Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
25 July 2021
Lots to chew on in this week’s issue. A couple of essays to start – MOND versus Dark Matter, and Operation Crossroads, the US Bikini atom bomb tests 75 years ago. Following that heavy stuff we have material on Amazon recruitment, a heat diffusion material for computer chips, and no less than two pieces on statistics!
There are three items in the pictures section, one crushing, one wacky, and one pretty, and the quote is about evidence...
Scanner has material on a balloon born telescope, COV-19 and coffee, crypto libraries, restarting a power grid, AI tools for space research, and Windows 11.
Oh! And there’s a footnote floating around somewhere near the end...
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Normal – next issue next week, 1 August
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Essays:
I’m sure most of my readers have heard of ‘Dark Matter’, and how it affects the gravity and therefore the rotational speed of galaxies. It’s a nice idea, but the trouble is that in the 40 years or so that the theory of dark matter has been around, no one has been able to detect dark matter particles in the lab!
There are alternative theories, a number of them, and there is a very good essay about one of them, called MOND, in a recent issue of Aeon magazine. MOND stands for Modified Newtonian Dynamics, and is what it says on the label – a change to the theory of gravity. MOND doesn’t need dark matter to explain the anomalies in the rotational speed of galaxies, and makes a number of other predictions.
MOND is a heresy as far as most cosmologists are concerned, and is fiercely rebutted by partisans of the ‘Standard Model’, even though they’ve never managed to produce any dark matter for examination. Reading this essay reminded me irresistibly of Thomas S. Kuhn’s book, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’.*
The essay is by a MOND supporter, and says some really interesting things about the current state of cosmology....
https://aeon.co/essays/we-should-explore-alternatives-to-the-standard-model-of-cosmology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
And in a completely different area, The Conversation has a piece marking the 75th anniversary of ‘Operation Crossroads’. That was the name given to the major series of nuclear weapon tests that the USA carried out on Bikini Atoll, in the Pacific. The Americans were absolutely determined that they would film the tests from every conceivable angle and they bought up so much film stock that there was a world wide shortage – even Hollywood couldn’t get enough stock to make films!
The Crossroads ‘Baker’ test was the one that you see in virtually every film since that featured an atomic explosion. It features in the Godzilla films, and it’s the explosion at the end of Kubrick’s ‘Dr Strangelove.
A fascinating and revealing read.
https://theconversation.com/from-crossroads-to-godzilla-the-cinematic-legacies-of-the-first-postwar-nuclear-tests-163280
Amazon:
The online business, not the river! Have you ever taken a look at Amazon’s recruitment stuff? I hadn’t and so I was really surprised to discover the sheer scale of their activities on this front. Amazon’s vacancies page lists 56,000 jobs including 15,000 in software development.
Until I read this I just kind of assumed that Google were the tops in the recruitment stakes. Clearly I should have looked a little more closely!
Take a look at the Register’s report on the subject before you rush off though – Amazon/AWS’s software work methods would definite only suit a certain type of personality.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/21/amazon_aws_recruitment/
Computers:
There’s some interesting new stuff being research on keeping computer chips cool. Given the hernia inducing weight of the liquid cooling system on my old tower computer any article about keeping computers cool was bound to pique my interest! And one in techxplore that caught my eye sounds very interesting. It’s a novel semiconductor material that can be integrated into chips to draw heat away from the chip.
Take a look at the article. I suspect that in the first few iterations it will only go into ultra-high performance type chips, but once that’s working I suspect it will rapidly diffuse down the rest of the way...
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-06-heat-management-material-cool.html
Statistics:
Oh dear. The figures show that in the UK between 1 Feb and 21 June this year more than half the people who died from COVID-19 had received at least one dose of the vaccine. If you know what you are talking about then you will know that this is an improvement on previous figures. Why is the ratio of vaccinated deaths so high? Because the vaccines only provide about 90% protection, and more people have been vaccinated.
Think of it this way: if everybody in the UK was vaccinated, there would still be some deaths because the vaccine isn’t 100% effective. But, because everyone is vaccinated the ratio would be that 100% of the deaths would be people who were vaccinated!
Worth thinking about...
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-covid-deaths-uk-vaccinated.html
And while we are on the subject of statistics, I thought you might like to know that the UK Office for National Statistics actually have a blog, and it’s rather interesting. At the moment they’ve been working on their average weekly earning figures for the UK, and what the problems are that can skew the figures.
For instance, most people who lost their jobs due to the pandemic were low paid workers. So, the average earnings went up – even though no one got a pay rise! And that’s only one of the problems.
You know, if this pandemic keeps up, given all the figure that the politicians keep quoting, we will soon stop being an nation of shopkeepers and become a nation of statisticians! Perish the though!
https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2021/07/15/far-from-average-how-covid-19-has-impacted-the-average-weekly-earnings-data/
Pictures:
Malaysian Police crush crypto-mining kit in the video that’s part of this article. <Sigh!> I would have taken it off their hands free of charge!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/19/malaysian_police_crush_crytpomining_compiuters_with_steamroller/
Artists with wacky ideas have all the fun. Take a look at this one day ‘art installation’ – a giant balloon shaped like a man’s head that floated over Tokyo for the day...
https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2021/07/16/tokyo-giant-head-hot-air-balloon/
If your artistic tastes run to things a little more down to earth, or in this case ice, take a look at these entries to the World Ice Art Championships. My pick? The one entitled ‘The Cutest Dragon’.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/painstaking-art-ice-carving-180974107/
Quotes:
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Usually attributed to either former UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, or to Carl Sagan.
In fact it has a much longer history dating back to at least 1887. There is an interesting discussion of its history at
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/09/17/absence/
Scanner:
Balloon-borne telescope promises Hubble-like images on a budget
https://newatlas.com/space/superbit-balloon-borne-telescope/
COVID-19’s socio-economic fallout threatens global coffee industry [Gulp! – AL]
https://phys.org/news/2021-06-covid-socio-economic-fallout-threatens-global.html
You Really Shouldn’t Roll Your Own Crypto: An Empirical Study of Vulnerabilities in Cryptographic Libraries
https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.04940
Black Starts: How the power grid gets restarted
https://hackaday.com/2021/07/15/black-starts-how-the-grid-gets-restarted/
An AI Toolbox for Space Research
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2021/06/22/an-ai-toolbox-for-space-research/
http://spaceml.org
Windows 11: What we like and don’t like about Microsoft’s operating system so far
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/19/microsoft_windows_11_hands_on/
* I first read the book as a 19 year old physics undergraduate. I thought it was great at the time, especially its implication that for a scientific revolution to take place you needed to wait for the current generation of supporters – senior lectures, professors and their ilk – to die of old age! After two terms, I dropped out of university and started to go and do work on really interesting things...
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
25 July 2021
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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