Blackcap Blog

Published at 19:17 on 29 November 2012

After covering the recent internet blackout in Syria, NPR All Things Considered had one of those basically useless wastes of breathable oxygen known as professional pundits come on to discuss the story. He was full of BS about how the USA so much better than that, and respects free speech so that anything of the sort would be “impossible” here.

Ignoring completely, of course, the inconvenient fact that the US ruling elite would like very much to have that capability, has sought it in the past, and almost certainly will seek it again. Oops!

Published at 21:20 on 14 November 2012

An astounding bit of progress, and the marijuana legalization is, for the first time in my memory, the United States (well, two states) actually starting to take the lead on something progressive for a change. (Same-sex marriage was the law of the land on other countries before the first state in the Union legalized it. Ditto for universal health care, which Obamacare really isn’t, given the cracks and gaps in that program, as much as it will dramatically expand coverage. But even The Netherlands never actually flat-out legalized cannabis use; they merely decided to stop enforcing the laws against possession of small amounts of it.)

But, there’s still plenty to do, particularly on global warming and ecological sustainability.

Published at 22:02 on 1 November 2012

Executive summary: Maybe. It’s impossible to say with any certainty. But that’s not the real issue to be concerned about.

Climate science is pretty unanimous that the Earth is warming and that human activity is responsible for that. But, the amount of warming so far has been a degree or two Fahrenheit. That’s far less than the natural variability that weather systems provide (deviations of ten degrees above or below norms are common).

It’s one of the things that makes life easier for deniers: “Look! There was a terrible, cold winter on the East Coast! That proves that the Earth cannot be getting warmer.” No, it doesn’t: add a degree of warming to a cold snap that sends temperatures twenty degrees below normal, and you have a cold snap that sends temperatures nineteen degrees below normal. Still a severe cold snap.

Might global warming have tipped things “over the edge” in this case, and caused a superstorm where none would have existed otherwise? It’s possible. Possible. Not certain. We can’t say. Weather is an extremely complex system and it’s not possible to predict specific outcomes well in advance.

Hurricanes have always happened. They happened well before humans started burning fossil fuels and dramatically increasing the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

But that’s irrelevant. There’s plenty of evidence that global warming will make storms like Sandy more common. Whatever Sandy’s root causes, Sandy offers a preview of what will become increasingly common in a warming world — and the more warming, the more common such storms will be.

That, and not any claim that Sandy must have been caused by global warming, is the real lesson to take from this week’s news.

Published at 22:47 on 30 October 2012

It’s going to be weeks before the subway fully reopens again. Weeks. If not months.

This was obvious the moment I heard about the flooding being worse than expected, and the media and the authorities are now starting to drop hints about it.

The biggest problem is the electrical and electronic components of the signal and control system. Salt water is absolutely the worst thing to expose such equipment to. Anything that’s been flooded by salt water will either have to be removed from service, washed several times with distilled water, baked for at least half a day in a drying oven, allowed to cool, and be thoroughly tested before reinstallation; or it will have to be discarded and replaced with new equipment.

Anything less will sacrifice reliability, and doing so is absolutely unacceptable on a passenger railroad. You don’t want malfunctioning signal and control equipment to send two trains in opposite directions on the same track, giving both a full-speed-ahead signal.

The reconditioning option will take much time and labor, and the replacement option will be (a) very costly, and (b) in the near term, impossible, because such equipment is fairly specialized and there’s not enough currently on hand to replace everything.

So the MTA is doubtless going to decide to give up on some lines of the subway system for the time being. Once you get away from lower Manhattan and downtown Brooklyn, there wasn’t much flooding. That means the unflooded parts of the lines being sacrificed can be salvaged for spare parts to restore service on the priority lines. Then, in the coming weeks and months, the damaged equipment can be either reconditioned or replaced and used to put the sacrificed lines back in service.

The problem is, there really is no substitute for the subway in Manhattan. It’s so densely developed that the only practical way to deliver the number of commuters who are employed there is an extensive rail system which is completely separate from the surface streets.

Sure, they will try to make do as much as possible with buses, probably bringing in rented ones from other cities and banning or severely restricting the use of private vehicles in Manhattan, so as to make room for the expanded bus service. But that will only go so far.

To some degree, it’s a moot issue anyhow, since the subway tunnels and building sub-basements are interconnected, meaning that there’s a huge chunk of office buildings which are now unfit for occupancy until the HVAC and mechanical systems in their flooded basements and sub-basements are reconditioned or replaced.

It is, in other words, a real mess. More later, including something about the relationship between Sandy and human-caused global warming.

Published at 22:35 on 1 October 2012

A prime example of that can be seen by considering the abandoned building at 11th Avenue E. and Pine St. in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. For over a decade it’s been disused for any purpose save for those of bill-posters. It’s typically covered in ads for upcoming music performances and whatnot.

Well, about a month ago, a group called Grrrl Army decided to appropriate that space for their own. It was a wonderful action which provided a glimpse of what a world where advertising is used to challenge people to become better individuals, instead of simply to turn a profit, could be like:

This was arguably vandalism, but then again, so was the postering of every available vertical street-facing surface on this structure, which to reiterate has been tolerated for a decade or more. But, it’s postering with a political meaning (as opposed to postering to encourage people to spend money). We can’t have that!

The building’s owners saw to promptly erect a fence to prevent any such further defilement of their precious dilapidated eyesore from happening again:

What’s particularly amusing about this is that the structure, post-Grrrl Army action, was far more attractive than it had been in years. The unified effect of everything being the same basic color scheme made it look significantly better than the disorganized collection of advertising which it had previously borne. It’s not just me who thinks so, either: a number of my friends volunteered the same opinion.

Published at 21:11 on 6 September 2012

I came closer than I like to think to missing it, but I managed to catch Kumare on the last night it showed in Seattle tonight.

It’s a documentary about what is essentially a case study on the human will to believe. The producer decided to exploit the advantages of his ethnic heritage and pass himself off as a guru from India. He basically concocted a spiritual belief system of his own (complete with plenty of new agey woo), and had no trouble attracting a small group of followers. (Which could have probably been a large group had he been so motivated to acquire one.) Eventually, he let them know the truth, after hinting at it in his teachings all along.

It’s an interesting study that raises a number of questions, not the least of which is his assertion that gurus are not needed. That’s an assertion that I am very fond of myself, but I have to admit that the movie can be taken as proving the opposite in some sense. Most of those who followed him really did seem to benefit from it, and it’s an open question whether they could have so benefited on their own.

Of course, we’re dealing with a self-fulfilling prophecy here. If you firmly and sincerely believe that gurus are necessary, and that you need one, then that belief in and of itself will get in the way of your being able to improve your life without finding and following one.

Published at 16:39 on 3 September 2012

As received while camping near Garland Mineral Springs, WA earlier this weekend.

Wolverine Radio

Published at 20:32 on 29 August 2012

First Kodak then Efke. This seems to be the year that the photographic film market collapses into a niche product.

I’ll probably still shoot it, because I like vintage cameras, but I’m also glad that this didn’t happen until digital cameras finally evolved to the point where they can compete with film SLR’s for my purposes.

Published at 20:54 on 20 August 2012

It seems as if one of my recent posts has attracted the attention of search engines, probably because in relating how I solved a Macintosh frustration, the information has proved helpful to others.

So far, so good. The bad news is that’s attracted the attention of spammers. No, they’re not getting any spam posted: I have several lines of defense against that. But they are getting through the first line of defense: the captcha on the comments form.

They’re probably doing that with the free porn scam, in which one writes some back-end software to impersonate a browser (not hard to do; I’ve done so many times for legitimate purposes), and presents the captcha image to someone who wants to be rewarded by viewing some porn for free if they solve it. The front-end that displays the porn then passes on the solution to the back-end, which uses the information to send back a form response containing the spam.

It’s a pretty minor irritation, but an irritation nonetheless. Maybe I’ll get motivated to go through my server logs and start reporting them to those responsible for the IP addresses the requests are coming from.

Published at 09:23 on 18 August 2012

Note to all: avoid iTunes videos that you must pay for like the plague.

I had been wanting to watch some Portlandia episodes , and last night tried to with iTunes video. Big, big mistake. After charging me $2.99 and commencing the download, iTunes sneeringly informed me that I could not watch said video on my computer, and then launched into a paragraph of arcane technobabble that even I could not understand at first.

Apparently, some lame copy-protection scheme mandated by the Hollywood studios considers all but a select few Macs a piracy threat, presumably because the digital video signal going between the system unit and the monitor could be used to create a decrypted, free copy of the video.

Of course, that’s no excuse for iTunes’ bait-and-switch behavior. iTunes could obviously tell if the system it was running on was unacceptable to Hollywood (hence the message); there’s no reason whatsoever for not sending it before you pay for a video and start the download. None except pure greed on Apple’s part, that is.

While researching the issue, I came across a comment in passing that mentioned BitTorrent and pirated copies of videos. A light went on. I downloaded BitTorrent, downloaded an AVI video player, typed in a few Google keywords, and within a matter of minutes BitTorrent was merrily downloading the content Apple had previously defrauded me for. Content which actually played.

And the BitTorrent download proceeded far faster than the iTunes download had. Just for yucks, I tried it again with another episode and that one arrived promptly and without issue, too.

Way to go Apple and Hollywood: you’ve successfully made it so difficult and risky for customers to pay for content that they opt for the easier option of pirating it instead.