Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
30 January 2022
Sigh! This week Microsoft offered me the ‘privilege’ of ‘upgrading’ to Windows 11. I put it off for a number of reasons. I’ll wait and see what comes out in the wash when other people try it. Nothing that it offered interested me. Sigh. I hate this sort of crap. The only thing I might be interested in is the Linux stuff, but they didn’t mention it in their ‘features’ blurb. I was wondering how easy it is to install and use the Microsoft version...
Anyway – on with the show!
Cheers!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: No issue next week – it’s my birthday this coming week (and don’t ask how old I am...) That means the next issue is due on 13 February.
Credits: Thanks to readers Fi and Barb for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
Essays:
How did the Universe get started? We do know there was a ‘Big Bang’, but how did the bang happen? These questions have a long history, and lots of speculation – after all none of us were actually there to witness it! There are no shortages of theories, some of which we can actually rule out, but we can’t prove that any of the remaining ones are correct.
I find the topic fascinating and recently I came upon an essay explaining what we have figured out and giving a good account of physicist Roger Penrose’s controversial theory of a cyclic universe – one that keeps being born, existing, dying and because of the nature of its death, being reborn.
Fancy reading a bit more about it? Science Alert has a very good essay on the topic – which I’d recommend to anyone interested.
https://www.sciencealert.com/how-did-the-big-bang-explode-out-of-nothing-this-could-be-the-way
Book Burning. I bet when you read those words you immediately thought of Hitler’s Germany or Ray Bradbury’s book ‘Fahrenheit 451’. It turns out though that book (and before the printing press, manuscript) burning goes back a long way in history. For instance, in 213 BC, Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered a bonfire of books, and he was by no means the first ruler to do so.
The Smithsonian online magazine has an interesting essay about the history of book burning, including, I discovered, the Brits burning the American Library of Congress during the war of 1812!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/brief-history-book-burning-printing-press-internet-archives-180964697/
Astronomy & Cosmology:
What do you think would happen if the Earth stopped spinning? I confess that I had visions of every one flying off into space! That’s not the case it seems – gravity would continue to hold you firmly in place. But there would, of course, be a lot of other changes. For instance days and nights would each last six months!
Want to know more? Then take a look at this piece in ‘The Conversation’.
https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-could-the-earth-ever-stop-spinning-and-what-would-happen-if-it-did-174132
Most explosions in the universe are a long way away – for some definition of long! We can be pretty thankful for that, given the likely effects of a very nearby explosion. However, in the early 1840s a nearer than usual star did explode and briefly become the brightest star we could see.
It was the binary system Eta Carinae, and at a mere 7,500 light years away it became the brightest star in the sky. It also ejected a load of its mass, and it’s now morphed into a beautiful nebula known as the Homunculus Nebula.
Using the Hubble and Chandra space telescopes astronomers have produced a computer model of the nebula that shows what it looks like at different wavelengths. And, what’s more they’ve made a video of the results.
Want to know more or see the pictures? Point your web browser at the ‘Science Alert’ web site and take a look!
https://www.sciencealert.com/new-visualizations-delve-into-one-of-the-brightest-star-explosions-humanity-has-ever-seen
Coronavirus:
During my most recent trawling around the net for material, I recently started to notice claims that ‘only’ 17,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the UK. This struck me as being just a trifle on the low side, and a bit of research indicated that it came from a Freedom of Information request for mortality figures where COVID-19 was the sole cause of death.
So what does one do in a case like this? I went over to the UK Office for National Statistics blog, and sure enough there was an explanation of what was going on. The point is that most deaths caused by COVID-19 and because it causes or exacerbates other problems, like, for instance pneumonia.
The underlying cause of death though is COVID-19. If they hadn’t been infected by COVID-19 which caused the problem, they wouldn’t have died. As the blog so succinctly puts it, “Since the start of the pandemic around nine in 10 deaths involving COVID-19 have been due to COVID-19. Therefore, COVID-19 initiated the train of events directly leading to death for more than 140,000 people.”
So, to find the true figures for deaths caused by COVID-19 you need to look for the terms “involving COVID-19”, which is how doctors document this type of death.
So now you know! Want to know more go and look at the blog – you don’t need to be a doctor or a statistician to understand it...
https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2022/01/26/to-say-only-17000-people-have-died-from-covid-19-is-highly-misleading/
Pictures:
Why do we count down to the new year? I’ve not really got any idea, to be honest. But we do and here is an article about countdowns with still, movie and video pictures involving countdowns!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/why-do-we-count-down-to-the-new-year-180979289/
The new exhibition ‘Celebration of Ramses II’ looks like it’s going to be a humdinger – take a look at these shots of it!
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/an-immersive-celebration-of-ramses-ii-transports-visitors-to-ancient-egypt-180979444/
Awwww! Polar bears have taken over an abandoned meteorological station on an island between Russia and the USA. Cute photos!
https://petapixel.com/2022/01/13/photographer-finds-polar-bears-that-took-over-abandoned-buildings/
Quotes:
“Your First Born Child
In using this service, you agree to relinquish your first born child to F-Secure, as and when the company requires it. In the event that no children are produced, your most beloved pet will be taken instead. The terms of this agreement stand for eternity.”
From the terms of service of a project from F-Secure Labs in 2014. Needless to say, everyone agreed to the terms – presumably without reading them!
https://archive.f-secure.com/weblog/archives/00002749.html
Scanner:
Product release cycles are killing the environment, techies tell British Computer Society
https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/27/product_release_cycles/
Crowds can cause bridges to sway unnervingly, and we may finally know why
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-a-fascinating-new-explanation-for-why-crowds-cause-bridges-to-start-swaying
The “Dating Apps” of Victorian England
https://daily.jstor.org/the-dating-apps-of-victorian-england/
Clever experiment reveals the ideal deadline to set to actually get stuff done
https://www.sciencealert.com/clever-experiment-reveals-the-ideal-deadline-to-set-to-actually-get-stuff-done
Floating solar farms are taking the world’s reservoirs by storm
https://hackaday.com/2022/01/24/floating-solar-farms-are-taking-the-worlds-reservoirs-by-storm/
Achieving Type 2 Diabetes reversal seems way more common than scientists realized
https://www.sciencealert.com/reversing-type-2-diabetes-seems-to-be-more-common-than-scientists-realized
IPv6 is built to be better, but that’s not the route to success
https://www.theregister.com/2022/01/24/opinion_column_ipv6/
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
30 January 2022
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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