Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
9 May 2021
This week’s issue contains quite a wide variety of pieces, starting with an essay on music and science. We then continue with 3D printed art, an ERP story for programmers, coffee, ever smaller semi-conductors, COVID-19 authoritative statistics, and increasing surveillance using Wi-Fi and devices like phones.
Pictures includes videos on bladeless fans, the world’s longest footbridge, and jet suits. There is also an URL pointing to 61 of the best Hubble Space Telescope pictures.
The quote is Napoleon I of France – his take on the English.
Scanner is extended a bit this week to help catch up with the recent missed weeks. There are URLs pointing to material on price collusion with AI systems, an age discrimination court case, terrorists and cryptocurrencies, management consultants, 32-bit rollover, SARS-CoV-2, the Beirut explosion, and finally the Internet of Beer!
Stay Safe,
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next issue 16 May. No issue 30 May (UK Spring Bank Holiday).
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Essays:
I thought I would draw your attention to an interesting essay in Aeon entitled ‘Quantum Music’. It’s a look at the role of music in physics – many of the great scientists in history were also musicians. There’s also the matter of dissonance, both in musical scales and in the physics. The piece is an unusual one with a different perspective from any I’ve encountered before. Take a look...
https://aeon.co/essays/uniting-the-mysterious-worlds-of-quantum-physics-and-music
Art:
Those of you with 3D printers might like to try your hand at printing a few of the more famous (and not so famous) art objects from history, such as Rodin’s Thinker, or maybe Michelangelo’s David. The organisation ‘Scan the World’ has 3D printing plans for no less 18,000 different art objects, and the list is growing. Better still – it’s all open source!
Of course you would need a pretty big printer to make yourself a copy of Michelangelo’s David to go in the hallway but there are smaller objects too, and a thriving community to help when you need it.
https://www.openculture.com/2021/04/3d-print-18000-famous-sculptures-statues-artworks-rodins-thinker-michelangelos-david-more.html
https://www.myminifactory.com/scantheworld/
Big Business:
The company GSK is a classic example of world wide big pharma, and ten years ago it started a massive ERP system, one of the aims of which was to unify the way the various business processes happened. Now, ten years down the line, the whole process is considered to have been pretty successful.
However...
A recent closer look at the system as it is now working, using a process mining tool, revealed the interesting information that there are somewhere around 28,000 different variations for the process of running a sales order!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/20/gsk_sap_process_mining/
Climate:
I was pleased to note that a recent discovery of a wild species of coffee which is more resistant to climate change. Not only that, but its flavour is close to that of arabica coffee, which will keep up the standards. Phew!
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-rare-wild-west-african-plant-could-save-coffee-from-climate-change
Computers:
Wow! IBM has announced new 2 nanometer semiconductors. That is impressive, especially when you consider that the current industry chip size is 7-nanometers. Once this goes into full scale production the results are going to be very interesting, both for devices that require relatively little power and for heavy duty work where the amount of power being used is not the main issue.
This has the potential for a major change in the industry, if IBM can get it economically into production, and other chip fabs can follow suit.
https://newatlas.com/computers/ibm-2-nm-chips-transistors/
COVID-19:
The UK’s Office of National Statistics has now reported the official UK death figures for 2020. There’s nothing particularly surprising about them, but the blog entry does include figures, graphs and explanations of how they are worked out. You probably know most of it, but it’s worth keeping a note of the URL in case you get into an argument about the figures!
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/deathsathomeincreasedbyathirdin2020whiledeathsinhospitalsfellexceptforcovid19/2021-05-07
Devices:
Two of the device stories I picked up on over the last couple of weeks I found quite disturbing, carrying nasty pointers to a ubiquitous monitoring future. The first is the work being done by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) to develop a standard to use the signals from Wi-Fi to measure the range, velocity, direction, motion, presence, and proximity of people and objects. Needless to say, the discussion does not include security and privacy!
The second is a piece about what information your phones are sending back to Apple and Google respectively – even if you told them not to. As the article explains, “Within 10 minutes of starting up, a Google Pixel handset sent about 1MB of data to Google, compared to 42KB of data sent to Apple in a similar startup scenario. And when the handsets sit idle, the Pixel will send about 1MB every 12 hours, about 20x more than the 52KB sent over the same period by an idle iPhone.”
I may be paranoid, but it seems to me that the technologies for the surveillance state are moving into place...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/03/31/wifi_devices_monitoring/
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/01/android_ios_location/
Pictures:
Quite a collection of pictures this week. First, we start with a video of James Dyson explaining how the bladeless fan works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8he8afjQyd8
Then we have a real treat – 61 of the best Hubble telescope pictures!
https://www.space.com/best-hubble-space-telescope-images.html
Next, another video, and this is one I can’t watch, because I absolutely hate heights. It’s a video of the world’s longest footbridge, which has just opened in Portugal. And it’s a ‘see-though’ bridge...
https://boingboing.net/2021/05/02/portugal-just-opened-the-worlds-longest-suspended-footbridge-and-its-not-for-people-afraid-of-heights.html
And the final entry is also a video, one about UK marines using jet suits to board an underway warship. I suspect it might be useful for French fishermen who are inclined to hang around the Channel Islands to take a look at this.
https://boingboing.net/2021/05/02/jet-packin-royal-marines-board-a-ship-like-iron-man.html
Quote:
And in the aftermath of Brexit and the Channel Islands/French Fishermen affair, I can but quote Napoleon I’s take on the Brits -
“England is a nation of shopkeepers.”
Source – The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fifth Edition
Scanner:
Looking for ways to prevent price collusion with AI systems
https://techxplore.com/news/2020-11-ways-price-collusion-ai.html
Age discrimination class-action against HP and HPE gets green light to proceed
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/16/age_discrimination_classaction_against_hp/
Terrorists still raise money through crypto, but the impact is limited
https://cointelegraph.com/news/terrorists-still-raise-money-through-crypto-but-the-impact-is-limited [Story via ADVFN newsletter]
Research finds UK NHS use of management consultants is a harmful habit
https://phys.org/news/2021-02-nhs-habit.html
How Berkshire Hathaway broke Nasdaq’s 32-bit code with its monster share price [special item for programmers – AL]
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/07/bug_warren_buffett_rollover/
SARS-CoV-2 circulated undetected months before first COVID-19 cases in Wuhan, China: study
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-03-sars-cov-circulated-undetected-months-covid-.html
The tragic Beirut explosion was so violent, it disturbed Earth’s ionosphere [I seem to remember reading about some thing similar during mass bombing raids on Germany in World War II – AL]
https://www.sciencealert.com/last-year-s-blast-in-lebanon-was-so-violent-it-literally-shook-the-roof-of-the-world
OK, so we don’t have a flying car yet, but this is possibly even better: The Internet of Beer
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/23/internet_of_beer/
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 May2021
Alan Lenton is a retired 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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