Rohan's Rants

Global warming, part 3

2007-04-06T22:55:00.000-05:00

There continues to be a widespread impression, perpetuated by miscreants like Al Gore, that “all the scientists” believe we’re suffering from global warming caused by human-generated greenhouse gases.

Apparently famous physicist Freeman Dyson is not one of the “all”. Read this article by Lawrence Solomon of the Urban Renaissance Institute. (For some of the source material, you can read the text of Dyson’s 2005 commencement address at the University of Michigan.)

And Michael Crichton, author of The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, gave a lecture at Caltech in 2003 in which he reminded the audience how “nuclear winter” was once going to destroy us all (are you old enough to remember that?). Until, among other things, Carl Sagan’s 1991 prediction of a nuclear winter effect resulting from Kuwaiti oil fires (caused by the Gulf War) failed to materialize. (Sagan may have passed away, but I’m still mad at him for putting onto the Voyager space probe a handy map showing any extraterrestrial beings who run across it exactly how to find us. Sagan was one of those people who believed that any extraterrestrials will “of course” be nice to us, e.g. not regard us as food even though we ourselves regard lots of animals as food. He was also once famous for his fondness for the phrase “billions and billions”, but somehow he didn’t care about the opinions of the other billions and billions of people whose location he was exposing.) I highly recommend reading the text of Crichton's lecture as it addresses the general question of non-science masquerading as science.

Thank heavens that a few scientists still believe in science.

Global warming, part 2

2007-03-24T16:36:00.000-05:00

Most of the talk about global warming comes from politicians, not from scientists who actually know something about the subject. (Perhaps they’re afraid that people will learn that the real cause of global warming is “hot air”.) Apparently those scientists who do know something can be actively locked out by the politicians. See the article Bitten by the IPCC by Lawrence Solomon, which appeared in yesterday’s National Post.

Too much knowledge can be a bad thing

2007-03-24T14:51:00.000-05:00

This isn’t a rant, but an account of something amusing that just happened to me.

While my computer was busy preparing a backup I was playing the game Text Twist (Palm OS version), where you are given 6 letters (e.g. USECED) and have to find words of 3 or more letters that can be formed from those 6 letters (e.g. USE, SEE, CEDE, CEDES, etc.). The more words you find, the more points you get. The critical thing is to find at least one 6-letter word (there’s guaranteed to be one), or you are tossed out of the game. (In the case of USECED, there are two such words, DEUCES and SEDUCE. But usually there’s only one word.) For assistance you can click “Twist”, which randomly reorders the letters.

This round I was presented with the letters EINSUX. It didn’t take me long to find UNIXES, a familiar name from my computer background, but not a valid word in Text Twist’s dictionary. Then I found USENIX; same problem. I couldn’t find anything other than those two before the clock ran out on me, and I wonder whether they blinded me from finding the valid word that was there. Which was UNISEX.

Billing vs. marketing vs. me

2007-03-23T15:51:00.000-05:00

I was just about to pay my Rogers Cable TV bill when I noticed something amiss: the Digital Terminal and Digital Services fees added up to $7.48 (they were $4.49 and $2.99 respectively), but my “VIP Discount” was only $6.98. This bothered me because in the past my VIP Discount exactly cancelled out those two fees.

I called Rogers customer service, who did a pretty good job with my call: the first-tier agent gave me enough information to convince me that my total was correct and only the breakdown was wrong, but because I still was unhappy she passed me on to someone in the “management office” who explained the whole story. Apparently Marketing had decided to raise the digital terminal rental by 50 cents for everyone, so that non-VIP customers would pay $4.49 instead of $3.99 while VIP customers would pay 50 cents instead of zero.

I objected that the bill explicitly stated that my VIP Cable package included a free digital terminal: “Your VIP Cable package includes ... first digital terminal (from $4.49), Digital Services Fee, ...”. Guess what: it does, if you look at it just the right way. This price change was made at the same time as another price increase, that of VIP Cable. VIP Cable programming went up by $2.50 and digital terminal by $0.50, for a total increase of $3. (If I didn’t have a digital terminal I’d save 50 cents a month. Plus tax.) But if you look at it another way, the increase was $3, which includes a 50-cent credit toward the higher digital terminal fee. Multiple answers with no official contradictions: these people should start a religion.

If you haven’t followed all this, that’s ok: the point is that the total is correct but the breakdown is misleading. (What they really need is to tell their billing system that there are now two VIP Cable programming products, one analog and one digital, with slightly different prices. But perhaps their billing system can’t handle it.) I suggested to the “management office” person that he pass this complaint on so that clarifying the bill could be looked into. He obviously didn't want to so I badgered him and he said that he would run it by his management, but I’m not holding my breath. He knows, as I know, that hardly anybody actually reads their bills and insists on understanding them. But as I pointed out to him, most people who think something may be wrong won’t call Rogers; they’ll just hate Rogers, unfairly in this case.

Global warming

2007-03-03T12:50:00.000-05:00

The Earth’s certainly been warmer than usual lately, enough so that I believe all the worry about consequences to be entirely justified. But it’s not at all clear to me that the global warming is caused by human activities. Yes, there are such things as greenhouse gases and we’ve been generating them, but there are lots of forces that affect climate, and I’m concerned that we’re just picking one to the exclusion of all others.

We humans unfortunately like to do that kind of thing, because it lets us believe that we can control things more than we actually can. For instance, when Ronald Reagan ran for U.S. president, he seized on the doctrine of supply-side economics because it would allow him to cut taxes, reduce the deficit, and increase spending — simultaneously. It didn’t work. The economic forces quoted by supply-siders do exist, but so do others.

If we want to put the brakes on global warming it is crucial that we understand what’s causing it. If we assume that the problem is greenhouse gases and we’re wrong, we may expend enormous efforts to reduce greenhouse gases only to have global warming gallop on unchecked — while we avoid dealing with the consequences because we believe we’re solving the problem at the source.

Some people have remarked that it’s not just the Earth that’s experiencing global warming, that other planets in our solar system that have atmospheres are experiencing the same thing. If that’s accurate, then global warming is almost certainly caused by conditions external to the Earth. For one person’s writing on this, with links to various sources, see this. I can’t vouch for any of it, but then nobody should vouch for the simplistic assumption that global warming is being caused by human-generated greenhouse gases. Climate is a very complex thing, just like economics, but certain people, like politicians (not just the publicly elected ones, but also those who maneuver their way into heading up non-governmental organizations), find it convenient to pretend that they have all the answers. Reaganomics didn’t work, and now one of the loudest voices in the greenhouse-gases-are-evil establishment is someone else who’s had a run at the U.S. presidency, Al Gore. Mr. Gore likes to act as though he’s a scientist, but he’s no more a scientist than Mr. Reagan was an economist, and he falsely claims that all the scientists agree on what’s behind global warming.

The US media

2007-02-14T12:38:00.000-05:00

When the USA and its allies invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, I watched CNN for a few hours. CNN spent much of its time showing how US forces were being humanitarian above all, dropping ration kits to fleeing refugees. Lots of airtime was devoted to showing how these kits were being dropped at low altitudes in such a way that they would land safely without needing parachutes. 37,000 kits were being dropped, an impressive-sounding number. (I’m glad I remembered the number correctly: a Google search for "afghanistan ration 37,000" found this U.S. Defense Department press release confirming details of the ration program.)

Well, the number 37,000 was meant to be impressive. It was mentioned that one kit would feed one refugee for one day. CNN was also saying that there were at least a million refugees. Am I the only person who can do arithmetic? One million refugees (minimum), trekking for multiple days, would need millions of meals. Of course they had brought some food themselves, but compared to a requirement of millions, 37,000 is almost nothing; it’s in the neighbourhood of one percent. Yet CNN, toady of the Bush administration that it is, was trumpeting it as an important indicator of how much the USA cared about the people whose country it was invading.

The uniformity of the US media has become much more complete since the days of the Cold War. During the 1990s, the US government permitted an unconscionable concentration of print and broadcast media that terminated the independence of the media. Today the US media is owned by 5 giant companies in which pro-Zionist Jews have disproportionate influence. More importantly, the values of the conglomerates reside in the broadcast licenses, which are granted by the government, and the corporations are run by corporate executives—not by journalists—whose eyes are on advertising revenues and the avoidance of controversy that might produce boycotts or upset advertisers and subscribers. Americans who rely on the totally corrupt corporate media have no idea what is happening anywhere on earth, much less at home.

—Paul Craig Roberts, columnist and formerly U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury

This may not be my Web 2.0 blog, but Web 2.0 is what gives me hope. In future Americans will get less of their news from giant corporations and more from smaller entities that have fewer sacred cows. They may end up going backward, in a good way. The American Revolution was partly inspired by a pamphlet called Common Sense. It was written and published by just one person, Thomas Paine, yet was very widely read, with hundreds of thousands of copies printed, a massive number for that time and place.

Since the age of 14 I have looked to the USA as my inspiration for freedom for all the people of the world. Lately, not so much — but Americans, I have not given up on you. The centre of the Web 2.0 revolution is in the USA.

"Best Global Airport" - to whom?

2007-02-02T19:15:00.000-05:00

On Tuesday, the Globe and Mail newspaper included an advertising supplement, oh, excuse me, “a special information supplement”, promoting Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. A collection of self-laudatory “articles” is supported by ads from companies that had little choice but to say yes when approached by the Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA), since the GTAA is their only possible customer in the airport business in Toronto, and not a good idea to alienate.

The supplement is clearly not intended to drive revenues or reduce costs, so self-congratulation appears to be the only goal.

Apparently the Institute of Transport Management named Pearson the Best Global Airport in 2006. Unfortunately this award came from an industry organization concerned with management, not from, say, an organization representing passengers.

I am occasionally one of those passengers, and I can tell you that the newest and greatest terminal, Terminal 1, is in some crucial ways much worse than its predecessors. It may be “reconfigurable” and have other qualities that delight the airport management, but I curse the GTAA every time I go through it.

The trouble starts right after I park my car in the parking building attached to the terminal. I have no idea where the terminal is, so my only clue as where to park in order to be reasonably close to the terminal is to go to the popular areas (the veterans having figured out over time where to go). Oh, and on some levels, like the one that you drive right into when you arrive, there are barricades in place to prevent you from getting close. How friendly. Other levels are better, but of course I had to learn that through experience without any help from the GTAA.

Once parked, there is the interesting question of how to walk to the terminal, since I may have no idea in which direction it is. Signs exist only once I’m close enough that I don’t need them any more. How about a big green flashing light suspended from the ceiling, visible from a fair distance?

Once I’ve arrived where there are corridors and elevators and stairs, I have no idea what to do. What I’ve since learned is that I have to go to a different level in order to access a bridge to the terminal building. Again, it would be nice if there were signs!

OK, so I’m at the elevator. But do I press the Up button or the Down button? No idea! I have to guess and press (say) Down. After I’m in the elevator I see that the floor marked Terminal is actually Up. Only if I’m lucky and there are no other passengers going down, and the elevator isn’t on its way down to pick up someone else, can I change the elevator’s direction at this point.

In case you think that I just have trouble finding my way around (which I generally don’t), let me illustrate that it’s not just me. On my last visit to the parking lot I had to flounder around with two fellow travellers, one of whom was married to a pilot and was a frequent visitor. I felt bad the one time I led our group in the wrong direction, but not so bad when the pilot’s wife later did the same thing.

Upon arrival in the terminal building (what a relief!) I take the escalator to Departures. But which one? — there’s one going off to the left and one to the right. I know now that it’s always the one to the right, at least for domestic departures (the international area having opened only three days ago), but it would have been nice if the signs said so. The first time I made the wrong choice and had to walk a lot further quite unnecessarily.

I suppose it wasn’t that much further; it just seemed that way. This is because one has to walk an awful lot more in this new and “improved” terminal. I’m surprised that the advertising supplement doesn’t include an article extolling the health benefits of light exercise.

So who cares about the passengers? Not the GTAA. It’s too busy pleasing itself and its fellow airport operators. Aren’t monopolies wonderful?

Blogger and control+S

2007-01-29T12:51:00.000-05:00

My previous post, Right-wing means for left-wing ends, wasn’t really a rant, though I suppose I could have written it in a more ranting style. However, while I was composing it something rant-worthy happened.

When I’m composing email messages, Microsoft Word documents, and other things, I frequently press control+S to save my work, so that if the application or the operating system crashes I won’t lose it. I expect I’m far from alone in doing that. But Blogger, the system I’ve been using to publish my blogs, takes control+S to mean “publish now”. So the post got published before I was finished, and I scrambled to finish it before anyone read it, in the meantime adding a note at the top to please come back later.

Unfortunate design decision. I wish they’d add an option to disable this “feature”.

Right-wing means for left-wing ends

2007-01-29T09:37:00.000-05:00

That’s my philosophy: right-wing means for left-wing ends. I’ve never seen or heard anyone else use this phrase, so let me explain what I mean by it.

I like “social justice”, “sustainability”, and similar lefty things. But I stopped being a socialist at the age of 14, when I realized that not only does socialism not work but it’s also anti-freedom.

Socialism being just “communism lite”, let me start with the communist ideal as wonderfully expressed by Karl Marx: “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. To me this sounds great. But not enough people voluntarily use their abilities for the benefit of those other than themselves and their families, and many people try to get more than others would say they really need.

Those problems are addressed by communist and socialist governments by forcing people to do what they won’t do by themselves: redistribute income via taxes and income supports, and maintain price controls at least on essentials such as housing, all backed up by penalties for noncompliance that include prison terms. And resources are allocated through varying degrees of central planning.

Governments never do a good job of such things. Greedy individuals always exist, and often come up with innovative ways of getting around the existing laws and regulations. Governments spend a lot of time catching up with them, creating more and more laws that require bigger and bigger bureaucracies that work less and less effectively. And speaking of innovation, anything new requires that the government figure out how to deal with it, and then put controls in place. As for central planning, bureaucrats can’t make good decisions ahead of time for things that can only be effectively decided at the time and place of the activity (I hope that neither my wife nor I ever needs a type of medical treatment that was underplanned by the healthcare czars in Ontario, Canada, where we live). The ideal system ends up being an inefficient mess. (I hear the objection now: Everyone may be poor, but at least they’re equally poor! Or, Nobody may be rich, but at least nobody’s richer than anyone else!)

Now that communism is almost entirely gone and socialism is also in decline, can we still achieve worthy lefty goals? I believe that the answer is to work with human nature, not against it. My leader in this is a network of related organizations based here in Toronto. In 1970, an energy team was formed at Pollution Probe, a prominent anti-pollution organization, and in 1980 the team left over a difference in philosophy and created its own organization, Energy Probe. Since then additional organizations have been formed to focus on non-energy areas as well, all under the umbrella of the Energy Probe Research Foundation (EPRF). Although the EPRF isn’t well known outside policy circles, its directors have included such notables as urban thought-leader Jane Jacobs, Canadian science and nature icon David Suzuki, and George Ignatieff, currently deputy leader of the Canadian Liberal Party. From one of those organizations’ web pages:

Environment Probe is a division of Energy Probe Research Foundation, one of Canada’s leading environmental and public policy research institutes. Established in 1980, the foundation is often viewed as a maverick, taking positions that are sometimes out of step with other citizens’ groups. The foundation has always championed market mechanisms and sound, democratic processes to protect consumers and the environment.

One 1995 book title nicely illustrates the philosophy: Elizabeth Brubaker’s Property Rights in the Defence of Nature. (It’s available online at no charge. You may notice my name on the list of “sponsors”.) The argument is that if property rights are properly respected, pollution of other people’s property will be prohibited, thus greatly discouraging pollution: what the government fails to enforce, landowners can enforce through the threat and practice of lawsuits. Unfortunately, in the name of “progress”, and in the service of friends in big business, industrial pollution and other environmental damage has been tolerated and even explicitly permitted through legislation.

Clearly we cannot rely on governments to consistently protect our environment or work for the benefit of consumers. Market forces, on the other hand, are remarkably effective, because they align with individual incentive instead of trying to fight it.

It’s not just the environment. It’s healthcare, it’s public transit, it’s access to decent housing, ... it’s all those things that good lefties care about! Right-wing means for left-wing ends.

For more on this I’m going to direct you to something that is short yet packed with significance: the EPRF’s 10 principles that guide us. If you’ve read this far, it won’t take much more time.

Peak Oil

2007-01-27T14:44:00.000-05:00

A reference I just saw to “Peak Oil” reminded me that this subject is well worth a rant.

“Peak Oil” is a term that refers to the peaking, and subsequent decline, of oil production as existing reserves get drawn down. But what it refers to, and the way it tends to be used these days, are two different things. Scaremongers use it to mean that “we’re running out of oil”.

Doomsayers rarely bother with simple economics. If the world’s oil reserves decline, it will take quite a few decades for them to actually run out. And during that period the price goes up, which causes two things to happen:

Oil users now have an incentive to look at alternate energy sources where practical, such as electricity generated from various non-oil sources. Often oil is used rather than something else simply because it’s the cheapest choice. And when some people switch away from oil, that reduces the problem for those who remain.
There is now an incentive to tap sources of oil that were not previously counted in the reserves because they were too expensive to exploit. For instance, the Alberta oil sands used to be uneconomic because it cost more to obtain a barrel of oil than the barrel was worth at then-current prices. Now that prices are higher, those oil sands have become a major source of oil, about 1 million barrels a day in fact. Canada is a significant world supplier of oil, and the oil sands now provide about 40 percent of Canada’s production of crude oil and equivalent. And they contain trillions (with a “t”) of barrels of oil. There are also oil sands in Venezuela, and there are other alternative sources as well, such as shale oil in the USA.

The net result is that oil costs go up in a manageable way, not that the world ends.

Quaker Oatmeal packets

2007-01-26T22:57:00.000-05:00

First, I need to rant about how Firefox crashed while I was writing this (it was trying to download and open a PDF that contained reference material for this post), and then how Blogger’s “Recover post” feature failed to recover anything. Oh, wait, the 3-word title was preserved! Lucky me. Hey, Googlemeisters, are you aware of this problem with the supposedly improved Blogger?

So, here goes again:

Traditionally, if a package of plain Acme Yummies sold for $2.99, Acme Yummies With Almonds might sell for something like $3.29. But in the last few years I’ve noticed that manufacturers have made things easier for everyone by keeping the price constant but varying the quantity, e.g. $2.99 for both, but contents of 350 g and 320 g respectively.

Quaker Instant Oatmeal is now like this. A box of Regular contains 12 packets, while the flavoured varieties each contain only 10. So far so good.

However, the different flavours have different costs. Rather than further varying the number of packets, which would be a reasonable (and consistent) solution, the “brilliant” “geniuses” at Quaker have chosen to vary the amount you get in a single-serving packet! Here in Canada (the numbers are different in the USA, though the structure is the same), Maple & Brown Sugar packets contain 47 g, while Peaches & Cream packets contain only 32.5 g!

32.5 g isn’t enough for me for breakfast, so I only buy the flavours that have at least 45 g, which is only three of them that I’ve seen. Too bad, as Peaches & Cream used to be my favourite. And no, I’m not going to solve the problem by using two packets at a time, because 65 g is too much.

To further show how confused this all is, remember how I said that a box of Regular has more packets than a box of flavoured? My guess is that the “brilliant” “geniuses” wanted to appeal to the frugal buyer by providing “extra packets” in Regular. In fact, each Regular packet contains only 31.25 g. That’s even less than Peaches & Cream. Per gram, Regular is actually priced significantly higher than Maple & Brown Sugar or Raisins & Spice.

Noisy vehicles

2007-01-25T10:59:00.000-05:00

A minivan without a functioning muffler just drove past, which prompted this post.

Motorcycles are a major culprit. I’ve heard that it’s usual practice after buying one to cut the muffler off. To impress certain people, I suppose.

Here in Toronto, the Municipal Code contains Chapter 591, Noise, which in addition to the “general prohibition” that

No person shall make, cause or permit noise or vibration, at any time, which is likely to disturb the quiet, peace, rest, enjoyment, comfort or convenience of the inhabitants of the City.

also contains the “specific prohibition” against

The operation of a vehicle, engine, motor, construction equipment, or pneumatic device without an effective exhaust, intake-muffling device or other sound attenuation device of a type specified by the manufacturer, which is in good working order, and in constant operation.

Have any readers in Toronto ever heard of any enforcement activity? Readers outside Toronto, what’s the situation like where you live?

Soundtracks ahead of their time

2007-01-23T16:19:00.000-05:00

Often, films and TV shows have a scene change — and the audio for the second scene begins while the video for the first scene is still running.

So I’ll be watching a scene, and somebody starts speaking who isn’t there. This confuses me until the new scene begins. It’s not for long, but it’s still unnerving.

And this is intentional: someone has to do extra work to make this happen!

What’s up with that?

Stop it, editors or directors or whoever you are! If it was new and hip once, it isn’t any more, and if you think it improves the experience for the audience, I’d bet you don’t have anything to back that up.

Pharmaceutical prices and the Canadian Health Minister

2007-01-16T02:20:00.000-05:00

Here in Canada we generally pay less for prescription drugs than Americans do, because of government controls that do not exist in the States. Consequently there are businesses that buy drugs in Canada and sell them across the border, though legality is iffy at best.

According to a front-page story in today’s Globe and Mail, four organizations representing Canadian pharmacists and drug distributors have asked the Canadian Health Minister to ban the export of prescription drugs to the United States. They fear that a bill introduced in Congress last Wednesday, which would allow drug imports to the USA from certain other countries, including Canada, would cause the manufacturers to end their willingness to keep Canadian prices low.

Health Minister Tony Clement has said in the past that he doesn’t expect possible U.S. legislative changes to affect Canada’s supply of drugs. And his spokesman has commented that the southward flow has actually dropped since 2004.

Wait a minute. If the flow has indeed dropped in the past, that is irrelevant, because the threat is of a change that would increase the flow in the future. Why would the minister’s spokesman try to misdirect the public? Something doesn’t smell right here.

Tony Clement is well known in Ontario, as he was a minister in the widely hated Mike Harris government (which gained power only because the majority of the voting population split its vote between two other major parties). Based on his past behaviour, my suspicion is that he is ideologically against price controls, and would be happy with an end to artificially low drug prices in Canada. But he won’t admit it for obvious reasons.

If I’m right about what’s happening then he’s being dishonest. (Something he would be well used to from his Mike Harris days.)

Blog 2.0

2007-01-16T01:54:00.000-05:00

In April 2006 I started writing a blog about Web 2.0. Sometimes I want to write about something else, but as I’ve written before, I don’t like it when a blog that claims to be on a particular topic strays too much. (I can relate anything to Web 2.0, but sometimes the explanation will be longer than the actual post.)

Thanks to prompting last Saturday at EnterpriseCampToronto by Mark Kuznicki, I’ve finally created a second blog where I can write about other things. Topics will be varied: whatever I want to rant about. There will be no shortage of topics. There will only be a shortage of time to write everything I’d like to.