Antarctic is is growing! Not melting away as is stated today in an Expressen editorial.

I guess this is against what people think, but as normal when global climate things arn’t as simple as they seem. (I tend to be very sceptic to anyone who is totally shure about global warming.) Look over here at news.com.au for the story i read the following:

Ice levels are decreasing in western Antarctia, but growing in the east. And since east anterctica is about 4 times as large the net effect is that there is more ice on Antarctica today than for ten years ago. Actually last year, the ice had a maximum thickness of 1.89m. The average thickness of the ice at Davis since the 1950s is 1.67m.

But please note the article isn’t published yet by the British Antarctic Survey but will be in the journal Geophysical Research Letters and is expected to confirm that over the past 30 years, the area of sea ice around the continent has expanded.

A couple of days ago i stumbled over this article in New scientist. And i have been thinking about eriting something about it, but i have been to busy with other stuff to really put an effort into this post. So i just decided to throw it out to you so it gets some attention, and in the same time i get it out of my brain…

Quantum physics have a hard time integrating gravity into the theory. Basically they would like to have a quantum theory of gravity to reconcile Einstein’s general relativity, which describes gravity at the largest scales, with quantum mechanics. And time is one of the things getting in the way all the time. So some researchers are considering that time might just be a derivative effect of some thing else going on. Wait, stop you might say, time is very real! But there is a great analogy in the article:

Temperature is very real for us. But the definition of temperature is the energy in the motion of atoms and molecules swirling around in the sample. So temperature is just a macroscopic average of the momenta of all the microscopic molecules. If we would have been (a lot…) better at seeing end feeling atoms and molecules we would not have temperature, but a collection of momenta for all the molecules in the sample.

So one line of reasoning right now is that time is also a derative, it dosn’t exit on a microscopic level. It only exits in our approximation of “reality”.

Read the original article here at New Scientist – Is time an illusion?

A strange (For anywhere else in Europe besides Holland) incident happened yesterday.

I was sitting with my friends at a local “hospoda” (Czech for pub) chatting and drinking a couple of Gambrinus (a Czech brand of lager) when a police officer came in and ordred a beer. In his uniform… (I guess that is strange enough in most countries.)

He walked over to a table and chatted with one of the local guys and afterward he sat down with his friends. Not so strange maybe, but add the following into the scene:

• Several packages of large rolling paper where scattered around the table.
• Several boxes of cigarettes had pieces torn of to be rolled up as “filters”.
• A number of half cigarettes with that typical twist on the top so the tobacco would not fall out.

To me that is a big indication of what is going on, not to mention the fact that they where going outside for a smoke once in a while. (Remeber here in the Czech Republic there is no ban on smoking in pubs, bars and restaurants…)

A little bit later another local at the pub walked over to the table and discreetly received a small package of marijuana, not bothered at all with the police officer sitting half a meter away.

That how totally open the drug scene is here in Prague. And a lot of downtown bars and discoteques have clean horisontal mirrors in the toilets so you have a clean surface to split your cocaine on. So dope apparently isn’t a high priority here.

I guess the police concentrates on hunting people who actually hurt others or steal, instead of hunting pot and cannabis smokers or people buying sexual services. This liberalisation is going on all over Europe except in Sweden, reports Henrik Alexandersson. I guess the Swedish government will scream like hell when the Danes start opening coffe shops in Copenhagen, only 20 mimnutes by train from Swedens third city Malmö.

By the way, The Economist have a good article about The war on drugs and liberalisation of narcotic related laws.

Yesterday i wrote about garbage and “secondary raw materials”. Today i stumbled over another strange way of generating energy. In the Swedish cities Laholm and Båstad they extract heat and electricity from, hold your breath! Shit and fine spirits…

Basically they collect manure (that’s a nicer word for shit), leftovers from schools and restaurants and other organic waste and mix this with spirits confiscated from smugglers. Now they ferment this slurry for about 25 days and in the process a lot of methane is generated. Enough to cover 20-25% of the heating in the area and 21 million kilowatt hours of electricity. When they are done they return the dry remnants of the slurry to the farmers to use as fertilizer.

A translation by google translate can be found here.

The other day i picked up an issue of the magazine “Czech Buisiness Weekly” (CBW) at the Pink Floyd bar in downtown Prague.

It was mostly filled with articles regarding the Czech presidency for the European Union and the economic crisis. But in the editorial i found an interesting side effect of the global economic slowdown. A garbage crisis!

That is, the Czechs used to export a lot of garbage to China! And now due to the economic crisis China, the worlds biggest buyer of “secondary raw materials”. Have stopped buying and transporting garbage to China. I guess they don’t expect to refine so much Czech trash into Chinese trash and export it back to Europe.

Strangely enough a couple of days later i read as they used to do about the opposite problem in Gothenburg, Sweden. During the last six months the Swedish garbage production has dropped by 20%. So now there isn’t enough garbage to feed the remote heating system in Gothenburg. According to Dagens Industri they have started to import garbage from Norway and Holland to keep the Swedes warm.

So Swedish tourists visiting Prague, please bring your garbage with you back home and you will help two nations

As someone put it, hell froze over today.

Daniel Bernstein aka. djb for the first time have paid out the promised 1000$ for the first security related bug in djbdns.

Basically if you have a subdomain (a setup that is discouraged, but supported) in control by a third party that third party can poison your cache to send out wrong answers to dns queries. Details of the bug and how to exploit it can be found here.

But still the first alpha of djbdns was made public 10 years ago and this is the first security bug. (The current version of djbdns was released in February 2001) That is a really good security record, specially considering that a big company like Microsoft can’t even manage 10 months without new security bugs…

So there will be a new version released soon, and djb says there will be a new security guarantee.

Here is the original announcement from Bernstein:

Date: 4 Mar 2009 01:34:21 -0000
From: D. J. Bernstein
To: dns@list.cr.yp.to
Subject: djbdns<=1.05 lets AXFRed subdomains overwrite domains

If the administrator of example.com publishes the example.com DNS data through tinydns and axfrdns, and includes data for sub.example.com transferred from an untrusted third party, then that third party can control cache entries for example.com, not just sub.example.com. This is the result of a bug in djbdns pointed out by Matthew Dempsky. (In short, axfrdns compresses some outgoing DNS packets incorrectly.)

Even though this bug affects very few users, it is a violation of the expected security policy in a reasonable situation, so it is a security hole in djbdns. Third-party DNS service is discouraged in the djbdns documentation but is nevertheless supported. Dempsky is hereby awarded $1000.

The next release of djbdns will be backed by a new security guarantee. In the meantime, if any users are in the situation described above, those users are advised to apply Dempsky’s patch and requested to accept my apologies. The patch is also recommended for other users; it corrects the bug without any side effects. A copy of the patch appears below.

—D. J. Bernstein
Research Professor, Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago

— response.c.orig 2009-02-24 21:04:06.000000000 -0800
+++ response.c 2009-02-24 21:04:25.000000000 -0800
@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@
uint16_pack_big(buf,49152 + name_ptr[i]);
return response_addbytes(buf,2);
}
- if (dlen <= 128)
+ if ((dlen <= 128) && (response_len < 16384))
if (name_num < NAMES) {
byte_copy(name[name_num],dlen,d);
name_ptr[name_num] = response_len;