WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Welcome back to Winding Down. This week we have material on the biggest Blue Screen of Death so far, Worldpay and hackathons, the EU and Apple, a new way of dealing with tumours, Oamaru – a steampunk town in New Zealand, averages, an engraving of a proposed 1,000ft globe (from 1893), and London Burning. The URLs in the Scanner Section will take you to stuff on why Americans have stopped using the internet, intergalactic photons and sun tan, Isaac Newton as the last magician, stopping WhatsApp mining your data, patching the IoT, Excel errors in scientific papers, and a fix for the GPS co-ordinates problem in Australia. Not a bad little selection, even if I say so myself!
Finally, having worked through a UK holiday weekend (last weekend) and an USA holiday weekend (this weekend ) we are taking a week’s holiday next weekend, so we’ll be back on Sunday 18 September.
In the meantime I wish all my US readers a happy Labor Day, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you all that the storm doesn’t cause too many problems.
Shorts:
Last week I drew your attention to a picture of a five stories high Windows Blue Screen of Death. This week we go one story better with a six story Blue Screen of Death at Manchester (UK) Piccadilly station!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/29/bsods_at_scale_we_laugh_at_your_puny_
five_storeys_heres_our_six_storey_fail/
I have to say, one thing that came in my mailbox last week I found rather worrying. It was an invitation to a Worldpay Hackathon. Hackathons, if you haven’t come across them before, are an event where a load of programmers get together and race one another to produce ‘interesting’ code as fast as possible. A sort of digital equivalent of musical jamming sessions.
I don’t approve of hackathons anyway – they promote really bad programming habits. But Worldpay are a major digital payment company. The idea that they might be processing card payments using code thrown together by a bunch of programmers whose main incentive was to produce something as fast as possible to win some of the prize cash I find really freaky. It’s exactly things like this that result in insecure code.
http://worldpay-hackathon.bemyapp.com/
I guess everyone has by now seen the news about the EU decision on Apple having to pay 13 billion Euro in back taxes. I guess everyone has their own opinions, but I thought I’d drop in a few other snippets of information about the issue.
First, in EU giving state aid to companies is illegal unless you have a special dispensation from the EU. Second, the nature of the tax breaks accorded the Apple (UK£50 for every UK£1,000,000 profit) were deemed by the EU to amount to state aid. Given that the EU had already ordered the state owned Electricite de France (EDF) to pay 1.4 billion Euros in back taxes on similar grounds, Apple is not alone or being picked on.
Of course the reason that that the EU can do this, is because Apple has been retaining the profits in the EU. The means that Apple has a simple solution if it doesn’t want to pay the EU. Move the money back to the USA. Of course, it would then mean it had to pay US corporation tax instead, but I know which I would prefer Apple to do if I was a US citizen!
On the other hand, if I was Apple, I’d be lobbying Congress frantically for a general tax amnesty to allow the company, and other US companies with large cash hoards, to bring the money back to the US without having to pay tax...
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2016/08/30/eu_commission_rules_on_
apple_ireland_tax_sweetheart_deal/
Homework:
There is an interesting looking piece in ‘Nature’ about a new way of dealing with cancerous tumours, using bacteria.
It’s by genetically programming bacteria that typically thrive near tumours to multiply until the population pressure is high enough, to cause them to commit suicide, releasing anti-cancer drugs. In other words, it’s programming the bacteria to be suicide bombers taking out tumours. After 12 days, mice who received the altered salmonella had tumours which were a quarter the size of those in mice treated with normal salmonella. [This non-techie’s explanation mostly stolen from reader Andrew’s email drawing my attention to the piece.]
Of course there’s a long way to go yet, but it does sound promising...
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v536/n7614/abs/nature18930.html
Geek Stuff:
Well here’s a place for those of you with steampunk tendencies to visit – New Zealand. It seems that the South Island farming town of Oamaru is well on its way to becoming the steampunk capital of the world! It started off with the advantage of a good collection of Victorian architecture, and a small number of would be steampunks.
After a while steampunk caught on with the rest of the population and outlying farms, and the farmers started coming to town with their own steampunk creations, built in their barns from left over bits and pieces. And – lo and behold – a steampunk town.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/aug/30/new-zealand-town-oamaru-steampunk-capital-of-the-world
Did you know that the use of averages in the general population dates back to the US Civil War? Apparently they were used to determine a lot of things in the Union Army – including uniform sizes. Clothes sizes of small, medium, and large date from this exercise!
There are a number of problems with averages, apart from the fact that they tend to cause ignorant politicians to make insane claim to the effect that their school reorganizations will make all children ‘above average’. But the real problem is that the average person doesn’t exist! The average person is the sum of all people’s characteristics, divided by the number of people. However broadly you define the characteristics, you can never find anyone who is exactly the same as the average in all of the characteristics.
I guess my problem is that on average, I hate averages...
http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/on-average/
Pictures:
This week’s picture is an engraving of a truly ambitious design for a 1,000 ft globe to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the new world. It was supposed to be part of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Actually, it looks to me as though, had it been built, it could have housed the whole of the World’s Fair!
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/palacios-plan-for-colossal-monument-to-columbus-1890/
London:
8:30pm British Summer Time, today, Sunday 4 September. It’s the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire of London, and you can watch, live, a replica of the London skyline, as it was in 1666, burn on the River Thames. You’ll need to adjust for your local time if you want to catch it (London is five hours ahead of New York, if that helps).
The skyline is 130 yards long and was built by young volunteers under the supervision of artist David Best. It promises to be a pretty impressive display, and the weather forecast is for overcast, but no rain, so it’s in with a chance of working properly!
http://www.visitlondon.com/greatfire350/watchitburn
Scanner:
Why a staggering number of Americans have stopped using the Internet the way they used to
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/05/13/new-government-data-shows-a-staggering-number-of-americans-have-stopped-basic-online-activities/
If managing PCs is still hard, good luck patching 100,000 internet things
http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2016/07/19/if_managing_pcs_is_still_hard_
good_luck_patching_100000_internet_things/
Newton, the last magician
http://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/newton-the-last-magician
Ten-trillionths of your suntan comes from intergalactic photons
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/12/ten_trillionths_of_your_sun_tan_
comes_from_intergalactic_photons/
How to keep Facebook from mining your WhatsApp data
http://fusion.net/story/341091/facebook-whatsapp-privacy-opt-out/
An alarming number of scientific papers contain Excel errors
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/08/26/an-alarming-number-of-scientific-papers-contain-excel-errors/
Australia plans new co-ordinates to fix sat-nav gap
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-36912700
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, 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 September 2016
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.
