Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
11 June 2023
An eclectic selection for you again this week! Essays looks at people who are working from home and miss their commute into work; we also take a look into the concept of driverless busses, and cover stories on ChatGPT tangling with the legal types, followed by a piece on how to tell if you are talking to an AI! There’s a great story about an artificial beach and angelshark fish making a come back.
Pictures covers Japanese road signs with arrows and also shipwrecks off the coast of southwest England, and the quote is from Darth Vader...
Finally, Scanner contains pointers to material on the relationship between the future and the past, music and memories, Boeing being sued, a Cold War mystery, air quality and income, a potentially illegal scanning law in the EU, and UK government ownership and debt.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next issue will be published on 18 June.
Credits: Thanks to Fi for editing, correcting errors, etc.
Essays:
Science Alert has a somewhat unexpected piece about how some people missed commuting to work (and back). It seems extremely strange, especially in the light of the struggle of a lot of people to remain working from home. For some people, though, the daily commute in the car provides some thoughtful private time and provides a clear mark for the transition between work and home..
The researcher also raises the concept of “liminal space”, a time that’s free of both the home and the work roles. It makes for an interesting read.
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-used-to-hate-commuting-now-we-realize-weve-lost-something
The ‘Odds and Ends of History’ blog has an interesting polemic about the possibilities for driverless busses. I love reading polemics – especially when they are backed by real facts and don’t fall into tit-for-tat abuse. Such is this piece which argues that driverless busses, once they are fully developed, are exactly what we need.
And my credentials for saying this? I actually have driven a double decker bus, in London (Chiswick to be precise) in the rush hour. I was applying for a job, and passed the test for driving the bus, but failed the medical due to a requirement for perfect colour vision. So I went into computer games instead!
https://takes.jamesomalley.co.uk/p/twitters-transport-experts-are-wrong
Artificial Intelligence:
Well even if the general public remains infatuated with ChatCPT, lawyers have recently received the equivalent of a bucket of ice cold water on the issue. It seems that a lawyer asked ChatGPT for examples of cases that supported an argument they were trying to make. It didn’t have any, so being ‘obliging’, it made some up! The lawyer duly filed with the court, including the ChatGPT invented cases.
The opposition, understandably, could not find the cases and the lawyer making the filing asked Chat GPT to confirm that they were real – which it did!
When the whole shambles came to light, the judge in the case was not amused...
https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/27/lawyer-chatgpt/
Well, should you have any inclination to repeat the gullibility of the lawyer in the previous item perhaps you should take a look at a piece in TechXplore that give some ideas about how to figure our you are talking to an AI bot and understand their limits.
It seems that AI bots are not as good at some things as humans are. So it’s worth trying out a few interesting questions involving skills that AI are not good at. To quote the article, “The questions demand the ability to respond to exercises requiring skills in counting, substitution of numbers or letters, recognizing the position of characters and numbers, recognizing “noise” that obscures data, and interpreting ASCII art.”
The article includes some samples – take a look for yourselves!
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-05-simple-reveals-bot-human.html
Ecology:
Hakai magazine has an interesting piece about the endangered angelshark fish as a result of the fake beaches created in the Canary Islands. The species was in near danger of total extinction because of the bottom trawling nets of the EU countries. The Canary Islands are a group of bleak volcanic rocks sticking out of the Atlantic near the coast of Africa.
In the 1970s the government set out to add a major beach to the island to create a tourist trade. Among other things this involved moving nearly a quarter of a million tonnes of sand from the Western Sahara to a prepared area in the Canary Isles. And it worked – sun and sand – tourists flocked in from Europe completely changing the economy of the region.
But something else, unlooked for happened as well – it provided just the environment angelshark fish needed in which to thrive, and they are compatible living with humans!
Fantastic!
https://hakaimagazine.com/features/huh-our-fake-beach-is-good-for-sharks/
Pictures:
First off in this section I thought you might like to have a look at a selection of Japanese road signs. All I can say is that I’m glad I don’t have to drive along Japanese roads!
https://www.spoon-tamago.com/gaku-yamazaki-unusual-arrows/
Out second set of pictures are part of a fascinating story of a British family that has been taking photographs of shipwrecks off the coast of southwest England for nearly a century. A great story and some nice photographs!
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gibson-family-shipwreck-images
Quotes:
I couldn’t resist this little item from Lauren Weinstein’s PFIR email list!
Using the Darth Vader AI chatbot:
How do I know that you’re always going to give me an accurate answer
when I ask you a question?
> I find your lack of faith disturbing.
Scanner:
To save physics, experts suggest we need to assume the future can affect the past
https://www.sciencealert.com/to-save-physics-experts-suggest-we-need-to-assume-the-future-can-affect-the-past
Why does music bring back memories? What the science says
https://theconversation.com/why-does-music-bring-back-memories-what-the-science-says-197301
Boeing sued for allegedly stealing intellectual property related to NASA’s Artemis moon rocket
https://www.space.com/artemis-sls-boeing-intellectual-property-lawsuit
The Cold War mystery the U.S. military can’t afford to forget
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/09/russia-u-s-air-cold-war-00090967
Study of air quality impact of EVs shows inequalities due to income differences
https://phys.org/news/2023-05-air-quality-impact-evs-inequalities.html
Europe’s CSAM scanning plan looks unlawful, per leaked legal advice
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/09/eu-scam-scanning-unlawful-advice/
What the UK government owns and what it owes
https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2023/04/21/what-the-uk-government-owns-and-what-it-owes/
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
11 June 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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