Monthly Archives: April 2019

Michael Le Page reports on the climate impact of all your computing devices for NewScientist (16 March 2019):

Our tech addiction is cooking the planet. The manufacture and use of smartphones, computers and TVs will produce 4 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and 8 per cent by 2025.

That is the conclusion of a report on the sustainability of the digital technology sector put together by 12 experts for a Paris-based think tank called The Shift Project, which says that energy use in this sector is increasing by 9 per cent every year.

In theory, digital technology could replace other activities that produce even more emissions. For instance, people might be using video conferencing instead of flying to meetings. But this isn’t happening, says Maxime Efoui-Hess, one of the authors of the report.

“The ‘good effects’ of digital technologies, in terms of energy consumption and associated greenhouse gas emissions, are constantly neutralised at global scale by the fact that we use these technologies without thinking about the right way to do it,” he says.

And if we fail to make excellent progress replacing fossil fuel power plants with ‘green’ power plants, however you wish to define ‘green’, then that raises the question of how to deal with these power hogs we have on our desk and in our pockets. Will we have rallies where we turn off all the computing devices for a day? A week? A month?

Or will we somehow enforce a ‘tasks suitable for computing’ regimen? No more computer filing, it’s all by hand? Back to Solitaire using real decks? A huge cached server to which you can make a request as to whether “something” has been computed, and get the immediate result back if true, otherwise you compute it and then contribute the result? That last one would present some interesting challenges in terms of problem specification and scalability, but for sufficiently difficult to compute problems, it might be useful.

And the impact on the public computing projects could be enormous. A choice between a better climate and more knowledge? Hard to make a pick. The servers that MUST be up 24 hours could continue to contribute, but everyone else, such as myself? It turns into an interesting question.

When it comes to North Carolina’s GOP, the charges are almost drearily to be expected:

Federal prosecutors have unsealed an indictment charging North Carolina State Republican Party Chairman Robin Hayes and three associates in an alleged bribery scheme involving campaign contributions to the state insurance commissioner.

Hayes, along with political and business figures Greg Lindberg, John Gray and John Palermo, made initial appearances in US District Court in Charlotte Tuesday.

“The indictment unsealed today outlines a brazen bribery scheme in which Greg Lindberg and his co-conspirators allegedly offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions in exchange for official action that would benefit Lindberg’s business interests,” said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski in a news release.

The March 18 indictment charges Hayes, Lindberg, Gray and Palermo with wire fraud as well as bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds and aiding and abetting. Hayes also has been charged with making false statements. …

The alleged scheme was to pay the commissioner of the North Carolina Department of Insurance at least $1.5 million in exchange for making staff changes, among other things, the court documents say. [CNN]

The little cesspool of North Carolina politics may have just had a filter put on it. I look forward to hearing how this turns out.

I keep wondering why I added my name to an email list AL Monitor uses to send mail concerning lobbying in Washington. Then I run across something like this from last Friday:

This newsletter reported last week that Saudi-owned alfalfa farm Fondomonte Arizona recently hired the Rose Law Group out of Scottsdale to lobby on “agriculture and employment issues.” Now the Guardian sheds new light on the issue with an in-depth look look into Saudi efforts to exploit loose water regulations in the drought-stricken American West to grow food for Saudi cows.

Which leads to this Guardian article:

Four hours east of Los Angeles, in a drought-stricken area of a drought-afflicted state, is a small town called Blythe where alfalfa is king. More than half of the town’s 94,000 acres are bushy blue-green fields growing the crop.

Massive industrial storehouses line the southern end of town, packed with thousands upon thousands of stacks of alfalfa bales ready to be fed to dairy cows – but not cows in California’s Central Valley or Montana’s rangelands.

Instead, the alfalfa will be fed to cows in Saudi Arabia.

The storehouses belong to Fondomonte Farms, a subsidiary of the Saudi Arabia-based company Almarai – one of the largest food production companies in the world. The company sells milk, powdered milk and packaged items such as croissants, strudels and cupcakes in supermarkets and corner stores throughout the Middle East and North Africa, and in specialty grocers throughout the US.

Each month, Fondomonte Farms loads the alfalfa on to hulking metal shipping containers destined to arrive 24 days later at a massive port stationed on the Red Sea, just outside King Abdullah City in Saudi Arabia.

The efficiency of the global transportation system continues to amaze me. More importantly, the ability of the Saudis to export the ruination of an ecological system, while not uncommon, is quite troubling, and speaks to the current position of royal agency the dollar has achieved in the American system – much to our unconscious (mostly) distress.

Much like The Day Of The Triffids (1962), the story Night Caller From Outer Space (1965) is an attempt by the British to infuse an essentially silly story with professional effort. Here we have a monstrous meteorite entering Earth’s atmosphere with neither an explosion or a crater left at its landing point, but just a small silicon-covered sphere. Found by the military in the company of a leading science team, they soon discover the sphere is actually a matter transceiver – but at the cost of the science team’s leader. Worse yet, the creature that comes through escapes the military compound with the matter transceiver in tow.

But it’s the connection to Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter, which is most puzzling. A number of young women in London and neighboring towns have gone missing, and somehow it’s connected to the creature – but how?

The police not accounting for the impossible, and a couple of bodies, and in the end, the creature escapes with the women. His goal? They will become the mothers of a new race of Ganymedeans, a race that is fatally damaged by their own hubris. As he leaves the horrified police behind, he shouts they needn’t worry about their safety.

Call it dark if you like.

This story has a few things going for it. The science, outside of the one incredible part allocated to it, doesn’t do too badly most of the time, although there’s a few head-shakers in the bunch. The lead female character is quite strong, and I liked her a lot – I wish she’d had more lines and scenes.

But the motivation of the Ganymedeans was more than a little difficult to take seriously. Perhaps if we’d spent a little more time with the creature, we’d have more empathy for the antagonist – but that would have shattered the tension the moviemakers are at pains to build.

In the end, this is not as good as The Day of the Triffids, and that’s too bad. It was a solid professional effort, undone by the script.

In NewScientist (16 March 2019, paywall), Donna Lu notes that our smartphone cameras have been enhanced so much that, well, they no longer record reality any longer, but replace it:

THE phrase “the camera never lies” has never been so wrong. Artificially intelligent smartphones are now editing pictures in real time to create images that can’t be produced by conventional cameras. These enhancements, known as computational photography, are changing the way we view the world.

The goal of digital photography was once to approximate what our eyes see. “All digital cameras, including ones on smartphones, have always had some sort of processing to modify contrast and colour balance,” says Neel Joshi, who works on computer vision at Microsoft Research.

Computational photography goes beyond this, automatically making skin smoother, colours richer and pictures less grainy. It can even turn night into day.

These photos may look better, but they raise concerns about authenticity and trust in an era of fakeable information. “The photos of the future will not be recorded, they’ll be computed,” says Ramesh Raskar at the MIT Media Lab.

The endangered activity that is not mentioned, I noticed, was citizen proctoring of police activities. After all, smartphones are the primary device for recording police misconduct by citizens. Is there anything to stop a policeman from arguing that the photography of his conduct cannot be introduced as evidence because it’s so easily modified?

Of course, this defense is less likely to work if there are more than one recording device employed, but it’s not hard to argue in this Age of the Network that the devices merely coordinated their modifications.

This will not be far in the future, I predict.

Arsenic and Old Lace (1962) is actually a play written by Joseph Kesselring, but we saw it in its movie form. This reminds me a little bit of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in that both are about the unsuspected, shocking secrets we keep from even our closest friends and family. Drama critic Mortimer Brewster’s surviving family consists of his delusional brother, Teddy, who believes he’s T. Roosevelt, currently President, occasional digger of canals, and someday to go on a famous safari in Africa (his sense of time is remarkable); his unmentionable and, well, loathed brother Jonathan, unseen for years since his eviction from the family home; and his spinster aunts, Martha and Abby Brewster.

He’s hoping to add a new member to the family in the form of Elaine Harper, asking her to marry him, and she is joyful to answer yes. But while hunting for some papers at his aunts’ boarding house, he discovers a body hidden in the windowseat, a discovery which doesn’t perturb his aunts, since, you see, they stored the body there after poisoning the poor man.

One might say Mortimer’s hair becomes a trifle undone at the revelation, but it nearly flies from his head when he learns that Teddy digging his “canals” means the digging of graves, and there’s eleven more, or is it twelve, down in the basement. (I feel a little as if I should be doing Dr. Seuss rhymes at this point.)

Distressing as this is, it’s merely a warmup, for it turns out that long-lost brother Jonathan may not be sentimentally missed, but neither is he lost. The aunts Mabel and Abby are distressed at his unexpected return and his desire to make their home his on a long-term basis, but they soon become absolutely furious. Why?

Well, his count of kills rivals their’s, for one thing. This is intolerable, now isn’t it?

The plot continues on, to Mortimer’s distress, as he tells his beloved that he cannot possibly marry her because of unnamed defects in his family. But as the police descend on them, albeit for a chip and a sandwich, who will end in the lead in their morbid little race, and where, geographically, in their midnight travels? And about that story-ending twist…

I thought this was a lot of fun, if not quite as agile and slick as The Importance of Being Earnest. The script had been slightly modified, I assume, for the presence of Boris Karloff, and the mods gave it a little bit of an extra kick. The only real problems are the production values, as there’s quite a bit of glare and occasionally the sound is a bit off. But if you like farce, this is not a bad one at all.

A reader sends in a link to some more climate change that seems a bit contradictory, published in Snow Brains:

A major glacier in Greenland that at one point was one the fastest shrinking ice and snow masses on Earth is growing again, a new NASA study reports and is covered by ABC.

In 2012 the Jakobshavn glacier was retreating about 1.8 miles and thinning nearly 130 feet every year. But that has reversed and in the past two years, it has started growing again at the same rate, according to a study in Monday’s Nature Geoscience. Study authors and outside scientists think this is temporary. …

There’s indeed a cold spot around Greenland – but it’s merely a day’s measurement, and isn’t measuring the ocean’s temperature. The scary part is all the red down around the equator. Sea Surface temp is more interesting in our case:

Again, a mere day’s measurement. But what I think is interesting is the connection to the North Pole. Could this be a result of the cold normally locked into the ice cap flowing down to Greenland, analogous to the recent breakdowns in the polar vortex? I hope to hear an answer to that unvoiced question some day.