kichik’s blog

Channel 8 had an interesting show yesterday about something I never heard of. It’s called radiation dimming and apparently it’s another side effect of us on the earth’s climate. It refers to air pollution which keeps radiation from the sun from entering the atmosphere and so keeps the earth cooler at daytime and warmer at nights. It is believed to partially mask the effect of the greenhouse gases on global warming.

So how is this dimming a bad thing? Well, while trying to undo the trouble, we maintain our focus mainly on reducing air pollution by cutting back on CFC, putting filters on just about everything and creating more resource efficient machinery. That’s all nice and dandy, but the damage has already been done and this fixes only one of these two side effects. Nature is all about balance and in this case we’ve broken the balance with air pollution, but created our own delicate balance instead. Now, while reducing air pollution, we broke the balance again. The ozone layer is still damaged, but our own “synthetic ozone layer of pollution” is slowly diminishing. Hence, while trying to fix the errors of the past for the long term, we’re actually making things worse for the short term. The greenhouse gases effect is getting stronger because its masking is slowly reduced.

The researcher the show was talking about had a nice method of proving his point. Contrails also take part of radiation dimming and the skies are filled with them. After 9/11, all flights in the USA were grounded for a couple of days. This gave him an excellent chance to test his theory and see if there’s any temperature difference when removing this polluter. And lo and behold, a difference of over 1 °C in the daily temperature variation was observed.

More information is available from BBC, Wikipedia (using the above links) and channel 8′s reruns.

Yesterday, I watched Lord of War again. It’s about a Russian guy named Yuri (Nicolas Cage), living in the USA, who gets tired of doing nothing with his life. Instead of spending the rest of his life in his parent’s restaurant, he decides to become an arms dealer.

The movie starts with a scene showing the production cycle of a 5.56mm bullet. Beginning all the way from a thin metal foil, through gun powder filling, QA and shipment, finally finding its resting place in the frontal lobe of a young African child soldier. One of the first things said in the movie is:

There are over 550 million firearms in worldwide circulation. That’s one firearm for every twelve people on the planet. The only question is: How do we arm the other 11?

The name comes from something Yuri’s biggest client says.

Andre Baptiste Sr.: They say that I am the lord of war, but perhaps it is you.
Yuri Orlov: I believe it’s “warlord.”
Andre Baptiste Sr.: Thank you, but I prefer it my way.

As you might have already guessed, this isn’t exactly a happy Sunday morning movie. It’s a “well-made political drama with an excellent story and a powerful performance by Nicolas Cage”. It’s a story about the good things in life, capitalism at its best and marvelous childhood games.

They say, “Evil prevails when good men fail to act.” What they ought to say is, “Evil prevails.”

Though hardly on the lite side, the movie does have the occasional joke.

Back then, I didn’t sell to Osama Bin Laden. Not because of moral reasons, but because he was always bouncing checks.

If you haven’t already, you should watch this movie. I really liked it. Not to be political or anything, it’s just sad funny to see how good of a job we’re doing killing ourselves and everybody else.

Welcome to my blog. I’m Amir Szekely, also known as kichik. I’m a programmer living in Israel. Most of my computer time, when not at my workplace, I spend on NSIS, an open-source installer for Windows. I’ve been working on it for over 4 years and it has been quite fun.

I don’t know what type of posts you can except to find here, only time will tell. I guess it’d include the occasional NSIS techy post, maybe some tips & tricks, some rants of a perfect world, movies, games, who knows… Just in case, I’ve setup a syntax highlighting extension, so I can share some NSIS codes here and there.

Name test
OutFile test.exe
Section
SetOutPath $TEMP
File /oname=test.nsi "${__FILE__}"
Delete $TEMPtest.nsi
SectionEnd

Installing this extension and the entire blog was a piece of cake. WordPress is very easy to use, with lots of DHTML and a smooth user-interface. I’m quite impressed. Took me a while to find a nice theme, but MistyLook saved the day.