Reality Check: Transfer of Consciousness

There is a certain public misconception, bolstered largely by Hollywood, that, in a few years' time, we'll all be able to transfer our consciousnesses into a robot body.

I offer up some arguments as to why that is unlikely ever to happen.

First off, the technology argument.

• The human brain is an incredibly complex machine, with something on the order of 100-billion synapses--the tiny components that store information. It is all arranged in a roughly hemispherical shape. To transfer all of that data, the brain must be scanned. The only way in which we can scan below the surface layer is to remove that layer. Thus, it must be a destructive process. Second, it must occur immediately after death, and not take too long, lest we lose information. I imagine that the process would, in implementation, be similar to that depicted in the television series Upload.
• The technology for scanning the brain hasn't been invented yet and, given the current advance of technology, won't likely be for at least another hundred years.
• In order for this to work, you will need a computer. If you are to be conscious, then this computer must be capable of consciousness itself--or figure out how to simulate it. It must also have a tremendous amount of storage space. We've barely scratched the surface of understanding consciousness; and, again, its implementation is likely to be in excess of 100 years away. 

Second, the pragmatic argument.

• All of the above presumes that you will die, and then, after a brief pause, you will regain consciousness in a computer-generated environment. I don't believe that. I believe that consciousness is tied to the physical domain it occupies. When you die, it's game over for you. You will never regain consciousness again. What will regain consciousness will have all of your memories and experiences--but it won't be you. It will be like a You II.

Finally, a thought experiment--one of Einstein's Gedankenexperiments.

Imagine this scenario:

You die, and your brain is scanned. The results are then fed into a network of ten computers, each of which will host a new you. The network signals arrive at the computers simultaneously.

My question is: In which computer will you wake up in? All of them at once? That would be mightily confusing.

Until you can answer that question with a valid argument, the answer is: "It ain't gonna happen anytime soon."

Are you really enthusiastic about your life carrying on without you?

Because that's about the best science will be able to do for about a thousand years.

Be well,

-Bill

Learn to Pronounce!

There are certain words in the English language which are habitually mispronounced by most people, and it drives me nuts. The pronunciation is clear from the spelling; yet folks constantly mispronounce.

Here's a short list.

"Tempachure" This one bothers me a lot. In fact, the mispronunciation is so common that I genuinely believe that most people do not know the correct way. Ugh!

"Febyuary" Is it really that hard to pronounce the 'r' after the 'b'?

"Fitty" This one grates on my nerves. When you can't even pronounce "fifty," I... bleah. This one is now working its way into advertising, and in ten years, everybody but me will be saying it that way.

"Athalete" Why the compulsion to put a vowel between the 'th' and the 'l'? Jesus...

"Ezzackly" Yes, exactly.

"Gummint" This is more an Americanism, but it's being heard more frequently north of the border, these days.

"Ax" If I'm greeted one more time by a young person asking, "Hey, dude, can I ax you something?" I'll scream.

There are others; but these are the ones which really grate on my nerves.

Now, that said, I know that there are plenty of people out there who have bothered to learn the correct pronunciation of words; the problem is that there are plenty more who haven't. It's such a basic thing; we use language every single day of our lives.

Be well,

-Bill

Weasels

Over the years, I've noticed a few disturbing trends in advertising. They are more or less obvious, but I'm going to point them out anyway.

The first and most obvious trend is advertising pollution. Apart from when outdoors, it's growing increasingly difficult to find something at which to stare, which is not sporting some sort of advertising.

Just in my lifetime, there has been a huge explosion in the amount of advertising to which we are exposed. Print, radio and television were already advertising media; but now we have the Internet; this post is probably surrounded by ads.

Just on a quick glance around the room here, I notice the following brand names: Lenovo, HP, Epson, Grand & Toy, Bell, Fluid, LCBO, Band-Aid, Friskies, Kleenex, Samsung, Tensor, McDonald's, Logitech, C. Crane--and I'll stop there. It's not a big room; maybe four metres square.

We really can't escape it. Even our clothing carries brand logos.

It's only going to get worse.

Second up, I don't appreciate the number of weasel words and phrases that advertisers use. "My husband was showing the signs of a heart attack, so he chewed..." They carefully don't state that he was, in fact, having a heart attack; only that he had the symptoms. Another good (and recent) example is a particular website touting its price reviews. "When I see the Good Price badge, I absolutely trust that." That's nice; you must be a trusting soul to give it a thumbs-up without any supporting evidence.

The third trend, and the one that I find most unreasonable, is the use of "simulations" of the product in action. Wait a minute. If you are advertising for a product, shouldn't you actually have to show the product in actual use? There is currently a cleaning product using that method; and I'm sorry, but there ought to be a law about that. Show the actual product, under real-life conditions, in realtime.

What I do infer, when I see that kind of advertising, is that the product obviously can't cut it in real life; and I add that product to my Do Not Buy list. Their attempt to induce me to buy the product has backfired. I can't believe that nobody out there realizes this. It's not, to borrow the vernacular, rocket science.

There. I feel better. This better moment was sponsored by Pfizer.

Be well,

-Bill

FM DX

As regular readers are aware, I have been DX'ing now for some 45 years. I started very young.

Over those 45 years, I've always confined my search for long-distance stations to the AM broadcast band. Recently, however, I've become interested in FM DX'ing; and I recently gave it a try.

It's different. Propagation at FM frequencies happens infrequently, and is largely seasonal, occurring, at temperate latitudes, mostly in the warm months.

FM DX sounds differently from AM DX. There is next to no fluttering; signals vary mostly by strength. You'll find that, in general, FM DX is much more directional; from here in Ottawa, I've heard signals from upstate Near York (about 100 km to the south), but still haven't logged the station in Rockland, Ontario, some 40 km east.

Identification is a little harder than on AM; music tends to predominate, and so the music format can be a strong clue. Voice identifications are less frequent, and more often station nicknames (e.g. "Jack FM") are colloquially used. Also, station listings are harder to come by.

I've quickly learned that one invaluable resource for FM DX'ing is forecast maps. One good such example is the DX Info Centre, maintained by William Hepburn. To cut to the quick: watch for a coloured area shading where you live. You can advance the forecast with the left and right arrows.

My total thus far is modest: 37 stations. But, it's a beginning; let's see where it stands in 30 years. ;)

Be well,

-Bill

The End of Knowledge

The title is a bit of a teaser.

For the past 50 years, I have immersed myself in matters astronomical. A voracious reader, I've pored through astronomy publications and periodicals, and drained the Internet of virtually every bit of information I can glean from it. I have about 30 years of visual and telescopic amateur astronomy, in addition. Hell, by grade seven I could talk the average person's ear off about stuff they wouldn't even have understood.

Where does that leave me? At this point, my base of general astronomical knowledge is as great as any amateur's. Ask me virtually anything about astronomy, or cosmology, or even astrophysics, and 99 percent of the time, I'll have an answer.

Let me be clear: I don't pretend to have the skills and knowledge of someone with a degree in astronomy; there are areas, such as orbital calculations, that I've not really touched on, more for lack of resources than for anything else. I haven't done calculations involving gravity (though I did deduce the rules for planetary velocity at about age 18).

Point is, to learn anything more about astronomy, I would just about have to enroll in a university. I'm running out of Internet resources; I scan the astronomy news sites daily. More and more, I find myself branching out into physics, particle physics, and quantum theory--there are plenty of resources out there, including lectures.

I watch television shows about astronomy, but generally the only new things I learn from them are minutiae (this morning, I learned that the first name of Mr. Penzias, who with Robert Wilson discovered cosmic background radiation in the 1960s, is Arnold.)

My best bet is to search university public resources, as some universities put their curriculum online. To that end, I've begun to take out my math and play with it again, so to speak. I finished high-school math a year early; and I keep my mind nimble; so it really shouldn't be a challenge.

That's it; just bitching/bragging on a beautiful spring morning.

My knee bursitis, by the way, now appears to be ebbing. Last night, my legs were merely stumps, not bloody stumps; and I'm looking forward to a day of good legs, as soon as I've done my priming walk of about 300 metres. Riding the bike actually seems to be helping; the trick is to go slow and build up gradually. My legs at this point do not have a lot of strength or stamina.

Be well,

-Bill

Nuts...

I've been battling knee problems for the last nine years or so.

It all started with a walking event in Kanata, late in 2011 or thereabouts. I remember bombing along in my usual fashion, but I also remember a grinding sensation in my knee. I remember that it began to get painful when I bent my left knee.

It got worse the following spring, when, literally, a knee-jerk reaction resulted in an impact injury to the same knee. Following that. I could no longer bend my left knee; and so I adopted a very distinctive stride, my right leg working properly, and my left knee stiff. It worked well that way for many years; but last year, things took a turn for the worse.

Beginning in December, I noticed that my knees were growing increasingly tender at night, particularly if I had walked the day before. The pain was persisting well into the day. A short walk would 'fix' my knees wonderfully--but I couldn't put together a walk of more than a kilometre, without it causing great pain the next day.

For years, I've largely dismissed my problems as "arthritis", and inevitable. I knew that at some point, I'd need to 'have my knees done'; a long, painful process. Now, push has come to shove, and I'm Taking Steps.

The first thing that I did was to look up my particular problem with my knee. I can step stiff-legged, or I can step a bit higher; but bending my knee at the angle required for walking causes it to lock up, as it were (the knee can only be straightened against great resistance, and at great pain). It sounds very much like a meniscal tear. That can usually be repaired by arthroscopic surgery, and the recovery period is short.

A sensation yesterday morning tipped me off to the possibility that the other problem is knee bursitis; a 'squeaking' sensation, similar to rubbing your fingers together when they're coated in chicken grease; a rapid-fire give-hold-give sensation.

Knee bursitis is treatable; one of the most important treatments is staying off the knees.

So, in order to facilitate this, yesterday I put my bicycle on the road. It's nothing much; a 1983 vintage ten-speed; it's so my style.

Now, I try to be responsible these days; so I carefully inspected the bike, made sure that the cables were tight; that the tires were in good shape; etc. I carefully tried the gear shifters and the pedals, all manually.

Now, picture the sequence as I get going: I mount the bike, quickly make sure that my right foot is nestled in the pedal trap, and start pedalling.

Problem: the chain itself is off of the rear sprocket, and whips around uselessly.

I fall off to the left, most spectacularly, in true old-man fashion. People stop. You okay, sir? Knowing glances--what was this old man doing, trying to ride a bike?

I managed to shrug off my embarrassment, set the chain onto the sprocket, and go for a nice ride.

I was mostly unhurt by the fall, by the way. I've sprained my left thumb.

So, for the next little while, it's no walking for me. And, as soon as the coast is clear, I'm going to see my doctor about my knee trouble.

Like a responsible older gentleman.

Blah.

Big Changes Coming to Retail

I've decided that it's time to step a little outside my area of expertise, as I've spotted some trends which I believe will affect the retail landscape over the next twenty years.

In short: it's going to be way different.

The Rise of Online Shopping

Online shopping has been taking chunks out of the retail market for a few years, now. Shipping times are dropping, and it has become convenient to order many of the things we need online. This trend is only going to continue. Shopping malls will be a thing of the past, save for so-called mini malls and perhaps in rural locations. Most of the things that we do not need on a daily basis will only be available online. The main streets of cities and towns will be largely abandoned and will ultimately give over to new residential developments.

What Does it Mean?

For the average consumer, it means much less choice. As we have seen, the Internet ecosystem favours large, de-facto monopolies--Google, Facebook, Amazon, and so on--and that trend will only continue. I can clearly see where, in twenty years' time, almost all of your online transactions will be with a single provider, because there will be only one, unless current laws are amended and enforced. Further, that single provider will know everything about you, including probably your health records, and will be able to tailor its advertising directly to your tastes. Or modify your tastes by offering slightly different products than you are used to. All of these transactions will probably be by way of a credit card (the lack of which, even today, brands one as a non-person), and that card will probably be hacked several times per year. I say this because, through all of human history, the pace of technology has outstripped our ability to control or deploy it helpfully. The Internet has several basic flaws which cannot easily be repaired at this point, and your expectations of online privacy in the future will be zero. Retail stores will be limited to specialty shops in larger cities, convenience and grocery stores. There may be a few general-type stores in rural areas.

The Pandemic Effect

The current COVID-19 pandemic, courtesy yet again of Asia's filthy wildlife markets, is going to effect some permanent changes, also--some of them probably for the better; many of them for the worse. Making a comeback will be Consumers Distributing-type stores, where one orders and is served from a wicket. Less mingling, goes the theory. Already some stores have implemented this. This business model was largely de rigeur in the 1930s and 1940s. It's coming back, to stay.

In grocery stores, once supplies become available, disposable gloves will be offered at the door. That will stop probably 70-80 percent of infections, right there. Possibly even face masks. This will be permanent.

Another innovation

This pandemic effect will be exacerbated by its increasing recurrence. In the past, a pandemic was largely allowed to run its course. But COVID-19 is too deadly; and once out among the general population, it will be difficult to eradicate. Future pandemics are likely to be just as deadly, and we're all going to have to get used to this. The promise of a vaccine is not as helpful as it sounds, as so many people have latched onto the anti-vax movement as onto astrology--and astrology is based more on reality.

Other changes are coming to the business world in general. Many more people will be working from home in the near-future; and if I had any money, I'd be investing in providers of those services (Citrix, FortiClient, etc.). We've probably nearly hit Peak Office. There will be far fewer construction cranes downtown, for the foreseeable future.

One Last Thought:

Paper money and coins will start disappearing within the next 10 years. That's a major freedom, and we need to fight for it.

Why Think About This Now?

Because by the time it happens, you won't be able to do anything about it. I'm not looking forward to having to order most of my stuff from Amazon, and being chided for buying items which conflict with my health records, and being reminded to do the things I was going to do anyway, for my health, and wearing an activity monitor for insurance purposes. Every transaction that I make will be tracked and probably scrutinized--probably by Amazon, too.

Get ready for it. It ain't pretty; and it's a whole lot less free--but it's coming.

Climate Change in Ottawa: 30-Year Report

I have lived in the Ottawa region for 34 years, now. I have always had more than a passing interest in the weather and meteorology. Let's combine the two, and see what comes out.

1. It's Getting Warmer

Over 30 years, the weather in Ottawa has gradually grown warmer, especially in Winter.

Anecdotal Evidence:
In the Eighties, temperatures frequently ventured down into the minus-thirties. News stories abounded, showing steam plumes off of every building, and people freezing through daytime highs in the mid-minus-twenties.

Now? It doesn't happen. Oh, once every few years, you'll get a low temperature in the minus-thirty range; but only one, and only once per winter. Generally, the lowest the temperature gets nowadays, in an average winter, is about -26.

Direct Evidence:
If you graph the daily temperature records for the year, against the dates they were set, a remarkable pattern emerges: again, especially in Winter, the low-temperature records were generally set years ago--decades ago--while the high-temperature records have been set in the past few years. It's really quite striking, when viewed in this way, and delivers an unambiguous argument that the climate is warming.

The Rideau Canal: In the eighties, it often opened in late-December; and skating generally lasted into mid-March. In recent years, it almost never opens before mid-January, almost always closes by late February; and this year, for the first time, not all sections of the Canal were opened. It's a trend.

Winterlude: Ottawa's famous winter festival is at risk of busting. In the past, the carnival was a 10-day event in mid-January. But it kept running into the January thaw. So they broke it up into three weekends, and ran it mid-February. Problem is, in recent years, there's often a meltdown mid-event. Our winters eventually will become too inconsistent to hold a major winter carnival, at all. I expect that to happen in the next 20-30 years. I also expect still to be talking about it at that point.

2. Winters are Getting Shorter

That's a process that seems to have accelerated somewhat in recent years.

I can only offer anecdotal evidence for this one. In the eighties, winter was usually well underway by mid-December. The snow often began falling in early November. I remember one winter, in the early nineties, when we didn't get a major snowfall, and the Canal didn't freeze, until late November.

Contrast that with today, when the Canal is often still unfrozen into mid-December; and often the first major snowfall now occurs in that month, too.

Yep; it's changing. Only an idiot can still murmur about natural processes, at this point.

Have a warm one,

-Bill

700! A DX'er Exults

As regular readers of this column may be aware, I have been DX'ing since 1975; or, for 45 years. I've been doing it in the Ottawa area for the past 34.

As you also may know, DX'ing is the attempt to receive radio stations over long distances. In my case, I chose to focus on AM radio.

As of this morning, I have now logged 700 distinct stations, from this area.

Putting it into perspective: there are approximately 120 AM frequencies available. This means that I've received, on average, almost six stations for every frequency. On only one or two frequencies have I never been able to log more than one station; and for some (the so-called graveyard channels), the total is close to 15.

I consider a 'distinct station' to be one that is identifiable by its frequency, callsign, and location. On the rare occasion that a station changes its callsign or frequency, then when I hear it again, I'll record it as a new station. If a station changes location, I generally ignore it, unless they switch transmitting locations (very rare, indeed).

Over the years, there have been many changes in the hobby. Audibly, in some cases; Canadian AM stations are largely switching to FM, and as a consequence French is disappearing from the band. At the same time, Spanish is increasingly heard from US stations.

The old clear-channel frequencies are slowly filling up. There are stations in Texas, for example, which I haven't heard since the eighties. My average distance per station has been steadily dropping.

In the Nineties, the expanded AM band (1610-1700 KHz) opened up, and there was a rash of loggings from low-powered travel information stations. Some of them were just jaw-dropping; a TIS from an airport in Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas, for example, running at most 10 Watts, with a daytime reach of maybe a kilometre. (For reference, I've logged the airport TIS in Ottawa--barely more than ten kilometres away, and operating at the same Wattage--only twice.)

Over all of those years, my greatest catch remains Vatican Radio, on 1611 KHz, in the late-nineties. That's a good third of the way around the world.

The ways you can identify a station have also evolved. Whereas, in the past, identifying a station took place primarily with the aid of printed references, which quickly run out-of-date, today we have the Internet. Vast numbers of stations can be heard in near-real time, thanks to streaming; and numerous Internet-based references exist.

There are many tricks I've employed over the years; the old canner-lid trick, to block strong signals from one direction, allowing fainter signals from another direction to trickle through; it's how I logged 1070 KNX, Los Angeles, from the West Coast, in the null of local station CFAX, in Victoria. I've used numerous loop antennas, the occasional longwire (in an urban environment, that's usually tricky, and potentially very noisy). I'll often tune one or two kilohertz away from a frequency, to better eliminate adjacent-channel interference. I'll play with the bass and treble controls, or audio bandwidth, to optimize for the voice I'm hearing.

The biggest factor, overall has been persistence. In the Fall, when the sun returns to setting early enough to make DX'ing worthwhile again, it takes me a couple of weeks really to get familiar with my station listings again. From then, until late Spring, I know my stations well, which makes it much easier to identify a station on the fly--and much easier to spot something that 'doesn't belong'. If you DX only occasionally, you'll constantly be asking yourself, "What's that station?"

That's my two cents' worth at 700. I'll chime in again about it when I reach 1,000. That'll be in ten or fifteen years.

Until then, be well. ;)

-Bill

Business as Usual

Well, four months in, with our bright, shiny new LRT already falling apart, a few things are becoming clear:

• The Rideau Transit Group has sold us a lemon;
• The contractors for the Phase II extension of the north-south line had no idea what they were even proposing; yet they were accepted as the low bidder;
• The City knew for months that raw sewage was leaking into Parliament Station, yet apparently did nothing;
• The City and OC Transpo blew the transition. Totally blew it.

First off, the LRT keeps breaking down. Faulty switches; EZ-Jam Doors; overhead wires falling down; computer failures; "wheel flats" (which are what they sound like); and the list goes on. This week, they are running "S1" supplementary bus service parallel to the O Train lines, because they don't have sufficient trains available to handle the load. Word is that Rideau Transit Maintenance, the turkeys hired to maintain the system, have been overwhelmed by these wheel flats, which aren't supposed to happen in a modern rail system.

On top of it all, the system was originally planned for 15 two-car trains. But the most that the Powers that Be have been able to operate (occasionally) is 13. That means longer waits for a train (when it's actually working), and greater crowding in the death-trap stations kindly provided for us. (I'm serious: when there's trouble, it's so crowded that you can't move).

Second, the City's acceptance of the winning bid for the Phase II extension borders on the criminal. The 'winning' proposal (from TransitNext, which is exactly the same set of suspects as constructed the 'Confederation Line'--smart; I'd change my name, too, after pulling a stunt like that) was turned down flat by the evaluation committee. It was clear that it had been cobbled together by people who didn't know what they were doing; it frequently makes reference to a 'catenary power system,' when the Line 2 trains are diesel. All I can say is, we're again going to get exactly what we pay for. And, again and again, we reward shitty performance with follow-on work.

The issue of raw sewage leaking into Parliament Station is an odd one. People were reporting the smell in the area, long before the line opened--and for months thereafter. The City finally 'fessed up about four months in. No explanation for the lag. Shut up and grab a nonexistent strap.

To rehash from previous columns, the City and OC Transpo totally blew the transition to LRT. They began cutting down on bus routes even before the trains rolled; sold off the buses immediately, and gave drivers pink slips. Several weeks later, when they came to the realization that a workable LRT system for Ottawa was at least a year away, they desperately tried to beg, borrow or steal buses from other municipalities, and begged for laid-off drivers to come back. Because of union rules, which meant that you had to re-enter the workforce at the bottom of the totem pole, most of the drivers told them to go hang.

So now we're in a colossal mess, and any fix is still months away. Meanwhile, buses--already cut back drastically--are being lifted to ensure a ready fleet for breakdowns.

So far, the City has been withholding payments to RTM, to cover the additional costs. Clearly, this cannot continue, or RTM will go bankrupt--which will open a whole new can of worms.

Either way, I can see the whole thing collapsing into endless lawsuits which will drain the city coffers.

Sadly, this is the way we do things in Ottawa; in a stab-blindly sort of way, with all the chips stacked in favour of the contractor. And, again and again, we get screwed. And, again and again, we reward this usurious behaviour. From all of this emerges a pattern: that the Mayor and Council are largely in the pockets of developers, "builders," whatever you'd like to call them. Mind, this is nothing new; when I first arrived, 30-some years ago, people were already carping about that.

Finally, a prediction: there's going to be an 'incident' at one of our new LRT stations. People will try to stampede in confining quarters, and there will be a few deaths and numerous injuries. And only then will our City Mothers realize the risk they've been putting us all through. Sadly, they can't shut down the LRT system, to fix it properly, because they've long ago given up the equivalent bus capacity. The resulting lawsuits are going to be hideous; and our grandchildren will still be paying them off.

Here's another prediction: those British experts from JBA, called in to babysit RTM's maintenance efforts, are going to strive mightily for three months and then, in the face of ever-mounting failures, are going to wash their hands of the mess.

So far, my predictions have not been wrong. I've been calling it correctly since the first doomed contract was signed, decades ago.

So, whom do we have to thank for this mess?

Suspect #1: Mayor Jim Watson. He's staked his career on LRT. But as more details leak out about the Top Secret procurement process (which, public money being involved, should never have happened in the first place), it's clear that the whole thing stunk to high heaven. And, I'm sorry, but he's gambled with a huge chunk of our money--and lost. He's the guy trying to justify a price hike for transit--at a time when it's not even working; when it's in its worst state since transit began in Ottawa! He's gotta be losing friends in business, left and right, since his fancy new transit system is costing local employers hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity, since their employees cannot get in to work. Nobody's been mentioning that. Yet.

Suspect #2: OC Transpo Boss John Manconi. Here is a guy who never rides the bus--in charge of a transit system that is so bad, you generally have to leave at least an hour early to have any chance of getting where you're going on time. OC Transpo has gone from being held in some esteem, years ago, to a laughingstock--a joke. He made the decision to decimate the bus fleet when it was still badly needed. He's the head of an organization that doesn't know how to run a train, and has forgotten that buses still make up a major part of its fleet.  I don't know how else to say it: Manconi has been a total failure since Day One. Get rid of this guy!

Those are the two to focus on, at the moment. I promise my next column will be about something other than Ottawa's LRT.

In the meantime, here in Ottawa, it's Business as Usual.

Have a good one,

-Bill