Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
20 November 2022
Well this week brings you another feature-packed issue of Winding Down, featuring a wide array of material. Updates covers the launch of NASA’s moon rocket, plus some, but not too much, of the continuing Musk/Twitter farce. The essays section contains a piece on a 76 year long medical/health/development program and an interesting piece about rain – something any Brit will talk about at the drop of a (wet) hat.
News items covered include the black hole at the centre of our Milky Way galaxy, a whole country to be uploaded to the metaverse before it vanishes under water, a US espionage oopsie, and past dubious activities coming home to roost at Google.
There’s a great picture of this autumn’s Harvest Moon, and a quote from the guy who’s been appointed to sort out the FTX crypto-shambles. Frankly whatever they are paying him isn’t enough!
Finally, scanner carries URLs pointing to material on the brain, the missile that hit Poland, space based solar power, the decarbonization of US aviation sector, a $400m crypto-currency mistake that was actually corrected, EV charging infrastructure insecurities, and Apple to switch to USB-C charging.
Finally, there are a bunch of URLs related to the Musk/Twitter ongoing saga, just in case anyone has been offline for the last week!
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next issue 4 December
Credits: Thanks to Fi for editing, correcting errors, etc.
Updates:
I’m happy to note that NASA did manage to launch its shiny new rocket, before the use by date on the boosters expired! However, they did have to send in a last minute team to tighten up the nuts and bolts! Congratulations, NASA – next stop The Moon.
https://www.space.com/artemis-1-rocket-red-crew-daring-launch-pad-repair
https://www.sciencealert.com/breaking-nasa-just-successfully-launched-its-artemis-1-moon-rocket
And so to Musk and Twitter...
This left me in a bit of a bind, because I have managed to stack up a load of comments/URLs and unverified reports on Musk/Twiiter topics this week. That’s far too much space for one individual to be given in this rag! So I will deal with just one aspect of Musk’s activities, and I’ve dumped the rest of the URLs at the end of the scanner section for anyone who wants more.
As a programmer I learned long ago that working on code through the day and night was a bad idea – leading to serious and subtle coding problems – especially when writing stuff that humans are going to use. Musk’s demand that all his surviving programmers (if there are any left) do this sort of coding is the fastest way I can think of to destroy Twitter’s code base, let alone the mental and physical health of the people involved...
https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-spacex-twitter-fired-employees-open-letter-1849794817
The whole thing is an interesting lesson in how to turn $44 billion into $44.00!
Essays:
I was absolutely amazed to discover that the UK has a program which has been running for 76 years, following the health etc of a group of 5,362 people who were all born in the same week of the same month in 1946. It started off as a study in the aftermath of the Second World War. The purpose was to see what needed doing to persuade couples to have babies. A lot of people were killed in the UK in the War and the population needed rebuilding.
Fascinating stuff – take a look, there’s a lot more in the article!
https://theconversation.com/weve-been-studying-the-same-people-for-76-years-this-is-what-weve-found-out-about-alzheimers-disease-183949
The other essay I want to recommend is about rain. We in Britain have an affinity for rain. We even believe that we are one of the wettest countries in the world! Wrong – our annual rainfall is only just above the world average... If you would like to try somewhere that really is wet, go to India to the state of Mawsynram, the wettest place of Earth. It has 12,000 millimetres of rain each year, compared to the UK’s paltry average of 1,150 millimetres. I really recommend this article it has all sorts of fascinating information about rain!
https://theconversation.com/five-things-you-probably-have-wrong-about-rain-194380
Astronomy:
Some three years ago we got the first picture of a black hole – that one was over 2,000 times further away than the one at the centre of our own galaxy. Now astronomers have a picture of the black hole at the centre of out own galaxy. It is the object known to astronomers as Sagittarius A* (the asterisk is part of the name), and we have a much less fuzzy picture to look at.
Mind you, the centre of our own galaxy is 26,000 light years away, so we are looking at what the black hole looked like (at radio wavelengths) 26,000 years ago! Still, it’s much more interesting than the blob that showed up as the one at the heart of Messier 87. And much more photogenic! See for yourself.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-the-image-of-the-milky-ways-black-hole-really-shows-180981125/
Climate Change:
It was announced at the COP27 climate change meeting of heads of state that the Pacific island country of Tuvalu is planning to upload a digital version of itself to the metaverse. Its physical existence is threatened by climate change driven water level rises. Hopefully this news will inspire government leaders to actually do something about cleaning up the causes of climate changes, although to be honest, I’m not all that hopeful about it.
https://www.sciencealert.com/this-entire-country-is-uploading-itself-to-the-metaverse
Espionage:
It seems that US intelligence agencies have finally woken up to the fact that allowing its retired personnel to work as contractors for other countries – even so-called friendly ones – is not a wise move, and could pose a threat to the security of the US itself. In this particular case it seems that the Middle Eastern United Arab Emirates (UAE) hired a bunch of ex-War on Terror US agents and US security contractors to build it an espionage system comparable to some of those available to the USA.
Unbelievably enough no one seems to have noticed what was going on, presumably because the UAE one of the Americans’ allies!
https://foreverwars.ghost.io/uae-espionage-nic-nsa-trans-midterms/
Privacy:
Google has agreed a settlement of US$391.5 million to settle a location tracking lawsuit brough by 40 US States. Sounds like a lot of money, but it’s pocket change for a company like Google. More importantly, Google has promised a number of changes which will make it easier for users to prevent tracking in the future.
This is the second such lawsuit Google has paid out to a US state in recent months. Last October it paid US$85 million to Arizona. Not only that, but the are other law suits from US states on the way, and sooner or later the EU will get it together and demand its cut of the loot!
Google’s original moto was ‘Don’t Be Evil’ Seems like it should now be ‘Don’t get caught being evil’!
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/15/google_391m_privacy_settlement/
Pictures:
This week’s great picture is the Astronomy Picture of the Day (aka APOD) from 15 September. It’s a superb picture of a Harvest Moon over the town of Castiglione di Sicilia. The Harvest Moon is the traditional name for the full moon nearest the autumnal equinox.
Enjoy!
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap220915.html
Quotes:
John Ray III, CEO of FTX Trading Ltd, who succeeded disgraced founder Sam Bankman-Fried following the collapse of the once notionally valued $32 billion cryptocurrency exchange, told a Delaware bankruptcy court on Thursday that the company is a disaster unlike anything he has ever seen.
And Ray oversaw the 2001 dissolution of Enron, the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history at the time.
Enron has since been eclipsed in dollar terms by the fall of Lehman Brothers, with assets of $691 billion when the financial giant declared bankruptcy in 2008, but Ray still considers FTX – which sought bankruptcy protection last week – exceptional.
“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Ray wrote in a court filing.
From The Register: https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/18/ftx_disarray_declared_unprecedented_by/
Scanner:
A brain area thought to impart consciousness instead behaves like an internet router, says study
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2022-11-brain-area-thought-impart-consciousness.html
What If the Przewodów Tragedy Had Been Caused by a Russian Missile? [Interesting piece about what NATO’s Charter actually says -AL]
https://www.lawfareblog.com/what-if-przewod%C3%B3w-tragedy-had-been-caused-russian-missile
Space-based solar power could really work, experiment shows
https://www.space.com/airbus-space-solar-power-test
Study shows full decarbonization of US aviation sector is within grasp
https://phys.org/news/2022-11-full-decarbonization-aviation-sector-grasp.html
Another crypto shocker: Major player actually corrects $400m mistake instead of cratering
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/cryptodotcom_gateio_400m/
EV charging infrastructure is seriously insecure
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/15/ev_charging_infrastructure_sandia/
Apple exec confirms iPhones will switch to USB-C because ‘we have no choice’
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/27/apple_usbc/
Musk/Twitter farce URLs:
https://www.androidauthority.com/twitter-sms-2fa-3234698/
https://digiday.com/marketing/never-been-critical-twitters-ad-boycott-is-starting-to-look-like-a-long-goodbye/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/14/musk_twitter_rpc_spat/
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/twitter-outage-predictions/471165/#close
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/musk-fires-twitter-engineers-for-correcting-criticizing-him-on-twitter-slack/
https://fortune.com/2022/11/16/elon-musk-makes-up-mind-twitter-blue-official-if-enough-verified-followers/
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/16/tech/elon-musk-email-ultimatum-twitter/index.html
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/11/twitter_musk_week/
Stop Press Sunday morning: Anecdotal reports that users are uploading full length movies and other forms of prohibited content to Twitter...
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
20 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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