Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
13 September 2020
It was a pretty quiet week, this week, but I managed to pull a few pieces out of the week’s news to tell you about, as well as looking through my trove of interesting, but previously no room for, articles. We start with the discovery of mammoth bones in Mexico, celebrate the 60th anniversary of the ALGOL 60 programming language, look at a new printing technology, consider a couple of essays on the topics of forest fires and the state of medical research, and touch on working from home.
Pictures features a ribbon, a rug, and amusing animal pictures, and the quote is from Gene Spafford. There is the usual crop of referrals in the Scanner section.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb, for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Archaeology:
Large quantities of mammoth bones seem to suddenly have started turning up fairly regularly in Mexico. Well, you know what it’s like, you wait for mammoth bones and none turn up for ages, and then loads of them all turn up at once. In the 1970s some were found during the building of the Mexico City subway. Then nothing more for some 40 years, until in 2012 when more bones were found during the construction of a wastewater plant.
Last year found the remains of 14 mammoths near the site of a new airport, and now a load more have been found in a ‘mammoth trap’ near the new airport.
At this rate you will soon be unable to fly into Mexico because everywhere will be covered in mammoth bones!
https://www.sciencealert.com/construction-at-mexico-s-new-airport-has-uncovered-an-incredible-mammoth-graveyard
Computing:
The computing language ALGOL 60 turns 60 this year. As the granddaddy of structured languages it was a precursor for languages like ‘C’ and Pascal. Its main weakness was its lack of standard input and output facilities. Whenever you use a modern computer language today, it’s pretty likely that you will be using some feature first introduced in ALGOL 60!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/15/algol_60_at_60/
Devices:
A new printing process developed at Purdue University looks interesting. They have developed a form of printing and paper that repels water, oil and dirt and that enables them to print vertical pressure sensors onto the paper. The demo showed that it was possible to print a keyboard on the paper that turned it into a keypad or a music player.
This looked to me like it could be a significant breakthrough – I wonder if it could be married with 3D printing...
https://newatlas.com/electronics/novel-printing-process-ordinary-paper-interactive-surfaces/
Essays:
I’ve two essays that you might like to consider reading over the next week.
The first is highly topical – it’s about wild fires in California. I’m sure you have all read the doom laden reports about people waking up to orange skies caused by the forest fires. The essay looks at the issue historically and explains that there have always been major forest fires in the state, since long before Europeans moved in.
It also makes it clear that this is not linked to climate temperature rises, in spite of the alarmist pieces in some newspapers and journals.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/09/10/why-environmental-alarmism-makes-forest-fires-worse/#18b7fb393712
The other essay is also topical, given the persistence of the global pandemic. It’s about the state of medical research, and it argues that currently such research is badly broken and makes some recommendations about how to fix it. A useful and fairly short piece, although I fear that while the recommendations would indeed fix the problems, I doubt they are likely to be a short term solution and are likely to rapidly run up against vested interests!
https://theconversation.com/medical-research-is-broken-heres-how-we-can-fix-it-145281
Space:
I’ve occasionally wondered, on reading pieces about meteor showers and meteors exploding in the upper atmosphere, whether anyone ever got hit by a meteor. Well now I know. According to the records, we have two cases.
In 1954 Ann Hodges from Alabama was hit by a meteorite which hit her house, and her, while she was having a snooze. She survived. Until recently that was the only recorded case!
Now, however, researchers have unearthed a credible historical account of a man who was killed by being hit by a meteorite. This happened on August 22, 1888 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq. So, now you know!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/1954-extraterrestrial-bruiser-shocked-alabama-woman-180973646/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/murderous-meteorite-discovered-archivists-turkey-180974741/
Working from Home:
I picked this article in the New York Times up early in the lockdown, but then it got lost in the huge stack of backlogged material, and has only just surfaced again. Nonetheless, I think it’s well worth a look. It’s about a piece of monitoring software that reports to employers on what you are doing so they can make sure you really are working, and not skiving.
I think it’s really creepy. See what you think.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/06/technology/employee-monitoring-work-from-home-virus.html
And while we are on the topic of working from home, are you missing your cubical? Of course you are! Never fear Panasonic have just the thing for you – a DIY cubical kit called Komoru which you can build in your living room! And it’s a snip at around US$835...
https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2020/08/06/panasonic-komoru-cubicle/
Pictures:
Our first set of pictures is some Hubble pictures taken of supernova remnants in the Cygnus constellation. The explosion took place between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago, and the debris is still expanding. And the outer edge of the shockwave (which is also still expanding) has produced a wonderful ribbon like structure. The pictures are part of an article on the issue, take a look – they are classic Hubble! (And the text is an interesting explanation, too...)
https://www.sciencealert.com/hubble-s-new-photo-of-the-cygnus-loop-is-giving-us-some-serious-feelings
The second picture I’d like to draw your attention to is a pretty amazing Azerbaijan rug, woven to look as though it’s melting. Beautiful!
https://boingboing.net/2020/09/10/fantastic-azerbaijan-rug-woven.html
There’s little enough to laugh about in the world these days, so I’d like to bring to your attention a selection of pictures submitted as part of the Comedy Wildlife Photography awards for 2020. Amazing, and amusing stuff...
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2020/sep/11/comedy-wildlife-photography-awards-2020-finalists-in-pictures
Quotes:
This week’s quote is from Gene Spafford in a talk about Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence
“Our ability to make bad decisions is now so much faster than human thought (even augmented with bourbon or tequila) that it has far outstripped our
willingness to think about ethics and human good.”
From Risks Digest 32.25
Scanner:
Don’t lump us in with Facebook, internet infrastructure companies warn European Union
https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/09/eu_data_networks/
Things are really weird in the outer Solar System, and we may have figured out why
https://www.sciencealert.com/things-are-real-weird-in-the-outer-solar-system-and-astronomers-are-homing-in-on-why
Software bug in Bombardier airliner made planes turn the wrong way
https://www.theregister.com/2020/05/29/bombardier_missed_approach_bug/
Book Review: War in Space
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4002/1
Space could be littered with eerie transparent stars made entirely of bosons
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-could-be-transparent-stars-made-of-bosons-masquerading-as-black-holes
7 years later, US court of appeals rules that NSA program leaked by Snowden was illegal after all
https://boingboing.net/2020/09/07/7-years-later-us-court-of-app.html
If you think Mozilla pushed a broken Firefox Android build, good news: It didn’t. Bad news: It’s working as intended
https://www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/firefox_android_update/
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
13 September 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.