Internet Scofflaw

Much is being made in some circles of the latest issue of Physics and Society (a newsletter of the American Physical Society) with this concession in its editorial:

There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution. Since the correctness or fallacy of that conclusion has immense implications for public policy and for the future of the biosphere, we thought it appropriate to present a debate within the pages of P&S concerning that conclusion.

and the inclusion of an article critical of anthropogenic theories of global warming. I wouldn’t make very much of it, the editorial seems carefully worded and the article is prefaced with this:

The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review. Its conclusions are in disagreement with the overwhelming opinion of the world scientific community. The Council of the American Physical Society disagrees with this article’s conclusions.

Based on my conversations with climate scientists, I think there’s much better reason to question future projections of global warming than there is to question analyses of what’s happened already.

UPDATE: This clarification, currently on the APS home page (no permalink), seems to prove my point:

The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007:

“Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth’s climate.”

An article at odds with this statement recently appeared in an online newsletter of the APS Forum on Physics and Society, one of 39 units of APS. The header of this newsletter carries the statement that “Opinions expressed are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of the APS or of the Forum.” This newsletter is not a journal of the APS and it is not peer reviewed.

Whew! (Via Instapundit.)

Seriously, although the doomsday scenario always seemed extremely farfetched, it wasn’t clear to me how anyone could say for certain. But, it turns out that, as CERN puts it: “Nature has already generated on Earth as many collisions as about a million LHC experiments – and the planet still exists.”

FoldIt, the protein-folding game by new CMU professor Adrien Treuille and colleagues of his at UW, gets linked by Instapundit. A longer story on FoldIt is at Science Daily.

The FBI has issued a warning over bogus WiFi networks:

How do hackers grab your personal data out of thin air? Agent Peterson said one of the most common types of attack is this: a bogus but legitimate-looking Wi-Fi network with a strong signal is strategically set up in a known hot spot…and the hacker waits for nearby laptops to connect to it. At that point, your computer—and all your sensitive information, including user ID, passwords, credit card numbers, etc.—basically belongs to the hacker. The intruder can mine your computer for valuable data, direct you to phony webpages that look like ones you frequent, and record your every keystroke.

“Another thing to remember,” said Agent Peterson, “is that the connection between your laptop and the attacker’s laptop runs both ways: while he’s taking info from you, you may be unknowingly downloading viruses, worms, and other malware from him.”

(Via Hot Air.)

It’s worth warning people about the dangers of bogus networks, particularly if this is form of attack is really going on a lot, but Agent Peterson seems confused about the nature of the threat. This is simply a form of the classic man-in-the-middle attack, which computer scientists have been aware of for a long time. The attack arises whenever the adversary can compromise a node along your communication path, such as a wireless router. So it has nothing to do with WiFi, per se. Also, the business about your computer “basically belonging to the hacker” is complete nonsense. A man-in-the-middle attack can only compromise the information you send over the network — not everything on your computer.

In principle, the man-in-the-middle attack is a solved problem. Rather than warning people to beware of public WiFi, the FBI should be cautioning people to take appropriate precautions in all their network activity. Those precautions are necessary everywhere, not just on WiFi.

A month ago I mentioned an Economist article about how spacecraft are not behaving quite as expected. A physicist friend of mine e-mails:

The sling-shot anomaly you asked about is taken seriously enough to have been published in Phys Rev Letters last month. Of course it COULD indicate undreamed of physics. But it’s more likely to be a subtle systematic error.

The same first author (Anderson) is also on the 1998 paper on the Pioneer anomaly which seemed to indicate that Pioneer 10 and 11 were accelerating towards the sun a little more than they should. That’s been a thorn in the side of general relativity for some time now. That effect has now been PARTLY explained by a rather prosaic effect: the heat from the plutonium power source warms the spacecraft which radiate thermal radiation. But, because of their composition, it turns out that they radiate more in front of them than behind. So radiation pressure slows them down…. how annoying… but not exciting.

As a condition to posting his email, my friend asks me to point out that he is not an expert. Noted. He knows much more than I do, though.

Determining whether or not a face is attractive no longer requires human computation. Researchers at Tel Aviv University have implemented an automated system to judge whether a face is attractive or not. (Via Instapundit.) The system is based on the idea that the most beautiful face is one whose features are close to the average.

The psychological research doesn’t sound new; I first heard the observation that beautiful equals average about 20 years ago. On the other hand, the vision problems implicit in the project sound hard. (For example, the article doesn’t say this, but surely they must locate the cheekbones in order to judge whether a face is attractive.)

In a way, though, this work is a pity. Now that a computer can tell whether a face is attractive, we’ll have to give up any hope that people will start using CAPTCHAs based on pretty faces. Oh well.

The March 8 issue of the Economist has an interesting article about how spacecraft apparently are not following their expected trajectories:

In 1990 mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California . . . noticed something odd happen to a Jupiter-bound craft, called Galileo. As it was flung around the Earth in what is known as a slingshot manoeuvre . . . , Galileo picked up more velocity than expected. Not much. Four millimetres a second, to be precise. But well within the range that can reliably be detected. . .

Once might be happenstance. But this strange extra acceleration was seen subsequently with two other craft. . . So a team from JPL has got together to analyse all of the slingshot manoeuvres that have been carried out over the years, to see if they really do involve a small but systematic extra boost. The answer is that they do.

Altogether, John Anderson and his colleagues analysed six slingshots involving five different spacecraft. Their paper on the matter is about to be published in Physical Review Letters. Crucially for the idea that there really is a systematic flaw in the laws of physics as they are understood today, their data can be described by a simple formula. It is therefore possible to predict what should happen on future occasions.

Anderson and his colleagues plan to test their theory when they receive data from Rosetta, which executed a slingshot maneuver in November. I hope I hear about the results.

If I had any readers, I’d ask the physicists if they knew anything about this.