Emergency Preparedness Adventure - Photos

The 433rd attended the Emergency Preparedness Adventure Day and a great time was had by all.

There was an opening sing song, followed by the unveiling of the new Emergency Preparedness Award (Cubs) and Badge (Scouts). The Provinces Emergency Mobile Operations Center was there. And the Armed Forces communications and rescue teams too.



We learned about first aid and what to pack in our emergency kits.



The Fire Marshall's office was there with their Hazmat gear. The OPP bomb robot was checking hats too. :-)



There were some great giveaways including a very cool flashlight that could work on several common types of batteries. IT also had feet so it wouldn't roll away. (Oddly this was one of the few local stores with the light on their web site).

Probably the favorite event of the day was the OPP response team's bomb watermelon disruptor!



Update: Some people aren't seeing the image properly. If the image above doesn't display properly try here or here. Thanks.

Yummy Science Experiment - eating the speed of light!

The folks over at the Orbiting Frog came up with this yummy science experiment. It turns out that anyone with a microwave (with turntable), microwave safe dish, a ruler, and yummy marshmallows or chocolate chips can measure the speed of light!

Whether they can do it without getting sick to there stomachs is another question :)

I haven't looked but I'm certain this could be worked into a badge somewhere. Cubs doesn't have a science badge, but Scouts do. Heck why should Scouts have all the fun.

Brilliant folks! We need more edible (or gooey) science experiments.

The Great Astronomers Badge Swap

I'd like to propose a modest project. To gather a collection of one of each astronomers badges from Scouters across the world.

Phase one would be a virtual collection. Please send me a digital photo of the badge and a photo or scanned image of the badge requirements. Please include group information and address. I'll put the collection together and make it available later. I'm thinking that I'll use the information in a Google map (like the map of the Solar System in Toronto in Astronomical Distances). And I'll track progress below.

Later it would be very nice to arrange a physical collection. I'd be willing to send a Canadian Astronomers badge to other Scouters that send me one from their country. But I want to coordinate this on a first come first serve basis so I don't have a bunch of folks send badges from the same place. If you are interested in this second phase, please contact me by email to coordinate an exchange.

Anyone wishing to send me one from their country can contact me at the email address on the sidebar (its obscured as an image so I don't get buried in spam).

Thanks - Mang!

Note: contact information will not be published.

Progress Updates:
1. Canada: 433rd Toronto Cubs - 5/7/2008

Astronomy Day - May 10, 2008

May 10th is Astronomy Day.

In addition to specific Astronomy day activities there are some resources for kids such as templates for colouring pages and mobiles. For more information see this article.

Mang's Most Popular

This is about what people have found interesting on this site so far. Overall, the most popular articles are:

• 13% Build your own Planisphere (Star Finder)!
• 11% Black Hole discoverer to be eaten by land developers (The DDO sale)
  
• 8% Earth's Other Moons
• 8% the home page
  
• 6% Navigation without a compass (or GPS)
• 6% Calculating Easter
• 3% How many planets have rings?
• 3% Laser pointers, bans, and stupidity
  

People find sites in two main ways. Direct references linked from other sites (or in emails) and through search engines.

The Bat Page traffic breaks down about as follows:

• 42% from searches
• 24% links from Carnival of Space articles
• 22% without a referrer
• 12% from Scouts, Email and other articles on this site

While I can't say much about the unreferred sites, people following direct links from Carnivals, emails, and other scouting links have a pretty good idea what they're getting. One place where it gets interesting is traffic coming from search engines.

So, what are people searching for?

• 24% templates for making northern/southern planispheres (star finders, star wheels)
• 7% games about knots and tides
  
• 7% rings around planets
  
• 6% finding your way without a compass
• 6% the DDO
  
• 5% information on twilight, sunset, and sunrise
  

Now some of these results were a bit of a surprise. In part this is because blogs tend to grow organically. I was pleased with the results for the star finders and finding your way without a compass. I was hoping for this, so when I wrote them I didn't limit them to my location. I specifically made sure to find out how this would work in the southern hemisphere and not just up north here in Canada.

One of the reasons for installing website tracking capabilities is to help web site authors and managers to tune the site to their audience. There are lots of tools for doing this but many of these use the same basic techniques. For a discussion of these, see "Understanding website tracking".

I use a service called Statcounter which is free with a small amount of log space. Statcounter gives me several types of information about my visitors:

• Their IP address and an indication if they are a returning visitor (cookies are used but I don't get to see them),
• What page referred them (e.g. Toronto Scouts, Carnival of Space, or a Search Engine),
• Browser and system information (see here),
• Search terms if the visitor came from a Search Engine.
• And, of course, what pages were visited.

Astronomy Sale ....

Khan's Scopes on Dufferin (east side, south of Yorkdale) have a twice yearly tent sale. The spring installment is this Saturday. If you're in the area, it's worth checking out. Their web site is here.

If you see Ray, tell him George :), David, Mang says hi.

Great Cubbing activities at Akela's Cubs!

In my hunt for good Scouting resources, I came across a blog that consistently shows Cubs involved in fun activities. A lot of these go the extra step with a little well prepared embellishment.

If you haven't already found it, you should check out Akela Joy's blog at the 9th Benoni. For a sample consider:

• Why just play capture the flag when you can play capture the pirate treasure, see Pirates!
• Cubs a bit overheated? Need a steam off game? Try some Icy Water!
• Feeling gooey? Take your cubs for a trip through the graveyard!
• Or try some reality Cubbing like Survivor!
  

Joy has lots more, so check it out.

Understanding Website Tracking

Most web sites track their visitors for any of a host of reasons. What the operators do with that information depends on their motives and intent. I track visitors to this site using a free service called Statcounter. My motives are to understand my audience better. One example of this is my article "Browser Wars part Deux". Others track for security, or ad revenue, or more sinister purposes. We as an audience may choose to agree or to disagree with how we are tracked and why.

There is a lot of misunderstanding out there about security and privacy on the Internet and during our browsing experience. Trying to understand the ins and outs of all of this is technical and a bit arcane. Most people don't have the time, patience or the background for it. I do. It's part of my job. Information security has been part of my job for most of my career.

With security and privacy, most of the time people get upset about the wrong things. It's not that their concern is misplaced, it just that people aren't that good at estimating risks.

Sometimes we choose to give up a bit of our privacy for things like free email accounts. Most people believe that companies like Google use their free email as vehicle to deliver ads. Automated analysis suggests something you might want. The most successful companies doing this will be the ones that are effective (suggesting something you really want or need) and not offensive or pushy.

Occasionally, these services get it wrong and the results can be quite funny. Because this blog is hosted by Google, I use a Google account just for it. A lot of the emails going through relate to scouting and astronomy. Google, through Gmail , displays a line at the top of my inbox informing me of interesting products and services. Sometimes it tells me about things relating to camping or astronomy. Regularly, it tells me about astrology, or doom and gloom sites (Nostradamus), and other weirdness. I don't mind it as it's not too pushy.

Website visitors are typically tracked by IP addresses and "cookies". Many people get upset about companies tracking their browsing habits. It's seen as an invasion of privacy and been the focus of a wide debate. The other part of the problem is their use by spammers and criminals.

As with most things, organizations that are the most aggressive in their use of technology tend to cross a line and become the focus of intense debates such as this. The debate then focuses on the use, abuse, and perceived abuse of the technology which then becomes a question of trust. This is no different from your real world business choices.

The first thing people need to know is that not all tracking is bad. In fact, some is necessary. To tell the difference, you need to understand how tracking works. There are several methods described below. If you don't want all the nitty-gritty read the italic paragraphs in each section.

People are tracked by means of IP addresses, Cookies, Web Bugs, and by coordinating the use of these things. Cookies and Web Bugs can even track you as you move a laptop from one place to another (e.g. home, work, hot spots).

IP addresses

Basically, IP addresses aren't all that good for tracking people by themselves because they can be shared and because they don't remain constant. If you want to see your IP go to What's my IP address.

That may change in the future as we change to a newer standard for IP addresses called IPv6 which is intended to allow every device to have its own unique IP.

If you want to know more about how this works read the points below. Otherwise skip a bit.

• IP stands for Internet Protocol. IP addresses are how are computers know to talk to each other. When you visit this blog, your browser needs an IP address. You type mangsbatpage.433rd.com and your browser asks the Internet's Domain Name System (DNS) to return an address. Today it sent back 72.14.207.121. Because this is a server at Google, it's unlikely to change too often. The computer I'm writing this on also has an IP address. It's dynamic and assigned by a home firewall/router. It's also private and can't be seen on the Internet. Finally there is the one that my firewall/router has. That one is assigned by my ISP dynamically and changes from time to time. It can be seen on the Internet. That one is also shared by other computers in my house.
  
• IP addresses were intended to be unique. In practice their aren't enough of them and they get shared and reused. As a result, they aren't in themselves all that good at tracking people.
• As I mentioned, some IP addresses are dynamic and change over time.
  
• Other IPs are fixed and represent many people. Large companies typically funnel all of their employee browsing through a few IP addresses. While most Internet Service Providers assign individual IP addresses to customers, AOL is (or was) a counter example and operated much like a large company.
• IP addresses in and of themselves aren't a great indicator of individual behaviour.
• There should be a healthy privacy debate around IPv6.

Cookies

Cookies are more commonly used for this tracking and as a result they are both abused and misunderstood. Cookies are essentially a way of associating information with a name to provide a memory for web servers. That's actually needed because in their basic form web servers can't tell one page request (or people) apart. Cookies that are very specific and restricted facilitate transactions. Cookies that are broad and unrestricted are open to abuse.

If you want to know more about cookies read the points below:

• Web servers are "stateless" which is just a fancy way of saying that they have no memory from one page to another. This is fine if the site is just only informational. If there is some kind of transaction happening the site must have a memory. You wouldn't want it any other way.
• Cookies can be restricted to specific sites. So-called secure cookies are generally a good thing. For example when you bank on the Internet, you most likely use cookies. When you sign on to a secure web site the server returns you a cookie called a secure session cookie. It's really just an enormous random number. Each time you click a new button or move to a new page withing that site, that number is how the web site knows how to connect the dots between the actions on each page. Of course the if someone were to get this number they could impersonate your session. There's a whole host of things done to prevent this.
• That's one reason why the banks encrypt their sessions.
  
• The random number must be extremely strong to prevent guessing.
• The random number is only good for a short while. When it expires, you must login again.
• Some web sites change the random number from page to page.
• Shopping cart sites use cookies to keep track of what's in your cart. They are similar to what the bank does but you might not need to log in.
• Wikipedia has an article on Cookies here.
  

Web Bugs

Another way you can be tracked is by the use of so-called "web bugs". These are references to invisible files hidden in a web page that are associated with a unique number. By embedding the same bug in emails and different web pages along with additional reference information, you can be tracked. Unlike cookies and IP addresses, I'm not aware of a clear need for web bugs beyond tracking. In fact there are lots of examples of abuses using this technology.

If you want to know more about cookies read the points below:

• Web bugs are often image files such as JPEGs that are drawn with a 1 pixel x 1 pixel size. There are other methods and a broader description can be found on Wikipedia.
  
• The references number is usually an argument to the file name (after the ? in the URL)
• The bug is really the reference and not the file.
  
• Tracking is possible because the name of the file and the unique number appear in the logs of servers you visit.
• Several email products can disable web bugs.
  

Tips

• If you are doing transactions like banking, you might want to shut down your browser and start it up from scratch to do your banking and shopping. When done the shut down and restart again. This will minimize the possibility of information accidentally leaking between different web sites.
• Most browsers allow you to select which cookies you'll allow to be set. You can also block entire sites and networks. The down side is that the frequent interactions when the browser asks you about each cookie can be highly annoying. There are also cookie managers that allow you to remove and block unwanted cookies.
• Browsers often allow you to control the loading of offsite image files
• Java script can be even more dangerous in what it can steal from your computer. I strongly recommend people use tools like Firefox's NoScript Add-on. This allows you to permit specific sites to use scripts.
  

50 Ways to get kids hooked on the outdoors!

Texas parks and recreation's blog had this article. The suggestions cover a wide age range and a lot of core Scouting activities.

Thanks to the Awesome Cub Scouting blog, here.

Emergency Preparedness Adventure - Saturday, May 10th, 9 am - 4 pm

Emergency Preparedness Adventure at Centennial Park - Saturday, May 10th, 9 am - 4 pm
Cubs and Scouts

For more information see here or download the flyer from here.

The group will be picking up the registration cost. Please let your section leaders know who will be attending.

UPDATE:

The event will be held near the Conservatory (Site #8 on the map off Rathburn and Elmcrest) west of the Olympium. See the official map of Centennial Park, here (warning large download). Parking near the site is limited and we will probably use the large lot between the Olympium and the Stadium about 600 meters from the site.

The 433rd goes to the Moon!

Yes, you heard it here first. It's true the 433rd is going to the Moon! Pack your bags, we leave later this year aboard an Atlas V 401 rocket. The trip out will take about four days and we can expect at least a one year stay. You may want to think about a few extra supplies because a lot of recent missions have run well into overtime.

How can a whole Cub pack go to the Moon you ask? Skeptical? Want proof? I don't blame you. Well here it is:


Just in case you want to send someone to the Moon, you can apply here.

If you want more information on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), look here. The LRO packs a lot of science and a high resolution camera too. It should be fascinating. And unlike other space exploration missions, we won't have to wait for years for results!

BTW. Has any one seen Alice Kramden's name on the passenger list :)

Update: It seems there is another opportunity to get your name into space with the Kepler Space Telescope that will be looking for exoplanets. For this you need to write a short summary about why the project is important. Perhaps we have another Cub Space Exploration project. For more information see here and here. For the entry see this.

Laser pointers, bans, and stupidity

New South Wales just passed a law banning the use of high power laser pointers without a permit. See here. However, the effectiveness of law is already being questioned. See here and here. NSW is not the first place to put in place such a ban.

The ban was prompted by some recent misuse of laser pointers, where beams were flashed at the cockpits of aircraft that were taking off and landing. Let's make no mistake. There is simply no excuse for intentionally targeting aircraft (or any vehicle) with a laser. To do so is 1st degree stupidity at best.

Update: It turns out that the idiots pointing lasers at aircraft aren't the only stupidity in this story.

• In an ironic twist a local Sydney (NSW) art object has been reported to reflect green lasers into the sky and has reportedly hit a helicopter pilot in the eye. See "Sydney skies menaced by deadly raygun disco-ball".
  
• Premier (NSW) Morris Iemma opined that a pet toy would be a valid reason to own a laser, see "Laser ban impossible to enforce".

The real question is will the ban be effective? And by this I mean, are we going to see a meaningful reduction in the kinds of incidents that provoked this ban? Politicians seem to love to ban things. More often than not these kinds of bans are ineffective theatre designed to let them say they are taking action.

Such incidents are also not unique to Australia, they have been recorded in the US and Canada and there are incidents dating back to around 2003. See here and here.

Understandably the pilots union supports a ban on these devices. Thankfully they were open to legitimate uses such as astronomy.

Laser pointers can be invaluable for teaching astronomy to small groups of people. They can also be annoying to other astronomers if used carelessly. Like many issues, finding a balance can be challenging.

Incidents such as these are a natural consequence of technology, any technology, becoming inexpensive and widespread. I have a hard time believing that these could be accidents. How many of these incidents were fuelled by anger, alcohol, or drugs? How many were poorly thought out pranks?

Banning high powered laser pointers and requiring a permit will raise the bar for people getting these devices. Essentially there are three groups of people to consider. Those with a legitimate need that will go through the bureaucratic hoops to continue using one. Those that do not will circumvent the system with intent. And those in the middle that don't have a legitimate need or the determination to get a permit. A ban is really only going to affect the middle group.

Handheld lasers exceeding 500 mW are for sale! Also, there are widely videos showing you how to build your own high power laser using surplus CD and DVD lasers (specifications vary from 30 mW to 300 mW with 100-150 mW being common)!

The problem is not the inexpensive laser pointers available in dollar stars. They aren't very powerful, typically under 1 mW, and can be used for presentations and entertaining pets. While I doubt these would have any effect on pilots at range, I would error on the side of caution and not want to test the assumption.

Laser pointers used for astronomy are something else all together. For starters the human eye responds poorly to red and blue light compared to green. A green laser should give you the best visibility with the least power. But how much power?

A number of factors affect visibility. The thickness of the beam. The moisture in the air. Even light pollution.

Over the years I've borrowed a few of these devices to use as star pointers. The smallest was a 5 mW green laser. This just didn't cut it. It was only really barely visible on moist nights with dark skies. On the other end of the spectrum, was a 55 mW class IIIb green laser. This one seems to be visible in just about all nighttime conditions. While this is a far cry from the 500 mW ones I've seen advertised, it is still over powered for star pointing. I've had discussions with others that suggest a 15 mW laser should be adequate for star pointing. But what I'd really like to see is something with variable power so that you can get just what is needed and no more.

Safety with these lasers is a matter of awareness, attitude and responsibility. When I was a Scout, I learned to shoot a rifle. We were taught never to point a gun at anything we did not intend to shoot. Never under any circumstance. The same applies to a laser pointer. When I use one, I follow a few simple rules:

• Keep control of the laser at all times yourself. Avoid rapid and wide movement. Don't let children use the laser.
• Never point the laser at anything that might be an aircraft (or vehicle). Avoid moving objects and flashing lights.
  
• If you need to point at a moving object, trail behind it. Do this even if you're sure it's not an aircraft. During Earth Hour, I was pointing out the International Space Station. Even though I was 99.99% sure it was the ISS and the laser couldn't affect the people on it, I still trailed the laser behind it.
• Be aware, look around carefully before pointing.
• Be respectful of other groups around you.
  

A NSW man was recently sentenced to three years in prison for shining a laser pointer at a police helicopter. See here. Others have been similarly convicted in other jurisdictions.

Now what will bans like these actually do?

• It will probably raise awareness of the risks.
• It may make it harder to obtain and use powerful laser pointers. Although without importation bans this will be less effective.
  
• Fewer people will seek to own such devices. (probably)
• Conversely by banning them, more people may want to own these devices.
  
• It may promote more responsible behaviour from laser owners. More likely it will slow the growth of irresponsible owners.
  
• And adds to the possibility of stiff penalties for abuse. Although, other laws can be used for this purpose and stiff penalties have already been handed out.
• It may not even help police track down abusers, because you can't simply stop looking after you've checked out all the permit holders. The abuser probably won't have a permit.
  
• It may criminalize people unfairly if not carefully applied (probably).

Will bans like this reduce such irresponsible incidents? That remains to be seen; but, I suspect that it will be less effective than its' authors hope. It also raises a lot of questions about what is considered "legitimate use" and who will be legitimate users. Lastly, I'm concerned about overzealous enforcement.

April - Last chance to see DDO Canada's largest telescope

I just received confirmation that the David Dunlap Observatory is shutting down tour operations. I expect this is the first step in the shutdown relating to the sale of the property.

There is a brief window of opportunity for any groups remaining to see it and I wanted to get the word out.

Any Scouting (and Guiding) groups from wishing to see the largest telescope in Canada have one last chance to visit. The staff can accommodate all age ranges from Beavers through to Rovers. But you must act fast to secure a spot.

The following dates are available April 21, 23, 25, 27,28, and 29th. No tours will be run after April 30th.

Group size is not important at this point. It can be 10 people to 70 people and can include family and friends. The fee is $5 per person. The minimum deposit is being waived.

If you know of groups that could be interested, please pass the word.

♫

To arrange a tour contact the DDO by email tours@astro.utoronto.ca or see http://www.astro.utoronto.ca/DDO/public/tourschedule_scouts.html

The 433rd Cubs recently visited the DDO and had a great time.

Thanks, Mang