January 2009 Archives

I hope our representatives in Washington will take a lesson from the financial problems that California faces. Our state, burdened with the expenses of our massive education and health care systems, is teetering on the edge of insolvency. Our State Controller, John Chiang, has been forced to delay payments to guarantee that the state has enough cash on hand to meet high priority obligations. Among other things, $2 billion in tax refunds will be delayed for 30 or more days.

This year-old video has been making the rounds again, most recently on Pharyngula. It asks an interesting question, "If abortion is to be illegal, what should the punishment be for women who have abortions?" Should the state impose a penalty, such as a fee or jail time? Should the woman be liable to pay damages to relatives or the father in a civil court? If no punishment is necessary, why should abortion be illegal?

This news is a couple weeks old, but I wanted to mention it anyway. Several years ago I mentioned a flaw in MD5. Seeking a proof of concept, a team of researchers successfully forged a CA certificate that could sign any certificate they desired. The resulting certificate would be implicitly trusted by all major web browsers. The team presented their results at the 25th Chaos Communication Congress last month in Berlin.

I wanted to briefly describe their ingenious technique but gave up after realizing how many prerequisite concepts I'd need to introduce. Read their excellent paper if you're interested in the details. The team used a farm of PlayStation 3 consoles to compute a CA certificate that collided with a carefully crafted certificate issued by RapidSSL.

There's no immediate risk to users. This development is primarily a wakeup call to certificate authorities to stop relying on MD5 immediately. MD5 is broken.

I finally have my hands on the recently released PC version of Mirror's Edge. This is the game I want to love, but it has been plagued with difficulties.

I had problems straight out of the box. Actually, it was a padded shipping envelope, courtesy of Amazon. One corner of the game's plastic case had been crushed in transit, so black plastic scattered everywhere as I removed the seal. The DVD was unscathed, so I popped it in. A bizarre error dialog appeared; the autorun was broken. I browsed the disk and launched the setup program manually. I spent the next three minutes searching the case for the product key, which I found on the back cover of the manual, small and unlabeled. I would later notice the "EA Downloader" running in my system tray despite having deselected that option during installation. The score so far: Amazon zero, EA zero.

After that grueling installation, I finally had the game running. The stunning visuals, catchy soundtrack, and novel gameplay more than make up for the game's vague background story. The clean and bright art direction is a refreshing departure from gritty gun metal grays. I was very pleased ... at first.

My first gameplay problem was the wall jump tutorial. The trainer repeatedly failed me and forced a replay of the demonstration, despite my successful wall jumps onto the platform. After a dozen attempts, the game inexplicably accepted my efforts at wall jumping. Okay.

Technical difficulties now trap me in the first level. The game randomly freezes whenever I have cops chasing me. At some point as I run up the stairs or leap to the next building, the game will just stop, the ambient sounds die out in turn, and I'm left staring at a still image. When I minimize the game, I can hear the action resume in the background, complete with gunfire killing me. The only escape is a three key salute to kill the process. I experienced similar hiccups throughout the tutorial level, but the game always managed to recover after five seconds. Not anymore.

Updating my video card drivers didn't help, which means I'll have to spend some time on EA's web site trying to fix this problem. Very disappointing.

I decided to enable anonymous comments, but there are a couple caveats.

1. You must provide a valid e-mail address.
2. If you want to avoid a brief moderation limbo, sign in.

Signing in has other benefits. I can mark regular contributors as "trusted," which will remove the rel="nofollow" attribute from thier links. Movable Type accepts a variety of external accounts, most notably OpenID, so you don't need a new account here.

I frequently see Democrats propose a significant increase in the minimum wage, also known as a "living wage," as a solution to what they see as the exploitation of the lower class. This would be disastrous. A price floor for unskilled labor has a multitude of negative effects on the very people it's meant to help. The minimum wage in the United States is close to the equilibrium rate for unskilled labor, but the following negative effects would become far more pronounced if the government mandated a significantly higher living wage.

• A minimum wage reduces the freedom of employees and employers. Just as a minimum wage tells the employer, "You may not hire employees below this rate," it also tells workers, "You may not accept work unless you can compete at this rate."
• An employee desperate for a job cannot undercut minimum wage workers. Minimum wage laws are regularly peddled in third-world nations as an instrument of discrimination to prevent minority groups from competing for jobs.
• Lower profit margins for employers encourage them to outsource jobs or switch to a business that does not employ low wage workers, thus decreasing the number of minimum wage jobs available.
• Employers pass higher costs to their customers by raising the price of services, which disproportionately increases the cost of living for the lower class.

A minimum wage benefits some at the expense of the least experienced and least productive workers. It renders the least employable workers unemployable.

If the goal is to improve the quality of life for the lower class, much more effective solutions exist. The best solution would be to reduce the supply of unskilled labor through voluntary vocational training programs. This would empower workers to take higher paying jobs while driving up the equilibrium rate for the remaining unskilled workers.

Heavy-handed government solutions that make more economic sense than a minimum wage include a negative income tax or earned income tax credit, both of which pass the financial burden to the entire society rather than the employers and customers of unskilled workers. A more radical proposal is a social security program of basic income.

A recent article in the Sunday Times regarding Google's carbon emissions sent the corporation's public relations team into a frenzy.

The Times journalist apparently had an axe to grind with Google. Alex Wissner-Gross, the scientist cited in the Times article, retorts that his research didn't even mention Google. The official Google blog claims that their data centers are the most energy efficient data centers in the world. A single Google search consumes about 0.3 watt-hours and releases a mere 0.2 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Yellow journalism at its finest!

Behold! United States Patent 7,466,536 was granted to EEStore Incorporated last month. Yes, that's 3500 volts. And yes, that's 31 farads. This is a capacitor.

Installed in an electric vehicle, an array of these capacitors could store 52 kilowatt-hours in a 282 pound box. That's 2.6 times the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, which would require a 752 pound box to store the same charge. Unlike a lithium-ion battery, this capacitor contains no toxic chemicals, will never explode, can be charged 60 times faster (with the right equipment), will not wear out after three years, and will keep a charge ten times longer.

Two advances in technology made this capacitor possible. The first was the application of integrated circuit screen-printing to create capacitors. The second and most important was the material used as the dielectric. Alumina-coated calcined composition-modified barium titanate has an amazingly high breakdown voltage of 610 V/µm at 85° C.

This capacitor has the potential to revolutionize the way we store energy in the very near future.

• It eliminates almost every disadvantage of the electric car and paves the way for electric buses, motorcycles, and tractors.
• Imagine laptop or cell phone batteries that outlive the device.
• You could buy all your household electricity at night when the rates are cheapest. Similarly, electric companies could make more efficient use of power grids by storing electricity near the consumer and discharging during peak hours.
  
• The biggest problem with solar and wind power has been the ability to store enough power for hours when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.

The largest disadvantage to this capacitor is the voltage required. Additional circuitry is necessary to convert to and from 3500 volts. In a car with regenerative breaking, for example, a converter is necessary to store that energy back into the capacitor.

This capacitor or similar inventions will change everything, and this is just the beginning. Giant leaps forward in solar panel technology are just around the corner too. I'm very excited about our energy future.

A recent Australian meta-analysis of research into the effects of open office layouts concluded that an open office layout decreases productivity, increases stress, and increases the rate of disease transmission.

Tracey A. Lincoln and Gerald F. Joyce from the Scripps Research Institute have created a molecule that can replicate indefinitely without any other enzymes or proteins. They observed this molecule doubling in numbers every hour, mutating, and evolving in the lab.

The molecule is an RNA enzyme modified to cross-replicate (i.e. copy each other). While this may not be how life started on Earth, this research provides valuable insight into molecular evolution prior to the first cell. Steve Novella discussed the implications of this finding on his blog, NeuroLogica.

I'm proud to say that this blog does not run PHP or MySQL!

PHP is the most prevalent web programming language thanks its ease of installation and popularity among web designers. MySQL is the most common open source database management system (on web sites, at least). Both are horrid pieces of software haphazardly thrown together. I'll surely rant about them later.

This blog is powered by Apache, Perl, PostgreSQL, and Movable Type with a little help from mod_include, all running on Ubuntu. (Alas, the FreeBSD VPS hosts were not as appealing.) I may be stuck using PHP and MySQL at work, but at least I can liberate myself at home!

The Sunday Times reported this morning that a Google search produces about 7 grams of carbon emissions. For comparison, that's roughly how much you release by breathing for 15 minutes.

I have a major problem with this kind of journalism. The internet is a complex system. What exactly did Alex Wissner-Gross include in this calculation? There are many parts of the internet that consume electricity or release carbon dioxide.

• User's computer and monitor
• Network infrastructure that connects the user to Google
• Google search farms
• Fans and air conditioners that cool all this equipment
• The manufacture, transport, and assembly of all this equipment
• Lights the technicians need to keep the routers and farm running
• The technicians' commute to work everday
• The technicians' lunches
• Light the user shines at their keyboard

How much does each part contribute to this total? Could we reduce emissions by optimizing specific parts? How much would reducing the number of Google searches reduce overall emissions? Should we be worried about this at all?

Phillip Dominguez, a 47-year-old gun enthusiast, was arrested on Friday after police at a security checkpoint near Los Angeles International Airport noticed 16 pistols, four rifles, hundreds of ammunition rounds, and an assault rifle in the back of his truck.

Dominguez claims he was heading to a shooting range in San Bernardino, 75 miles away, with a friend flying in from Baltimore.

Even more surprisingly, it is legal to drive a truck loaded with weapons to the front doors of an airport terminal. Phillip was booked on felony charges because he failed to transport his licensed assault rifle directly to the shooting range as required by California law.

Giles Bowkett of Ruby fame recently alleged that libertarian society is impossible because libertarianism assumes cultural conditions that can exist only with pervasive free education. And he's correct ... except in his understanding of libertarianism and education.

The libertarian position on education is simple. Greater quality and efficiency is best achieved by a wide diversity of choices. Parents should have the freedom to choose the best schools for their young children, and schools should be managed locally to promote greater accountability and involvement. Libertarianism does not mandate that parents pay all expenses for their child's education out-of-pocket, but it does require that parents have full control over the funds spent on their child's education.

Prior to the 1850's, there was no education system in the United States. Local towns and cities organized their own schools, which they funded through some combination of tuition and local taxes. There was no requirement that anyone attend school, so students spent far less time sitting in classrooms. Americans were nevertheless among the most educated thanks to a combination of apprenticeships, homeschooling, formal education, parents who understood the importance of raising productive members of society, and good old self-motivation. "Unschooled" did not imply "uneducated."

Giles Bowkett underestimates the curiosity and ambition of our children. Public schools of today resemble prisons and have many of the same problems. Compulsory public education traps children of low-income families in underachieving schools while forcing parents to pay for such schools through sales taxes.

Updated on January 12, 2009 10:50 PM to add citations.

Can anyone make any sense out of the conflict in the Gaza Strip? I've tried listening to news coverage of the situation. In the few broadcasts that attempt to be more or less balanced, both sides of the conflict seem equally obnoxious and unreasonable. A few points come immediately to mind.

1. It is never acceptable to indiscriminately fire rockets at civilian targets.
2. It is reasonable to restrict trade into a region that actively seeks weapons to shoot at you.
3. It is never acceptable to block food, water, fuel, and medical supplies to a civilian population.

I can't help but think that this situation could be resolved if the Israeli blockade would permit any and all humanitarian shipments into the Gaza Strip. Why doesn't this happen? Why do militants in the Gaza Strip continue to fire missiles when Israel opens humanitarian trade, as they did recently in November? Why does Israel feel compelled to block all trade if a single missile is fired? Wouldn't it be sufficient to block only the weapons and luxury goods until the missiles stop raining down?

Welcome to Vital Vector, the personal blog of Matthew Nelson, a software engineer in Los Angeles. I'll be filling these pages with my random insights into software and the internet with a few equally random tangents into politics and religion. I hope you enjoy!

In case you're curious about the older posts here, I've imported select posts from blogs I've abandoned in the past. Most are dry and outdated, but this blog looked far too empty without them!