Jason’s Random Thoughts

The World Health Organization continues to spread fear.  It is suggesting that a H5N1 flu pandemic could kill between 50 million and 150 million people, despite the fact that there has not yet been a single case of bird flu being transmitted from one human to another.  It did the same with SARS, claiming that it would kill 50 million SARS actually killed less than 800 people.  While we should take precautions against the pandemic threat, we shouldn’t be panicked by wild stories, whatever their source.

This is not the only example of wilful exaggeration or “puffery” shaping public policy and social behaviour. The threat from terrorism is another.  Despite political rhetoric, deaths from terrorist attacks are actually in decline and have been for some time.  It is also the case that the number of armed conflicts in the world has been in steady decline for some time. Those that promote the idea of a growing, menacing threat are usually in pursuit of budgets, equipment or resources.

Annual world military spending now stands well in excess of $1-trillion (Canadian), of which at least 60 per cent is spent by NATO countries with which Canada is in alliance.  This is why approximately one in twelve of the world’s workers work in defence and security related industries they have a lot at stake in promoting fear.

Another example is the threat of global warming.  Allegedly caused by man-made greenhouse gases, global warming is usually presented as a gloomy catastrophe that will induce the mass extinction of animals and plants, epidemics of contagious and parasitic diseases, droughts and floods, and even invasions of mutated insects resistant to insecticides.

Melting glaciers are predicted to raise sea level by 3.67 meters, flooding islands, densely inhabited coastal areas, and great metropolises.  There will be mass migrations and a host of other social and environmental effects always detrimental, never beneficial.  We have to remember that a lot is at stake for these doom and gloom scientists.  The amount spent on climate studies worldwide has now reached the astonishing level of about $5 billion per year.  In North America alone, more than $2.5 billion is spent annually for climate studies, not including the costs of satellites, ships, and laboratory construction.  Climatologists have obtained this immense amount of funding by creating the vision of a man-made planetary climate catastrophe.

According to one American climatologist, the “scare-them-to-death” approach seems to be the best way to get money for climate studies.  Dr. Stephen Schneider, a leading prophet of man-made climate warming (who used to suggest that we were facing a new ice age), stated this bluntly: “To capture the public imagination… we have to… make simplified dramatic statements, and little mention of any doubts one might have….  Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective and being honest”.  So much for the scientist as an objective observer.  The fact is that we don’t know if global warming is occurring and, if it is, what is really causing it.  There is no scientific consensus science doesn’t work by voting.

One last example; It is often reported that one in four women will experience rape in their lifetime.  Just one incident of rape is too many, but one in four is a very big number.  The real number is much lower, depending on the definition of rape used (not that I condone any form of forced sexual activity).  Most scientific analysis suggests it is nearer 1 in 20 a very different figure, but any number above zero is unacceptable.  The data also shows that there are significant regional and ethnic variations in the incidence rate, but the 1 in 4 number keeps on appearing despite the fact that it cannot be justified.  Fear again - this time to support the work of feminist organizations, police, and related support services.

We seem to have forgotten Paul Ehrlich’s 1960s’ prophecy that a population explosion would lead to starvation in America by the end of the 1990s.  We have forgotten Thomas Malthus’s 1790s’ predictions that European famine was an absolute certainty.  We have forgotten all those pundits claiming that the world would experience prolonged and serious disruption, starting on January 1, 2000, as the millennium bug struck.

We seem to like fear and doubt and uncertainty more than we like truth.

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How many sets of glasses do we go through in a ten year span?  Two?  Three?  I’ve gone through four, but oddly enough, the last two have not been able to provide 9 months of usage without replacement.

Back in 1997 I decided to do something about the constant headaches and eye-strain by getting myself a pair of glasses.  Sure, I could have asked my parents for a pair a few years earlier, but I was not going to get stuck with the cheapest lenses and frames and walk around looking like something out of Napoleon Dynamite.  By purchasing the specs myself, I could ensure they would look relatively decent on my face and match my personality.  Six years later, and after many quick repair jobs, they had to be replaced because I accidentally ran over them with a 3–ton forklift.  Cost of glasses:  $375.

In 2002 I managed to get a replacement pair of glasses for $425 (including eye exam) and they were relatively decent, however, because I was programming full time, my eyes had deteriorated a bit and a new prescription was in order.  In 2006, I decided to put my employer’s health benefits to use for the first time ever and get a nice pair of frameless glasses.  After a quick trip to the optometrist and several very painful examinations, I paid the $830 (which I was able to claim back) for a single pair of frameless glasses that looked good, solved my vision problems, automatically tinted in the sunlight, and was purportedly made with Crizal lenses, which are supposed to be pretty tough.

Essilor, the maker of Crizal, claims that these lenses are care free, reflection free and scratch free.  For the most part, this is accurate.  I haven’t had a single scratch on these lenses.  However, I do have several very prominent cracks where they attach to the arms.  What’s upsetting about these cracks is that this is not the first time it’s happened.

In early April 2006 I had picked up my first pair of glasses.  After just three months, I started noticing cracks forming where the arms connect to the lenses.  I don’t play sports, nor did I do anything to cause stress on the lenses aside from sitting in front of computers for 14+ hours a day.  Before flying to Japan in December of 2006 I had the lenses replaced under warranty, but noticed the cracks were forming once again before my birthday in April.

$830 and I can’t even get a year from two pair of glasses?  How the heck did the $375 pair last right up until the forklift incident?

I don’t think this is a fault of the lenses, themselves, but instead in the design of the glasses.  These are frameless, and as such, there is nothing to absorb the stresses between the arms when they bend, and the plastic lenses.  The initial reason I had spent over eight-hundred dollars on a pair of glasses (aside from the fact that I could claim the entire amount back) was because I had hoped the specs would last five to ten years.  However, it seems that this is not the case, and I’ll need to buy a new pair before the end of this winter.

Has anyone else had problems with frameless glasses?  Is there any type of lens or frame that you recommend?  There’s no way I’ll ever pay such a high price for specs if I can’t even get a year of normal wear without cracks.

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There seems to be this perception that the Earth would have less damage if struck by an icy comet rather than a rocky meteor of the same size.  With the number of movies and documentaries that show objects entering the atmosphere and super-heating with friction, I can see where this idea can come from.  Unfortunately this is typically not the case.

I was recently in a lovely debate over IRC on this subject with some college students that believed an object of less than one cubic kilometer made of mostly ice would disintegrate to such a degree that only a small crater would be created on the Earth, whereas a solid object of the same size would cause enough damage to wipe out half of Canada.  While I typically avoid heated discussions over IRC and similar forums, I was compelled to give these students a little physics lesson.

For the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume that a one cubic kilometer-sized comet was on a direct collision course with the Earth.  Let’s also say this comet was traveling at the same speed as the Perseid objects, which is a relatively slow 52,800 km/h.  Objects coming from the far reaches of our solar system or beyond could go much faster.  Since I just moved from Vancouver and everyone there is impatiently waiting for the “next big quake”, let’s use that city as ground-zero.

The common perception is that an comet or meteor made of mostly ice would be less dense, and therefore create less damage.  On a global scale, this is true.  There would be less total energy in the impact and slightly less dust and other particulate matter in the atmosphere, as well as less matter ejected back into orbit after the event.  However, the difference would be so slight that it wouldn’t make one bit of difference for the unfortunate residents of Vancouver and everyone within a radius of several thousand kilometers.

The problem is quite simple … we simply do not have enough atmosphere.  When the object begins to slow and heat up due to friction with the Earth’s atmosphere (let’s say, in the lower regions of the Thermosphere – about 100 kilometers up), it’s only 10.8 seconds away from impact.  Remember, the object’s initial speed relative the Earth is 52,800 km/h.  This means that the entire column of air underneath the object has less than eleven seconds to leave the area.  To put this another way, the air between the Earth and the meteor/comet would have to move at 52,800 km/h to get out of the way.

Supercomputer models of this scenario shows us that air does not get out of the way for objects at this speed.  Instead, the leading edge of the meteor, regardless of its composition, super heats into a gas or plasma.  The air underneath also super heats into gas or plasma.  The city of Vancouver would also super heat into gas or plasma.  The upper atmosphere also super heats, as heat rises and air is pretty good at thermal distribution.  What about the people in those cities?  Well … hopefully they wouldn’t feel anything past the initial boom of impact.

Once things have become hot enough to turn concrete, steel and water into plasma, the issue of rocky objects vs. icy is only going to be interesting to scientists hiding in bunkers in Europe, Asia and Africa while they wait for the skies to stop snowing mud.

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According to a study at the University of Guelph, 70% of the internet is in English.  Considering how one in five humans can speak English to some level of competence, I’d say the internet is just too darned monolingual.

Thanks to translation services at AltaVista and Google, people can offer their pages in several other languages (WordPress bloggers can use GlobalTranslator, which simplifies the services) but machine translation often leaves much to be desired.  Slang comes out wrong.  Mis-spelled or mis-used words can make sentences unreadable in other languages (a prime example is the mis-use of “their”, “there” and “they’re”).  On top of that, most of us that can speak several languages tend to use only one when we write something online (who wants to write a blog post or static web page two or three times in different languages, after all?).

But despite some of the current limitations of machine translated pages, they’re still better than nothing.

Of course, there are some benefits to offering your site in multiple languages.  I’ve had GlobalTranslator on this site since January and have found that a full 38% of my readers are reading content in a language other than English.  Spanish seems to be the most popular, with a full 22% of the readership, followed closely by Traditional Chinese and German.  If the study’s 70% English figure is accurate, then all those “make money online” blogs are potentially missing out on a massive market.

And this language issue is the crux of my problem.

I read hundreds of blogs every week from every continent save Africa (I don’t think they’ve discovered blogging, yet), and 80% of these blogs have a fatal flaw in their website:  English-Only Commenting.  Perhaps I should rephrase that … because it’s not the comments themselves that I want to see in other languages … it’s the name fields.

Since I read so many blogs, there are times when I want to leave a comment or two.  Because there are so many other people with the name Jason, I try to mix it up a bit by entering “ジェイソン (Jason)”.  This does a few things for me.  By writing my name using Japanese Katakana, people are a bit more likely to click the link back to my site (I’ve noticed a significant jump in visits when using non-English characters in my name when commenting), and it sets me apart from all the other Jason’s on the internet.  I’ll be the first to admit that there are several people with this name here in Japan (I’ll be working with one shortly, too), but the odds of others using this visual link-clicking tactic has been slim thus far.  Unfortunately, when I start using Unicode characters, websites start to complain.

The error I’m often presented with is often a lovely MySQL error which spits out the raw query which tells me what tables or columns are rejecting the data.  This is most often seen with privately hosted WordPress blogs, as the larger blogging sites (Blogger, WordPress.com, etc.) tend to be happy with Unicode characters.  I can understand that most people don’t really give much thought to the table types and collations when setting up a database for their blog (I also understand that most people don’t even know about these things to begin with), but I’m curious to know why the default tends to be less-friendly towards the East-Asian and Middle-Eastern character systems.  There are far more people speaking Mandarin and Arabic than English.

According to the Internet World Stats page, approximately 17.8% of the world’s population has access to the internet.  This is roughly the same percentage of people that also speak English on some level.  As more of us connect to the global community, I’d love to see webpages become more language-friendly.  Whether it’s in the form of a machine-translation service, or a nice UTF-8 Unicode-capable site that can handle people’s names and comments in their native language, any progress towards greater communication would be beneficial.  Of course, if people are posting comments in languages other than the site’s primary target, these comments would need to be translated before being entered into the database (perhaps making the original comment available in the foreign language on request?).

The Internet has been called a Global Village.  This might have been an apt analogy at first, but the tiny village quickly grew into a big city with its own Chinatown, Little Italy, and every other pocket of culture that we see in the physical world today.

Should we try to reduce the language barriers that exist on the Internet today?  Or is it better to leave things as they are?

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Radio controlled models are incredibly fun.  They bring out the boy in most adult men, and give us the opportunity to get our children interested in physics and science.

But before getting into electric rc helicopters or even planes, there is one bit of advice I can pass. Start small and inexpensive.  I had started with the little micro helicopter that is sold by many manufactures that is controlled with an infrared beam. It was durable and crashable to a point and still flies.  The controls are easy enough and will get you used to have a lot to keep track of.  It is a battery-copter and needs about a 1/2–hour charging time to fly.

I have since upgraded to a channel (two sticks that move 4 directions each), and they have two sets of main rotor blade that turn in opposite directions. The helicopter itself is also much larger (about a foot and half long) and runs on a battery. It is a lot more to manage price wise considering fixing up but not as bad as the gas ones. The advantage to starting with an inexpensive model (low risk mind you) is that it’s much easier to deal with a $40 machine crashing into an unforgiving concrete launch pad than a $250 model.  Some of my friends have the larger ones and have much more difficulty and cost trying to learn with theirs than I have (even taking into account the cost of the first helicopter which still works and has never broken over many crashes).

The advantage of the channel models are the counter-rotating props.  These allow for a much more stable flight and will even help you restabalize the vehicle if you happen to get caught in an unexpected side-draft.  Because it’s easier to control, most people attach digital cameras to these models and take aerial photographs of the neighborhood.  The biggest advantage, though, is the cost of maintenance.  In the first year I had spent less than $30 in replacement parts, even though I was out flying for several hours three to four nights a week.

Unfortunately, I’m not flying in the near future as there just isn’t enough time or money to get back into the hobby.  But I think that another trainer-copter will be in order when Reiko and I have children.  Having the opportunity to fly a remote vehicle will fire up a child’s imagination and I’ll be sure to cram as much physics into their head while they’re still interested in the subject

If you’re interested in starting the hobby, or you’re in the market for a hobby store with every part and model ever known to man, be sure to check out Hobby Warehouse.  Most of their models are ready to fly right out of the box, and replacement parts are available should there be an “unfortunate incident” while out at the park.

This post was sponsored by Hobby Warehouse.

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