Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
8 August 2021
Right! I seem to be back on schedule this week. Apologies for last week’s no show – this week’s version is action packed to make up for it! We start with an update on our old friends Boeing, then there are three essays for you to read, if the fancy takes you. The first is about “hygiene theatre”. the second is about controlling the internet, and the third (and most fascinating, in my opinion) is about stupidity and clever people.
Next is a piece about the ‘travels’ of Carlos Ghosn, former head of Nissan and Renault, a piece on the so-called ‘Moore’s Law’, and some Cov-19 stuff – flawed published papers, a possible drug that might help in hospitalised cases, and finally a piece on the disastrous attempts to use AI to help defeat the virus.
Pictures are from the 2021 iPhone Photography Awards and there are a couple of quotes – one about the so-called ‘herd immunity’ and one about repeating the same thing over and over.
Finally, Scanner has pointers to material on iPhone scanning, caffeine and bees, Windows 11 (beware of Microsofties bearing presents), AI and protein structures, the first two hours of MTV, ransomware, spaceport traffic management, and ‘Ever Given’.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Normal – next issue next week August 15th
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
Well, I guess we can always rely on Boeing to provide some sort of problem to report in this section! This week the headline in Space.com said it all – “Boeing’s Starliner heads back to hangar after valve issue thwarts test launch for NASA”. These guys just do not seem to get their act together...
https://www.space.com/boeing-starliner-oft2-leaves-launch-pad-again
Essays:
Our first essay this week is a piece from the UK’s Guardian newspaper about how what it calls “hygiene theatre” gives a false sense of security over COV-19 infection spread. We are one and a half years into the pandemic, and after about 6 months it was pretty conclusively demonstrated that the transmission of the virus is by airborne particles.
In spite of this, a lot of people believe that they are taking precautions about the spread of the virus by washing their hands, and that masks, which really do restrict the spread of airborne particles, are some sort of optional extra. First and foremost among the purveyors of this myth is none other than the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson...
Incidentally, I happen to think washing hands more often is a good thing for a general improvement in hygiene, but it doesn’t stop the spread of COV-19!
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/jul/12/hygiene-theatre-how-excessive-cleaning-gives-us-a-false-sense-of-security
The second essay I’d like to draw your attention to is about the internet. It’s relatively short and discusses the fact that in the mid-2000s the internet changed from something built on open source protocols to being built on a few large platforms such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook, which has given them an enormous amount of control over the internet.
Actually I think the break took place long before the 2000s. In my opinion it happened with the rise of the ‘internet providers’, who only allowed you to view the internet and not run public sites over your personal computer.
The piece is very interesting and suggests that blockchain is the way forward. I think that’s a possibility – and it would certainly restore some power to the owners of the personal devices. Perhaps! Remember that governments are involved too. They may not like the relatively untrammelled power of the big internet companies, but they would much rather deal with a few large companies than with millions of citizens!
https://a16z.com/2021/01/14/internet-control-crypto-decentralization-community-owned-operated-networks/
And for something completely different, my final recommendation in this section is an essay in Psyche about why it is that really smart people can be so really stupid! I found this piece absolutely fascinating, and it made a lot of sense. Highly recommended.
https://psyche.co/ideas/why-some-of-the-smartest-people-can-be-so-very-stupid
Big Business:
If you follow the financial news, then you’ll be aware of the high level problems revolving around Nissan. So for a bit of light reading I thought I’d draw your attention to a piece on the BBC web site about Carlos Ghosn, former boss of Nissan and Renault escaping from Japan in a rock band flight case!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-57760993
Computers & chips:
The Register (El Reg to its aficionados) has an interesting piece on the evolution and possible future of silicon chips. One of the things that makes it so interesting is that it explains how chip managers have managed to stay ahead of ‘Moore’s Law’ (which isn’t actually a law, legal or physical), and how they aim to continue doing so, albeit more slowly.
Personally, I would have thought that the next thing needed to continue was obvious, having built chips in one, two and three dimensions to stay ahead, the next move must be to start building chips in four dimension – by adding time. Just think, for instance, how much easier error correction would be if chips could move backwards in time as well as forwards!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/05/moores_law_what_next/
Coronavirus:
You might like to take a look at a couple of interesting papers I came across on the medicalXpress website. The first is about how flawed scientific papers are fuelling misinformation about COV-19. It’s really an alarming picture.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-07-flawed-scientific-papers-fueling-covid-.html
The second is a rather cautious piece of what could be good news. Scientists have been testing existing approved drugs to see if they will help COV-19 patients, and they think they have found one that might help. At the moment the work is basically all in-lab, but they are moving to human trials as soon as possible. The drug is readily available, taken orally, and not expensive.
Fingers crossed!
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2021-08-drug-sars-cov-infection-cent-reveals.html
And while we are on the topic of COV-19, a report published in MIT Technology Review points out that hundreds of predictive AI tools have been built to help with COV-19, but none of them work.
It’s not just that sometime the algorithms were inappropriate, it’s also the training given to the AI. One, for instance, ended up being trained to ‘think’ that patients scanned lying down had COV-19, while those standing up were clear. Another was deciding who was infected by what font the scans were annotated in!
All AI researchers should read this piece. It looks like the article is subscription only but with a bit of persistence it eventually let me in and told me that I had two free stories remaining. It was well worth the couple of minutes it took!
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/30/1030329/machine-learning-ai-failed-covid-hospital-diagnosis-pandemic/
Pictures:
Just one set of pictures this week – from the 2021 iPhone Photography Awards. Not a particularly inspiring selection, but I though 19, 20, 21 and 24 were nice and that 11 and 12 were maybe. Incidentally, my warped mind noted that the in pic 24 the shepherds carrying the lambs were wearing sheepskin jackets...
https://newatlas.com/photography/iphone-photography-awards-2021-winner-gallery/
Quotes:
“..since everyone is talking about herd immunity but very few have actually studied it, that I have to explain that the concept of herd immunity was discovered by vets, and they were talking about an actual herd. (I should also point out that, in the initial paper on the subject, they weren’t talking about vaccinations as much as which animals were immune to a certain disease, and their initially recommended course was not vaccinating the non-immune, but culling them first. Taking that approach in the current situation might have a very beneficial effect on vaccine hesitancy.)...”
– Taken from a discussion on Traffic Analysis and Herd Immunity in Risks Digest 32.77
“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results.”
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/03/23/same/ [for an investigation into who might have said this first! -AL]
Scanner:
Apple is about to start scanning iPhone users’ devices for banned content, warns professor
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/05/apple_csam_scanning/
A caffeine buzz helps bees learn to find specific flowers
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-caffeine-bees-specific.html
Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/windows_11_comes_bearing_thaas/
New artificial intelligence software can compute protein structures in 10 minutes
https://phys.org/news/2021-07-artificial-intelligence-software-protein-minutes.html
Watch the first two hours of MTV’s inaugural broadcast (August 1, 1981) [Pretty dire! – AL]
https://www.openculture.com/2021/08/watch-the-first-two-hours-of-mtvs-inaugural-broadcast-august-1-1981.html
How do we stamp out the ransomware business model? Ban insurance payouts for one, says ex-GCHQ director
https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/09/ban_cyber_insurance_payouts/
Spaceport traffic management
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4142/1
Ever Given, big boat that blocked Suez Canal, finally allowed to leave
https://boingboing.net/2021/07/07/ever-given-big-boat-that-blocked-suez-canal-finally-allowed-to-leave.html
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
8 August 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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