Pioneering Misinformation

Slashdot is running a story about a physics experiment to be performed with the Rosetta spacecraft,

...but the slingshot itself will allow ESA scientists to examine the trajectory for unusual changes seen in several other probes' velocities. An unaccountable variation was first noticed as excess speed in Pioneers 11 and 12, and has since been called the Pioneer Anomaly.

Uh, no, sorry, that would be Pioneer 10 and 11, not 11 and 12. I should know, I've done a little work on the subject.

The so-called flyby anomaly that would be measured with Rosetta is quite distinct from the "Pioneer Anomaly." Both are unexplained discrepancies between measured Doppler shift data and currently understood theory, but the Pioneer Anomaly pertains to unexplained gradual velocity shifts of spacecraft cruising through deep space, while flyby anomalies pertain to sudden impulses as a spacecraft swings by the earth. Both discrepancies have been observed. In all likelihood, these experiments are telling us that our models of the classical physical forces affecting these spacecraft are not complete. Perhaps, on the odd chance that there is "new physics" involved, both anomalies are related somehow. But they definitely not the same observed effect.

Thankfully the original ESA press release gets these points correct. The more subtle points seem to have gotten lost in translation on the way to publication in Slashdot.

Thunderbird 3 Beta Review

Summary:

• Thunderbird version 3 is a significant upgrade and improvement to the Thunderbird line
• The application is faster and more responsive
• The new search capabilities are impressive
• The user interface has gotten more cluttered and difficult to use, especially in regards to the message pane and "gloda" search results
• Indexing and re-indexing seem a little clunky still
• The Dock icon on the Mac has become next to useless for me now

I've been using the Thunderbird email client for the past 2-3 years, and it has been pretty good. It hasn't received a real refresh in that time, but that is about to change. Thunderbird version 3 will be coming out soon. I've been using the "beta" versions (beta's 2, 3, and 4) to see how it works.

The first very noticeable thing is that the client is much faster. Thunderbird 3 is now using underlying libraries which are faster (and the basis of Firefox version 3). The speed is most noticeable at start-up. Also, accessing messages, which often used to require a long pause, are now available much more quickly.

Another big change is the new "gloda" search engine. The engine basically indexes all of your messages, regardless of mailbox, into a giant database that you can search. Where before, you had to choose which mailbox to search ("inbox" or "outbox"?), now you just search everything. The resulting display is actually quite cool: you see a little time history of all your messages with your search terms, and you can click on a particular month, year, or person to zoom in on something more specific. It seems quite handy.

A final big change relates to the user interface. In previous versions, the "toolbar," which appears at the top of the main window, provided a lot of actions which you could apply to the message or messages you were viewing. Now, these tool icons appear attached to the message itself, not on the main toolbar. If your muscles are used to clicking in a certain position for "reply" or "delete," they will now be quite surprised because most of the tool icons are gone.

I think this is one area where Thunderbird as started to derail. The user interface appears to be getting cluttered and unpolished. Some icons are still sitting in the main toolbar (such as "tagging"), but others are relegated to the message pane. How these choices were made is unclear, but it makes for a tacky and confusing appearance. Thankfully, you can customize your toolbar, and bring back many of your favorite icons if you want.

I'm also unhappy with the layout of the message pane in another respect. In early betas, the message header was nice and compact, occupying a few lines of screen real estate showing the most important properties of the message such as the sender and send date. In beta version 3, this option was removed, and the message header occupies an enormous part of the screen, usually with irrelevant stuff that most people simply will not want to see. This is a big step back in the usability of the client because it forces you to scroll more, or to open the message in full screen mode just to see its contents. Thankfully, there is an extension called CompactHeader which brings back a more compact look, and also allows you to choose which "action" icons are visible for each screen. The mainline developers should look at putting this feature back in.

There's another area where polish is not quite up to snuff yet. The new gloda search can be quite handy, but the search results appear cluttered and a bit unreadable. The results are mostly message text with very tiny separators between each message. Search terms should be highlighted but are not, which makes it harder to determine the relevancy of the message to your search. For that matter, it's unclear how search results are ordered, and it's difficult to wade through all of them when you get a large number of hits. Some effort needs to be expended to make the presentation a little better in order to fully exploit this feature.

A bit more on performance. The first time you start up Thunderbird 3, it will spend a long time indexing your mail folders. This is more or less a one-time operation, but it will consume a significant amount of time and CPU while its happening. The upside is that once it's complete, you get all of those great search features. The downside is that the program seems to want to re-index quite often. Re-indexing doesn't try to do everything at once, but it's unclear what it's actually doing since there appears to be a bit of fumbling around by the program before it declares itself done.

I have a few peeves. This new version of Thunderbird no longer shows the number of "new" messages - messages I have just received - in the Dock icon. Instead it shows the number of "unread" messages. For someone like me who has thousands of unread (but useless) messages, the unread message count is next to useless. I want the icon badge to show me when new mail has arrived!

The new index files consume a significant portion of disk space (a few gigabytes). In this day and age, that's not a big deal, and we should use disk for these kinds of conveniences. However, every time any one of your messages changes, or if you get a new message, the index file changes. If you have a regular backup schedule (you should!), then you will find that it is now backing up a huge monolithic index file every time. This is a recipe for exhausting your backup space that much more quickly than before. There is not much the developers can do about this, but I would recommend that the new index files be placed in a separate directory. Most backup programs like Apple's Time Machine, allow you to exclude directories from the backup operation. If my hard drive crashes, it's no big deal that I wouldn't have a backup: I'll just reindex my mail.

Overall, this is a significant improvement, and it's nice to seem some activity in the Thunderbird line. There's some creative work going on there, especially regarding the message search functions. On the other hand, the usability of the application has taken a hit, which is unfortunate.

Double Whammy

Imagine that you are a young person that had a file sharing application on your computer, and that you shared 24 songs with other people.

Now we can debate if song sharing is bad or not, but basically it's against the law, and there are penalties for breaking the law. And there's a civil lawsuit brought against you by the music industry, and you lose. Twice actually.

You might imagine that the penalty is somehow related to the cost of the songs, maybe the number of files shared. How much is that, 99 cents per song on iTunes? Oh wait, maybe because of iTunes shenanigans, most of those tracks cost $1.29 now. So what is that, $31? OK, so even with treble damages, the total penalty should be less than $100, right?

Could you imagine that the penalty is actually $80,000 PER SONG? So that your actual total penalty for all 24 songs is close to $2 million!!!

You, the poor defendant, argue that the penalty is so unconsionably high that it could not be constitutional. After all, you are but a poor individual, not a money making song pirating outfit. $2 million is nowhere near the value of the songs shared, nor the amount of damages, nor what you could even pay.

But guess which administration has just filed a legal brief that $2 million is absolutely constitutional. In fact it is "carefully crafted." Yes, you guessed it, the Obama administration Department of Justice. This is a government agency intervening in a civil trial on behalf of the music corporations, against an individual, claiming that a $2 million damage award is just fine.

Sigh.

In reality, these penalties were established by Congress, at the urging of the music industry, to prevent industrial-scale music "piracy." The large fines were intended to deter business enterprises from entering the illegal music copying business. And yet, here this law is being used to destroy a young person.

The young person in question, Jammie Thomas, admitted she did share the songs, and her trial is part of a larger strategy by the music industry to file lawsuits against their own customers because file-sharing. Thomas definitely was not a saint. But there's no way that $2 million is in any way comparable to the amount of actual damage done. Or that she deserves her own government to go to bat for the other team.

It's a double whammy really. The law with an $80,000 penalty was "crafted" at the urging of music industry lobbyists, and Congress and the (then) president were happy to sign off on it. So already the deck is stacked once against the little guy. But then -- and here is the second whammy -- the government's lawyers intervene on behalf of the music industry during the trial to say that this law is great. Indeed it was finely crafted! How can Ms. Thomas have any chance at all? I don't doubt that this intervention is actually more payback for political contributions. Department of Justice lawyers know who butters their bosses' bread.

If music file sharing were a rare and extremely damaging thing, there might be a point to having extraordinary penalties. But in fact, there are tens of millions of file sharers, and in surveys, most people considering some file sharing to be morally acceptable. The actual damage is small. As noted above, sharing a few songs with others would cost the music companies at most a few hundred dollars in lost sales. The actual punishment, $80,000 per song, is so usurious it is absurd. The fact that tens of millions of people may be liable for such huge penalties just shows how arbitrary the whole process is. Whether you get caught in the music industry's dragnet or not is the difference between sharing a few songs and sure bankruptcy. The fact that the administration's "Justice" department is intervening in favor of wreaking such personal destruction is very dismaying.

My Dark Little Secret

All these years I've been trying to keep my true citizenship a secret.


Darn you, kenyanbirthcertificategenerator.com for finding my birth certificate!

Noctilucent Emissions

There's a new study suggesting that "noctilucent clouds" are caused by the plumes of space shuttle launches, which is somewhat ironic for me. For those that don't know, noctilucent clouds are the highest clouds found in the Earth's atmosphere. They are ice crystals floating high in the mesosphere, where large amounts of moisture are not typically found, and are usually only seen in twilight when the setting sun illuminates them against the dark sky. There is also evidence that these clouds are a modern phenomenon, within the past century, and so they may be related to human activity, or perhaps climate change.

Noctilucent clouds over Lake Saimaa. Photograph taken by Mika Yrjölä. Permission by Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License (from Wikipedia).

Early studies have suggested that noctilucent clouds were caused by space shuttle launches. The space shuttle exhaust plume is composed mostly of water vapor. As the shuttle launches into orbit, it can dump significant amounts of water vapor into the upper atmosphere as it passes through it. More recent studies by Dr. Michael Kelley have added credence to that idea: shuttle launches in 2003 and 2007 produced corresponding noctilucent clouds.

NASA launched a satellite called AIM in 2007 to study noctilucent clouds. AIM stands for Aeronomy of Ice in the Mesosphere. AIM continues to study the phenomenon using several instruments, including two imagers and a meteoric dust measuring device.

The part I find ironic is that NASA launched a satellite to study a phenomenon caused... by the launch of NASA satellites!

OK, there are far more noctilucent clouds than can be entirely explained by shuttle launches, so this is not a complete exercise in navel-gazing. The shuttle-noctilucent connection was known before AIM was selected by NASA.

Update 2009-07-30: Added noctilucent cloud image from Wikipedia.

Solar Dud or Doozy?

There is some news in the past few days that the a few new sunspots are appearing, it may be that the next period of solar activity has begun. Will it be a dud or a doozy?

The sun has a quite regular cycle that repeats about every 11.5 years. Each cycle represents a reversal of the the sun's magnetic field -- magnetic north becomes south, south becomes north -- so it actually takes 23 years for the sun's magnetic field structure to return to its starting configuration.

During one of these 11.5 year cycles, the sun's magnetic field gets tangled and wound up in its circulating convective zone, located in the outer third of the sun. Once in a while, the magnetic field pokes out from the beneath the surface, and a sunspot appears. So sunspots are indicators of the how chaotic the magnetic field is within the sun.

Solar activity is a problem for us on the earth since the energetic particles ejected during solar storms can affect communications, power grids and the orbits of satellites. Being able to predict the the solar cycle, both timing and strength, is a valuable tool that can save lives and equipment. Unfortunately, predictions have been more of an art than a science.

I was really intrigued by a presentation at the 2005 AAS conference several years ago by Peter Gilman and Mausumi Dikpati, which claimed an improved method for solar cycle prediction. Their solar model showed that the solar convective zone had large scale circulations, almost like oceanic currents on earth. They also showed that it takes approximately three solar cycles for the solar flows -- which are almost like conveyor belts -- to make one circuit. Thus, they could train a reasonably accurate predictive model, based on the known solar activity from three cycles before (with the added benefit, that it produces predictions for about three cycles into the future as well). Their prediction was that the current solar maximum would be delayed by 6-12 months, but 30-50% more intense than the previous cycle. The "conventional" predictions were calling for the beginning of the cycle to begin in early 2007, while Dikpati and Gilman's group were calling for activity starting in the late 2007 to 2008 time frame.

Well at this stage, it's clear that both the conventional and new Dikpati/Gilman predictions were wrong, since we're past halfway into 2009 before any serious solar activity has appeared. But it's interesting that the onset of the cycle has indeed been delayed from its expected appearance, which indicates that perhaps there is something behind the Dikpati/Gilman model. The "conventional" prediction was recently revised, and now claims that the next cycle will be a dud -- weaker than usual. I've had a little harder time determining if the Dikpati/Gilman group has revised their forecast for the strength of the cycle.

Either way, I think it will be an interesting cycle to watch. I actually hope this solar cycle is an extreme -- either a dud or a doozy -- rather than an average one. Extremes are much better test cases for theories than boring average cases. While I have something to lose if this cycle is a strong one, at least it would be lost in advancement of science.

Ipod 3.0 software update

The iPod3.0 touch software update doesn't look that compelling for the iPod touch first generation. Here's what they advertise as new:

• cut and paste - want
  
• landscape keyboard - kind of want
  
• spotlight search - meh
  
• buy media on your ipod touch from itunes - do not want
  
• stereo bluetooth - could not use (2nd generation only)
  
• head to head games - could not use (2nd generation only)
  
• shake to shuffle - do not want
  
• parental controls - do not want
  
• new languages - do not want
  
• automatic wifi hotspot login - do not want
  
• push notifications - probably won't use
  
• itunes store account creations - do not want

My question is whether I will have to pay the $9.95 just to keep
up-to-date with security updates and bug fixes for the older
version of the iPod touch operating system.

Damn the Torpedoes

Warning: spoilers!

Recipe of the Star Trek movie: (1) One part damn the moral dilemma, full action ahead! (2) Two parts damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead! (literally) (3) Three parts damn the bridge procedure, I'm going on the away team! (4) Most. powerful. mining ship. evar. (5) Seasoned to taste with a pinch of red matter. (may substitute deus ex machina juice if required) Smooth over plot holes with a frosting of computer graphics. Served as a non-stop space action movie with a Star Trek logo pasted on top.

The tasting: I liked it for the action part, I quite liked the acting and character interactions, but as a Trekkie film, it wasn't really there for me.

Pick a Side, Any Side

Does it matter what we believe, as long as we believe something? That's what a television news commentator would urge us to do:

Believe in something! Even if it's wrong! Believe in it!

-- Glenn Beck, Mar 2009

The video is in this Comedy Central clip, around time 3:10:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
IndigNation! Populist Uprising '09 - The Enragening
comedycentral.com

OK, you might argue, this is just a typical opinion
entertainer on one of the several "news" networks, trying to
fill up on of the 24 hours the network is on the air, every day.
Let's even excuse the fact that Beck seems to believe all of what
he is saying, down to the teary-eyed professions of love for his
country and the little guy (see video above). Is there something
to what he says?

As it turns out, perhaps. A recent survey by Anthony Leiserowitz asked television viewers which of several "news" shows they watched before the general election in 2008, and about their general beliefs. Of those who watched the specific shows of interest, they broke down approximately evenly between left-leaning (such as Olberman, Colbert and Stewart), and right-leaning shows (such as O'Reilly, Hannity and Limbaugh).

What fascinated me was this question,

We should always be willing to fight
for our country, whether our country is right or wrong.

A whopping 70% of those who watch right-leaning shows agree
with this statement. Which means if our country is wrong, no
matter how egregiously wrong, 70% of these viewers would still
support military action? The left-leaning shows are really not
much better, with 30-40% of viewers responding that they agree
with the statement. Of the respondants that didn't watch any of
the specific shows, about half agreed that we should be willing
to fight no matter what.

Note that the question was not about whether we
should "support the troups," although that phrase has it's own
moral ambiguities. No, the question was whether we should
support our country, in military action, even when that action is
something we know to be wrong. I wonder if the right-leaning
watchers still agree with this statement, now that a Democrat
holds the presidency.

I'm a little taken aback by this philosophy. It basically
says that a large number of citizens place country above
morality. Or rather, that our nation creates its own
morality by virtue of its existence. These respondants are
willing to hold and support beliefs that they know to be wrong,
simply because the name of their country is attached to it. I
guess I would prefer it to go the other way: that our country
earns the respect of the righteous by actually doing the right
thing in the first place.

Der Party Starter

One of the Superbowl commercials that I really laughed at...

Just how much is a teenager worth these days?

Sadly, we now know the answer:

"Martinez had arranged through a third party to have his [14 year old] daughter marry the older teenager, identified by authorities as Margarito de Jesus Galindo, of Gonzales, California. In exchange, Galindo was to pay Martinez $16,000 and provide him with 160 cases of beer, 100 cases of soda, 50 cases of Gatorade, two cases of wine, and six cases of meat, Greenfield Police Chief Joe Grebmeier told CNN.

Apparently it's a common practice in the Oaxaca province where the people involved were from, but it's also a little chilling to know the negotiations revolved around a few cases of gatorade.