Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
17 May 2020
Well, it’s still lockdown for over 70s here in the UK. I can’t bang my Zimmer frame along the railings as a mark of disrespect :( But I can still write. So this week we have a digital epistle covering nice statistics, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, the weight of the universe (a very weighty matter), a smirk at AI, the Sandman, and the War of Jenkin’s Ear.
Quotes from Fred Hoyle and Albert Einstein and a range of Scanner URLs complete the pot pourri. I hope you like it.
Credits: Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Statistics – Nice, easy, cheerful, stuff:
I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for statistics – especially Bayesian statistics – and in the midst of all the current doom and gloom I was delighted to see a piece by statistician Hans Rosling showing how much better off we are now (despite the dreaded virus) than in the past.
Here’s a quick cut through some of the statistical graphs he presents: legal slavery, down to almost zero. HIV, steadily declining. Child deaths, down from 44% to 4%. Smoke particles, down from 38kg per person to 14kg per person. Countries with cases of smallpox, down to zero. Tons of ozone depleting chemical used down from 1.6 million tons in 1970 to 22,000 tons in 2016.
And that’s just a few of the 16 different improvements modelled!
PS: Right click on the two pages shown at the URL to get bigger sized versions of the graphs...
http://www.openculture.com/2020/05/16-ways-the-world-is-getting-remarkably-better.html
Astronomy & Cosmology:
I’ve always had an interest in SETI (Search for extra-terrestrial intelligence), though I’m by no means a fanatic on the topic. Thus it was that my interest was piqued by an article suggesting that we should be looking at super-earth exoplanets with hydrogen atmospheres. That’s in addition to the current search for Earth sized planets with oxygen atmospheres.
So why the new addition? Well it turns out that the bacteria E. coli (billions of which live in your intestines) can survive and prosper in a hydrogen rich atmosphere which has no oxygen. Actually, the same goes for at least one variety of yeast. Instead of getting energy by reacting carbon and oxygen to form CO2, E. coli can react hydrogen with carbon to form methane.
And why a super-earth? Ah, well that’s easy – hydrogen is the lightest element and a gas, so it can easily escape the gravitational pull of a planet the size of the Earth, and drift off into space. You would need the gravitational pull of a rocky planet several times the size of Earth to prevent that.
Most of the big SETI programs are looking for technological evidence of extra-terrestrial intelligence, such as radio transmissions and dyson spheres. But what if we are looking for the wrong things? Perhaps the highly adaptable E. coli have already colonized the galaxy and even the universe? Maybe we humans for all our hubris are merely convenient containers for moving colonies of E.coli around!
Actually, I don’t think that’s the case, but it’s a sobering thought!
https://www.sciencealert.com/life-could-be-found-on-an-exoplanet-with-a-hydrogen-atmosphere-says-study
And while we are talking about cosmology, did you ever wonder just how much the universe weighs? No? Well, to be honest, neither did I – until recently, when I discovered that like the issue of the speed at which the universe is expanding (see the Hubble constant article in WD 22 March) there are two different ways of ‘weighing’ the universe.
And, just like the measurements of the rate of expansion, the two different ways of calculating the mass of the universe give different answers!
The scientists doing the calculations are currently trying to refine them, but if, like the Hubble constant, the values they give stubbornly remain different, there’s going to be some hard thinking to do about how the universe really works!
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-heavy-is-the-universe-conflicting-answers-hint-at-new-physics/
Artificial Intelligence:
OK. I admit it. I smirked when I saw this story. Our behaviour in this pandemic has seriously screwed up machine learning systems!
It seems that our new locked-down lifestyles are throwing all the algorithms into a tizz... For instance, even an unobservant computer geek like myself had noticed that Amazon’s suggestions as to what I might want to look at bordered on the bizarre. It seems I wasn’t the only one.
OK, I admit I never bought coffee from Amazon before (actually, their own brand roasted to level 5 was surprising tolerable). But I can’t honestly say that the women’s floral wrap dresses are my thing. Though I will admit that I did, for a bet, once attend Leeds University Student Council in full drag, including 5” high heels. Going down the curving staircase in the Union building was the most dangerous thing I had ever done...
But that was 45 years ago and I’m much more respectable now – though some people would dispute this.
That is as it may be, but some retailers are running into problems in their supply chain ordering problems as their stock control algorithms order tons of toilet rolls and thousands of face masks at inflated prices. My heart bleeds for them! Rule one of computers – make sure you understand what you are asking it to do before you use it!
https://www.sciencealert.com/our-behaviour-in-this-pandemic-has-seriously-confused-ai-machine-learning-systems
Sandman:
OK, I admit it. I’ve been a sucker for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman stories, ever since I stole the kids version of ‘A Game of You’. Now it seems an audio drama of the series is in the offing. I’m waiting. Is it literature? I don’t know, but I love it. Highly recommended.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/exclusive-neil-gaimans-sandman-audible-123000658.html
History:
Finally I thought I’d be a bit specifically Brit oriented. Yes, this is about the one bit of history that I, like thousands of other kids in the UK, thought was the one thing that made history really, really, worth studying – The War of Jenkin’s Ear! I still have no idea who Jenkins was, but the idea of going to war because his ear was cut off by upstart foreigners had a sneaky resonance!
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/War-of-Jenkins-Ear/
Quotes:
This week a couple of quotes from scientists...
“Space isn’t remote at all.
Fred Hoyle
“Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.”
Albert Einstein
Scanner:
Scientists have discovered huge sabre-tooth anchovies from prehistoric times
https://www.sciencealert.com/huge-sabre-toothed-anchovies-once-hunted-the-world-s-oceans
San Diego’s massive, 7-year experiment with facial recognition technology appears to be a flop
https://www.fastcompany.com/90440198/san-diegos-massive-7-year-experiment-with-facial-recognition-technology-appears-to-be-a-flop
UK spies will need artificial intelligence – the Rusi report [not to mention a dose of reality -AL]
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52415775
Adobe: to read the Terms of Use, you must first agree to the Terms of Use [Update: OK, they fixed it, but it made me smirk – AL]
https://boingboing.net/2020/05/05/adobe-to-read-the-terms-of-us.html
Don’t trust deep-learning algorithms to touch up medical scans: Boffins warn that ‘highly unstable’ tech leads to bad diagnoses
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/13/ai_medical_scans/
Helix of an elusive rare earth metal could help push Moore’s Law to the next level
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-helix-of-the-rarest-of-rare-earth-metals-could-compete-for-world-s-smallest-transistor
Artificial Intelligence isn’t a solution to all our problems
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/ai-isnt-a-solution-to-all-our-problems/
England to debut the world’s longest coastal path by middle of next year
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/england-debut-worlds-longest-coastal-path-middle-next-year-180974711/
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
17 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.
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