Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
14 June 2020
Here is a new Winding Down. The first one, I see, for nearly a month. I thought I’d better explain the problem, before people start cancelling. It’s because I’m having to cope with (non-COVID-19 virus) long term illness in the family, which is taking up a lot of time and making it difficult to concentrate on other things.
Alan Lenton
The main part of this issue takes a more overall look at where we are with the virus, since most of what I’ve seen on the web seems to concentrate on specific aspect of the problem. There is also material on photoshopped pictures in a major news outlet, and some updates on SpaceX and Boeing.
The pictures section covers abandoned cars, very old trees, lockdown pictures, a tiny scale model of a mainframe, and a program that generates Chinese landscape paintings in your browser!
The quote is a timely one from George Orwell, and the scanner section points to material on SpaceX, 3D heritage models, life elsewhere in the universe, a cable subscribers revolt, the legendary U2 spy plane, and security certificate problems for the Internet of Things.
Credits: Thanks to reader Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
The Pandemic – a look at what’s happening:
The question of the pandemic is riddled with perfectly legit arguments and controversies. That’s not surprising. It’s 100 years since the last pandemic of this scale – the 1918 flu pandemic – happened. There’s no one left who remembers it (those who were alive at the time and are still alive would have been small children in 1918).
Thus, when it started we had to do a bunch of things simultaneously – start looking for a vaccine, figure out how the virus works to infect people, figure out how to prepare hospitals for a massive influx of seriously ill patients, figure out what steps to take to reduce the severity, and try and get some accurate figures on the number of cases to work out what else would happen.
Let’s see how we are doing on each of these issues...
Vaccine. Well, given that the original estimates were that it would take several years to discover a vaccine, let alone to produce billions of doses of it, the fact that several possible vaccines are already in test on humans is encouraging.
There remains, though, the time it is going to take to actually produce and distribute billions of shots of the stuff. I predict that there will be some who will refuse to be vaccinated. Exactly how we should deal with vaccine refuseniks, I’ve never figured out...
How the virus works to infect. There has been definitely movement along this axis. Researchers have been very busy, and enormous numbers of ordinary people have helped by donating idle time on their computers to solving what would normally be considered to be supercomputer scale problems involved in modelling the virus. Good work – and very useful to the search for a vaccine!
Hospital capacity. A mixed story. Countries hit early in the pandemic were often overwhelmed. Most of those hit slightly later were able to apply the lessons from earlier and just about cope by emptying hospitals of non-urgent cases, and setting up temporary hospitals for virus hit patients. It showed that at least some governments can learn from experience...
Reducing the severity of the pandemic. Well, there were quite a lot of choices – most of them mutually exclusive. At one end you have the Swedish solution – basically do nothing and assume that this will build up ‘herd immunity’ for the future. There have proved to be problems with this approach. The first is that the death rate first time around is noticeably higher, the second that we still don’t know whether catching it once will prevent infection next time around.
At the other end of the spectrum you have some of the far eastern countries who instituted hard line lockdowns and succeeded, at least temporarily, in stopping the spread. And you had every variant in between. The harder the lockdown, the faster the infection rate dropped. But, of course, that was during the lockdown. We still have little idea what will, happen now the lockdowns are being eased...
The other point to remember is that -any- lockdown will have a knock on effect on the economy of the country locking down. Some predictions suggest that the hit may be of a similar scale to the great depression of the 1930’s. One can only hope that it’s not going to be as bad as that.
And finally, we come to the realm of the data scientist and the epidemiologist – modelling the pandemic to predict its course. But... In the beginning there was no data! Needless to say, this didn’t stop models being build, and they all came to different conclusions, which was great for the politicians, because they could each choose the models that best represented their views...
Fortunately, figures did start to come in fairly quickly once the pandemic got established, resulting in the discarding of some models and the refining of others. But there’s still plenty of choice, and a lot of work to do.
To give you some indication of the ongoing problems, take for example the issue of the comparison of number of infections and number of deaths for different countries. The number of people infected is determined by the number of people testing positive, but different countries have different test strategies and so some countries are testing a larger proportions of their population, which results in a higher positive result. Add to that the fact that there are several different tests, some of which are more accurate than others, and you get a whole bunch of figures that are not commensurate.
Then there is the number of deaths figure. Some countries count only deaths totally from the virus, others also count deaths where the virus didn’t directly cause the death, but it might be a contributory cause. And some countries are rumoured to CHEAT and FUDGE their figures (mentioning no names – you know who you are). What it comes down to is that the death figures are not really suitable for comparison.
Finally there are a number of issues which are still open to debate. To give you an example, there is the case of what are called ‘superspreaders’. It has been observed that there are cases where a single infected individual infects a large number of people – much larger than normal. It has been suggested that as many as 80% of cases might come from this superspreading. Not everyone involved in this discussion agrees with the 80% figure.
But that’s not the only problem. We don’t know for definite whether the person doing the spreading is super infectious, or whether the event itself enables an ordinarily affected person to spread the infection more widely. Events in this category seem to be indoor concerts, theatres, nightclubs, bars etc. If it is the event and you accept the 80% figure, then you don’t need a full lockdown, just to lock the indoor places where superspreading events arise. Otherwise the only solution is a full lockdown, given that we can only identify the superspreader after the event.
It’s a sobering thought that even after all the scientific advances, especially in the biological sciences, in the 100 years since the 1918 flu pandemic, we are still at the mercy of some of the smallest organisms on the planet. When the pandemic is over, I’d guess with around half a million dead worldwide as a result, things will not be the same, and many beliefs will be overthrown.
Let me give you one example. One of the solutions offered to reduce climate change is to get people out of their motor cars, and into mass transit systems. Ask any inhabitant of New York or London, for instance, what it is like on the buses and subways in the rush hour. Ideal superspreader events every morning and evening. Remember, not everybody can work from home – a lot of jobs still require a physical presence. An indication of how little thought has been given to this by the powers that be here in London is that money is still being ploughed into new and upgraded mass transit as the lockdown is relaxed.
The web is starting to produce ideas and speculative forecasts about what the post-pandemic future might hold. Some are good, some are OK, and some are just crazy, you have to make up your own mind about what makes sense. If I had to make a recommendation I’d suggest Tim O’Reilly’s piece ‘Welcome to the 21st Century’ is a good place to start.
https://www.oreilly.com/tim/21stcentury/
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/why-do-some-covid-19-patients-infect-many-others-whereas-most-don-t-spread-virus-all
Politics:
We regularly hear of Photoshopped pictures masquerading as the real thing. It’s so prevalent that most are not even worth a story any more. However, for that to happen on a major legit news site is a different matter!
Fox news is the culprit. In its coverage of the current Seattle protests it combined a picture from Capitol Hill with two Seattle photographs taken last May. it also showed a picture of burning buildings in St. Paul, Minnesota above the headline “Seattle helpless as armed guards anarchists ‘autonomous zone,’ shake down business: cops”.
Finally, they added a picture of a rifle armed man onto a picture of a barrier saying ‘You are now entering Free Gap Hill’.
Fox news tried to justify its use of the pictures, but the use was unanimously condemned by the photojournalist community, to name only a few. A classic abuse of digital tools, which I suspect is only going to get worse.
Sadly, this misuse of digital tools was not predicted in the beginning, but it’s difficult to see how it could be avoided even if it had been foreseen.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/fox-news-runs-digitally-altered-images-in-coverage-of-seattles-protests-capitol-hill-autonomous-zone/ [includes the offending pictures and the originals – AL]
Updates:
SpaceX, which is run by the tech billionaire Elon Musk, has a $2.6bn contract with NASA to provide six crew flights to the space station. The first of these is scheduled for the end of August, given the success of Hurley’s and Behnken’s demonstration. The Boeing company has a similar contract, but it is a year at least behind SpaceX in its development timeline. Something to do with the software, I believe...
And while we are on the topic of Boeing, I see that they’ve restarted their 737 Max aircraft production line. This is in spite of the fact that they still haven’t got the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to re-certify the plane after its grounding in 2019. Even if the FAA re-certify it, and airlines buy it because of its lower operating costs, who would want to fly in it? Actually, who would want to fly in an aeroplane at all, given all the border restrictions and the confined space of aircraft cabins? No one I know, that’s for sure!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/28/737_max_production_resumes/
Pictures:
We start this section with an unusual choice – a selection of abandoned cars from around Europe and the US.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/in-pictures-52632396
The Smithsonian has an interesting and unusual collection of photos of Africa’s oldest trees – Baobab trees.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/photos-ancient-trees-beth-moon-southern-africa-diamond-nights-180955603/
New Atlas has some rather nice pictures of people in lockdown situations.
https://newatlas.com/digital-cameras/lockdown-gallery-agora-best-quarantine-photography/
Imgur has some great pictures of a tiny scale model of an IBM 1401 mainframe computer which is amazing.
https://imgur.com/t/staff_picks/VAiP1G0
And finally, Boing Boing has a story on a little program that runs in the browser and creates random Chinese style landscape paintings!
https://boingboing.net/2020/06/12/generative-shan-shui-landscape.html
Quotes:
This week’s quote is from George Orwell, and given the arguments that have been raging over the last month or so, I thought people might find the perspective interesting, even if it is a two edged sword:
‘If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’
George Orwell
Scanner:
SpaceX launches experimental sun visor to reduce satellite visibility
https://newatlas.com/space/spacex-starlink-sun-visor-satellite-visibility/
You can now download 1,700 free 3-D cultural heritage models
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/you-can-now-download-1700-free-3-d-models-cultural-heritage-artifacts-180974308/
The odds on intelligent life in the universe
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2020/05/19/the-odds-on-intelligent-life-in-the-universe/
US cable subscribers are still being ‘ripped off’ by creeping price increases – and this lot has had enough
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/27/charter_lawsuit/
Famed U-2 Spy Plane takes on a new surveillance mission
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/famed-u-2-spy-plane-takes-on-a-new-surveillance-mission/
An Internet of Trouble lies ahead as root certificates begin to expire en mass, warns security researcher
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/10/iot_trouble_root_certificates_expire/
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
14 June 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.