Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
19 December 2021
Happy Christmas – herewith the final edition of Winding Down for 2021. It’s not been a good year, but one could hope that the next one will be at least a little better... And my thanks to those who dropped me a get well soon email :)
There’s a wide spread of material this week: we look at tech obsolescence and climate change, inventing diseases, tachyons, Anti 5-G jewellery, vaccine terminology, Visa versus Amazon, replicating published research, robot reproduction, and, of course, Log4j. There’s a whole bunch of pictures, and a bunch of quotes that I came across recently.
Finally, there are URLs pointing to disaster task allocation, AI debating ethics, the first stars in the universe, Amazon fined €1.13bn, anti-maskers generate income for a restaurant, and IMS crypto warning (pinch of salt available), battery powered trains, and a supply chain crisis silver lining.
Have fun!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next Issue 9 January 2022.
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi, Barb and Erin for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Essays:
The Register has an interesting piece by Rupert Goodwin about tech CEOs and the choices they make that affect climate change. I don’t normally like Goodwin’s writing, but this piece raises important questions about the role of tech companies in manufacturing designed to be unrepairable and have a life of a couple of years.
That’s not just direct manufacturing either. Think of Microsoft’s latest Windows ‘upgrade’, with a requirement for a majority of users to buy a new computer to run it, when there is nothing wrong with their ‘old’ ones.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/15/tech_must_help_save_planet/
See also: https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4298/1
The interestingly named UnHerd has a useful piece on the World Health Organisation inventing new diseases – in this case Internet Gaming Disorder. I suspect (as does the author) this is pressure from China, whose opposition to computer games is legendary. My game, Federation, was blocked by the ‘Great Firewall’ in the 1990s.
The problem is from the Chinese bureaucracy’s point of view that most games, whether they set out to or not, tend to promote independent decision making. That’s not good for the future of bureaucracy!
https://unherd.com/2021/11/whats-china-got-against-gaming/
Finally, in this section, I’d like to point you to a rather interesting little essay about tachyons. Tachyons are one of the most interesting particles in the particle ‘zoo’ – they seem to violate the light in a vacuum speed limit and causality! Have a read and see what you thing of the little beasts.
https://www.space.com/tachyons-facts-about-particles
Conspiracies:
Anti-5G conspirators in Holland have taken to wearing what they call ‘Anti-5G’ necklaces for protection. You might think this is just a harmless fad. Well, I guess it is a fad, but it’s simply not harmless, since the things have turned out to be radioactive.
Yes, really!
They aren’t massively radioactive, but wearing them next to your skin for, say, a year or more is definitely not a good idea. These things are advertised as ‘quantum pendants’ and ‘negative ion’ jewellery and, unlike 5G equipment, do emit ionising radiation...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/17/anti-5g-necklaces-radioactive-dutch-nuclear-experts-quantum-pendants
Coronavirus:
Earlier this month I spotted an article about vaccines and the terms used by professionals. I found it very useful, and since ‘The Conversation’ has a good reputation for getting pieces written by genuine experts in the fields that they cover, I thought readers might find it helpful for navigating the jargon.
https://theconversation.com/how-effective-are-vaccines-against-omicron-an-epidemiologist-answers-6-questions-173554
Credit Cards:
Well this is a turn up for the books – Visa, top dog in credit cards versus Amazon, top dog in consumer retail. Amazon have announced that from 19 January 2022 they will no longer accept Visa cards in payment for goodies. Amazon have finally run up against a supplier they couldn’t browbeat! I await the outcome of this battle with bated breath, though I predict that both sides will claim a victory, whatever the outcome...
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/17/amazon_visa_drop/
Research:
The Register reports that most published research in science and technology cannot be replicated. Why? Because not enough detail is provided on the software used in the study. Some of the missing info is in the form of short scripts, but in others it is much more complex. Research using major apparatus like the Large Hadron Collider or the Square Kilometre Array uses millions of lines of code! This sort of research is quite simply unverifiable.
Not a good state of affairs.
https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/25/research_software_inquiry/
Robots:
What would you say if I told you researchers have found a way to get a type of robot to reproduce? I must admit that my first mental image was of those lurid 1950s SciFi magazine covers with a robot reaching for a half dressed young lady! But fear not – these robots are free floating frog stem cells which can cluster together to assemble new stem cells.
This, I suspect could be the start of some thing important.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/scientists-unveiled-the-worlds-first-living-robots-last-year-now-they-can-now-reproduce-180979150/
Security:
I guess all of my readers will know about the Apache Log4j vulnerability by now. Not exactly the Xmas present sysadmins were expecting. It’s a particularly bad and very widespread problem. Why it is such a problem is well explained in a Google security blog which you can find here:
https://security.googleblog.com/2021/12/understanding-impact-of-apache-log4j.html
Pictures:
Here are a whole bunch of pictures to provide some nice eye-candy over the Xmas period...
Some aerial pictures of London.
https://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/aerial-images-london-helicopter-2021
A selection of pictures from the recent total solar eclipse in Antarctica – including a time lapse sequence.
https://www.sciencealert.com/antarctica-s-solar-eclipse-does-not-disappoint-in-these-dazzling-photos
https://www.space.com/2021-solar-eclipse-timelapse-video
A cable car ride in San Francisco in the 1960s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vml6vq3X-Js
An artists impression of the Quetzalcoatlus – the largest flying animal to ever exist on earth – with a 40 foot wingspan!
https://phys.org/news/2021-12-fleshing-bones-quetzalcoatlus-earth-largest.html
Finally an amazing video shot by a drone swooping through a campus – and it’s all done in a single shot, not multiple bits added together – very clever.
https://boingboing.net/2021/12/16/brilliant-shot-of-drone-swooping-through-campus.html
Quotes:
A selection of quotes this week:
“‘Spinoff” technological benefits for the domestic economy? “But this is an old argument: Spend $75 billion to send Apollo astronauts to the Moon, and we’ll throw in a free non-stick frying pan. One can clearly see that if we are after frying pans, we can invest the money directly and save almost all of that $75 billion.” – Carl Sagan
https://daily.jstor.org/should-we-go-to-mars-carl-sagan-had-thoughts/
“Upon their dispersals in Central and Western Europe by around 42,000 years ago, groups of Homo sapiens started to manipulate mammoth tusks for the production of pendants and mobiliary objects, like carved statuettes, at times decorated with geometric motifs. In addition to lines, crosses and hashtags...”
Hashtags! Hashtags are over 40,000 years old? Wow! – AL]
https://phys.org/news/2021-11-earliest-evidence-humans-jewelery-eurasia.html
And for those of you trying to build fusion reactors...
“Try to contain a loop of jelly inside a ring of rubber bands to get a sense of the challenge.”
https://www.sciencealert.com/korea-s-cutting-edge-fusion-reactor-breaks-its-previous-record-for-swirling-plasma
Scanner:
An online method to allocate tasks to robots on a team during natural disaster scenarios
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-10-online-method-allocate-tasks-robots.html
We invited an AI to debate its own ethics in the Oxford Union – what it said was startling
https://theconversation.com/we-invited-an-ai-to-debate-its-own-ethics-in-the-oxford-union-what-it-said-was-startling-173607
Astronomers may have just found evidence of the very first stars in our universe
https://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-may-have-just-found-evidence-of-the-first-stars-in-the-universe
Amazon fined €1.13bn by Italy’s antitrust authorities for abusing its power
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/amazon_fined_italy/
A restaurant profits from anti-masker 1-star review in the most devilish way
https://boingboing.net/2021/11/23/a-restaurant-profits-from-anti-masker-1-star-review-in-the-most-devilish-way.html
International Monetary Fund warns crypto-related risks could soon become systemic
https://www.theregister.com/2021/12/10/imf_calls_for_crypto_regulation/
Researchers suggest battery-powered trains could very soon be economically viable
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-11-battery-powered-economically-viable.html
The supply chain crisis has a silver lining – container ships should be decarbonised faster
https://theconversation.com/the-supply-chain-crisis-has-a-silver-lining-container-ships-should-be-decarbonised-faster-170391
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
19 December 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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