Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
1 March 2020
And another issue of Winding Down hits the virtual presses! <Clunk!> And for your edification this week we have material on what info Amazon is collecting about you, the problem with aerodynamic lift, the difference between panic buying and reasoned preparation, parking meters (off with their heads!), and a ghost ship.
Pictures, yes, well, how does 2.8 million from the Smithsonian grab you? You want more, no problem: try the underwater photos, maybe the cars up for auction. And quotes? How does five short snappy quotes instead of one long one sound?
And finally the scanner section contains material on Facebook vs IRS, internet domains, night coding, cash, 54 million euros lost when the password for the wallets was thrown out, an animal that doesn’t need oxygen, and global PC sales.
Next week there won’t be an issue, because we will have family visiting and my study doubles up as guest room. So in the meantime on with the show.
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
Still no updates! I think the usual suspects really are keeping their heads down...
Big Tech:
Amazon... I’ve been buying stuff from Amazon almost since they started up in the UK. I have always had a healthy cynicism about them – I know they are collecting info about me, but their attempts to predict my ultra-eclectic music tastes tend to make me laugh smugly.
However, the BBC web site has a piece from a journalist who decided to go through all the info Amazon has on him, and the results are mind blowing. Get this for starters:
31, 082 interactions with the Alexa assistant
2,670 product searches since 2017
83,657 Kindle interactions since 2018, including the exact time of day for each tap
and loads more files with other info in them.
If like me you use Amazon, and I suspect most of you do, although, unlike Amazon, I don’t keep files on people who read my newsletter, then you will probably be shocked to find out just how closely Amazon track what you are doing. Take a look for yourself – it’s really rather freaky!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/CLQYZENMBI/amazon-data
Aviation:
I was fascinated to find out from a Scientific American article that there is no agreement on what actually generates the aerodynamic force known as lift. And no, they weren’t talking to Boeing management at the time!
I find it a bit worrying. After all, it’s well over 100 years since the ‘Wright Flyer’ made its trip of four miles near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on 17 December 1903.
True, there are equations that you can feed your numbers into and get useful results out. But to explain what the equations -mean-... Ah! That’s a different matter, and there is no shortage of different theories. One favoured theory treats the air as a fluid and uses Bernoulli’s theorem to explain the lift, another explanation uses Newton’s Third Law of Motion. Unfortunately, when the chips are down, neither theory completely holds up (so to speak).
Even Einstein looked into this issue. His comment after studying the problem? “There is a lot of obscurity surrounding these questions,” Einstein wrote. “Indeed, I must confess that I have never encountered a simple answer to them even in the specialist literature.”
Want to know more? Take a look at the URL.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/no-one-can-explain-why-planes-stay-in-the-air/
Society:
Science Alert has a timely article about the difference between panic buying and reasoned attempts to prepare for a crisis. As they point out, it’s not unreasonable to make an assessment of future problems, conclude that there may be shortages and take steps to lay in stocks of food and such like.
One of the things that characterises being human is the ability to plan ahead and if resources are available, and meet the anticipated problems, prepare. Actually, this is even more important in this day and age than it was perhaps 20 or 30 years ago. The reason is modern supply chains, which are designed to keep costs down by ensuring that you never have stock in hand other than what people normally buy.
This means that once what is on the shelves is gone, that’s it. There are no longer warehouses full of the stuff to act as a buffer if there is a disaster. Stuff is manufactured when it’s expected to be needed, or in the case of food, left in situ until it is planned to be needed. If people think there is going to be a shortage, then they want to stock up while stuff is available. It’s a natural and sensible thing to do, not some sort of imagined panic.
Frankly, when it comes to preparing for this sort of thing, where it’s the people v the planners, I’d back the people any day!
https://www.sciencealert.com/reasonable-preparations-before-a-crisis-isn-t-panic-buying-here-s-the-difference
Devices:
Parking Meters. Those nice people at Hackaday have a piece about the history of the infernal devices. It turns out that they first appeared in the 1930s – I had no idea they were so old. It was the government of Oklahoma City that first committed this heinous crime against innocent car owners. The first ones were called Black Marias and they were driven by the person parking who turned a handle to set the time allowed and start a timer which counted down showing the time remaining.
The rest, as they say is history. Except that smirking is allowed when reading about the thousands meters that had their heads hacked off and stolen in Washington DC, and the 14,000 electronic parking meters in New York that stopped working on January 1st 2020 because of a bodged fix for the year 2000 bug 20 years earlier!
Well worth a read!
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/26/parking-meters-throughout-the-years-and-year-related-bugs/
And ships:
While we are in that issue of Hackaday, you might also look at the story of how the 2,300 ton MV Alta, abandoned by its crew off Bermuda, managed to wash up on the Irish coast in the middle of a storm after two years of drifting around the Atlantic. In that time it was spotted only once by a Royal Navy polar research vessel!
It’s an interesting story – take a look.
https://hackaday.com/2020/02/26/just-how-can-you-lose-something-the-size-of-a-cargo-ship/
Pictures:
This is the big one: 2.8 million pictures! That’s what has just been released onto the net by the Smithsonian. Better get started looking at them soon, because there’s more to come in the future!
https://www.si.edu/openaccess
If that’s not enough, or it’s too overwhelming, then perhaps you’d rather take a look at some nice pictures taken underwater for the ‘Underwater Photographer of the Year’ competition?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-51633570
Alternatively if you are into collectible cars and have a million dollars or so to spare, then you might like to browse through a mere 174 pictures of cars in the 2020 Amelia Island collectible car auctions preview...
https://newatlas.com/automotive/amelia-island-2020-collectible-car-auctions/
Quotes:
The quotes have been rather wordy recently, so I thought for a change I’d collect a few rather more snappy ones for your edification.
“I married beneath me, all women do.” – Nancy Astor.
“Rien” (Nothing) – King Louis XVI diary entry on the day of the storming of the Bastille.
“History is littered with wars which everybody knew would never happen.” Enoch Powell.
“Rock journalism is people who can’t write interviewing people who can’t talk for people who can’t read.” Frank Zappa.
“Think of what we would have missed if we had never … used a mobile phone or surfed the Net – or, to be honest, listened to other people talking about surfing the Net.” – Queen Elizabeth II of the UK.
All quotes taken from ‘The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations’, Fifth Edition
Scanner:
Facebook tells US tax bods: Swear to God, we were only worth US$6.5 billion in 2010 because we were menaced by... MySpace and smart phones. The IRS wants Zuckerberg’s empire to cough up US$9 billion in back taxes
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/19/facebook_irs_tax/
The ambitious plan to reinvent how websites get their names
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613446/the-ambitious-plan-to-make-the-internets-phone-book-more-trustworthy/
Why developers like to code at night. [I wrote Federation at night when I got home from my day job! – AL]
https://opensource.com/article/20/2/why-developers-code-night
An elegy for cash: the technology we might never replace
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614998/an-elegy-for-cash-the-technology-we-might-never-replace/
Talk about making a rod for your own back: Pot dealer’s seized €54m Bitcoins up in smoke after keys thrown out with fishing gear
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/25/drug_dealer_bitcoin/
Scientists find the first-ever animal that doesn’t need oxygen to survive
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-is-the-first-known-animal-that-doesn-t-need-oxygen-to-survive
Looks like the party’s over, folks: Global PC sales set to shrink as Windows 10 upgrade cycle tails off, says Gartner
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/21/gartner_pc_forecast/
Footnote
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
1 March 2020
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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