Winding Down

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
19 March 2023

Lots of stuff this week. I trust you all survived the Ides of March – a number of banks didn’t! In this issue we have the Silicon Valley Bank UK bought by HSBC for the magnificent sum of one pound sterling! There’s also material on the Ides of March, Central Banks, AI assisted coding, open source coders, the music of the spheres, MIT Open Learning Library, and the last Boeing 747.

Pictures offers you a selection of classy (and not so classy) retro movie theatres, and some pictures relating to the building of the longest railway bridge in the UK. Quotes gives you a chunk from a research paper on ChatGPT.

Finally, there is an extended Scanner section where we are still trying to catch up with the month we were absent. Topics covered include the first author for whom we have a name, an Antarctic whale gathering, a Chinese spacecraft, Mary, Queen of Scots, and cyber security, magnets, destructive ‘Super Pigs’, a genetic imbalance that may drive aging, and finally, whither smartphones...

Phew! Enjoy!

Alan Lenton

Publishing schedule: Next issue 26 March 2023

Credits: Thanks to Fi for editing, correcting errors, etc.

Late breaking:

Silicon Valley Bank’s UK arm bought by HSBC for one British pound in rescue deal.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/13/svb_uk_hsbc/

Essays:

Beware the Ides of March. (That’s 15 March, for those of you who don’t know.) Jstor has an excellent essay covering the Ides of March, the Roman calendar, Caesar’s assassination, and ancient Roman politics. Fascinating reading – take a look.
https://daily.jstor.org/beware-the-ides-of-march-wait-what/

The Conversation has an excellent piece on central banks with more than a little relevance to the current financial chaos. It’s written by Richard Werner, the man who ‘invented’ ‘quantitative easing’, a phrase much bandied around but mostly by people who don’t understand it.

Code and Coding:

Tech Crunch has an interesting piece on a paper suggesting that using code generating AI can introducing security vulnerabilities. The researchers looked at Codex and they suggest that that the study participants who had access to Codex were more likely to write incorrect and insecure (from a cybersecurity view) code than a control group. They were also more likely to say that that their insecure answers were secure than the people in the control...

Any manager hoping to use AI code generation to avoid long and ‘tiresome’ code reviews is in for a shock! Though it’s clearly early days.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/28/code-generating-ai-can-introduce-security-vulnerabilities-study-finds/

Who are the authors of open source software? That’s the question posed in The Register. Common knowledge has a vision of pale spotty youths (exclusively male), toiling away in a basement, surrounded by a collection of semi-defunct equipment. That’s no longer the case, of course, if it ever was so.

Many open source developers work for the big tech companies – Amazon Web Services, Intel, Red Hat, Google and Microsoft. Yes, even Microsoft. Other, obviously work for the big open source companies. And some get the chance to work in their non-open source company time. Finally, a significant number still work in their own time on their own personal open source product. Like it or not open source software is so deeply integrated into modern products that the system would collapse without it!
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/24/who_writes_open_source/

Cosmology/

So, what do you think the Universe sounds like? Pythagoreans thought it was an ethereal harmony produced by vibration of the celestial spheres. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory thought differently and has been working with other researchers to meld astronomy with music. The result is surprisingly musical, though a bit heavy on the bass!

You can read about the project and listen to some of the resulting music in The Smithsonian Museum’s newsletter.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-does-the-universe-sound-like-180981715/

Learning:

With all the churn going on in the techie world at the moment I thought this would be a good time to draw your attention to MIT’s Open Learning Library. Through it MIT makes available its regular teaching material in a number of topics for free. Among the subjects covered are Structure of Materials, Introduction to Machine Learning, Mathematics for Computer Science, Quantum Information Science I and II, The Science and Business of Biotechnology, to name but a few. Looks like a good option – especially if you are between jobs for any length of time!
https://ocw.mit.edu/course-lists/open-learning-library/

Space:

Somehow I missed this one late last year, but I thought it was rather good, and it’s not time based, so I’m recommending it now...

It’s from the space.com web site and it looks at 20 space myths that are wrong. See how many you knew the correct answer to, for instance ‘The dark side of the moon’ (tip of the hat to Pink Floyd for that one). How about ‘The asteroid belt is very hazardous? Or maybe even ‘Stars in constellations are close together’? Take you pick...
https://www.space.com/space-myths-busted

Transport:

It’s the end of an era – the last Boeing 747 has come off the assembly line. There will be no more. The 747’s first commercial flight was as I left school and set off for university, and I would have given anything to fly in the ‘upstairs’ bit. But, of course I could never afford it. Until...

Many years later I was regularly flying to the US, because our game servers were on US services, and on one flight my seat was double booked. The flight attendant apologised and asked me to vacate the seat for another passenger. Being a polite boy I did so and she walked with me up to exit door at the front of the plane. Then she said, “We are upgrading you, sir, since you are a frequent flyer.” And she lead me upstairs! Wow! LEG ROOM, free bar, comfy seat, the works. That was one of the few times I ever enjoyed a commercial flight.

Ah well....
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/01/boeing_747_final_goodbye/

Pictures:

Here is a special pictures treat for those of you who like to see movies and enjoy a retro movie experience. These pictures are all of classic functioning movie theatres, in the USA, the UK, Germany and Canada. While I don’t very often watch movies, I would certainly like to visit most of the places shown!
https://www.atlasobscura.com/lists/movie-palaces

The Ian Visits web site has some interesting pictures of what will become Britain’s longest railway bridge being built in the Colne Valley. At 2.1 miles going over main roads and a vast collection of abandoned, water filled gravel pits it’s pretty impressive. Needless to say the project is way behind schedule and over budget...
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/final-piles-installed-for-west-londons-new-hs2-railway-bridge-60289/

Quotes:

“Our study indicates that the current version of ChatGPT performs well for structured tasks, such as translating code from one language to another and explaining well-known concepts, but struggles with more nuanced tasks, such as explaining less widely known terms and creating code from scratch.”

“We find that using new AI tools may help practitioners, educators, and researchers to be more efficient and productive. However, in their current stages of development, some results are misleading and wrong. Overall, the use of generative AI models in SPC must be properly validated and used in conjunction with other methods to ensure accurate results.”

From a research paper by Fadel M. Megahed et al, How Generative AI models such as ChatGPT can be (Mis)Used in SPC Practice, Education, and Research? An Exploratory Study, arXiv (2023). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2302.10916.

For a summary of the paper go to: https://techxplore.com/news/2023-03-explores-potential-shortcomings-chatgpt-spc.html

Scanner:

History’s first named author was a Mesopotamian priestess
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/first-author-ever-mesopotamia-woman-enheduanna

Capturing the mysterious Antarctic whale gathering on film
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/bertie-gregory-antarctic-whale-gatherings

A Chinese spacecraft has been checking out US satellites high above Earth
https://www.space.com/chinese-spacecraft-tjs-3-inspecting-us-satellites

What Mary, Queen of Scots, can teach today’s cybersec royalty
https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/20/opinion_column_mary_queen_of_scots/

New approach to ‘cosmic magnet’ manufacturing could reduce reliance on rare earths in low-carbon technology
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-approach-cosmic-magnet-reliance-rare.html

Destructive ‘Super Pigs’ from Canada threaten the northern U.S.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/destructive-super-pigs-from-canada-threaten-the-northern-us-180981692/

We’ve discovered a subtle genetic imbalance that may drive aging
https://www.sciencealert.com/weve-discovered-a-subtle-genetic-imbalance-that-may-drive-aging

Smartphone makers searched for a way forward at MWC 2023
https://techcrunch.com/2023/03/03/smartphone-makers-searched-for-a-way-forward-at-mwc-2023/

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 March 2023

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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