Archive for the 'Geek Miscellany' Category

Liars, damned liars, and statistics. Apparently, several of the most “reliable” temperature recording surveys in the world indicate that the Earth’s average temperatures are actually showing a downward trend during the last decade. But the single most quoted source, NASA, says exactly the opposite. From an article on The Register…

How can scientists who report measurements of the earth’s temperature within one one-hundredth of a degree be unable to concur if the temperature is going up or down over a ten year period? Something appears to be inconsistent with the NASA data - but what is it?

One clue we can see is that NASA has been reworking recent temperatures upwards and older temperatures downwards - which creates a greater slope and the appearance of warming.

[From Is the earth getting warmer, or cooler? | The Register]

The report suggests that NASA has been “correcting” historical temperature records using some method known only to them. These corrections don’t agree with anyone else’s historical records, and result in a more convincing upward slope in temperatures over the last century than anyone else’s data. Interestingly, the man in charge of the NASA data is Dr. James Hansen: science advisor to Al Gore, and a luminary in the global warming advocacy movement.

There are a ton of interesting links and data in the article. What is the truth? Well, as I’ve said before, I think humans have had a major negative impact on the world’s environment and climate, and it is critically important to start doing something about it. But I also think we barely understand how the climate actually works, and if we are being fed rejiggered data by various supposedly authoritative bodies then the job of trying to figure out the reality becomes increasingly impossible.

There is a lot of evidence of misdirection and outright lying on both sides of the global warming discussion: enough to make me doubt where the truth actually lies. There are obvious (to me, at least) political agendas here. Unfortunately, scientists are human just like the rest of us: subject to arrogance, hubris, political scheming, power hunger, greed, and all the rest. Usually, scientists are, as a whole, capable of self-regulating- the nature of their work demands that they question the common truth. But when funding, careers, and public opinion can be pulled, terminated, and manipulated, it makes it hard for scientists to remain honest and neutral.

According to Dr Hansen, the climate tipping point will arrive within my own lifetime. By 2016, we will be past the point of no return. Nothing we do after that will save us: if we haven’t already radically reduced our CO2 footprint, it will all be over. I hope Dr. Hansen is wrong, I fear he is right: regardless, we have to make major changes to the way we live, or pay the price. Just how radical do those changes have to be? Are we really the singular cause of the problem, or are there other factors at work? What worries me here is that the facts are being manipulated, possibly by both sides of the debate, and perhaps by people and organizations we should have absolute trust in.

According to Jim Cicconi, “Vice president of legislative affairs” at AT&T, the whole Internet will be completely full by 2010. If you believe Jim, 20 typical households in 2010 will generate more traffic than the entire Internet today.

Sorry to have to break this to you, Jim, but you are either a complete ignoramus or you assume everyone you are talking to is. There is no credible evidence that anything this VP is saying has any truth to it whatsoever. Doing some simple math should make this incredibly clear: the aggregate bandwidth of the main U.S internet backbone is measured in terabits per second. There is no conceivable way that 20 U.S. households could consume even a noticeable fraction of that bandwidth. Even countries like Japan where “low bitrate” home connectivity means 20 Mbps have no problems managing the capacity of their Internet backbone. And there is absolutely no likelihood that anything approaching 20 Mbps to the home will become “standard” in the U.S. within the next decade, let alone the next three years.

So, why would this supposed senior executive, whose title implies to me that his primary skill is lobbying government officials to do AT&T’s bidding, say such incredibly inaccurate things? Simple- money.

AT&T and the other major communications network providers have built backbone networks that are pretty robust: home users aren’t going to impact that. No, the real problem is at the edge of the network. The mythical “last mile”, from the service provider’s backbone to the local concentrator and finally to your home. For the past two decades, network service providers have been massively over-committing the bandwidth at the edge of their network to home users: that is, they are selling the same bandwidth promise over and over and over again. The 4 Mbps you pay for, as an example, might share a common 10 Mbps link with 100 other people in your neighborhood who are also paying for 4 Mbps. This works out okay when no one is actually using what they paid for. But if more than two or three of those 100 people start using the network bandwidth they think they deserve, then the service providers have a problem.

Let me repeat my example for clarity: 100 people are paying for 4 Mbps of bandwidth. To increase profits, the service providers are pushing all 100 of those people through a single 10 Mbps link. That 10 Mbps link is overcommitted by approximately 40 times: if it were properly sized, it would be 400 Mbps to accommodate all of the capacity that the service provider had actually sold. Note that the websites and other Internet services home users connect to are *also* paying for connectivity to the Internet. Google, Apple, and Youtube spend millions of dollars a month of bandwidth each- but they get the bandwidth that they pay for, and that is written into their contracts. Not so for the home users.

To correct the massive overcommitment problem at the “last mile” to home users would cost tens of billions of dollars. The Telcos could afford the necessary upgrades, but that would cut into their profit margins for many quarters. For years they have been selling a pig in a poke: raking in profits based on the fact that they are selling something they can not conceivably deliver on the infrastructure they have deployed. Now more and more people are actually starting to use some significant portion (I.E.: more than 10%) of the bandwidth they have already paid for. And this causes a problem for the service provider’s business model.

Naturally, the service providers would like to make more profit, not less. So what they want to do is “shape” or throttle traffic, and charge both end users (I.E.: you) and service providers (I.E.: Google, Microsoft, Apple) extra to make sure you actually get the bandwidth you are already paying for. It is much, much cheaper to lobby the government to make sure they have the ability to get paid at least three times for every bit that gets pushed through their networks than it would be to actually upgrade the network appropriately.

What is at risk here isn’t the Internet. What is really at risk is the defective business model deployed by the major service providers themselves. They can’t see a way to keep on selling bandwidth the way they have (I.E.: massively overcommitting bandwidth to the home) without reducing their profits, so they are looking for legislative support to grant them a new way to charge extra for what people have already paid for.

When you hear about Network Neutrality, and you read about the big service providers like AT&T being against the concept… this is what it is all about. AT&T and their friends want the ability to charge you again for the bandwidth you have already paid for, all because they sold you a lie to begin with and can’t figure out now how to deliver what they promised without cutting into their profit margin. And since their initial lobbying efforts against Network Neutrality weren’t very well received, they are now starting to preach that the Internet is facing imminent collapse unless they are granted what they want.

Whenever I read about these tactics on the part of the big network providers, I can’t help but imagine a big, greasy mafia guy threatening some poor family in their home… “dats a nice movie you iz downloadin’ dere. Would be a shame if sumthin were to happin to dat movie, ya know what I mean? Bits could get lost, mabbe the connection drop: things like dat, they just happen, ya know? I cud look out fer dat, ya know, keep yer bandwidth safe. Fer a fee…”

I’m shocked and disappointed. Apparently, that Iron Man trailer I told you about some time ago is being made into a (are you sitting down?) a *movie*

Are they crazy? This is nuts- they’ll ruin it!
Sometimes The Onion really does manage to tickle my funnybone….

I came across this video on Gizmodo today and… well, there is something about automatic weapons, rockets, and cars instead of clay pigeons that just tickles my funny bone.

The video itself is from a British program called Top Gear. Apparently, this particular episode was a commentary on car recycling: looks like a fun show!

I spent a couple of hours this weekend trying to remember the name of a movie I vaguely recall watching many years ago. It was back in the ’80s, during the era of Conan and its imitators: the era of Sword and Sorcery movies. I recall the film being kind of fun: a first rate B movie, if that makes sense. Yet I couldn’t recall a title or, with any certainty, the details of the plot.

I remembered two scenes from the movie, and possibly a third one. I wasn’t sure if perhaps I was misremembering, and combining these scenes from several different movies together into some sort of frankenmemory. I recounted my vague recollections to my nephew Shane when we were talking about other movies, and to my friend Chris, who I recall was there when I saw this particular flick all those years ago.

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I came across this photo on Gizmodo and thought it was sufficiently odd to reference here:

Yes, apparently that is an iPod sitting on the dashboard of the Space Shuttle Endeavour. My friend Chris caught mention of the iPod earlier, but I thought the picture was interesting in its own right.

I clearly remember how I first got into Dungeons and Dragons. I was 15 years old at the time. My friend Tim was a member of Mensa, and told me that they had this thing called Dungeons and Dragons that they played. Since I was a big fan of Tolkein’s Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, Tim’s description of D&D sounded perfect. I wrote an IQ test and discovered I missed the grade by a couple of points: the fact that I wrote the test on the day I found out my Dad had died might have had an impact, but I also never really claimed to be a genius. But the desire to play D&D remained.

I bought my own Players Handbook (Advanced D&D 1st edition) and started a D&D group shortly thereafter. That’s how I met my life long best friend Chris, and role playing was the foundation for a ton of other improvements for me. I’d always been “bookish”, but had never really fit in with any particular group- D&D gave me a ready-made introduction to any number of like minded people. It also focused my creative interests, helped me become more social (I had to form that D&D group after all, and continue to find new members as the years passed by). Years later when I was still playing the game in my 30’s, I once joked that my original Players Handbook was older than some of the players in our group. Although I haven’t actively played for a few years, D&D was truly a life changing activity for me for at least 25 years of my life.

Gary Gygax, or “E. Gary Gygax” as his byline used to be on all the source materials, was sort of like the iconic “father” of the game. Yes, there were others arguably who contributed more to the mechanics, but Gary was the “face” of the game during it’s early years. He was also a bit… odd, and seemed like a magnet for equally odd people. His one-time-wife, for example, who ultimately stripped him of his place within TSR and removed his name from the game. In later years he was re-recognized by the new owners of the game, Wizards of the Coast (and later Hasbro), and was granted the chance to have his name associated with the game once again at conferences and in the occasional article that he wrote.

I never met Mr. Gygax. I don’t doubt that we would have had some things to talk about, but I’m also pretty sure that we wouldn’t have gotten along terribly well. That is beside the point, however: I owe a debt of gratitude to the man for his contributions to Dungeons and Dragons. A man who was responsible for a major part of my adolescent growth has died, and I shall miss him.

I vaguely recall hearing that an Iron Man movie was in the works, but more or less ignored it. I like superhero movies when they are done well: Batman Begins was done well, the first Spiderman was done well, but many (most?) such movies end up being more or less… bad. And I didn’t have a lot of hope for Iron Man.

I saw a trailer today that changes all of that. Check it out, then tell me that Iron Man doesn’t look cool.

May 2, 2008: will the movie be as good as the trailer? One can hope…

I am not really the “typical” Wired reader. For one thing, I’m far from “cool” or “hip”. I’ve got the “geek” thing down, though. Despite being outside the correct Wired reader demographic, I often enjoy reading the columns by Lore Sjöberg in Alt Text. His most recent one regarding the lies told to us by that ultimate deceiver, our own brain, is really a hoot. Check it out, and don’t turn your back on your brain!

I’ve been playing less and less of EQ2 during the past year or so. Other than logging in for our regular Saturday session with my Sister Judy and her husband Bryan, my Nephew Shane and his wife Monique, and of course my wife Irene, I really haven’t been playing at all.

I’ve been playing massively multiplayer RPGs for over a decade now: I have a collectors edition version of Ultima Online So I could easily chalk it up to just being “bored” or tired of such games in general, and that’s what I did. I even tried a couple of other games. Vanguard was one, but it didn’t appeal, and ultimately the game itself sort of “died out”. More recently I re-activated my World of Warcraft account- that was fun, but more importantly I started to figure out myself and my disinterest a bit more.

Then my Nephew called up and suggested I get out of that WoW crap and create a new character in EQ2- that might be just the thing. Once I started playing that “new” character (actually one I created a year or so ago- a Kerran Paladin), the final piece explaining my ennui fell into place. I’m back to playing a couple of hours several days each week in addition to our Saturday session. And I’ll likely cancel my WoW account again shortly.

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