Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
18 October 2020
Welcome to the last 2020 summertime edition of Winding Down. Summertime ends in the UK next weekend, and there won’t be an edition that week.
This week we have, for your Sunday breakfast reading, material on Facebook’s artificial intelligence, and a selection of essays on space travel. We also have essays on libraries, archives and bookshops, as well as a piece on German culture. Other items look at jet suits, lockdown Lego, a claim of 132% efficiency, a whole slew of pictures and no less than three quotes!
Finally the scanner section points you at material about breaking up big tech, data breaches, a broken Apple chip, the Pentagon’s (lack of) budget, Bayes Theorem, the first consumer boycott, and a new version of the Linux kernal.
Stay safe!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: No issue next week – 25 October (Summertime ends in the UK)
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb, for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Artificial ‘Intelligence’:
A classic blunder this week from Facebook’s computer-vision algorithm. Apparently, it flagged up a picture of a basket of onions as being ‘overtly sexual’. It’s enough to make you want to cry!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/13/in_brief_ai/
Essays:
It’s 50 years since we first landed on the moon. Since that time we’ve drawn back, almost to the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere.
Why?
There are a plethora of explanations, but few decent syntheses, so I’d like to draw your attention to some of the work taking place on Paul Glister’s ‘Centauri Dreams’ web site. There are two essays from J N Nielsen that deal with this issue historically, and go on to look at what is needed to move on. Neither of them are short but both of them are very informative, and I think they are well worth a read.
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2019/12/27/bound-in-shallows-space-exploration-and-institutional-drift/
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2020/09/25/the-technological-indispensability-hypothesis-an-addendum-to-bound-in-shallows/
This week I’d also like to draw your attention to a piece looking at the role of book stores, libraries and archives in the digital age. Written by Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian, Internet Archive, it takes an interesting look at the difference between bookshops, libraries, and Archives in the digital era. Well worth a read.
https://www.against-the-grain.com/2020/09/on-bookstores-libraries-archives-in-the-digital-age-an-atg-guest-post/
And one other essay this week, since you’ve got two weeks until the next edition of Winding Down. It’s a look, 30 years after the reunification of Germany, at how former East Germany’s cultural differences on women working and child bearing have affected their West German counterparts. A very unusual essay, since most work on East/West German comparisons are about West German norms affecting the East Germans.
https://theconversation.com/women-in-work-how-east-germanys-socialist-past-has-influenced-west-german-mothers-147588
Jet Suits:
I’ve always thought jet suits were something of a gimmick, and a dangerous one at that. I’ve clearly not been following how they’ve been developing, and they are now hot stuff (so to speak), and producing impressive results.
A recent test in the mountains of Scotland revealed just how far they have come since the days of enthusiastic amateurs. In an exercise organised by the emergency services, a paramedic using a jet suit was able to get to an ‘injured’ climber in a rugged area in a fraction of the time it would take a helicopter to take off from its base and fly to the search area. And, of course, the jet pack requires far less landing area than the helicopter.
Take a look at the video – it’s impressive.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/sep/29/jet-suit-paramedic-takes-lake-district-test-flight
Lockdown:
With ‘second wave’ Covid lockdowns in the offing all round the world, I thought I’d draw attention to something more unusual for people to do. Lego fans among my readers will already know about the 2,000 brick Lego version of the legendary Apollo Saturn V rocket. However, what you probably don’t know is that a third party company has produced a 3,500 brick version of the launch pad and tower! Note that this is not a Lego company piece, it’s a third party, but judging from the pictures, it really does match – and it’s even bigger than the rocket (as was the real thing).
Make sure you build it where it’s going to end up – the chances of successfully moving it elsewhere look minimal!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/15/saturn_v_launch_tower/
https://www.lego.com/en-gb/product/lego-nasa-apollo-saturn-v-21309
Materials Science:
A dubious sounding headline on the New Atlas web site triggered off my cynicism into overdrive a month or so ago. It said “Black silicon photodetector hits record-breaking 132% efficiency”. The article was about a new photoelectric material. It seems that in these sort of materials a photon hitting the material can, sometimes, generate an electron. Enough light hitting this type of material will produce sufficient electrons to make a measurable electric current.
So far, so good, that’s what solar cells are. Now, it seems that if every photon hitting the material produces one electron, then it’s defined as 100% efficiency. I’m not sure if that idea comes from the company producing the stuff, or it’s an industry standard. In this case, however, it is claimed that there is a 32% chance of getting two electrons out of the single photon. Therefore, a claim of 132% efficiency can be made. To be fair, the achievement is impressive in its own right, and has implications for solar cells.
However, it’s clear that this so called ‘efficiency’ needs to be redefined so that it doesn’t appear to be breaking the laws of thermodynamics! I suspect that a better measure involves something like 100% being the maximum number of electrons that you could theoretically knock out of the outer shells of the material involved...
https://newatlas.com/energy/black-silicon-photodetector-130-percent-efficiency/
Pictures:
Have we got pictures for you this week!
First off are some amazing little sculptures/pictures carved from leaves. They are from a Japanese artist known as Lito.
https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2020/09/23/kirie-leaf-artist-lito/
Still on the pictures front are a set of high class pictures of characters taken from a collectible card game based on Frank Herbert’s book ‘Dune’. Very nice.
http://markzug.com/dune/dune-the-card-game/
Next in line are two sets of photographs from NASA’s Earth Observatory. The first shows the mud carried into the Atlantic Ocean by the Amazon river, while the second shows the smoke from the west coast fires meeting the Paulette and Sally hurricanes. Very dramatic!
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147327/mud-from-the-andes-carried-by-the-amazon
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147293/a-meeting-of-smoke-and-storms
And finally something rather unusual, and great fun. Have you ever wanted to prod and poke the serious looking people in some famous paintings? Well you can, if you live in Pittsburgh. Just toddle along to the Children’s Museum, where you will probably find a load more grown ups monopolising an installation that allows you to do just that!
https://boingboing.net/2020/10/12/poke-and-prod-famous-paintings-with-this-playful-installation-by-neil-mendoza.html
Quotes:
Extra special bonus – three quotes this week!
“If we want to seriously use the power of computation – and AI – then inevitably there won’t be a ‘human-explainable’ story about what’s happening inside.”
Stephen Wolfram
“To put it simply, companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons,” the chairman of the US House Judiciary Committee Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) writing in the Antitrust Subcommittee Report’s foreword.
“Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs which properly concern then.” – Paul Valery. French poet, critic, and man of letters
Scanner:
Big Tech to face its Ma Bell moment? US House Dems demand break-up of ‘monopolists’ Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Google
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/06/tech_giants_antitrust/
World’s biggest data breaches & hacks [a good visualisation – AL]
https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-biggest-data-breaches-hacks/
Apple’s T2 custom secure boot chip is not only insecure, it cannot be fixed without replacing the silicon
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/08/apple_t2_security_chip/
The Pentagon’s bottomless Money Pit
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/
Bayes’s theorem, and making probability intuitive
https://aeon.co/videos/what-is-it-to-be-bayesian-the-pretty-simple-math-modelling-behind-a-big-data-buzzword
How one woman pulled off the first consumer boycott – and helped inspire the British to abolish slavery
https://theconversation.com/how-one-woman-pulled-off-the-first-consumer-boycott-and-helped-inspire-the-british-to-abolish-slavery-140313
Eight release candidates later and it’s out: New hardware and more AMD in Linux 5.9
https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/12/linux_5_9/
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
18 October 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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