A film from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, adapted from the 1958 essay by Leonard E. Read. For more about I, Pencil, visit www.ipencilmovie.org
November 15, 2012
I, Pencil: The Movie
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Latest advances in “trouser-cough suppression”
Lester Haines has a bit of fun with this “news” article:
Pairs of fart-absorbing underpants designed to contain the copious trouser cough output from Irritable Bowel Syndrome sufferers have proved a hit with Japanese businessmen.
Manufacturer Seiren expressed pleasant surprise that their guff-busting smalls had attracted the attention of suits more accustomed to allocating most of their underwear budget to schoolgirls’ used knickers.
Spokeswoman Nami Yoshida said: “It took us a few years to develop the first deodorant pants that are comfortable enough to wear in daily life but efficient in quickly eliminating strong smells.
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November 14, 2012
From strategic nuclear bomber to “bomb truck”
The B-52 is still in service with the US Air Force and still finding roles to play:
The U.S. Air Force is continuing to upgrade its fifty year old B-52s. The latest upgrade will enable each B-52 to carry over 110 of the 130 kg (285 pound) Small Diameter Bombs (SDB, also known as the GBU-39/B). Six years ago the rotary bomb rack inside the B-52 was modified to carry 32 SDBs instead of 15 larger bombs.
The SDB was designed from the bottom up as a smart bomb. The SDB has a more effective warhead design and guidance system. Its shape is more like that of a missile than a bomb (nearly two meters, as in 70 inches, long, and 190mm in diameter), with the guidance system built in. The smaller blast from the SDB resulted in fewer civilian casualties. Friendly troops can be closer to the target when an SDB explodes. While the 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs have a spectacular effect when they go off, they are often overkill. The troops on the ground would rather have more, and smaller, GPS bombs available. This caused the 500 pound JDAM to get developed quickly and put into service. But it wasn’t small enough for many urban combat situations. The SDB carries only 17 kg (38 pounds) of explosives, compared to 127 kg (280 pounds) in the 500 pound bomb. The SDB is basically an unpowered missile, which can glide long distances. This makes the SDB even more compact. The small wings allow the SDB to glide up to 70-80 kilometers (from high altitude.) SDB also has a hard front end that can punch through nearly three meters (eight feet) of rock or concrete, and a warhead that does less damage than the usual dumb bomb (explosives in a metal casing.) The SDB is thus the next generation of smart bombs. The more compact design of the SDB allows more to be carried. Thus F-15/16/18 type aircraft can carry 24 or more SDBs. The SDBs are carried on a special carriage, which holds four of them. The carriage is mounted on a bomber just like a single larger (500, 1,000 or 2,000) pound bomb would be. However, this feature was rarely needed in combat situations.
This makes the B-52 even more effective as the cheapest to operate and most reliable “bomb truck” the air force has. With a max takeoff weight of 240-250 tons the BUFF (Big Ugly Fat Fellow) is basically a large aircraft designed to carry bombs cheaply and efficiently. Last year the readiness rate of these bombers was 78 percent. Although a half century old, most of the internal fear has been replaced with modern electronics and furnishings. It’s all flat screens and modern gear. Look closer and you see fifty year old metal.
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November 13, 2012
Protecting children from online pornography – the impossible dream
In the Guardian, Cory Doctorow talks about the actual scale of effort the British government is attempting to mandate to “protect the children from pr0n”:
In order to filter out adult content on the internet, a company has to either look at all the pages on the internet and find the bad ones, or write a piece of software that can examine a page on the wire and decide, algorithmically, whether it is inappropriate for children.
Neither of these strategies are even remotely feasible. To filter content automatically and accurately would require software capable of making human judgments — working artificial intelligence, the province of science fiction.
As for human filtering: there simply aren’t enough people of sound judgment in all the world to examine all the web pages that have been created and continue to be created around the clock, and determine whether they are good pages or bad pages. Even if you could marshal such a vast army of censors, they would have to attain an inhuman degree of precision and accuracy, or would be responsible for a system of censorship on a scale never before seen in the world, because they would be sitting in judgment on a medium whose scale was beyond any in human history.
Think, for a moment, of what it means to have a 99% accuracy rate when it comes to judging a medium that carries billions of publications.
Consider a hypothetical internet of a mere 20bn documents that is comprised one half “adult” content, and one half “child-safe” content. A 1% misclassification rate applied to 20bn documents means 200m documents will be misclassified. That’s 100m legitimate documents that would be blocked by the government because of human error, and 100m adult documents that the filter does not touch and that any schoolkid can find.
In practice, the misclassification rate is much, much worse. It’s hard to get a sense of the total scale of misclassification by censorware because these companies treat their blacklists as trade secrets, so it’s impossible to scrutinise their work and discover whether they’re exercising due care.
November 12, 2012
Firefox users more likely to stay on old version longer than other browser users
John Leyden summarizes the recent findings about how quickly users update their web browsers after a new release:
Nearly one in four netizens are using outdated web browsers and are therefore easy pickings for viruses and exploit-wielding crooks.
The average home user upgrades his or her browser to the latest version one month after it is released, according to a survey of 10 million punters. Two thirds of those using old browser software are simply stuck on the version prior to the latest release — the remaining third are using even older code.
Internet Explorer is the most popular browser (used by 37.8 per cent of consumers), closely followed by Google Chrome (36.5 per cent). Firefox is in third place with 19.5 per cent.
Firefox users tend to be the worst for keeping up to date with new software releases, according to the survey by security biz Kaspersky Lab. The proportion of users with the most recent version installed was 80.2 per cent for Internet Explorer and 79.2 per cent for Chrome, but just 66.1 per cent for Firefox.
Old-codgers Internet Explorer 6 and 7, with a combined share of 3.9 per cent, are still used by hundreds of thousands of punters worldwide.
November 11, 2012
The natural lifecycle of a “monopoly”
In Forbes, Tim Worstall celebrates the natural end to a “monopoly” — the quasi-monopoly of Chinese exports of rare earth compounds:
These past several years I’ve been shouting to all who would listen that while China does indeed have a stranglehold on current production of rare earths that’s not something that we really need to worry about. For the important thing about rare earths is that they’re not rare (nor earths either). There are plenty of deposits around and we can get all we need from other areas of the world if we should care to.
The same cannot be said of Kuantan, the Malaysian locale where Lynas plans to build a rare earth processing plant, a type of facility residents and Australian supporters say, in online campaigns, will result in “millions of tonnes of toxic radioactive waste left behind”.
Residents took Lynas to court in Malaysia, resulting in the suspension of its operating licence. That decision was overturned yesterday.
Lynas is the company desiring to mine the Mt. Weld deposit (a nice rich one it is too). They are going to separate the RE concentrate at that plant in Malaysia. There’s been a vocal campaign against the licensing of that extraction plant and Lynas has, as above, just succeeded in over-turning a previous license refusal. Once up and operating fully the plant should supply some 20,000 tonnes a year of REs. This is a substantial portion of demand outside China: it’s some 15% or so of entire global demand in fact.
And thus we again see how an apparent monopoly isn’t really all that much use to the supposed monopolist. It certainly was true that China supplied 95-97% of the world’s REs. Largely because they were willing to mine and supply at prices that made it not worth anyone else’s while to do so. But when they tried to constrain supply, to exercise that monopoly, instead of being able to exploit us all they simply encouraged the competition that destroys that monopoly.
Markets do indeed work and the only monopoly that can really be exploited is one that isn’t contestable. And an attempted monopoly in something as common as rare earths simply is contestable and thus cannot be exploited.
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November 4, 2012
The last of the Vulcan bombers to be grounded
The RAF took the Vulcan bomber out of service in the 1980s, and the last flying example of the aircraft has been kept up by a trust organization since 2005. The trust has concluded that they can’t afford the necessary repairs to keep the aircraft airworthy:
They were once the UK’s most potent nuclear deterrent and were on standby for a role in the Cuban missile crisis.
But in recent years there has been just one that kept the flag flying for the Vulcan Bombers.
XH558 is the final airworthy aircraft of its type and has been admired by thousands of people each year at air shows as a result.
But soon it too could be grounded like all those before it.
The “tin triangle”, which is more than 50 years old, needs “challenging modifications” to both wings which the trust that owns it has decided cannot be funded.
The Leicestershire-based Vulcan To The Sky trust, which bought the aircraft in 2005, says escalating costs and limited engine life mean soon it will be confined to the runway for limited displays.
[. . .]The XH558 is now used to woo the crowds at air shows but keeping the 52-year-old aircraft in working order is a constant challenge for the engineers who work on her.
Chief engineer Mr Stone said he has had to have “words” with some of the pilots over the years who have pulled manoeuvres and airborne stunts which have made him “almost fall off his chair” as he watched from the ground.
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Rethinking software patents
Software patents are becoming a clear and present danger to innovation:
The basic problem being that there are so many patents, covering so many things, that the system is in danger of eating itself like Ourobouros.
When Dan Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation studied one large program (Linux, which is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system) in 2004, he found 283 U.S. patents that appeared to cover computing ideas implemented in the source code of that program. That same year, it was estimated that Linux was .25 percent of the whole GNU/Linux system. Multiplying 300 by 400 we get the order-of-magnitude estimate that the system as a whole was threatened by around 100,000 patents.
If half of those patents were eliminated as “bad quality” — i.e., mistakes of the patent system — it would not really change things. Whether 100,000 patents or 50,000, it’s the same disaster. This is why it’s a mistake to limit our criticism of software patents to just “patent trolls” or ”bad quality” patents. In this sense Apple, which isn’t a “troll” by the usual definition, is the most dangerous patent aggressor today. I don’t know whether Apple’s patents are “good quality,” but the better the patent’s “quality,” the more dangerous its threat.
It’s near impossible to develop new software when there are so many such patents out there. Further, even if you tried to get clearance (or signed up to licenses and so on) to use them it would be near impossible.And we do need to recall what the purpose of a patent system is. No, it isn’t to provide and income to those who create inventions. That’s only the proximate aim: the ultimate aim is to maximise the amount of invention and innovation.
The economics of patents accepts that there is a tradeoff here. Yes, we’d like people who come up with useful new things to make money. Because that incentivises people to work on coming up with interesting new things to all our benefit. However, we also want people to be able to create derivative innovations and inventions. If our protection of the original inventors is too strong then we limit this. What we want is a system that hits the sweet spot, of encouraging the maximum amount of both, original and derivative. The problem of course being that to encourage one we weaken the incentives to do the other, either way around.
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November 1, 2012
The development of personal computing
At The Register, Tony Smith charts twenty significant items that lead to modern personal computers:
Personal computing. Personal. Computing. We take both aspects so completely for granted these days, it’s almost impossible to think of a time when computing wasn’t personal — or when there was no electronic or mechanical computing.
To get from there to here, we’ve gone from a time when ‘computers’ were people able to do perform complex calculations themselves, through mechanical systems intended to do the work for them and then to powered machines able to automate the process. These led to systems that could be programmed to perform not only mathematical tasks but to store and retrieve other forms of data, taking us right up to desktop devices for a one-on-one interaction with computing power.
Since then, that power has been compressed into smaller, more convenient packages: laptops, tablets and smartphones.
What a trip. In memory of the many people who have help us along, here then are some of the key stages of that journey, represented by the 20 objects that, to us, most embody the steps that brought us to where we are today.
It’s not a comprehensive list — and feel free to comment with the devices you think we should have included — but here are the first ten of our 20 items, from the early days up to the end of the 1970s. Part two will bring us from the 1980s to the present day.
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October 31, 2012
The economic problem with recycling is that it’s the inverse of retail value
Tim Worstall at Forbes:
We all understand how pricing in the retail chain goes. Each unit of something in a shipload of them is worth less than each unit when there’s only a container of them, and so it goes on. As we get closer to the retail point each unit rises in value. As we break down the shipment from tens of thousands of units, to a truckload, then a pallet load, finally to the one single item sitting on the store shelf. If you agree to purchase 5,000 iPads you’ll expect to pay less for each one than if you tried to buy just one.
We get that: the thing about recycling is that pricing works entirely the other way around. To a reasonable approximation the value of one unit of anything for recycling is worth nothing. The value of each of 1,000 units in the same place is higher than that solitary one. One scrap car in the middle of a field isn’t worth much if anything. 1,000 cars in a scrap yard might be worth $300 a tonne for the steel content (don’t take these numbers too seriously by the way, they’re examples only). Precious metals refining, scrap metal, recycling: they all share this same economic point. The more of something you have then the more each unit of that something is worth.
[. . .]
… the way we tend to look at the economics of recycling. We hear a great deal about how recycling plastics, or cooking oil, metals, electronics, you name it we hear the same thing, “saves resources”. Sometimes this is absolutely true. Other times however what we get shown is the value of the actual recycling being done. And we’re not told about the costs of collecting what is to be recycled. And as above it’s those costs of collection that are really the key to the whole enterprise.
Just as an example there’s value in 1,000 tonnes of used plastic bags. Among other things you can burn them in a power station and get some energy. Great: but what is the cost of collecting enough used plastic bags to make 1,000 tonnes? That’s the part that seems not to get into the calculations that our green friends present to us.
Cash4Gold seems to have gone under because the collection costs of the materials were higher than the value of recycling those materials. What’s really rather worrying about the larger recycling movement is that this can be/is often true of other materials. But because we don’t properly account for the collection costs we don’t see this as clearly as we do in the accounts of a (failed) for profit company (OK, would be for profit company).
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October 30, 2012
Detecting Photoshopped images – a primer
I’m sure almost everyone saw dramatic and scary images of “Hurricane Sandy” like this one that went round my friends’ Facebook timelines yesterday:
As you’ve probably guessed from the title, this is a ‘shopped image. RJS Security has a quick primer on detecting doctored images using this example:
Whenever a major media event happens (like Hurricane Sandy), we are inundated with news. Sometimes that news is useful, but often it merely exists to create FUD… Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. While I have not personally seen any malware campaigns capitalizing on the event yet, it is inevitable. The pattern is generally as follows:
- Event hits the news as media outlets try to one-up eachother to get the word out.
- People spread the warnings, making them just a little bit worse each time they are copied.
- Other people create hoaxes to ride the wave of popularity.
- Still other people create custom hoaxes to exploit the disaster financially.
A few minutes ago, at least in my little corner of the internet, we hit stage 3 when this image was posted
H/T to Bruce Schneier for the link.
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A source of obscure and unusual do-it-yourself books
Michael Bradshaw‘s letter to the editor in the most recent Libertarian Enterprise alerted me to a possible source of interesting and unusual do-it-yourself books and pamphlets:
“The Lindsay” of Lindsay’s Books has announced his retirement “in 2013 or earlier” and the closing of his book store.
For many decades Mr. Lindsay has been the premier supplier of technical books to the do-it-yourself crowd, machine shop mavens, foundry sand-crabs, eccentrics, nut cases (like me) and geniuses at large (like “Uncle Dave” Gingery).
It ain’t all Uncle Dave.
He (Lindsay, not Dave) has titles from all over and back to the mid nineteenth century. He used to have De Re Metallica by Agricola in the Hoover English translation, but I don’t know if it is still cataloged. There are tech-school text books, how-to volumes from some of the best industrial arts guys around and collections of articles from technical manuals and magazines back to the early twentieth century. Get a 1940’s version of “How to Run a Lathe” by the South Bend Machine Tool Company.
His titles cover a plethora (really!) of stuff, such as:
- Machine shop practices, building the major tools from scratch — from scrap (the Gingery series), building EDM machines and other shop tools and techniques.
- Foundry tools and methods. Make your own molding shop and blast furnaces for the back yard. Fuel them with charcoal, propane or natural gas. Pour castings in aluminum, zinc and pot metal, copper alloys, iron alloys. Design and build centrifugal fans to power your crucible and cupola furnaces. Make your own crucibles. Dig ore for your cupola furnace, with a sharp stick, while wearing a leather breech-clout, a tie and a top hat! (OK, that last one was a joke. Lame.)
- Sheet metal shop tools and methods. Make your own brake and slip-roll. Books of projects. Start a local sheet metal fabricating business.
- Make electric generators, modify alternators, re-build or modify motors, make electro- and permanent magnets. Make radios from scratch. Emulate Nicola Tesla. Short circuit yourself and go up in a puff of smoke!
- Learn about old-time chemistry. Set up a chem-lab. Screw up and dissolve, stain, burn, poison, blow-up and generally kill yourself in the most ingenious ways! Go up in another puff of (green) smoke!
- Make wooden toys for kids. Make ship models for yourself.
- Make steam, sterling, turbines and other kinds of engines. Build boilers from scratch and blow yourself (and the garage) up again! Build locomotives from scratch. Well, “maybe” on that last one.
- Make wind and water turbines to power your generators or shop. Recycle waste oils.
- Other stuff that I forgot to mention.
Basically, if you drop a bunch of money (including postage) on Lindsay, he will show you how to make a very complete industrial revolution. You may even have some fun. While killing yourself in the most ingenious ways. Count your fingers at the end of the day.
[. . .]
Get a catalog for $2 from Lindsay at lindsaybks.com Order some books. Do it NOW while you still can. The complete machine shop from scratch series is available in a package deal at a discount. There are some other package discounts. Check out the trauma center and links to other book dealers. Some are available on Amazon.com, but not many.
You can also buy Uncle Dave’s books (and his son Vince’s, too) direct, at the Gingery book store.
Note: I just received a note from Lindsay Books. Here is the pertinent part:
“In the future, you may want to visit our new associate e-store:
Your Old Time Bookstore
youroldtimebookstore.com
YOTB’s site offers all books printed by Lindsay and provides decline/error notification before processing…Thanks!
Lindsay Publications, Inc.PO Box 538
Bradley, IL 60915
Fax: 815-935-5477″See you in the shop.
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October 29, 2012
The Dragon returns, bearing cargo
At The Register, Brid-Aine Parnell reports on the mostly successful cargo delivery round-trip by SpaceX’s Dragon capsule:
The reusable cargoship dropped into the ocean yesterday evening around 250 miles off the coast of Mexico after resupplying the ISS and its crew. The Dragon was ferried to a port near Los Angeles where it will be prepped for its return to SpaceX’s test facility in Texas.
Some of the cargo brought back by the capsule is due to be returned to NASA in the next couple of days, including research samples from the station’s microgravity environment. The ship delivered 882 pounds of gear to the ISS, including scientific research and crew supplies. It returned with nearly twice that weight of stuff.
The mission was only a part-success, as the secondary objective was to launch a satellite for Orbcomm, but due to a malfunctioning engine in the launch phase, the satellite could not be placed in the correct orbit and was lost. Orbcomm is sticking with SpaceX for two more satellite launches in spite of this initial failure.
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October 27, 2012
In praise of (invisible) editors
I don’t have a huge library of ebooks: partly because I’m still years behind in reading my actual printed book backlog, and partly because I’m not over-fond of reading books off a screen. However, I’ve often heard from those who do read some of their books in ebook format that typos are much more common there than in the printed versions:
… the reason for so many typos here is that almost no self-publishers are passing their work under the nose of an editor. Perhaps this distinction is easier if I use the English English words, editor and subeditor (or “sub”). An editor decides on what is going to be published, how stories are going to be tackled. A sub does the work that is lacking here. Correcting typos, making sure sentences are whole, perhaps rewriting the occasional line to make it flow.
What almost everyone who hasn’t worked for a newspaper doesn’t understand is that all of the copy in anything has been passed under such a nose. The subs rescue many of us from the its/it’s problems, dangling participles (not that I even know what that is) and so on. One of the things that everyone writing online has had to learn (or relearn!) is all of these rules. For we don’t have subs online.
We’ve all also had to learn (or relearn) that subbing your own writing is near impossible. The eye just skips over some of the things that a writer is prone to. Sure, spellcheckers help but they’re not perfect. And they won’t help with grammar or the its/it’s thing, or “arc” and “are”.
So this is the first reason that many ebooks are filled with mistakes and typos. Many are being written by those who don’t know about the vital function of the sub and wouldn’t afford one even if they did. And given that it is incredibly difficult to sub your own work this might well be a problem that doesn’t have a solution.
