Google has gained a bit of a reputation of trying to outdo everyone else in all things internet related.  GMail was the first free e-mail service to offer a no-need-to-delete-e-mail inbox when all other free e-mail servers imposed strict disk space restrictions.  Google maps has been pretty successful at overtaking the success and functionality of MapQuest  Google video tried to outdue the success of YouTube - without much luck.  Google Docs is currently trying to take the place of Microsoft Office and other office-suite software.  Google's latest venture is an on-line encyclopedia to rival Wikipedia, which they have labeled “Knol,” presumable short for Knowledge.

Wikipedia is quite well established and has a head start of many years over anything that Google will be able to put out.  So how does Google hope to compete?  Well, they've picked up on one of the great weakness (and strengths) of Wikipedia -  the simple fact that anyone can anonymously edit the information.  Realizing that some sources are slightly more reliable than others, Google will require that all submitted work show who the author is.  They also work on a full-article submission system where one must write an article for a given subject.  Multiple articles will exist for every entry, and each on is “signed” by the original author.  Casual editors who only want to improve rather than create have the option of submitting suggested corrections to the author of each article.  Unlike Wikipedia, the original author must approve all changes/edits to their article before the public can see it.

Google's system hopes to avoid edit wars as well as vandalism, whether it be intentional or simply the result of ignorance.  If you don't agree with what someone has written, you are welcome to write your own article on the subject.  This will hopefully force a lot of people to put their keyboard where their mouth is, and silence the many obnoxious backseat article writers.

We're currently living in the “digital world”.  Computers dominate our lives.  We store our musics on CDs or mp3 players. Movies go on DVDs or blu-ray discs.  Even our books can be downloaded in PDF format.  Sticking the word “digital” on anything helps it sell.  And that's because digital is better... right?

Well, in some ways digital is better, which is why we are moving toward it, but in many ways it isn't.  The alternative to digital is analogue.  Think of analogue as a continuous signal.  When you draw a line on a piece of paper, that's analogue. The line is continuous – that's what makes it a line.  Now let's think of a digital line.  Well, we have to break up the paper into discrete blocks.  We can call these blocks pixels for convenience.  For each pixel, the line is either there or isn't.  Our ability to see the line as an actual line is now solely based on how man pixels we have and how large they are.  If the pixels are large, our line looks jagged.  If the pixels are spaced far apart, our line looks dotted rather than smooth.  You've seen this many times before.  Take a close look at a picture printed in a paper or displayed on a TV.  As you get closer, you can see the dots that make up the picture and it ceases to look like the picture.  Now take a traditional film picture and look closer. No matter how close you look, it should still look like the picture.  It may be blurry, it may be boring up close, but it's still continuous.

The bit problem with digitizing everything is that we take something that used to be continuous and represent it with a series of discrete sampled points.  One of the biggest problems this causes is known as “aliasing”, and I'm sure you've heard it before.  This is one of the big reason that there are so many people that still swear by vinyl records rather than CDs and mp3s.  Analogue signals still contain more info.

So why is digital so popular if it is seemingly inferior?  Well, computers use digital signals (1 and 0 for “there or not there”) and allow us to manipulate our signals very easily and quickly, whether they be pictures, music, or otherwise.  We can also conserve or copy digital signals much more easily (e.g., e-mail) and with much higher fidelity (and I'm using this term loosely).  Short of a read/write error, a signal being 1 or 0 doesn't leave much room for ambiguity.

While we are certainly heading toward digital, try not to forget that it isn't necessarily “better” than analogue - just much more convenient in our modern world.

With my last post in my other blog focusing on the differences between analogue and digital, I though it only appropriate for me to also talk about digital TV.  All the advertising I've seen has D-Day at 17 February 2009... but a bit more digging actually shows that here in Canada we'll still be broadcasting analogue signals up to 31 August 2011.  I guess we're still lagging a bit behind the US, even when it comes to the ever popular digital revolution, but considering how many US stations Canadians view (especially near the border), we're sure to start running into problems as soon as the US switches over.

So what does digital TV mean?  Well, obviously the format the signal is being sent/received is changing.  Think discrete signals of 0s and 1s, or “there, not there”.  Why do it this way other than the fact that everything “digital” seems to be popular?  Well, it turns out that we can actually send/receive a lot more information this way.  This means a few things. Either we can send more signals in the form of more TV shows in the same “space” (bandwidth), or we can just send more information for each TV show.  This can mean subtitles, additional audio, or a better resolution sound/picture paving the way for HD TV shows to be broadcast over the air.  (I've also mentioned in a previous post that the reduced bandwidth has freed up a block of frequencies that have been auctioned off.)

No major turn over of formats comes without problems though.  The big problem this switch over will cause is that most older TV sets will not be able to interpret the digital signal.  Continued use of these TV sets will require special converter boxes, which bring with them all the usual problems.  First off you will need to fork out money to buy one of these boxes. You'll also only be able to change the channel via the box, so trying to select channels via your TV, VCR (probably not such a big problem any more), TV remote etc. will not work so well.  In terms of the picture quality, if broadcasters overdue it with the compression (or compression format) that they use, odd artifacts can result in the video, such as odd colouring, sound, blurring or blockiness.  You've probably seen all of these types artifacts in low quality videos on the internet.

The switch to digital TV is definitely a good thing and will bring with it lots of new good things to our viewing enjoyment, but there will almost certainly be teething issues as each country switches over.

They are now up to Guitar Hero III, with additional versions for portable games, the original game developers have moved onto Rock Band, South Park dedicated a full episode to making fun of it, and even Wikipedia has stepped in and put the game in the limelight as one of its featured articles.  I think it's safe to say that the games have become a little popular.

Okay, so it's been about three years since the first game hit the market.  Why is it still so popular?  Well, music is pretty important in the lives of most people.  The game designers did a pretty good job of choosing some “classics” that everyone would love.  (Check.)  Learning how to play an instrument well enough that it actually sounds half decent takes a lot of work.  Most people get frustrated before they ever achieve anything resembling talent.  The game allows you to skip all of that and you are playing a half decent song just by touching a couple of buttons.  (Check.)  Deep down inside at some level most people have a dream of being a rock star with all the fame and fortune it brings.  The game does a pretty good job of trying to recreate that with an overly done-up avatar, virtual screaming fans, and constant reassurance like “You rock.”  (A bit of stretch... but check.)

I guess what I'm saying is that the game makes it easy to think you're good at playing music and could actually sound good, and this makes most people happy.  So is it true?  Sadly not.  Some of the best Guitar Hero players out there still can't pick up a real guitar and play anything resembling music.  Even those who have tried (and I'm basing this on a few people I've talked to), didn't find it all that must easier to learn.  Then of course there is the story of an actual rock star trying to play one of his own songs and being booed off the stage, giving credit to the idea that the game just doesn't mimic playing a real guitar at all.

So go ahead and enjoy Guitar Hero.  But just remember that it is a game and nothing more.  Don't go quitting your day job to pursue ambitions of making it big in the music world because you sound half decent while playing the game.

While this may not apply to everyone, I think it's pretty safe to say that we don't cook all that many meals for ourselves these days.  The average person eats a “cold” breakfast like cereal or some kind of snack bar.  Lunch is often a sandwich (maybe leftovers) or, all too often, bought.  Dinner is the one meal that most people will spend a bit of time cooking – but not always.  I know I'm guilty of relying on frozen foods quite a bit.  Even when I do cook a proper meal, I often cheat and rely on a lot of prepackaged products.  Perhaps the bottle of sauce for my paster, maybe the seasoning I add to flavour my meat, or just the condiments I add afterwards.  Then of course we can also indulge ourselves and just eat out on a proper sit-down restaurant.

Okay, realistically it just doesn't make sense to make things completely from scratch every time we have a meal.  Who really wants to bake their own bread, or perhaps package their own jam?  Who really has the time even if they wanted to?  If you are just resorting to these but otherwise make your own meals, I think you're doing pretty well. What I really want to focus on is prepackaged meals and eating out.

I don't think the danger of prepackaged foods are the ingredients that you can't pronounce and don't know, but rather are the ingredients that you do know:  sugar, salt, carbohydrates and fats.  Let's face it, these companies want to make money and so they want you to like (and preferably become addicted to) their product.  To do this they need to make it “flavourable” and filling.  The easiest way to do it is to dump these things in abundance.  Worse than that, they often pump products full of one, like salt, and then hide this by adding the other, like sugar, to neutralize the flavour.  (This salt and sugar can also be counted toward the net weight of the product.)  While they may try to put catch health-like advertisements on their products (e.g., “cholesterol free” or “fat free” when it's pumped full of salt, sugar and carbohydrates, but no meat), at the end of the day very few of these products are actually good for you.

Eating out (and I'm not thinking fast food here) is probably a bit healthier since most of the ingredients are fresh and only cooked when you order it.  However, most places are more focused on making tasty rather than healthy food again, which means a lot of the same problems listed above.  In addition to this, eating out is usually more expensive and if you're doing it regularly, you're wallet may be suffering as a result.

Unless you're actually making it yourself, or at least making most of it, don't expect your meal to actually be healthy.

Those who have been reading my blogs for a while will know that I tend to focus on a number of things including energy sources and waste resulting from our less than eco-friendly society.  It shouldn't be much of a surprise as I try to tackle both topics in this rant.  How can we bring them together?  Gasification.

Gasification is the process where we take organic garbage, and this can include plastics, and heat it in a environment with little to no oxygen.  The result is called syngas (“synthesis gas”) that can be used as a fuel source.  Syngas consists of hydrogen (good) and carbon monoxide (not so good), and can be further used to create other fuel sources such as methane and methanol.  What's left behind is an inert slag that can be used for road building material and other uses.

The advantages of gasification are obvious:  less garbage, more fuel.  The process of gasification is also considered carbon neutral.  While use of the resulting fuel source does of course give off carbon dioxide as a byproduct, the source of the fuel is biomaterial which traps it in its life cycle.  This is very similar to the carbon cycle from the food we eat.  While we do exhale carbon dioxide as a byproduct of our respiration, this is the “same” carbon dioxide that our food source (which can eventually be traced back to plants) removed from the atmosphere as it grew.  Overall, we are therefore not really adding or removing this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere.

And the bad news?  Well, this isn't really a mature process yet.  All that has been mentioned so far is a “best case” discussion.  If it doesn't work properly, it can be very expensive, produce very little fuel, and potentially worse byproducts.  Then there is the potential stench from the process as well.  While everyone may admit that it sounds like a wonderful idea, who would be the first to volunteer their backyard for the site of a gasification plant?

Apple just released the latest version of their iPhone, and for those of us here in Canada, this is the first time that the iPhone is officially available on our side of the border.  While they are certainly nice and shiny, and there are plenty of fun things that they can do, the phone itself isn't what has caught my attention.   The fact that there were people lining up days before so that they can be one of the first to get one/see interests me more.  This is the same things that happens when new movies come out, like the Star Wars or Harry Potter ones.

I want to blame companies for brainwashing the masses and whipping them into such a frenzy that they feel they must wait in line for the privilege of buying the product.  As much as I try though, I don't think the blame can be placed there.  It's more likely that there are simply crazy people out there who make this decision wholly on their own.  So let me try to take a minute to try and understand these strange beings.

Limited supply:

Okay, if there is a good chance that you won't be able to get one of the items because of limited stock, I guess I can understand (to a degree) why you'd want to wait in a line to ensure you got one.  I may be wrong, but I don't think that was actually the case for the iPhones.  Even if it were, is it really too much to wait an extra week or two to get hold of one?  If this were life saving medicine or needed food, this would make sense to me, but to do this just for a toy (or movie)??

Bragging rights:

I can't think of a girl who'd be impressed with a guy for waiting days in a line to get a hold of toy, so this can't be part of any mating rituals, and would have to be limited to impressing friends.  But again, if you're friends are the type to be impressed by this, they're likely also the type that would be there waiting in the line with you.  “Bragging rights” just seem to lead more to the impression of a sad sad person, rather than anything positive.  Maybe this is more of a “don't want to be the only one left out” type of syndrome.

Nothing better to do:

Yeah right.  Even a person with no life would likely be more interested in staying home and watching TV or playing video games than waiting in line.  Hell, I'd hope they'd be more interested in sleeping in a normal bed and not out in the rain. Everyone has something better to do!

At the end of the day, I think this just comes down to obsession.  As much as I would like to understand these types of people, I really don't think I can... And I can't help but feel a bit nervous near them.

I recently read the book Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, and he brings up many interesting points about the English language and its evolution.  I thought I'd share a few with them.

To make a word plural we typically add an “s” or “es”.  There were actually a number of contenting ways to make a word plural at one point, and any one of them could have become the standard that we use.  Adding “en” or “ren” to the end of the word was once a big contender for pluralizing words.  Words like oxen, brethren, and children, the plurals of ox, brother and child, are remnants of this alternate style.

Many words had alternate meanings that we have since stopped using, however we still maintain phrases using these alternate meanings.  Here are a few examples:

“The exception proves the rule.”

“In your neck of the woods.”

“One fell swoop.”

Prove used to mean test (such as in “proving grounds”), neck used to refer to a parcel of land, and fell used to mean fierce/cruel.  These sayings probably make a bit more sense to you now, don't they?

There are also pairs of words that used to exist with opposite meanings, but for some reason one of the words have disappeared from the language while the other remains.  The word “expede” is one such example, which is the opposite of impede.  This seems a bit odd especially since expedient, and other variants of the word still exist.

Bryson also goes through many other interesting historical events and facts regarding the language, including why we use the word “gotten” in North America, but no one does in England.  The word “nice” has completely switched meanings throughout history such that in many cases scholars do not know whether the author actually intended the use to refer to pleasant or cruel.  There are also currently more people studying English in China than there are in North America, which is pretty scary if you think about it.

If you found these facts interesting, I highly recommend you go out and pick up a copy of Mother Tongue.

While more and more people have become “computer literate” since the introduction of the PC back in 1982, most are still quite ignorant about their computer's specs.  The average person has no clue what RAM, bus speed, and cache mean in terms of their computing experience.  This makes it equally hard for consumers and retailers when it comes time for a person to buy a computer.  How does a person know what to buy?  How does the retailer explain the choices to the consumer and convince them to buy a system without simpling confusing them?

Well, back in the early days of PCs, brand name was the way to go.  IBM was of course the big guy, and choosing between an IBM and a “clone” was the real question (unless you were an Apple fan).  An IBM was equivalent to quality and reliability, while a clone was the cheap but “risky” alternative.  It didn't take too long though for people to realize that the “clones” were just as good as the “original” IBMs, and so the term has since died away.  We now have a plethora of companies, such as HP, Dell, Gateway, and Acer, all of whom are technically “clones”, but each respected in their own way.  On top of that, each computer component has a multitude of respected (and non-respected) manufacturers, with Intel and AMD being easily recognizable ones when it comes to the CPU.

Once we realized the brand name wasn't all that important, we had to move along to the actual specs of a system to decide if it was good or not.  Enter the clock speed.  For a while, faster clock speed was equated with better computers.  While this is true to a degree, clock speed is far from determining which systems are good and which bad.  Manufacturers realized this public misconception and started a war for the fastest speeds.  They also introduced inferior chips, such as the Celeron, which did not perform as well, but could reach very large clock speeds, to maximize their profits.   Power hungry chips that given off incredible amounts of heat with minimal performance improvements was the breaking point and I think we've finally started to realize our mistake.

So where does that leave us now?  Well, looking through computer ads, I think that manufacturers are using three things to sell their computers:  the number of “cores”, the quality of the included LCD screen,  and, sadly, sex appeal.  The first tries to equate more cores with better computers.  This would be true if all software currently developed actually took advantage of this, but most don't and our extra CPUs tend to sit idle, wasting their potential.  The latter two have been picked up by Apple, as they realize that computers have become a fashion accessory.  The right colour computer, with the right type of case makes all the difference to those who don't actually need much computing power (e-mail and web surfers).  It's sad, but we now seem to be more interested in what's on the outside of our computer than the inside.

I've read a few too many times that children are hitting puberty earlier today, and heard that “kids are having sex earlier and earlier” more than I care to count.  Both of these are inevitably is linked to the slow downfall of society.  Blaming it on hormones in milk, chicken, and other food, or even chemicals leaking out of plastics has become very popular.  While scientific theories explaining how this may be possible may be sound on some level, when it comes down to it, there has been no real satisfactory proof that it is actually happening.  Showing that plasticizers are similar in structure to hormones and could be mistaken for them in the body, doesn't mean it's actually happening.

Hearing this stuff from the media, which are desperate to report anything mildly interesting is one thing, but I'm disturbed by how many people reiterate it in day-to-day conversation.  When I asked the last person about it, I got the “well I remember hitting puberty much later”.  So first off, this person is looking back on their youth with the typical rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia trying to pin point something to the precision of a couple of months compared to the “norm”.  I can't say I trust their memory that much.  Then there is the fact that they are comparing themselves to...? Yeah I doubt they have any idea either.

Then there is the second side to this “problem”:  young people are having sex younger and younger.  Last I read the average age was something like 16 and maybe dropping a bit.  Now perhaps I'm a bit misinformed, but I thought that it wasn't so long ago (and I'm thinking back to the dark ages and earlier) that it was pretty common to marry off daughters at a very young age, or to have arranged marriages where the bride and groom weren't that old.  If anything, our average age is still much higher than many periods in the past.  Perhaps things are changing within recent years, but this is still nothing when looking at history as a whole.

I'm not saying that these aren't things we should be worried about, nor am I saying that we should ignore their possibility.  I'm just saying that we need to confirm the facts first and put them in the bigger perspective of history before running through the streets and screaming that the end is near.  Compared to people throughout history, I don't think we're really all that different in this “modern” age.

I've discussed the dot-com boom, which consisted of a lot of traditional retailers moving their stores into virtual space with limited success.  I've also talked about the advertising revenue that accompanied it, and has since outlasted it.  In the tradition of trying to make money off of internet ventures, Getty Images has partnered up with Yahoo to take advantage of Flickr

Getty Images  is a stock photo supplier to businesses, selling them both exclusive and non-exclusive rights to images to use for any purpose including advertising.  Flickr's database full of user photos will give Getty Images a very large resource from which to draw and could potentially give them a big boost to their business.  And not all the money will go to Yahoo and Getty Images.  Owners of the images uploaded to Flickr stand to get 20-40% of the fee Getty Images charges to customers.

If the possibility of making money off of your photography skills appeals to you, uploading your photos to Flickr will certainly increase your chances of achieving this.  However, like all things internet related, don't expect this to be get-rich-easy path.  Getty Images will be combing the database for “interesting” photos, so if you've never had photographic talent before, don't expect your photos to be chosen.  Even if you're photos are chosen and you're invited to become one of their contributers, at ~$50-$150 per image sold, don't expect to even be able to sustain yourself off of the revenue.  If you are truly serious about making money off of your photography skills, you're probably going to have to search beyond Flickr to make your dreams come true.

The truth is that only a very small percentage of people trying to make money off of the internet actually succeed.  This includes advertising money, as only a small portion of sites receive enough traffic to make large amounts of advertising revenue, and internet retailers, as so many during the dot-com bust learned.  Don't rely on the internet and Flickr to help you make big money from your photography skills, but if your photos are chosen off of Flickr, go ahead and feel proud that someone wants to pay your for your work.

Thomas Beatie has made a lot of news recently for being the first “legally pregnant man” on record.  If this sounds a bit strange to you, the emphasis is on the “legally” part as Thomas is recognized as a man by law, but not by nature, being a female-to-male transgender.

Call me a bit small minded if you like, but I'm actually confused as to why this is making so much news.  When someone is genetically and physically a woman, it doesn't sound like much of a miracle, or even much of an advancement when that person gets pregnant with a child.  Now you might argue that Thomas doesn't look like much of woman physically, but the important parts, namely the ovaries and uterus, are still quite intact, making it very possible for this to happen.

Okay, so realistically I'm not so confused as to why this is getting so much attention.  When someone living (legally) as a man, who is even married to a woman, decides to have a child approaching the dream of a “normal” family, it gets many people scared for the sanctity and survival of the traditional family.  Those who embrace alternative lifestyles also want the attention to show that it can and does work.  What annoys me about this is that for the former, there isn't anything they can do.  We've progressed enough in Western society where we realize that people have the right to live as they choose without being restricted to a specific set of ideas created from a limited tradition in history.  As for the latter, if they truly want to be accepted and considered just another form of “normal”, they must stop drawing attention to just another instance of “normal”.

At the end of the day, while I consider the situation of Thomas and his wife to be incredibly weird, I do respect their right to live the life they have chosen, and I find the amount of media attention to what has happened to them to be ridiculous considering the everyday mundane event that has occurred to them – at least by nature's standards.

One of the side effects of the late '90s dot-com bubble was the growth in the internet advertising market.  Companies offered relatively large sums for sites to host banner ads on their pages.  Most companies paid out “per view” and would “randomly” select a banner from their clients to send to host web site.  Some paid extra, or restricted payment to “per click”.  Even more interesting were the direct-to-user schemes that arose.  A few companies, such as Alladvantage, went directly to the end user and had them install software that would display banner ads while surfing.  Users were paid for the number of hours that they viewed ads while surfing, resulting in up ~$10-$20 per month.  Like most things with the dot-com bubble though, most of the advertising companies collapsed and a lot of site owners never actually received the cheques that they were promised.  Most of the systems were also plagued with fraud of one sort or another.  People constantly refreshing the page, or taking words from an advertisers' webpage as a needed password for page/file access in their site.  Programs to mimic users web surfing also became popular to defeat the “pay-to-surf” schemes.

Okay, so none of this is particularly surprising.  Advertising is big money and for any system out there promising to pay money, there will be people trying to rip it off.  While internet advertising may have taken a large blow, it certainly isn't dead.  Google is a big contender these days and tries to prevent fraud by carefully analyzing the traffic from sites on which it has ads.  Suspicious behaviour is often flagged and they certainly only pay for “unique” loads and clicks.  They also go a step further by scanning the content of the site on which they have ads, and only posting ads relevant to the content of the page.  By focusing on the audience of the site and providing only relevant ads, advertisers are more assured that they are not just wasting their money on ineffective advertising.

What I find more interesting are sites that now let you bid on banner space.  You click on the banner itself, specify how much you want to spend, what hours of the day you want your ad displayed, and then bid on the payment rate that you are willing to pay.  The person with the highest rate gets their ad displayed – until they reach the max sum that they specified they'd be willing to pay.  The next highest bidder then gets their ad up.  This of course changes throughout the day, and cheaper advertising can be found throughout the night.  Not so different from TV advertising, but certainly an interesting innovation.

I recently read an article that was very pro internet journalism over traditional printed material.  Some of the big pros brought up is the instantaneous ability to publish.  If there's a big news event happening, we typically start to know within minutes (or at least it is posted within minutes) and updates to the story can be made at the same pace.  This is possible because we're not restricted to traditional means of printing the matter and distributing it.  It is also due to the lack of traditional checks like fact checking, editors and reviewers in general.  And this is where I see things becoming much more dangerous.

As I've mentioned before, most people distributing the information aren't really employed and therefore aren't really afraid of losing their jobs over mistakes.  Many who are employed have started to rely on less-than-reliable sources such as Wikipedia, leading to errors and issues such as the examples I've previously brought up.  (Makes you want to read all my blogs, doesn't this??)

Then there are the fake or joke articles.  Viral adversing is one example I've talked about, where an article that was supposed to be so outrageous that it should have been instantly recognized as fake floated around the internet quoted by many as truth.  Articles by comedy type sites including The Onion have also been picked up my legitimate news reporting sources and accidentally been reported as truth.

I think overall, this is pretty bad.  The internet has created more of a  large rumour mill rather than a true form of instantaneous news.   Unless it comes from a very reputable site, I've started to become very careful about believing anything I read off the internet.  I recently had a conversation with friends and found myself discussing a news story that was completely fabricated.  I only remembered the source of the story midway through, leaving me in an embarrassing situation of having to admit that I was effectively just propagating gossip.  Not good.  Not good at all.

Those who have been keeping up to date with my blogs won't be terribly surprised to hear that I'm pro banning the use of cell phones in cars.  I'm a believer that they distract drivers and lead to accidents, and I have personally seen too many people do stupid things while yapping away on them.  As a pedestrian I have seen too many motorists tend to to start making a turn without first looking to see if anyone is crossing the road.

So a few states, California included now, have banned the use of a cell without use of a hands-free device.  Canada isn't quite there yet, but I hope we follow suit quickly.  Personally, I'd like to see things a bit stricter; a ban on cell phone use, hands free set or otherwise, is the way to go.  I do acknowledge that banning the use of a hands free set would be equivalent of banning conversation between the driver and passengers in the car, which wouldn't be so easy to implement, but think of how often we have been told of accidents caused by someone yelling at others in the car (or playing with the radio).  If we're truly after improved safety on the roads then this should be were we are aiming.  Granted, without a cell phone in someone's hands, it'd be hard to catch them red handed and prove that they were actually on a cell.  Anyone driving with passengers would just be able to claim that they were talking to them instead.  Even if it's not used that much, having it on the rule books as a warning would probably still be a good thing.

While we're at it, maybe we can also look to laws against walking with cells.  It'd stop people walking around blind to everyone else around them, which often ends up in them bumping into you or something equally obnoxious.  Okay, okay, I'm definitely going too far, but I just can't believe how many annoyances the cell phone culture has brought with it.

Google maps were amazing when they first came out, and even now they're still pretty cool.  Google keeps trying to outdo itself, adding street view, pre/post disaster comparisons, moon and Mars maps, etc.  All this “freedom” of information is having a price though.

The latest report of Google-map abuse is pool party crashers.  Users in the UK are taking advantage of Google maps to figure who has a backyard pool.  With a quick facebook posting and exchange of cell phone numbers, these people throw quickly arranged pool parties... at the home of strangers.  Pool owners are coming home to find their backyard trashed, and in some cases, even come early enough to still find uninvited guests enjoying the use of their pool.

Past invasions of privacy include Google maps catching people sunbathing naked (luckily the map resolutions are still too low to really “see” anything), and funerals in progress, and street view has made many people upset as pictures of their living rooms, and even themselves have wound up on the internet, sometimes showing them doing or coming from places they'd rather that the rest of the world not know.

Many websites have also made a game out of these types of images.  Past ones have included finding evidence of UFOs, “government black helicopter,” and natural features on the Earth that resembles something interesting, including the face of Jesus:

http://amazingillusionsphotos.blogspot.com/2006/11/google-map-spots-jesus.html

Even finding Google's mistakes has become a game of sort.  One of the most publicized was the spotting of a very small bug that must have been squished in the scanner Google was using to digitize some of the images:

http://google.blognewschannel.com/archives/2006/09/28/google-maps-spots-giant-bug-terrorizing-germany/

Considering the shear magnitude of what Google had set out to achieve, it is not exactly surprising that mistakes and other unintentional side effects such as these have arisen.  There simply isn't enough time to shift through all the information that they acquire before making it public, which leaves the public to spot many of these things.  To be fair to them though, they've been pretty good at fixing/removing any images that have caused people grief once it was brought to their attention.

With the current outrageous gas prices, and warnings that it will only get worse, the prospect of any alternatively powered cars is getting most people excited.  But the prospect of a really cheap alternate fuel source seems to be pushing people a little over the edge.  There is a lot of talk about “water-powered cars” floating around the internet.  This is just garbage.

It's certainly easy to understand where people might have become confused.  Hydrogen powered cars are legitimate, and in fact Honda has just released one about a week ago for the southern California market.  It is also common knowledge that hydrogen can be produced through a process known as electrolysis.  Water is essentially split into its component hydrogen and oxygen by passing an electric current through it.  This process requires a lot of energy, and following the basic laws of thermodynamics, the amount of energy you will get out of the hydrogen will necessary be less than the energy from the electricity that you had to use to create it.  So, technically you're better off just using the electricity to power the car directly rather than trying to use the hydrogen to power it. 

Okay, but people are obviously still pursuing hydrogen power.  There must be an advantage to storing the power in hydrogen as a fuel.  Well, if you're thinking of carrying around the hydrogen directly, remember it's a highly volatile low density gas. Since gasoline is pretty volatile too, let me ignore for that for the moment.  The fact that's it's a low density gas is probably a big enough issue on its own.  Store enough of it, and your car will start to float away.  Don't forget that the Hindenburg was a hydrogen-filled airship... before it crashed and caught fire.  Hydrogen fuel cells store the hydrogen in a special and safer manner, and require special fuelling stations – one of the reasons that southern California is seeing these types of cars before the rest of the world.

The bottom line is that you will be seeing a car that you full up with water as a fuel source.  Water might be used at some point to produce hydrogen, but even then, you wouldn't be doing it at home to fill up your hydrogen-powered car.  At least not yet.

Salmonella poisonings seem to making the news quite a bit recently.  I can think of three specific examples:

Salmonella spinach scares from a company originating in California but distributed throughout the US and Canada back in the summer of 2007.  I couldn't find any reports of people actually getting sick from this, but it did test positive for it and was recalled.

The University of Western Ontario had a number of salmonella poisoning cases reported from people who ate at one of the main food courts located in the University Community Center back in Nov. 2007.  They never did quite figure out where the source of the contamination was but effectively had to shut down the food court while trying to figure things out and to prevent more people from getting sick.

Currently we're going through a tomato salmonella scare with fast food places refusing to serve tomatoes.   This incident has stemmed from 150+ people in the US getting sick from tomatoes, and has caused the price of tomatoes to jump as sources of untainted ones have become much harder to locate.

So what is salmonella anyway?  Well, it's a bacteria often associated with contaminating chicken and eggs.  It causes salmonellosis which results in diarrhoea, fever, vomiting and an all-around unhappy person.  Most people recover in 3-7 days on their own, but it is known to result in death in the young and elderly (or those already susceptible to disease) in the population, mostly due to dehydration, and it is almost always these types of people of which the death reports from salmonella describe.

Salmonella can be killed by properly cooking your food, which is always recommended when eating chicken and eggs.  It becomes more of a problem when fresh fruit and vegetables are infected, as people are more likely to eat them raw.  While it rarely results in death, it is certainly not something that we want floating around the general public and hence the numerous (and perhaps overly melodramatic) public warnings that we get from time to time in an attempt to prevent an outbreak.

Mozilla Firefox web browser v3 is now out.  Well... it's actually been out since yesterday.  Usually that's not a big difference except that Mozilla decided that it wanted to try to break a Guinness World Record for most number of downloads within a day.   Considering no record previously existed, they weren't really setting a hard goal for themselves and finished with a bit over 8 million unique downloads in total.   (I'm pretty sure they got the record.)  They had planned things out nicely to maximize the number of users online and the ideal time of day to offer the download by starting their “day” at 11:16 am PDT.

Okay, okay, so I've been assuming that everyone is familiar with Firefox.  If you're reading this blog, chances are that you are at least mildly familiar with web browsers and are hopefully aware that there is more out there than just Internet Explorer (IE).  Opera and Safari are other alternatives to IE, but Firefox still wins second place to IE.  Netscape was the former big competitor to IE, but lost the browser war to them around the same time the Firefox was starting up, and both being part of the Mozilla foundation, Firefox can almost be though of as the Phoenix rising from Netscape's ashes.  It also supports the  usual open source/freeware ideology.  Firefox is about 4 years old now if you want to consider the launch of v1.5 as the real starting point, and even as they've released v3, future versions are already in the works.

As much as I like it, I'm not sure if you can call Firefox truly pure.  I think that they've marred their innocence a little with their deal with Google.  The little Google search bar and anti-phishing engine are not a coincidence but actually the result of a rather lucrative agreement between Mozilla and Google.  Google funnels a lot of money their way for this privilege, and while it doesn't seem like it can result in any harm to the end user, it does result in Google having a lot of private user information.  While Mozilla's agreement doesn't let them use it for anyting other than anti-phishing protection and usual search requirements, if Google ever strays from its “Do no evil” motto, it could result in quite the intrusion of privacy.

I'm definitely a Firefox user... for the moment.  I think it's much better than IE, but then again I was also a Netscape user and felt the same until their latest releases became so awful that I had to switch over to IE and finally to Firefox.  I won't blindly follow the Mozilla releases, but as long as they keep the quality up, I'll definitely keep choosing them over IE.

I've already complained about the bogus story of the kid who stole his father's credit card to play XBox with a bunch of “escorts,” created as part of an viral advertising campaign.  I know I shouldn't point too much at this single example with contempt.  It's an accepted means of advertising, and this certainly isn't the first instance of it.  In fact, I remember quite well the first instance of viral advertising that came to my attention.  It was a video clip floating around the internet of a “bridezilla.”  A supposed bride-to-be freaked out just before her wedding and hacked off her hair.  It turns out that everyone in the video was a paid actress and the whole thing was sponsored by Sunsilk trying to promote their hair products in one form or another.  It certainly got attention, but I never did figure out if it was “good” attention.

The Blair Witch Project did exactly the same thing but on a much larger and successful scale, and, since then, companies have been releasing numerous “homemade vidoes” onto sites like youtube in the hope of of them catching on and giving them cheap advertising.  Almost every product, especially Hollywood movies, like to tease audience with quasi-official sites and limited edition products that dole out “secret” bits of info.  The new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, is a prime example.  From fake “Gotham Times” newspapers to mock kidnapping of fanboys and the obligatory website, it's covered all the main bases of viral advertising.

I guess what bugs me about it so much is the inherent dishonesty of it.  Here are these large companies that are no longer coming out and just saying “buy our product,” but are trying to pretend to be common, average consumers spreading the word.  The whole premise is based on the idea of word of mouth as one friend recommends a product to another. 

These companies certainly are no friend of mine, and I hate how they try to pass themselves off as one.

I haven't spoken about our marketing friends from evil university in a while now.  So what have they been up to lately? Well, a lot of you may have heard the story about the kid that stole his father's credit card and had a little fun.  His night culminated in playing Xbox at a hotel with escorts because partying with prostitutes is 'what you do'.

This story was floating all over the internet, making it onto the front page of Digg.  Even offline media was picking it up, with the radio station in my local town talking about it for a full week.  The problem is that the story is a fake.  The original posters of the story have now put up a disclaimer to ensure that their readers realize it is a joke, a not-so-subtle fact that everyone missed the first time round:

http://www.money.co.uk/article/1000390-13-year-old-steals-dads-credit-card-to-buy-hookers.htm

So what were they after pulling a prank like this?

The answer is publicity.  They were hoping (and quick successfully achieved) a lot of back links to their website increasing their page ranking and therefore “importance” on the internet.  This is  a classic case of whoring oneself out for a attention, exchanging credibility for attention, a speciality of our marketing friends.

This type of technique is referred to as viral advertising.  Rather than spreading word of their product entirely on their own, they wait for social networks, like other news sites and radio stations to stumble on it and then spread the word for them. When this happens, they can sit back and watch others do their work for them.  To achieve this though, they have to keep secret the fact that their story (or action in general) is merely a publicity stunt and not “real.”

Bottom line:

They lie and deceive to get your attention and advertise; something that every marketing person from evil university must be very proud for achieving.

Do you want the red pill or the blue pill?

In my last post, I discussed that creating a “perfect” virtual world would require providing information to all five senses. Good progress has been made toward sight and sound, but providing info to the remaining three senses is very poorly achieved if not completely ignored by current attempts.  However, what I intentionally ignored is that possibility of simply trying to fool the brain rather than the individual senses.

This was described as being “plugged in” in The Matrix.  Since the brain ultimately controls information received by the body, if we can properly “crack” the code of the information send to and from the senses, we can simply go right to the source rather than trying to fool each individual sense.  I think my fellow Canadians will remember well the Heritage Minute ad depicting Dr. Wilder Penfield performing brain surgery on a women who suddenly smells “burnt toast” as he pokes around in her brain.  Achieving things like that with slightly more precision would enable us to build virtual worlds.

My statement of “simply” trying to fool the brain is a gross understatement though.  How we would go about this seems a bit scary.  The brain it just a tad bit complicated and important to maintaining our life.  Would we be required to hook up numerous wires and connectors to all parts of our brain to achieve this?  A single plug that goes into the back of our necks like in The Matrix seems to be just a bit over simplified.  I wouldn't even want to think of the number of holes that would have to be made into the skull nor what would happen if even a single connection malfunctioned and/or led to brain damage.

As disturbing as trying to achieve a direct connection to the brain sounds, if we are ever to achieve a “prefect” virtual world, I'm pretty sure that we will have to work on fooling the brain itself rather than the individual senses to be truly be successful.  I can't imagine who would volunteer to be the first guinea pigs in trying to achieve this goal.  The punishment from a mistake still seems to be too large compared to the reward offered by a success.  Having said that though, it could always give people who are paraplegic of who have locked-in syndrome a chance a second “normal” life, which is a pretty amazing reward for trying such things.

The idea of virtual reality probably extends back as far as the human imagination.  Before there was technology, there was the idea of magic.  Magician, sorcerers and even gods could create worlds, which did not truly exist, for humans to explore.  The vehicle of virtual reality shifted from magic to technology with the invention of television, amusement park rides, and special effects.  Virtual worlds now exist as any World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy Online player will quickly tell you, but the concept of the “perfect” virtual world still looms on the horizon.  It no longer seems a matter of if it will happen, but simply when.

A “perfect” virtual world needs to combine all five senses: sight, sound, touch, smell and taste.  So far we are okay with sight and sound.  Large screen TVs or theatres are a poor attempt to immerse a person into a new world, but virtual goggles are slowly improving to truly full a person's view.  Large surround sound systems and earphones are pretty good at delivering a full audio experience.

A few experiments have been done to add touch.  Some joysticks offer force feedback, a few amusement park rides move entire vehicles or chairs in which you sit, but for the most part these touch experiences are limited to certain parts of the body and are very primitive in what they can simulate.  Weightlessness  or increased gravity, and sensations such as being wet are beyond our current capabilities.

Smell is mostly ignored.  A few ideas that seem almost jokes have been suggested and outlined, such as a “smell-o-vision.”  A few novelty rides or devices also release a few very distinct smells.  As far as taste goes, I have trouble even thinking of an idea that tried to incorporate it.  If you want someone to taste something, you still feed it to them.  Not really much in the way of a virtual world unless you really want to consider artificial flavouring as filling that role.

In terms of building our “perfect” virtual world, we can maybe put a tick next to sight and sound.  I say “maybe” because even so, a person is still very aware that they are wearing goggles and/or earphones, so it is no longer “perfect.”  Touch, smell and taste lag too far behind though for me to really get exited about this happening any time soon.

Do I think that there are people out there who sexually prey on young children?  Yes.

Do I think that teenagers make poor decisions and should be protected by the law when it comes to sexual relationships? Absolutely.

I don't want anyone to misunderstand me; I think statutory rape laws are a good thing.  It makes perfect sense to me to make it a crime to have have sex with someone less than 16 – 18 years old, depending on the country/situation.  However, I also think we need to realize that there are situations where these laws are being horribly abused.  I am thinking about the recent case of Alisha Dean.

Alisha is effectively a predator on older men.  She used her myspace page to pass herself off as an adult, lying about her age, and then to find an older men for “adult” relationships.  After a few dates, the relationship becomes sexual, and the her male partner, unbeknown to him, has now broken the law.  The truth eventually came out, and he has been charged with sexual battery.  He will spend one year in jail, followed by five wearing an ankle bracelet, and will almost certainly have to register as a sex offender.

You can blame her partner for being too naive - for not being smart enough to find out the truth sooner rather than later.  You might even be able to convince yourself that he deserves his punishment regardless of whether he knew he was breaking the law, and I might agree with you, except that he is the second person to whom Alisha has done this.  That's right, he is the second guy that she has deceived and who is serving jail time because of her.  And what punishment is she receiving for lying to these men and ultimately putting them in jail?  Nothing.  No consequences from the law, and none from her parents.

I understand that this is a very sensitive area when it comes to the law.  Any judge needs to ensure that their ruling won't open loopholes to criminals who prey on youths.  However, I do think that in cases such as this, where the “victim” is blatantly lying and actively seeking out this type of situation, that they should be treated differently.  At the very least, both parties should be found guilty of crimes in these situations.

Phoenix, a robotic spacecraft that is part of NASA's low-cost mission to Mars through its Mars Scout Program, landed on Mars on 25 May, 2008, making it the sixth and most recent spacecraft to land on Mars.  Phoenix was sent to answer the question of “life on Mars,” searching for the geologic history of water on the planet and for a habitable zone.  No one is expecting to find little green men on the planet, but rather the possibility of past/present/future microbial life.

The primary mission is planned to be just over 92 days long, and Phoenix will continue to be used until rendered non-functional, which will likely be the result of the intense cold of the Martian winter.  Unlike some of the previous spacecrafts sent, Phoenix is not designed to be a rover moving along the planet surface, but is instead remaining stationary for its mission.  The reasoning behind this was that it kept the cost of the mission cheaper, allowed for more room for scientific equipment rather than locomotive components for the same weight and size.  The area chosen for the landing is also mostly uniform, meaning that the ability to move along the surface wouldn't provide much advantage.

In terms of the mission so far, everything has gone  well overall.  The spacecraft landed more or less successfully, with a few minor hiccups, including a delayed deployment of its parachute, a short loss in contact, but is still currently in communication with Earth and is considered to be doing well and 'healthy'.  Numerous pictures have been relayed back and are readily available with a quick search on the internet.  A soil sample has also been taken, which will be heated and the gases analyzed to determine the composition.  It also looks like the robot arm might have exposed ice – but more testing will be required to confirm.

While we all like to complain about the price of gas on this part of the world, other parts of the globe are dealing with something a little more serious:  the rice prices are soaring.  The price of rice has gone up to roughly three times the price it was at the beginning of the year.  While we may like to think that gas is essential, and we can't live without it, in reality it is more of a luxury than a necessity to us.  As tough as things may seem, we aren't likely to starve to death due to the price.

The same can't be said about rice.  It forms the staple diet of a very large part of the world's population.  More importantly, it represents a large portion of the diet of a large part of the world's poor population.  As prices soar, these people have no other options but to eat less.   Because a large percentage of their of the income has traditionally been used for food, they simply do not have more money to spend on food to compensate for the price increase.

So why has the problem arisen?  Well, it's not too different from our oil crisis; it's a combination of supply and demand. Recent natural disasters have destroyed some of the crops, such as the cyclone in Bangladesh last summer.  The increasing world population means that there are literally more mouths to feed.  As more people switch onto more expensive diets, namely meat, this also puts a further strain on the system.  It takes roughly ten times as much food by weight to produce an equivalent amount of meat.  The rising oil prices has also affected the rice production more directly.  Since oil products are used to produce fertilizer, run much of the farm equipment, and transport the food, increased oil prices will also cause increased rice prices.

Fears of a food crises has seen many countries cutting their rice exports, and further fuelling the price increases.  Hopefully this is just a temporary problem, but considering the issues of oil prices, global warming, over population, etc., this may just be wishful thinking.

It's kind of hard not to notice Nintendo's newest video game system, the Wii.  Playing any of the games seems to involve flailing arms, wild motions, and wrist straps to prevent you from accidentally throwing your controller through your TV.  They just recently released their newest toy for the system too,  the Wii fit (pad), which is giving them lots of publicity, and opening up their console to a new market.

Nintendo was actually taking quite a gamble with the Wii.   While the Gamecube wasn't a flop, it wasn't exactly the winner of the console wars for that generation, losing to the Playstation 2, and they couldn't really afford to lose another battle in the console wars.  Nintendo's traditional rival of Sega had long lost the console wars to them, but Microsoft with the Xbox and Sony with the Playstation consoles have been continually stealing market share from them.  The Wii still doesn't win out against its competitors with respect to raw processing capabilities and graphics ability, but Nintendo has been successful in completely redesigning the user input devices.  It is exactly this feature that has made the system so popular.

By having players move their body to stimulate the actual motion within the game, people feel more involved in the game and just have more fun.  Nintendo has also aimed itself at new markets with the new Wii pad – home fitness.  Turning exercise into a game is big money, especially if they are success at both halves.   Being much cheaper than most pieces of gym equipment, many people will probably buy the system and add-on on the mild chance that it can help them lose a few pounds.  All the various add ons also means big money for them.  They practically have a separate “optional” controller holder for each game out there.  Okay, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but if they can get each person to buy a wheel for Mario Kart, a sword for Zelda, a light sabre for Star Wars, a gun for one of the numerous shooting game, a tennis racket/bat for Wii Sports, etc., they can practically double their revenue from the game.

Nintendo is without a doubt the current winner of the console wars for this generation of systems, outselling both its competitors.  The Wii is making them lots of money, and ensures that they'll be part of the console wars for at least another generation of hardware.

I complain about Wikipedia a lot; it has its issues, especially when people misuse it; its current state falls far short of the high goals set forth by its creator and early adopters.  But as I've also said before, there is also a lot of good about Wikipedia too.  The latest thing that has caught my attention is a teacher using it as homework.  Not to research topics off of it, but rather to add information to it.

I think this is a great idea for a number of reasons.  First off, it shows the students just how easy it is for information to be changed within the online encyclopedia.  If they understand how easy it is for someone like them to add information, they may start to think twice about who added the other information that they read, and start to think critically about everything they read in Wikipedia.

To add information to Wikipedia, they need to find it on other sources.  The process of completing the assignment will help them learn how to research topics in more traditional and reliable ways, using primary and secondary sources at a library. Writing the page improves essay-writing and even basic English skills.

I think what I like most about the assignment is that it actually accomplished something.  So many school assignments are just busy work that do not accomplish anything at the end of the day.  Students are forced to solve problems that have already been solved, or complete works that no one will see except the teacher, and even then, only for marking purposes. A Wikipedia page, as much as I may not like it, will be read and used by many people over the internet.

In terms of how the teacher would mark the students on their assignments, luckily Wikipedia logs all changes and makes it very easy to see changes to an articles.  Articles edited by students that make it to “featured” status on Wikipedia are almost certainly assured good marks by the teacher.

I think the scene in Total Recall is classic when Arnold Schwarzeneger's character along with the female lead are forced outside on Mars - devoid of a suitable atmosphere.  Faces started bulging, eyes looked like they'd pop out.  Of course, they're saved just in time, but the idea of what happens to the human body in a vacuum, and especially the vacuum of space, has caught the imagination of quite a few people.  This is one of the more common questions that NASA and other space organizations get.

The big things to consider is 1) water (and therefore bodily fluids) will boil at low temperatures in a vacuum, 2) lack of oxygen will cause a person to blackout, and 3) the extreme cold of space will also freeze a person.

According to NASA, freezing to death in space is probably the least of your worries.  A vacuum means that there are no particles through which your body heat will be transferred via conduction of convection.  Radiation is really the only way your body can give off its heat, and that would take a while.  Having your bodily fluids boil off is also not such a large concern, as the pressure that your skin, veins, etc. exert is enough to prevent this.  Lack of oxygen to the brain is actually the biggest problem that a human would face.  When suddenly exposed to a vacuum, a person has about 15 seconds to try to help themselves before losing consciousness.  After about another minute or two without oxygen, brain damage starts to occur and a person actually starts to “die.”

Other smaller issues include a sunburn as the skin is exposed to to unfiltered sunlight, damage to the lungs if a person tries to hold their breath, as the reduced pressure will cause the air to expand against the lung walls, and injuries similar to “the bends” experienced by scuba divers as nitrogen dissolved in the blood stream suddenly bubbles out, again due to the reduced pressure.

So, while being exposed to the vacuum of space certainly would not be healthy, the human body can actually stand up against the dangers surprisingly well.

Having your stuff stolen really sucks.  Typically the value of the items are too small for the police to bother doing anything about it other than making a police report.  Unless you have insurance, or are very lucky, you're not likely to see your stuff again.  This has led to a whole slew of new devices and ways to protect/prevent against theft, forming a whole new market.

On more expensive items like your car, GPS trackers have become popular.  Thieves may steal your car, but you'll know exactly where they are and can send the police to their doorsteps.   Houses usually have more active theft protection, with real-time monitoring companies (to whom you have to pay monthly fees) that both wire up your house with automated sensors, and also have human operators continually monitoring the status of your house.

What about smaller items?  Bikes and other things have locks, which only sometimes deter thieves.  Expensive and small items like computers, especially laptops, are a big concern when it comes to theft.  I recently came across an article with a woman who used a very ingenious way of catching the thieves of her laptop:

http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2008/05/11/woman-logs-into-stol.html

She owned a Mac and used the remote login feature to enter her laptop while the thief was using it.  She then used the laptop's camera to take a picture of one of the thieves, which she promptly took to the police and led to their capture.  Seems like a rather simple thing, but yet incredibly effective.

I don't suggest that everyone go out and pay for remote desktop services on the chance that their computers might be stolen, but there are similar and much easier/cheaper options.  Sites like No-IP.com offer free dynamic IP management.  You can register a free URL and download their free software that updates your computer's IP to it every time it detects a new internet connection.  If your computer is ever stolen, the next time the thief logs onto the internet, they'll broadcast their IP.  Hand this info to the police along with the time and they should be able track down the thieves.  Again, simple but effective.

Here's another phrase that has entered popular culture:  “fair trade.”  The basic idea behind it is that the current global market has been set up such that it exploits poor people in third world countries.  As the name suggests, free trade offer these poorer produces of products a “fair” price on their items.  The end result is supposed to be slightly more expensive items, but the chance to equalize the financial inequalities that exist between various parts of the world – one small step at a time.

The reality of our current market  is that companies look for the cheapest way to produce their goods.  This typically means outsourcing labour and production to third world countries where people are willing to work for lower wages, allowing the price of the end product to be lower.  This also typically means that products wholly harvested or created within a third world country are also bought at a much lower price and sold at a much high price in first world country; this is standard business practise. This is also why so many of our items are now produced in China and shipped to us.  It is simply cheaper to do so.

While these third world citizens may be willing to do this, it does mean that their average financial status is much poorer than one of the first world country.  Unless these practises are changed, this discrepancy between the wealth of first and third world people will continue.  Enter free trade organizations to change this.  Divert more money to the primary producers in these third world countries, as well as their communities, and over time these developing countries have the opportunity to become developed first world nations.

Free trade has its roots back in the 1940s with needlework artwork from Puerto Rico, and has since expanded to many different organizations.  While I agree with the underlying ideas and goals of the movement, I am not sure that it can ultimately succeed.  I see the problem being centered around a few key issues:

1)  People tend to buy from the person with the cheapest price.  Despite their best intentions, people still want to get the most they can from their limited salaries and will continue to shop at places like Wal Mart.

2)  Artificially inflating the cost of products in an attempt to better compensate the primary producer creates an unstable market.  Unless demand causes the inflation of the price, there is a tendency to over produce in the hope of making more money in what seems like a lucrative market.  If over production occurs, this can lead to the market crashing and the producers sitting with a lot of unsold products.  It is exactly things like this that lead to a recession in an economy.

3)  Continually relying on exports will eventually cripple a nation.  Money needs to flow into a nation through imports or at least maintained within a country by buying local goods.  Fair trade still fundamentally encourages the flow of funds out of the country, which is not healthy for it.

4)  Where money and people are involved, there is inevitably corruption.  It is very easy for a few people with selfish intentions to divert the funds from the system to only benefit themselves rather than the community.  It is certainly not uncommon in third world countries for there to be a small group of very wealthy individuals with the rest of the country living in utter poverty.

While I like the idea of free trade, I can't see it working properly and am therefore very hesitant to properly support it myself.

Two Belgium guys have launched a urinal “peeing game” that uses sensors installed on the urinal, along with a healthy stream of pee, to control a video game.  Users can entertain themselves by skiing down slopes or killing aliens while relieving themselves in the bathroom.  When I first heard about these, I thought it was just a joke.  I mean something like this couldn't actually be real, right?  But the more I think about it, the more it just makes sense.   There certainly could be a market out there for urinal video games.

Okay, the idea of doing “stuff” with urinals isn't new.  Advertising companies have long realized that the ad space above a urinal is pretty valuable.  You essentially have a captive audience – they can't change the channel or anything – and the average length of a urinal stay is on par with that of an average TV commercial, and more so for those who've been holding their bladder for a while.  You're guaranteed that someone is going to be looking at your ad and you know pretty well their demographics.  Novelty urinals have also had a good history of catching the attention of the public, and popularizing the places that install them.  Here are a few of my favourites:

http://tpzone.blogspot.com/2007/11/funny-urinals_19.html

So what's the benefit of urinal video games?

Well, providing incentive for guys to aim in the right spots is always a good thing, especially from the point of view of the cleaning staff.  More realistically though, just like the novelty urinals, these will ultimately give customers another reason to head over to the business and provide some welcomed free publicity.  Bars and pubs would be some of the prime customers for these types of devices and will provide just one more incentive for their drunken customers to choose their place over the competitor.  These video games also open up the potential for a few problems too.  Faulty sensors, games that look a little too ancient, and potential messes as a result of those who get a little too carried away are some of the headaches that might plague owners of these video games.

As of today, the US now lists the polar bear as an endangered species.  Polar bears rely on sea ice as a platform when hunting seals and as a pathway to their dens on the Arctic coasts.  The sea ice is receding, with global warming being blamed as the cause, and the bear population is expected to decrease by almost a third over the next 30-40 years.

So what's the big deal?

Well, the US government has been dragging their feet on this decision because of the possibility of oil mining in Alaska.  By listing them as an endangered species, their habitat becomes protected and it becomes much harder for oil and gas exploration and harvesting by companies.  Many environmentalist were hoping to use this as a means of stopping or at least slowing down use of oil and thus helping to fight against global warming.  It actually took the pushing of many environmental groups and a ruling by a Federal judge forcing the government to list the polar bear for action to finally be taken.

Will this work?

This depends on what you mean.  They're listed as an endangered species, which means that they are more protected now than before.  This doesn't mean that it'll stop them from becoming extinct.  It also does not necessarily mean that their habitat will be saved, as was the intention of environmentalists.  The government added stipulations when listing them to make it easy for oil and gas exploration and development, and only linked the receding sea ice to the decline of the population, rather than global warming itself.  So while environmentalists may have technically gotten what they wanted, protection for the bears, they cannot use this as a tool in the greater battle against global warming.

Considering that most polar bears are actually in Canada, and the danger is not so much hunting as changes to their habitats, this decision by the US will likely only have a very limited impact.

With our current limited means of producing electricity, power shortages are a reality. This can mean brown outs, black outs, and even something worse as a large chunks of Ontario and the northeast US found out back in 2003.  And power demands will only increase.  Power companies are hoping that the introduction of a “smart” power meter will help to solve, or at least alleviate some of the problem.

The idea behind this relies on the fact that the demand for power fluctuates throughout the day.  There are peak hours when there is a high demand for electricity, such as during the prime working hours of factories, or even as people arrive home and start to prepare dinner.  If some power users can be moved off of the peak hours to times where there is less demand, the power-producing capabilities of a region need not be as high.

So how is this implemented?

Well, power consumption/output can be monitored, which correlates to demand.  If there is two-way communication between the power meter at a person's home and the power company, the power company can notify the end user that they should reduce their power consumption.  It has even been suggested that the power company be able to remotely power down nonessential devices, although I don't think many would be willing to give such control to power companies.  I personally would see it as an invasion of privacy.

Can this work?

Not without incentive.  Given enough blackouts or other complications, I think people would be willing to adopt such devices seeing it as the better option.  But until that happens, there needs to be a financial incentive to the end user.  Power companies are toying with the idea of changing the cost of power throughout the day, making it most expensive during peak hours.  Those who use power mostly during off hours can find themselves saving on their monthly bills.

Whether these type of devices become commonly used or not, at best they can only be a temporary solution.  Electricity demands will continue to grow and eventually each region must be able to increase its ability to supply it.

A few weeks ago, tragedy struck a couple in Calgary when they tried to call an ambulance for their 18-month-year-old son using their VoIP line.  They didn't stay on the line long enough for the VoIP 911 center to collect their information and transfer it to the local 911 emergency center.  Instead, the VoIP center forwarded the information they had on file, the address registered with the line.  Paramedics were sent to an out-of-date address in Mississauga, Ontario while the family waited in Calgary, eventually going to a neighbour's house to call 911 from their regular land line.

Sadly this type of problem is not new.  It is the same problem that cell phones had (and most actually still do have) with regards to transmitting caller location to emergency crews.  Governments started stepping in about 10 years ago, requiring cell phone providers to be able to locate handsets.  Currently, most are able to send information on the location of the nearest cell tower being used, giving a rough location.  A few are able to give more exact locations of the caller, but not many, and governments are pushing for this to be required.

The question to be asked is can something similar be done for VoIP?  Most accounts are meant as house landlines, and so a physical address can be registered with it. However, as the incident mentioned above proves, you simply cannot rely on this. While VoIP accounts don't use cell towers, they do use internet connections.  It should be possible to transmit the geographical location of the IP address through which the VoIP call is originating.  Proper location will of course require the coordination and cooperation of the ISP and VoIP provider, and maybe a loss of some privacy, but in theory it is possible.

Until such things are perfected though, always remember to give the 911 center (whichever you are connected to) your full location, and keep your current address registered with your VoIP provider.

No sooner do I discuss cyborg insects (or at least the first steps toward them) and advances in the design and testing of human bionic eyes than I stumble upon a story of a “bionic dolphin”:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/08/earlyshow/contributors/debbyeturner/main3148359.shtml

Okay, this isn't quite as exciting as it sounds at first.  Winter (the name of the dolphin) was caught in a crab trap and lost her tail when quite young.  No longer able to swim like a normal dolphin using an up-and-down motion, she instead learnt to swim using a side-to-side motion.  She was eventually “rescued” and, her keepers were worried that the unnatural swimming style would cause problems for her spine.  So, with the help of a prosthetics expert (and a year and a half of work), she is being given a new artificial tail to enable her to swim properly.

Heart warming?  Oh yeah.

But what is slightly more interesting (at least in my opinion) is what the artificial tail... entails. (That'll be my only pun – I promise!)  If you're thinking a year+ seems like a long time to make an artificial tail, you're right.  Since the tail must be able to move and flex in many different directions with her spine, rather than being rigid like a normal prosthetic for a person, it had to diverge from typical styles of prosthetics.  This means different materials, different designs, and, of course, a different application.  Problems such as durability, fit, even the fact that it'll be in a “different”, much saltier, environment needs to be considered.

Like all advances, this different style of prosthetics may find itself being applied to disabled people in new and novel ways.  This can mean improvements to current prosthetics, or even prosthetics for parts that didn't exist before.  I can't help but think this would have good applications for the idea of prosthetic tongues?

Skyrocketing gas prices and predictions for further increases are getting a lot of attention.  I've discussed this problem with respect to cars and the incentive to use public transport, but the implications of this are more wide spread.  One of the areas it's hitting hard is the airline industry.  Jet fuel costs are increasing along along with all other oil derivatives, leaving the companies with only a few options: swallow the cost and suffer the loss, pass the cost along to the customer, or try to minimize it.

Quite a number of airlines have have gone bankrupt recently.  I must admit that I was one of the sad souls holding a Jetsgo ticket when it went under a few years ago. Harmony is another one that we've lost.  So, swallowing the cost and suffering the loss seems like it's a rather risky thing to do – and not exactly the basis of good business practice.

Pass the cost along to us?  Well, I don't know about you but I tend to go for the cheapest tickets.  If one airline looks like its gouging me, I just avoid it.  So, if you're the only one passing along the cost to the customer, chances are you're going to face bankruptcy again as you lose your customers to the cheaper competition.

Minimizing the costs is where most airlines are focusing their attention.  Improved efficiency in jet engines is big money.  Even small changes result in big savings since so much fuel is consumed.  However, even with current engines, the airlines have started to take extra steps to improve gas mileage.  Flying slower is one approach. Just like your car, you tend to have better gas mileage at slower speeds than at higher ones.  Flying with a tailwind also requires less work and therefore less fuel.  Conversely, avoiding head wind is also beneficial.  Airlines are taking extra efforts to have their flights routed at ideal altitudes and routes.

Airplanes are a major mode of transportation, so I doubt we'll see the industry ever collapse completely, but the current oil prices are certainly taking their tole on the industry.  Only the companies that keep themselves very competitive have the chance to survive.

I bet I'm not the only one that has noticed that Apple's Safari web browser has been added as an “update” in Apple's automatic updating software right next to iTunes and Quicktime.

I've never been much of an Apple fan, but I've at least been able to respect the company.  Their iPods are the best mp3 players on the market in my opinion.  Their computers and operating system satisfies the needs of their audience for the most part.  And they haven't used many of the evil little tricks that Microsoft does – until now.

Forcing their software on desktop computers to push out competition has been a major strategy of Microsoft in the past.  In fact, Microsoft got themselves into a bit of trouble by preinstalling Internet Explorer with Windows 95, but the stunt worked and they beat out Netscape, taking dominance over the market.  Apple is now turning around, selling out their morals, and doing the same thing.  While they can't preinstall it with the operating system, they're doing the next best thing by tricking any user with any Apple software on their system to unintentionally install it.

Personally, I'm a FireFox user.  I've experienced Safari a couple of times when using a Mac, but I can't say I like or hate it.  What I do hate though, is this tactic that Apple has adopted.  It's dishonest, and quite annoying.  I can't figure out how to remove it from the updates list so it keeps popping back up.  That's one thing I can say for Microsoft; when I told it I didn't want to install the Genuine Advantage Tool (and this is something that annoyed me thoroughly too, which I may feel the need to rant about one day), it at least stopped asking me about it.

This whole incident has made me lose respect for Apple.  I really hope they don't adopt more tactics of Microsoft.

I acknowledge that different people have different definitions of what is considered art.  Some define it by its beauty.  Some by the feeling it inspires.  Some by the feeling the act of creating it gives.  Some by the thoughts it provokes... and so forth.  I can't say I agree with all definitions, but most of the time I can at least understand where the person is coming from.  However, every now and then I see something that no matter how open I try to make myself, I just can't accept it as art.  The latest incident that has caught my attention is a a group of Germans living in a museum in Israel with lice in there hair:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/7370842.stm

The museum actually selected this idea from many submissions for their exhibit on “hosting”.

First off, I'm left wondering who actually wants to go see this exhibit?  Free or not (and I'm not even sure it's free), I've got better things to do with my time, like watching paint dry.  Secondly, money is being spent on this.  Maybe just the museum's money, but quite potentially tax money as well.  If it were my tax money that was being wasted on something as stupid as this, I'd be rather ticked off.  I can't think of any country whose social services couldn't use a bit more funding, and to waste money on something like is, well, a waste.

Don't get me wrong.  I don't think all art is a waste of money.  Every country should spend some of its money (yes, tax money collected from the masses) to support the arts, and to provide a collection for the public to view.  I just get annoyed when I see something as silly as this masquerading as art and taking away money that could be used for much better causes – even art related ones.

Does anyone out there disagree with me and think that the above exhibit is really art?

Back in January, I brought up the idea of wireless VoIP as an alternative to cell phones.  In particular, I mentioned Linsys's WIP330 wireless VoIP device.  Well, the price on these little toys has finally dropped to the point where I thought it would be a good idea to pick on up.  I've had it for just over a week and I think it's time to post a review.

Basic info:

This phone is a little larger than most cell phones coming in at around 14cm in length.  The weight is fine though (just over 100 g), and it isn't too large as to make it unwieldy.  It runs off of Windows CE and is currently the only wireless VoIP device that has a built in web browser – which was the main reason I wanted this model.

Setup:

It took me a good 2 hours to get this phone working with my home wireless network and VoIP account.  It was having a lot of problems until I upgraded the firmware. Unfortunately upgrading the firmware requires you to log onto a wireless network to download the files.  I had to drop all encryption on my network to get it to communicate and takes ~30 min to download and install the files, but most of it is automated requiring minimal user interaction.  Even with the latest firmware, the phone will not support WPA2 encryption, forcing me to change my network to just WPA. Once it was working with my network, it took me just a bit of extra time to get it working with my Acanac VoIP account.  Unfortunately the phone had a default port of 6060 entered in, giving me a bit of grief until I realized it should be 5060 and changed it.  At that point, every started working smoothly.

Pros:

The voice quality was great on phone calls with the default settings.  It has no problem detecting wireless connections and signal strength that it receives is just as good as on my desktop.  A full charge lasted me about 24 hours between ~1 hour of talk time, lots of playing around with colour screen and the web browser, and the rest on standby.  I think this is reasonable, but not great.  I now turn the phone off overnight and when I don't need it, and the battery lasts many days.  Avoiding having the screen on saves a lot of battery time too.

Cons:

The setup was NOT trivial as I described, and I don't think the average user would fair well getting it working.  It also doesn't support all connection encryption formats.  The “keyboard” design drives me crazy.  You need to scroll between lowercase, uppercase and numbers using the pound key rather than pushing the corresponding number button to go through all options at once.  This makes it incredibly annoying to enter info into forms, as needed when logging onto Wi-Fi spots with web logins.  When the phone loses the connection with a web login Wi-Fi, you need to re-enter all info into the form again.  Customization of the phone is very limited in terms of ring tone, background etc.  There is also a button on the side of it (near the volume buttons) which has no purpose.  All literature for the phone conveniently ignores its existence in their description of the phone.  This might change with future firmware updates.

Bottom line:

I'm happy with my new toy, but I don't think this phone is for everyone, especially at the current price tag.  As it gets cheaper, and better firmware upgrades are released to make it more easy to use/setup, it might start to appeal to a wider audience.  For the moment, only those who are tech-savvy and like toys should invest in one.

For those of you who haven't heard yet, an 8-year-old boy made a 3.5 min video of himself threatening to kill President Bush and posted it on youtube.  It has since been taken down, but a lot of sites are still mirroring it.  Here is one if you want to want to see exactly what he said (be warned this contains foul language and unpleasant statements):

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/347311/

Yes this is American.  Yes it is rather disturbing.  But I still want to talk about it because the very fact that it exists, and the response it has gotten, says a lot.

The first thing, of course, is that it is rather unlikely that the kid developed these sentiments and ideas on his own.  He probably heard it from his parents and other family members.  Bush's lack of popularity (to put it politely) isn't exactly new, but it is now reaching a level where people are openly expressing the desire  to see him dead.

The second point is that is shows how people incorrectly think that the internet gives them anonymity.  I don't think the average person realizes just how easy it is for authorities (or anyone else with the right connections) to track back the access of a site to them.  Most things done on the internet are recorded in one log file or another.

The third point lies in the response to the video.  Here I am, one of many, who is writing about, linking it, and giving it attention.  While not a single person has condoned the video, and we talk about it only to express our disapproval, the very fact that we do so gives it credit.  This video could have been ignored, causing it to slip into obscurity and be labelled as another bad joke/idea.  Our very need for news (and yes, entertainment) enables and even encourages people like this to pull these stunts.

I guess I'm just a slave to the system.

I am among those pleasantly surprised by Susan Boyle’s performance of the song “I Dreamed a Dream” on the TV show Britain’s Got Talent.  She is a refreshing change from the manufactured groups and singers who have to rely too heavily on digital filters to fix the holes left by their lack of talent.  For those who haven’t seen her performance yet, take a look for yourself:

http://uk.video.yahoo.com/watch/4853639/12942069

Sure the show did try to play it up a bit, and probably encouraged her to dress down and/or mislead the judges, but you can’t deny the contrast between her talent and image compared to that of the average pop singer.  It is exactly this contrast that has impressed so many people, and made her recent fame inspirational.

And she has just recently had a makeover.

I am the first to defend her right to live as she chooses.  She shouldn’t be restricted in how she can dress or look just because the rest of us like the idea of her “ability over beauty.”  That said, I can understand how so many people fear that she’ll be whitewashed into just another celebrity.  The point where she starts worrying more about her looks than her singing ability is the day the public has really lost her.

It may seem a bit trivial.  It definitely seems odd that I should be writing about a makeover and not making fun of it.  But all of this just underlies the idea that most of us don’t like the image-obsessed mentality of celebrities, and when ones come by that embody all the talent and essence of what we should be putting into the spotlight, we don’t like the idea of it being tarnished.

Her brother has assured the public that the makeover hasn’t changed who she is, and having looked at a picture of the new her, I don’t think there is too much to worry about… yet.

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to build the world's first bionic man.”  A very famous phrase from the TV show The Six Million Dollar Man.  One of bionic parts given to the main character was an eye.  This show ended only 30 years ago, but very recently a company named Second Sight has received approval to start trials of its second generation chronically implantable retinal prosthesis.  Yes, the bionic eye may be closer than you think.

Second Sight was formed in the 1990s and underwent trials for their first generation implant between 2002 and 2004 with six subjects, five of whom still use it today.  The retinal prosthesis involves implanting an electronic receiver inside the eye attached to the retina.  A special set of glasses with a camera is worn and relays information to this receiver, which in turn relays signals to the optic nerve through the retina.  The brain interprets these signals, providing a rudimentary image.  The first generation implant used 16 electrodes, while this newer second generation one uses 60, allowing for more information and a better image – in theory.

This device is not aimed to cure all forms of blindness.  The optic nerve, and at least some of the retina must still be functional and able to receive the signal being sent by the device.  In particular, the company is trying the prosthetics on a specific group of people that suffer from retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary disease that affects the retina causing tunnel vision and loss of night vision, potentially progressing to complete blindness.

Second Site is also not the only company pursuing a “bionic eye”, and their product (along with all others) is still far away from giving people back full and complete vision.  At best, shadowed outlines and other limited information are being provided to these trial subjects.  However, even with this limited eye-site, these subjects are finding themselves able to achieve an array of tasks that were previously not possible, giving them hope and a level of independence that they did not have before.

Riding the success of the X PRIZE foundation, which gives away large cash prizes to encourage progress (I covered this in my other blog), PETA has come up with their own contest.  They will give $1 million to the first to researchers who can produce chicken meat in vitro (outside the living body) and therefore avoid having to kill chickens for food:

http://www.peta.org/feat_in_vitro_contest.asp

The deadline is 30 Jun 2012, the meat was have the same taste and texture as real meat, being indistinguishable to both meat and non-meat-eaters, and must be sold in at least 10 states at a competitive price.  Contestant entries will be judged by a panel of 10 PETA judges using a fried “chicken” recipe from a vegetarian web site.

Does PETA actually think this will be achieved?  I really doubt they care.  They're in a win-win situation with the contest, as they're either getting a lot of publicity to one of their causes, or actually achieving the end goal and saving the lives of many chickens.  What they've probably overlooked though, is that a lot of chickens are likely to lose their lives in any type of pursuit like this, whether it be to gain access to the material to start things off, or to compare the in vitro stuff to the real.

For those who feel that life is sacred, there is also the question of what constitutes “life” or the “animal”.  Is consuming meat grown in a petri dish really absolve one of the crimes of consuming animal meat?  To put the question in a more critical light, would you be okay with people who consume human flesh as long it is grown in a petri dish?  (Disgusting I agree, but would it hold the same moral issues?)

Generally I'm not a fan of the extreme actions taken by PETA, but this contest has got me intrigued.

Air France has already started trials allowing cell phone use on planes.  The verdict:  crappy and expensive!  Sound quality, ease of use and cost are all pretty awful.

Early users have described the quality as sounding like talking to a “small robot”.  The planes also have have to use satellites rather than ground stations to relay the information, resulting in typical delays of the signal and an “echo” as you can hear yourself coming through on the other end a few seconds later, along with all the associated awkwardness from both parties start talking over each other.

Ease of use also seems to be a big problem, as only six people at a time can make calls.  Some users have also reported having to attempt calls multiple times before succeeding, and no one has yet been able to receive a call while in flight; inbound calls just go to voice mail.  Blackberry users have also complained that that they cannot receive e-mail.

And what do you expect to pay for this substandard service?  Well, it depends on the provider, but 2-3 euros per minute seems to be the price range for this test trial. I don't know about you, but I think I can wait the few hours to call someone from the ground rather than being extorted for horrible call quality.  And then there is the comfort of fellow passengers about which I warned in my last post.  Some have complained in surveys that it ruins the previous “zone of calm” created by the cell phone-free atmosphere or disturbing them during their much needed sleep before business meetings the following morning.

The only thing that people seemed to feel positively about was the use of in-flight text messages.  Services like these are more along the lines of wi-fi on the planes – something which airlines may soon offer in-flight quite separately from any cell phone service.

I can't help but feel relieved and smug that the first trials of cell phone use on planes has gone so miserably.  We may be saved yet from having to endure the loud and obnoxious person in the seat next to us shouting into his phone!

Embarrassing music and movie industries who complain about piracy when people copy material without permission, real pirates in the international waters near Somalia have been terrorizing the ships using the shortcut  through the Gulf of Aden rather than taking the longer and more expensive trip south around Africa.  The pirates have made the whole process into a rather lucrative operation – and not only for themselves.  In the process of collecting millions by keeping cargos and crews captive, teams of lawyers and negotiators are needed for each of these incidences.  In an attempt to stop the problem, armed patrols – usually boats but sometimes crew – are also employed.

Okay, so a bit of a reality check before continuing.  Despite the media coverage and the great headlines that these produce, pirates are only capturing small fraction of the ships that pass through the area.  Many shipping companies can simply get away with playing the odds that their shipment won’t be the one to get caught.  Even if the ship is captured, the ransom and process isn’t something that’s going to bankrupt them.  It’ll hurt the bottom line of course, but they’ll be able to pay and the pirates know it, not to mention any insurance payouts that the company may get.  At the end of the day, the crew and cargo are set free if demands are met.

The big question is how can these people be getting away with a 200+ year-old crime in this modern age.  One of the keys points is that it takes place in international waters.  This means that it is hard to push the blame on a specific country, even though they are from Somalia.  International laws also make it hard to board an “enemy” boat in the case of seized cargo, and maybe even harder to persecute any offenders.  The US likely broke an international law or two when the recently rescued a ship’s captain.  Their only defense would be that they thought the captain’s life was in danger.  In addition to this, and probably the true driving force, is the cost of properly policing the area.  There are too many ships passing through, and the area is too large to do it cost effectively.  The loss of a ship or two is sadly better for the bottom line.

Maybe I'm being a bit melodramatic.  Maybe I'm overreacting.  But I don't think so. The European Union's decision to allow cell phones on air plane flights is definitely a sign that the end is near...

Sure, sure, there might be some legitimate uses for this.  Cell phone use means access to the internet and all forms of information transfer.  It'll allow businessmen to get a head start on their work, and help alleviate problems that communication blackouts on really long flights can cause.  But let's be realistic. The vast majority of cell phone use will be by obnoxious people droning on about mundane and completely unnecessary things.  And they'll likely be doing this about 10 cm from your ear in the seat right next to you.

It's one thing to allow people to use cell phones in public areas where you can walk away from them if they annoy you.  You might even be able to justify it on public buses where the trip is short enough that you can just close your eyes and wait for it to be over.  But on a long flight, when you're stuck in a flying sardine can with nowhere to go, and no alternatives, letting people obnoxiously yak away on their cell phones are almost certainly going to lead to more than one case of “plane rage”.  It'll only take one guy with a poor connection shouting into his cell phone for it to disturb the entire plane.  And lets not forget about the d***ringing of the cell phones too.  You know how much it annoys you during shows and lectures, or even the dinner table.  Considering the demographics of most plane rides, your bound to hear a lot more of them interrupting your in-flight movie or feeble attempt to get sleep on the plane.

As much as I'd like to try, I can't see this ending well.  I just keep imagining all the complaints that airlines will receive from people describing how they spent the entire flight with some jerk yelling right next to their ear.  My only hope is that cell phone companies keep the cost of these calls prohibitively high.

In my last post, I covered the fact that all countries recognize China's sovereignty over Tibet because of the Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet signed in 1951.  However, the more important question is should Tibet be “free” and independent.

Tibetans view themselves as being distinct in culture, religion and history from the rest of China.  (Sounds very similar to Quebec's position in Canada, doesn't it?)  The Tibetan government in exile (not officially recognized by any country) claims that China forced the Seventeen Point Agreement to be signed under duress and thus it should not be legally recognized.  Furthermore, they claim that China has been intentionally bringing in new Chinese settlers to the region and denying native Tibetans equal social and economic status in an effort to dilute Tibetan culture and control.  Many Tibetans have also been killed in uprisings  or imprisoned as political prisoners over the years.  The Chinese government counters that they have done nothing but improve the infrastructure and life of the people of the region, and try to control the violence that has irrupted in the area.

While I won't deny that China has committed crimes against Tibetans, I think that we must also be aware that Tibetan forms of protests have also been less than peaceful.  There have been numerous incidents of non-native Tibetan business being specifically targeted for looting and destruction.  Violence wasn't limited to property, but also aimed at people with stones and even knives leading to the loss of lives.  Fighting against an invading force is one thing, but attacking civilians cannot be justified, no matter how much the Tibetan people feel they have been wronged, and I certainly cannot condone or respect these actions, nor do I think they should be ignored by the Western media either.

Putting aside the wrongful actions of both China and Tibet, I still must say at the end  of the day that if Tibetans want autonomy, then they should have a right to it.  Just as Quebec can hold referendums to split from Canada, Tibet should have the same ability to choose.  I have yet to see any good reason as to why China must retain absolute control over the region.  The Dalai Lama states that he is fighting not to separate Tibet from China, as Tibet needs to be part of the People's Republic of China in order to develop as a modern nation, but rather just for full autonomy within China to protect their culture.

Unfortunately, I think that even if Tibet is granted the autonomy it wants, it will still take a long time before the region sees proper peace.  Even among Tibetans, there is a feeling within the younger generation that there needs to be a separation between government and religion, as the Dalai Lama currently represents both the spiritual leader and potential government head.  They fear the possibility of being serfs bound to land owned by monasteries and aristocrats as the majority of people were prior to 1951.

With the 2008 Summer Olympics being held in Beijing, a lot of attention has been drawn toward China and specifically Tibet.  “Free Tibet”/anti-China activists have marred much of the traditional Olympic Torch Relay ceremony.  With so much controversy surrounding Tibet, I thought I'd dedicate a couple of posts to understanding what it is all about.

What is Tibet?

Yes, let's start with the basics:  Tibet is a region in Central Asia home to approximately 2.5 million people.  The average elevation of Tibet is 4900 m, making the it the highest region (not point) in the world and giving it the nickname “Roof of the World”.

Is Tibet part of China?

The short answer is yes. 

But let's try to look at the longer answer:  While Tibet has a long history, I'll jump to the Qing Dynasty of China starting in the late 1600s.  Rulers of this dynasty did manage to secure power and influence over Tibet, and China argues that it was officially incorporated into the country.  Regardless of the status at this that time, when the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, Tibet declared it's independence from China.

Tibet's independence wasn't really questioned until the conclusion of World War II when the the People's Republic of China was formed in 1949.  They claimed that China had never renounced it's claim or control over Tibet and launched a 40 000 strong army that crushed the Tibetan army of 5 000.  With the defeat of their army, the Tibetan delegates signed the Seventeen Point Agreement for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet in 1951.  It is this document that the countries in the world recognize as giving China legal control over Tibet.

But from all the news and media it sounds like none of the first world countries see China's right to Tibet.  Are you sure that no one recognizes the the independence of Tibet as a nation?

While Hollywood celebrities and pop culture may make it seem that China is illegally occupying Tibet, not a single countries recognizes it's independence.  When China invaded in 1949, the Tibetan government fled and now resides in India, including the Dalia Lama, and refers to themselves as Tibetan government in exile.  Again, with the signing of the Seventeen Point Agreement, not a single country recognizes

Tibet's sovereignty, but instead all countries recognize China's control over the region.

What I've covered here is really just the technical info/history of Tibet's situation.  My next post will focus more on the moral concerns with Tibet's situation.

A little while ago, I blogged about the possibility of using insects for surveillance.  To achieve this, you would need to be able to control the insect as well as implant recording devices or even tap into the auditory and visual information from the insect. I had delegated this idea to the realm of science fiction rather than science fact.  However, after checking out this video I think I might have to start to rethink my statement:

http://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/04/video-cyborg-mo.html

Cool?  Absolutely.  They show that they can directly control the wings, their flapping frequency, and even influence the direction that the insect turns and when it takes off.  They also take it one step further than I had already talked about. They've created an mechanized structure using the moth as the brain/sensory input. In a odd sort of way, adding the moth can simplify the design of the machine as the moth already has much of the “equipment” that is “built in”.

Before we get a little too excited though, looking at those videos it still seems a bit far away to have a truly remote controlled insect.  First off, the wires attached to the moths were very evident and would be very restrictive.  They would first have to go wireless, implementing some form of RF (or other frequency) control. This is probably not as restricting as actually figuring out how an operator would manage to control the moth.  Watching the video (and even just watching any insect), the timing and reflexes needed from the operator would be incredible.  It would either take a lot of training to become successful at it, or it would take computer-aided help.  I'm guessing the latter will become the more feasible of the two, and the design of the (or any) artificial intelligence would take quite a bit of work and debugging (I had to put at least one pun in here somewhere!) to become successful, as any video gamer could quickly tell you.

While I'm willing to admit that the idea is approaching science reality much quicker than I had originally thought, I'd still be very careful about jumping the gun and expecting this type of technology to be useful any time in the near future.

People strapping bombs to their body, walking into crowded civilian areas and detonating themselves to cause as much harm to others as they can.  Suicide bombing isn't pretty and isn't something that is easily stopped.  There is no one to arrest, no one to charge and no closure for those who are injured.

Attacks against civilian populations is nothing new unfortunately.  Up until World War 2, war had evolved almost a gentlemanly approach to it.  Armies, or even warriors, of opposing sides would meet and one would eventually come out the victor. The consequence of losing in the battlefield would eventually propagate back to the losing nation.  What was discovered in WW2 was that wars could be won much more quickly and easily by attacking the civilian population rather than the the army. Civilians are not trained to deal with attacks.  They are not prepared to suffer the same conditions and, if driven to it, can end a war early before their army is defeated.  The isolated arena of the battlefield was erased and civilian populations were drawn directly into the war.

Suicide bombers take this one set further.  Without officially declaring war, without giving any warning, they infiltrate directly into civilian populations and attack.  Some try to justify them as a means to fight oppression; A means to fight against wrongs visited upon them and a means to fight against a much larger force.

First off, attacks upon civilian populations are just plain disgusting and immoral. The average civilian does not know or even care about the conflict that their country has involved itself in.  They are simply trying to carry on with some semblance of their life.  Attacks against civilians are downright cowardly.

Suicide bombers are even worse.  No matter what injustice has been done, what oppression one is trying to fight, or the message one is trying to make, there  could NEVER be ANY excuse to going and randomly kill innocent people.  There is nothing that the victims could ever even have to done to change the cause that the bomber is supposedly fighting for.  Suicide bombings are designed to spread misery, fear and pain to those who don't deserve it.  They accomplish little else.

Suicide bombing will always be a stain against human morality and represents some of the darkest aspects of human nature.

In my last post I brought up the notion that doctors have a very privileged position within the health care system.  Let's face it, you're willing to tell them things that you wouldn't tell anyone else.  You're willing to take your clothes off in front of a stranger (MD) without thinking too much about it.  In fact, you'd probably even let them cut you open and do things inside you if they told you it was necessary.  Now that's what I call privileged.

Don't get wrong, most of these things aren't done arbitrarily.  They're done to ensure your health and well-being.  What ticks me off is when I see blatant examples of MDs abusing their position.  This story is a little old, and Romanian, but I think it illustrates exactly the type of thing I am complaining about:

http://www.metro.co.uk/weird/article.html?in_article_id=33257&in_page_id=2

For those not wishing to read the entire article, let me summarize it:  a surgeon is having marital troubles at home.  He performs surgery on a patient and accidentally cuts the urinary channel.  In a fit of rage he cuts off the patient's p***and proceeds to cut it into small pieces before storming off.  The courts found him personally accountable (not an insurance company) for ~$250 000 to pay for reconstructive surgery and the patient's suffering.

The doctor's union in Romania then complained that he shouldn't be held personally accountable, that loss of his license was punishment enough.  They claim that if physicians are personally accountable they wouldn't attempt procedures that they weren't sure they could do.

First off, I don't care how bad things are at home, what gives him any sort of right to disfigure the man?  I think he should be treated like any other person if they had cut off a man's p***and proceeded to mutilate it; I really think he should have been criminally charged with assault or whatever else is appropriate.  Why should he be treated differently for his crime just because he is a doctor?

Secondly, how can you say you're offering patients proper care if you are giving them physicians who aren't even confident that they can properly perform the procedure?!  I understand that there is some level of hands-on learning that is required, but each patient should be fully informed if they are being treated merely by a student and should have the option to refuse.  In this instance, I think it partially comes back to the patients to look out for themselves with sites like rate:

http://ratemds.com/social/

Healthcare is a touchy subject to most people, and within the system doctors, or rather physicians, have a very privileged position.  Physicians are typically ranked among the most “trusted” professions and their advice is often given sacred status: “But my doctor said I shouldn't do this.”

What some people forget is that medicine is like every other profession.  There are some who are very good at it, and there are many who are very bad at it.  The concept of getting a “second opinion” is just as important in medicine as any other profession, and perhaps even more so.  Many patients are injured or even die every year due to errors by physicians.  A recent example of a major medical error happened in Germany.  A women who went in for surgery on her leg instead had her bowels operated on:

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2008/03/german-surgeons.html

This article also lists other major blunders, such as a woman left with a cancerous kidney because the physicians removed the healthy one.

Luckily not everyone is as blindly trusting.  A number of patients banded together and formed a website to rate their doctors:

http://ratemds.com/social/

The idea is that if enough patients leave feedback on their physicians, the incompetent ones will quickly become apparent and the potential harm they can cause will quickly diminish as they find themselves without patients.  But isn't it possible that this site will be abused and negative comments left for good physicians?  Absolutely.  Every rating system is abused to some degree.  However, as the site states, if physicians encourage all their patients to rate them, the truth will quickly overpower a few abusive comments.

What I truly find scary is that many physicians have attacked the site stating that what they are doing is “inappropriate” and even threatening to sue them.  Since when is giving an honest opinion about services rendered inappropriate?  And more than that, what do these physicians have to fear?  Is the quality of their services something that should be kept secret?  Should their blunders be kept hidden?

There are a lot of good physicians out there, but there are also a lot of bad ones.  Don't be afraid to seek a second opinion if you're not confident that your doctor really knew what he/she was doing.  I think rating-your-doctor is also a great idea and recommend that everyone rate theirs.  Don't forget to talk about both the bad AND the good!

We take for granted the ability to record sounds.  Everyone owns (and probably hates) an answering machine.  Most people know of records, used to record music, poetry and other performances, that gave way to 8-tracks, which were replaced by cassettes, CDs and now flash-memory players.  But the ability to record sound is actually a rather new invention.

Edison is credited as the inventor of the first device to record and play sounds, known as the phonograph.  He invented it in 1877 and it was the invention that first gave him real fame, although it certainly was not his first invention. However, devices to “record” sound predate his invention by just a bit.

A 10 second recording of an anonymous singer singing “Au Clair de la Lune” from 8 April, 1860 has very recently made big news.  The recording was made on a machine known as a phonautograph, invented by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857, which was designed to turn sound into a visual representation not intended to be played back.  The idea behind the device is simple:  sound causes the device to vibrate, and these vibrations are imparted to a writing instrument that draws them onto a length of paper.  With the help of modern computing, these visual recordings have been converted back into their original sounds and cleaned up a bit to remove noise and inconsistencies in the sampling rate of the recording.

This finding predates the previous earliest (playable) recording from 1978 and Edison's oldest recording from 1888 (of a Handel concert).  Though Edison is not credited with having created the oldest recording, no one contests that he should still be credited with inventing the first machine to both record and play back audio sounds.

For those interested in hearing the “Au Clair de la Lune” and other early audio recordings, you can find them at this website:

http://www.firstsounds.org/

The chance to go somewhere where few other have gone.  Weightlessness.  A view of the Earth from space.  There are many reasons that make the idea of travelling into space very attractive, and more than just a few companies are realizing the commercial potential of space tourism.

Okay, so the idea of travelling, or rather site seeing, in space isn't exactly new. Some of the great fiction writers like the late Arthur C. Clarke, Roald Dahl (if you don't believe me, give Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator a read), Larry Niven and of course Gene Roddenberry.  We've even gotten to the point where we're comfortable enough with the idea that we can even satire it.  Futurama is the prime example, where the even the Moon has been turned into a tacky amusement park.

What's a bit more interesting is that within the last 10 years, this has started to become a reality.  Dennis Tito became the first space tourist in 2001, spending just under 8 days in space at a cost of ~$20 million.  (Okay, some like to argue that there were earlier tourists, others like to argue that since he conducted experiments in space that we he wasn't really a tourist.  He just paid for his own ticket.)  Since then, a few other people have followed in his footsteps, paying for the privilege to go to space.

Right now the race is still on for the first private company to offer commercial trips into space.  At the moment there are roughly half a dozen companies hoping to test out their ships within the next few years.  Virgin Galactic, one the companies, has already taken reservations at a cost of $200 thousand each.  Ideas of space hotels and paid space walks have also been proposed.

With the Federal Aviation Administration estimating space tourism to be more than $1 billion market by 2021, we'll likely see more companies trying to edge their way into the market and hopefully a drop in the expected price for a ticket into space.

The X PRIZE Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that offers large cash prizes for the achievement by the first group/person to successfully complete a set goal.  The basic idea is to encourage radical breakthroughs in technological advancements through competition.  The inspiration for the organization came from the different prizes offered in the early 19th century to encourage advancements in aviation, and the Orteig Prize in particular, which offered $25 000 for the first non-stop flight between New York and Paris.  Funding currently comes from large companies after which the prizes are typically named.  Prizes that have been offered and awarded already are the Ansari X PRIZE and the Archon X PRIZE.  Prizes currently being offered that have not been won yet are the Progressive Automotive X PRIZE and the Google Lunar X PRIZE.

Ansari X PRIZE

The goal of this prize was to inspire advancements in the area of space.  The $10 million prize was awarded to Burt Rutan for his SpaceShipOne, which achieved the goal of launching a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks.

Archon X PRIZE

This was also a $10 million prize, and was designed to inspire advancements in medicine (genomics in particular).  The prize was won by  Stewart Blusson for building and using a device to sequence 100 human genomes within 10 or less day, with only an allowable error of once in every 100 000 sequenced bases, covering at least 98% of the genome, and costing no more than $10 000 USD per genome.

Automotive X PRIZE

This prize was inspired by global warming concerns and a need for improvement in the automotive industry.  This is actually two separate competitions: a mainstream class and the alternate class.  The prize moneys will be given for the design of the first commercially viable super-efficient vehicles that will achieve 100 MPG, in addition to a few other criterion depending on the class type.

Google Lunar X PRIZE

This $20 million prize is again designed to encourage space advancements.  The objective for this competition is to land a rover on the moon that can rove at least 500 m and transmit back high definition images and video.

It’s been well over a year now since Microsoft rolled out its new operating system, Windows Vista.  Aside from the usual updates in eye candy, the operating system was supposed to focus on security improvements and cut back on the malware and other issues that have plagued their previous operating systems.

So, what have they achieved?

Well,  in the eye candy area they offer new transparencies, much sexier icons and even a side bar for “gadgets”, not to mention a new splash screen as you load up.  Yes, if you haven’t noticed, I don’t think too highly of Vista.  Everything they offer as  “new” features has long since been done already with 3rd party support in XP or by another operating system like Mac OS or Linux.  In terms of their added security, anyone who has seen the Apple commercials making fun of Vista with a security guard asking whether  to “cancel or allow” every other second has a pretty good idea of what it’s like.  On top of being just plain annoying, it also blocks a lot of other 3rd party legitimate software from running that include a lot of rather useful stuff.  So Vista = more annoying and allows you to use less software.

But haven’t they now fixed that with their service pack 1 (SP1) that was just released?

If Microsoft were a good company, absolutely we should expect that.  But we know better.  Apparently service pack 1 has cause many programs that are supposed to be “Vista compatible” and that used to work fine to suddenly stop.  It’s annoyed people enough that there are even official recommendations out there not to apply the updated:

http://slashdot.org/articles/08/03/23/181210.shtml

So once again, nicely done Microsoft!

But, it can’t really be that bad, can it?

Let me put it this way, Microsoft, In attempt to appease annoyed customers, has just announced that they will be offering free support to all Windows Vista users for SP1.   On top of that, they had intended to stop selling and supporting Windows XP by now.  But, because people hate Vista so much and would prefer to go back to XP, they have been forced to continue selling and supporting it.  After having spent half a day last week downgrading a laptop from Vista to XP, even though the laptop manufacturer does not officially support XP, I still have to say it’s worth it because Vista is so frustrating.

For those who actually like Vista, power to you.  For almost everyone else, hopefully Microsoft will eventually be able to salvage something useful from this miserable operating system.  Or better yet, maybe they’ll finally lose the market to Mac OS or Linux.

It’s been official for a little while now that Blu-ray won the race for the next generation format.  HD-DVD is taking its place next to Beta as just another failed technology that caused early adopters to waste a lot of money.  But, unfortunately, all is not well in the world of Blu-ray.  Dr. Gertrude Neumark Rothschild has recently filed a law suit against the major manufacturers for copyright infringement.  This includes big names like Hitachi, LG, Motorola, Nokia, Pioneer, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Toshiba and, of course, Sony.

Who is this Rothschild anyway?

She’s a PhD in chemistry from Columbia that has worked at Sylvania Research Laboratories and Philips Laboratories.   She holds a few patents including ones on the production of wide band-gap semiconductors in the blue/ultraviolet range, which is likely the one that she is using to sue the big companies.

What does this mean?

Well, the case is still under investigation, but if she wins it means that these companies will either have to stop producing/selling these products or pay her royalties for using the patent.  This will probably be in addition to damages that they will owe her for products already sold.  For the end consumer, this will likely mean that Blu-ray devices will be more limited as to who produces them, and quite potentially more expensive as they increase the price to cover the extra royalty costs that the manufacturers will now owe.  (Yes, the bill would probably be passed on to us, the consumers.)  And don’t worry, this patent dispute probably covers the same technology in HD-DVD, so even if Blu-ray had lost, we probably would still be dealing with this exact same problem.

Before anyone panics over this, let me reiterate:  As of right now, the patent dispute is still under investigation.  No one has won/lost it yet.

At the age of 90, Arthur C. Clarke died on 19 March 2008.  While he hardly died young, it is always a bit of a shock when someone so monumental dies.  Clarke is best known for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey and movie by the same name that was created in collaboration with Stanley Kubrick.

So you might be wondering what this is during in a blog about science and technology.

Well, Clarke is one of the classical examples of how science fiction heavily influences science, helping to turn it from fiction into science fact.  The book was written in different forms from 1948 and published in the now familiar novel in 1968.  This was a year before humans even stepped fit on the the moon (20 July, 1969) yet Clarke described events occurring on the moon and much deeper regions of space in erringly accurate ways.  Jokes were even made on early space exploration missions of discovering giant black monoliths.  For a book that is 50 years old, it still does an amazing job of predicting technology, such as computer advancements and communication, and I would recommend that everyone read it.

Besides his work on fiction, Clarke is also known for proposing the idea of geostationary satellites.  In a 1945 paper titled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays” he theorized the idea of the ideal telecommunications relay by having a satellite orbit the earth in synchronization with the rotation of the Earth, always keeping it above the same region.  This style of orbit prevents “blackout periods” where communication with the satellite is lost because it is being blocked by the Earth itself.  While it is probably doubtful that his work directly led to the modern telecommunication satellite networks, geostationary orbits are still sometimes referred to as Clarke Orbit or the Clarke Belt to honour him.

The world is definitely a richer place thanks to the work of Clarke.

I touched upon genetically modified (GM) foods a bit when talking about organic food and again when talking about golden rice, but I want to spend a little more time explaining it.  GM foods aren't all bad as some would have you believe, but they do have some risks associated with them.

Let's start with the basics again.  Most people are comfortable with the idea of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) at the blueprints for life.  It's in plants, animals, and, yes, that includes us humans.  Portions of DNA can be broken down into genes which form the “useful” bits.  These genes code for proteins that are needed to create an organism, determine how it functions, and how it looks.

The first GM food was a tomato designed to delay its ripening process, produced in the early 1990s.  By remaining unripe, it was easier to transport and more resistant to bruising.  This is essentially the idea behind GM.  We find something very useful or beneficial, often within one type of organism, that we would like to see in a different one.  Another example is if one type of food produces a natural pesticide, it would be very beneficial if our primary food crops could also create their own natural pesticide.  By finding the gene that controls this pesticide production, it can be copied into the DNA of one our primary crops, adding the gene into it.  When this GM crop is grown, it will now produce the natural pesticide.

The advantage here is obvious.  We can include beneficial traits into our food making it easier and safer to grow.  In the case of golden rice, where the gene to produce the precursor for vitamin A was added, it can also make the food more nutritious to eat.  Since all genes are made of the same things, GM ones included, your body can't tell them apart and they can't directly harm you when you eat the food.

However, there are potential dangers.  GM isn't always an exact science. Often other genes are transferred along with the desired one.  If these additional genes produce undesirable results, then the resulting GM food may not be beneficial. In addition, the result of the new gene itself may not be exactly as expected or desired.  This includes both the response within the GM food as well as within the environment and food chain resulting from it.  Another potential problem is if the GM strain of the food starts to compete with the original form. There is always the chance that the GM food will start to dominate pushing the original strain to extinction.  While this isn't necessarily a bad thing, especially if the modified strain offers many advantages without any detrimental aspects, most people would agree that the loss of the original is undesirable.  Because of the potential of these last two problems, the growth of GM food is often heavily regulated and large efforts are made to keep them separated from natural vegetation.

So are GM foods good or bad?

Well, there is no single answer to such a general question.  There are many good GM foods.  Golden rice is one such example.  Other results are not as good.  The first GM tomatoes were very expensive and did not perform as well as other naturally occurring types, making it a failure.  Essentially each GM food must be looked at on an individual basis – no different from normal non-GM foods!

The population of the world is roughly 6.6 billion and it is expected to hit 9 billion by 2050.  That's a lot of people.  And most of them live in poverty. Feeding everyone is a big problem.  Feeding everyone and preventing malnutrition is an even bigger one.  A healthy diet consists of a number of things including calories (i.e. energy for your body to run), amino acids that form the building blocks of your body, vitamins, and essential minerals.  If any of these are missing from your diet, it leads to severe health problems and even death.  So it's not surprising that people have been searching for cheap and easily accessible food to feed to the populace that will prevent malnutrition.  I want to focus on three “complete” foods:  quinoa, golden rice and plumpy'nut.

Quinoa:

This is an naturally occurring plant that originated in South America.  The seeds form the primary crop, although the leaves of the plant are also eaten.  The seeds have a high protein content, a balanced set of essential amino acids, and it's a good source of dietary fibre, phosphorus, magnesium and iron.  It is gluten free making it easy to digest.  It also has a natural bitter-tasting coating that prevents the crops from being ravaged by animals and other scavengers (this coating is removed during processing).

Golden Rice

With large portions of the population being concentrated in Asia, it is not surprising that rice is a staple for many people.  While rice is a good source of calories, it doesn't contain much else.  Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer genetically engineered rice to produce beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A, within the rice grain (it is already naturally produced in other parts of the plant) and dubbed the results “golden rice” due to the resulting colour.  The result is considered a major breakthrough and has helped to fight vitamin-A deficiency within the world population.  However, problems include the resistance to genetically modified food and the fact that golden rice is still missing many other essential parts of the diet.he population of the world is roughly 6.6 billion and it is expected to hit 9 billion by 2050.  That's a lot of people.  And most of them live in poverty. Feeding everyone is a big problem.  Feeding everyone and preventing malnutrition is an even bigger one.  A healthy diet consists of a number of things including calories (i.e. energy for your body to run), amino acids that form the building blocks of your body, vitamins, and essential minerals.  If any of these are missing from your diet, it leads to severe health problems and even death.  So it's not surprising that people have been searching for cheap and easily accessible food to feed to the populace that will prevent malnutrition.  I want to focus on three “complete” foods:  quinoa, golden rice and plumpy'nut.

Plumpy'nut

Also known as Plumpy.  This falls into the different category of Ready-to-Use Therapeutic Food.  It's designed to be a cheap famine relief food that can be given to a populace to immediately combat malnutrition rather than a long-term solution.  Since it is hard to over eat, and does not go bad easily with a shelf life of 2 years, it can be handed out without need of further supervision.  However, unlike the other two mentioned foods, this is not a crop but rather a commercial product and requires industry/factory to produce, making it limited for any long-term solution.

Hemp gets a lot of publicity thanks to the US, which is trying to suppress Cannabis as a drug (i.e. marijuana), and advocates who see its potential uses in industry. The term “hemp” actually refers to all strains of Cannabis, but in an attempt to distance it from psychoactive drugs, it is used only in conjunction with strains that have industrial rather than drug uses.

Is hemp dangerous?

The psychoactive ingredient in marijuana is delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC). This exists in all strains of hemp, BUT to very different amounts.  Cannabis used in the drug industry contains 20-30% THC.  Legal limits in plants used for industrial in the EU and Canada are set at 0.3%.  That's 100x less.  Effectively, industrial hemp could never be used in the drug industry.

What are its uses?

Hemp is used in the food industry in a similar manner to the soy bean.  Seeds can be eaten raw, turned into a “milk” and derivative products, or even used to harvest oil.  Rich in omega fatty acids, amino acids and minerals, these products offer many health benefits.  The seed yield from hemp plants is very high, making it cheap and cost effective to grow.

Hemp is also used in more general industries to form fibres for clothes, paper and other uses.  It can also be used to form plastics and turned into biofuel.  Hemp requires minimal amounts of pesticides and is one of the crops that can replenish soil with nutrients and nitrogen, important when maintaining farm land.

Does it have a future?

Yes.  Hemp products continue to gain in popularity.  As oil becomes more scarce and farming practises must be maximized, hemp products will be ideal to full demand.  Laws in the US and other countries are continuing to become more relaxed, allowing the growth of hemp for industrial uses much easier.

I recently brought up the idea of human cyborgs – but I completely forgot to talk about insect ones!  Imagine putting implants into an insect... and then adding the functionality of a remote control.  This is exactly what has the US military interested.  The first step is to put implants that allow audio and visual feedback. This turns the insect into a standard “bug” (sorry for the bad pun).  Adding additional implants to actually control the insect turns it into the perfect spy.  A fly on a wall is transformed into, well... the perfect fly on the wall, listening in on private conservations and meetings!

This isn't the first time that these ideas have surfaced.  Previous interest has centred around controlling larger animals such as rats.  Larger animals have some advantages: a heightened sense of smell, better hearing or eyesight all help in the location of many items.  Research is still continuing in this area with a potential application of searching for survivors in the rubble of bombed structures.  Use of a shark, dolphin, or other aquatic life also enables expansion into the underwater world.  However, the larger size of these animals tends to make them less inconspicuous and hence the interest by the US military into the smaller insect world.

So how close are these ideas to reality?

Well, a rat with a camera strapped to it is a reality already.  Controlling the rat is a different issue.  While training the rat is possible, this is simply behaviour modification, which is very different from being able to control their movement via a remote.  Adding cybernetic implants to insects is almost certainly limited to science fiction for the moment, but with the ever decreasing size of technology, don't count out the idea of strapping a camera to the back of a beetle.  As for the fly on your wall, I don't think you need to start worrying about what you discuss in front of it quite yet.

For a little more info, check out this news article:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/technology/technology.html?in_article_id=527328&in_page_id=1965

I've written about global warming before.  Still big news.  Greenhouse gases are still a big problem.  In an over simplified explanation: we release these gases into the atmosphere.  They cause heat generated by the sun's rays to be trapped on the Earth rather than being radiated back out into space and the average temperature of the Earth starts to rise.  Since carbon dioxide is one of the main greenhouse gases that are being blamed, the concept of “carbon credits” has been created in an effort to force everyone to cut back

Each country must regulate the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere.  In turn, each country must designate a set number of allowable carbon units to businesses.  These businesses now have two options:  either they can ensure that their setup is environmentally friendly enough that they fall within their allowable limit, or they must spend money to buy extra carbon credits to cover the excess gases their business will be releasing.

So why go this route?

Well, most countries responsible for carbon emissions are capitalistic in nature. By creating the concept of carbon credits, businesses are forced to add greenhouse gases to their financial considerations.  If they are environmentally friendly, they can make more money by selling off extra credits.  If they are not, it will cost them real money.  In theory, the number of carbon credits will stay fixed, while the need for them will continue to grow.  This should cause the cost of carbon credits to increase, forcing companies to continually become “greener”, and preventing the increase of greenhouse gases.

Where do the carbon credits come from?

Well, as mentioned before businesses are allocated them.  If a business doesn't use them all, they can be sold to others for a profit.  In theory, there could be companies that are set up solely for removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere effectively creating new carbon credits.  As carbon credits become more expensive, these companies would base their business plan off of removing carbon dioxide at a cheaper rate than they would get form the resulting carbon credits.

Is this the right way to regulate greenhouse gases?

Only time will tell..

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been around for a while now.  Like normal MRIs, it is able to make an image of your brain.  Unlike normal MRIs, it can also look at what parts of the brain are using more oxygen, which indicates which parts of the brain are being “used” for a specific task.  That's practically mind reading, isn't it?  Well, not quite.  There is still a big step between knowing what general parts of the brain are used for what tasks and learning how they correspond to different thoughts, but researches at the University of California at Berkley have taken a small step forward in this area:

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/03/mri_vision

Essentially they just did the tedious task of making a large database of people looking at various images and recorded down which parts of the brain responded.  Using this database, they compare it with an “unknown” brain map and try to predict what the person is looking at.  Supposedly their success has been very high – much to the surprise of the researches.

So what are the uses?

Seeing into people's dreams is a big area of interest, and there is even the possibility of  “recording” them.  On a less scientific note, it can also be used by advertisers to see which images get the best brain “response” to maximize their effect.  A long way down the line there is also the possibility of helping those disabled in one form or another with the technology.

What are the limitations?

Human sight is very complex and what the brain thinks it sees is not what was actually there.  This process can only see what the brain perceives, preventing it from being a “truth” machine.  fMRI machines are also large and expensive, and they require subjects to lie down in them and remain very still.  Don't expect to see a small portable version in the foreseeable future – or ever!

Part human, part machine.  Cyborgs have been popularized in Bladerunner and Terminator, they exist as cylons in Battlestar Galactica, the borg in Star Trek, and even Darth Vader is technically one.  I don't think we're at the level where reality can match any of these fictions, but we're not as far off as some might think.  Here is an article that describes a an electronic tattoos:

http://www.physorg.com/news122819670.html

The device is made of flexible silicon and silicone.  It is designed to fit just under the skin above the muscle and features a touch screen as well as a display that acts similar to tattoo ink.  The device has two small tubes that connect to a vein and an artery allowing blood to flow through a cell that converts blood glucose to energy.  You literally fuel it with the food you eat.  The device also has ability to wirelessly communicate with other devices.

Possible benefits include continual testing of the blood for any potential problems or disorders.  Possible problems that I can think of include an immune response to a foreign object in the body, loss of sensitivity to the area and just preventing the thing from getting damaged.  There is also the question of obsolescence.  With the rate that technology changes and improves, will people find themselves being constantly cut open to have their hardware replaced with the latest?  We already have people addicted to plastic surgery; will we  now have people addicted to “cyborg implants” too?

Just to be clear though, this is just a concept and not a reality yet.  Don't expect to see anyone walking around with one of these devices any time soon.  We are still many years away.  I think the concept is cool, but I'd certainly be very hesitant to jump on the cyborg bandwagon.

I just spent a couple of weeks in the southern US and I was struck by a few simple gadgets that make life a bit easier.  These aren't anything exceptionally high tech or anything that is exclusive to that area, but they are things I just haven't seem much of in Ontario but make a lot of sense.

Parking sensors in parking complexes:

At the entrance of all the parking complexes are large digital signs that show exactly how many parking spots are still free and on which floor they are located. No more guessing if you'll find a spot and no more slow circling as you figure where the last couple of spots might be.

Automatic change dispensers:

When you buy something from a store the clerk only hands you bills.  Any other change that is in the form of coins is automatically dispensed from a machine.  This saves a lot of time as you don't have to wait for the clerk to count out the small stuff.  I haven't seen anything for coin counting on the other end (as you take it out your wallet to pay), but that would be the next logical step to me.

Garburators:

These are definitely available in Ontario and I know some people have them, but not on the same level as down there.  Everyone seems to have one down there.  While some areas have introduced the green box, for areas that haven't these little machines act as a very good way to keep organic waste out of the garbage.  Shredding it and sending it out with the biological waste will allow it to be biodegraded.

None of these are exceptionally brilliant or groundbreaking gadgets, but they certainly make life a little bit easier and more pleasant.  And at the end of the day, it's the small things that make us happy.  Here's hoping these things become more mainstream in Ontario – or at least in my life!

With all the doomsayers lurking around over the years predicting that “the end of the world is neigh”, I thought it be fun to look at some of the “accepted” end to humanity that have been predicted over the years.  Okay, maybe not fun.  Probably even a little bit morbid.  But interesting nevertheless.

Self destruction:

Ever since the invention of the atomic bomb, people have been predicting that we'll destroy ourselves in an atomic war.  If the initial bomb blast doesn't kill us, the resulting radiation levels near the bomb sites, or the the ice age that would likely results from the amount of dust being blown into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun, probably will.  On the positive side, unless it is a really large atomic explosion, the earth is likely to eventually come out of the ice age and give birth to a new generation of species on its surface.

Disease:

Hollywood has played up this idea a number of times in different movies, but the possibility of another virus or super bacteria arising and destroying the earth's population isn't beyond the realm of possibility.  It is because of this possibility that plaque-like things such as SARS are able to cause such mass hysteria.  Such a virus would likely only affect humans and maybe other primates, but would leave the remaining species on earth unaffected.

Exploding sun:

The sun is just another star and stars eventually die.  Current estimates give our sun another 5 billion years of life.  While it's probably not the limiting factor in human existence, if we do make it that long on the earth, we're eventually going to have to accept that the sun will die and with it the earth.

End of the universe:

The final fate of the universe is still being heavily debated.  Suggested ideas are the “big freeze” where the universe has expanded and spread out to the point where the heat has been spread out as much as possible (i.e. temperature is minimized in the universe) and the universe becomes static and unable to support life... or anything else.  The “big crunch” is another idea where the gravitational forces of all matter in the universe causes it to draw in upon itself culminating in the reverse of the big bang.  If you think the end of the sun is far away, it is still the equivalent of tomorrow compared to the end of the universe.

Well, don't let this post depress you – tomorrow is another day.  (Hopefully.)

Pastafarianism is a parody religion created by Bobby Henderson in response to the the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to introduce intelligent design into the school curriculum as an alternative to evolution.  Pastafarianism centres around the “Flying Spaghetti Monster” (FSM), an invisible and undetectable deity that created the entire universe “after drinking heavily”.  Links to the Kansas decision is made obvious by the statements that the FSM planted all evidence of evolution and uses “His Noodly Appendage” to change any scientific measurements made to support it.  Henderson has stated that he created Pastafarianism for his own amusement, but it's subsequent popularity shows that it is a very useful vehicle to show the absurdity of trying to teach a religion as science.  (Henderson is very clear that he has no problems with religions themselves, just religions posing as science.)

The big scientific issue with teaching intelligent design is that it is an untestable theory.  Unsurprisingly, considering it is a religious concept, intelligent design relies on belief rather than any supporting fact.  This is exactly the same problem Henderson created with is invisible and undetectable FSM. He has created Pastafarianism in such a way as to make it impossible to disprove, and any discrepancies can be explained away as being changed by the FSM using “His Noodly Appendage”.  Henderson goes one step further and draws attention to a secondary problem in science of confusing cause and correlation.  By plotting the number of pirates in existence and the global temperature against each other, Henderson concludes that it is the decline of  that is causing global warming.

As Pastafarianism has gained popularity (as a joke!), a lot of related paraphernalia and jokes have popped up.  It's now possible to get a FSM car magnet similar to a “Jesus fish” or Darwin fish ones.  Henderson was also commissioned to write The Gospel of The Flying Spaghetti Monster with a rather nice $80 000 USD advance.  The FSM has found its way into numerous web comics and main stream entertainment like South Park.

Whether you are religious or not, hopefully you have a sense of humour and see Pastafarianism not as an attack on religion, but just a humourous way of viewing what happens when you try to force belief on those who do not share it.

“Poor people pay more taxes than rich people thanks to tax loopholes and government tax exemptions.”

Feels good to complain about it doesn't it?  Not only do the rich make more money, on top of that they even get to keep more of it away from the ever-greedy government!  Right...?  Well, not quite so true.  Let's take a small look at taxes by comparing federal tax rates:

15% on the first $37 885

22% on earnings between $37 885 and  $75 769

26% on earnings between $75 769 and $123 184

29% on more that $123 184

It doesn't take much to realize that the more you earn, the more money that you have to pay in income tax, and on top of that, the higher the percentage you have to pay in tax.

Is this an oversimplified view?  Absolutely.  This is only one of the many income taxes and it does not include deductibles and other types of tax breaks.  However, it is still clear: the more money you make the more you owe in income tax.

Where things become more blurry is when we look at the percentage of a person's income that is paid in income tax.  While a “rich” person may pay a larger amount in taxes, the percentage of his total income that he pays can be much lower than people in much less financially secure situations.  Many have actually criticized the Canadian government for shifting taxes in this respect in favour of the rich.  One article claims that back in 1990 the top 1% of earners paid 34.2% of their income in taxes, while the bottom 10% of earners paid 25.5% of their income to taxes, compared to today where 30.5% for the rich and 30.7% for the bottom 10% of earners:

http://money.canoe.ca/News/Economy/2007/11/07/4639072-cp.html

Is this fair?  Base morality says no.  We have to move away from a society where the rich get richer and the poor only get poorer, creating major class and opportunity differences.  Those who have more should be willing to give more to help the greater good of a community.  On the other hand, we must also remember that the rich support many tax-based benefits (e.g. road maintenance, garbage collection, educational institutions) and do no necessarily gain any more benefit from them.

This still doesn't excuse the taxations levels, but just remember, if you drive out the richest within your community with pitchforks and torches, you're likely to find all areas and social programs within the community a lot poorer (quite literally) as a result.

You probably don't think much about your toilet unless you're redoing your washrooms, but “back of the envelope” calculations show that you probably spend ~5% of your life on the can.  For those who want a bit more accuracy, try this calculator:

http://constantlyconstipated.com/calc.html

Considering how big a... uh... fixture the toilet is in our lives, it's kind of odd that no real changes have been made to it in over 100 years.  Can you think of anything else so important to life that has changed so little?  Those of us in Canada and the US are actually a bit more behind (so many puns!) the curve than the rest of the world.  For almost 30 years now, much of the world has introduced a duel flush system for water conservation.  One button is the full flush (the only flush for us) while the second is a half flush that uses much less water.  However, compared to the Japanese toilet market, we are like cavemen!

“High-tech” Japanese toilets have control panels that would put an air plane cockpit to shame.  Some of the basic features available that these panels control include:

water jets – performing the same function as a bidet

blow dryers – for after using the water jets

seat warmers – why don't we have these in the “cold North”?!

timers – so you can calculate exactly how much of your life you waste on the can

and other features include radios/iPod attachments, water temperature controllers, TVs, automatic seat/lid openers, “deodorizing fans”, automatic washers... and of course a few manage to even include a flusher!

So why don't we see these in North America?  Well... this is something that I'm still trying to figure out.  While some of these features are a bit over the top, a lot of them make sense, and well, a lot of them would really turn an average washroom to into a luxury one.  Supposedly the big North American market for these types of toilets come from those who visit Japan, fall “in love” and want to bring a little (porcelain) piece of the country home.

I haven't personally had the privilege of using one of these hi-tech toilets yet... but curiosity is getting the better of me and  I'll certainly take advantage of the opportunity if it comes my way!

Bottled water “mania” has been around for a while and doesn't look like it is going to slow down any time soon.  The concept is simple but brilliant: take something that can be obtained (practically) for free from any tap, put it in a plastic bottle and sell it back to consumers for roughly the same price as a soft drink or juice. Our marketing friends from Evil University must be very proud of themselves.

Before I get flamed back into the stone age, yes bottled water is good and even essential in some cases.  In third-world countries where the drinking water is not safe, don't trust water that is not bottled.  The same applies in cases of water contamination, like the e-coli water poisoning incident in Walkerton, Ontario. However, in first-world nations like ours in which our drinking water is regulated and heavily treated to ensure it is safe to drink, their isn't a great case for bottled water.

In fact, there is a large case against bottled water.  The amount of garbage created each year from empty bottles does have a major impact on our landfills.  Even if they are recycled, this takes energy and has an impact on our resources.  If the water is being shipped from one location to another, there is also the wasted fuel to be factored in.  In short, the environmental cost compared to a glass cup, or a drinking foundation is just incredible.  On top of that, there has been a lot of health concern over contaminants leeching into the water from the plastic bottles in which they are stored.  Bottled water now caries expiry dates on it – not because we are afraid of the water going bad – but because of fears of the concentration of the leeched contaminants.

With the quality of our tap water, there really is no excuse for buying bottled water.  I think this point is well supported by the fact that some water bottle companies just use tap water as their source and resell it as  “purified”.  If your reasoning is “it tastes better”, I recommend you do you a blind taste test of different bottled water brands along with bottled tap water.  You might surprise yourself.