Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
19 July 2020
A shorter that usual Winding Down this week, because my wife, Barbara finally came home from hospital on Friday night. But I’ve managed to put together a few bits and pieces for reading over Sunday breakfast. For a start there are two articles giving a pair of very different historical accounts of experiences of wearing (or not, as the case may be) face masks in the last hundred years. Then we have an interesting report on an experiment on not using targeted advertising, and some dire news about logging by certain VPN providers.
Pictures has a set of rather nice pictures of the Milky Way and a video of a wood working craftsman at work. There’s a quote from playwright Bertolt Brecht, and scanner has URLs pointing to stories on the Linux kernel, a possible new massive particle collider, a Cornish pub in the UK, the return of the ‘The Far Side’, internet trademarks, the Viking Link between the UK and Denmark, and more on breaking the Enigma code.
Enjoy!
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
History:
As the controversy on wearing face masks continues to rage I thought I’d draw people’s attention to a couple of pieces about attitudes to wearing face masks in the past.
The first is from London during the German bombing blitz in 1940. At its height there were around 150,000 people sleeping in the crowded and poorly ventilated tube (subway) stations and tunnels. They were certainly much less likely to be killed by bombs, but that crowding and poor ventilation was tailor made for the spread of airborne disease.
Acting on the recommendations of health authorities and scientists (does that sound familiar?) at the time, the government recommended the wearing of face masks to help prevent an epidemic.
Interestingly enough, it seems their advice was generally accepted and people wearing face masks soon became a common and acceptable sight – almost de rigueur, in fact!
https://theconversation.com/why-londoners-in-the-blitz-accepted-face-masks-to-prevent-infection-unlike-todays-objectors-142021
The second is a very different story, and it concerns the attitude of Americans to the mandated wearing of face masks during the 1918 flu pandemic.
In the USA, then, as now, there was considerable resistance to the mandated wearing of face masks, even though the pandemic killed 675,000 Americans. Even when they were forced by law to wear the masks or face jail time, still many Americans refused. Wearing masks became a very contentious issue, and fines ran from US$5 all the way up to US$200. ($200 was an enormous amount of money a hundred years ago!)
Even so, as there is today, there were still large numbers of people who refused.
Interestingly enough, refusals intensified after the first wave of flu subsided and when the second wave started – just like the situation now.
My take on the matter? It as much a social and cultural issue rather than a fundamentally political issue.
http://www.openculture.com/2020/07/what-happened-when-americans-had-to-wear-masks-during-the-1918-flu-pandemic.html
Internet:
Now here is something that’s very interesting. Something that I’m sure sends icy shivers down the collective spines of the likes of Google. It seems that Dutch national broadcaster NPO stopped running third party trackers on its online video website. And the result? Increased advertising revenue! Gulp!
Theoretically, at least, you should get more from targeted advertising, since you are only showing ads for your goods to people who have somehow indicated (knowingly or otherwise) a propensity to buy what you are advertising. Targeted advertising is the holy grail of the advertising industry.
But, the problem is that in the real world of digital advertising a lot of other people are charging you for the task of separating the wheat from the chaff, and by the time all of them have taken their cut the savings from only showing ads to people who are most likely to be responsive to them have all but vanished – and maybe some more!
So, expect to see, in the near future, articles from advertising ‘experts’ bent on ‘proving’ that these results are just an interesting anomaly, but not useful in the real world!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/03/stop_tracking_increase_revenue_effectiveness/
Do you use A VPN provider that claims not to keep logs of your internet usage? How do you know they’re not lying? An interesting question, and difficult to answer. However if you happen to use any of the following: UFO VPN, FAST VPN, Free VPN, Super VPN, Flash VPN, Secure VPN, and Rabbit VPN, we can indeed provide an answer. They’re lying!
How do we know they are lying? Easy! The supposedly non-existent logs were accidentally left unprotected on the internet. Oops!
If you do use any of these providers, I suggest you shift to a new one. The Internet does give you a choice in these matters, even if in the end it turns out that it’s merely the ability to choose which government’s security service is going to read your logs!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/17/ufo_vpn_database/
Pictures:
New Atlas has a nice collection of images taken from the annual Milky Way Photographer of the Year list. They are absolutely stunning – especially to someone like me who has always lived in cities and never actually seen the Milky Way himself! My favourites? 3, 8, 11 and 12. Have a look and see what you think.
https://newatlas.com/digital-cameras/milky-way-photography-competition/
The second offering in this section is a wonderful video of a craftsman wood turner making a coffee mug from a piece of apple wood. Few things can beat watching a true craftsman plying his, or her trade!
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/15/watch-this-expert-woodturner-m.html
Quotes:
This week a quote from the German dramatist, Bertolt Brecht:
“Who built Thebes of the seven gates?
In the books you will find the names of kings.
Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock?...
Where, the evening that the wall of China was finished
Did the masons go?
Scanner:
Rust code in Linux kernel looks more likely as language team lead promises support
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/13/rust_code_in_linux_kernel/
The world doesn’t need a new gigantic particle collider
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-world-doesnt-need-a-new-gigantic-particle-collider/
Cornish drinkers catch a different kind of buzz as pub installs electric fence at bar [This made me roll my eyes -AL]
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/14/cornish_pub_electric_fence/
Gary Larson quietly brings back ‘The Far Side’ after 25 years away
https://boingboing.net/2020/07/10/gary-larson-quietly-brings-bac.html
The internet becomes trademarkable, sort of, with near-unanimous Supreme Court ruling on Booking.com
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/30/supreme_court_trademarks_domain_names/
Viking Link will carry enough electricity to supply 1.4 million households
http://viking-link.com/the-project/
Cambridge student rebuilds Polish Enigma-code-breaking box that paved the way for Turing ... and Victory!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/15/enigma_cracking_cyclometer_recreated/
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
19 July 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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