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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: December 17, 2017

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WINDING DOWN

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

Christmas greetings, readers. This is the last Winding Down of the year. I pondered long and hard about what should go in it. First I decided that there would be no round up of the year. Even more important there will be no predictions for next year (which means I can’t be proved wrong*). And, since it is Christmas, there will be no bad news. I realized that the latter choice was perhaps a little unfortunate, since all the news I had picked out was bad news... Still I persevered, and so this week we have some varied Christmas reading that I hope you will find interesting, including the rise of silent reading, the limits of science, customer service, colonizing the Moon, how to use Git (that’s for would be programmers) and a different perspective on why the Roman Empire fell. There’s also an old chestnut from xkcd for the geeks, and no less than four pictures from the APOD archives. Finally, there’s a quote from one of the earliest programmers, Grace Hopper, who would have been 111 years old on the 9th of this month.

Hope you like what I’ve pulled together. It will be the last Winding Down until January 7, 2018. I know you’ll find it difficult to survive without your weekly fix of Winding Down, but, don’t worry, like all the villains in the movies – ‘I’ll Be Back!’

Happy Christmas to all my readers, and I wish you all a prosperous New Year.

Some reading for over Christmas:

Reading to yourself is a relatively new experience, confined to the last 300 years. In this interesting piece Thu-Huong Ha looks at the changes that reading silently brought to individuals.
https://quartzy.qz.com/1118580/the-beginning-of-silent-reading-was-also-the-beginning-of-an-interior-life/

Martin Rees, one of the UK’s top scientists, and its Astronomer Royal considers what he feels are the limits of science, and why, indeed, there are limits, despite its successes.
https://aeon.co/ideas/black-holes-are-simpler-than-forests-and-science-has-its-limits

I’m sure there will be plenty of people flying this Christmas, and plenty of tempers lost as a result, airlines not being noted for their customer service. Take a moment, perhaps, to look at this piece by Martin Geddes, which considers customer service from a different perspective.
http://mailchi.mp/martingeddes/humanise-customer-service-calls

Donald Trump just told NASA to get back to the Moon, so perhaps it’s time to consider how we should go about colonising the Moon. As it happens, not very long ago, I found an article in Medium explaining just how to colonize the Moon...
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/new-space-policy-directive-calls-for-human-expansion-across-solar-system
https://medium.com/teamindus/how-to-colonize-the-moon-6723a5c388de

For budding programmers, Medium has an article for those starting out on how to use the source code control system Git. The article’s called ‘So WTF is git?’, and it does indeed tell you WTF Git is! And as an aside, if you need a book on the subject, I’d recommend Mike McQuaid’s ‘Git in Practice’, published by Manning. (Note that I’m not unbiased on this, since I was a was a manuscript reviewer for this book.)
https://codeburst.io/so-wtf-is-git-fa7daa0e0271

Ever wondered why the Roman Empire fell? The classic book on the subject has been that of Edward Gibbon – ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’. But things have moved on since the 18th Century, and in a thought-provoking piece, Kyle Harper suggests that there were other reasons for the decline of the Roman Empire. I was impressed!
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-climate-change-and-disease-helped-the-fall-of-rome

Geek Stuff:

Not the first year this one’s been out, but it’s still my favourite Christmas xkcd. I snurfed my coffee all over the keyboard the first time I saw this one!
https://xkcd.com/838/

Pictures:

As a Christmas treat, here are no less than four pictures from NASA’s APOD archives!

Meteors over Mongolia: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171213.html

Meteors over Alberta, Canada: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171216.html

An Auorora over Norway: https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171210.html

And finally my favourite picture – meteors in a beautiful night sky, with a radio telescope dish in the foreground:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap171215.html

Coda:

“It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to get permission.” Admiral Grace Hopper
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/99/11375.html

* I will, however, tell you over the next year, the ones I would have made that would have proved to be right

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
17 December 2017

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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