We're all going to drown

The BBC reports that the global sea level is rising and we're all going to die:

The study's headline conclusion is that the polar ice sheets have overall contributed 11.1mm to sea level rise but with a "give or take" uncertainty of 3.8mm - meaning the contribution could be as little as 7.3mm or as much as 14.9mm.

14mm a year! That's over 5.1 meters per century! Vast areas of low-lying land will be inundated! We're all doomed!

Oh, wait:

Another author, Dr Hamish Pritchard of the British Antarctic Survey, said: "The next big challenge - now that we've got quite a good understanding of what's happened over the last 20 years - is to predict what will happen over the next century."

So it's 14mm (worst case) over 20 years. 70 mm (7 cm) in a century. Whoop-de-doo. Can we please put the myth of catastrophic sea rise to bed?

I particularly liked the comment:

The findings are in line with the broad range of forecasts in the 2007 assessment by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In 2007 they had 15 of the 20 years of data already, and they were trying to forecast the final 5 years. Colour me unimpressed. Forecast 20 years in the future with reasonable accuracy, and maybe we'll listen. What does "broad range" mean, anyway? Presumably not "claimed range"?

Break open the popcorn!

This should be interesting: a gay French-Algerian man is planning to open the world's first gas mosque in Paris:

Mr Zahed says the mosque, situated in a Buddhist chapel in Paris, will also break another Islamic taboo by refusing to segregate women and men.

You have to admire the guy's minerals, even if you don't personally agree with his life choices. I can imagine that the reaction from Paris's resident Muslim community is going to be, erm, "spirited". Hope the congregation at the new mosque can afford good security, because I think they're going to need it.

So this is going to be an interesting choice for the more conservative-minded French citizens. Do they condemn him as a gay marriage proponent, or do they applaud him for confronting militant Islam and sexual segregation? It should be fascinating to watch. Good luck, Mr. Zahed, and I strongly suggest you ensure you have good home security and a fully paid up life insurance policy (before the insurance company finds out what you're doing)

It's not prejudice if it's accurate

An expat friend of mine, acquainted with my political prejudices, sent me a copy of a magazine that his child brought home from school. His child is in the US public school system, and anyone who considers the US public education system to be a bunch of lefty commie pinkos would find their hearts warmed by the magazine's content. The magazine in question is "Scholastic News" (November 19, 2012, Edition 3), published in Missouri by Scholastic, Inc. The lead article is on Obama's re-election:

President Barack Obama will lead the U.S. for four more years. On November 6 he was elected to a second term as President of the United States. Obama is a Democrat. He defeated Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate. [So far, so good]
...
Obama was first elected President in 2008. He made history as our country's first African-American President. [Well, technically, African-American-Caucasian since his mother Ann Durham was mostly of white English ancestry.]
When Obama took office, many Americans were out of work. [And when he was re-elected, about the same percent were out of work: 7.8% in Jan 2009 vs 7.9% in Oct 2012].
He put together a plan to help save peoples' jobs and create new ones. [And what a triumph that was, see above.] He also signed a new health-care bill into law [which is making firms move full time workers to part time in order to avoid huge additional employment costs] and ended America's war in Iraq [which was drawing to a close anyway; in the meantime, anyone want to mention Afghanistan?]
...
"Whether you want to start a business, be a great doctor, or build something that's never been done before, I want to make sure that our young people have the chance to do it," Obama told Amiri. [And then he'll tell them they didn't build that.]

Good grief. Scholastic wouldn't know political neutrality if it was shoved up Scholastic's corporate posterior. Even The Guardian would be ashamed to publish a piece like this as news.

Scholastic is a company with $2bn annual revenue, 9500 employees worldwide, quoted on the NASDAQ (SCHL). Interestingly it looks like they took a real bath last week since investors are worried about the effect of federal spending cuts on them. I wonder whether their attempts to promote Obama are related to this?

Let's give control of the Net to China and Russia!

Following on from the European Parliament voting to keep the Internet out of the hands of the ITU, we have the Chinese "People's Daily Online" "editorial team" arguing for the opposite - placing ICANN firmly under the thumb of the ITU. One can only imagine about the divergence between the opinions of the People's Daily editors and the Communist Party leadership; I suspect you'd find it hard to slip a sheet of rice paper between them.

It's fairly clear what the Chinese want:

More and more countries are beginning to question the U.S. control over the world's Internet as the international resource should be managed and supervised by all countries together.

Note that, as per the Europarl vote "more and more countries" does not seem to include many of the countries which actually respect freedom of speech. And what will this change consist of?

As a big country on the Internet, China opposes the U.S. unreasonable and unilateral management of the Internet, and seeks to work with the international community to build a new international Internet governance system.

"Governance". Well, we've seen the Chinese and Russian approaches to governance in their countries and the great contributions that they have made to human rights and freedom of speech. This sounds like just the approach that the Internet could benefit from, don't you think?

I submitted a comment to the People's Daily article, since they have a comments box. Oddly, no comments have yet made it through moderation. How strange.

Napolitano chutzpah

Who is the USA's greatest ally? Britain? Canada? Poland?

Apparently, the answer is France:

According to the l'Express report, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano reportedly did not deny the allegations [about hacking French government emails] when asked point-blank about them.
"We have no greater partner than France; we have no greater ally than France," Napolitano reportedly answered, at the opening of an interview with l'Express.

Speechless. A little hyperbole to extract oneself from a sticky situation is acceptable, but this is comparable to the President of Poland reminiscing about the congenial border relations with Germany, or the Chinese Premier inviting the Japanese Premier for a cordial tour of Nanking to celebrate their nations' shared past.

For the record, I don't think that even the most ludicrously optimistic and Europhilic UK government minister would have made this claim. Quite why Napolitano thought she'd get away with it is beyond me.

Europarl in "doing the right thing" shocker

It pains me physically to do this, but I have to applaud a recent Europarl vote: specifically, where the European Parliament is pushing back on the ITU's attempted Internet power grab:

[The European Parliament] believes that the ITU, or any other single, centralised international institution, is not the appropriate body to assert regulatory authority over either internet governance or internet traffic flows," the resolution reads. It was passed by a large majority of EP officials.

For those of you not following this event in detail, the UN-based International Telecommunications Union (which wouldn't know "innovation" if it sidled up and bit it on the arse) has been pushing to be more involved in Internet regulation. This has notably been led by such bastions of freedom and democracy as Russia and China.

Where global Internet regulation really matters is the Domain Name System (DNS), the process whereby a name such as "www.facebook.com" gets translated into a series of numbers such as 69.171.24.56 (the "IP address" of the site). There is a hierarchy of servers providing this look-up, but they end up at the 13 Internet root name servers. If a user in (say) Russia wants to look up information about feminism, she will conduct a Google / Bing / Baidu search for the relevant terms. Baidu will probably not have very many hits, but Google or Bing should point her to relevant sites. With luck, those sites will support the https protocol so anyone eavesdropping on her connection can see that she has connected to an IP address that matches the campusprogress.org site, but not what she is reading about.

The only way that she can normally connect to the campusprogress.org servers is to use DNS to convert the campusprogress.org name to the corresponding IP address. If Russia (via the ITU) can gain control over DNS globally, it can prevent campusprogress.org from obtaining an IP address - and hence shut it out of public awareness. Those in the know can certainly connect to it by entering the IP address directly, but that address form is a lot harder to remember and propagate than the name. The advent of IPv6 will make this even more of an issue. How I suspect this would actually play out is that the rules around purchasing a domain name, and who can serve on one, would suddenly mushroom. There would be various approval processes, codes of conduct, the ability of the ITU to yank or reassign domain names in an essentially arbitrary process... exactly what you expect to happen when totalitarian and bureaucratic organisations get their hands on a global system.

What really bugs me about the ITU power-grab is that it violates the engineering maxim "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." The only way the Internet is "broken" from the ITU's perspective is that a) America retains an "unhealthy" amount of theoretical power over the infrastructure of the Net, and b) "unaccountable" organisations like the IETF define the standards by which the Net operates. What it can't articulate is how it would "improve" matters in any tangible way other than by giving governments more control over the Net infrastructure - and I would be fascinated to see an elaboration on this point that goes beyond waving around the phrase "democratic accountability" like a dead cat.

Why is helium now so expensive?

With one of the last remaining Zeppelin operators closing its doors due to rising helium costs, you might wonder why helium is so expensive in the first place when we've been happily filling party balloons with it for the past 15 years at rock-bottom prices.

As you might guess, government is involved:

Though new private helium production plants are set to come online in the coming years —including a Wyoming plant expected to open later this year — private industry hasn't been as interested in producing helium as Congress hoped. Until more companies begin producing helium on their own, consumers are left with spiking prices and tightening supplies.
Under the federal system, those prices are unstable partly because they have less to do with supply and demand than they do about the need for the government, under the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, to pay off the cost of creating the Federal Helium Reserve

Because most of the world's helium is produced in the USA (principally Texas) the US Government gets to set helium prices, and for the past 15 years those prices have been low in an attempt to get rid of the US Federal Helium Reserve - currently around 10bn cubic feet of helium. Now that the US Government has to pay off the multi-$bn cost of creating the reserve in a fairly short time, prices have to spike. Nice one.

I knew helium was produced by uranium and thorium decay, but didn't realise that many natural gas fields contain reclaimable helium. Neither did I realise that escaped helium doesn't just go up to the atmosphere - it is so light that it escapes Earth entirely. So reclaiming it from the atmosphere is out.

For those arguing for greater Government involvement in industrial planning, consider what a mess has been made of an effective near-monopoly position in helium which has no effective substitute in many of its uses.

Proper engineering: Iron Dome

Ignoring the rights and wrongs of the current Israel-Hamas contretemps, what has been interesting is the performance of Iron Dome, the Israeli counter-rocket missile system.

Iron Dome tackles an odd problem which occurs due to the economic asymmetry between Israel and its guerrilla opponents (here, Hamas). It is relatively cheap for Hamas to acquire rockets, smuggle them into suitable locations and fire them at Israel. The rockets have a substantial terror value; you never know when they will be fired, where they will hit, and there is only 15 seconds or so of warning. If they do hit housing areas then casualties are nearly guaranteed

Iron Dome's two key features are therefore 1) providing a relatively cheap guided missile capable of intercepting and destroying an unguided rocket with a high probability of success, and 2) only aiming at rockets which are likely to endanger civilian areas. 2) is reasonably straight forward - it's just an evolution of counter-battery radar which plots the initial trajectory of a mortar or rocket to locate the firing point. Instead of going backwards, however, it plots the trajectory forwards to identify the probable area of impact, and is programmed with a map of vulnerable versus deserted areas so it knows which areas to defend.

1) is trickier than you might think; it's no good destroying the body of a rocket if the warhead is still mostly intact, since it will continue in its ballistic path and do damage when it lands. There's also a variety of potential rocket targets:

• Qassam: man-portable, up to 100Kg weight, 20Kg warhead, up to 20km range;
• Grad: truck-mounted, banks of up to 40 tubes, rockets up to 70Kg weight each with 20Kg warhead and range up to 20km;
• Fajr-5: truck-mounted, 900Kg rocket with 175Kg warhead, range up to 75Km.

Iron Dome "Tamir" missiles therefore have to be able to disable the largest possible target while still being cheap enough to be a reasonable trade-off for the cheapest missiles (around $800 for a Qassam, presumably plus $200-$500 cost of smuggling it to the right place in Gaza). Tamirs cost around $50K each.

To date in this phase of the conflict, around 800 rockets have been fired by Hamas with a single fatal hit (3 civilians). Iron Dome has been intercepting around 30% of these; presumably 2/3 of all rockets land in unoccupied areas, which doesn't speak well for either their accuracy or skill at aiming.

The economic calculation from the stats we have so far is therefore that firing about 800 Qassams will cost around $800,000. Israel will need to expend 240 Tamirs at $12 million cost, and can expect one hit with a civilian cost of, say $3 million. So the cost ratio is about 16:1. This is not great, but it's certainly far better than previously where no missiles would have been intercepted, 240 missiles could have landed in civilian areas and say 100 of them would cause damage at $50,000 and 10 would have killed 2 civilians so $2 million each - $5 million + $20 million = $25 million. Israel has therefore halved the economic damage of rocket attacks, not to mention nearly eliminating the terror value.

What Hamas has done in this attack is given the Israelis priceless data on real-life volley attacks. Rafael Armaments can continue to tune their algorithm for which rockets to intercept, and improve the performance of Tamirs in effectively wrecking missiles that they intercept. The other issue is that Iron Dome functions as an extremely effective counter-battery locator; the Hamas rocket launching teams will be under rapid attack from artillery and air platforms (drones, Apache or Cobra helicopters) and will have to be lucky to manage a series of attacks without being pounded.

This isn't the end of rocket attacks on Israel. It isn't even the beginning of the end. But maybe it is the end of the beginning.

Sex, lies and mortars

Uncle Jimbo at Blackfive nails what's made me feel very uncomfortable this week:

A US ambassador and 3 Americans are killed and the media can't be bothered to even ask why.
A couple of Generals screw around and they hit full over drive.

I try not to give conspiracy theories much credence, on the principle that governments can't organise a piss-up in a brewery let alone an elaborate conspiracy, but it's hard not to view the current Petraeus - Allen - Ward blowups as fantastically well-timed for the purpose of burying Benghazi-related news.

Just forgive the debt

Occupy Wall Street has come up with a novel idea: buy distressed debt and forgive it:

OWS is going to start buying distressed debt (medical bills, student loans, etc.) in order to forgive it. As a test run, we spent $500, which bought $14,000 of distressed debt. We then ERASED THAT DEBT.

Fantastic, surely? We can sort out the USA distressed debt at a stroke!

Not quite so fast, though: a commentator puts his finger on the wrinkle:

But I do have a question. If you can buy debt, can individuals buy debt, even our own debt?
Just curious. It would seem to me to be a great Idea for us to buy our own debt, then forgive it.

Yes. You can buy your own debt. If you owe $14,000, and the debt holder only thinks they are going to get back $500 net after their expenses in hounding you, they will sell your debt for $500 and not care who pays that. Except - well, except that if you have $500 free and clear to spend buying back your debt without selling off any goods, the debt holder is going to think that they can get back more than just $500. So they will want (say) $800 instead. And around we go.

If Occupy Wall Street went into this business in a big way, they'd increase the demand for purchase of distressed loans. So the price of distressed loans would rise. So the debt holders wouldn't be willing to sell $14,000 of distressed debt for $500 any more. In fact, it would be in the debt holders' interest to exaggerate the expected return from the loan (say, if they didn't really expect any money back after their expenses), and get $500 for free from Occupy Wall Street. Oopsie! Once again we see that asymmetric information is a bitch.

There's also the not inconsiderable problem that the person owing $14,000 has just received an effective gift of $14,000. Guess what? That's taxable! Say, 25% federal tax plus 2%(?) FICA plus 5% state tax - he now owes nearly $4500 in taxes. And since he's unlikely to have $4500 in assets if that debt was only values at $500, where's that going to come from? If you thought a bank holding your debt was bad, wait until it's Uncle Sam instead.