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

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by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 4, 2015

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WINDING DOWN

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

We have quite a lot for you this week in Winding Down. We start with the ‘Happy Birthday’ song and copyright and then move on to fair use, 1,600 works of modern art online, some new historical maps online, the biggest atlas in the world, haunted houses and air quality, a 1/90th scale maglev train, a 1,000mph rocket car, a Dreamliner built in four minutes, a 49ft long piece of 3D artwork, and a video of London in 1918. If that’s not enough for you then we also feature a collection of URLs leading to material on the UN’s view of the web (yuk!), women and tech, an 11,000 year old statue, printer drivers stymie education in Australia, a patent troll and USB hubs, the Fifth Amendment and passcodes, and using slinkies in earthquake research.

Shorts:

Well you lucky people, you can now sing ‘Happy Birthday’ without having to hide from the Warner/Chappell Music copyright police! Warner/Chappell have been collecting royalties on the words (and the piano arrangement) since they registered a copyright in 1935, but now a US judge has found that there were problems with that registration, and ruled that Warner/Chappell don’t have the rights to the words.

Over the years, Warner/Chappell have collected millions of dollars in copyright fees relating to the words of the song. If they can’t get this ruling overturned by a higher level court, they are going to have to pay it all back... Lotsa money at stake over this little ditty, folks!
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/happy-birthday-copyright-ruled-be-826528
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/23/happy_birthday_copyright/

Incidentally, while we are on the subject of copyright, last month the US Appeals court struck a blow for ‘fair use’ in a copyright ruling. Those of you with long memories should go back in time to 2007, when the Universal Music Group forced the take down of a YouTube video of a toddler bouncing around to background music. The said background music being a short clip of a Prince song. The mother wasn’t prepared to give up without a fight, and with help from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), she’s been fighting a case against Universal for misuse of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) through the courts ever since.

Well, the appeals court judges have now ruled that copyright holders “must consider the existence of fair use before sending a takedown notification.” So, the question, given that YouTube takedowns alone run into six figures annually, is how do you code the judicial concept of ‘Fair Use’ into an automated takedown program?

That question leads to a really interesting issue. If you can, as a majority of the judges suggested, code ‘Fair Use’ and other judicial concepts into a computer algorithm, then obviously you wouldn’t need human judges...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/eff-scores-a-win-in-long-running-dancing-baby-copyright-case/

Homework:

The New York Guggenheim may be Frank Lloyd Wright’s two fingers to New Yorkers, but I have to applaud their latest project. They’ve put 1,600 works of modern art online. Kandinsky, Miro, Tanguy, Klee, Mondrian, Dali, Duchamp, Man Ray, they are all there. In all there is material from 575 artists. Stunning – this is the sort of thing that restores ones faith in the virtues of the internet!
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/free-the-guggenheim-puts-online-1600-great-works-of-modern-art-from-575-artists.html

I absolutely adore maps – old ones as well as new ones. I still find it easier to navigate via a map than by one of these new-fangled GPS devices when visiting somewhere I’ve not been before. Thus it was that I was happy to discover that the University of Chicago Press has put onto the net, free of charge, the first three volumes of its massive publication, ‘The History of Cartography’.
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/the-history-of-cartography-the-most-ambitious-overview-of-map-making-ever-now-free-online.html

And while we are on the subject of cartography, why not take a look at the biggest atlas in the world – It’s six feet tall and the same amount wide when open. It’s called ‘The Klencke Atlas’ and in its time (1660) it was absolutely the state of the art. It was originally a gift given to King Charles II of England, and I’ve no idea how you would use something that size. My biggest atlas (The Times Atlas of the World) is 18 inches long and 26 inches wide when open, and I have to clear my desk when I want to look something up!
http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/behold-the-largest-atlas-in-the-world-the-six-foot-tall-klencke-atlas-from-1660.html

Now, here’s an interesting use of the scientific method! Investigating haunted houses. What do we know about haunted houses, apart from the fact that they have a reputation for being haunted? Well for a start, they are usually old. They are often abandoned. They creak when you move around in them.

And what does this imply? It implies that they are badly maintained, damp and mouldy.

Mould. Hmmm. Aren’t a lot of hallucinogenic drugs based on moulds and fungi like ergot? So, thought a group of undergrads at Clarkson University, why don’t we have a look at the air quality in reputedly haunted houses. And that’s exactly what they are doing at the moment, investigating whether there is a link between haunted houses and the air quality in such houses, compared to the air quality in non-haunted houses.

Of course it won’t be absolute proof that the effects of haunting are -caused- by bad air quality, merely that there is a possible link. For all we know mould in old houses could be caused by them being haunted! Correlation is not causality. The haunting could even be caused by ancient Martian remains, as portrayed in ‘Quatermass and the Pit’...
http://www.labmanager.com/news/2015/04/undergrads-research-link-between-hauntings-indoor-air-quality#.VhDXG_lVhBc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ergot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quatermass_and_the_Pit

Geek Stuff:

Now this is real ‘Toys for the Boys’ stuff – a toy maglev train that uses real maglev! It goes pretty fast as well – in the demo, photographers had problems getting a photo because of the speed! It’s a 1/90th scale version of the record breaking 375mph SC Maglev train. OK, it’s only got a relatively small oval track, and only a single train and it does cost US$316, but it’s really impressive. The article pointed to tells you not just about the train, but includes details of how it works. Absolutely fascinating.
http://www.gizmag.com/takara-tommy-linear-liner/39600/

And now for something even faster: the Bloodhound 1,000mph rocket car. Just take a look at this little baby. Well actually, it’s a rather big beast, complete with a Rolls Royce fighter jet engine to get the speed up to a mere 300mph, at which stage the Nammo hybrid rocket kicks in to take it the rest of the way. As the article points out, the key problem is keeping the wheels on the ground so the ‘car’ doesn’t take off!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/25/bloodhound_1000mph_rocket_car_unveiled/

And talking about speed – just watch this time lapse video of Boeing building a Dreamliner aircraft for British Airways in just four minutes...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/01/dreamliner_time_lapse/

London:

How does a piece of 3D artwork that’s 49 feet long grabs you? That’s what Londoners have been able to see this last week. It’s a scene from the first Star Wars movie – the scene where Luke and friends try to take out the Death Star by flying down a trench in its surface. Sadly, by the time you read this it will have gone, but the whole idea is so exciting that I have no doubt there will be more of these 3D pictures by next summer. One of the most stunning pieces of hi-tech artistry I’ve seen for a long time! Take a look at the URL and wish you were here...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3257117/The-artistry-strong-one-Classic-Death-Star-scene-Star-Wars-recreated-49ft-long-3D-work-bridge-London.html

Ever wondered what a place like London would look like to a tourist 100 years ago? Well now’s your chance to find out, because in 1918 the American traveller Burton Holmes made a 15 minute movie of his trip to London. It’s in black and white, of course, and it was taken prior to the end of World War I, so there are rather more uniforms around that you would otherwise have seen.

And, of course, it’s quite touristy – you don’t get to see the slums for instance! That doesn’t stop it being a valuable historical record of just how things used to be. See what you think.
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/seeing-london-1918/

Scanner:

The United Nations has a radical, dangerous vision for the future of the Web
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/09/24/the-united-nations-has-a-radical-dangerous-vision-for-the-future-of-the-web/

New study into lack of women in Tech: It’s NOT the men’s fault
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/07/27/new_study_into_lack_of_women_in_tech_
its_not_the_mens_fault/

Wooden statue found in 1890 said to be 11,000 years old
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9740036/wooden-statue-found-in-russia-is-twice-the-age-of-egyptian-pyramid/

Printer drivers ate our homework, says Australian NSW Dept of Education
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/08/31/printer_drivers_ate_homework_says_nsw_dept_of_education/

Massive patent troll suit seeks to tax USB hubs at Wal-Mart, Amazon, Best Buy
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/09/nest-ceo-and-ex-apple-star-are-inventors-in-patent-troll-suit-over-usb/

Smartphone passcodes protected by the Fifth Amendment – US court
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/09/25/us_court_rules_phone_passcodes_are_
protected_by_the_fifth_amendment/

Slinky finds use in earthquake research
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9740382/slinky-finds-use-in-earthquake-research/

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi 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
4 October 2015

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/index.html.

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

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