Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
17 January 2021
Well, first I must apologise for the lack of last week’s issue. On top of my other family problems I now also have a brother on oxygen with COV-19 breathing problems. Since he is 70 I’m keeping my fingers crossed, and I hope you’ll cut me some slack over the next month or so.
We start, inevitably with an update on Boeing and software, followed by two essays I thought were interesting, one on a war game that nearly started a war, and one on talking to yourself!
If that’s not enough we have pieces on Egyptian coffins, Big Tech and finance, cheating soldiers, social media, and we have pictures of the building of the Forth Bridge, and a quote about the Debian Linux community!
Inevitably, after being offline for so long there’s a whole slew of Scanner stuff, including ad blocking, disasters that didn’t happen in 2020, a Google union, the 10,000 hour ‘rule’, chilli pepper and solar cells, an African potato, the Solar Winds affair, cyber security in health, and, of course, Lego.
Phew!
Stay safe!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Erratic...
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb, for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
Well, yes, more angst over software for Boeing over the Christmas/New Year period, with the FAA safety bulletins over software updates for its 747, 777, and 787 aircraft. I think that someone needs to take a hard look at how Boeing writes software, and how it communicates what’s changed to the people who actually fly the aircraft.
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/16/boeing_software_updates_faa_warning/
https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/emirates-777-crash-probe-revisits-pilot-awareness-of-design-logic/136614.article
And then, of course, there are the 737 Max crashes. That isn’t over yet. At the end of the first week of the new year it was announced that the US Justice Department had agreed a US$2.5 billion settlement of fraud charges and compensation with Boeing over the affair.
That sounds like a lot, but perhaps not in the light of the fact that in 2018 (the first 737 Max crash was in 2019) Boeing’s gross profit was US$19.706 billion!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/08/boeing_737_charges/
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/boeing-charged-737-max-fraud-conspiracy-and-agrees-pay-over-25-billion
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/BA/boeing/gross-profit
Incidentally, I haven’t seen any evidence that the Department of Justice is investigating the FAA over possible collusion or complacency in its dealings with Boeing on this issue...
Essays:
Two essays for you to have a look at this week. The first is a fascinating, and extremely freaky piece in Ars Technica about how a war games exercise for the US and NATO nearly triggered World War III. The exercise convincingly slotted into how the USSR believed the US would behave if it was aiming to take out the country and its allies with nuclear and conventional weapons.
Incidentally, the UUSR was mainly relying on a computer simulation developed by the KGB to figure out what was going on. Maybe there is a lesson there for our current heavy reliance on computer simulations – which are only as good as the assumptions programmed into them...
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/11/wargames-for-real-how-one-1983-exercise-nearly-triggered-wwiii/
And for something completely different, and considerably less scary, Psyche Magazine has an interesting essay about how talking out loud to yourself helps your thinking! I thought it was really interesting – I’d recommend reading it, though be prepared for some strange looks if you take up its ideas!
https://psyche.co/ideas/talking-out-loud-to-yourself-is-a-technology-for-thinking
Archaeology:
I see that towards the end of last year archaeologists in Egypt dug up some 160 ancient coffins, some of which were apparently sealed with a curse. This is part of the tremendous bounty that that is being provided by the explorations of Saqqara, an ancient city of the dead in Egypt.
Ever since Victorian times, Egyptian antiquities have fascinated westerners and a large chunk of those materials have vanished into private collections and into the worldwide illegal markets. Fortunately, it looks like these coffins will be dispersed to Egyptian museums where, presumably, they will be available for study.
Fingers crossed.
https://www.sciencealert.com/archaeologists-unearth-160-sarcophagi-from-an-ancient-egyptian-necropolis
Big Tech:
I note that the USA has decided not to put import taxes on French goods after the French planned a 3% online service revenue tax. I’m pretty certain that some sort of compromise will be worked out because everybody agrees that “something has to be done” about the way the big (mainly US tech companies) avoid paying tax by shifting their money around. Most people feel there is need for an agreement to deal with these big tech companies.
‘Most people’ are wrong!
The problem is not tech companies, they are only the most blatant users of legal, and semi-legal loopholes left by governments in their financial control systems. These loopholes are used by all big international companies and governments turn a blind eye. The only difference between tech and non-tech companies is that the non-tech ones have learned to be more discrete about their activities, which only tend to come to light in exceptional circumstances like major hacks...
What needs dealing with is the loopholes used by the companies – both tech and non-tech!
I await the outcome, but being cynical I frankly don’t expect much to actually happen, except that tech companies will take a rap, because they are, after all, the brash upstarts who need to have the realities explained to them so they can be a little less blatant in the future.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/08/us_france_tariffs/
Military:
I note that 70+ cadets at the USA’s West Point military academy were caught cheating and disciplined. Naughty! But I find myself in two minds about the issue. Seems to me it’s not the cheating, as such, that is the problem, it’s being unsubtle enough to be caught.
Armed forces need sneaky people who can think outside the box. That’s how wars are won without the sort of horrendous slaughter we saw in the wars of the 20th Century. However, I will admit that slavishly copying an answer, which happened to be in error is not very clever...
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/21/949025580/more-than-70-west-point-cadets-accused-of-cheating-in-academic-scandal?t=1610874190811
Social Media:
The intense scrutiny of the activities of the social media companies following the events of the US election and the occupation of the Capitol Building got me thinking about the whole social media thing. As soon as I have a bit more time I will actually write a piece on the subject for my website. But in the meantime I will share with you something I call ‘Alan’s Laws’, which consists of four laws and a corollary:
Alan’s Laws:
Law 1. Crap always expands to fill all the space available, especially space reserved for future expansion.
Law 2. Crap always drives out good non-crap material.
Law 3. Crap is sticky. No matter now much you clean it out of the system some always remains to expand back out.
Law 4. Most crap is human generated, but computer AI generated crap is rapidly catching up.
Corollary: Crap is subject to quantum effects. It is capable of tunnelling out of any system and into new ones, no matter how high the barriers.
Pictures:
This week we have a time capsule of the building of the Forth Bridge in Scotland in 1886-1890.
https://retronaut.com/capsules/1886-1890-construction-of-the-forth-bridge
Quotes:
“A prediction that there will be conflict within the Debian community is relatively safe in any year, 2020 included.”
taken from the LWN.net magazine round up of the last year and predictions for 2021.
https://lwn.net/Articles/840584/
Scanner:
Ad blocking made Google throw its toys out of the pram – and now even more control is being taken from us
https://www.theregister.com/2020/12/14/google_manifest_plugin_opinion/
Yep, 2020 was tough, but here are five things we’re relieved didn’t happen
https://www.sciencealert.com/sure-2020-was-bad-but-here-are-five-things-that-didn-t-happen
Union at Google parent Alphabet seeks bigger role for workers
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-workers-google-parent-alphabet-union.html
The “10,000-hour rule” was debunked again. That’s a relief.
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/8/23/20828597/the-10000-hour-rule-debunked
The compound that makes chili peppers spicy also boosts perovskite solar cell performance
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-compound-chili-peppers-spicy-boosts.html
New African potato resists the same disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-create-a-new-potato-with-complete-resistance-to-a-disastrous-disease
SolarWinds breach could reshape cybersecurity practices
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-01-solarwinds-breach-reshape-cybersecurity.html
Health to be on cyber-security’s front line in 2021
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-55411830
Hokusai’s Great Wave, sculpted in Lego blocks by Jumpei Mitsui
https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2020/12/13/hokusai-great-wave-lego/
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
17 January 2021
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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