Submarine cables

Whew, just managing to post under the wire and still call it Friday…

If you’ve ever wondered about those mysterious undersea cables that news stories refer to every now and then — which carry almost all of our telecommunications and internet activity from one continent to another — there’s a great interactive map of the whole shebang. I had no idea there were so many of these things strung along our ocean floors, and had a geekfest clicking on various dots to find out which cables were terminating where. Turns out there are 10 different cables landing in four Portuguese cities, which surprised me. Then I thought about Portugal’s convenient location as a jump-off point for Africa, and it wasn’t so surprising after all.

For all its massive size, Canada has only four cables landing on its shores: one in Newfoundland/Labrador, and three in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The vast majority of the transatlantic cables land along the northeast coast of the United States. And over on the west coast, all of the northern cables land in Alaska.

Overall, the impression is of a massive web of cables, connecting every continent but one. Poor Antarctica gets no love.

Jazzing at the dry cleaners

The great thing about artists is they hear or see art in places the rest of us don’t. Like, for instance, the percussive potential of a dry cleaning shop, discovered by Diego Stocco:

I used a puff iron, press and dry cleaning machines, a washer, clothes hangers, and a bucket full of soap. The bass and lead sounds were created from the buzzing tones coming from the conduits and engines. There are no additional sounds from any traditional or electronic instruments.

Totally toe-tapping.

Bill = receipt

Today we received a bill from UPS for an overnight international package that we shipped last month. When we shipped it, we paid cash. Nearly 70 euros worth, in fact, so you can imagine that I was a little perturbed to get a bill for that amount. Did the delivery man pocket the cash and report the bill as unpaid?

Then I thought, well, maybe I’m not reading this correctly. It’s true that I sometimes make mistakes when interpreting the impenetrable gobbledy-gook of bills and “official” statements. But no, right there at the tear-off bottom part it said, “Include this part with your payment.”

My wife looked at it and said, “No, it’s got to be a statement.” I pointed at the top, where it said “Factura,” which means “bill” in Portuguese. It did not say “Recibo,” which would mean “receipt.” Then I pointed at the bottom tear-off part.

Baffled and now as perturbed as I was, my wife got on the phone with the local UPS. She hadn’t even finished describing the problem before the clerk interrupted and said, “Oh, you’re referring to the lower part of the bill? Yeah, don’t worry, we send out the same paper to people who have accounts with us and charge their shipments. So if you’ve already paid, then it’s not a bill.”

So, let me get this straight. Portugal’s UPS office sends bills to everyone who ships with them, whether they charged the shipment on account or paid cash. If you haven’t paid, it’s a bill. If you have paid, then it’s a receipt. And in the meantime, exactly how many phone calls must that office get from confused and worried customers? Obviously quite a few, since my wife didn’t even finish explaining before the clerk knew exactly what she was talking about.

What, do they only have one kind of stationery?

(Cynically, I am wondering how many people pay twice, and whether UPS refunds their money.)

Our lying printer

A few months back, we bought a new Canon inkjet printer. We’d been fairly unhappy with the old one, but the final straw was when it ran out of ink in all five cartridges simultaneously. We added up the cost of replacing them and recoiled in horror. Then we realized that by throwing in another few euros, we could just get a new printer.

Enter the shiny new Canon MG6150. It did everything we needed, for about two months. Then it stopped printing. The error message informed us that the main black ink cartridge was empty, and there would be no printing whatsoever until we’d bought a new one.

Disgusted, I started doing research. And the first thing I learned was that our printer was lying to us.

Ink sales are a huge moneymaker, not just for printer manufacturers but also for third-party companies specializing in compatible refills. The ink itself is cheap to manufacture, and yet, according to PC World:

An average black-ink cartridge contains 8 milliliters of ink and costs about $10 which translates into a cost of $1.25 per milliliter (or more horrifyingly, $1250 per liter).

(Note: the quoted article is three years old; the cost has gone up since then. And here in Europe, with the VAT, it’s even more expensive.)

If you’re a manufacturing company making great profits on a cheap product with a huge markup, what’s your next step? Selling even more of that product. How do you do that? 1) Tell your customers that they need it, even when they don’t, and 2) prevent them from using their printers until they go out and get it. A total halt to productivity makes for great incentive.

Most of us are pretty sure that our ink cartridges aren’t really empty when the printer says they are. We suspect we’re being scammed but can’t prove it. PC World set out to find that proof with a little old-fashioned empirical testing.

PC World Test Center results show that models from Canon, Epson, and Kodak reported ink cartridges as being empty when in some cases the tanks had 40 percent of their black ink remaining.

The quantity of unused ink ranged from about 8 percent in an Epson-brand cartridge to a whopping 45 percent in an aftermarket cartridge for a Canon printer.

So, now we know we’re being scammed. And those of us with an environmental bent are also fairly pissed off about the waste. But what can we do, when the printer locks up due to the “out of ink” message?

We can reset the chip.

Ink cartridge chips are the latest tool used by printer manufacturers to make sure that customers can’t override the low ink warning. The tiny electronic chips monitor ink usage, or, in many cases, simply count pages. Once the predefined threshold of a chip is passed, it will lock up the printer. The warning cannot be overridden.

But it turns out that there is a whole community of irritated printer owners who do not like being scammed. They have started up companies catering to other irritated printer owners, and one of the things they do is take ink cartridges and reverse engineer the chips. Then they build inexpensive “chip resetters” that exist for one purpose only: to reset the chip’s page count or ink level usage to zero.

I ordered a chip resetter from Octoinkjet, and raced to the printer the moment it arrived. It took me about twenty seconds to remove the inkjet cartridge, slip it into the chip resetter, pull it back out and return it to the printer. Immediately, the printer registered a full ink level.

So far, we’ve printed more than 60 pages of dense text and images with our “empty” ink cartridge. I’m watching carefully, ready to pull the cartridge the moment the text starts looking light (because you don’t want the ink to run out or nasty things happen to the print head), but so far it’s quite happy. When it really does run low, I’m ready to refill it myself, having bought those materials as well. To heck with being victimized!

My chip resetter cost €23. A new large black ink cartridge from our local Staples costs €16. In another usage or two, the resetter will have paid for itself — and both my magenta and cyan cartridges are already saying they’re low.

But I know they’re lying.

UPDATE 30 SEPT:

Martin Smallridge, the owner of Octoinkjet (where I bought my chip resetter and refilling supplies), has weighed in with a more nuanced explanation of what the chips do and why you don’t want to keep printing until your ink runs out. I may have brushed over that part too lightly — when I wrote “nasty things happen to the print head,” I probably should have added “and then your printer becomes a bibelot.” Which is why I’m watching mine so closely. I’d have refilled the black cartridge right away, but since I am replacing it with a previous model cartridge (which has a transparent section making it much easier to refill, as opposed to the opaque plastic of the current model), I want to use up as much ink as I can without endangering the printer.

For more on this, please check out Martin’s comment below. I will just add that I believe a manufacturer’s claim that the extra ink in an “empty” cartridge is really for the protection of the printer when that extra ink amounts to 8%, as in the Epson example in PC World’s tests. When the extra amounts to 40%, then I’m not buying the excuse. That’s not protection, that’s a scam.

But it is definitely better to be safe than sorry, so unless you’re refilling, use a chip resetter with extreme caution.

Wallpaper Monday

Photographer Lorenzo Menendez describes his entry into this year’s National Geographic Photo Contest:

One morning while on the Big Island of Hawaii i [was] exploring my surroundings to see if i could find something to photograph. I almost went back inside when something on this huge palm tree leaf caught my eye. I stayed around and it was this little gecko, startled by my presence he was hidden between the ridges of the leaf. He would pop his head up periodically to check his surroundings, as soon as he saw i was still there he would hide again. We played this game for a while until i got the shot.

We have a gecko living out on our kitchen veranda. She’s made a home in the space between the pine shelving unit and the side wall, and occasionally comes out to cavort through the container plants. But a green gecko in the Algarve would be rather conspicuous, so ours are a mottled brown. Just as cute, though.

(Click the image, then scroll to the bottom of the page for the downloads. There are several other fantastic shots in this gallery, including one from the canyons of Page, Arizona that seems literally out of this world.)

Rethinking the death penalty

I’m taking tomorrow off to focus on a video project, but in the meantime, here’s a big one to throw out there. I’m rethinking my stance on the death penalty.

Though the issue is hugely polarizing in American politics, I don’t remember discussing it much with friends or colleagues. I have, however, discussed it quite a bit with my wife. I’ve always thought that in certain cases, the death penalty was appropriate. She is proud of Portugal’s early repudiation of the policy and finds modern day executions to be a sign of a barbaric government. It’s one of the very few issues that we’ve really disagreed on.

But lately I find my defense of it withering in light of the ugly reality. When the audience of a Republican political debate wildly cheers the mere mention of a candidate presiding over 234 executions, something is very wrong.

In that linked video, Texas Governor Rick Perry is asked if he loses any sleep at night over the possibility that some of those 234 executed individuals might have been innocent. He answers, “Never.”

One execution that should have given Perry at least a little niggle of concern was Cameron Todd Willingham, put to death in 2004 for the arson deaths of his three children. Before his execution, a nationally recognized arson expert said that Willingham’s conviction was based on erroneous forensic analysis. His report was sent to state officials, who did not act on it. Perry refused to sign a stay of execution, and it went on as scheduled.

The story didn’t die with Willingham, however, and a five-person panel of the nation’s leading arson experts concluded that in fact none of the scientific analysis used to convict Willingham was valid. The Texas Forensic Science Commission investigated, and didn’t like what it saw. It especially didn’t like the report it received from its hired arson expert, who said that not only had the expert witnesses at Willingham’s trial been wrong, but they should have known they were wrong at the time. In fact, there had been no arson.

That’s when the politicking came in. The commission scheduled a hearing in mid-2009 to formally hear the testimony of this expert. Two days before it was to take place, the chair of the commission and three other members were replaced by Governor Rick Perry. The new chair immediately canceled the hearing and redirected the scope of the investigation.

When you’re contemplating a run for US president, you don’t want minor little issues like a wrongful execution to cloud your message. But I’m not sure Perry should even be that concerned, given one supporter’s response: “It takes balls to kill an innocent man,” he said.

That is such a perversion of the death penalty — who cares if some guy is innocent, what matters is the macho swagger of killing him anyway — that I was honestly stopped in my tracks upon reading it. From that moment on, I’ve been doing research and thinking hard. And in the middle of all this, Troy Davis was executed.

Davis is another man whose conviction has been thrown into doubt. Accused of killing a police officer, his conviction was based solely on witness testimony. There was zero physical evidence. Since the trial, seven of the nine witnesses who testified against him have recanted or contradicted their testimony. One of the two who did not was Sylvester Coles, who has now been implicated by nine witnesses as the actual shooter.

The affidavits by the witnesses who recanted (including some who did not testify at the trial) have a recurring theme: they all talk about police coercion in their questioning. Four of them did not read the statement the police told them to sign. One couldn’t, because he’s illiterate.

Unfortunately for Troy Davis, while the US principle of justice is “innocent until proven guilty,” that reverses after a conviction. Then it’s “guilty until proven innocent,” and proof is hard to come by. (Though not impossible, as demonstrated by the 17 former death row inmates whose innocence was proven by DNA evidence.) Witness statements have the power to convict, but in an appeal they’re not usually given the same weight. The time to stop a miscarriage of justice is before the conviction, not after, but forensic mistakes, inaccurate memories and testimony, incomplete investigations, prejudice, ego, and politics can all get in the way.

It’s those last three that keep circling around in my thinking. Troy Davis was a black man, living in Georgia, accused of killing a white police officer. It’s difficult to imagine that prejudice and politics were not involved in his case. Cameron Todd Willingham, on the other hand, was a white man living in Texas, but also a previously convicted criminal and apparently a wife beater. His last words before he died were a profanity-laced invective against his ex-wife. Personally I think any man who beats his wife should be thrown into a small dark room for a good long time, but we don’t kill people just because they’re reprehensible human beings. (If we did, there’d be almost no one left alive inside the Washington Beltway.) We kill them because we are convinced, beyond any reasonable doubt, that they have committed a grievous crime.

There was reasonable doubt in both of these cases, but that didn’t seem to matter. Egos, prejudice and politics got in the way. Digging into other past cases reveals more of the same.

I formed my belief in the rightness of the death penalty when I was younger and idealistic. These days I’m better informed, more willing to do research, and much more skeptical. My belief in the death penalty doesn’t stand up to a critical review, because it was based on a concurrent belief in a justice system that didn’t make mistakes, and a political system that worked for the best interests of the citizens, not the politicians.

Those systems don’t exist. I wish they did. But in the real world with actual humans involved, the death penalty is subject to all of our failings. As such, it is inherently flawed. We cannot guarantee that we aren’t executing innocent people. And if we can’t guarantee that, then we have no business executing anyone at all.

Earth from above

This video has been making geeks and space nerds squee loudly. It’s a time-lapse, put together from 600 still photos shot from the International Space Station as it flew over North and South America. The whole thing is magical, but one of the best parts is the lightning in the storm systems sitting off Central and South America.

Warning: it is nearly impossible to see this just once. And you may end up like me, with an atlas open next to your computer, trying to figure out exactly what you’re seeing. (The speed at which this film moves over continents is misleading. I know the west coast of North America quite well and still needed several viewings to figure it out.)

This will get you started. The video passes over, in order:

Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, El Salvador, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Lake Titicaca, and the Amazon.

You can also see the ozone layer, and the stars “rising” as the ISS travels around the globe. Major kudos to science educator James Drake, who assembled this. (He has a tumblr blog, too.)

Need I mention that you really should watch it in HD and full screen?

And if you need more marvelousness from the ISS, check out this glorious video of the Aurora Australis. It’s another time lapse, made from photos taken on 11 September.

Just what Portugal didn’t need

Portugal, apparently jealous of Italy and Greece for getting all the bad press these days, recently learned that the autonomous region of Madeira has been lying about its debt.

Oh, did I say “lying”? Apparently the preferred phrase is “failed to report.” For three consecutive years.

Alberto João Jardim, president of the Regional Government of Madeira, first denied that there were any hidden debts. Then he said well, okay, yes there are. (Does that make the first statement a lie, or a “failure to report” all the data?) And then he said that in fact he’d known about the debts but hadn’t reported them because he knew that if he did, the evil overlord mainland Portugal would have taken even more money away from Madeira.

Finally, a truthful statement!

But after his brief fling with honesty predictably blew up in the mainland press, Jardim said that he is currently campaigning for a new term, and so he’s been on the road and talking a lot and getting tired, and ya know, things get emotional and he didn’t really mean it.

Translation: “Oh shit, I didn’t mean to tell the truth! It was an accident!”

Now that, I believe.

The PNW rocks

The PNW — Pacific Northwest, for those of you not familiar with the upper left corner of the United States — is an awesome place for many reasons. Here are two of them, from the recent news.

1. Oregon: A 69-year-old grandmother, serving her shift as night manager of a restaurant, fought off a would-be robber by scaring the crap out of him.

The intruder leapt over the counter, breaking part of the wood, and fell to the floor.

“I just automatically grabbed my chair,” the feisty, gray-haired grandmother said. “I was going to hit him with it.”

The stranger got up, scooted backward, and yelled at Lane, “Get away lady!”

“No, you get away!” Lane shouted back. She reached for a butcher knife she keeps beneath the cash register for just such eventualities.

“I said, ‘No, you back up. Back, back out,” she ordered, holding the butcher knife up. [...]

When the robber showed up, she said she was tired and grew disgusted.

“You don’t want to get the old lady mad,” Lane said. “I’m in the process of moving and I’ve been a bit crabby lately. He picked the wrong day.”

It turns out this was not Ms. Lane’s first adventure with frightening off robbers. The last time was five years ago, with a man who claimed he had a gun.

“No, you don’t,” she said bluntly, grabbing the butcher knife. “Your sweatsuit is so tight, you couldn’t even fit a toothpick in there.” The robber turned and ran out.

Do not mess with Oregon women.

…

2) Washington: The state’s Democratic Central Committee has endorsed an initiative to legalize and tax marijuana, with distribution handled by the state’s Liquor Control Board. This is a Very Big Deal, transforming a fringe political issue into one with powerful mainstream backing. Washington Democrats are defying the federal government’s “War on Drugs” (which has been about as successful as its War on Terror) and baldly stating that instead of spending vast amounts of money to criminalize marijuana and its users, they want to treat it like alcohol: control it, regulate it, tax it, and enjoy the revenue. If that law actually passes, I may have to smoke a joint in solidarity and celebration.

I’ve never figured out why my national government spends billions subsidizing and protecting the growth and sale of one smokable leaf, while simultaneously spending billions more suppressing and prosecuting the growth and sale of another smokable leaf. But a deep recession has a way of casting old regimes in a new light, especially where there’s a revenue stream involved. Or at least, it does in the Pacific Northwest.

Kick-ass grandmothers and a possible state repeal of Prohibition — the PNW rocks.

Wallpaper Monday

(Click the image to solarize.)

Here’s a place we haven’t gone before: right to the surface of the Sun. From the Astronomy Photo of the Day:

This stunning image shows remarkable details of a dark sunspot across the image bottom and numerous boiling granules which appear like kernels of corn across the top. Taken in 2002, the picture was made using the Swedish Solar Telescope operating on the Canary Island of La Palma. The high resolution image was achieved using sophisticated adaptive optics, digital image stacking, and other processing techniques to counter the blurring effect of Earth’s atmosphere.

Stunning, indeed. The original image has tickmarks for scale, showing that the sunspot — which is only one of a large group — is around 16,000 kilometers wide at the base of the image. For a bit of perspective, the Earth’s diameter is roughly 12,750 kilometers at the equator. It would fit inside this sunspot with plenty of room to spare.

For another bit of perspective, this image of the whole Sun was taken on the same day and shows the sunspot group in its entirety.

Well, I feel small.