Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
5 September 2021
Welcome back – we have a variety of stuff for you to read this week, even though it’s been rather quiet recently. There’s an update on the Apple iPhone scanning affair, a very sad site relating to anti-vaxxers who died of COV-19, the US army’s portable nuclear reactors, social media and trolls, wannabe astronauts, and an interesting supply chain problem. There are pictures of the last blue moon until 2023, and a couple of quotes – this time from songs!
Finally, Scanner has URLs pointing to material on business air travel, Microsoft and blockchain, hype cycles, computation and neurons, 30 years of Linux, autonomous vehicles and the environment, and finally Windows 11.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next Issue 12 September.
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Updates:
Apple’s plans to scan people’s iPhone for what they consider to be needed to ‘protect’ kids from pornography etc got a lot of people wound up, since it represents a massive breach of customer privacy. Even Scientific American – not what you would consider to a left wing or libertarian rag – printed an article suggesting that the proposal would do more harm than good!
In fact, the whole thing has blown up in Apple’s face so badly that even they have now backed down and announced the postponing of the proposal. I can’t remember the last time Apple backed down on anything, which gives some idea of the scale of the backlash!
In mega-corporation speak that usually means one of two things. Either the idea will be dropped without them ever admitting that’s the case, or waiting till the furore dies down and doing it without mentioning it to anyone...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/apples-new-child-safety-technology-might-harm-more-kids-than-it-helps/
https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/09/03/apple-backs-down-on-csam-features-postpones-launch
COVID-19:
The saddest story of the week was the discovery of a site which had pictures of anti-vaxxers who had died of COVID-19. It’s easy to say, “Serves them right”, but it’s not really that easy. These are still people, family members, someone’s friends, deluded in our opinion, maybe, but did they really -deserve- to die? I think not.
Personally, I think that the attitude and contradictions of governments has a lot to answer for, but I guess that’s a whole different story.
https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com
Energy:
The recent news that the US Army is experimenting with portable nuclear reactors for battlefield use is raising a few eyebrows about the possible dangers. However, not that many people realise that it’s not the Army’s first try at using portable reactors.
In fact, their first attempt goes back 60 years when they installed one at Camp Century in Greenland, about 800 miles south of the North Pole. It was not a success, even though nobody was shooting at it. In fact it became so leaky and dangerous that the base had to be abandoned. When the base was shut down eight years later the reactor was so radioactive that it had to be buried in a nuclear waste dump
Now the US, Greenland and Denmark are at odds over who is going to clean up the remaining mess as global warming melts the ice...
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/camp-century-portable-nuclear-reactor
Social Media:
Gizmodo has an interesting report about social media. It turns out that social media itself does not create trolls. Instead, it gives them an online megaphone on which they can broadcast their inanities! I’m not sure how you could use this info to deprive them of their ‘megaphone’, but hopefully someone will think of a ways soon...
https://gizmodo.com/online-trolls-actually-just-assholes-all-the-time-stud-1847575210
Space:
Fascinating! Space.com reports that the European Space Agency has been absolutely inundated with applications for people wanting to be astronauts. I’m not sure how many astronauts they were actually looking for, but there were 23,000 – yes twenty-three thousand – applications!
A clear case of “Stop the planet, I wanna get off!”
https://www.space.com/european-astronaut-applications-esa-2021-delays
Supply Chains:
NASA recently had to postpone a Landsat satellite launch because of a shortage of liquid nitrogen. The shortage was caused by a shortage of medical grade liquid oxygen. Yes, you read that correctly. I too did a double take the first time I read it.
What happened is that hospitals were running out of the oxygen they needed to cope with the upsurge in cases caused by the delta variant of COVID-19. So, of course, the suppliers increased their output of liquid oxygen to catch up with the demand. So far so good. However, the liquid oxygen has to get from the supplier to the hospital and that involves tanker lorries, which are heavy vehicles. And, of course they needed drivers.
You can’t just get into and start driving a heavy goods vehicle (HGV), you need to be trained and take a special test. But even if you have an HGV license, you need still more training to drive a tanker which is carrying liquid gasses under pressure. So, only a relatively small number of people can actually deliver this stuff to the hospital and the likes of NASA.
And, of course that small group are as liable as anyone else to go down with COVID-19 – and the priority for the remaining drivers is hospitals to help save the dangerously ill in intensive care.
So that’s how a shortage of liquid nitrogen was caused by a shortage of liquid oxygen in the county’s hospitals!
https://www.space.com/nasa-landsat-9-earth-satellite-launch-delay
Pictures:
Space.com has some rather interesting pictures of the last blue moon of the year, which was on 22 August. Actually it’s the last blue moon until 2023. In fact it’s not blue at all – even I can tell that even though I’m partially colour blind! Still there are some nice pictures – take a look and see.
https://www.space.com/blue-moon-august-2021-photos
Quotes:
While I was listening to some music over the holiday there were a couple of songs with lyrics that seemed to sum up all that the pandemic represents, at least from my point of view – even though they were written long before the COVID-19 came into existence...
“Lately it seems to me – what a long strange trip it’s been” – The Grateful Dead – Trucking
“Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
‘Relax,’ said the night man
‘We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like
But you can never leave!’“
- The Eagles – Hotel California
Scanner:
‘Forever Changed’: CEOs are dooming business travel — maybe for good
https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/business/forever-changed-ceos-are-dooming-business-travel-maybe-good
Microsoft wants to use Ethereum blockchain to fight piracy [via ADVFN newsletter]
https://cointelegraph.com/news/microsoft-wants-to-use-ethereum-blockchain-to-fight-piracy
Gartner Gartner on the wall, which is the hypest cycle of them all
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/24/gartner_hype_cycle/
How computationally complex is a single neuron?
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-computationally-complex-is-a-single-neuron-20210902/
30 years of Linux: OS was successful because of how it was licensed, says Red Hat [You may well disagree with this! -AL]
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/25/30_years_of_linux_red_hat/
The environmental trade-offs of autonomous vehicles
https://phys.org/news/2021-05-environmental-trade-offs-autonomous-vehicles.html
Windows 11 will roll out from October 5 as Microsoft hypes new hardware
https://www.theregister.com/2021/08/31/windows_11_rollout_date_android/
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
5 September 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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