Keys Corner

I bought an i-Blue 747 GPS track logger recently. You can pick one up, new, on eBay for around 40 – 50 Euro. The idea is to use it to tag photos with their position – our cameras don’t have GPS receivers built in, and often when we get back from holiday, its difficult to remember where exactly we took which pictures. If you set the clock in the (digital) camera before you set off, the time-stamp from the GPS log, together with the position data allow you add the exact position of each photo to the EXIF data that the camera stores when each picture is taken.

The problem is, few GPS loggers come with any software for downloading and processing the track data on a Mac. I’m not aware of any that supports OS X “out of the box”. However, there is lots of third party software around which can be used to read out the scans and process them on the Mac. It takes time to track them down, however. So here’s what works for me:

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The Observer claims to have obtained a confidential report commissioned by the Pentagon:

Climate change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters.

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents…

...Already, according to Randall and Schwartz [the authors of the report], the planet is carrying a higher population than it can sustain. By 2020 ‘catastrophic’ shortages of water and energy supply will become increasingly harder to overcome, plunging the planet into war. They warn that 8,200 years ago climatic conditions brought widespread crop failure, famine, disease and mass migration of populations that could soon be repeated.

Update (2007-02-27):
Ahem – as Andrew pointed out, this article is from 2004! I found it while reading the Observer online on Sunday – how I stumbled across such an old article and didn’t notice the dateline is beyond explanation…

Picture from Arborsmith Studios website (click picture to visit)Axel Erlandson an American arborsculptor opened an exhibition in 1947 featuring trees which he had shaped by pruning, bending and grafting. The original exhibition, called The Tree Circus had a chequered history, only bringing in a little over $300 in a good year (1955). Eventually 12 of the original trees were bought by Michael Bonfante for his amusement park, Bonfante Gardens, in Gilroy, California. We’ve been to California a number of times, but didn’t know about these trees, unfortunately.

Researchers today are capable of building their own viruses:

Thanks to steady advances in computing power and DNA technology, a talented undergraduate with a decent laptop and access to any university biology lab can assemble a virus with ease. Five years ago, as if to prove that point, researchers from the State University of New York at Stony Brook “built” a polio virus, using widely available information and DNA they bought through the mail. To test their “polio recipe,” they injected the virus into mice. The animals first became paralyzed and then died… ...Then, two years ago, after researchers had sequenced the genetic code of the 1918 flu virus, federal scientists reconstructed it, too.

In fact, it is possible to reconstruct viruses which have been extinct for millions of years (perhaps Jurassic Park wasn’t so far fetched?). This is exactly what is now happening, in a bid to find an effective AIDS vaccine. Pan troglodytes endogenous retrovirus (PtERV) – a virus related to H.I.V. has been extinct for millions of years, but researchers at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have resurrected it as part of a program to try and find out why humans 4 million years ago were apparently completely resistant to PtERV although chimps and gorillas were susceptible to the virus. On the other hand, today humans are susceptible to H.I.V., but the apes aren’t affected by it, although they carry the infection. There’s an 8 page article in the current New Yorker about virus research, which describes the research. – interesting reading, but it does make you wonder whether we aren’t increasingly likely to make ourselves extinct when the inevitable mistake is made in a research lab.

The environmental lobby often laments mankind’s unfortunate obsession with the short term. People, by and large, don’t tend to think ahead (two-thirds of Britons lack wills, for example, leaving them unprepared for one of life’s few real certainties). Politicians, with one eye always fixed on surviving the next election, are particularly guilty of short-termism. That is a problem, since human time-scales don’t always match environmental ones. A razed rainforest may take decades to regrow. Climate change will remain a problem for centuries, even if carbon emissions were to cease tomorrow.

One of the thorniest long-term problems is what to do with nuclear waste. Many western countries may build new nuclear plants; they see the energy as clean and secure. But their publics remain dubious, and nuclear waste tops their list of worries…

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Elephants are in the news at the moment:

• Elephants can differentiate between different tribes and different types of humans
• Bees repel elephants
• Elephants seem to like revenge

The issue of whether the toilet seat should be left up or down after use seemingly generates a lot of passion among the parties concerned, however, scientific inquiries into the matter are almost non-existent. Notable exceptions are Choi (2002) and Harter (2005). Choi (2002) argues that the rule of leaving the toilet seat down after use is inefficient in the sense that there is at least one other rule that outperform this rule. The unit of analysis in Choi (2002) is the household and the efficient rule is defined as one that minimizes the total cost of toilet seat operations per household. Choi (2002) does not model the issue as a situation of conflict, hence ignores the game theoretic aspects of the problem. Harter (2005) models the situation as a cooperative game and proposes a contract that splits the costs of toilet seat operations evenly among the parties. Both papers agree that the social norm of leaving the toilet seat down is inefficient in the sense that it does not minimize the total cost of toilet seat operations per household. However, both papers fail to address an important concern: If a female finds the toilet seat in a wrong position then she will most probably yell at the male involved. This yelling inflicts a cost on the male. Based on this omission, women may argue that the analysis in these papers is suspect…

Hammad Siddiqi (associated with the Lahore University of Management Sciences) has applied game theory to look at the best strategy for men and women when they finish using the toilet.

Remember the Club of Rome report Limits to Growth, published in 1972? There’s an interesting article and graphics (subscription required for full article) in the current New Scientist showing what the latest estimates are for how long precious and rare metals will last.

Not just of interest if you are considering buying jewellery – these metals include platinum, used in catalytic converters, and indium, used in LCD screens. The predicted number of years left are surprisingly few for many metals – especially if the rest of the world were to increase their usage to current levels in the USA.

I mentioned recently the book “When smoke ran like water”, which describes how industry has for decades paid to discredit research which they don’t like.

The latest example of such behaviour comes from Exxon, who has been offering scientists $10 000 each if they will discredit research on climate change. Exxon is the most profitable company in the USA (over $39 billion profit in the latest fiscal reporting year). Exxon sells under the brand names “Esso” and “Mobil” in many countries, if you want to boycott their products, which is probably the only effective way to protest about their behaviour.

Update (2007-02-02):
Here’s a link to the summary of the report Exxon are trying to discredit.