WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week we have for your Sunday reading material on the leaning tower of San Francisco, the burned out reactor of Chernobyl, the missing (or otherwise) Antarctic sea ice, a creepy demonstration of big brother watching you, the technical story behind the Samsung flaming phones, and some classy aerial shots of London. And, if that’s not enough, then URLs will take you to a US$300 Apple dead tree book, diamonds + nuclear waste = batteries, more dangers from the Internet of Things, is there a ‘geek gene’ and, since it’s only three weeks to go until Christmas, a Christmas pudding recipe from no less than George Orwell.
All Christmas puddings are equal, but some are more equal than others...
Shorts:
Ooops! It turns out that readings from European satellites show that the highly prestigious US$350 million Millennium Tower in San Francisco has already sunk 16 inches and is listing several inches to the northwest. The problem is it’s built on landfill. It’s sitting on a concrete slab, but the piles for the slab don’t go all the way down through the landfill to the bedrock. The building was completed in 2009, so it’s sunk the 16 inches in less than 10 years.
Apparently the people who bought the very pricey apartments in the building are, understandably, not happy. I expect there are plenty of lawyers buzzing around the tower.
This is the sort of thing that happens when you build tall buildings on landfill! To successfully build these sort of buildings you need proper bedrock, like Manhattan Schist, on which New York’s skyscrapers are built. Will the tower fall over? Clearly the developers didn’t think it would, and the city’s building inspectors didn’t think it would, either. The developers estimate was that it would sink less than 10 inches over its lifetime...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/25/san_francisco_millennium_tower/
https://www.nycgovparks.org/parks/j-hood-wright-park/highlights/12369
http://www.citylab.com/weather/2013/09/incredible-history-san-franciscos-coastal-industry-seen-air/7010/
Last week saw the remains of Reactor Number 4 at Chernobyl covered up by a new confinement structure billed as the world’s largest moving structure. This new building is reckoned to last several hundred years, which will, hopefully, be long enough for a proper clear up to become available. For those of you too young to remember the melt down of the nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, I’ve given a Wikipedia link to a pretty reasonable description.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/30/chernobyl_new_reactor_shield_in_place/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster#Experiment_and_explosion
Homework:
The Telegraph has an interesting piece about Antarctic sea ice. Ever since global warming became a hot topic (so to speak), the climate change community has been pushing the loss of sea ice in Antarctica since the 1950s as an example. We haven’t heard much about it for the last few years, though, since the sea ice seems to be expanding. Very confusing.
Now a group of scientists led by Dr Jonathon Day have published some interesting research on the topic. Since satellite observations of the area began only thirty or so years ago, they had to look elsewhere for information about earlier times. So, they went back to the end of the 19th and start of the 20th Century, when the race to explore Antarctica was at its height. They went through the extremely detailed log books of the expeditions to get details of the state of sea ice at the time.
What they discovered was that at the start of the 20th Century, the sea ice was virtually the same as it is now, which suggests that there is cyclical variation in the amount of sea ice in Antarctica. Presumably there was an increase in the during the first half of the Century, followed by a decrease – which was picked up by satellite measurement in the second half. Nice work!
I was a bit worried by the lack of references in the Telegraph article so I did a bit of research to find out just what Dr Jonathan Day’s credentials are, and exactly who publishes the journal ‘The Cryosphere’. It turns out Dr Day is Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Meteorology in the UK’s Reading University, and ‘The Cryosphere’ is published by the European Geosciences Union.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/11/24/scott-shackleton-logbooks-prove-antarctic-sea-ice-not-shrinking/
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~jonny/home/
http://www.the-cryosphere.net/
http://www.egu.eu/news/308/antarctic-explorers-help-make-discovery-100-years-after-their-epic-adventures/
Click-click... If you ever wondered just how detailed the information a website can legitimately and technically get about you from your computer, then you just have to visit click-click for a demonstration. Try it – I think you’ll be surprised.
https://clickclickclick.click/#cba10da1958548c0c432c2454e714292
Geek Stuff:
This is something for the hardware geeks out there. Instrumental have done a tear down of the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, to find out why the batteries were exploding. Needless to say they kept a fire extinguisher handy during the process!
The result made interesting reading. It was, in fact a combination of the perils of the battery designers trying to get the maximum power capacity of the battery, and the phone designers trying to fit the battery into an absolute minimum of space. In the process a number of the commonly accepted ‘rules’ for how you design lithium polymer batteries were broken, not to mention how you use them.
The article is impressive – and not just for the detective work. The explanations of what was wrong, and how lithium polymer batteries work is clear and accessible to non-techies. Recommended reading!
https://www.instrumental.ai/blog/2016/12/1/aggressive-design-caused-samsung-galaxy-note-7-battery-explosions
Pictures and London:
This week’s pictures are a selection of aerial photographs of London. The top picture is a magnificent picture of the Isle of Dogs which is a sort of overflow from the City of London. The next one will be recognised by all James Bond aficionados – the Dome, as featured in the opening part of ‘The World Is Not Enough’ movie.
London ‘s financial district (aka The City) has a number of weirdly shaped buildings which mark it out as being London. All those sort of buildings have, of course, been given nicknames by Londoners. See if you can identify the Shard, the Cheese Grater, the Walkie-talkie and the Gherkin. The gherkin is sometimes known by a less flattering name, but not in polite society... The Walkie-talkie is interesting – the architect failed to take into account the fact that all that glass set in a curved concave shape would focus the sun – just like a concave mirror. A number of cars had their paintwork go up in smoke before the cause was figured out. Fortunately, there were no crispy fried humans!
http://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/these-aerial-shots-of-london-are-something-stunning
Scanner:
Mac book, whoa! Apple unveils $300 design tome
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/11/16/apple_unveils_300_design_tome/
Diamonds turn nuclear waste into nuclear batteries
http://newatlas.com/diamonds-nuclear-batteries/46645/
Internet of Sins: Million more devices sharing known private keys for HTTPS, SSH admin
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/07/bad_key_security_holes_getting_worse/
FBI to gain expanded hacking powers as Senate effort to block fails
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-congress-idUSKBN13P2ER
‘Geek gene’ denied: If you find computer science hard, it’s your fault (or your teacher’s)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/09/28/geek_gene_denied/
Try George Orwell’s recipe for Christmas Pudding, from his essay “British Cookery” (1945)
http://www.openculture.com/2013/12/george-orwells-recipe-for-christmas-pudding.html
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 December 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.
