Ipsa scientia potestas est

Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet is planning on airing a show entitled “Whale Wars” which details the actions of the crew of an independent vessel “Sea Shepherd” and a Japanese whaling vessel.  Upon watching the promotional trailer of Whale Wars I was immediately sick to my stomach.

Before you read my response, review the trailer:

After watching this trailer I was so disgusted by Discovery Channel’s Animal Planet that I wrote the following email to them:

Good evening, I am quite concerned with the airing of Whale Wars. Glorifying any form of eco-terrorism is simply unacceptable; whether through the eradication of a species or the fundamentalist attitudes which fight the Whalers, I believe this program is too violent for Animal Planet. While on a personal level I believe young adults and children should be exposed to information about Whaling, a show which essentially berates a culture and sensationalizes eco-terrorism is in absolute poor taste. I am shocked and appalled that this program actually aired. If this sort of programming is the direction which Animal Planet is taking, I and my family will not endorse or encourage our friends and their families in watching Animal Planet. Thank you, - Evan Brewer

Please, if you feel the same as I feel, write to Animal Planet and inform them of the inappropriateness of this show.  Due to the difficulty of finding a contact-form I have provided a direct link:

http://extweb.discovery.com/viewerrelations

This show is inappropriate for children.  This show endorses violence.  This show promotes piracy.  This show encourages terrorism.  Civic duty is only appropriate in the country of which you’re a citizen; international matters should be managed by government authorized representatives, not a random group of hooligans flying the jolly rodger, wearing masks and throwing percussion grenades.

Animal Planet endorses eco-terrorism by promoting this program.

Update: Irrespective of the acceptance of scientific permits issued by Japan to supposedly bypass the whaling moratorium, the essence of my position is as follows: It is irresponsible of a family oriented channel to sensationalize violence and depict eco-terrorists as heroes.

Read http://www.iwcoffice.org/conservation/permits.htm for details on scientific permit issuance.

Update: 2008/12/04: Discovery wrote me a boiler-plate response to my email, but unfortunately it has a non-disclosure signature so it would be irresponsible of me to duplicate it here.  I will give you the synopsis though.  The email was not personal in nature whatsoever and clearly it was a legal-dept reviewed response which really stated nothing other than what we already know.

Update: 2008/12/18: Apparently Greenpeace has decided to furthur distance themselves from the Sea Shepherd. Do you think this might be an indication of being too leftist?

When I first started investigating the MobileMe platform, I quickly discovered that the “Push EMail” that Apple touts is designed for people use the domain “me.com” for their email address:  mudslinger@me.com for example.  If you’re reading this, you have an email address, and you’ve probably been using that email address for a while now.  So what Apple doesn’t tell you is that in order to make use of the Push EMail on your phone, you’re going to HAVE to use their me.com address.  That sucks because I don’t want to change business cards, websites, or any other place I might have distributed my email address.

In my case, I use GMail.  I have been using GMail since ~2003 when it was still an invite only system growing organically, and I also host a few domains which all have EMail hosted by GMail.  GMail offers some really good spam protection as well as countless advanced features which most other free-email providers just simply are too lame too provide.

So give me a picture, what does this look like.  Receiving mail is the “complicated” part, click on the image to get a larger view.

So what is going on here?  Random person sends an email to your pre-configured GMail address.  Inside your GMail account, go to settings:

Then change your Forwarding settings:

Once you have the GMail configured, test a send and receive of mail just to be sure the configuration is setup right.  The last thing you want to do is get this whole thing setup and then discover that you fat-fingered some entry and need to do it over again.

The next thing to do is remove any accounts you currently have on your iPhone, because at the time of this writing, there is a specific order you should set the accounts up in order to make this work correctly.

Setup your GMail account on the iPhone. This should be pretty straight forward as all of the settings will be filled out for you.  Apple has done a nice job including all of the default settings so you don’t have to go digging around on the net to find this information.

Your Name is your name, Address should be your gmail.com address, Password is your password to your GMail account, and Description should be “gmail”.

Next, we setup the MobileMe account.  This account is also pretty straight forward.

In the MobileMe account, once again your Name is your name, your address is whatever your me.com account email address is: mudslinger@me.com for example, Password is your password for your MobileMe account, and finally the description should just simply be “mobileme”.

Now that your gmail account is forwarding to your MobileMe account, test it out and make sure it is doing what you expect.  Mail sent to your GMail account should pop up on your iPhone.

So most people would stop here and say, “jeepers, I could have figured that out on my own.”  Well we’re not done.

The issue here is, if you click the reply button on your iPhone to respond to a message which was forwarded to you, the response will appear to be coming from your me.com account.  We don’t want that.  The second to last thing we want is for your me.com account to become exposed.  The whole point here is to use the email portion of mobileme as a push-mail-conduit, not for general internet consumption.

What we do is, we change the outgoing SMTP server for the iPhone to be GMail’s SMTP server.  This way we receive mobileme push email, and respond as if it came from GMail.

Go into your iPhone “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” settings option, and under the “Gmail” account, slide the “Account” toggle to “OFF”.

Next, go into the mobileme account, here its listed as mudslinGer@me.com…

The under “Account Info”…

One caveat here is that I forgot to take the picture of the SMTP listed as the me.com account, which yours should look like “smtp.me.com” at this point….  Nonetheless, click on SMTP….

Notice how the “Primary Server” on your iPhone is set to smtp.me.com, and it is toggled On? Turn it off.  Also, under “Other SMTP Servers”, make sure that “smtp.gmail.com” is On.

Now, MobileMe email gets pushed to the phone, we hit reply, it uses GMail’s SMTP server and bang, it appears as if it were coming from GMail the whole time.

You might say to yourself, well wait a sec, let me see the mail headers from the response to make SURE theres nothing in there.  I bet you’re lying.

Return-Path: <dmess0r@gmail.com>
Received: from ?10.83.222.32? ([32.153.218.221])
        by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id b8sm27743629rvf.3.2008.12.08.16.54.00
        (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=RC4-MD5);
        Mon, 08 Dec 2008 16:54:01 -0800 (PST)
Message-Id: <036B727F-14C0-4D10-B8FF-DC7F7B735520@me.com>
To: Evan Brewer <dmess0r@el8.org>
In-Reply-To: <1d35dd450812081652q631cde59gb3f51da8b8a4ff9d@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset=us-ascii;
	format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (5G77)
Mime-Version: 1.0 (iPhone Mail 5G77)
Subject: Re: Its a piece of cake to bake a pretty cake
Date: Mon, 8 Dec 2008 16:53:52 -0800
References: <1d35dd450812081652q631cde59gb3f51da8b8a4ff9d@mail.gmail.com>
From: Evan Brewer <dmess0r@gmail.com>

If YOUR mind is hazy

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 8, 2008, at 4:52 PM, Evan Brewer <dmess0r@el8.org> wrote:

> If you mind is hazy

See? I told you.  No exposure of “me.com” anywhere.

Another thing that Apple doesn’t tell you right off the bat is that junk mail filtering in MobileMe is disabled by default.  This means that if you begin to diseminate your new address, you may be a target for spammers.  Really, the email intended for your me.com email address should be as private as possible given this configuration.  The last thing you want is your iPhone inundated by crap email.  Granted Apple does have anti-spam functionality, but once again the point of this system is meant to be simple, just use mobileme as a conduit for push-email.

Even if you don’t use GMail as your primary email host, I strongly recommend that you even “wash” your email by forwarding it through GMail before pushing it to MobileMe.  This way you at least clean out the vast majority of spam before using valuable minutes/data/airwaves.

While nearly every iPhone 3G user is aware of the embedded GPS functionality, I imagine most users don’t realize that if you allow the iPhone’s camera application access to your “location”, current GPS information is embedded in the image you capture as EXIF data.  This is a process called “geocoding”.

For those of you who do not know what EXIF data is, EXIF stands for “Exchangeable image file format.”  Essentially it is text, words, characters or information stored inside an image which is usually present to assist devices/applications in understanding more detail about the image than just how it looks.

Details like camera type or aperture are just two of an infinite number permutations available.  Usually this data is represented as name:value pairs.  For example:

MIMEType => image/jpeg
Make => Apple
Model => iPhone

So what exactly happens when you select “OK” when the iPhone camera prompts you for location usage?  (Which also happens to be the default selection.)  The iPhones camera accesses data from the built-in GPS and writes your current location into the image as GPS coordinates.

Bear in mind that once you select “OK” the camera will always embed the data until you reset or disable location services.

Good idea?  Bad idea?

The reality is it really depends on subject matter of the image.  Let’s say the image is of you performing a nefarious deed: You’ve just documented the time and place with photographic evidence of your deed.  Talk about damning evidence.  What about a good idea: You take a picture while on vacation and want to document your exact location so others may see what you’ve seen.

Bad idea: You’re a Realtor trying to sell a home without disclosing its location. You take pictures and put them online to entice buyers. It makes no difference if you don’t disclose the street address because you’ve just told the world with GPS data exactly where that home is situated.  Epic move.

Good idea: You’ve just stumbled across the best Japanese restaurant in the known universe and want to share with everyone. You snap the picture, send it to everyone who cares and they now have everything they need to find the place.

Bad idea: You’ve cheated on your loved one by taking hot pictures of your mistress doing things illegal in 37 states and you’ve brilliantly opted-in for geocoding.  Your clued-in girlfriend/wife finds the images, checks the GPS coordinates and pays your sassy tart a visit.

Good idea: You’re hopelessly lost in the wilderness by yourself and somehow you have Edge or 3G service.  Your vocal chords are broken by a tree branch and the only hope is to take a picture and email it to someone who can help.  You don’t know where you are, but the GPS does.

So what does this data look like?  What are the name/value pairs embedded in the EXIF data?  The following data was pulled from an image I took the other day:

Aperture => 2.8
BitsPerSample => 8
ColorComponents => 3
ColorSpace => sRGB
CreateDate => 2008:11:29 12:26:22
DateTimeOriginal => 2008:11:29 12:26:22
Directory => .
EncodingProcess => Baseline DCT, Huffman coding
ExifByteOrder => Big-endian (Motorola, MM)
ExifImageHeight => 800
ExifImageWidth => 600
FNumber => 2.8
FileModifyDate => 2008:11:29 14:41:38-06:00
FileName => web.jpg
FileSize => 149 kB
FileType => JPEG
GPSLatitude => 9 deg 42′ 15.28″ N
GPSLatitude (1) => 9 deg 42′ 15.28″
GPSLatitudeRef => North
GPSLongitude => 1 deg 40′ 5.20″ E
GPSLongitude (1) => 1 deg 40′ 5.20″
GPSLongitudeRef => East
GPSPosition => 9 deg 42′ 15.28″ N, 1 deg 40′ 5.20″ E
GPSTimeStamp => 12:26:18.07
Gamma => 2.2
ImageHeight => 800
ImageSize => 600×800
ImageWidth => 600
JFIFVersion => 1.01
MIMEType => image/jpeg
Make => Apple
Model => iPhone
ModifyDate => 2008:11:29 12:26:22
ResolutionUnit => inches
ResolutionUnit (1) => inches
XResolution => 72
XResolution (1) => 72
YCbCrSubSampling => YCbCr4:2:0 (2 2)
YResolution => 72
YResolution (1) => 72

So really you can see here that a lot of detail has been added, including GPS coordinates.  The name:value pairs we’re concerned for article relevance are as follows:

GPSLatitude => 9 deg 42′ 15.28″ N
GPSLatitude (1) => 9 deg 42′ 15.28″
GPSLatitudeRef => North
GPSLongitude => 1 deg 40′ 5.20″ E
GPSLongitude (1) => 1 deg 40′ 5.20″
GPSLongitudeRef => East
GPSPosition => 9 deg 42′ 15.28″ N, 1 deg 40′ 5.20″ E
GPSTimeStamp => 12:26:18.07

While there is a little bit of redundancy, you can see that the location and GPS timestamp is embeded.  Using a tool like Exif Viewer for Firefox, you can not only view the GPS data, but also link you right into Google Earth to jump to the coordinates.

So what is the moral of this story?

Every piece of technology can be used for good or evil. Fire can be used to cook meat or set huts ablaze; a knife can be used to gut a fish, or a human.  Handguns can be used to fend off wolves or bears in the wild Northwest Territories, similarly a handgun may also be used to whack a Consigliere from a Borgata of which you’re not too fond.

Same rules apply with technology.  Unwitting individuals will take photos of places/settings/people which really shouldn’t be geocoded.  Will they know any better?  Probably not.

Now that it is at least a couple days past Thanksgiving, Christmas decor is safely appropriate.  My wife and I just went out to our favorite Christmas Tree Farm and picked out what we consider to be a good tree.

One of the issues we faced a few decades ago was that bringing a live tree into the house also brought unwanted visitors: pollen, bugs, etc.  The trick we’ve been using for quite some time now is to make sure the tree has a fresh cut at the bottom, string up the tree outside from our deck, hose it down, and let it dry hanging in a bucket of water.  Once dry, lower down and bring into the house.

The fresh cut seems like an obvious one, but many times people will pick out a tree and just schlep it home and bring it right into the house; sucks to be you if you do this.

Make sure that tree has a fresh cut, it will allow the tree to suck up the water easier and will keep those needles nice.

Next is the fun part, stringing up the tree.  This really only works if you have a place you *can* to which you can string the tree.  Here is an example of the balcony above our garage with the tree.  Take a gander at this:

Basically I used a bowline knot to hang up the tree.  You want to make sure that when you tie the knot that it is tight around the main tree body and not pulling on any of the branches.  Putting this much weight against a branch will kill the branch pretty fast due to the weight and pressure.

You’ll also want to be sure to hang it from a strong beam or even better yet, a pulley from the base of the balcony.

Also, before you put the bucket underneath the tree be sure to hose it off really well.  Knock out any dead needles, bugs, pollen or other undesirables.

Next here is the tree hanging, and you can see the bucket in which it is suspended.

One thing you’ll notice in the next picture is that the bottom tree branches are not touching the rim of the bucket.  You really don’t want to rest the lower branches on the bucket as that adds pressure and weight which you really don’t want.

I hope these tips help you.  They’ve helped our family for decades.

After watching a wonderful documentary on Antarctica on MOJO TV, I decided to do some more up-to-date research on what the scientific community has to say about global warming.  In my opinion, the only real source we can/should reference is the National Environment Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).  Both centers contain relevant data; paleoclimatic as well as current.  Much of the data I refer to below is based upon the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Ultimately there is no scientific debate on whether or not the mean average of global climate temperature is rising.

Given this information one immediately jumps to the conclusion that this increase is drastic, widespread and spells out the end of the world or some such nonsense.  Luckily the end of the world isn’t scheduled for Dec. 21 2012, and not only are temperature increases non-uniform, there are places on the globe which have been getting cooler since we have began to measure more accurately.

Whereas many parts of the world are experiencing an overall increase in temperature, some parts of the southeastern U.S and parts of the North Atlantic have decreased in temperature over the last 100 years.

What is also interesting is that while the Arctic ice is decreasing, the Antarctic ice sheet is actually growing slightly.  A quote from the NCDC:

Sea ice in the Antarctic has shown very little trend over the same period, or even a slight increase since 1979.

Another misconception that countless individuals have is this notion that melting glaciers are somehow responsible for the global mean sea level rising.  The rise we’ve seen over the last several thousand years is due in large part to thermal expansion.  Even today, modern science still does not fully understand how glacier dynamics play into the hydrologic system.  A quote from the NCDC:

… our current understanding of ice sheet dynamics renders uncertainties too large to be able to assess the likelihood of large-scale melting of these ice sheets.

The moral of this story is that while global warming is happening there are simply too many unknowns to make sweeping statements about glacier melt, rising sea levels and the overall impact on the various species which inhabit our planet.