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Monday 11th November

The end of the world as we know it? Forget rocks from space, we may be in much more imminent danger from something happening far beneath our feet. Earth’s magnetic field is weakening, and scientists are concerned this may be a prelude to the magnetic poles flipping — magnetic north becoming south and vice versa. Obviously, this will cause problems in itself:

Anyone trying to navigate with a magnetic compass is going to have a tough time, but what is going to happen to all those birds, fish and other animals that migrate vast distances using their own internal magnetic compass? Will they have time to re-draw their magnetic maps and get new bearings?

Even more creatures such as bees and some bacteria use a sense of magnetism for finding their way around their local territories, for a north/south or up/down axis.

That is not all, and not the worst of it, though. Before the switching of the field, the magnetic field would disappear completely. When that happens, our protection from intense solar radiation also disappears, and the impact of this stream of charged particles on the atmosphere would have unpredictable and potentially severe climatic effects; it all depends on how long the switch of the poles takes — it may be a few years or a few thousand years. And there’s pretty much nothing we can do about it.

For quite a while in the latter half of the 20th Century jingoism was generally unacceptable, despite the occasional flashes of it during the Falklands War — which was twenty years ago. (Difficult to believe, that.) Jingoism is, though, back with a vengeance, especially in the USA and the more right wing of British politicians (yes, that includes the Prime Minister). Most of the world is relieved that Saddam Hussein seems to be working his way towards complying with the UN reolution regarding weapons inspectors; not Andrew Sullivan:

It’s hard not to feel dread when Saddam seems to be moving toward “compliance” with the latest U.N. resolution. I don’t mean, of course, that we should dread actually disarming him; merely that we should dread his trapping the U.S. and the rest of the world in yet another sandpit of confusion and obfuscation. That’s why it seems to me that we should be publicly mobilizing for war right away.

He isn’t quite saying that the US should be going to war right away: he says that the “display of military might and readiness” makes a peaceful outcome more likely. Well, what he actually says is that it makes peace more likely “whether the weaponry is used or not.” Perhaps he has lived in a gun-toting culture so long that he truly can’t grasp that using the weaponry will mean peace is finished.

There are so many things wrong with this American obsession with Iraq: war with Iraq is unnecessary whether the inspectors go in or not because although Saddam is a menace, he is a contained menace; the existence or imminnent development of weapons of mass destruction is a shibboleth in the pro-war factions of the West, yet no evidence supporting this has been made public; if Saddam does have such weapons, the only circumstance in which he is likely to use them now would be if backed into a corner by Western military action, when he would have nothing to lose; even if that does not happen, a US attack on Iraq will destabilise the Middle East — the consequences are completely unpredictable; there is also the little fact that Saddam Hussein is not the real problem facing the West at the moment: he had nothing to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, or Bali. El Shrubbo’s determination to kick someone’s ass means that Saddam is an obvious target, but not only will it not help in dealing with Al Qaeda, the chances are an American military onslaught falling on Iraq will provoke more terrorism.

There is also the basic consideration that we should be attempting to find legal ways to deal with brutal regimes; we’re a long way off that, and the USA’s refusal to support the ICC does not help. However, if an international legal system is not developed, we are only left with recourse to war and the threat of war.

It seems Bertelsmann aren’t the only music company who want to show how macho they are. EMI Germany clearly don’t want to be the cuddly one in any “good cop, bad cop” routine. A German customer bought Toto’s Through The Looking Glass. In his complaint to EMI, he noted that on the CD was the following statement:

It is designed to be compatible with CD audioplayers, DVD players and PC-OS, MS Windows 95, Pentium II 233 MHz 64MB RAM or higher.

However, he could only play tracks 1–8 in his DVD player. Tracks 9–11 were neither displayed nor playable. He no longer has an ordinary CD player, so he tried it in his Macintosh, running MacOS X. This time, only tracks 1–7 were playable. Putting in his PC, he found that it would only play with a piece of proprietary software he did not have installed on his computer and did not want to install — and why should he?

He finishes with a bit of laudable plain speaking to the music corp:

Leider übersehen Sie, dass nicht nur die bösen Raubkopierer Schuld an Ihrem Umsatzrückgang sind. Vielmehr sind eher folgende Gründe ausschlaggebend:

* Der Hauptkonsument — Jugendliche — geben einen Großteil ihres Budgets für Handys aus,

* mit der DVD ist ein Konkurrenzmedium auf dem Markt erschienen, der tief in den Gefilden der Musikbranche fischt, denn es gilt, dass man ein Euro nur einmal ausgeben kann und jeder ein mehr oder weniger begrenztes Budget hat

* durch den Kopierschutz ist ein Abspielen der CDs auf DVD-Playern nicht oder nur sehr eingeschränkt möglich. Viele Haushalte sind nur noch mit DVD-Playern bestückt. Leider schneiden Sie sich damit ins eigene Fleisch. Sehr töricht.

* es gibt keinen Kopierschutz, der nicht zu knacken ist :-)

Which roughly translates as:

You must see that the decline in your sales is not only because of the naughty pirates. Rather the following reasons are decisive:

* The major consumers — young people — spend most of their money on mobile phones

* With DVD a competing medium appeared on the market, one which encroaches deeply into the music industry’s territory because one can spend a euro only once and everyone has a more or less limited budget

* With copy protection a CD may not play at all or possibly only in to a limited extent on a DVD player. Many households only have a DVD player. You are shooting yourselves in the foot. Very foolish.

* There is no copy protection which cannot be cracked. :-)

Well said. He adds that copy protected CDs, being unplayable in his home, are worthless to him so he won’t buy them any more.

How did EMI reply? Well, you can see a translation of the whole reply at The Register (very good of them). Here’s the first paragraph:

We will refrain from addressing the points in your email that are clearly erroneous. We also don’t want to bore you with a lengthy explanation of why the music industry is forced to use copy protection measures, even though we would prefer to do something else. Only this much: There are 250 Million blank CDRs and tapes bought and used this year for copying music in comparison to 213 Million prerecorded audio media. This means the owners are only being paid for 46 per cent of the musical content. For a comparison: In 1998 almost 90% of all audio media was paid for. Even without a degree in economics everyone should realise that such trends will result in the music industry ceasing to exist. Only one measure can be used against widespread cloning of prerecorded audio media by burning CDRs: copy protection! This is also the reason why record companies increasingly have to protect their CDs. An alternative solution for stopping this abuse is unfortunately not within sight. But we fear that these facts don’t interest you at all. Because these measures mean the end of free music, something that must cause you much grief.

So, not only doesn’t it matter that their customer could not play the “CD” — remember that Philips say these aren’t CDs and shouldn’t be labelled as such (and since they invented the CD, they should bloody know!) — because he has complained about it they are telling him he is a music pirate as well. They go on to say that if he really has a problem with playing the CD then he should tell them the exact model of player so they can compare this with the list of players which play the protected discs without problem:

Then we’ll see if the problem really is the copy protection or if there are completely different reasons. The case you are reporting that even multiple players refuse to function can, in our experience, only originate from the realm of fairytales.

So he’s a liar, then.

The nice EMI drone then goes on to say that the copy protection is state of the art, which “means there’s nothing better available to date.”

The inability to see that “nothing better available” is in no way synonymous with “works perfectly without problem” is not the only bit of foggy thinking in the EMI response. Let’s look back at their justification for copy protection:

There are 250 Million blank CDRs and tapes bought and used this year for copying music in comparison to 213 Million prerecorded audio media. This means the owners are only being paid for 46 per cent of the musical content. For a comparison: In 1998 almost 90% of all audio media was paid for.

The huge assumption being made is that all the blank CDRs and tapes being bought are being used for precisely one thing: music piracy. The 1998 figures are no doubt based on the much lower sales of CDRs in 1998. This could, of course, have something to do with the reducing price of CDRs — they are, frankly, dirt cheap and sold in packages of 30 or more, so it’s hardly surprising that sales have climbed.

The fact is, there is more than one reason for buying CDRs. They can be used for system backups, for one thing. What about the increasing usage of digital cameras, some of which produce files about 17Mb large? The obvious storage medium for something like that is a CD. Don’t forget, too, that there will be people out there making music who want to record it on something. I know one person who writes software and sells it, distributing it on — what else? — CDs. Another acquaintance takes video of his young son, storing it on CDs. And then, of course, there is the legitimate copying of music.

It has long been accepted that it is legitimate for a user to make a copy of a record, tape or CD for his or her own personal use. The reasons for someone doing this are simple: because CDs (which is what we’re talking about here) are not cheap, when you buy one you want to take care of it. It is easy to damage a CD when using it in, say, a car CD player or a portable CD player — much better to make a copy to play in the car. Then there is the time you want some music to play at a party; there’s rarely a single album which will do, so you want a few tracks from one, some from another, and so on. You could tape it, but CD is more convenient. None of this robs anyone, because none of these cases involve someone copying a disc rather than buying it.

The German user is right: the music companies are shooting themselves in the foot (I know, that’s not a literal translation). The only reason there hasn’t been an enormous row about it yet is that, as far as I can see, most people don’t know what the music companies are up to; to me that rather suggests that very few people are trying to copy a CD.

The music companies: utter bastards, or what?

To continue with revisiting previous topics, you may recall the post on the fools who insist that the Moon landings of the late Sixties and early Seventies were hoaxes perpetrated by NASA(with, of course, the collusion of the Soviet space programme).

One of the most irritating things about reportage of the hoax hobby horsers is the way they are treated seriously by the media. Take this BBC report on a French amateur astronomer and photographer’s claims, which are not run-of-the-mill Moon hoaxer assertions:

An amateur astronomer and photographer claims in a new book that some of the photos said to have been taken by US astronauts on the Moon were actually faked on Earth…

Mr Lheureux, whose book is called Lumieres sur la Lune (Lights on the Moon), told France 2 television that NASAtook the fake pictures during training for the Apollo Moon flights. “In order not to give out the real photos containing scientific information about the Moon which could be used, they released photos taken during the training stages.”

This is — not to beat around the bush — staggeringly stupid, even more so than the usual Moon hoax rubbish. What scientific information? That the Moon has dust on the surface? That there are craters and rocks? That the sky is black? What information can you get from photographs taken on the Moon which we didn’t already know before July 1969?

At least the other Moon hoax nuts have a consistent idea behind their ramblings — i.e. that it is just plain impossible to go the Moon because of the radiation; they’re wrong, but if their basic premiss were correct the hoax idea might make some sort of sense. But M. Lheureux’s claims don’t make any sort of sense on their own terms.

So, why has he decided that this is the case? What was that? He wants to make money and be a little famous, so he is advancing a sensational notion, but it can’t be the plain Moon hoax idea because that’s been done? Well, you may be right, but I couldn’t possibly comment.

His stated reasons are, of course, anomalies — or what he thinks are anomalies, not at all the same thing — in the photographs he has see. What are these anomalies?

1. Armstrong said the LM was kicking up a lot of dust as it came down, yet in a photograph the LM’s foot is dust free. (Lheureux here demonstrates how stupid you look if you don’t find out something about the subject before you pontificate: in a vacuum, the dust is blown away by the rocket, falling straight back down to the surface; there is no air to keep it billowing around after the motor has stopped. A dust-free LM foot is precisely what you would expect.)
2. Lheureux claims that in a photograph showing one astronaut reflected in another helmet, each astronaut is lit from a different direction. (As usual with the Moon hoaxers, Lheureux seems to be assuming that the lunar surface is a perfectly flat plain, which it is not, and also, I suspect, he is not taking into account the distortion from the helmet’s curvature; I think he also does not realise that much of the illumination of the astronaut in the picture is reflected from the suit of the astronaut reflected in his visor.)
3. One of the rocks in one photograph is marked with a letter C as though it were a movie prop. (He really does his research, doesn’t he? This one has been answered so often: the supposed letter C is in fact a hair which got into the mechanism during the making of a set of prints of this particular photograph; other copies of the same photograph do not show the curly artefact.)

The BBC report simply recounts his arguments and finishes like so:

The television [sic] said NASA had admitted that about 20 pictures, of the thousands taken, did raise some questions.

But it added: “The American space agency says that on close examination they all have a scientific explanation”.

There is no attempt to provide any factual counterbalance to Lheureux’s nonsensical notions; the final sentence is so weak it might as well not be there.

I imagine the BBC would defend the report on the grounds that they are not reporting M. Lheureux’s claims, they are reporting the report of his claims on France 2 television (as part of monitoring the world’s media). However, the page is presented in the same format as all BBC news reports, it is linked to from BBC news reports: the BBC has some responsibility not to lend spurious credibility to claims which can easily be shown to be fallacious. There is not even a link anywhere to, say, Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy site which would present the reasons why the Moon hoaxers’ claims don’t stand up.

NASA was supposed to have a book in the pipeline rebutting the Moon hoax claims, but publication has been cancelled.

Criticism that NASA was displaying poor judgement and a lack of confidence in commissioning the book caused it to abort the project, agency spokesman Bob Jacobs said.

The writer, Jim Oberg, is apparently still going to produce the book, although obviously he will have to find some publisher and it will not have any official connection with NASA. It seems that the criticism of NASA was that in officially publishing Oberg’s book the space agency would be lending credibility to the hoax nutters’ claims.

I don’t agree. If NASA were to publish the ravings of Bill Kaysing, for example, that would be lending credibility to the nutters’ claims; publishing the facts can surely only show how foolish the hoaxers’ assertions are. (I can’t help thinking that pulling the publication may lend them some credibility, though.)

While I have been writing this, the BBC’s online science editor has posted an article which echoes my thoughts:

Am I the only one who thinks that the American space agency, NASA, has missed a good opportunity in cancelling the book planned to give a rebuttal of the Moon hoaxers. You know the ones. They believe that the moon landings were faked in some military hanger somewhere, and that in the more than three decades since such conclusive evidence as a few photographs with seemingly funny shadows or reflections have emerged to prove the lie…

You can understand NASA’s thinking. They do not want to see the headline, “NASA proves it went to the Moon,” as it implies they have something to explain, which they do not.

But the sad fact is that the belief that the moon landings were a hoax is a growing one, and if it is ignored then those with unsupportable ideas are left unchallenged and given free reign to convince others.

NASA should have produced the book and said, “that’s that. End of discussion.”

I read that and thought, “Too right.” But Dr. Whitehouse seems to have a knack of neat phrasing. This is a perfect description of the Moon hoaxers:

What always puzzles me about conspiracy advocates is their lack of critical thinking and how they parade their deficiencies as virtues.

It is as if the question is all important and the answer irrelevant, as if the need to believe the conspiracy overwhelms the evidence.

As for the evidence that the moon landings were hoaxes, there is none. Or at least none that stands up to anything more than trivial investigation.

The fact is that every single shred of so-called evidence put forward by the Moon hoax theorists is either obviously stupid — a result of their own ignorance of basic science — or has a straightforward explanation.

Mozilla is an excellent browser, as I believe I have mentioned before once or twice. It isn’t, though, designed primarily for the end user, but as an open-source core which can be customised to make different applications. Here’s a new one (to me, at least): Ghostzilla. This is based on Mozilla 1.0 and allows you to disguise the fact that you are surfing the Net. What it basically does is duplicate the appearance of the application you should be using — M$ Word, a C editor, whatever — and render the Web page in the pseudo-application’s window; the page is rendered in pale grey, only small images are shown (in grey — larger images are marked by dashed lines and can be viewed on demand), and a flick of the mouse removes Ghostzilla from the screen to reveal the actual application it is mimicking. There are some screenshots showing it in action. (Note the URL of that link, by the way.)

Of course, this does nothing to hide what you may be up to from the IT department should they look at the logs of the sites you have visited, but it will protect you from the ire of a passing boss who can’t bear the fact you don’t spend every single second working.

What made me smile — if a little uneasily — was this note about using Ghostzilla:

If you have a responsible job (an air-traffic controller, for example), where your full attention to what is going on on the screen is vital, please do not use Ghostzilla.

Sticking with words ending in -zilla: if you are looking for an FTP client you should have a look at FileZilla. As far as I know, it has no connection with the Mozilla Project, but it is a nifty little program.