Need a fresh start? Want to live like Jason Bourne? Or just need a backup plan in case everything goes all to hell?

Apparently, one way to do that up until now has been to get a fake birth certificate from Puerto Rico, then leverage that into a United States passport.

“There are so many [Puerto Rican birth certificates] floating around… a lot fall into the hands of unscrupulous individuals,” said State Department Bureau of Consular Affairs spokeswoman Rosemary Macray. “We’ve uncovered many cases of people posing as Puerto Ricans” in applying for U.S. passports.

For whatever reason, Puerto Rican birth certificates were seen as easy to forge. So easy, in fact, that the government of Puerto Rico is taking a radical step: invalidating every birth certificate issued on the island before July 1, 2010. Everyone entitled to Puerto Rican documents will have to re-apply and get new ones issued.

Obviously, the government must have been moved to desperation to even consider such a bold move. Two big problems with it:

1. You’ve got until June 1, 2010 – just over a month – to apply for a U.S. Passport now using your not-yet-invalid – but perhaps fraudulent – documents. Got a real one? A fake one? Get your application in now. (Is the island still issuing birth certificates even though they’ll have to be re-issued in just a few weeks? Pity the kid born on May 31.)
2. The massive wave of re-issues offers its own opportunity for fraud. Someone who was born on the island, but left long ago, might have difficulty proving that fact. Government officials are going to have to err on the side of caution. lest they accidentally strip someone of citizenship. And with that implicit leniency, comes the opportunity for fraudulent applications, possibly supported by fraudulent witnesses.

Reminds me of something I read when I was younger:

“When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere.” – Robert A. Heinlein

( Photo Source / Photo Rights )

A few years ago, I was concerned that Apple wanted to boil the planet’s oceans by including the ZFS file system in a future release of OS X.

(I know that saying “ZFS file system” is like saying “ATM machine.” Not everyone knows what ZFS stands for; get over it.)

Apple has apparently reversed that decision, and thanks to Gruber, I found some speculation as to why. Unfortunately, the Gerbarg piece is totally devoid of the Armageddon theory.

ZFS. Sounds innocuous, doesn’t it? But when Daring Fireball reported that Apple’s OS X 10.5, code-named Leopard, would include support the new file system, I had to do some poking around. Turns out that this method of storing your computer files will bring about Armageddon.

Don’t believe me? Just look:

ZFS is a 128-bit file system, which means it can store 18 billion billion (18.4 × 1018) times more data than current 64-bit systems. The limitations of ZFS are designed to be so large that they will never be encountered in practice. Project leader Bonwick said, “Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn’t fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans.”

Boiling the oceans? Holy crap! That’s got to be hyperbole, right? Just an off the cuff remark? Nope. Turns out it’s more like a British-style understatement. Bonwick later elaborated:

Although we’d all like Moore’s Law to continue forever, quantum mechanics imposes some fundamental limits on the computation rate and information capacity of any physical device. In particular, it has been shown that 1 kilogram of matter confined to 1 liter of space can perform at most 10⁵¹ operations per second on at most 10³¹ bits of information [see Seth Lloyd, "Ultimate physical limits to computation." Nature 406, 1047-1054 (2000)]. A fully populated 128-bit storage pool would contain 2¹²⁸ blocks = 2¹³⁷ bytes = 2¹⁴⁰ bits; therefore the minimum mass required to hold the bits would be (2¹⁴⁰ bits) / (10³¹ bits/kg) = 136 billion kg.

To operate at the 10³¹ bits/kg limit, however, the entire mass of the computer must be in the form of pure energy. By E=mc², the rest energy of 136 billion kg is 1.2×10²⁸ J. The mass of the oceans is about 1.4×10²¹ kg. It takes about 4,000 J to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius, and thus about 400,000 J to heat 1 kg of water from freezing to boiling. The latent heat of vaporization adds another 2 million J/kg. Thus the energy required to boil the oceans is about 2.4×10⁶ J/kg * 1.4×10²¹ kg = 3.4×10²⁷ J. Thus, fully populating a 128-bit storage pool would, literally, require more energy than boiling the oceans.

Look, math is the reason I went to law school instead of doing anything that requires real brains. But this guy is saying that stuffing too much information in this file system will not only boil the oceans, it will leave us with plenty of leftover heat to spare.

Break out the marshmallows – it’s time for a great big ‘Smore!

Dean Esmay writes about overpopulation fears:

First off, what about all those poor areas that are so horribly overcrowded in the third world? I invite you to look carefully: in any country that is generally free and features a generally democratic government (say, as ranked by Freedom House as a 4,4 or better), no matter how poor that country is, you will find that the areas within it with the greatest population density are the ones with the highest standards of living and best incomes. No? You don’t think so? Find me the exception.

Another challenge: of nations ranked at least partly-free (again, using the Freedom House data set), find me a single one that ever experienced a famine while it was ranked as at least partly-free. You can’t do it. Know why? Because it’s never happened. As in, never. “Close” does not count. Neither do cases of “malnutrition,” which can be anything from vitamin or mineral deficiency to overconsumption of calories causing obesity. “Famine” means the real thing: throngs of emaciated, withering away people, bodies rotting in the streets wasted away from hunger. Free societies do not experience this, ever.

[Emphasis added.] Since I’m still working on Jared Diamond’s Collapse, I find Dean’s argument very interesting.

Link via Erick.