And Still I Persist

Back on March 5th of 2008 and February 10th, I pointed out that we were still missing sunspots. In fact in the weeks since then we have seen a few small sunspots appear, some that were judged to be part of the new cycle, and some part of the old cycle. This was quickly argued over, and it seems the general consensus is that everyone is waiting for the new cycle to get going.

As of today, there are zero sunspots on the face of our local star. This has been an unusual quiet period that may have broad implications for our environment and enjoyment of our planet. While most of the world is going ga-ga over “Earth Week” and trying to out green each other, the threat of a period of decreased solar radiation is becoming more real.

For everyone waiting for things to get really hot (Global Warming after all) the danger that it might get quite a bit colder instead keeps increasing slowly but steadily. From NOAA: Can an increase or decrease in sunspot activity affect the Earth’s climate?

Times of maximum sunspot activity are associated with a very slight increase in the energy output from the sun. Ultraviolet radiation increases dramatically during high sunspot activity, which can have a large effect on the Earth’s atmosphere. From the mid 1600s to early 1700s, a period of very low sunspot activity (known as the Maunder Minimum) coincided with a number of long winters and severe cold temperatures in Western Europe, called the Little Ice Age. It is not known whether the two phenomena are linked or if it was just coincidence. The reason it is hard to relate maximum and minimum solar activity (sunspots) to the Earth’s climate, is due to the complexity of the Earth’s climate itself.

It is now May of 2008, and the new sunspot cycle was to begin in late 2006 to mid 2007. Clearly the sun is taking a breather, and we should devote some fraction of study into what implications that might have to our climate.

Back in March of 2006 (that’s right - 2 years ago) the know-it-alls had this prediction that was published in the New Scientist:

Bumper sunspot crop forecast for next solar cycle

The next 11-year sunspot cycle will be late but strong according to a new computer prediction. The model used was virtually spot on when applied retrospectively to “forecast” the last eight solar cycles.

“We predict the next cycle will be 30% to 50% stronger than the last cycle,” says the model’s creator, Mausumi Dikpati, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s High Altitude Observatory in Boulder, Colorado, US.

[Later in the article]

The new results contradict those of a model published in 2005 that found the next cycle could be the weakest in 100 years. Leif Svalgaard, a member of the team behind that model, says the key difference boils down to one simple thing: “How long does the Sun remember its magnetic field?”

Based on the last 12 cycles, “large cycles usually start early”, Hathaway told New Scientist. He expects the cycle to begin in late 2006 or early 2007: “We’re anxiously awaiting the appearance of those first spots in the new cycle.”

What can we learn from this? Firstly that our science on this subject and thousands of others is far from complete. That means you must take predictions like the one cited above, and rises in global temperature due to greenhouse gases with a grain of salt.

The last 20 years have seen a rise in predictions based off of models. As computing power has increased more and more science people have stopped doing real science and started doing mathematical “models” in an attempt to short cut to an answer. This can sometimes work with fairly simple systems. Where it falls to pieces are in large scale dynamic systems with millions of billions of variables, most of which have not been identified. As a result we end up with pseudo-scientists applying more or less linear predictions to dynamic systems. This is always a good plan for getting it wrong.

Cracked, which I (rightfully) disdained in my youth as a poor imitation of Mad Magazine, has reinvented itself brilliantly in the Interwebz Age by publishing a steady (one might say relentless) stream of articles listing “the <adjective> <number> <items> <further qualification>”, such as these:

• The 25 Least Inspiring Military Operation Names
• 5 Horrifying Food Additives You’ve Probably Eaten Today
• The 5 Most Ill-Conceived Action Figures
• and one of my all-time favorites: The 6 Most Terrifying Foods in the World

Most of these are at least amusing (if occasionally profane — ok, frequently profane), and some are actually educational and/or informative.

A few, however, are brilliant, and one of the latest lists — “8 (Pointless) Laws All Comic Book Movies Follow” by Henry A. Lee — qualifies as such. His insight is not just in the few cliches that we might immediately think of but in the consistent trends in comic book movie franchises that extend to 3, 4, or even 5 movies. I don’t want to give away much here — he deserves the traffic, and his revelations unfold in a measured way — but stop and think: in how many comic books movies have you seen the pattern of “the Brain, the Bod, and the Bumbler” among the villains? (And that’s not even one of his major laws, merely a side observation. My own observation is that it also appears among the heroes: think “Hellboy” and “Pirates of the Caribbean”.)

More than anything, his article explains why a certain numbing sameness tends to set in with comic book movie franchises: they all tend to follow the same patterns through the first, second, and third films. All Hollywood producers, directors, and screenwriters who work on comic book films should read this piece — but I’m not holding my breath. ..bruce w..

j[UPDATED 05/02/08: Google has lifted the designation; more details here.]

Last Monday (4/21), I brought up the SiteMeter statistics page for this blog and noted in passing that the traffic seemed a bit light that morning. I chalked it up to the usual variations in site flow and didn’t think much of it.

But then I happened to click on one of the incoming Google searches (as I often do) just to see what other sites that search brings up and where my blog ranks in the results. I was startled — and dismayed — to see something that looked like this:

I was rather dumbfounded, to say the least. I clicked on the ‘This site may harm your computer’ link and found myself at Google Webmaster, having their “StopBadware” initiative explained to me. Since this blog (along with all my others) is hosted on a dedicated remote server, I fired off an e-mail to the support staff, as well as to my co-blogger Bruce Henderson. In the meantime, I brought up CuteFTP and started searching through the blog’s files.

I quickly encountered some files that weren’t part of the WordPress installation — they had been recently created, and most of them started with the prefix “fx_” (as in “fx_wp-cron.php”). Henderson found them as well; he also found reports that this problem was related to a known WordPress exploit. I had not yet upgraded the blog to WP 2.5, since I’m always a bit leery of new major releases, so I got caught in the exploit as well.

I then proceeded to spend a full day cleaning up the mess. I backed up the blog’s contents as an XML file (to avoid copying out any PHP files), relocated the image files, then deleted the entire WordPress installation, including the database, leaving little more than an bare-bones index.html (’PLEASE STAND BY…”) file. I then did a clean installation of WordPress 2.5 and upgraded it with the security-related portions of WordPress 2.5.1. I then restored the blog’s content by importing the XML file (broken up into three smaller chunks, since WordPress will only import XML files < 2MB). I restored the image files and requested a new review of the website by Google.

Google told me that the site still had “badware” — but the section that was supposed to inform me where the badware was, was completely blank. Aargh. I requested a new review and noted in the comments that Google was telling me there was a problem with my website without giving me any information about what it was. This process continued for several days.

Today, I checked Google again and saw that this blog was still listed as ‘harmful’ — but now it pointed me specifically to the (current) third page of the blog. A cursory review of that page didn’t uncover anything. I then did some more online research and found a post talking about iFrame injections. I did a ‘view source’ on the 3rd page of this blog, searched for ‘iFrame’ — and bingo! There it was, embedded in my post on HP Lovecraft. I deleted it from that post, but to be sure, I exported the entire blog out to XML again, opened that file in UltraEdit, and did a search on ‘iFrame’. I found two legit uses of iFrame (some of Henderson’s Google maps during last fall’s San Diego fires), but found another iFrame exploit in an old post on ‘Time Traveller Day’. I deleted that one, then did a resubmit to Google.

Through all this, my site traffic had declined sharply, down to less than a third of what it had been averaging each day:

There was a brief spike on the 25th-26th, but that mostly Digg traffic on the ‘rainbow’ photo that Henderson posted.

I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Google ‘Stop Badware’ initiative. On the one hand, it sure brought the problem to my attention in a hurry — but only because I happened to backtrack on a Google search that landed at my site. (Google claims to notify via a variety of e-mail addresses, but I enabled several of those for this blog, with forwarding, back on the 21st and have yet to receive a single e-mail since then, despite several ‘Request review’ requests.) What’s more, Google has never provided any information about what the alleged ‘badware’ is that it found on my blog, and it is has been for the most part vague and unhelpful in letting me know where the alleged badware is.

In the meantime, for a full week now anyone using Google who hits my site sees that “This site may harm your computer” phrase. I can only cross my fingers and hope that Google in Its Inscrutable Wisdom decides that my site is OK now. Henderson and I have spent nearly two years building the blog’s traffic to its current level, only to see that drop by 60% in a single day and mostly stay there for the past week. We’re not alone in this mess; a Google search on “Google site may harm computer” yields 649,000 hits.

Have you checked what Google is saying about your blog? ..bruce w..

I am a great fan of Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, for its willingness to go back and actually look at the historical rise of fascism (and Fascism) in the 20th Century, in our own country (under Woodrow Wilson), in Italy (under Mussolini), in Germany (under Hitler), and in Russia (under Stalin). Indeed, I consider Liberal Fascism along with Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man to be the two most important works of 20th Century US political history written in the past decade.

So it was with sensitized eyes that I found myself re-reading The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis, written in 1944 and addressing “Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools” (the actual subtitle of the work). I happened to pick this up again due to a passing reference to this work over at Jerry Pournelle’s blog.

Those who think of Lewis merely as a ‘Christian apologist’ should take the time to read this book or, say, his lectures on Paradise Lost. He was a brilliant logician and at the same time profoundly humble — a most unusual combination. But he was never shy about quietly, methodically dismantling what he saw as shoddy or unfounded reasoning. You may disagree with his premises, but it’s much, much harder to pick apart the chain of logic that leads to his conclusions.

Lewis, as always, is eminently quotable, and so it’s hard to pick and choose. But since fascism has been on my mind, this paragraph — where he is talking about advances in science and knowledge, particularly in shaping human nature and even human form — leaped out at me:

For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please. In all ages, no doubt, nurture and instruction have, in some sense, attempted to exercise this power. But the situation to which we must look forward will be novel in two respects. In the first place, the power will be enormously increased. Hitherto the plans of educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted and indeed, when we read them — how Plato would have every infant ‘a bastard nursed in a bureau’, and Elyot would have the boy see no men before the age of seven and, after that, no women, and how Locke wants children to have leaky shoes and no turn for poetry — we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. But the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please. (pp. 59-60)

We speculate much about the coming singularity, which Lewis himself appears to glimpse in this chapter. What we talk less about is what happens if the first humans to make a singularity transition have — out of all good intentions (go read Goldberg)! — fascist tendencies. The thought of a trans-human Woodrow Wilson — much less a Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin — is a chilling thought indeed. ..bruce w..

UPDATE: I have to put in one more quote from Lewis:

I am not thinking here solely, perhaps not even chiefly, of those who are our public enemies at the moment [1944]. The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rules of Germany. Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent ‘ideologies’ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere hyle [Greek: matter, clay], specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men; now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration, and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are ‘potential officer material’. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligences, are sales-resistance. (p. 74)

As always, ahead of his time. ..bfw..

I was startled a few days ago to see this blog show up in Google as being potentially harmful (e.g., “this site may harm your computer”). As it turns out, we’d been the victims of an exploit in WordPress (my fault for not having upgraded to WP 2.5 sooner).

As a result, we backed up the posts, etc., in XML form and then completely deleted the WordPress installation. After that, we did a clean install of WordPress 2.5, added the 2.51 security upgrades, and restored the posts, etc.

There have been a few problems with the restorations (particularly with linked images, the sidebars and the blogroll); bear with us. ..bruce w..

UPDATE: Oh, and I changed the WordPress theme.

UPDATED UPDATE: By popular demand, I changed the WordPress theme back.