I have a phone.

My phone is small, cheap, and works well -- as a phone. For instance; I can use it to make and receive phone calls.

It has a camera in it.

This was unavoidable at the time -- it's not a very good camera as these things go. It does not, for example, have hardware zoom, or the ability to adjust exposure time, take time-lapse images, or any of those things. To me, that's kinda like pointing out that it doesn't do the ironing. It is a camera in my phone. It takes OK photographs.

I also have a camera.

Occasionally I like to take photos that are not just OK. Not often but it happens. My camera has these hardware things that my phone lacks due to being, you know, not a camera. This, in no way, reflects negatively on my phone.

I do not feel the need to take really good photos, so my camera is about middling as these things go. Someone may point out that my camera cannot send the photo to another phone or to my email account. That's all right - it has a USB port and I can use that to send the picture to my mini tablet - which is what I use for mobile computery things like image processing and networking. I can do this with any computer. If I am not carrying my USB cable, the camera has large storage which is removable and almost everyone has a card reader. Besides, if I have to wait a bit before sharing my latest cute-kitten pic I find I annoy fewer people.

If I really really need this functionality, I can actually buy a camera that has a phone (or some other network device) in it. The phone in these things is not at all useful for making phone calls: that's OK, nobody cares, because the camera is awesome and you can send your photos where you like right away.

Between them my camera and phone cost less than, say, picking a device completely at random, an iPhone.

I occasionally see people discussing (to push a definition of the word "discuss" somewhat) the various comparative merits of different cameras that are in those phones that come with cameras. These multiuse appliances all seem to their owners, or the owners of a competing brand appliance, (or wannabes - it's hard to keep track) to these people to be somehow deficient in one or some or all of their functions. If by some miracle the sweet perfect appliance has been manufactured, it mysteriously failed to sell and has been discontinued.

This message is for you.

Here lies the path to happiness:

You want to take a photo, use a camera.
You want to make a phone-call, use a phone.

G+ Work and WOF

In reverse order:

WOF woes continue - my car has a fluid leak - power steering. I have to keep topping it up but this means I don't have a WOF. I need a new cooling tube. Maybe we can build one but right now looking for an authorized part.

I've bitten the bullet and presented myself to the local service station - pump-hand here I come. The thing is, though I have a lot of applications out for teaching positions, nothing is going to show up before March. I want something on the Island that will be enjoyable and the service station is just down the road and it's relaxed. I'm hugely overqualified and the boss there looks enthusiastic.

Still active with google plus. If you want to see what sort of thing I get up to over there, have a look at this formatted summary.

Relaax

It's all about the sunshine today - and a bit of maintain the car.

WoF: Failed - but only on one tyre. It seems that directional mags are going out of fashion or something so I have to order-in the replacement. Ho hum - pass wof tomorrow.

But since I'm out and about and it's such a gloriously sunny day, I took the top off and went for a cruise. It's an expensive passtime these days, and I'll count the cost tomorrow. Today I went the length of the Island, visited Man of War bay, which was at high tide so it was nice. Enjoyed the breeze and the scenery and read a bit of my SF novel (Greg Bear - Legacy: it's OK). Headed back.

Snapper and chips at Onetangi Beach - a bit windy - wash the car - and back home. Sun still on the deck so drag a chair from the lounge-suite outside for coffee and tim-tams and more reading. Decadence. Smeagol joined me - he's changed color: his head and shoulders are still black but the rest of him has gone rusty. He'll probably go black again towards midsummer.

He's been off his food last few days, and he's lost a lot of weight. I gave him some beef mince - which he nommed up (but only if it has a bit of dirt on it). He does not normally get red meat - after he finished, he whipped his tail, leaped vertical off all four feet, spun around and tore off into the bush.

I've changed the music (see sidebar). Also sampled Gin Wigmore's single "Black Rose", online.

There's a stack of mail wating for me ... tomorrow. By carefully ignoring things that actually need to be done I get to call today a win. Bananas and ice-cream time, then a bath.

Cheers.

The Solar System in Perspective

If the diameter of the sun is our unit for length, the orbits come out something like this (someone check my math):

distance	diameter	planet
0	1.000	Sun
39	0.004	Mercury
72	0.009	Venus
100	0.009	Earth
153	0.005	Mars
520	0.102	Jupiter
956	0.086 (0.179)	Saturn (rings)
1919	0.037	Neptune
3008	0.036	Uranus

This means, if you wanted to build a scale model of the Solar System with Sun as a 1m diameter beach ball in the middle of your lounge, Mercury would be a 4mm speck 39m away! Jupiter would look good as a 10cm striped ball half a click away while the Oort cloud, at the outer reaches, is at 5000km... which would put the final touches of your model about an eighth (45deg) of the way around the Earth from your lounge.

I'm bringing this up because of a movie circulating the internets that appears to show a planet-sized comet impacting the Sun and spraying the solar system with gobs of Sun-stuff. Hopefully these figures will give a wee bit of perspective. Space is big, really big!

Wikipedia on CMEs

ACTA Update

Seems the USA push to extend their own broken laws on The Rest of the World has reached a critical step. Also seems NZ will be a signatory. Remains to be seen how well the treaty will be honored or the extent to which it obligates us to alter our laws to suit large US-based manufacturers.

One of the concerns - iirc - was that generic medicines may become illegal as "counterfeit" products. Looks like it's gone from the final version of acta but the interest in this is very big and it is now in TPPA. Block it there are it will show up someplace else unless NZ makes a firm statement that no such provision will pass or, if passed "on the sly", will not be enforceable.

And in other liberty news, NZ FOSS folks brace themselves for the rollout of MSs secure boot process, which has the potential to remove your ability to replace the pre-installed operating system. There is another way to securely boot your computer - replace windows. There is no reason to hand over control of your computer to MS just to secure yourself from flaws in MS software ... especially since it won't work.

On the upside - maybe we can get a beef-up to our anti-competition laws, say, set the fines to a percentage of a company's net worth, then milk Microsoft Corporation to fund our national debt. Just a thought.

FTL Neutrinos ... oh dear oh dear...

I was brought up short by a news thing about neutrinos apparently measured faster than light. The comments in that link are sad sad sad. But to be fair, it's a poorly understood part of science.

My favorite description of relativity vis a vis FTL, with the problems this poses. Basically, special relativity manages to be internally consistent as long as nothing goes faster than light (in a vacuum) or if it does, it is restricted in how it does so. Of course, special relativity could be wrong.

In quantum mechanics, the things we are pleased to think of as the Laws of Physics are more like "firm guidelines" which are only obeyed on average. This means that the speed of light is approximate and energy violations occur all the time. There are still restrictions on how this can happen though, so that the physics does not contradict itself.

An example is the FTL information transfer apparent in Quantum Entanglement experiments (used to be called "teleportation"). In these experiments, an observation made in one place affects the results of an observation in another place in such a way that it cannot be turned into a kind of FTL radio.

An easier example would be the spot of light cast from (say) a laser pointer onto a surface. If you move the pointer through an angle A, the spot moves RA where R is the distance to the surface. Make R big enough and even quite slow movements of the pointer results in FTL movement of the spot.

But these are neutrinos... weakly interacting particles with a very small mass (<16eV/c^2) so we need to be more careful about what we actually say is happening.

The researchers set up an experiment to test the quantum oscillation of mu and tau neutrinos (mu and tau neutrinos can be set up to change between each other cyclically) from a well configured source. This sort of thing involves setting up a source of mu neutrinos with a known set of statistics, firing them off at a target, and counting how many mu and tau neutrinos get detected (compensating for the sensitivity of the detector and the background of detection events) to see how the result compares with the theoretically projected counts.

Presumably they got fewer tau and more mu than expected, which could be interpreted as a higher than expected speed (or a slower than expected oscillation). If you have reason to discount the oscillation rate as a cause, then you can use the data to compute what sort of speed must have been achieved ... they did this and reported that the anomalous neutrinos arrived at the detector 60ns sooner than light would have traversed the same distance in a vacuum. The uncertainty in the calculation was 10ns - so the result is highly significant, statistically.

At this stage, the findings have been made public so the scientific community can check them, maybe repeat the experiments. This was the right thing to do. It shows scientific humility to put your findings up to scrutiny like this ... someone could find an embarrassing mistake.

I stress: I don't know for sure that this is the method they used. I am going by how such experiments are _usually_ done. Maybe someone was sitting on the detector with a stop-watch, but it's unlikely.

One of the big problems is that there have been plenty of opportunities to see something like this before now. For example, the neutrinos from SP1987A arrived about 3 hours ahead of the light-pulse from over 187000ly away. This difference is consistent with the light having to traverse the surrounding stellar material first. If the above figures are treated as correct, then they should have been of the order of months early, even taking into account the uncertainty in the distance.

There have been many neutrino experiments, and many experiments looking specifically for this sort of thing using other particles.

One of the ways that has been considered for FTL concerns the way QM represents particles as waves. In _wave mechanics_, a particle is represented by a wave-packet - the square of the part of the wave-packet inside the detector is the probability of the particle being detected. In wave-mechanics, it is these wave-packets that move around.

A typical wave packet used in an experiment is Gaussian (normal distribution). Relativity means that the speed of the peak of the packet (the group velocity) cannot be faster than light. But, with this kind of packet, different parts of it travel at different speeds. In particular, the leading parts are faster and the trailing parts are slower. So it is technically possible to set up a situation where some distant part of the leading edge is moving faster than light. Thus, there is a small, but non-zero, chance that the particle gets detected well ahead of when the peak would have arrived at the detector. This would detect as FTL.

To my knowledge, this has not been seen.

It could be something like this, with the particular care taken in these experiments being the reason nobody saw it before now. However, this is highly unlikely. A fluctuation in the background mu neutrinos would also produce this sort of result, much like you can get a freak wave when you are out rock-fishing. This is why it is very important to repeat these experiments.

I can't believe something so simple could be so effective!

(or: late night infomercial rubbish)

The title is the catchphrase from a certain infomercial for a certain shoe insert, you know the one. Another notable comment: "Could it be that it creates a force field that ..." Answer: no. It cannot possibly be because that's not what "force field" means.

What they do is show you loads of people doing something called a "balance test" where subjects are easily shifted off balance unless they are wearing the special inserts. Here is what it looks like:



... this is an old con exploiting misconceptions about how well we balance, as well as a bit of basic physics. In general, humans are unstable - particularly with their feet together - which is why toy soldiers need a wide base to stand up. We balance by shifting our weight and generally moving about.

Look carefully at the video again: the subject is in an unstable, but sustainable, position. In the first test the seller pushes down and a bit away from his body, thus directing the force away from his feet, pulling him over. In the second, she pushes down and towards his body, basically directing the force down to his feet and improving his stability. Nothing to do with the inserts.

This method has been used to sell a wide variety of junk. It is so effective it works in even less stable stances like, standing on one leg. Here's how it generally works:



Skeptics have been facing this sort of thing for a while now. While the basic testing method (double blind) shows up the fallacy, it is generally not very convincing if you don't know how it works. You just can't believe such a simple con can be so effective!

This is because, if you have experienced the test, it is very convincing. We are just not used to doubting our own experiences, and it is unpleasant to do so. On top of this, skeptics deliberately avoid using methods which encourage the willing suspension of disbelief. Skeptics want you to question everything, the advertiser does not. So the skeptic will always appear the less believable of the two.