We're Toast 1

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts. I had intended to make it a page that I would update periodically, but I think the list would get too long. 😒

Climate Change

• New Study Shows Just How Frighteningly Fast Greenland Is Melting
• Permafrost Melt Could Destroy a Third of All Arctic Infrastructure, Affecting as Many as 4 Million People
• The Inconvenient Truth about Climate Change and the Economy
• The Race to Understand Anartica's Most Terrifying Glacier
• The Truth About These Climate Change Numbers

Politics

• The Real Roots of American Rage
• Trumpism Is Rasicm, So Things Will Get Worse
• A devastating report details a ‘monumental’ assault on science at the Department of the Interior

Technology

• We Must Prepare Now for Quantum Attacks, National Academy of Sciences Warns
• “Alexa, Launch Our Nukes!” Artificial Intelligence and the Future of War
• How We Can Prepare for Catastrophically Dangerous AI – And Why We Can't Wait
• The Iran Hacks Cybersecurity Experts Feared May Be Here
• ests New Hypersonic Missile System Under Direct Orders From President Putin [Updated]

Getting the Washington Post Free Through Amazon Prime

Thanks to a post on Mark Shainblum's Facebook page, I found out that Canadian members of Amazon Prime can get the Washington Post for six months free by installing Amazon's Washington Post Android app. I had thought that Amazon didn't allow app downloads or purchases in Canada, but I guess that has changed since they started selling their Fire tablets here.

The process isn't as straightforward as installing an app from Google's Play Store but it is possible. I didn't make notes when I was installing the Washington Post app, and I did run into some problems, but the procedure below is close to what I did. (FYI, I am using a Samsung Galaxy S8 running Android Oreo. The process may vary depending on your phone and OS).

1. First download the Amazon Appstore app. On your device, go to https://www.amazon.ca/androidapp and download the APK file. 
2. If you get a warning about downloading third-party apps, allow the download and install it.
3. Open the Amazon Appstore app. 
4. Find the News section (not Newspapers) and then find the Washington Post app.
5. Add the app to your Wishlist. (You may get an error message saying that it was unsuccessful, but it should get added anyway).
6.  Go to your Wishlist and install the app. Accept any requests to install third-party apps.
7. The app should now appear in your app drawer.

 The app is optimized for tablets but works perfectly well on my Galaxy S8. It does have two features I like: a night-mode setting and the ability to share articles, which means I can send long articles to Pocket so I can read them on my Kindle.

The subscription is free for six months as long as you are an Amazon Prime member. After that, I think it is $4/month. I say "think" because the information is hard to track down. That seems a reasonable price; if it turns out to be more than that, I will likely cancel it.

Tor.com's Most Anticipated Books of 2019

The good folks at Tor.com have published a list of the books they're most looking forward to in 2019. I haven't checked, but I assume that most, if not all, are published by Tor or its affiliates. It's quite a list, dominated by fantasy, which seems to be the trend in publishing in recent years. There are also many new authors, which is a good thing.

These are the books that I am looking forward to reading:

• Black Leopard, Red Wolf by Marlon James (February 5)
• The Best of R.A. Lafferty (February 7)
• The City in the Middle of the Night by Charlie Jane Anders (February 12)
• Ancestral Night by Elizabeth Bear (March 5)
• A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (March 26)
• Agency by William Gibson (April 2), This is probably the book of the year for me. 
• Exhalation: Stories by Ted Chiang (May 7)
• The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz (September 24). If this is anywhere near as good as Autonomous, it should be a great read.

What Will Be Left of Us in a Hundred Million Years?

It's now generally accepted by scientists that humans have entered a new geologic era of their own creation–the Anthropocene. If you don't think that humanity has modified the environment of the Earth in a way that has affected the very geology of the planet, you need to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario for their exhibition, "Anthropocene", showing until January 6, 2019.

Anthropocene dramatically illustrates how we, individually and collectively, are leaving a human signature on our world.

World-renowned photographer Edward Burtynsky and multiple award-winning filmmakers Jennifer Baichwal and Nicholas de Pencier have created a powerful series of new photographs, including large-scale murals augmented by film extensions, film installations and augmented reality (AR) installations, that take us to places we are deeply connected to – but normally never see.

The artists travelled to countries on every continent, save Antarctica, documenting irreversible marks of human activity. Informed by scientific research, powered by aesthetic vision, inspired by a desire to bear witness, they reveal the scale and gravity of our impact on the planet.

We have reached an unprecedented moment in planetary history. Humans now change the Earth’s systems more than all natural forces combined. This is the central argument of the proposed current geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

It's a powerful and emotionally moving exhibition, well worth the price of admission if you can get to it before it closes. Seeing it raised an interesting question in my mind—what will remain of humanity in deep geologic time, say a hundred million years from now. Will anyone looking at or in the Earth in that far future be able to detect that some form of civilization had blossomed across the Earth? The answer appears to be yes.

In The Fossils of the 21st Century, Maddie Stone looks at what might remain of human civilization a hundred million years from now. It's clear that there would be evidence of our existence in the fossil record, although exactly what it would be remains open for debate.

And some scientists—Zalasiewicz and Bennet included—suspect the fossil record of the Anthropocene will be profound. For one, if humans to continue to drive up extinction rates worldwide, our geologic moment will feature a sudden, dramatic pruning of the tree of life, comparable perhaps to the five major mass die-offs in Earth’s history. At the same time, our industrial takeover has resulted an explosion of new, potentially-fossilizable things, analogous to the trace fossils animals leave behind in the form of nests and footprints.

Zalasiewicz told Earther that the number of potential technofossil “species”, while only roughly estimated, is “at least hundreds of millions”, far in excess of the biodiversity recognizable in the rock record based on fossil shape, pattern, and structure.

“The levels of techno diversity are huge,” he said.

These potential Anthropocene fossils are not only diverse in form, but in composition. For most of life’s 4-billion-year run on this planet, fossils have formed from precious few starting materials: mainly hard-stuff like bones, shells, and wood, and in rarer cases, soft tissues. Modern civilization has gone and expanded the stratigraphic ingredient pantry to include semi-natural substances like concrete, metals rarely seen in nature like aluminum, and things that never existed at all, including artificial glasses, plastics, and an entire family of new gems and minerals.

And then there are chickens, but you can read the article to find out about them.

There's another way of looking at the question. Could we detect a short-lived industrial civilization in the fossil or geologic record of the deep past? If it was like ours, then the answer is yes.

Now that our industrial civilization has truly gone global, humanity’s collective activity is laying down a variety of traces that will be detectable by scientists 100 million years in the future. The extensive use of fertilizer, for example, keeps 7 billion people fed, but it also means we’re redirecting the planet’s flows of nitrogen into food production. Future researchers should see this in characteristics of nitrogen showing up in sediments from our era. Likewise our relentless hunger for the rare-Earth elements used in electronic gizmos. Far more of these atoms are now wandering around the planet’s surface because of us than would otherwise be the case. They might also show up in future sediments, too. Even our creation, and use, of synthetic steroids has now become so pervasive that it too may be detectable in geologic strata 10 million years from now.

You can read the study on which the article was based on arXiv.org.

Featured Links - December 27, 20188

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• It's 2018, and the iPhone Is Still Super Annoying. Many reasons why I don't use an iPhone.
• Animal House. Life in a Toronto startup. I am glad I got out of startups when I did. 
• Four Days Trapped at Sea with Crypto's Noveau Riche. Laurie Penny goes on a crypto cruise. 
• 'There's no major city like it': Toronto's unique ravine system under threat. It must be bad if this story made the Guardian, but why aren't Toronto media picking it up?
• What to do when you feel awful and nothing seems to make sense: identifying and navigating gaslighting. Sadly, a necessary read.
• The Fears Behind Amazon's 'Eyes on the Street'. Amazon's panopticon.
• How to get the most out of your new Kindle e-Reader. This is a good summary if you are new to the Kindle.  (Some features described are not available in Canada).

Fifty Years After Earthrise

Fifty years ago today, Apollo 8 astronauts took what has become one of the iconic photographs of the 20th century–the Earth rising over the lunar horizon. Now, an imaging team at NASA has used data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and modern graphics to recreate that moment.

Using photo mosaics and elevation data from Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), this video commemorates Apollo 8's historic flight by recreating the moment when the crew first saw and photographed the Earth rising from behind the Moon. Narrator Andrew Chaikin, author of "A Man on the Moon," sets the scene for a three-minute visualization of the view from both inside and outside the spacecraft accompanied by the onboard audio of the astronauts.

I wasn't gong to post over the holiday, but given that it is the anniversary of the photo, I couldn't let this go without sharing it. Enjoy.

Merry Christmas and All That

It's almost Christmas, and I'm going to be too busy to blog, and you're probably going to be too busy to read it. So I'll be back sometime next week.

Have a merry Christmas, or happy holiday, if that's your preference.

Corsair K55 RBG Gaming Keyboard

I bought myself an early Christmas present–a Corsair K55 RBG gaming keyboard. I have been using a Logitech keyboard for the last few years. It haa backlit keys, a necessity for me at home, but the keys are laptop style, flat and slippery, and I found that I was making far too many typos.

The Corsair K55 is a low-end gaming keyboard. I got it because it's cheap as these things go, it has multi-colour illumination for the keys, and it's fairly quiet. I tried some more expensive keyboards, which had mechanical switches, but most of them were noisy. The Corsair has a decent feel for touch typing and I've already found my typing speed is much faster than on the Logitech keybaord.

The lighting controls are basic - the keyboard is divided into three zones and you can only set the colours for a zone. I would have liked more control (setting a different colour for the home keys would be nice, as would the abilty to turn off the edge lighting along the rows of keys).

I did install Corsair's iCUE software, which lets set profiles for different games and the like, and offers more colour choices, but found the software impossible to use due to lack of help or documentation, so I uninstalled it.

The keyboard has six programmable macro keys on the left edge. I'll probably find a use for them, but the first thing I'll do is set the first one to act as an ESC key because it's right next to the ESC key and I keep hitting it. There are also buttons for sound and media control, which is a useful feature.

For the price, the K55 is a good value, as long as you don't want mechanical key switches and total control over keyboard illumination. Hardcore gamers will probably want something more advanced but for my purposes it will do.

Has Elon Musk Made a Tunnelling Breakthrough?

Earlier this week Elon Musk demonstrated a new transit system near SpaceX's headquarters, running Teslas through a tunnel dug by his Boring Company. From what I've read, most articles treated it as something of a joke, but they missed the key point. That tunnel, basic as it was, was dug at a cost that's at least an order of magnitude less than the tunnelling systems used by most major transit projects. Musk also claims that the Boring Company can dig turnnels at least ten times faster. 

I think the idea of running cars through tunnels, even if they are moving at 150 miles per hour, is silly, and it certainly won't do much to relieve traffic congestion. But if the Boring Company can scale their machines to the size needed to dig subway or railway tunnels, they might make it a lot easier to build public transit. 

As this article points out, subway tunnels in the US (and Canada, although the article doens't show any Canadian statistics), are expensive, somewhere between 500 million and 1 billion dollars a mile. Even allowing for the costs of adding the necessary infrastructure, Musks costs would appear to be somewhere under a tenth of that. 

Rail fans may be laughing or hanging their heads at Musk’s display, given the entrepreneur/inventor/CEO’s tendency to make big promises, as well as his commitment to displacing more proven, efficient modes of transit from conversation. But it’s hard to dismiss one key achievement of this project. Musk put a Tesla in a tunnel, and he did it for a potentially game-changing price: The demonstration tube cost $10 million a mile to dig, according to Musk.

That excludes costs of research, development, or equipment, the L.A. Times reported. Whether it factors in property acquisition or labor—which generally represents at least 30 to 40 percent of a project’s cost—isn’t clear. But even at $50 million per mile, it would still be a fraction of what comparable projects cost. If Musk’s company has built what many tunneling pros have long thought unachievable—a boring machine that does the job cheaper and faster than the stalwarts of civil engineering thought possible—that could be a boon for underground transit systems in the U.S., which often struggle to justify their enormous construction costs.

I should note that being tunnels aren't the only part of an underground transit system, as those living along the Eglinton Crosstown LRT line in Toronto are finding out. The tunnel machines finished their job a year ago, but the line won't open until 2020 or 2021, largely due to the time it takes to build the underground stations. 

Why Choose Body Text Instead of Normal in Word?

I cannot count the number of times I've had to clean up a Microsoft Word document for one of my co-workers in which unexpected things started happening to the formatting, and they couldn't figure out why. In almost every case, the problem was that they were using the Normal paragraph style for their text and had changed the style properties. But other paragraph styles then changed, and suddenly their document was a mess.

The solution is to not use the Normal paragraph style for anything. Instead use another style (generally Body Text) and base your other styles on that (where appropriate). I was always careful to do this when I designed document templates; the trick was then to get people to use the templates.

In "Why choose Body Text vs Normal in Word" the Office Watch site explains why and how to use Body Text (or another style other than Normal) as the basis for your Word documents and templates. I can't stress strongly enough how important it is to do this, and the Office Watch article is about the best I've seen on the subject.

And while you're at it, if you use Microsoft Office, I recommend subscribing to their newsletter. I've been a subscriber for many years.

An Interview with Santa's Lawyer

John Scalzi is noted for humorous fiction, and this year he's given us a Christmas treat. Here's a link to "An Interview with Santa's Lawyer". Don't read this while eating or drinking.

Please state your name and occupation.

My name is Marta Pittman, and I’m a partner at Xavier, Masham, Abbott and Stevens.

And you’re Santa Claus’ lawyer.

That is correct. More accurately, I’m the partner in charge of our firm’s Seasonal Litigation and Clearances practice, which has as a client NicolasNorth LLC, Santa’s corporate entity.

I wasn’t aware that Santa needed to have his own corporation.

Of course he does. One, Santa heads a massive global enterprise, whose activities are spread over a wide range of areas. Having a corporate structure allows him a measure of organization and systematization. Two, Santa has a large number of employees, mostly elves, who have their own idiosyncratic employment issues and practices. The corporate structure simplifies hiring, benefits, and negotiation of labor disputes. Three, due to the nature of Santa’s work, he has immense exposure to liability. The corporate structure acts as a shield for Santa’s personal wealth and property.

Santa has liability issues?

Fairport Convention: Celebration - Granada TV 1981

Ok, since I'm still in a bit of a Richard Thompson mood today after Saturday's wonderful concert, here's a real treat. This is a British TV broadcast from 1981 of a one-off Fairport Convention reunion (they had split up in 1979) with the original Full House lineup, with Linda Thompson in Sandy Denny's role. I had no idea this had ever happened.

"The separate tracks from this programme are elsewhere on the channel in lesser quality. Now, here is the whole thing (minus ads) in its entirety as telecast on Granada TV in August 1981. Hosted by Mike Harding, this captures the "Full House" line-up of Fairport - Dave Swarbrick, Richard Thompson, Simon Nicol, Dave Pegg and Dave Mattacks with guest Linda Thompson - in the period when the band was in hiatus. They reformed with a somewhat different line-up in 1985 and continue to this day.

Material is a combination of songs they recorded in 1970, then-current tunes from Swarb's "Smiddyburn" album and rarities such as Bright Lights Tonight and the then-unreleased Wall Of Death."

Could SpaceX Get to the Moon Faster and Cheaper than NASA?

If NASA has its way, it'll be at least 10 years before Americans set foot on the moon again, and the cost will be measured in tens of billions of dollars. But there is a better way, which would be both faster and cheaper, using existing SpaceX boosters.

The plan, called Moon Direct, would use three Falcon Heavy and one Falcon 9 launches to land the material necessary for a lunar outpost followed by a crewed Dragon lander. It would be far, far cheaper than NASA's plan, which involves several launches of its unproven and hideously expensive Space Launch System.

Moon Direct requires relatively little launch mass and largely uses existing technologies.

Following our assumption that launch costs and non-launch costs will be roughly equal, we could execute our setup missions (two flights for Phase 1 and two Phase 2 missions) for about $1.5 billion. Recurring missions will cost $420 million per year. This is two percent of NASA’s current budget. This is very inexpensive by the standards of human space programs. NASA’s human spaceflight program total budget is currently around $10 billion per year with little clear purpose.

Unfortunately, given the US Congress' propensity for funding expensive NASA programs as the basis of job creation for their districts, I don't see much likelihood of this plan happening, unless a private company, or consortium of companies takes it on.

Farout is Really Far Out

Astronomers have discovered a Trans-Neptunian object, or dwarf planet, more than 11 billion miles from the sun, making it the farthest discovered object in our solar system. The official name is 2018 VG18, but has been dubbed Farout, which seems much more appropriate. 

The newly discovered object was announced earlier today by the International Astronomical Union’s Minor Planet Center. Many more years of observations will be required to fully characterize the object and its orbital path, but the IAU has added it to its database under the provisional name 2018 VG18, along with its coordinates and observational notes. Farout, as it’s been nicknamed, was discovered by astronomer Scott S. Sheppard from the Carnegie Institution for Science and his colleagues at the University of Hawaii and Northern Arizona University.

Farout was first observed on November 10, 2018 by astronomers using the Japanese Subaru 8-meter telescope located atop Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The object was re-observed in early December with the Magellan telescope at the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile. These multiple observations, in addition to confirming the object, were used to establish its path across the night sky, along with its size, brightness, and color.

Richard Thompson at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre

I expected that Saturday night's Richard Thompson Electric Trio concert at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre would be good, and I wasn't disappointed. It was spectacularly good. Thompson and his trio (augmented on some songs by a second guitarist) were tight and powerful. Throughout Thompson showed once again that he is an absolute master of the guitar, both electric and acoustic.

The setlist featured several songs from his new album, 13 Rivers, several of his classic tunes (1952 Vincent Black Lightning, Wall of Death, Dimming of the Day, Beeswing) and a few more obscure numbers, including a couple going back to the days of Fairport Convention. It's hard to pick highlights, but 1952 Vincent Black Lightning, a song I've never much cared for on record, was a master class in acoustic guitar playing, and on the electric side, Guitar Heros and Put It There Pal were standouts.

If you want a taste of what it was like, check out this pro-shot YouTube video of his set at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival in August. The setlist is almost identical to last night's show (unlike some bands I could name, he doesn't vary his setlists much on a tour).

I honestly don't know why Thompson has never achieved more than cult popularity. Looking back on his career, which now spans more than 50 years, I can only think of one other performer who has been around for as long and maintained a similar level of quality in his recordings and live performances and that's Neil Young. If I had to choose between going to one of their concerts, I would pick Thompson.

Featured Links - December 15, 2018

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• Artist lovingly paints Texas fast food joints in Kinkade-esque scenery. Warning: you won't be able to unsee this.
• The Books that Made Dracula. An exhibit of Stoker's reference material at the London Library.
• Dawn of Dianetics: L. Ron Hubbard, John W. Campbell, and the Origins of Scientology A fascinating piece about the early history of science fiction. 
• The American Economy is Rigged, by a Nobel Prize-winning economist.
• NASA Astronaut Shares Harrowing New Details About Failed Soyuz Launch. It was a pretty rough ride.
• Rush’s Geddy Lee Talks Massive New Bass Book, Meeting John Paul Jones. A long interview with one of my favourite bass players.

Automated Customer Service: A Treat from John Scalzi

SF author John Scalzi was on a book tour last month. As a treat for his audiences, he read a new short story, "Automated Customer Service", about the dangers of automated customer service phone lines and the Internet of (Dangerous) Things.

He's now posted on his blog in both text and audio. it It's typical Scalzi, snappy and funny but also quite grim. If you have 12 minutes, I recommend listening to Scalzi's reading of it. Warning: Do not try eating or drinking while reading or listening to this.

Thank you for calling the customer service line of Vacuubot, purveyors of America’s finest automated vacuum cleaners! In order to more efficiently handle call volume, we rely on automated responses. To continue in English, press one. Para Espanol o prima dos.

Let's continue in English. Which Vacuubot product are you calling about? For the Vacuubot S10 model, press one. For the Vacuubot XL model, press two. For the Vacuubot Extreme Clean model, press three.

How Facebook Made a Universal Open Source Language for the Web

In the last couple of years in my job at the TSX, I had to learn a bit about REST and some other methods for querying data. If I was still working, it probably wouldn't have been long before I encountered GraphQL, an open source query language invented at Facebook. I can understand the need for it; it seems a bit like DITA for data.

Wired has an article explaining what QraphQL is and how it came to be.

The diversity of languages creates a need for a lingua franca that applications can use to talk to one another, regardless of the language used to create them. For example, the mobile version of a travel app might need to extract a flight schedule or upload changes to your profile on a server running software written in a different programming language. Meanwhile, application developers increasingly outsource parts of their software to cloud services that handle tasks such as sending text messages; the companies offering those services need to make them compatible with multiple programming languages.

Historically, that lingua franca has been something called REST, short for "representational state transfer," a simple but sometimes blunt approach to sharing information between applications and servers. But a more flexible alternative called Graph Query Language, developed by Facebook, is spreading fast and has won over companies ranging from GitHub to Audi.

I'm not surprised that GraphQL was developed at Facebook, given the size of the Facebook user base and the amount of data that a typical Facebook page must handle. It makes sense that they would need a tool that can create leaner data queries than legacy tools like SQL and REST. I am a bit surprised that they made it open source, given some of the other news about the company, but it's a good thing that they did, even if it means that technical writers are going to have to learn how to document yet another API.

Bitcoin Death Spiral?

I've been skeptical about the value of Bitcoin almost since the beginning of its success. There are just too many problems with it to make it a stable, long-term investment. My biggest concern isn't the instability that the cryptocurrency markets have demonstrated; it's the energy requirements to mine Bitcoins and the every increasing size of the distributed ledger. Now it seems that Bitcoin may be entering a death spiral as the value decreases below the cost of mining it.

Yet the cost of mining bitcoin is not a fixed-dollar amount. There is a feedback mechanism in mining any commodity that applies to bitcoin: as the price of bitcoin increases, new miners enter the market, increasing the effort required to mine a bitcoin, as its reward will be shared among a larger group of miners. Similarly, when the price of bitcoin falls and miners exit, the cost of mining decreases. However, the number of miners cannot fall below a certain level, because without the miners providing the computing power to maintain the ledger, the bitcoin blockchain will not remain viable.

Mining at a cost higher than the cost at which you can sell in the futures market destroys value. So, any rational investor — even one who strongly believes the price of bitcoin will rebound — has no incentive to mine if the cost of mining is higher than the future price and is better off buying in the futures market. And unlike gold, which can retain its value even if mining activity stops, bitcoin can have no value absent the mining activity that maintains the ledger of who owns it. Absent the mining activity, bitcoin is a just a set of encrypted numbers with no value.

Update: I meant to mention this and forgot to - the energy cost of mining Bitcoin. According to this Wired article, Bitcoin mining now uses more energy than the country of Serbia. Obviously, this is not good.

The Year's Best Science Fiction, Thirty-Third Annual Collection

The Year's Best Science Fiction is a long-running series of anthologies that were edited by the late Gardner Dozois and were generally considered as the gold standard in "best of" anthologies. I've been reading them for many years and just finished the 33rd collection, which includes stories published in 2015. (Yes, I know I'm behind; maybe now that I am retired, I'll be able to catch up).

As with all anthologies, there were some stories that I didn't enjoy. Generally, if a story didn't grab me I didn't finish reading it. But there weren't that many. Dozois had good taste, and his tastes were pretty close to mine.

These were the stories that thought were the best of the 36 in this book:

• "Ruins" by Eleanor Arnason: One of several stories here from the Old Venus anthology, set on the tropical Venus of the old pulp magazines. 
• "Meshed" by Rich Larson: A look at the high-tech future of sports and what it might mean for the athletes.
• "Gypsy" by Carter Scholz: An interesting take on interstellar travel.
• "The Astrakhan, the Homburg, and the Red Coat" by Chaz Brenchly
• "Calved" by Sam J. Miller: 
• "Botanica Veneris: Thirteen Papercuts by Ida Countess Rathagan" by Ian McDonald: Another Old Venus story and my favourite of the whole anthology. I didn't want it to end. 
• "Consolation" by John Kessel: A near future story where Canada takes over some of the U.S. 
• "City of Ash" by Paolo Bacigalupi: A grim tale of climate disaster in Phoenix.
• "Trapping the Pleistocene" by James Sarafin: Hunting giant beavers in the past. 
• "Inhuman Garbage" by Kristine Kathryn Rusch: A taut police procedural set on the Moon. 
• "Hello, Hello: Can You Hear Me, Hello" by Seanan McGuire: AI and communication with a non-human species. 

As always, your mileage may vary.

Featured Links - December 9, 2018

Links to things that I found interesting but didn't want to do a full post about.

• Podcast interview with the astronomer who speculated that Oumuamua might be a sign of extraterrestrial life
• Up close and personal at a Soyuz launch. I hope they were wearing earplugs!
• This is what Toronto was like in the 1920s. How things have changed!
• SF authors John Scalzi and Cixin Liu in San Diego, "Where we literally talk about life, the universe and everything. It was captured on video! Here it is."
• The 1995 Anime “Ghost in the Shell” is more relevant than ever in today’s technologically complex society I've watched this movie several times and I never get tired of it. 
• There's a new map of all the movies filmed and set in Toronto.
• Bruce Sterling on architecture, design, science fiction, futurism and involuntary parks. Bruce Sterling is always interesting.

David Crosby and the Lighthouse Band at the Capitol Theatre

Last night, the Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, NY presented David Crosby and the Lighthouse Band, and thanks to Relix Magazine, the concert was webcast live. It was wonderful, at least until the feed crapped out at the beginning of the second set. So I was very glad to see that the whole show is up on YouTube.

The Lighthouse Band features Michael League of Snarky Puppy, Becca Stevensn, and Michelle Willis, and this is very much a band show where they get to show their instrumental and vocal talents. Most of the songs were written by the band or its members in collaboration with Crosby, although there are a few Crosby classics (Laughing, Guinevere, Carry Me and more) mostly in the second set.

I enjoyed this show immensely. I've been a fan of Crosby's music ever since hearing the Byrds when I was in high school. He's a wonderful singer and he still sounds good  in his seventies, not a mean feat. I think playing with younger musicians has revitalized him, something he alludes to in his between song patter. My favourite moment of the concert is in the last song of the first set, at about 1:23:30 in the linked video, a short instrumental bridge of such exquisite beauty it brought tears to my eyes.

After watching this, I'm kicking myself for not going to see him when he came to Toronto a couple of years ago. I won't make that mistake again.

Eye Chart Font

I have spent too much of my life staring (generally peering and squinting) at eye charts. It never occurred to me that there was anything special about the font that they use, but it turns out that it isn't a standard font that you'll find on your computer. The LogMAR chart that is used by opticians and ophthalmologists all over the world was originally developed in Australia but has only 10 letters.

Now the typographer Fábio Duarte Martins has developed a complete new font, Optician Sans, based on the font originally used in eye charts. As you'd expect, it's very easy on the eyes, and you don't have to sit in a dark room to use it.

Water from the Air

Scientists have spent many hours looking for better ways of providing water to desert or drought-stricken areas. Now it looks like researchers may have found a simple solution, a way of cheaply extracting water from the air.

In a paper, published in Environmental Science and Technology, the team describe the results of their small, “easy-to-assemble-at-household” prototype. After just two-and-a-half hours in the sunlight, they report, the device can deliver 20 grams (0.7 ounces or about four teaspoons) of water. And to provide an adult’s minimum water requirement for a day – 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds, or four and one-quarter cups) – would cost about half a cent per day.

Of course, as always, the issue is whether what they've found can be easily and cheaply mass produced and distributed.

Is SpaceX Contaminating the ISS?

Contamination aboard the International Space Station can be a serious thing. You don't want mould or bacterial films growing in a closed and supposedly sterile environment. But it can be more subtle than that. Most of us are familiar with the "new car smell", not just in a new car, but from other, new products, including electronics. It's caused by the outgassing of volatile compounds. and NASA takes steps to ensure that it is minimized on the ISS, where it can affect delicate and sensitive instruments.

Sensors aboard the ISS have detected increases in contamination during resupply missions where the SpaceX Dragon capsule is docked at the station. The exact cause of the contamination isn't known, but it is definitely correlated with the Dragon capsule.

SpaceX, meanwhile, is looking at its ingredients. “SpaceX has scrutinized all external material selections on Dragon and is working with suppliers to custom-develop low outgassing variants of qualified materials to help improve the molecular deposition rate,” says the company, adding that NASA pre-approved all the materials used in the first Dragon design.

Antonius de Rooij, author of the Space Materials Database, believes the capsule’s paint is the likely problem. For one, he says, “the white painted surface is very large, meaning that even low outgassing products can have a large contamination effect.”

Technically, this is an interesting problem. But perhaps more important is NASA's response, which, as the reporter points out, lacks transparency. I'll be following this story to see what happens and what the effects are on SpaceX, which will be launching a new  Crew Dragon capsule to the ISS in 2019.

Falcon Sunrise

SpaceX launch today from the Cape at 1:16 p.m. EST. Here's the Falcon at sunrise.

A Hawk

We live close to Lake Ontario and its wetlands so we do see a lot of birds. Hawks are the biggest and most impressive. Yesterday, one was sitting high up in our neighbour's tree, scanning the back yards for prey. The neighbourhood squirrels were conspicuous by their absence. (A few years ago a hawk sat on our hedge eating a squirrel, so they have reason to hide).

For the photographers among you, I took this picture with my Fuji HS-10, a "bridge camera", which has a 24-720 mm. equivalent lens, at full zoom, with the lens braced against the patio door to steady it.

Some Thoughts on the Kindle Paperwhite 4

A few months ago the charging port on my Kindle Paperwhite 3, which is about five years old, started to get loose, making it hard to charge it. In early November, just after Amazon announced the Kindle Paperwhite 4, it reached the point where I couldn't charge it at all, so I ordered one of the new Kindles. What follows are some thoughts on the Paperwhite 4 after using it for a month. It's not a full review; for that you can see this post on the eBook Reader blog.

First, this is very much an incremental upgrade over the Paperwhite 3. It's almost the same size, the screen is a bit brighter and more evenly lit, and it's a bit lighter. The screen is one piece of glass, flush with the bezels, which are smaller. It's waterproof and has Bluetooh so you can listen to Audible audiobooks (although sadly, there is no text to speech capability).

There is a new home screen format, which I don't like, and I have gone back to the old format. Books bought from Amazon have new typesetting controls, including variable boldness, and justification can be turned off (if the publisher supports that). The screen is now 300 dpi, but I haven't noticed any real difference from the older Kindle.

I have found the new reader to be a bit harder to hold, because the case I got (one of Amazon's) is more slippery than the old one. The narrower bezels mean that it's easier to turn the page by mistake. Other than that, there's not much difference from the Paperwhite 3.

If you're happy with your earlier Kindle, the Paperwhite 4 doesn't offer any compelling reasons to upgrade, nor does it offer anything much over the current Kobo ereaders. Amazon is spinning its wheels with this update. It's a perfectly adequate device, but it could have been more.

Welcome to Core Dump 3.0

Welcome to the third incarnation of Core Dump.

The first Core Dump was hosted here, but in 2010 it was merged into Core Dump 2.0, hosted in a WordPress blog on soltys.ca. Last year, I started getting warnings from my web host about exceeding their bandwidth limits, so I stopped updating the blog. It's still there, for now, but I may take it down in the future.

This blog is very much under construction, so expect changes to the format over the next few weeks.