Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
10 May 2020
We are back with a wide variety of stuff for everyone, and a bigger than usual Scanner section as I try to catch up with all the outstanding material.
Oh, and lots of pictures/videos!
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Programming:
Those of you following energy/business news may well have noticed reports about the price of oil going negative. Yes, as storage facilities ran out and with the drop in demand companies running out of storage were paying customers to take it away! And the fiasco that resulted has been suggested is similar to that with Y2K, the computers that crashed when the prices went negative.
But, frankly, I don’t think the cause in this case was programmer error at all. In the Y2K affair the problem was caused by programmers trying to save a few bytes of memory here and there. This error was entirely different.
It seems to me reading the reports that the problem was caused by a failure to specify that the price could go negative! And that was the fault of the business executives who wrote and signed off on the specification in the first place.
But, as we all know, blame is subject to gravity, and travels down the chain...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-08/oil-crash-busted-a-broker-s-computers-and-inflicted-huge-losses
InfoWorld has an interesting piece on why we don’t write code like we used to, and uses the Apollo moon lander as an example. It offers five reasons:
- Code was simpler then – modern languages do many more things with each statement.
- Security was simpler then.
- The focus was on functionality, rather than user interface.
- Fewer moving parts – both in the sense of machinery it was handling and the number of tasks it was performing.
- Freedom from lawyers.
Definitely worth reading, even if you’re not a programmer...
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3519612/5-reasons-we-dont-write-code-like-we-used-to.html
And if you want an example of software complexity, all you need to look at is the trials and tribulation around the F-35B military jet plane. It had endless problems during development, especially with the maintenance software, and now it turns out that the people who bought the things (including the Brits) haven’t been flying them enough for them to be considered fully tested. Thus the relevant bodies in the USA, where it is designed and built, haven’t been able to show that it meets the necessary standards of reliability!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/07/f35_dote_fy2019_report/
Politics:
An interesting study recently published seems to show that the so called ‘Fake News’ sites on the internet probably don’t have as big an impact on elections as has been thought. Few people with a background in political science or sociology will be surprised at that result.
The fact is that most people have fairly clear and fixed political views, even if that view is of the ‘they’re all the same’ or a tactical voter. It takes a lot to change a citizen’s long held political views, which is why most political voting areas always vote the same way, resulting in only a small number of so called ‘swing’ states or constituencies.
It can happen that a big enough issue will force itself to become almost the sole issue in an election and that will produce unusual voting patterns, but the voting almost always returns to ‘normal’ by the next election.
Fake news sites don’t really have much effect because they tend to only be visited by people who already believe what’s on the site. They rarely change people’s views. The real danger lies in a totally different direction. They provide an ideal opportunity to introduce the idea that censorship is acceptable, either by the political establishment, or by the big boys of the internet...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fake-news-web-sites-may-not-have-a-major-effect-on-elections/
Internet:
There’s an interesting case going on in the US Supreme Court. At stake is the question of whether you can trademark something with a .com suffix. The rules on trade marking are simple. You can’t trademark something that’s generic – you can only trademark names that are specific. For instance you can’t trademark mustard, but you could trademark (say) Alan’s Mustard – provided no one else beat you to it!
In this case the name being contested is ‘Booking.com,’ which the US trademark organisation refuses to trademark because .com is so generic. For the record, there are 145 million .com names registered, so the outcome of this case is going to have a lot of implications, if names with .com (and other internet suffixes) become trademarkable, to put it mildly.
Definitely something to watch in the future.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/06/booking_supreme_court/
Pictures:
No shortage of pictures built up during my absence!
Let’s start with some spectacular astronomy – the best of 16 years worth of material from the Spitzer Space Telescope, which finished its life last January. The pictures range from our own Milky Way galaxy to the furthest reaches of the universe. My favourite? The Helix Nebula (picture number 23) which looks like an amazing red eye!
https://newatlas.com/space/spitzer-gallery-infrared-photography/
And if you think we are currently having a bad time, take a look at this amazing animation of a day in the city of Pompeii. The date – 21 August 79AD, the time, 8am.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY_3ggKg0Bc
While we are on the subject of disasters, here’s the original Pathe News coverage of the Hindenburg disaster in 1937.
https://boingboing.net/2020/05/07/watch-the-hindenburg-disaster.html
And while we are on the topic of crashes, here from the archives of NASA and the FAA is what happens if you crash a jet liner without first dumping the fuel. It was the experiment that ended the controversy about whether it was necessary to dump fuel before a crash landing. Take a look – no one was hurt in the test which only used crash test dummies...
https://boingboing.net/2020/03/05/when-nasa-crash-landed-a-jetli.html
And if you would like something a little more peaceful, why not take a look at this beautiful picture of Monument Valley at sunset?
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/photo-of-the-day/2020-05-07/monument-valley-at-sunset-1/
Quotes:
I offer this Abraham Lincoln quote without any comment...
“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts.”
Abraham Lincoln
Scanner:
The simple truth about physics
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/the-simple-truth-about-physics/
Why video calls are surprisingly exhausting
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-video-calls-are-surprisingly-exhausting-180974773/
Did Galileo truly say, ‘And Yet It Moves’? A modern detective story
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/did-galileo-truly-say-and-yet-it-moves-a-modern-detective-story/
Latvian drone wrests control from human overlords and shuts down entire nation’s skies
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/04/latvian_drone_breaks_free/
Tax havens: there’s a chance now to apply conditions to bail outs
https://theconversation.com/tax-havens-theres-a-chance-now-to-apply-conditions-to-bail-outs-137303
ICANN votes down controversial .org sale proposal
https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/30/21241946/icann-dot-org-isoc-ethos-capital-sale-rejected
U.S. hospitals are losing millions of dollars per day in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic — and recovery may take years
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/05/hospitals-losing-millions-of-dollars-per-day-in-covid-19-pandemic.html
Rolls-Royce plans to build up to 15 mini nuclear reactors in Britain
https://newatlas.com/energy/rolls-royce-plans-mini-nuclear-reactors-in-britain/
“Punch Card” DNA could mean cheaper high-capacity data storage
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/punch-card-dna-could-mean-cheaper-high-capacity-data-storage/
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
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
10 May 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.
If you have any questions or comments about the articles on my web site, click here to send me email.