Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
13 November 2022
This week’s Winding Down features the return of the update section, thanks to Twitter. Apart from Musk’s machinations we have material on life expectancy after the pandemics, Ametris and rocket boosters, historical Halley’s comet panic, and cycling in Barcelona. There are a couple of nice pictures of winterscapes, and a spot on quote about the difficulties of running Social networks.
Scanner contain URLs pointing to material on the world’s first alphabet, increased police powers in Europe, e-scooters and e-bikes research, how we think of time sequences, a new miniaturised atom accelerator, a review of an unusual book, and the activities of a dish of brain cells!
Oh, and by the way, something someone said the other day reminded me of a comment by my house master on one of my school reports. It said, “Alan could do better, if he wasn’t such a mine of useless information!”
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next issue 20 November
Credits: Thanks to Fi for editing, correcting errors, etc.
Updates:
Well, previously Boeing used to hog all the update space, but now they have been overtaken by tales of Elon Musk and the effects of his takeover of Twitter.
Last week I covered most of the huge layoffs, this week we have updates to his attempts to generate some cash. Musk changed the rules for account verification in an attempt to increase cash flowing into the company, by allowing people to buy ‘verified’ accounts without, it appears, actually doing any proper verifications. There was an enormous increase in fake ‘verified’ accounts , including at least one fake Elon Musk account!
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/11/10/fake-account-chaos-engulfs-musks-twitter-00066217
The next thing that emerged was that a number of Twitter security execs quit with people in the know suggesting that Musk’s tampering will mean that Twitter will be violating a Federal Trade Commission privacy decree which was part of an existing settlement from earlier this year.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-fueled-chaos-at-twitter-makes-it-hard-to-comply-with-ftc-privacy-order/
Next in line on Thursday there was a report that Twitter’s chief information security officer had resigned, and it was also rumoured that the chief privacy officer and the chief compliance officer had also resigned.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/10/twitter_ciso_quits/
Also, on Thursday a few more details about the layoffs filtered out. For instance, Twitter’s communication staff has been cut from 100 to two! And one of those has since left... No wonder it’s difficult for the press to get answers from the company! It also appears that engineering jobs took a big hit.
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-twitter-layoffs-engineering-spreadsheet-1849767712
Finally (for now at least) it seems that the remaining engineers have been told to sign off their work that it complies with the FTC order mentioned earlier. Elon Musk’s lawyer is assuring Twitter’s surviving employees that they will not be held criminally liable if they botch the company’s security guidelines. Given the pressures on the surviving staff, making mistakes is more than likely, and the FTC are not known for being forgiving!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/elon-musk-lawyer-assures-twitter-staff-they-wont-go-to-jail-for-ftc-violations
Essays:
Science Alert has an interesting little essay based on a report from researchers who gathered mortality data from European countries and the USA. Obviously mortality rates went up during the pandemic but the researchers wanted to see how rapidly the countries’ mortality rates recovered (rebounded, as they call it).
The result is fascinating. Most of Western Europe is recovering, but Eastern Europe and the USA are not doing too well. I would be worried if I were in the USA – since we are talking about life expectancy here. I think it’s a useful piece of work, but I’d recommend avoiding the graph the researchers came up with – it’s one of the most confusing ones I’ve seen in a long time!
https://www.sciencealert.com/life-expectancy-recovers-in-western-europe-and-continues-to-drop-in-the-us
Space:
Those of you who follow what’s happening on the rocket front will be aware that the recent storms on the US Atlantic coast have delayed the launch of NASA’s Artemis 1 moon rocket several times. It still doesn’t have a definite launch date. While I was looking through Space.com’s report on this I came across a fascinating piece of information.
Did you know that, just like the food in your supermarket, rocket boosters have a ‘use-by’ date? It seems that the boosters on Artemis 1 rocket are getting near their use-by date, and if the launch doesn’t happen before the middle of December, they will have to be taken off the rocket and sent back to the makers, Northrop Grumman...
https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-1-moon-rocket-boosters-expire-december
And moving on from the present to the past , it seems that once Halley’s Comet was discovered (by none other that Edmond Halley!), its reported approach caused some panic. Numerous devices were offered to the public! They included the likes of anti-comet umbrellas, anti-comet pills, and even anti-comet gas masks. The latter were supposed to provide protection from a phenomenon described by French astronomer Camille Flammarion, who claimed that, “cyanogen gas would impregnate the atmosphere and possibly snuff out all life on the planet”.
In the event, the comet passed by Earth in both 1910 and again in 1986 without the anticipated apocalypse happening!
https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/anti-comet-umbrellas-halley-inventions/
Transport:
I am not a great fan of cyclists – especially the ones that cycle fast and consider that traffic rules and lights don’t apply to them. However, I think the experiments with kids cycling going on in Barcelona are just brilliant. They call it bicibus. It’s a hybrid of bycycle and bus. Instead of going to and from school by bus the kids are organised into groups with bicycles and with grown-up volunteers riding herd, cycling to school in the morning and home in the evening.
The movement started a few years ago in Barcelona and has spread to other areas, so far over 1,200 kids pedal their way along more than 90 different routes to more than 70 different schools in the Catelonia region. Brilliant!
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/students-ditch-school-buses-for-bicycles-in-barcelona/
Pictures:
Two pictures this week, both from the Smithsonian Magazine. The first is a nice restful relaxing picture of the Emerald Lake Lodge in the Rocky Mountains.
https://photocontest.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/enchanting-emerald-lake-lodge/
And for those who like their pictures, how shall I put it, a little more rugged, try this one of the Atkins Glen Winterscape in New York!
https://photocontest.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/watkins-glen-winterscape/
Quotes:
“...Platform speech, as Elon Musk is learning, is a super-hard problem. The platforms have not done a great job of figuring out the right speech rules – assuming there is such a thing. And the federal government is very unlikely to do better...”
Jack Goldsmith, Learned Hand Professor at Harvard Law School discussing social media
Stop Press: A quote spotted on Twitter reported in PFIR:
“Elon has pulled all the control rods out of the Twitter reactor, and
then boasts about how much energy it’s making.”
Scanner:
This Ancient Inscription Is The Oldest Sentence in The World’s First Alphabet
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-ancient-inscription-is-the-oldest-sentence-in-the-worlds-first-alphabet
New Europol rules massively expand police powers and reduce rights protections
https://www.statewatch.org/news/2022/november/new-europol-rules-massively-expand-police-powers-and-reduce-rights-protections/
Study investigates the extent to which e-scooters and e-bikes displace cars using real-world data
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-11-extent-e-scooters-e-bikes-displace-cars.html
Oxford University is older than the Aztecs
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/oxford-university-is-older-than-the-aztecs-1529607/
Compact electron accelerator reaches new speeds with nothing but light
https://phys.org/news/2022-09-compact-electron.html
Book review: London’s Lost Department Stores
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/book-review-londons-lost-department-stores-58206/
Watch: A dish of brain cells figured out how to play pong in 5 minutes
https://www.sciencealert.com/watch-a-dish-of-brain-cells-figured-out-how-to-play-pong-in-5-minutes
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
13 November 2022
Alan Lenton is a retired on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist (among other things), 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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