funkboxing

Some of my early Blinded with Science articles dropped off the internet so I thought I’d post the whole series here, what with the apes about to take over and all. This is actually for their benefit.

Hey future hyper intelligent apes of the future, careful with that hyper intelligence, it can make you stupid.

• Blinded with Science – Lasers: Pointing to the Future
• Blinded with Science – Freestyle Science, Part II: Cryptozoology
• Blinded with Science – Freestyle Science, Part I: Paranormal Research
• Blinded with Science – 2012: Countdown to the Big Whatever
• Blinded with Science – Who Gives a Crap about Open Source Software?
• Blinded with Science – Television: Better than Reading
• Blinded with Science – Election Technology: Rise of the Voting Machine
• Blinded with Science – Criminal Chemicals
• Blinded with Science – The 300 Million Dollar Battery
• Blinded with Science – Mr. Wizard: The Last Action Hero
• Blinded with Science – Picking Bones
• Blinded with Science – Relativity – Part 2: General
• Blinded with Science – Relativity – Part 1: Special
• Blinded with Science – Stem Cells: The Root of All Evil
• Blinded with Science – Earth: Magnet for Change
• Blinded with Science – Thinking: The Mental Challenge
• Blinded with Science – E.T.: Illegal Alien
• Conservatruth is Stranger than Fiction
• Blinded with Science – Cellulosic Ethanol: Tomorrows Fuel for Drinking and Driving
• Blinded with Science – War on Wires
• Mortal Values
• Blinded with Science – Super Collider? I barely know her!
• Blinded with Science – Trekonomic Incentives
• The Curses of Science Fiction
• The Calculus Conspiracy

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – February, 2010

BWS – Lasers – Mp3

For hundreds of thousands of years, primates pointed at things. It all started with the finger.

Over time, pointing techniques improved: toes, chins, noses, and even the occasional thrust crotch were employed to express interest and intent.

Primates evolved into Homo erectus, capable of walking upright and pointing at things while on the move. While mobile pointing had its advantages, our hominid ancestors were still limited to pointing at things with their body parts.

Homo habilis was the first of our ancestors to point at things with other things. The first tool used by early man was not a stick used for digging or smashing. The first tool ever conceived was actually a stick used to point at other sticks to indicate that such sticks could be useful for digging or smashing. Without this early mastery of the “pointer,” mankind might still be digging and smashing with its bare hands.

When our ancestors began to think very deeply about what they were pointing at, why they were pointing at it, and how pointing might be perceived by that which was being pointed at, they became Homo sapiens. We are Homo sapiens, and just like our ancestors, we love to point at stuff.

Modern humans still use the finger and the stick to point, but over time we’ve developed the resources to point to things higher and farther away. Early in history, we began manufacturing really straight sticks to point at stuff with a high degree of accuracy. Later, telescoping pointers were created to make long-distance pointing more portable.

The theoretical pinnacle of pointing progress was always imagined as a portable, easy-to-use device that would point at great distances, would be highly visible, and could also be used to entertain and confound house cats. The application of this theory would come in the form of the laser pointer, but first, we had to invent the laser.

A laser is essentially an emitter of light, much like a candle, a flashlight, and that big, crazy, yellow circle in the sky that keeps waking me up every morning. Unlike other emitters of light, a laser emits monochromatic, coherent, directional light. That is to say, lasers emit light that is of a single color or wavelength. These wavelengths are in phase, and they all agree that they should travel together. Most light consists of many wavelengths and phases, none of which have any desire to hang out together for very long.

Laser is actually an acronym that stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Since visible light is only one form of electromagnetic radiation, the laser has many cousins, including the maser, uvaser, and xaser, emitting microwaves, ultraviolet, and X-ray radiation, respectively.

The taser is not a cousin of the laser, nor is the phaser, though the phaser can be used in conjunction with lasers to protect Starfleet from Borg attacks. The blazer is also unrelated to the laser. However, blazers can protect against laser and phaser weaponry, which is why the Borg dress code was changed from “exposed bionics” to “business casual.”

Albert Einstein established the theoretical foundations for the laser pointer in 1917 in his paper “On the Quantum Theory of Radiation,” which was about as difficult to understand as it sounds like it would be. For over 40 years after Einstein’s publication, physicists babbled and scribbled about short waves, stimulated emissions, optical pumping, and other remarkably nerdy sexual innuendo in the attempt to sound like they knew what Einstein was talking about.

Finally, in 1960, Theodore Maiman demonstrated a functional laser pointer. This was a great achievement for pure science, but since Maiman’s laser was massive and could only point in the direction it was built to point in, it failed to advance the cause of pointing. Fortunately, the new laser technology was found to have other uses.

Lasers can direct energy with precision that is unachievable by any other means. Intensely powerful lasers can be used to cut, weld, and mark materials from steel to plastics. Lasers are also used in delicate surgical procedures, including operations on the human eye. While having a laser pointed into your eyeball sounds like a bad idea, considering that the alternative is a scalpel, it’s actually become quite popular.

The laser has also become ubiquitous in the consumer market. A laser scanned the barcode on the DVD player you just bought. Inside that DVD player is another laser that will read your Battlestar Galactica DVD so you can watch humans and Cylons blast each other with lasers. Not surprisingly, there is also a laser in the color laser printer you bought so you could print out those inappropriately Photoshopped images of Cylon models six and eight.

Of course, a great deal of laser technology was initially developed for military purposes. Laser navigation and targeting have made military operations more accurate and effective, and have dramatically reduced collateral damage from bombs and missile attacks. Sadly, though, military laser technology has not developed to the point where soldiers can easily blast clean, smoking holes in each other with beams of light.

Though military lasers have a long way to go to catch up to science fiction, the military was the first to bring the laser back to its developmental roots: pointing. Though a laser cannot blast a clean, smoking hole in an enemy, lasers are commonly used to point to the spot where a bullet will blast a less immaculate, though wholly as effective, hole. Einstein would be proud.

Laser technology is now 50 years old. It’s taken us half a century to realize the potential of the laser, but today, inexpensive, handheld laser pointers are everywhere. Modern human beings can point to anything with the touch of a button. Within just a few generations, index fingers will become vestigial appendages.

So what’s next for lasers? We’ve already seen Val Kilmer reprogram an assassination laser to fill an unscrupulous professor’s house with popcorn. Dr. Evil finally got his sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads. What else is left?

*originally posted in Red Shtick Magazine – December, 2009

I believe in ghosts. I have never seen them, heard them, or been convinced in any way that ghosts exist, but I believe in them. I also believe in sasquatch, though I have never met one of them, either.

Based on these two unsubstantiated beliefs, I am scientifically certain of the existence of the ghost of sasquatch, or “ghostquatch.” Through extensive mathematical analysis, I have determined that the probability of actually seeing a ghostquatch is the inverse of the product of the probabilities of seeing a ghost and a sasquatch, and that’s pretty darn improbable.

However improbable a ghostquatch sighting may be, it is at least as improbable that someone would write a series of articles proving the existence of ghostquatch, yet here we are.

To provide incontrovertible proof of the existence of ghostquatch, I must first prove the existence of the components of ghostquatch. First up: ghosts.

Ghosts are dead people who have decided that acting dead is not their bag, or they have not been properly informed that they are supposed to act dead, or they are simply very bad actors. These uncooperative, uninformed, or untalented dead people continue to do things that only the living are supposed to do, long after the biological processes of being alive have ceased.

Since being alive is widely considered to be a biological process, the act of remaining nonbiologicially alive presents somewhat of a conundrum, especially to those who study life. Due to the lack of reproducible evidence, the phenomenon of nonbiological life has not been sufficiently explored by biologists or any other reputable scientific discipline.

Fortunately for the nonscientific community, television has stepped in to fill the void. Ghost hunting and other rigorously scientific forms of paranormal investigation have become a popular pastime for filmmakers and storytellers who have abandoned the arts of making films and telling stories.

The imaginatively titled Ghost Hunters television series is currently the most popular example. The show’s creators, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, began investigating paranormal phenomena in their spare time while working as plumbers for Roto-Rooter. Hawes and Wilson felt that their day jobs did not provide their lives with sufficient crap content, so they endeavored to inject more crap into a well-primed crap pipeline: cable television.

Hawes and Wilson employ advanced scientific instruments such as video and infrared imaging, EMF detectors, and Geiger counters to detect paranormal phenomena. This equipment is extremely useful in paranormal research as it provides unequivocal evidence of the existence of thermal as well as electromagnetic radiation.

Mainstream science has proven that thermal and electromagnetic radiation are things that exist. If ghosts are things that exist, then detecting things that have been proven to exist in the same area where ghosts are believed to exist represents concrete scientific evidence that ghosts could probably exist in the same area.

Even as Hawes and Wilson provide mounting substantive evidence of the existence of things that they say prove the existence of ghosts, less-televised scientists continue to doubt. The life sciences in particular have long taken issue with the existence of ghosts because the act of being a ghost is, or would be, a violation of our current scientific understanding of life.

Biologists define life as a characteristic that distinguishes objects that have self-sustaining biological processes from those that do not. Objects in which these functions have ceased are considered to be in a state of not being alive, best known as dead.

Objects that have never demonstrated biological processes are classified asinanimate, a confusing state in which an object is not alive but is also not considered dead. In practice, the best way to tell if something is living or inanimate is to try to eat it and see what happens.

The problem with the definition of life is that it is circular. Living organisms are defined as objects with the characteristic of biological processes, but the definition of a biological process is simply the process of a living organism.

The dirty secret of the life sciences is that science cannot strictly define what life is, let alone how it works. Despite this uncertainty, many scientists have the audacity to dictate what is alive, what is inanimate, and what shouldn’t be floating around acting like it’s alive because it has already died and should know better.

Even with the circular definition of life, science arrogantly claims that life exists. Such blind faith in the existence of life could be considered highly irresponsible. There is no real proof that life exists except the empirical observations of life made by those that are clearly biased – in that the observers themselves are admittedly alive.

Inanimate objects have never conceded that life exists. Until there is consensus on the existence of life, I maintain that a state of being that falls outside the classification of living or inanimate is still quite plausible.

Ghosts have never made any attempt to refute the existence of living beings. Ghosts are confident enough to go about their business without wasting time qualifying their existence. In truth, it is the existence of life that should be in question, not ghosts.

Through the evidence provided by paranormal investigators and my own exhaustive logical analysis, I have clearly proven that ghosts not only exist but are probably a lot more easygoing than the people who deny the existence of ghosts.

Having proved thusly that ghosts exist, in the next issue I will prove that sasquatch also exist, and I will explain why math scores and literacy rates in the sasquatch community are higher than in most American high schools.

At this point, many savvy readers may be asking why an article focusing on paranormal research makes no mention of the most popular paranormal research group of all time: the Ghostbusters. Well, I just did, so there.

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – January, 2009 (pdf)

Source code is the set of instructions that some programmer wrote for your electronic device. That programmer may very well have been me, and I may have told that device to despise you and to do anything in its power to make your life hell. Keeping that in mind, take a long, hard look at your laptop. Do you have any idea what that thing is thinking right now? I do, because I told it to find out what you’re thinking, and then tell me so I can sell you stuff.

In truth, I didn’t do that. I’m a mediocre programmer, but if I was more talented, I certainly could. I could because you would let me, because you don’t care if the code running the devices you rely on is open-source or closed.

I don’t mean to harsh on the ignorant masses or those taking advantage of them; we all swing both ways. Lord knows, I’ll jump in the crowd in a pinch, and on my best days, I’ve got all the scruples of a fox hoarding for winter. At some level, we’re all just monkeys that learned to make stuff and do stuff, and then learned to buy and sell the stuff we make and do.

Patent laws encourage people to make and do stuff in new ways by allowing them to protect the way they make and do stuff. This promotes invention and ingenuity and generally makes for good business.

Source code is an anomalous problem in patent and copyright law, because it is both a device that must function properly to perform a task, and also a piece of intellectual property that can be easily reproduced. A new book is copyrighted against reproduction of its content, and a new engine might be patented against duplication of the process by which it is manufactured or the way it operates. The ease of copying software creates rampant opportunities for competitive theft and pirate distribution.

As monkeys who make and do stuff, we tend to specialize. I specialize in making fun of other monkeys. Some monkeys are shovel makers, rocking-chair salesmen, undertaker’s assistants, auto mechanics, or computer programmers.

Sometimes mechanic monkeys get married to programmer monkeys. In such marriages, if the programmer monkey buys a car, the mechanic monkey will most likely have a look under the hood to verify that there is an engine in there, and that it is not sewn together from banana peels. If, however, the mechanic monkey buys a Windows PC or a Mac, then the programmer monkey should become enraged and throw poo at the screen.

Closed source, proprietary software is basically a car with the hood welded shut, with a big sticker across the seam that reads “DO NOT REMOVE BY PENALTY OF LAW,” and has a hologram of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs crossing their giant, prosthetic, male enhancements over America. Needless to say, this kind of industrial freedom is the brass ring for automotive manufacturers, but since most mechanics are way tougher than most programmers, it remains unreachable.

If mechanics were denied access to machines the way programmers are denied access to programs, then Hogwarts would probably be the leading manufacturer of everything.

Oh, but Thomas, you ignorant slut, a machine cannot be copied onto a thumb drive or shared over the interweb; are we supposed to ignore that? We do ignore it; it happens all the time. By sheer volume, proprietary software is copied more freely than open-source software, and Microsoft still posts profits.

Smaller software companies can be devastated by piracy. I have some sympathy for these struggling niche companies. I have enough sympathy to purchase their software at a fair price if they provide a working demo, and a quality product that fulfills my purpose. That said, I lose some sympathy if I cannot inspect the workings of the product, and more when I am hassled by serial numbers. I lose all sympathy the instant I see a “dongle.”

“Dongle” is a word that expresses a feeling of cosmically justified rage. In the computer industry, a dongle is a small, phallic object that is used to physically violate your computer. These demonic artifacts grant digital droit de seigneur to software companies.

A car has a key to protect you from car theft. A dongle is much like having a separate key for your transmission, which has a tendency to jiggle loose just before your interstate exit.

The methods of protecting software have spanned from brazen to bizarre. Software companies are constantly improving the sophistication with which they skirt consumer protections and provide untested and unreliable products at outrageously inflated prices. While proprietary software companies busily undermine centuries of legal precedent, the open-source software movement quietly builds the foundations and infrastructure of the computer and IT industries.

Linus Torveldes wrote the first Linux kernel in 1991. He and thousands of other highly capable programmers contributed to the GNU project, started in 1983. Their goal was to create a free and open-source operating system based on Unix. Linux and the open-source utilities Apache, MySQL, and PHP today constitute the backbone of the interweb and run the bulk of business servers. The open nature of this system has lead to an unparalleled level of stability and security. It’s easy to see how open-source systems might become more stable over time thanks to open testing. However, it is hard to see how security might be improved.

Think of a bank. Now imagine a way to rob that bank. You’d probably want to get a copy of the building’s blueprints. You might think that the availability of those blueprints makes the bank less secure. Next, imagine that you are trying to design a security or fire-suppression system for this bank, and imagine you must do this without dimensions or blueprints.

So now you’re a bank robber and you’ve got blueprints. You know the staff at the Linux Credit Union has blueprints, too, and they all carry tasers and handcuffs and practice jujitsu. In the Windows Bank, they wear blindfolds and carry Nerf weapons. Which would you rather rob, or even sell Girl Scout cookies at? Think of this next time you bask in the glow of a blue-screen of death, or are caught by the inevitable pop-up ambush.

I don’t honestly expect to convert anyone to Linux with this rant, but there are fantastic open-source software packages out there that you can run on Windows or Mac OS. Since this article has pretty much run out of funny anyway, I’m just going to list some of the open-source packages you should know about so you can download and use them for free, instead of paying some shmuck for hacked-off code that crashes every computer in a 10-mile radius. Okay, none of this stuff is perfect, but it is free, and since it’s open-source, you’re free to perfect it yourself if you’re a big enough nerd.

1. Scribus – Desktop publishing for people that think Adobe has too much money.
2. Abiword, Open Office – Sweet office suites.
3. Blender – 3-D modeling, animation, and CAD.
4. EphPod – Windows iPod support without the iTumor called iTunes.
5. VLC – A media player that doesn’t report your activities to a CEO.
6. Gimp – Photoshop for non-dummies.
7. Audacity – Aud … aud …  I bet it has something to do with audio.
8. Avidemux, Jahshaka – Non-linear video editing suites.
9. Firefox, Thunderbird – Web browsing and email. For the love of God, please use these.
10. TightVNC – Remote desktop access and virtual networking.
11. PuTTY – if you need this, you already know what it does; this is just here to give props.