Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
13 December 2020
Another issue of the delectable Winding Down hits the net! This week is an interesting melange of lab grown chicken, a games table, directional signs, the battlefield internet – or not as the case may be, and Red Hat/IBM/CentOS (not to mention Rocky Linux). There’s a picture of India and Tibet at night, and a set of Northern Lights pictures. The quote is about cyber attacks.
Scanners features URLs pointing to a graphic novel, small islands and global sea rises, burning iron, the human brain and the universe, the Venezuelan army and bitcoin, and two items on Facebook and the US government.
Stay safe!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Christmas Hols – No issues on 27 December 2020 and 3 January 2021
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb, for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Food:
I note that Singapore is allowing lab grown chicken ‘meat’ to be sold. That, apparently, is a world first. It seems it’s going to be on sale as a constituent of chicken nuggets. I foresee a world of argument over this, if it spreads. For a start, will it be allowed to be called chicken? Could it be classed as suitable for vegetarians or vegans? What other food ‘meats’ are going to be made?
And of course there will be the inevitable problems of reconciling GM-type food with its smaller greenhouse gas/global warming foot print!
In the meantime, anyone for a serving of Soylent Green?
https://www.sciencealert.com/singapore-will-be-the-first-country-to-have-lab-grown-meat-up-for-sale
Games:
Here’s something that some gamers might be interested in. It’s a game table you can use to play traditional board games. Reminds me of a project I was trying to get off the ground in the 90s and the 00s, when Fed had its biggest user base. What I wanted was an LED screen that was flexible so you could roll it up when not in use or being carried, and unroll it on any flat surface. Unfortunately, there was, even in the 00s still a lot of ‘games are a waste of computer power’ attitudes around, and Kickstarter hadn’t got kickstarted then (it launched in 2009).
I’m not sure that this one will take off, but it’s worth a look. I guess you could make a case for being the government specified distance apart if you sat one on each end!
https://newatlas.com/games/infinity-game-table-touchscreen-digital-board-games/
Misc:
Have you ever wondered how typefaces are designed and chosen for the signs you see on the roads, railways, airports etc. I have, possibly because I worked for a while in the studios of a number of weekly magazines*. It is interesting, and if you happen to be into that sort of thing and are in London in the next few weeks take a look at this piece on the work of Margaret Calvert, who designed a lot of the typography and the symbols that we are so familiar with that we don’t even consciously read them!
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2020/11/10/margart-calvert-a-retropective-and-a-new-railway-design/
Politics:
Politicians must stop thinking of the internet as some sort of ‘battlefield’. That’s the message from the UK’s former head of the National Cyber Security Centre, a government body. It just doesn’t work trying to, for instance, name and shame the likes of Russia and North Korea.
The problem, I suspect is that most of our politicians grew up in a MAD world. That’s the idea of nuclear Mutually Assured Destruction, not the satirical magazine. MAD seemed to work. No one actually launched a nuclear onslaught after the end of World War II. So now the concept of MAD seems worth trying to apply again – as in “Surely if we have the digital ability to ‘nuke’ their networks it will deter them from trying to ‘nuke’ ours.”
Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. Using cyber weapons against a country doesn’t automatically turn it into a radioactive waste land, killing in excess of nine tenths of the population! Thank goodness...
https://www.theregister.com/2020/11/11/ciaran_martin_speech_cyber_policy/
Programming:
Normally by this time of the year I’m scratching around for meaningful stories, but there was one that came out loud and clear in the last ten days.
Most of you will remember that some time ago Linux software system provider Red Hat took over CentOS, which was basically a free version of Red Hat’s open source paid for flagship enterprise version. Later on, Red Hat was taken over by IBM (there were those who argued that the takeover was the other way round, but I don’t think so!)
Now, big surprise, Red Hat/IBM have changed CentOS so that it is no longer usable as a production version. Presumably IBM saw no reason why they should continue to support a version of their software which was free for people to use. A logical position for a major company running in a cutthroat capitalist economy.
Now, we may be running in a capitalist economy, but this is open source software we are talking about, and there are a lot of small companies out there who need a solid system to run on their computers but can’t afford to license Red Hat’s offering. So, in the best tradition of the Open Source community, there is now a new equivalent of the original CentOS offering!
It’s called Rocky Linux and it aims to be 100% compatible to Red Hat Enterprise Linux!
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/09/centos_red_hat/
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/10/rocky_linux/
Pictures:
We start with a picture taken by ISS astronauts of North India and the Tibetan plateau at night. Now I have to admit that I’m not usually enamoured of the innumerable night-time ISS pictures, but this is different – you can actually see the geography of the area very clearly and in perspective. On the right are the well lit crowded plains of northern India and Pakistan, on the left is the high standing Tibetan Plateau, and separating the two is the Himalayas mountain range.
This picture should be on every geography teachers ‘must show the pupils’ list!
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/147622/lighting-the-edge-of-the-roof
The other set of pictures is a little more conventional for Winding Down. It’s a small collection of pictures of the Northern Lights. Number six is very Christmassy :)
https://newatlas.com/photography/2020-northern-lights-photographer-of-the-year/
Quotes:
“Where cyber attacks don’t work, in my strong view, is as a psychological deterrent to attackers. I don’t say this as a matter of philosophical conviction; I would love it to be true that cyber-retaliation deters attackers. But it’s not true.”
Ciaran Martin, former head of the UK National Cyber Security Centre
Scanner:
Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic gets special spice-laden treatment in ‘Dune: The Graphic Novel’
https://www.space.com/dune-the-graphic-novel-excerpts
Weirdly, some small islands are growing bigger in the face of rising seas
https://www.sciencealert.com/some-small-islands-are-growing-bigger-in-the-face-of-rising-seas-not-being-swallowed
World first: Dutch brewery burns iron as a clean, recyclable fuel [But what does the beer taste like? – AL]
https://newatlas.com/energy/bavarian-brewery-carbon-free-renewable-iron-fuel/
Study maps the odd structural similarities between the human brain and the universe
https://www.sciencealert.com/wildly-fun-new-paper-compares-the-human-brain-to-the-structure-of-the-universe
Venezuelan army starts mining Bitcoin to make ends meet
https://cointelegraph.com/news/venezuelan-army-starts-mining-bitcoin-to-make-ends-meet [via ADVFN]
Facebook announces plan to break up U.S. Government before it becomes too powerful [Warning! Satire! – AL]
https://www.theonion.com/facebook-announces-plan-to-break-up-u-s-government-bef-1844121902
FTC and 48 Attorneys General sue to break up Facebook [Not satire! – AL]
https://gizmodo.com/ftc-and-48-attorneys-general-sue-to-break-up-facebook-1845845246
*In case you are wondering, I gave it up when colour printing became cheap and ubiquitous, because I’m partially red/green colour blind!
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 December 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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