically I know I really shouldn't. If everyone donated money to every charity that ever called them, then charity cold calling would just explode and everyone's phone would be continually ringing. The amount of money these charities received would probably increase at first but then fall back to normal levels as people found themselves having to donate smaller and smaller amounts per phone call.
On the other hand, if no-one ever donated money to charities that called them, the calls would soon stop, the people employed to make the phone calls would be able to put their energies towards more constructive uses (such as promoting that charity's cause in less invasive ways, or working more directly to help the people that the charity is trying to help) and I could go back to expecting to speak to family or friends whenever I heard the phone ring.
I figure the best thing to do with charity phone calls is just to hang up as quickly as possible (without even saying anything) after discovering that it's not somebody I know or some kind of emergency. That way I have used up as little of that charity's money/time as possible (not to mention my own valuable time). Doing this feels kind of rude but it really isn't - the call in itself is rude so the social contract of politeness has already been broken and there should be no expectation of politeness from me.
I'm not against the concept of charity altogether (I donate money through work so it gets taken out of my paycheck before the tax withholding, my employer matches my contribution and I don't have to remember what I donated when I come to file my taxes).
At work today, I had a security hole to investigate. Say what you like about Microsoft, but you have to admit that in recent years they have really turned things around on the front of taking security seriously. It was interesting to get to experience this from the inside today.
As it turned out, all the Microsoft Security Response Center wanted to know was if this bug (which is known to affect certain no-longer-supported parts of Visual Studio 6) also affected the later versions (Visual Studio .NET, Visual Studio .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005). Rather than just testing the exploit against these later versions, I insisted on debugging through the VS6 code to find the faulty code and then making sure that this code was fixed in the later versions.
It's quite a strange experience to be debugging through such old code (some of it at least a decade old) especially when I work every day on the code that is descended from it. It's kind of like going back in time and meeting your ancestors. There are some strangely familiar things there but it is very much code from another time. It's also much simpler with 10 years fewer layers of features and added special cases. I was surprised at how easy the bug was to track down.
It was also a relief that, when I found the right place, the bug was completely obvious to any (modern day) programmer looking at the routine in question. Rather than being some subtle and hard-to-spot side-effect of a rare interaction between unrelated parts, the faulty code was doing all the things you're not supposed to do, like allocating a fixed-length buffer on the stack and concatenating C-style strings without any size checks. Such code could never get into the product with the processes we have in place now.
Amazingly, the function with the fault still exists in the codebase today, though the buffer overrun was fixed a long time ago (sometime before November 2000, when the code was moved to the version control system we currently use). It's good to know that when issues like this come up we can track them down quickly even in ancient code, and that our processes work.
I always enjoy listening to Car Talk on the radio. I think it's wonderful that it is possible to have a show with such broad appeal on such a technical subject. I suspect that most people who actually know a lot about cars find it annoyingly simplistic and inaccurate but probably still enjoy the jokes.
I wonder if it would be possible to do a similarly broadly-appealing show about computers? I guess the closest thing I've seen was Call for help on the old TechTV but I think that was both too geeky (and not funny enough) to have broad appeal, and also too simplistic to be of interest to real geeks. Being on TV instead of the radio probably didn't help either - if you're watching a TV show it's much more difficult to do something else at the same time than if you're listening to the radio so you're only going to watch if you're particularly interested, not if you're just a casual computer user.
I think a car-talk-style show about computers would be great fun to do. It would include all the jokes, banter and puzzles that we enjoy on Car Talk, and also help normal, non-geeky people with their computer problems. Sure you'd get a lot of calls just consisting of "Help! My computer has spyware!" but the Car Talk guys get a lot of calls just consisting of "Help! My car is making a funny noise/smell!" and somehow they always manage to make it interesting so I'm sure it's possible.
Perhaps it is just an idea whose time has not yet come. Computers have only been widely available for about half as long as cars have. Perhaps in another 30 years or so computers will be enough like cars are now that such a show would be possible.
As a man, I am always a bit nervous about taking my car to the garage or going into a hardware store because I am expected to know about such things. I went into a hardware store last weekend and was afraid that they were going to ask me if there was anything they could help me with and then laugh at me if I said something like "I need some grease for my garage door" instead of something like "I need a type 2 metallic lubricant with a polarization ratio of less than 7 diflurges per snoof". Women, I am sure, generally do not have this problem as they are not expected to know about these things (though knowing about which sorts of shoes are currently in fashion sounds more difficult to me so I think I prefer being a man on the whole).
The problem is exacerbated because lots of bits of hardware have different names in this country. Who would have though that a rawl plug would be called a "wall anchor", for example? (Okay, in this particular case it would probably be more difficult for an American living in England).
Wasn't there a TV comedy sketch which had a salesperson in a hardware shop tried to narrow down exactly what type of flange his customer was looking for by asking lots of nonsense questions? (Did you want a screw type flange or a plain flange? How many legs?) I think it might have been a Two Ronnies sketch, but all I can find on the internet is the "four candles" sketch which (while hilarious) is not what I was thinking of.
Last weekend, one of my car's dashboard warning lights came on. I cursed slightly, because that usually means a fair bit of expense and inconvenience. This proved to be the case this time too - so far its cost $500, the car has been at the menders for 3 days and the light is still on.
One up side is that this has caused me to do some research on the parts of my car that went wrong, and they were two parts that I had no idea even existed.
One is the Exhaust Gas Recirculation Valve. This pumps a small amount of exhaust gas back into the cylinder towards the end of the ignition cycle to cool the reaction and inhibit the oxidation of nitrogen. I knew about NOx pollution from secondary school chemistry but didn't know this was how it was fixed in modern cars.
The other is the carbon canister, which adsorbs vapors from the fuel tank, preventing these vapors from leaking out into the environment while allowing the pressure in the tank to equalize with the external pressure.
Fascinating stuff.
My favourite of the Star Trek serieses has to be The Next Generation. The Original Series was groundbreaking for its time but I don't think it has aged well and now looks very silly and dated. The more recent series never quite recaptured the spirit and originality of TNG. There were some truly marvellous pieces of TV in that series, such as:
And, of course, there is the episode "Hide and Q" where Picard (surely one of the greatest characters in all of TV) defeats an immortial, omnipresent, omniscient alien by quoting Shakespeare at him! What could possibly be more awesome than that?
Here's an interesting little analogy I thought of the other day. In the theory of Speciai Relativity (SR) the result of any experiment is the same if the entire experiment is moving at constant speed in a constant direction, so there is really no way to tell if you are stopped or moving at a constant speed, so the concept of "absolute rest" is not really meaningful from a point of view of science (you can only be "not moving" with respect to something, like the planet Earth for example).
Somebody who believes in God is kind of like somebody who believes that they are at absolute rest. There is no way to prove or disprove that claim, scientifically speaking, but if it makes them happy and it isn't doing anybody any harm then there's nothing wrong in believing that.
The trouble comes, of course, when somebody else believes just as strongly in a completely different god, or when they are moving at 100 miles per hour towards the other believer and claiming that it is they, not the other guy, who is actually in a state of absolute rest. If the two believers are firm in their beliefs they may choose to disagree amicably as they pass each other, or if they are fundamentalists they may choose to blow the heads off the heretics and unbelievers. This is where religion (and unprovable beliefs in general) stop being harmless and start to become a real problem for society.
Perhaps that is the real answer to the "science verses religion" debate. Science deals in relative things, religion deals in absolutes. Science is perfectly compatible with any given religion but two different religions are fundamentally incompatible with each other. Hence there are plenty of Christian scientists and plenty of Islamic scientists but no Christian Islamists.
My philosophy is that one should believe what one likes, but should let others believe what they like as well and should not try to blow the heads off those who disagree with you. Don't try to push your absolutes on someone else who may have their own absolutes already. We can all agree as long we only speak in relative terms ("this guy is at rest relative to the Earth") rather than in absolute terms ("this guy is at absolute rest). Relatives are universal and absolutes are personal. Science is universal and religion is personal.
This post is about something that almost certainly doesn't exist and what it would be like if it did.
The things in question are Cosmic strings. These are not to be confused with the superstrings of string theory (which are generally sub-atomically tiny). Cosmic strings are very big things and you would know if you had one in your back yard.
If you have a bunch of objects (be they atoms or grains of sand or planets or black holes) and you put them in a row far out in deep space, gravity will eventually pull them all together. But suppose you had an infinite number of such objects and you were somehow able to put them into an infinitely long row. There is no way for gravity to pull them together because there is no center of gravity to pull them into - each object is pulled up by all the objects above it and equally down by all the objects below it.
Even so, tiny irregularities in the spacing of the objects in such a string would tend to cause them to condense out into increasingly large (and widely spaced) lumps like droplets of water on a dew-laden spider's web. But what if the string is perfectly homogeneous? Then there is no way for such irregularities to creep in and the structure is completely stable. This is something like what a cosmic string would be like.
It was thought (before a better explanation came along) that such strings could have formed very early on in the development of the universe (as "topological defects"). Such strings would be very dense - about the mass of Earth for each mile in length, but thinner than a proton. So they would be sort of like black holes stretched out along an infinite line instead of confined to a particular point. But despite all this mass, they would not cause a gravitational force. Instead, their effect on space-time would a bizarre and subtle one. Suppose you took a circular walk around a cosmic string, facing it all the time. When you got back to where you started you'd think you would have turned through 360 degrees, but due to its weird effect on the surrounding geometry, you would actually have found that you would have turned through slighty less than that. Circles only have about 350 degrees instead of the usual 360 when they encircle a cosmic string.
Cosmic strings could also be used as a time machine. If you were to have two parallel cosmic strings passing close to each other at very high speed and you move around and between them in just the right way you could theoretically go back in time. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), this isn't very practical for going back to last thursday week and warning your earlier self that it would probably be better for all concerned if he/she/you didn't get out of bed that day (one of the most common reasons for wanting to travel through time).