Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
7 November 2021
Quite a wide variety of stuff for readers this week. We start with an essay on risk, before moving on to AI and datasets, an initiative from the Linux Foundation, and of, course, Facebook is closing it’s facial recognition down. There’s note about a court case which looks like a peek into the heart of how Google works, Mozilla is screwing over the Firefox browser, the first ever car journey, Dune, Malaria, antibiotics and bad colds.
As if that wasn’t enough we also have a couple of nice pictures, one relatively near and one far, far away. There’s a quote from satirist Jonathon Swift, and Scanner has pointers to 999 fakes and one genuine pic, Devuan 4, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a Bluetooth wristband, baseball’s big fix of 1919, Alder Lake, 500 terabytes of data into a CD-sized glass disc, and finally, cocaine in a PS5!
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next Issue 14 November.
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Essays:
I guess we have all taken risks at some time. I know I have, and some of them, taken when I was growing up in rural Devon, make me shudder to think of now! However, risk in the more formal sense as practiced by financiers, traders and their ilk was invented by 12th Century Genoese merchants.
Psyche has a fascinating essay on how what was to become the modern concept of financial risk started and spread throughout the Mediterranean. Fascinating stuff, take a look.
https://psyche.co/ideas/how-12th-century-genoese-merchants-invented-the-idea-of-risk
Artificial Intelligence:
I have to applaud an initiative by the Linux Foundation to develop a project called OpenBytes which aims to come up with a way of making opening up data sets less legally risky. The intention is that this will make it easier to share datasets in a way in which the ownership and rights remain with the owner, and they have some ethical control about how the sets are used.
Most of the datasets in the news recently have been ones involving people’s personal data, but there are many more, ranging from molecules to galaxies, and some structure (legal or otherwise) is needed to ensure their sharing and non-abuse. Non-techie people are waking up to the fact that while AI algorithms may be a problem, training data sets can have just as devastating an effect. Hopefully this initiative will, at least to some extent, deal with that issue too.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/02/linux_foundation_openbytes/
And while we are on the subject, I note that Facebook (aka Meta, but still referred to as Facebook by everyone I know) is shutting down its facial recognition software. Well it says that’s what it is doing... I guess it probably will shut down the system – it would be too easy for attempts to hide it to be leaked out.
It’s difficult to assess the damage done by the completely amoral Facebook and its ilk over the years. Future generations will be asking how we could let it happen.
https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/technology/1792695-facebook-will-shut-down-facial-recognition-system
Big Tech:
AI is the thing in the news at the moment, but bubbling under all this is a prosecution of Google in a New York court. The judge in the case has opened the prosecution’s statement of the case to the public. From all accounts it makes very interesting reading. It’s 173 pages long and alleges massive anti-competitive practices on Google’s part.
We are going to hear a lot more about this in the not too distant future...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/26/google_deliberately_throttled_ad_load/
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/01/google_opinion_column/
Browsers:
Mozilla’s browser, Firefox is heading for trouble! The latest incarnation, it seems, is dropping its XUL-based extension engine – the one feature that made the browser really stand out. In practical terms that means that 19,450 add-ons created by 14,274 people over the last 15 years are being junked. Clearly Mozilla has a death wish. (I moved from Firefox to using the Vivaldi browser some time ago. I like it, though the number of things in the settings can be a little intimidating at first!)
I suspect it’s only a matter of time before Mozilla makes another attempt to kill off Thunderbird, the top cross platform email client. I’ve used it for years – it’s excellent. Mozilla also tried to kill off the Rust language, but that’s doing really well on its own, as are earlier forks of Firefox. All told, Mozilla trashing attempts provide an excellent example of why open source works!
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/04/waterfox_firefox_fork/
Cars:
Did you know that the first ever car (horseless carriage) journey took place in London, England? Yep! Was in the year 1903 that the engineer Richard Trevithick, later to become famous for his work on the railways, invented and had built a steam carriage. It was in London that it carried either seven or eight passengers on a ten mile round trip through the streets of London.
During a later journey it was also involved in the world’s first car crash after something went wrong with the steering and it crashed into some railings, destroying the railings and seriously damaging the contraption!
https://londonist.com/london/history/the-world-s-first-car-journey-took-place-in-london-in-1803
Dune:
The release of the third version of Dune has excited a lot of people and engendered that hope that this version might be a better representation of the book(s). We shall see when the second half comes out...
In the meantime, the publicity swirling about inspired a group of data scientists to simulate the desert planet of Arrakis and see if humans could actually live on a planet with the climate of Dune. In case you’re wondering, it was a -climate- model, so they didn’t have to model the effect of spice :)
I’m not going to tell you the result – you will have to go and look at the model yourself to see whether humans can live on Arrakis!
https://theconversation.com/dune-we-simulated-the-desert-planet-of-arrakis-to-see-if-humans-could-survive-there-170181
Health:
I don’t particularly like the Chinese government, but I have to admit that the news, certified by the World Health Organisation, that China has eliminated Malaria is something to congratulate them on. To give you some idea of the size of that achievement you need to know that China used to have 30 million (yes, 30 million) cases annually. Fantastic.
I suspect the Chinese don’t tolerate people who refuse treatment....
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/china-eliminates-malaria-history-tu-youyou/
It looks like biomedical engineers are on to something searching the human genome as a data set. The idea is that rather than seeking new antibiotics outside humans, the genome is a database to search for things that code for building substances the body already produces which help fight infection.
It’s an intriguing idea and a fantastic way of getting new possibilities much faster than the current methods based on chemical intuition and experiments. Fingers crossed that it works.
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-encrypted-peptides-wellspring-natural-antibiotics.html
And finally, not so good news. Winter is coming on and the common cold seems to be somewhat more virulent than usual. So, The Conversation magazine asked consultant microbiologist Fidelma Fitzpatrick to explain what’s going on. Her explanation is really good, well reasoned and from a known expert, rather than Facebook or Twitter! Take a look...
https://theconversation.com/qanda-is-the-common-cold-really-much-worse-this-year-170338
Pictures:
A couple of pictures to look at this week.
The first is a picture of a swamp in Russia. Very severe, a classic landscape.
https://photocontest.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/the-cold/
The other is just a little bit further away and possibly hotter. It’s an astronomy picture which includes both the Horsehead and Flame nebulas.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap211103.html
Quotes:
This week’s Quote is from Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) an Anglo-Irish poet and satirist
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein, beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
From the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Scanner:
For Sale: One real Warhol print, hidden among 999 fakes [I love it and it’s all above board! – AL]
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/art-pranksters-sell-one-real-warhol-print-amid-999-fake-ones-180978975/
Devuan debuts version 4.0 – as usual without a hint of the hated systemd
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/15/devuan_4_chimaera_released/
Busted! Astronomers confirm the Large Magellanic Cloud totally ate another galaxy
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-large-magellanic-cloud-totally-once-ate-another-galaxy
Reg scribe spends week being watched by government Bluetooth wristband, emerges to more surveillance
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/19/7_days_with_singapore_shn/
World Series: The sports data pioneer who spotted baseball’s big fix of 1919
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/baseball/59078788
Intel claims first Alder Lake chip is the fastest desktop gaming silicon in the world
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/27/intel_alder_lake/
High-speed laser writing method could pack 500 terabytes of data into CD-sized glass disc [I want one! – AL]
https://phys.org/news/2021-10-high-speed-laser-method-terabytes-cd-sized.html
Australian cops find cocaine stash in PS5 from Portugal
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/03/cocaine_ps5_australia/
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
7 November 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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