Spotification

I don’t use Spotify much†. To be honest, the main reason is that I’m still stuck to the concept of “owning” music, mostly still on physical CDs, although I do always rip them into compressed format for playing at home, or in the car.

But I also have reservations about how much, or how little, Spotify pays artists. (This is a couple of years old, but it makes a powerful point. If you could live on 150 album sales a month on CD, you’d need 4,053,110 Spotify plays to match that income. [http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/])

Today, I found another reason. When I started up the Spotify client, I was working on something else concerning open files, and I happened to notice outgoing network connections. A lot: 271 of them. Because the command I used was helpfully doing reverse DNS, I could see the host names. Ones you’d expect, like something.spotify.com and (say) something.disney.com (for the adverts).

The majority, though, were obviously the home PCs of ordinary users; (in the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands, as it happens, although I have no idea if that is representative).

I checked the Spotify website to see what the fuck was going on, and found nothing other than a claim of “clever technology” to avoid buffering. It was the Wikipedia article [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotify] which gave me the answer: Spotify uses a peer-to-peer system for sharing streamed music around the internet, although the details are not made public of how it works.

As is common, my home network has a firewall which blocks incoming connections, but it allows outgoing ones; and once a connection is established, it can be used in both directions. (After all, that’s how, say, normal web browsing works.) Presumably, the software on my computer is being given a list of addresses to call. That list must be constantly updated and downloaded as people go on and off line.

If you assume that everything is kosher, compared to other streaming services the only downside is the extra network traffic in the “up” direction from your computer to all the other Spotify customers you’re connected to. If you’re on fixed broadband, neither the volume nor cost of that is likely to be significant. If you use mobile internet and pay for your data, it may be more of a concern.

No worries then if you trust Spotify. You have to trust them because the technical details are a secret, and the network traffic is actually encrypted. So cross your fingers and hope that their software is behaving responsibly on your computer, and also hope that their design is robust enough to stop it being hacked. (And, for the latter, almost no software is.)

With my background in internet security, I have a few rough ideas on how I might hijack the hidden Spotify connection between your computer and my computer to plant bad software on your system. Not that I would, of course.

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†(I only use Linux, but I haven’t bothered to try the specific Spotify client, which originally only worked with Premium accounts (maybe still the case?). The latest Windows software for Spotify works fine on Linux, with Wine providing the Windows compatibility.)

Think It Possible You Might Be Wrong

I don’t know exactly why I was so upset by the death of Savita Halappanavar. In part, it was because the very people whom she trusted to save her failed in their duty to do so, but that would apply to any case of medical negligence. I think that in the main, I was just appalled that anyone would be prepared to enforce a position of moral absolutism even in the face of such distress and death.

I don’t like absolute moral rules, because I think that no rule can cover the complexity of every situation. In fact, people seem to use them simply to avoid the effort of thinking. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a parody of totalitarian states, “four legs good, two legs bad” was a rule designed to relieve the citizens from the burden of thinking.

Though there are some issues where it’s easy to decide the side you should be on: racism, gender equality, democracy, say. I don’t think that abortion is one of those. It’s difficult, and complicated, and there is no easy answer.

But here’s how I think about it. An unfetilised egg cell is not a human being. A new-born baby is. A human life arises between those two points.

The absolutist position adopted by many (mainly religious) people who oppose abortion totally is that human life begins at the instant of conception. To me, that makes no sense. A fertilised egg might be a potential human being, but then it was a potential human being a moment before. Conception is just one of the essential stages on the way to life. Why not choose successful implantation (which often fails to occur) or some phase of cellular division?

Setting the beginning of life at the instant of conception is purely a religious, mystical belief with no basis in biology or common sense. While people are free to believe whatever ideas they like, it’s the duty of society to prevent them being imposed on others who reasonably disagree. Savita must have been distraught that her pregnancy had failed, but there is no reason to suppose that she thought she had to go to the point of death anyway. Somebody else made that decision.

Even if you do discard the mystical, if there’s to be a law, it has to be the best we can make. A law will have to say that up to some point, for some reasons, it will be legal to terminate a pregnancy, but neither of those criteria is obvious or easy.

My own instinct is to balance off the two. That is, no restriction on measures such as the “morning after pill” which prevents implantation of a fertilised egg cell; but very strict conditions from the point where a fetus might conceivably be saved medically, say 20 weeks. That’s actually more or less the UK law as it stands, but review and discussion is always good. Sticking to an absolute is never good.

Walk The Walk

Around the turn of the year, probably a slack news period, a scientific publication got an unusual amount of news coverage. No, it wasn’t the discovery of a new boson, or a habitable planet circling a nearby star. This one was titled “High heels as supernormal stimuli: How wearing high heels affects judgements of female attractiveness” [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513812001225]

I’m always envious of researchers who can make a living carrying out such work. I remember one study which measured the amount of bare flesh in a nightclub and compared it to the owner’s fertility cycle. That one showed that women do show more skin during the most fertile time of the month, but only if they are in permanent relationships, but out without their partners. You can draw you own conclusions.

Still, you have to be sceptical, particularly if there is a claim of some evolutionary origin of a particular behaviour. That’s almost always stretching the evidence much too far, and anyway, human behaviour is too complicated for a neat just-so story.

That thing about high heels though. It’s an issue which has perplexed and slightly embarrassed me for years. I’d already guessed the same conclusion as the authors of the much-reported paper: that the high heel effects some kind of “supernormal” sexual signal. That is, biological systems seem to work on the basis of “if X is good, then XX is better”. Research (mostly on animals) has shown that exaggerating a stimulus, even well past the point of naturalness, can generate a heightened response.

But it’s not clear exactly what factor is in operation. The research paper was investigating walking, and reported a “shorter stride” and “increased rotation and tilt of the hips” for high-heeled as opposed to flat shoes. From my own observations, I’d add that the static posture is different as well, all the way up to the shoulders; and the silhouette is changed subtly. Which of these things –some? or all? –change our perception?

I say “our” deliberately. In the research, both men and women rated walkers in heels more attractive, even though they were only seeing a pattern of light spots on the joints of the subject. A different set of viewers were found to be twice as likely to guess that the walker in flat shoes was male, even though all subjects were actually female.

So I guess it’s settled. Heels do something to make a woman more feminine and more attractive. It’s not surprising that they are the only item of apparel to be consistently “in fashion” for hundreds of years.

I think it was Sigmund Freud who came up with the concept of “fetishism”, where sexual attraction derives from an object, rather than a person. The liking for high heels was well-known in his time, and his suggested explanation was that we experience our first sexual feelings before we can even walk, when we are crawling around among the ladies’ feet, and henceforth always associate sex with Victorian buttoned boots. But Sigmund was like that: he just made stuff up without a shred of evidence behind it.

I’m not old enough (honest) to have seen high-heeled buttoned boots as a baby, but now I think they can be quite sexy. And other high heels too. That’s the source of the mild embarrassment which I mentioned at the beginning, because if I’m honest with myself I have to admit that some kind of transference has occurred in my brain. The shoe itself, completely separate from the wearer, triggers a response.

I’ll quickly point out that it’s only a little response, only a mild dose of fetishism. I’m sure a brief internet search would reveal sites showing a complete obsession, although I suppose that’s true of practically everything. Anyway, I don’t judge. Sexual attraction is never based on logic or good sense in any of us.

Happy Birthday, Alfred

The name of Charles Darwin is firmly attached to the science of evolution, but if it hadn’t been for one coincidence, maybe someone else would have been more famous.

(I’ve noticed that the religious nuts who deny the occurrence of evolution often use the term “Darwinism” instead of “evolution”, as though it’s easier to dismiss it if it’s the theory of one man. That’s wishful thinking though.)

It’s not entirely unfair that Charles Darwin gets the credit. Some of the ideas on evolution had been discussed for quite some time previously (his own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had written a treatise on evolution, The Temple of Nature. In the form of a long poem.) But Charles Darwin was the first to come up with a coherent theory which included natural selection.

The Darwins were rich, and Charles never had to work for a living. He went to the same university as I did, except that I actually got a degree. His famous voyages were paid for by his father. But Charles was a meticulous observer and an intelligent and talented scientist. When he returned from his travels and wrote up a synthesis of his theories, that was pretty much the theory of evolution worked out. It was done by the early 1840s.

He didn’t publish though. Perhaps he was too timid about the possibility of a controversy, perhaps desperate to do more studies to build up the evidence. His close friend, the geologist Charles Lyell, was familiar with Darwin’s ongoing work, and in 1855 spotted a paper published by a young naturalist in Borneo, Alfred Russel Wallace, which showed thinking along the same lines.

Wallace wasn’t rich. He’d had to drop out of grammar school when his family could no longer afford it, but learned surveying and map making as an apprentice under his brother. He worked in various jobs, in surveying, civil engineering and teaching, but at the age of 25, left for Brazil to become a professional collector of natural history specimens to sell to armchair naturalists in England. The business was never very successful, and Wallace was always on the brink of bankruptcy, but he learned a great deal and became a respected scientist. (Or at least, reasonably-well respected, for he was not, of course, a gentleman.)

Wallace sent Darwin his new paper on the theory of evolution in 1858, asking for his advice on whether it was fit for publication. The content was so close to Darwin’s own unpublished theories that it put him in a dilemma. If he did the decent thing and recommended that Wallace’s paper be published (because it was top-class work), then Darwin would lose priority and could not claim to be the discoverer of evolution by natural selection.

If, on the other hand, he now rushed his own theory into print first, the scientific world would never know how much was original and how much had been inspired by Wallace.

At the suggestion of Lyell, a solution was reached where Darwin summarised his own material into a new paper, and both his and Wallace’s were published together as a joint presentation to the Linnean Society.

If Wallace had decided to consult someone other than Darwin, or had submitted his paper for publication directly to one of the scientific journals, then it might have appeared in print before Darwin knew of it. We might today talk of “Wallace’s Theory of Evolution”.

Alfred Russel Wallace, OM, FRS (8th January 1823 – 7th November 1913)

Christmas 2012 In Verona

Saturday 22-December-2012

With the nice motorway between Newry and Dublin, it now takes only about 90 minutes to drive from Belfast to Dublin airport. Maybe one day the Northern part of the route will be upgraded too. We parked the car in the long-stay car park and got the shuttle bus to the terminal.

Air travel is tedious, the security pantomime is stupid, and fellow passengers are gormless. Nevertheless, we arrived safely in Verona, and I spotted Giulia and Niccolò waiting for us. We were driven the short distance into the city and introduced to the apartment. Charmingly, they had set up a Christmas tree and illuminated nativity scene.

One of the things our hosts had to show us was the “cave”. Each apartment in the block has one of a series of underground storage rooms, like a concrete bunker, acessed from stairs in the courtyard. Let me put it this way: it would be a good location for a modern horror movie. The reason we needed to know was that our departing flight was in the evening, but we had to clear out of the apartment at ten in the morning for the next guests. We’d be able to leave our luggage in the cave.

It was nearly ten by the time our hosts left, but I’d identified a nearby pizzeria from internet research and we had a late dinner.

Sunday 23-December-2012

Neither of us being early risers, we didn’t leave the apartment until about midday. It was a soft, foggy day. There was a choice of two directions from the apartment into the old part of Verona, both about 20 minutes’ walk. On this first foray, we arrived first at the old castle with its swallowtail crenellations, and went inside to the courtyards.

From Castelvecchio, the 1355 Ponte Scaligero crosses the river in three unequal arches. We crossed over, but then followed the river embankment round to the more modern Ponte Vittoria and came back to the South bank. It was a sort walk to one of the Roman gates, the Porta Borsari. From there, we meandered and ended up in Piazza Erbe with its market in full swing.

Up above the Roman theatre (not the amphitheatre), up a LOT of steps, there’s a restaurant which was recommended in the airline’s magazine for its good food and great views over the city. We climbed up and checked it out for Christmas lunch, but no; they weren’t open on Christmas day. But, anyway, the top of the hill was a good place to look out over Verona and take some photos.

Coming back down, we saw the famous amphitheatre — known as the Arena — and the open space of Piazza Bra for the first time. Doing the whole tourist thing, we entered the Arena and climbed up through one of the access tunnels to the great ring of seats. As Grace pointed out, the open, unbroken ring of terraces gives a more atmospheric feel than the Colosseum in Rome, even though the latter is larger. For Christmas, the Veronese attach a huge iron shooting star to the side of the Arena, with its spiky head touching down in the piazza.

   
More internet research: I’d found a supermarket which was open on a Sunday. It’s a Spar store which has been tastefully inserted into a stylish art deco building right in the city centre, originally built as a Fiat showroom. We bought some essential supplies — pasta, wine and tea — and went home to have our first self-made dinner and a night in.

Monday 24-December-2012

After an even later rise than the day before, we took the alternate walking route towards old Verona. This one featured a rather pedestrian-unfriendly set of crossings to negotiate a major intersection near the station. Given that it’s legal to turn right on a red light (as it is in America, but the equivalent left turn isn’t allowed in the UK or Ireland) it was definitely a requirement to be alert at all times.

We arrived at Piazza Bra by the big double gate, the Portone della Bra, built in the 14th century, and navigated to “Juliet’s House”. It has to be conceded that Verona does exploit tourist credulity by associating real places with the entirely fictional Romeo and Juliet, but there’s no real harm in it. Juliet’s balcony is a particular example though: it was built in 1936.

The courtyard used to be plastered with lovers’ grafitti, but it’s been cleaned up in recent years, with the scribblings now restricted to the entrance arch. You can still buy a little lock, write your names on it and attach it to the iron grille to signify eternal love. There’s no way that the city authorities can really let them accumulate though. There must be some behind-the-scenes process of regular removal. A (modern) bronze statue of Juliet is is the courtyard, and for some reason it has become traditional to pose for photographs with a hand on her right breast, which is very shiny as a result.

At the town hall, or Palazzo della Ragione, we chanced upon an exhibition of nativity scenes (“presepi” in Italian) made by children, mostly of primary-school age. But these weren’t the little figures and animals that you might expect. They were all recycled materials, with odd items substituting for the holy family and the rest of the cast. For example, one baby Jesus was a prosecco cork, there was one nativity star made from cod liver oil capsules, and one scene was set entirely inside an old television chassis.

We had a (very) late lunch and set out for the distant Giusti gardens, but thought better of it and aborted the mission after a long trek. We had a rest in the church dedicated to St. Thomas Beckett and returned home, again via the supermarket. We had decided that our Christmas lunch would be DIY, and it was necessary to buy the ingredients, most importantly brussels sprouts.

Since we’d walked so much during the day, in the evening we went to the taxi rank at the railway station and got a taxi into town. During the day we’d located the trattoria “Pane e Vino”, which was recommended in the guide book for its food, service and moderate prices, so we made that the destination. It wasn’t actually all that cheap, but the food was absolutely excellent. Grace ate a horse. (http://www.trattoriapanevino.it/)

The other reason for choosing Pane e Vino was that it was a short walk from the cathedral, the Duomo, where Christmas mass was to run from eleven to midnight. Heathens as we were, tipsy from the copious wine with dinner, and not understanding much of what was said, we still felt perfectly happy to stand at the back and take in the proceedings. The singing by the choir was top class, as you’d expect in an important cathedral.

Spiritually and gastronomically refreshed, we walked all the way home, hand in hand. For some reason it took about twice as long as normal.

Tuesday 25-December-2012
Christmas Day

We exchanged presents, pulled crackers and opened a bottle of prosecco. Grace, looking exceptionally glamorous in a sparkly black dress, took to the kitchen and began to organise the menu. We decoded the unfamiliar oven controls and loaded in the joint. It hadn’t occurred to us to buy foil, but an improvised arrangement with one roasting dish inverted over the other proved to be entirely successful.

With a fairly late start and a leisurely approach to cooking (and a few drinks), it was actually around four before we had “lunch”, but it was a one hundred percent successful meal. We make a good cooking team. In the evening, leftovers and rice were magicked into a delicious risotto, and we finished off all the wine.

Wednesday 26-December-2012

For Boxing day, a good long walk would restore us after the previous day’s overindulgence. I wanted to see the other large church, San Zeno, second to the cathedral. Zeno, first bishop of Verona, died in 380, but he’s still there, lying in state wearing a silver mask.

An invented tradition is that the crypt of this particular church is where Romeo and Juliet were secretly married. Since they didn’t exist, that’s impossible, but who am I to argue. The crypt is suitably atmospheric anyway. The church’s bronze doors are interesting, with individual plaques from different periods all mixed together. The style is simple and rustic and reminded me strongly of medieval African bronzes.

As well as the actual body of San Zeno, there is a larger-than-lfe statue, where the old bishop is grinning and has caught a fish on a line dangling from his crozier. In the adjoining cloister (originally part of a 9th century abbey) there was a half-scale nativity scene, with sheep, shepherds and the baby Jesus, lying in a manger.

After some more exploring, we returned home, pausing only to buy the panetone (now cut price) which we had missed for Christmas.

Our target for the evening was another restaurant which had had a positive write-up, this time in the Guardian newspaper. I persuaded Grace that we should take the bus to save walking, and we went to the bus stop outside the apartment and carefully checked the times. Then, just before the bus arrived, I suddenly realised that we were on the wrong side of the road! Buses in Italy drive on the right, of course. We crossed the road and because of some dithering on my part, just managed to miss the one coming in the correct direction.

There was nothing for it but to walk, and bad planning was further exposed when we found that our target restaurant inexplicably wasn’t open. Fortunately, I had prepared a Plan B. One of the readers’ comments on the Guardian item had recommended San Matteo Church, a pizzeria and restaurant in a deconsecrated church. (http://www.smatteo.it/)

It’s a large and busy place, with a mezzanine floor inserted into the body of the church. Although it seemed crowded, we were instantly directed to a free table upstairs, where we could look at the diners below on the ground floor, as well as having a panorama of the place in the huge mirrors on the walls. The service was efficient and the meals were excellent. Good house wine too, and we got complimentary little lemon sorbet glasses to end the meal.

Thursday 27-December-2012

I hadn’t realised before arriving, but on the Saturday night, our host Giulia had mentioned that Milan was only 90 minutes away by rail. Well, actually a check on the internet showed that the cheaper train (at €11.30 or half the price of the express) took all of 115 minutes, but that seemed pretty good as well.

Not being early risers, we picked the slow and cheap afternoon train, arriving in Milan at half-past three. One of the stops was Peschiera Del Garda, giving us a brief view of the lake.

I blame myself for what happened on arrival. With the trip being an on-the-spot decision, I hadn’t made a proper plan for visiting Milan. I’d checked the maps and worked out the right direction to the Cathedral, in one of the main historic areas, but had no idea how far it was. So we walked and walked, managing to lose our bearings in the process. Eventually, we saw a bookshop and bought a laminated tourist map. With its help, we found the Duomo, some 90 minutes after leaving the station.

Although it was getting dark, there was a cheerful Christmas market around the Cathedral, and ample luxury shops to keep any woman happy. Grace cruised the shoe shops and spotted a pair she liked. Having tried them on and selected the correct size, she was pleased to discover that they were even cheaper than the price in the window. A bargain!

Near La Scala theatre, we found a cafe and had a pleasant pasta dinner, before taking the Metro directly back to the central railway station. In retrospect, of course, we should have taken the Metro on arrival and saved a lot of aimless wandering. A tip for our next visit.

Friday 28-December-2012

In the opposite direction to Milan is Venice, at about the same distance, some 150 km. Again, there was a choice of fast, expensive trains or slow, cheap ones. In fact, the “regional” trains are fully a third of the cost of the express, at only €7.40 each way.

Compare that with the €6 for a single vaporetto ticket in Venice, but still, learning from the previous day’s experience, it seemed worth it to sail pleasantly down the Grand Canal to St. Mark’s Square. The weather was fine and blue-skied, and by the time we spied St. Mark’s, the sun was getting low enough to tint the stones with pink.

We’d both been in Venice before, but hadn’t been into the Doge’s palace, the Palazzo Ducale. The entry fee is very expensive (although it includes other museums in the vicinity) but we took the hit. For me, the best bit was to cross the Bridge of Sighs and look out at the canals through the tiny windows.

Leaving St. Marks, we explored some of the tiny winding streets (many full of shops with loads of touristy junk) and spotted a pizzeria which claimed to be a genuine Neapolitan one. Very good pizzas and a couple of beers. You can’t beat it.

Following the chain of prominent yellow pedestrian signs to “Ferrovia”, the railway, through the maze of streets and bridges, we easily found the station in good time for a late train back home, a double-decker. It was even slower than the other one, taking over two hours, with a stop at every one-horse platform, but it was only a short walk home from Verona station to bed.

Just before bed, it occurred me to check my e-mail, just on the off chance there was some information from the apartment owners. And indeed there was: the next guests weren’t due until late in the evening, so we could leave our bags in the apartment all day, rather than going underground.

Saturday 29-December-2012

The cleaning lady was still due to do the apartment at ten however, so for the first time, we were bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and out on the streets of Verona at ten. Well, ten past. We walked into town to say farewell. Piazza Erbe, still with a busy market. The river. Piazza Bra and the Arena.

At a chic place on Piazza Erbe, we stopped for coffee. Or at least, I had a coffee while Grace decided to try the classic “spritz” which was being enjoyed by a group of German tourists at the next table. She liked it, so we ordered one each. Then, a little later, with the day still being sunny and warm enough to sit outside, we took a table overlooking Piazza Bra and ordered “torta della nonna”, granny’s tart, a classic Italain cake; and a coffee or spritz according to preference. (Hint: I had the coffee.)

On the way, we’d checked out the Guardian-recommended restaurant and found it was open until three. Good for a late lunch to tide us over until we were at the mercies of airport and airline. The restaurant, Enocibus, had a mere paragraph in the newspaper’s “Top 10 Budget Eats In Verona”, but the owners were very proud of it, even bringing a print-out of the web version for us to read. (It was exactly like the one I’d printed before leaving home…)

After the lunch, we walked back to our apartment, no longer ours, and collected our bags. It was a short walk to the station, where we took our places on the airport shuttle bus. Our flight departed more or less on time, unlike the one at the adjacent gate where unfortunate Moldovans had been waiting for four hours and seemed doomed to wait longer.

Air travel is tedious, but you just have to sit it out. At Dublin airport, while the shuttle bus delivers you directly to the terminal door on the way in, to catch it for the reverse journey you have to trek across a long distance of bleak concrete walkways. But we took the bus, got back to the car, which started reliably and carried us the 90 minute drive back to Belfast. It was after one in the morning. End of an adventure.

The End Is Nigh

You’ll have heard that there is a “Mayan Prophecy” that the end of the world is imminent, but I bet you haven’t heard any circumstantial details. Where was this prophecy written? Some stone inscription? An ancient partchment? Who discovered it? Can you see it in a museum?

I was trained to do job interviews, and there was always the possibility that someone might not be entirely honest, so there was a simple technique to expose deceit: you asked for more and more details. It’s very easy to remember minor details if you’re telling the truth, but difficult to invent them spontaneously but consistently when lying. I’m sure the police use the same sort of thing when questioning suspects.

The absence of detail about the “Mayan Prophecy” idea is a pretty good guide to its being fake, simply an internet fiction. In fact, it’s one of those rolling stories which mutates as it spreads, because, originally, it was a “Sumerian Prophecy” that the world was to end in 2003. It didn’t.

The Sumerian notion originated outside the internet in the books of Zecharia Sitchin, who made his own “translations” of real Mesopotamian inscriptions, readings which, to put it politely, were not consistent with what all other scholars get from them.

Mayan digits

Once the world didn’t end (again) in 2003, some of the elements of the story were added to a new concept, that the world would end when the Mayan calendar ran out of digits. You know how children, newly introduced to numbers, sometimes go through a phase of thinking that there must be a “biggest number”? But they soon learn that you can always add one to any number. The Mayan calendar has no “biggest number” either.

The Mayans and related cultures used a “Long Count” system, which was simply the number of days since the beginning of time, a day which we call the 11th of August, 3114 BC. The earliest actual date using this system (found so far) is inscribed on a stone in Chiapas, Mexico, and denotes 1,124,333 days after the Creation. That’s 6th December 36 BC.

It’s striking that these ancient peoples were quite able to calculate numbers in the millions. They had their own notation, different to our modern one (which originated in India) and they counted in 20s, not 10s. A Mayan “digit” is a simple glyph which uses a dot to signify 1 and a bar to signify 5. Three bars and two dots is therefore 3*5 + 2*1 or 17. Today, a Mayan number is usually represented with the digits in decimal and periods between them, such as 12.17.3.2, which would be 12*20*20*20 + 17*20*20 + 3*20 + 2.

(Long Count numbers are actually slightly different to ordinary numbers. The third digit from the right rolls over at 18, not 20; probably because 17.19.19 plus one is 360 days, or close to a year.)

The next “round number” in Long Count dates is 13.0.0.0.0 or 21st December 2012. And the day after that is 13.0.0.0.1 and the day after is 13.0.0.0.2, and so on and so on, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The Mayans didn’t think that time was going to end at any particular string of digits, although they did have the general concept of cycles of time and history, and they probably had a bit of a party when a lot of digits flipped over.

Me, I’m most excitedly waiting for the instant when the date changes from 19.19.17.19.19 to 1.0.0.0.0.0 which will be midnight on Thursday, 12th October 4772. Let’s party like it’s 1999.

Oh My God

The universe is full of fast-moving sub-atomic particles. Even a staid, middle-class star like our Sun generates a stream of energetic particles which we occasionally see interacting with the Earth’s magnetic field and atmosphere in the form of Auroræ.

Even higher-energy particles arrive from outside the Solar System, and when they crash into our atmosphere they generate a tiny flash of light. The University of Utah operates one telescope system specifically to observe these flashes, because the original particle’s path and identity can be deduced, giving the astronomers information about what is happening out in the universe.

But one night in 1991, the scope detected a flash which could only have been created by a particle with 3.2×10²° electron volts, about forty million times more powerful than the Large Hadron Collider. This particle came to bear a name based on the astronomers’ first reaction. It’s called the “Oh-My-God Particle”.

You’ll know from Special Relativity that nothing (with mass) can be accelerated to the speed of light, but by adding more and more energy, you can edge ever-closer to light speed. Well, the OMG Particle, if it was a proton, would have been doing 0.9999999999999999999999951 of light speed, or to put it another way, in the time light crossed a light year of distance, the OMG would cross a light year less 46 nanometres.

Back to Special Relativity: obviously it takes light a year to travel a light year, and likewise for the OMG (minus 46nm). But for the particle itself, time dilation occurs. Time       actually       slows       down. From the OMG’s point of view, time is slowed so much that the travel time is much shorter. Much, much shorter: 100 microseconds.

If you could accelerate a spacecraft to OMG speeds, you could visit the centre of our galaxy in 3 seconds, or neighbouring galaxies in a few minutes. I can’t see how such speeds will ever be possible for a solid object like a spaceship, but maybe one day we’ll use more modest relativistic effects to make interstellar flight feasible.

The problem that the OMG presented the astronomers — and it still hasn’t been solved — was that when they traced the path back, there was nothing there. Nothing which could plausibly have generated such huge energy in a particle. In fact, because all of space is filled with the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation, energetic particles interact with it and are eventually slowed down. The maximum distance that OMG could have travelled is about 50 megaparsecs (160 million light years), which implies that there is a fixed volume of space out there within which it must have originated, but when you investigate: nothing.

Since OMG, there have been about 15 additional detections of its brothers and sisters, but there is still no generally-accepted theory to explain what they are and where they come from. My own favourite is that the universe contains “topological defects”, where the actual geometry of space-time has a discontinuity or flaw. Postulated one-dimensional defects are called “cosmic strings” (nothing to do with string theory) and would be a rippling crack in space-time, the thickness of a proton, but hundreds of light-years long. If a string was to thrash around and loop back on itself, the parts would split off, with a huge release of energy, more than enough to generate OMGs.

Statistics and Lies

The American Presidential election is “too close to call”. It’s “on a knife edge”. Depends on “swing states”.

Does it hell. If you look at the actual data of the opinion polls and compare to past election results, the outcome is boringly obvious: the overwhelmingly likely result is that President Obama gets re-elected.

The NY Times blog ‘Five Thirty Eight’ [http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/] does heavy number-crunching and is currently showing the probablity of Obama winning as 86.3% and only Ohio as a relatively important “swing state” (with a 50% chance of providing the decisive electoral vote. Obama has a small but consistent lead in Ohio.)

So why is that blog (and other numerate ones that crunch numbers) not telling us the same as the mainstream media? Because. The. Journalists. Are. Lying. To. Us.

Again.

The news media have a vested interest in portraying a close contest to make exciting news.

The Democrats have a vested interest in portraying a close contest to encourage voters to get out and vote, rather than take it for granted.

The Republicans have a vested interest in portraying a close contest to encourage voters to get out and vote, rather than becoming discouraged.

Everybody is lying.

Hackers Anonymous

I had absolutely no experience of computers before I went to university. My school hadn’t even had any of those classic BBC machines, and the home computers of the day were not up to much.

None the less, I signed up to do Computer Science as an auxiliary course to my Physics and Maths, and I learned a little about programming and algorithms, and even something about hardware. After my degree, it was actually the computing experience that got me a job, in software engineering.

The new software centre I joined had one (count them) computer to serve the general needs of about 20 engineers for documents, memos, mail, calendars and the like. It was a Digital (a.k.a DEC) VAX 11/780. (Actual software development was mainly done on specialised microprocessor systems.)

I was one of the two “system managers” or “superusers” of the VAX when it was first installed, and this meant that we had to go on the requisite training course at DEC’s centre in Reading.

Since we were being trained to administer the VAX, the machines and accounts we had at DEC had full privileges to do anything, and one of those things was to link up with other machines using the DECNET. It was the very early days of the internet (nobody knew it would catch on) and DEC had implemented their own network, with their own protocols, linking many of their own sites, and some of their customers’.

When you got a new VAX, it had default accounts and passwords, which you were supposed to change immediately for security, but my colleague and I played a game of connecting to remote machines and testing those default logins. It was surprising how often that worked. Because of the design of the DECNET, you could usually “see” more different computers once you logged in to a remote one. You could navigate around the world, one step at a time.

Well, that was my first experience of “hacking”. It was harmless; no damage done; and in the subsequent years, I would occasionally browse around networks and poke at distant computers. (I have one particular memory of accessing a NASA computer which had been set up for use by astronauts. Security was trivial to circumvent, and you could choose any user’s account to impersonate. I picked Neil Armstrong.)

It was around that time that the concept of hacking became more widely known, with the publication of Clifford Stoll’s book “The Cuckoo’s Egg”, in which he described tracking and identifying a hacker who was probing American military systems, and stealing material which he sold to the KGB. (Really!)

According to Stoll’s book, many of the military computers had very poor security, and the hacker, Markus Hess, could often log in by using the default passwords, as I had with the DEC machines, or even by logging in as “guest”, with no password at all.

But that was all twenty years ago, in simpler times, and you’d expect that security would be taken much more seriously today, particularly since there are billions of people (and a few dogs) using the internet.

Actually, no. At least not in the American military. The recent protracted extradition case of Gary McKinnon demonstrated that a casual hacker with relatively little technical expertise could access and even gain control of computers, simply because security was sloppy. (To me, prosecuting McKinnon seemed like a poor choice of priorities, when there were obviously some computer staff who needed their asses kicked. Badly.)

Me, I don’t do that stuff any more. Not since I got all mature and sensible. But I do like to keep up with current news and events, and the main theme is still that the human is the weakest link. Almost all hacking and computer misuse depends on exploitation of known vulnerabilities which already have been fixed by security updates. Or rather, and this is the point, not fixed because the computer’s owner didn’t bother to implement the updates.

Though the root cause is that security in the current computer and internet infrastructure requires humans to do things that humans aren’t very good at: boring, repetitive, technical tasks. Until humans are cut out of the chain of defence, they’ll still be the major vulnerability. For now, you’re on your own.

Coming Out

Today, 10th October, is World Mental Health Day, a concept instituted 20 years ago “for global mental health education, awareness and advocacy”. This year’s theme is specifically on depression, which, according to the World Health Organization, was ranked as the third leading cause of the global burden of disease in 2004 and will move into the first place by 2030.

So this would be a particularly good time to reveal something which only a few very good friends know about me: I’ve been fighting depression for all of my adult life.

Depression takes two general forms. In the less common type, “bipolar affective disorder”, sufferers have wild mood swings, from deepest depression to crazed mania. Stephen Fry is well-known for being affected by this form of the disease. But more often, there is no manic phase, just recurrent episodes of depression, which can vary in severity. It can be referred to as “unipolar” or “episodic” to distinguish from the bipolar syndrome.

I’ve found that non-sufferers (or let’s call them “normal people”) just don’t understand depression. They’ve been very sad in their lives themselves, or experienced grief, and imagine that depression must be a bit like that. It isn’t at all.

I’m only speaking from my own experience, but depression seems to me to be more like a mental paralysis than any kind of sadness or just feeling low. Doing the simplest things requires a huge effort. A common other symptom is having very low self-esteem, and perhaps feelings of worthlessness, but I’ve never had that. I have two alternate explanations for this difference. One, I wholeheartedly accept that depression is an organic disease, and nothing to do with my self-worth (just as I wouldn’t feel it was my fault if I caught tuberculosis). Or second, maybe I just love myself too much.

The episodic nature of the disease means that I have good times and bad times. During the more severe spells, I cope by cutting down activities and socializing to a minimum. Today, I’m fortunate not to have to get up and go to work every day, but when I did have to do that, I mostly got by, and only rarely invented a physical sickness to cover a day or so off.

So my depression is definitely not the most severe category, because I can continue to function, albeit with some impairment. But some people are hit much harder by it, and practically “shut down” and withdraw from every aspect of normal life. A small percentage decide that they just want it all to stop, and take their own lives.

Friends and relatives can help a lot, but it’s not easy, because depressives are in a state where they interact badly with others. If your friend is depressed, it can help to be gently persistent. They’ll turn down a social event, for example, but might concede after a little encouragement. Or not. Don’t be offended by a refusal, and if you care about someone, don’t give up on them.