Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
23 July 2023
This week we look at the Apollo 11 ‘man on the moon’ project and discover its impact on what would later become Silicon Valley. We take a look at some current AI problems (two different ones) and early cycling. Pictures covers the Osaka Star Festival, an early morning view of birds over Lake Erha, and a set of great astronomy pictures. The quote is from biochemist Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi.
Scanner points to material on NASA’s quiet supersonic jet, AI and the right to be forgotten, AI at the crossroads, a subscription based Windows 11, some ingenious librarians, and the deadliest day in human history.
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Hopefully, the next issue will be published on 30 July. However, I am due to have some eye surgery this coming week. Assuming everything goes alright, there will be an issue. Otherwise, there won’t be an issue until the following Sunday.
Credits: Thanks to Fi for editing, correcting errors, etc.
Essays:
The Smithsonian Magazine has a fascinating piece looking behind the scenes of the Apollo 11 mission 50 years ago. In retrospect it’s amazing it ever got off the ground, but it did, and put the first men on the Moon, and returned them safely to Earth.
Along the way, among other things, it built and used the first micro computer using early microchips. The first year, the project spent $1 million, by five years later it was spending that every three hours on Apollo, 24 hours a day! This story about what was going on behind the scenes is well worth a read – highly recommended.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-you-didnt-know-about-apollo-11-mission-fifty-years-ago-180972165/
Artificial Intelligence:
It seems I can’t read anything much on the net these days without coming across horror stories involving the misuse of the AI.
A good example is the problems being faced by the sci-fi magazine Clarkesworld. The editor reports that they have been absolutely inundated with submissions which have clearly been AI written. Indeed it’s so bad they have had to close the submissions portal!
Dealing with all this crud and trying to sort out submissions by real humans from the crud takes a lot of time and it reduces the time the editor would otherwise be spending discussing the work of human authors, and helping them improve their offerings. To give you some idea of the problem, the magazine never exceeded 25 submissions a month until the start of this year. In this February alone they received 500 spam submissions!
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/21/clarkesworld-ai-generated-submissions/
There is just a tiny smidgen of good news, though. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Amazon, Anthropic and Inflection have committed to developing tech to clearly watermark AI-generated content. That’s good – but how long is it going to take to set this all up?
Although the point of this is based around tracking copyright, it should, hopefully, help solve a wider range of problems. More to the point, why didn’t they do this -before- unleashing AI onto the net?
There was a point, some 50 years ago, when the mega-corp sized companies started hiring sociology, philosophy, politics and such like graduates to try to ensure that their products made sense from a human point of view. Maybe it’s time the internet biggies started doing the same – and getting them involved when the projects start!
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2023/07/openai-google-will-watermark-ai-generated-content-to-hinder-deepfakes-misinfo/
Cycling:
I often wondered what it was like to cycle with those weird looking early versions of cycles. And, lo and behold, the Londonist’s history newsletter has a great piece on the topic starting with the Dandy Horse in 1819. It seems that right from the start, they had problems with people riding on the pavements – something which even in those days was illegal for any wheeled vehicle.
Thus it was that the first fine for riding on the pavement came about. We don’t know the name of the miscreant, but we do know that he was fined £2 for riding on the pavement.
A fascinating read!
https://londonist.substack.com/p/the-rise-of-the-velocipede-londons [Note it’s the last article – scroll down to find it – AL]
Pictures:
Spoon & Tomago have a really nice set of pictures of the Osaka Star Festival with 40,000 floating LED lights in the river. I guess I can appreciate something of what’s involved because once in my mis-spent youth I was involved in launching paper boats with lit tealights into the River Thames on the evening of Hiroshima Day. It was difficult and I got very wet and cold. Our wonderful Metropolitan Police showed their appreciation by zooming their launches up and down that part of the river, trying to swamp the lights with the bow waves...
https://www.spoon-tamago.com/osaka-amanogawa-festival/
The Smithsonian Magazine has a nice picture of red billed gulls over Lake Erhai early in the morning. A very dynamic picture – someone got up early to get that, judging by the position of the sun.
https://photocontest.smithsonianmag.com/photocontest/detail/erhai-lake-in-the-morning/
And finally, I’d draw your attention to a different set of pictures also in the Smithsonian Magazine. Ten fantastic pictures around the theme of astronomy. My favourite? Difficult, very difficult, but I think I would go for the picture of the RCW 58: Wolf-Rayet Bubble, by Mark Hanson and Mike Selby. Absolutely stunning.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/see-ten-dazzling-space-images-from-the-astronomy-photographer-of-the-year-awards-180982555/
Quotes:
“Discovery consists of seeing what everybody had seen and thinking what nobody has thought.”
Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986) Hungarian born biochemist
Source: Oxford Dictionary of Quotations , Fifth Edition.
Scanner:
NASA ‘quiet’ supersonic jet is nearly ready for flight
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/07/nasa_quiet_supersonic_jet/
Right to be Forgotten laws must extend to generative AI, say researchers
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-07-forgotten-laws-generative-ai.html
Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads [A thoughtful piece from Lauren Weinstein’s Blog – AL]
https://lauren.vortex.com/2023/07/13/artificial-intelligence-at-the-crossroads
Windows 11’s potential subscription-based Cloud future revealed by FTC
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-11-cloud-subscription-ftc-docs
Ingenious librarians
https://aeon.co/essays/the-1970s-librarians-who-revolutionised-the-challenge-of-search
What was behind the deadliest day in human history?
https://www.sciencealert.com/what-was-behind-the-deadliest-day-in-human-history
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
23 July 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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