Winding Down

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
3 October 2021

Welcome back. This week we have a number of things to draw your attention to, though not as many as I would really like... We have a wide selection of stuff, though, starting in the Essays section with the drop in male life expectancy in the national statistics – what it is and what it really means. There’s also an essay about the generational difference in the way the generation currently in higher education use their computers. Fascinating stuff.

Moving on there is material on death and crypto keys, and touching in holograms, the picture is amusing (well I thought so, anyway), and the quote is from Jacob Bronowski. Scanner has URLs for material on reservoir computing, edge computing, email stress, coffee prices, space cowboys, a hospital data case and finally the tombs of Saqqara.

Enjoy!

Alan Lenton

Publishing schedule: next issue 10 October...

Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.

Essays:

Statistics collected and analysed by the UK’s Office of National Statistics (ONS) show that, for the first time in 40 years, the life expectancy of men in the United Kingdom has fallen. In spite of that, there are actually record numbers of centenarians around this year – around 15,120 of them. This actually relates to the post World War I (yes, World War One, not World War Two) spike in births. The phrase ‘baby boomers’ takes on a whole new meaning!

The URL for this piece of information is that of the ONS’s blog. I’d really recommend the blog because it has wonderful explanations of what national statistical figures really mean, explained in a non-technical way!
https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2021/09/23/has-the-coronavirus-pandemic-caused-life-expectancy-in-the-uk-to-fall/

I’d also like to draw you attention to what I suspect is a very important essay in ‘The Verge’. It’s all about a massive change in the way people use computers if they were born in, or after the late 1990s. Old crusties, like myself, born before that time are familiar with the structure of files in a computer. We almost instinctively use directories to organise and retrieve our files. That was how things worked when we learned to use computers, and the learning was sort of related to how schools and businesses used filing cabinets.

But, in the early 2000s the first of the really effective search engines started to appear and were available for use by new users. The mental picture changed. Instead of seeing computer storage as a digital filing cabinet where you located your files via the structure of directories and folders, they saw the computer as a huge bucket of unsorted files in which they retrieved things via their preferred search engine.

Don’t laugh – it’s a viable way of handling your files, at least until you run into hundreds of thousands of files, and maybe even then it’s OK if your search engine and computer are good enough. Where there are problems is when pre-1990s and post-1990s people try to work together. That’s why the problems first became obvious in higher education where the students now coming in are post-1990 and the teachers are pre-1990.

I guess this problem will literally die out over time. However, it does at least give me some indication of why the tablet I recently bought is so difficult for me to figure out how to use it efficiently!

Death and Crypto:

In 2018 the heir to the Mellon Bank dynasty, Mathew Mellon, died, apparently of a heart attack. He left behind an estimated US$500 million in XRP cryptocurrency. Unfortunately, he never shared the location of the digital keys needed to access the fortune, so it very much looks like it’s a complete loss.

Sadly this is all too often the case – although maybe not with quite so much at stake. Digital currencies are especially a problem, but there’s a similar problem with tangible assets. The US State Department of Unclaimed Property is sitting on more than US$58 billion (yes – billion) of unclaimed assets – most of it because there was a death and the family didn’t know that the deceased owned the asset.

Fascinating!
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/billionaire-banking-heirs-cryptocurrency-fortune-after-todd-jarvis [ Via ADVFN]

Holograms:

One of the key problems with holograms is that although you can see the image in three dimensions, you can’t touch what you can see. This may well change. Researchers at the University of Glasgow have figured out a way to create the sense of touch using jets of air. They call it aerohaptics. It’s still at an early stage – you can’t use it for a long distance handshake yet, but the work has a lot of potential.

I suspect, though, that the early uses of this will be to provide the ability to feel objects remotely during discussions in things like engineering or artistry. Something to watch for though, and something to possibly worry about as it adds a new dimension to wrapping ourselves in our own ‘pods’ communicating only by electronics...
https://theconversation.com/we-created-holograms-you-can-touch-you-could-soon-shake-a-virtual-colleagues-hand-167478

Pictures:

I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this picture in the Smithsonian Magazine. I don’t normally, as regular readers will be aware, tell you to have a look at blank pictures. However...

The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg loaned artist Jens Haaning 534,000 Danish krone (the equivalent of US$84,000). They thought he was going to incorporate the money into a piece of artwork – something which he’d previously done. What they got, however, was two blank canvases titled ‘Take the Money and Run’.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/danish-artist-takes-museums-cash-for-blank-canvasses-titled-take-the-money-and-run-180978794/

Quotes:

“The essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to a pertinent answer.”
Jacob Bronowski

Scanner:

Scientists develop the next generation of reservoir computing
https://phys.org/news/2021-09-scientists-reservoir.html

Edge computing has a bright future, even if nobody’s sure quite what that looks like
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/21/future_of_edge_computing/

This simple fix can reduce everyone’s email stress, according to a new study
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-need-to-email-better-to-reduce-stress-in-the-workplace-study-finds

Coffee bean prices have doubled in the past year and may double again – what’s going on? [Could have a serious effect on programming! – AL]
https://theconversation.com/coffee-bean-prices-have-doubled-in-the-past-year-and-may-double-again-whats-going-on-169000

Criticism of space cowboys isn’t enough
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4253/1

Brit law firm files suit against Google and Deepmind over use of hospital patients’ data
https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/30/royal_free_deepmind_representative_action_uk/

Inside the Tombs of Saqqara
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/inside-tombs-saqqara-180977932/

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
3 October 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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