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The Mutability of Immutable Decay

Aug 24th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

Boy, did this come out of left field: Something in the Sun alters the rates of radioactive decay of certain isotopes. Read that again, and slowly. You are in the presence of an exceedingly rare thing: experimental results that call into question something once thought to be about as settled as science gets.

To summarize for those in too much of a hurry this morning to click to the article: Scientists at Stanford and Purdue (hardly cranks or lightweights) have measured differences in the decay rates of certain short-lived radioisotopes. That’s boggling enough, given my own science education (granted, now 35+ years old) which indicated that decay rates were utterly immutable. But your boggler isn’t finished yet: The differences in decay rate appear to be synchronized to the period of rotation of the core of the Sun–33 days. So something the Sun is doing is influencing the timing of nuclear decay, way out here at just short of a hundred million miles’ distance.

Wow. Like, wow.

Because the core of the Sun is where solar neutrinos happen, the assumption is that neutrino flux is what does the job, as strange a notion as that is. Neutrinos are as close to nothing as things come without actually being nothing, and they can pass right through the core of the Earth without slowing down, much less hitting something two millimeters wide sitting on somebody’s lab bench. The effects are minute but measurable, and not an illusion. Somebody, somewhere (perhaps more than one somebody) is going to score a Nobel for this.

It’s too early to say much more, but I’ll put on my Scientific Wild-Assed Guesser’s Hat here and suggest that there’s another, more intriguing explanation: gravity waves generated by the rotation of the Sun’s considerable mass, particularly its core, where most of its mass lies. The rate of decay of radioisotopes might depend on the local curvature of space. If that curvature changes, as by a passing gravity wave, the rate may change. (Don’t ask for references here; I made it up on the spot and it’s nothing more than a wild speculation.)

The cool thing about this is that it might be testable, with patience and better instruments than we have right now. (Having a small black hole to play with would help a lot, but I won’t wait up for that.)

The Universe, my friends, is full of surprises!

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: ·

Daywander

Aug 21st, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

We’re at a dog show in rural Greeley, Colorado, a little north of Denver–and right smack dab next to a huge cattle feedlot. Now, I’m a caveman and a realist–manure is the price we pay for beef–but that stuff sure do stack up and make its presence known. We kennelled QBit and Aero to simplify show logistics, but it’s funny not having Aero with us at a show. He’s a champ now, and the spotlight has shifted to Dash, who at 15 months already has 11 points (of the required 15) and one major win (of the required 2) toward his own championship. Aero was always a shy dog, and fearful at the outset. This cost him points early on, but Dash has never had any such problems, and it’s (remotely) possible that he could score a big enough win this weekend to make him a champion while still technically a puppy. (He won’t reach his majority until 18 months.) Master groomer Jimi Henton will be helping Carol make him and Jack look their best, and we have high hopes.

I just finished a dozen Lucerne eggs and I’m still alive to write about it, so the big contaminated egg thing may not be as horrible as some are making it out to be. But half a billion eggs, sheesh–and that from one company. Am I going to give up eggs? Hardly. My sole gripe is that Lucerne’s are the only eggs I can find locally in Medium, and I’ve titrated myself to a pair of Medium eggs scrambled for breakfast as what best carries me until lunchtime without any energy lapses. So I may have to fall back to a single Extra Large until I can scare up a different brand of Medium eggs. And while eggs are on the table here, does anybody see size Small or Peewee eggs sold at retail? (As best I know, these are generally sold to food producers for cakes and such.)

I bought and have been tormenting a new-ish WYSIWYG EPub editor product called Jutoh, from the guy who gave us the free ECub editor. It’s available for Windows, Linux, and Mac, and I’m testing it under Windows and Ubuntu. My first impressions are generally good, though the product still has a couple of thin spots, foremost of which is an inability to import .DOC files. More on it once I have a chance to get a couple of projects through it.

It may sound odd, but I’m pleased that Jutoh is not free software. It’s only $22, which is trivial–I’ve spent more than that just having an indifferent lunch with Carol at Village Inn. I don’t want to see the category of inexpensive commercial software die out. For a long time it seemed that software was going to cost either zero or a thousand dollars, which would mean that few solo software geeks would attempt to field an innovative utility that would not sell for hundreds but might sell for tens. I bought Atlantis some time back for $45 and love it–it generates the best EPubs of anything I’ve tried so far. (Jutoh is still in the running, but the race has barely begun.) Free software can be superb but all too often evolves slowly, if at all. Zoundry Raven, on which I write this, hasn’t been updated since 2008…though I must balance this by citing the free ebook manager Calibre, which is updated every couple of weeks.

We have lost the Star Hustler. Jack Horkheimer has gone off to see what the stars look like from the other side, and as little as I saw of him (I’ve not watched much TV in the last 40 years) I will say that he did a spectacular job making observational astronomy compelling to ordinary people, especially young people–and as goofy as he seemed sometimes, he never made me want to kick his teeth in, as all too often happens with Bill Nye. Science should not be full of itself (nor, alas, full of something else, as is the case far too often) and Jack was not. Keep looking up…maybe you’ll spot the light of the Big Bang glinting off the top of his head.

Posted in: None Of The Above.
Tagged: · · · ·

Odd Lots

Aug 17th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · · · ·

Rant: Higgsism and the Moral Dimension of Health

Aug 16th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
12 comments

As most of you know (or can guess) I’m not content to accept received opinions about things like health insurance reform. I’ve been researching it and working it out for myself for a couple of years now. Most of the discussion online has been tribalist bullshit and not particularly useful, but I’ve managed to define a few things that make the whole issue of health insurance a lot harder to deal with than otherwise might be. What surprises me the most is that these issues almost never come up.

The first of these, in fact, I had to coin a name for: Higgsism, from the clueless protagonst of Samuel Butler’s wicked little gem, Erewhon. If you recall, while Higgs is jailed in Erewhon, he befriends his keeper’s daughter, Yram. Higgs watches, astonished, as people who fall into bad health are convicted of a criminal offense, yet people who have been caught embezzling are treated as though they were suffering from a headcold. When Higgs himself gets a headcold, Yram scolds him severely, and only at that point does he put two and two together. As poor Higgs puts it: “I never remember to have lost a cold so rapidly.”

It’s a great book; a sort of steampunk Gulliver’s Travels, and bears close reading. In a nutshell, what I call Higgsism is this: the belief that we have complete (or almost complete) control over our health, and that when we get sick, it’s because we have done something wrong, making illness our own damned fault. Just as the lucky prefer to ascribe their success to hard work, the healthy generally ascribe their health to pure clean livin’.

Alas, the more we look, the more evidence we see that health is more luck than skill. Matt Ridley’s 2004 book The Agile Gene describes the emergent nature of the human body, and how we’re at the mercy of not only our genes but also poorly understood environmental stressors of gene expression that come into play starting at the moment of conception. Beyond avoiding a handful of obvious hazards like smoking, recreational drugs, and promiscuity, there’s not a whole lot we can do. Eat moderately, walk a little, and get your sleep–but hell, if body weight is almost 80% heritable, health may be a steep climb indeed.

I’ve lived long enough to see a fair number of people die for no known reason. A healthy, trim, athletic nonsmoking man like Harry Helms with no family history of colon cancer dies of it. What did he do wrong? Carol’s late Aunt Berenice lived a modest life and never held a lit cigarette, yet she died of lung cancer. What did she do wrong? The truth is that they did nothing wrong at all. Yet these days, when somebody gets cancer, everybody starts thinking back to try and identify what the poor slob’s sin was.

The truth is grim: We control little of our own health, and what little we do control is often misunderstood (like carbohydrate metabolism) and not always universally applicable across the human species. (Milk is great for you–if you can digest it.)

The health insurance industry can only get away with medical underwriting because of the implied moral culpability of the unhealthy: If you’d just lived a cleaner, healthier life you wouldn’t have cancer or diabetes or ALS or whatever, so you’re a poor risk and deserve to go bankrupt and die. This widespread belief is why high-deductable catastrophic health insurance is unpopular: People see it as money going out of their pockets directly into the pockets of heedless reprobates who can’t or won’t adopt a healthy lifestyle, whateverthehell that is, while those who practice clean livin’ still have to pay for their own broken ankles and flu shots.

As long as we continue to believe that, we’ll be unwilling to face the truth: Health insurance is a sort of luck tax. The lucky pay the money while getting little back in terms of benefits. The unlucky get their lives saved through expensive treatments that they could never afford out-of-pocket. The moral dimension of health is almost entirely an illusion.

What’s the solution? I didn’t say I knew of one; in fact, I’ve often wondered if universal health insurance as we understand it is even possible. Yet even if it is possible, as long as we embrace Higgsism, I guarantee you we’re not going to get anywhere with it. You might as well give antibiotics to embezzlers.

There’s another part to this, which I’ll try to get to in coming days.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis, Rants.
Tagged: ·

Redeye-ing the Perseids

Aug 12th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Just a quick reminder: The Perseid meteor shower should peak tonight just before dawn, so if you can manage to haul outside between three and four ayem you are almost guaranteed to see some interplanetary grit hit the fan.

Look east, but pay attention to your peripheral vision, because the meteors can appear in any part of the sky. If your skies are good you might well see one every minute or so, and sometimes they come in bursts. And there’s always that long-shot hope of catching a bolide.

I’m about shot for tonight, but I will draw your attention to a previous entry I did on the Perseids, which are something of a tradition for Carol and me. (It also contains my now-legendary 13-line sonnet on the meteor shower, which demonstrates that I am neither poet nor mathematician.)

Take the Off! with you, especially if you live in Chicago. Trust me on that one.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged:

Fedora Anxiety

Aug 11th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
11 comments

JeffAndHatDehalftoned1992.jpgThis morning’s Wall Street Journal persuaded me that I am, for once, way ahead of the curve. The A-head story documents the Millennials’ puzzlement over hat etiquette: When should I wear them indoors? They are baffled. They are struggling. Deep within their sensitive souls, they are suffering.

Perhaps I can help: Listen up, people! Outdoors is for hats! Indoors is for heads! Sabe?

Deafening silence. So it goes.

My father wore a felt fedora to work every day, even when he had to change it out for a hard hat when he arrived at a job site to help clueless technicians figure out why an industrial gas main was delivering only half the methane that it was supposed to. A felt fedora was part of the company uniform, and he was unapologetically a company man.

The uniform changed in the first half of the 1960s, and the canonical felt fedora almost became extinct. The newly hip in the Sixties thought that hats smelled too much like the Fifties. Ewwwww, can’t have that. (This is the same reason that Unix fanatics in the First Age declared that Capital Letters Are For Engraving In Stone: Capital letters smelled too much like COBOL. Ewwwww, can’t have that.) My father reluctantly complied, reluctantly because he had only a little more hair than I do. It turned out all right because he was working in Chicago, where we saw the sun maybe once every three weeks in the winter.

Fast-forward to 1990: Jeff and Carol move to Arizona to launch PC Techniques. Down there it’s the other way around: We saw clouds maybe once every three weeks in the winter. And in the summer. (Except for two months’ worth of late summer monsoon, when we saw a few every afternoon. A few.) Jeff (who has less hair than his father, and almost none since the late 1980s) gets scorched a time or two, up top where your skin is so thin that you can feel bottom.

Jeff, doing what makes sense, buys a hat. I had one by late summer 1990, but it wasn’t until the April/May 1992 issue of the magazine that I appeared along with my hat. (See my editorial photo above.)

Oh, the humanity. Half the readership seemed to think I’d be better off wearing a dead skunk. The other half said nothing. Even the ever-so-always-polite-and-considerate George Ewing (peace be upon him, and is) wrote in a letter-of-comment: “I dunno about the hat.”

I stuck with it. Pace Woody Allen, my brain is my first favorite organ, and this was Arizona we were talking about. (Your brain doesn’t need drugs down there. No questions.) Over subsequent years I bought a lot more hats, and now a quick count shows eleven, plus a twelfth that I leave in Chicago just in case the sun ever comes out when I’m in town. True, a couple are special-purpose, like my Ben Franklin Kite-Flying Hat, and a formal felt business cowboy hat that I had custom-made by Ronald Reagan’s hatmaker in 2000, during which I had my idiosyncratic skull measured by a mechanical hat sizer machine built in 1910.

Wearing a hat was a contrarian act in 1992, so it was a good fit for me. And now in 2010, a fifty-year ice age in the hat industry has come to an end. Having tasted the sweet nectar of hattedness, the Millennials can’t bear to take them off for a second, perhaps fearing that another Ice Age is just around the corner. One is. Wearing your hat in the bathroom won’t help.

A hat is a roof over your brain. You only need one roof. When you step under one, take off the other. It’s that simple.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: · ·

Odd Lots

Aug 10th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments
  • My installation of Thunderbird 3 has correlated with a lot of weirdness, not only in system performance but in taskbar “stalls” in response to clicked links in messages. I’ve heard a lot of people having trouble with it as well, and we are apparently not in the minority.
  • How can I have lived the last ten years as an SF writer and never heard of John Titor, Time Traveler?
  • Stephen Hawking has told us that we must abandon Earth or die. Agreed. Now, Dr. Hawking, would you please invent us a hyperdrive already?
  • No, bichons are not groomed this way. (That’s for miniature poodles.) Thanks to Jim Strickland for the link.
  • Microsoft is working on a tablet prototype with keys on the back surface, opposite the display, so you can type with the fingers that you’re using to grip the device. (Thumbs remain on the front.) This looks better than it tells; do follow the link. Will it work? No opinion until I try it.
  • If anyone here has not yet been to thereifixedit.com, Go. There. Right. Now. (Via Make.)
  • Many people have sent me a link to this item from City Journal , which may indicate that some sense is finally creeping into the nutrition world. Sugar and grains may be killing you. Meat, eggs, dairy, and animal fat are probably not. I’ve known this from my research for a long time. Now, to get the government to admit that they’ve been slowly killing their citizens for over 30 years…
  • Not convinced? Fructose seems to be the preferred sugar of cancer cells.
  • Still not convinced? The inventor of Cheese Doodles just died at age 90. So much for salt and fat being deadly. (The food dyes worry me more than either.)
  • Pete Albrecht points out that LA coffee shops are beginning to unplug their Wi-Fi access points and plaster over all their wall outlets. They’ve found that people buy more coffee and snacks when they actually talk to one another. No shirt, Sherlock!
  • Formufit: PVC pipe fittings for when you’re not using PVC pipe for plumbing. Fine stuff!
  • I think that what we’ll miss most about our deathwish-afflicted newspapers are all the silly headlines.
  • And anyone who has ever scratched his or her head over that famous if gappy Latin expression “Et in Arcadia ego” should look at the variations here. (I find myself thinking of a paraphrase of another classic expression from junk mail: “You may already be in Arcadia!”)
  • Heh. As long as Carol’s beside me, I am.

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · · · · ·

Insight Is Gone From Ubuntu…

Aug 9th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
73 comments

…and in fact from everything else based on Debian. Not six months after I saw Assembly Language Step By Step, Third Edition hit the shelves, the Debian team decided to pull the Insight debugger package from their seminal Linux distribution, on which Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Mint, and several others are based. Come Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx at the end of this past April, and suddenly people reading my book can’t work through the examples, because the software that I used in those examples (for single-stepping and examining registers and memory) is no longer available for their version of the OS.

This isn’t new news, and I’ve been trying to figure out how to finesse the problem ever since I heard about it mid-May. I got a number of queries this past week, suggesting that I had better get on it. (This is why you haven’t seen much from me in recent days.) Assuming at first that Insight had been dropped just to keep the distro CD-size, I tried to install it under Lucid from Software Center (not found), next a deb package, and finally from source, but nothing worked quite right. As the months have passed and more and more people are installing Lucid, I’m getting more and more mail about this. It’s a serious problem: A lot of the skill of assembly programming lies in debugging at the instruction level, and much of the tutorial depends on being able to run a debugger. Insight was that debugger. It’s GUI-based, rather than purely textual, and I think it’s a great deal easier to grasp, especially for newcomers.

So why didn’t I just use gdb?

Um…I did. Or at least I thought I did. Insight is an odd case. Most people assume (as I did) that it works the same way that Nemiver, KDbg, and DDD work, as independent front ends for gdb, passing textual commands to gdb and getting textual data back for display. Not so: Insight is gdb, and therein lies (in my opinion) most of the problem. What Insight’s originators did was take the gdb source code and add a built-in GUI, using Tcl/Tk. In effect, they forked gdb and produced a new custom version that contains all of gdb (at least gdb as of 2007) plus a windowing visual wrapper.

That in itself is unorthodox but not necessarily damaging, though forking something as fundamental as gdb should not be done lightly. Still, if you do it, you have to do it well, and I’m seeing indications that Insight isn’t nearly as clean a product as it should be. The Debian team spoke tersely; see the bug report and resolution here: “RoQA; insane packaging; unmaintained; low popcon.” (Yes, I read “popcorn” at first too.) More details may be found here. (Warning! DDG: Deep Debian Geekery.)

Quick translation:

  • RoQA means “Request of Quality Assurance”; basically, Debian’s QA team decided that the package was too broken to keep in the Debian distribution and requested that it be removed.
  • Two release candidate (RC) bugs were reported by the Debian team to Insight’s maintainer, but no one there responded. This is odd, because the maintainer is none other than Red Hat.
  • An NMU is a non-maintainer upload, which is when a package is sent to the distro team by someone other than the package maintainer of record. It is often a sign that the maintainer has abandoned the package, especially if the maintainer never acknowledges the third-party fix.
  • “Low popcon” is a reference to Debian’s unique “popularity contest” system for gaging how much individual distro packages are being used. Insight got 36 votes, which, in browsing the rest of the stats, seems low but not fatally low.

The real problem is that “insane packaging” issue. Insight contains embedded copies of software that is maintained by others and would be better linked in as libraries. The embedded bits “age” with respect to the current release of the OS and its libraries, eventually getting out of sync to the point that the package will not understand the current system well enough to function correctly. Tcl and Tk are either part of or easily installable to any Linux distro there is; you do not have to cut’n’paste them into your program source. With old software copied into its sources the package may build correctly, but might not necessarily run.

That said, the right way to approach the problem may be no more complex than taking the most recent release of Insight and making a proper Debian package out of it. The version I used last year in Karmic Koala goes back to 2007, and that’s the version pulled from Debian. The July 2009 release may be better. I’ve read enough on building Debian packages to know that I’m not the guy to do it, but I hope that somebody with better Debian chops will eventually try it, so that we can tell if Insight was just wounded, or if it’s really and quite sincerely dead.

In the meantime, the best fix appears to be falling back to Ubuntu 9.10. More here as I learn it.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged: · · ·

Odd Lots

Aug 3rd, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments
  • Please read this short article by Mark Shuttleworth. I’ve been saying this for years, but he’s a lot more famous than I am: Tribalism makes you stupid. It also means that you are owned, and are not a free man or woman.
  • The Insight debugger front end for gdb has been removed from all Debian-based Linux distributions, and is not present in Ubuntu 10.4. The Debian package for Insight has been criticized as “insane” and unmaintained, and I’m curious: Has anyone here used it in recent releases of Fedora or OpenSuse?
  • Autodesk founder John Walker has an interesting free Web toy for Greasemonkey, which attempts to spot “media trigger words” and alert you when weaselspeak is being attempted. (Thanks to Jason Kaczor for the tipoff.)
  • Oh, no! It’s the Pluto Effect for dinosaurs! Triceratops is actually an immature Torosaurus!
  • Man, turn your head for ten minutes and there’s a whole new kind of punk out there. But this one I may actually like: Dieselpunk. Think Art Deco urban fantasy, with the cultural clock set at 1920-1945. This might include the first Indiana Jones movie, and certainly one of my personal favorites, The Rocketeer. Lessee, we still need Musketpunk, for gritty urban fantasy in 1780 Philadelphia. Ben Franklin with tattoos. Could work, no?
  • Don’t be drinkin’ Diet Mountain Dew while reading this site. Trust me.
  • There is an entire news site devoted to good news. Perky people like me and Flo read it every day now.
  • Sheesh. What’s wrong with “Hi! Is this seat taken?” (Wait, no, that was the 70s. And purely analog.)
  • I don’t think I posted a link to this back in April, but I should have. There’s a rectangle of this identical cloth hanging on my workshop wall as framed art. Pray without ceasing, even when you’re soldering up a regenerative receiver.

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · · · ·

Classmates: Hacked, or Poor Proctoring?

Jul 31st, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Quick update: Either Classmates.com was hacked, or nobody over there is paying the least attention to user activity. Textual obscenities and dirty pitchers abound; those with strong stomachs may see it for the time being here.

I’m divided as to whether I should alert them to it. There are 17,000 Lane alumni in the system online, and I can’t imagine that at least one of them hasn’t complained about it yet. (Lane is a big school, and has been around for a very long time.)

I’m definitely watching it, and am still interested in reports from people (especially from other schools) who have gotten forged emails from Classmates lately, containing obscenities or not.

Posted in: Daybook.
Tagged:

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