Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
27 November 2022
Welcome to another thrill-packed edition! Updates is Twitter-orientated, again – but at this rate soon to be banished to the end of the scanner section. Essays has two pieces, one on rape and the British justice system, and one on the automation of managers. The astronomy section looks at wormholes (well not literally!) and construction points you to material on 3D printer drones. There’s some help in the form of an analogy to help understand what FTX was doing when it crashed. Finally in this section there’s some Sherlock Holmes stuff!
Pictures has a 7,000 year old burial site, and a set of pictures showing Japanese landscape much of which is being changed by industrialisation. The quote is from the great physicist, Richard Feynman, and Scanner contains pointers to material on probabilistic computing, UK tech sovereignty, cosmic storms, open source databases, baby sea turtles, and salt mashes.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: No issue next week. Next issue 11 December
Credits: Thanks to Fi for editing, correcting errors, etc.
Updates:
Just a couple of Twitter updates that you may have missed this week. Lauren Weinstein pointed out that over the last few years government agencies, emergency services and the like have started to make increasing use of Twitter for important and emergency announcements. He suggests that now is the time to find an alternative. I couldn’t agree more!
Meanwhile Musk is preparing to revive banned accounts – many of which were banned for threats, harassment and misinformation.
Finally, I note that sources I do have confidence in, like ‘The Register’, are suggesting that hundreds of the remaining engineers at the embattled company had declined to take up Musk’s offer to work in an ‘extremely hardcore environment’.. (An interesting choice of words given some of Musk’s other activities!)
https://mastodon.laurenweinstein.org/@lauren/109400908853348927
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/11/24/twitter-musk-reverses-suspensions/
https://www.theregister.com/2022/11/18/twitter_staff_resign_en_masse/
Essays:
The first essay I would like you to read – male readers as well as female ones – is a piece about rape, the judicial system, and why so few accused rapists are even prosecuted, let alone convicted. I can only quote the first paragraph of the essay, to give you some idea of how serious the situation is: “Today in England and Wales, an estimated 300 women will be raped. About 170 of those cases will be reported to the police. But only three are likely to make it to a court of law.”
The author is a former senior police detective and currently Senior Lecturer in Police Studies at the University of Portsmouth.
https://theconversation.com/why-do-so-many-men-get-away-with-rape-police-officers-survivors-lawyers-and-prosecutors-on-the-scandal-that-shames-the-justice-system-192782
If anyone reading this is a manager, and thinks that their job is safe from automation, you need to think again! Tracking of the majority of lower level employees is already well under way, and managers have a wide range of tools to keep an eye on productivity, even when the employees concerned are working from home. But those same tools represent another opportunity, for their results are already in a form that a computer algorithm can use...
The first management levels to go will undoubtedly be the lowest levels, but it is easy to see the techniques creeping up the levels to the very top!
So, whatcha gonna do about it guv?
https://www.sciencealert.com/your-boss-may-soon-be-an-algorithm-if-theyre-not-one-already-that-is
Astronomy:
Wormholes in space! A staple of science fiction. No one has ever spotted one so far. Or have they? Maybe they didn’t recognize it for what it really is. Well, work is being done on the topic by a team of physicists at Sofia University in Bulgaria, who have developed a model of how this might all work and how it would look to observatories like the Event Horizon Telescope that brought us the pictures of the Sagittarius A* black hole at the centre of the Milky Way galaxy.
I’m sure we will here more about this in the future.
https://www.sciencealert.com/wormholes-may-already-have-been-detected-physicists-say
Construction:
Now here is an interesting idea – using large 3-D printing drones to construct buildings. My first reaction to that was ‘What?’, but then I stopped to think about it. Consider an old fashioned, brick-built house. It consists of layers of bricks placed one on top of the other. And how do 3D printers work? They build a 3-D object by building up layers of resin, or some other suitable material, one layer on top of the previous layer.
What’s being proposed becomes just a matter of scale. Of course, there will be problems, but I have little doubt they will be overcome.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/these-3d-printing-drones-could-alter-the-future-of-construction-180980831/
Cryptocurrencies:
I’m not a financial expert, so I wasn’t all that sure about what was actually going on in the FTX crash case. However, recently, I found an explanation in terms that even I could understand. Take a look, I’m sure you’ll like the analogy, but remember it is only an analogy to help you understand, not the actual thing!
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/11/the-ftx-debacle-eli5.html
Sherlock Holmes:
OK. Here’s a little bit of a break from the heavy stuff! It’s two pieces about the great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes. The answers to any conundrums posed, are, of course, elementary!
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/sherlock-holmes-letter
https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-reichenbach-falls-schattenhalb-switzerland
Pictures:
Pictures from two very different sources this week. The first is from south western Spain where the waters of the reservoirs have been lowered by the ongoing high temperatures. This has revealed a 7,000 year old prehistoric burial site.
https://photocontest.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/dolmen-de-guadalperal-2/
The second is a series of Japanese landscape pictures painted by the ukiyoe artist Kawase Hasui (1883-1957). Much of what is portrayed is, following industrialisation, no longer part of the landscape. There are also a couple of videos that give some background to the painter and his paintings.
https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2021/11/11/traveling-ukiyoe-artist-kawase-hasui/
Quotes:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”
Richard Feynman
From The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations.
Scanner:
From bits to p-bits: One step closer to probabilistic computing
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-08-bits-p-bits-closer-probabilistic.html
Arm founder says the UK has no chance of tech sovereignty
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/29/arm_founder_uk_tech_sovereignty/
Tree rings chronicle a mysterious cosmic storm that strikes every thousand years
https://www.sciencealert.com/tree-rings-chronicle-a-mysterious-cosmic-storm-that-strikes-every-thousand-years
Open source databases: What are they and why do they matter?
https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/05/open_source_databases/
Many baby sea turtles never make it to the sea. This genius idea could save them
https://www.sciencealert.com/many-baby-sea-turtles-never-make-it-to-the-sea-this-genius-idea-could-save-them
This English town is letting the sea have its way. The coastal community of Selsey welcomes the return of salt marshes where farms once stood
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/selsey-england-slow-water
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
27 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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