Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 22, 2013

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news

by Alan Lenton

Bit of a mixed bag for the last issue of 2013. But I’m proud to announce that I didn’t resort to a rehash/review of the year! The sociology part of my identity focuses on Google for the main story, then we take a look at some very fast food in New Zealand, nuclear weapons launch codes, a peek into the UK’s National Archives, a fabulous animated weather map, a review of Bjarne Stroustrup’s ‘The C++ Programming Language’, and ultra-wide monitors. For those in need of further reading over Christmas there are URLs to an article on why nuclear weapons create mushroom clouds when you let them off, At&T and Verizon transparency reports, Polynesian binary math, fudge factors in climate models, and using electric fields to make power plants cleaner.

Before we get on to the nitty gritty, I just wanted to share with you all a classic case of the law of unintended consequences. The other day I popped in to a well-known supermarket to pick up a sandwich for lunch. As that was all I was buying I went round to the machines where you pay and bag it yourself. As I was waiting for my change to clatter out, I noticed the guy next to me grab a big wodge of plastic carrier bags and stuff them into the bag he was putting his purchases in.

He saw me looking and grinned sheepishly. “What was that all about?’, I asked. He explained that his daughter’s school had organized the kids to do a plastic bag recycling project, and kids had a competition going to see who could bring in the most bags. He was under orders to get the most bags he could get away with. Looking round I spotted a couple of other people who seemed have rather more bags than they needed to carry their meagre supplies...

I strongly suspect that for all its good intentions, the main effect of the school’s project will be to massively increase the number of carrier bags in circulation in the area! Such is the law of unintended consequences.

We will be back to annoy/interest/put you to sleep on Sunday 12 January 2014. So until then have a very happy Christmas and a great New Year.


Analysis/Rant: Google

Google is beginning to annoy me.

Before I explain why, let me establish a couple of things. First, there is no such thing as a free lunch. Second, contrary to the general belief Google services are not free; you may not actually pay for them in cash, but you certainly pay for them in other ways.

Third, the mass of people who use Google’s ‘free’ services such as search, maps, and G+ are not customers. They are the raw material in a technical-industrial process that results in valuable aggregate data that Google sends to its real customers – those companies that pay hard cash to use its advertising and analysis data.

This is why Google has no customer service or means of getting in touch with them for the masses. You only provide customer service for customers.

So why are they annoying me, given that I’m well aware of the above facts, and have been for a long time? It’s because they are trying to unify the three different accounts I have with them under a single G+ banner. This means that they are mixing up my different identities which is causing me problems – minor ones at the moment, but it will only get worse.

Different identities? No, I’m not some sort of international crook, with a vast collection of different passports, driving licenses, and bank accounts (if only...). We all (well nearly all) have and use different identities every day, each of them a different facet of our overall personality.

My work personality is different from my home personality – I don’t usually discuss politics at work, or surrealist art, jazz, English history, the US Civil War, science fiction, archeology, sociology (which I have a degree in), or typography, just to mention a few of my non-work related interests.

When I was giving talks about programming and technology, and before that when I was involved in political activism, I had a different, much more confident outgoing personality than I normally have. Deceit? No. Just one of the things that we all do as part of our daily routine to survive in human society. We partition ourselves to adjust to the current circumstances. One of the consequences of this is that if a facet gets into the wrong set of circumstances the result can be serious problems – especially for politicians!

What Google are doing is trying to mix up the online components of my job, my outside work technical interests, and my personal life, each of which has its own email address. I don’t want personal stuff mixed into my work communications. I don’t put this out under my work address.

Sometimes the line is very clear – work/personal is completely separate, and I want to keep it that way. Personal/outside technical is more blurry, but the divide still exists. And I don’t want Google messing with it.

Why are Google doing this? It’s obviously part of an overall plan to consolidate things and give Google more control over its ‘raw materials’ in the future. But the fact that they could choose to do it this way (they have the capability to do this behind the scenes, rather that openly, I sure) indicates a sociology problem, not a technical one.

I said earlier that we all have a myriad of different identities. This is perhaps a sweeping statement; it would be more accurate, perhaps, to qualify it by adding ‘to a greater or lesser extent’. Most ordinary people have at least a work and a home identity. But the people who work at Google are, from my observations, different. For them there is no distinction between in work and outside work, if only because there is so little time outside work, and their focus is on their Google work.

And Google itself compounds this. Staff are picked up from home by coaches, bussed into the Google Plex, they eat in Google restaurants in the buildings, and when, eventually, they finish work, they go home by Google coach. Google is not just work, it’s their life. In the circumstances, it’s not surprising that they have no concept of having different identities. For them Google is the sum total of their way of life.

And this shows up time and time again in the decisions made by Google – technically brilliant decisions marred by an inability to analyse the social implications of what they propose.

Hmmm... I think that’s enough of a rant. And in case you are wondering, yes, I really do like Google, though they drive me to distraction, and I’d hate to actually work for them!


Shorts:

Fast food with a vengeance in one New Zealand cafe. How would you like three mini-burgers and a side of fries delivered to your table at 87mph! The system is a pneumatic tube system – loaded in the kitchen and delivered to your table seconds later.

Oh wow, it’s almost worth a trip half way round the world to try this one out. Long time readers may remember that I really like pneumatic systems – they go back to Victorian times, and I think that combined with the new materials coming out now and the modern electronics, they are the goods transport of the future.
http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/pneumatic-tube-system-delivers-burgers-87mph
http://eater.com/archives/2013/12/13/watch-sliders-fly-at-85-mph-in-pneumatic-tubes-at-a-new-zealand-cafe.php

Gulp! Did you know that for nearly two decades at the height of the cold war the launch code for all the Minuteman missile silos was the same – 00000000 – eight zeros. And just in case you forgot it, it was also on the check list for launching the things. Apparently, things are a little safer now...
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/nearly-two-decades-nuclear-launch-code-minuteman-silos-united-states-00000000/


Homework:

There’s an interesting article in The Register about how the UK’s National Archives work. This is a transition period for the government’s National Archive, because the government information coming in is starting to change over from physical to digital, so the article is about past, present and future ways of storing historic material.

Among the treasures housed in the Archives are the Doomsday Book, two copies of the Magna Carta, Henry VIII’s divorce from Anne Boleyn papers, and the Treaty of Versailles from the end of the First World War. I think it’s perhaps time I paid it a visit.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/11/feature_geeks_guide_uk_national_archive/?page=1

Here’s something soothing and de-stressing for Christmas – it’s a live weather map with animated wind currents. It’s amazing and quite hypnotic, I spent far longer than I intended looking at it when I was going through the material for this week’s issue. Take a look!
http://earth.nullschool.net/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/12/19/earth_wind_maps/


For Geeks:

I quite often review the books I read, both on my web site, and on Amazon – last time I looked, I was something like 8,000 from being the top reviewer on Amazon. There’s a section called ‘Recent Reading’ on the front page of my web site, which has the last two or three reviews. A month or so ago, though, I finished reading the fourth edition of Bjarne Stroustrup ‘The C++ Programming Language’, which deals with how to program using the latest standard version of C++. It’s an important book, aimed at showing existing programmers how to effectively use their skills and the new features to write safer, clearer, cleaner, code.

In the event, the review ran to nearly a thousand words – an unprecedented size (at least for me). So I decided to break my usual rule (it is after all Christmas) and point you to a review I’ve written!
http://www.ibgames.com/alan/reviews/c++.html

And since it’s a big review, how about a big screen to read it on (apart, of course, from the 21” HP tablet you bought after reading last week’s Winding Down)? Take a look at LG’s new 34-inch UltraWide monitors which will launch at CES. 34-inches, with a 21:9 aspect ratio, and 3440x1440 resolution. I figure I can just about get two of them on my desk at home. So I guess you all know what I want for Christmas!
http://www.gizmag.com/lg-ultrawide-computer-monitors-ces-214/30166/


Scanner: Other stories

Why nuclear bombs create mushroom clouds
http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2013/11/nuclear-bombs-create-mushroom-cloud/

Verizon to publish Transparency Report amid NSA furor
http://business.time.com/2013/12/19/verizon-transparency-report/

AT&T follows Verizon’s lead, will start publishing law enforcement request data in early 2014
http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/20/5230412/att-will-start-publishinglaw-enforcement-request-data-in-early-2014

Polynesians may have invented binary math
http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2013/12/polynesians-may-have-invented-binary-math

BBC exposes ‘Fudge Factor’ in ClimateGate global warming comp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwGVr8rItsE

Flame-taming electric fields could make power plants cleaner
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=flame-taming-electric-fields-power-plants&WT.mc_id=SA_CAT_TECH_20131217


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Asti, Barb, Fi and George for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.

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
22 December 2013

Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.

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