Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
22 August 2021
A varied collection of stories this week: Apple spying on its customers, NHS sneakiness thwarted, living underground, the early universe and supermassive black holes, self driving cars, mopping up oil spills with human hair, California energy rules, and in the pictures section, a time lapse video. There’s also a quote from the poet Heinrich Heine.
Scanners has URLs pointing to material on the number pi, supernova, carbon emissions, HIV vaccine, conquering polio, and, finally, the Perl community hassles.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: No issue next week – it’s a holiday weekend here in the UK. We will be back on 5 September
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
The row over Apple spying on its users continues to rumble along. The algorithm Apple is using to scan people’s iPhones has already been duplicated and researchers have already found hash collisions, which in this case means that it’s possible for two pictures to have the same hash. So if an iPhone owner happens to have a picture on their iPhone that gives the same hash as a child pornography picture, the consequences hardly bear thinking about...
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2021/08/apples-neuralhash-algorithm-has-been-reverse-engineered.html
A few issues back I warned my UK readers that the UK National Health Service was trying to make yet another attempt to get its hands on the data in the patient files held by general practitioners, with a view to renting it out to private companies. In spite of being warned by the UK’s National Data Guardian that they needed to be more open this time round, another attempt was made to snaffle the data.
This time they picked the height of the second wave of the COV-19 pandemic in the UK to try their nefarious tricks, but were thwarted by the professionals in the health service. It’s now been shelved while there are ‘consultations’ and presumably to wait for the next opportunity when they think no one will notice!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/19/ndg_warned_about_gp_data/
Archeology:
Science Alert has an interesting piece discussing whether in history any human societies have truly lived underground. From what they say it seems to me that while no one has permanently lived underground, in certain circumstances the inhabitants of some cities have retreated underground – in some cases for as much as several years.
There’s also some nice pictures of underground cities that have been discovered.
https://www.sciencealert.com/in-all-of-human-history-have-any-societies-ever-truly-lived-underground
Astronomy & Cosmology:
As we get better quality observing instruments into space we can see further into the universe and in effect further back in time. One of the things that has surprised astronomers is that relatively early in the life of the universe, less than 10% of its current age, the universe had supermassive black holes. Given that, according to current theory, there wasn’t time for black holes to get that big, what’s going on?
Enter our old friend ‘Dark Matter’, stuff that no one has ever managed to actually identify! I hope readers will forgive me for being a little cynical, but it all sounds just a little bit too convenient for my taste. (And as far as I know, you can’t taste dark matter either!)
https://www.sciencealert.com/dark-matter-could-be-responsible-for-huge-black-holes-at-the-dawn-of-time
Cars:
It turns out that while everyone’s attention was focussed on tales of problems of Tesla’s ‘self-driving’ cars, another company, Mobileye – a division of Intel – was taking a different route, and has had its version driving around the streets of New York City for some time.
What I thought was fascinating was the difference in what the Tesla is trying to do and what Mobileye is trying to do. Tesla is trying to define and implement what a self-driving car will do, whereas Mobileye is trying to make its car behave as though it had a -human- driver. In a given situation it would try and figure out what a human would do in that situation.
I find that fascinating – I’ve always thought that Tesla will not really succeed in cities until pedestrians are banned and cities are re-laid out to only use Tesla style cars. In the meantime, I would really like to see how Mobileye ‘s car does on London streets, because in the UK there are no anti-jaywalking laws!
https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/08/13/self-driving-car-company-to-test-a-second-autonomous-vehicle-in-nyc/
Ecology:
Oil spills – one of the nastiest things that can happen to marine ecology. But there is some hope. Obviously the best option would be if there were no oil slicks, but it turns out that there is a fascinating way to clear up the surface slick.
Human hair!
It turns out that hair is absolute magic when it comes to slurping up nasty stuff like oil floating on water. It can absorb somewhere between three and nine times its own weight in oil and grease. I can attest to that – as a teenager I was plagued by greasy hair!
There are already something like 40,000 hair salons in the US that donate their hair clippings to a trust which has them woven into oil absorbent mats for use in spills (of which there, sadly, is no shortage).
Definitely a piece of sheer brilliance on the part of the people involved!
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/when-oil-spills-strike-call-in-the-hair-force/
Energy:
Now here’s an interesting little snippet. Turns out that Dell won’t ship its gaming level PCs to California. Why? Because the machines demand more energy than the local standards allow. I wonder how many other states (and countries) are going to institute similar regulations. The effect on Bitcoin-style mining activities, and thereby the overall effect on digital currencies relying on mining, is going to be interesting. I suspect it will speed up the move away from proof of work, possibly towards proof of stake...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/07/26/dell_energy_pcs/
Pictures:
This week a time lapse video of one of the most amazing drawings I’ve ever seen – well worth the six minutes and eleven seconds it takes!
https://youtu.be/kvcnZFu35xU
Quotes:
“Wherever books will be burned, men also, in the end, are burned.”
Heinrich Heine – German poet, 1797-1856
Scanner:
Pi calculated to ‘62.8 trillion digits’ with a pair of 32-core AMD Epyc chips, 1TB RAM, 510TB disk space
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/17/pi_world_record_challenged/
Elusive new type of supernova, long sought by scientists, actually exists
https://www.space.com/new-supernova-type-discovery
Suburban living the worst for carbon emissions – new research
https://theconversation.com/suburban-living-the-worst-for-carbon-emissions-new-research-149332
Moderna’s experimental HIV vaccine could begin human trials as soon as this week
https://www.sciencealert.com/moderna-s-experimental-hiv-vaccine-could-begin-human-trials-as-soon-as-this-week
Conquering Polio
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/conquering-polio-79115957/
Perl Foundation faces more departures after pausing Community Affairs Team
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/13/perl_resignations/
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
22 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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