Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
9 August 2020
Greetings readers, I hope you appreciate that I’ve taken time off from trying to figure out how the controller on our smart new door answering device works (it has lots of buttons, and the instructions are for a different model) in order to entertain you over the Sunday breakfast table.
We, as is becoming the tradition, start with updates on Boeing, firstly the saga of the 737 MAX, and then a notice of the demise of the great 747. After that a short piece on Samsung Blu-ray owners’ blues, and dodgy work from Netgear. Then we note an upcoming attempt in New Zealand to try to make broadcast power a commercial proposition.
And of course there is the pandemic – three pieces – one on pandemic ‘wargaming’, one on the activities of the super-rich, and finally a look at the effect on digital currencies and the pandemic. Oh! I forgot there is also a little coda to give you the shivers.
There’s a bountiful set of pictures this week. The pyramid of Giza, Renaissance cats, landscapes, Amsterdam 1922 and New York in 1911. Finally there’s a music video of an interesting version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
Finally the Scanner section points you to material on vaccine supply deals, the black hole information paradox, an Intel blueprint leak, the shape of the heliosphere, is Planet 9 a black hole, and finally coal fired electricity and the pandemic.
More next week!
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi, Barb, and Lois for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
It’s our old friends, Boeing, again. The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has listed the conditions under which it will allow the 737 MAX to resume commercial flights. The URL has a list of the specific requirements, but basically, they want it to stop flying into the ground.
I can’t imagine any way we will see commercial flights resuming this year, especially given the current state of the airline industry. And even when the FAA has certified it for the USA, other countries have made it clear that they will be doing their own certifications, before they grant permission to fly over their own territories. Gone are the days when the United States FAA certification was good enough for everyone else...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/04/faa_737_max_airworthiness_directive/
And while we are on the subject of Boeing, I see that one of its airliners that does work is getting to the end of the line – the legendary 747. It seems that the aircraft, which first flew commercially in 1970, is no longer economic, even for freight transport. The last ones will be coming off the assembly line in 2022.
End of an era...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/30/747_production_ends_in_2022/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_747
Devices:
I see that Samsung managed to brick a slew of their Blu-ray devices with a botched software upgrade delivered over the internet. They obviously don’t do things by halves! They managed it so that it’s impossible to install a new version over the internet. The result? Thousands of Samsung Blu-ray owners are going to have to send their players back to the factory to be fixed!
With new second edition pandemic lockdowns in the offing all over the place, I’m sure that is going to go down really well with the owners!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/18/samsung_bluray_mass_dieoff_explained/
At least Samsung are prepared to fix their problems. Not so Netgear. They seem to have decided to quietly not bother to patch a remote code execution vulnerability security hole in some 40 models of their home routers. I have to confess that much against my will I am moving towards the belief that the whole business of software security patches and software as a service needs some sort of regulation.
Sigh...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/30/netgear_abandons_45_routers_vuln_patching/
Electricity and Power Transmission:
OK. This seems very speculative to me, but...
New Zealand is about to trial the world’s first commercial long distance wireless power transmission! If it really works, it will be a major breakthrough. If it doesn’t, it will be the latest in a stream of failed attempts that go back to Nickola Tesla at the end of the 19th Century.
See what you think. Here are two URLs – the first is a description of what is proposed, the second an interview with one of the key people involved.
https://newatlas.com/energy/long-range-wireless-power-transmission-new-zealand-emrod/
https://newatlas.com/energy/wireless-power-transmission-emrod-interview/
The Pandemic:
I was fascinated to find out that, on an international level, the people who are responsible for dealing with pandemics regularly hold their own equivalent of ‘war games’. What those games showed was that there would be travel bans that leaked, leaders that didn’t take it seriously until too late, and massive economic disruption. They even foresaw the scramble for vaccines and, in the USA, predicted the disputes between federal and state leaders.
What they didn’t foresee, though, was the effect of Donald Trump being the President of the USA as the pandemic developed!
Scientific American has a really comprehensive essay on the issue of how the public health authorities were unable to make leaders understand the likelihood and severity of the pandemic before it started, and in its early stages. Well worth a read.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/two-decades-of-pandemic-war-games-failed-to-account-for-donald-trump/
Ever wondered how the really rich handle times of danger like those we are currently facing? The poor, of course, have little option – they have to stay put and weather the storm. The middle classes and the well to do are a little better off many of them have at least a holiday home in the country to which they can retire for the duration.
But the really rich? Their options are very different. In effect they have, as part of their general risk insurance, purchased in one way and another citizenship of smaller, less likely to be affected, countries, thus evading travel bans that may be in effect in those countries for the duration! This is not just a visa to visit the country – that wouldn’t get them in – it’s effectively a purchase of citizenship.
Want to know more? World Crunch has an interesting piece on this subject. It starts about half way down the issue, scroll down past the ‘7 things to know right now’ piece. It’s the section entitled ‘Superrich buying passports to dodge COVID-19 travel bans’.
https://mailchi.mp/worldcrunch/iran-deepening-isolation-world-1406856?e=c8be2ccc15
And finally, in this section, I thought you might like to take a look at a very speculative piece on the impact of the pandemic on the use of blockchain and digital currencies. I especially, given my background, liked the bit on online gaming – maybe I’ll write a new game to take advantage of it...
https://www.supplychainbrain.com/blogs/1-think-tank/post/31351-the-impact-of-covid-19-on-blockchain-and-cryptocurrency [via ADVFN newsletter]
Oh! And just in case you were starting to feel a little bit more hopeful, I spotted this little item while going back over some material from earlier in July...
https://www.sciencealert.com/chinese-authorities-issue-warnings-after-mongolian-farmer-contracts-the-bubonic-plague
Pictures:
After last issue’s dearth of pictures, we have a bounty this week.
I guess we could start with a little bit of archaeology – a 360 degree tour of the Great Pyramid of Giza!
http://www.openculture.com/2020/07/take-an-360-interactive-tour-inside-the-great-pyramid-of-giza.html
Next, some very different pictures – theatrical and surreal images painted in a Renaissance style by Tokuhiro Kawai (includes cats!)
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2020/06/29/tokuhiro-kawai/
Then maybe a little soupcon of landscape photography – 36 pictures to choose from. My favourites? 3, 16, 23, and 31
https://newatlas.com/photography/best-landscape-photography-competition-agora-2020-winner-gallery/
Still not got your fill? OK, then let’s go back in history a hundred years to have a look at a trip through the streets of Amsterdam in 1922
http://www.openculture.com/2020/08/scenes-of-daily-life-in-amsterdam-in-1922.html
If you liked that, we can also go back another ten years or so earlier for a similarly treated trip through New York in 1911. Really nice!
http://www.openculture.com/2020/02/1911-video-of-new-york-city-colorized-with-machine-learning.html
And, for those of you who prefer something a little more up to date, I have a music video. It’s a tribute to the surviving members of the rock band Led Zeppelin. It’s from Heart, Live at the Kennedy Centre Honors in 2012. It’s the only version I’ve ever seen/heard that comes anywhere near doing justice to the original!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFxOaDeJmXk
Quotes:
This week’s quote comes from the English Duke of Wellington, the victor of the Battle of Waterloo. He later became Prime Minister, and had this to say about his first cabinet meeting:
‘An extraordinary affair. I gave them their orders, and they wanted to stay and discuss them!’
[Source: Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 5th edition]
Scanner:
Coronavirus: how countries aim to get the vaccine first by cutting opaque supply deals
https://theconversation.com/coronavirus-how-countries-aim-to-get-the-vaccine-first-by-cutting-opaque-supply-deals-143366
Have we solved the black hole information paradox?
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/have-we-solved-the-black-hole-information-paradox/
Intel NDA blueprints – 20GB of source code, schematics, specs, docs – spill onto web from partners-only vault
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/06/intel_nda_source_code_leak/
Is our solar system shaped like a deflated croissant? [How do you deflate a croissant? – AL]
https://www.space.com/solar-system-heliosphere-shape-croissant.html
Planet Nine could be a black hole, and a new telescope will tell us
https://newatlas.com/space/primordial-black-hole-planet-nine/
Experts think the coal industry may never recover from the pandemic, and we’re not sad
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-coronavirus-pandemic-might-be-enough-to-seal-coal-s-fate-for-good
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
9 August 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.