An interesting climate change animation by Bloomberg

The scientific evidence of climate change / global warming is irrefutable. Turning what really is settled science, raising political and ideological objections to it and then claiming that that makes the issue unsettled science is, to put it mildly, too stupid for words. There are so many studies and measurement and statistics that back this up and so few that call it into question even a little tiny bit that I'm not sure what to say to those who simply refuse to accept that we have a serious problem with what is happening to our climate.

Not only is the evidence that our climate is getting warmer irrefutable, it is also irrefutable that the primary driver of this warming is a consequence of what we humans have done and are doing. I have read a wide variety of alternative explanations for why our climate is getting warmer and, quite frankly, I have yet to encounter a non-anthropogenic explanation for global warming that even passes the laugh test.

Here's an interesting animation which illustrates just how fast our climate is changing. I will add more links as I encounter / remember them.

http://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2014-hottest-year-on-record/

Thirteen of the fourteen hottest years are in the 21st century.

What made Bletchley Park possible?

The people, including Alan Turing, who worked at Bletchley Park during the Second World War were not only fighting to win the war, they were, in many respects, inventing the foundations for the computer age that we live in today.

Here's a very cool video that gives an interesting perspective on what made it possible for Bletchley Park to play such an important role in the Second World War. The killer quote comes right at the end:

"Many people want to work on the edge of innovation. If they alive in those days, they would have been at Bletchley."

http://youtu.be/3Ky3-Tbkyhg

Is electronic voting a good idea?

Here's a not too geeky explanation of why it is impossible to create an electronic voting system which is trustworthy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3_0x6oaDmI&feature=youtu.be

An excellent video. He does an exceptional job of explaining in relatively non-geek terms why it isn't possible to have a trustworthy electronic voting system.

That said, I think that there's yet another problem with electronic voting which is a different aspect of the trust problem. From my perspective, one of the key features of a conventional paper ballot system where humans do all the counting is that it is possible for pretty much any concerned citizen to look at the system carefully and convince themselves that it is trustworthy in the sense that nobody will be able to see how they voted or be able to fake the results or any number of possible things that a concerned citizen might be concerned about.

Now let's assume that you have an electronic voting system that actually is perfectly secure (remember, I said "let's assume") and is actually worthy of our trust. The only citizens who are in a position to actually convince themselves that the electronic voting system is trustworthy are a tiny handful of geeks who are in a position to actually inspect the system. The only thing that an arbitrary concerned citizen can do, assuming that they are not one of this tiny handful of geeks, is ask said tiny handful of geeks if the system is trustworthy and then try to trust the answer they get (obviously, if they actually do trust the answer that they get then they are fools since nobody in their right mind would accept an answer along the lines of "trust me, I'm a geek and I happen to know that the system is trustworthy").

The bottom line is that even if their electronic voting system actually is trustworthy (an admirable yet impossible goal as Computerphile explains in this video), only a concerned citizen who is a complete fool would ever trust that their electronic voting system is trustworthy.

As it turns out, this conclusion leads directly to yet another problem with electronic voting - since any concerned citizen with half a brain will realize that they cannot trust the electronic voting system, the fact that the electronic voting system is essentially being forced on them will breed distrust and cynicism in their democratic system as a whole. This is fatal to any democratic system because, quite frankly, even if it is possible for a concerned citizen to truly and properly convince themselves that the system is trustworthy, the vast majority of citizens actually have faith in the system only because they have faith in the system (i.e. their faith is circular and illogical and unfounded but it is all that they have to work with).

Are photographs works of art?

A photograph recently sold for the astonishing sum of $6.5 million dollars. Here's an article which discusses the sale and which essentially concludes that photographs are not art.

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/dec/10/most-expensive-photograph-ever-hackneyed-tasteless

For what it is worth, I quite like the photo described in the article. There is also no question in my mind that this photograph and many other photographs are works of art. While easier to create than a painting or a sculpture of similar compositional complexity, there is no question in my mind that a lot of skill goes into creating a great photograph.

That said, I am uncomfortable with the notion of any photograph (other than a few very special cases that I will get to shortly) having a significant value. The reason for this discomfort is that when one buys a print of a photograph, it is not only impossible to know if there are other identical prints in existence, it is also usefully impossible to know if additional identical copies of the print can be made.

Another way of looking at the issue is that a work of art by a famous artist is valuable in significant part because it is exceptionally rare. In fact, the work of art is so rare that there is often exactly one instance of the work of are in existence in the entire world. Furthermore, even if the artist is still alive and still has literally everything that they need (the scene/model, the equipment, the paint, the lighting, etc., etc., etc.), it is generally if not essentially always impossible for the artist to create another identical copy of the work of art. Even when it is possible for the artist to create subsequent copies which are identical in all the ways that even the most expert expert could use to figure out which copy is the original (i.e. which copy was created first) then there will still only ever be a relative handful of such identical copies. Consequently, the person paying a large sum of money for a conventional work of art has some assurance that the work that they are buying will remain relatively if not truly unique / original and thus preserve much of its value.

In contrast, photographs, as a rule, simply do not have this same property.

There are a few exceptions. For example, if one could purchase the oldest photograph ever taken then one would have in their possession a physical artifact which could be demonstrated to be THE original oldest photograph ever taken because the technology used to create that particular photograph is such that making another copy of the photograph that a seriously expert expert could not identify as being a copy is impractical to the point of being impossible. There are a relative handful of other photographs in existence today with the same traits - that they are effectively impossible to duplicate in such a way that a seriously expert expert would be unable to identify which was the original and which was the copy.

For those interested, the oldest existent photograph in the world was a scene taken by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce in 1826 or 1827. It is a very dark and rather difficult to see image of the view out of an upper floor window of his home in Burgundy, France. See

http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/permanent/firstphotograph/

for more information about Niépce's photo.

John McCain's 2014-12-09 response to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA interrogation methods

John McCain's 2014-12-09 response to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on CIA interrogation methods.

http://www.mccain.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2014/12/floor-statement-by-sen-mccain-on-senate-intelligence-committee-report-on-cia-interrogation-methods

On the United States' failure to "do the right thing" regarding its commission and coverup of officially sanctioned acts of torture . . .

So the country of Jefferson and Franklin, of Washington and Lincoln, of Franklin Roosevelt and others now finds itself orchestrating and defending the coverup of what can only be described as crimes against humanity. Two successive administrations have essentially rationalized these crimes on the grounds that a U.S. President said that they were legal. By defending and covering up these clearly criminal and immoral acts, the U.S. has conceded the moral high ground on any number of issues for years and years to come.

The only good news is that both the infliction of torture and the coverup of torture are defined by international treaty to be crimes of universal jurisdiction. While the vast majority of the hundreds if not thousands of Americans involved in the infliction of torture or the coverup of torture may choose to avoid foreign travel for the rest of their lives, eventually someone will make a mistake and be arrested and put on trial by a country somewhere in the world which has the moral fortitude to call a spade a spade.

The sooner that day comes, the better . . .

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/12/opinion/after-report-on-cia-torture-no-more-disclosure.html

A custom set of Harry Potter books by Kincső Nagy

A very impressive custom version of the Harry Potter books.

https://www.behance.net/gallery/19617679/J-K-Rowling-Harry-Potter-

This is the work of Hungarian design student Kincső Nagy. It was apparently done as a degree project. No idea if it will ever become commercially available. With luck, we'll be seeing more of this artist's work!