Some SF&F TV Worh Watching

The last part of the year was marked by the release of several major SF&F television shows. It's clear that the effects technology and producers' understanding of how to adapt a novel to the long-form television have reached the point where it's possible to make a quality show out of even the most complex stories. Here are some comments on five shows that we watched.

• The Mandalorian turned out to be quite watchable, if not quite up to the quality level of the other shows discussed here. It's obvious Disney put a lot of money into the first live action Star Wars show; the sets and effects were first rate. They turned down the cuteness, concentrating it in one character, Baby Yoda, who will not doubt sell enough merchandise to cover the show's budget. I liked it more than any of the movies, but it's still just warmed over 1930s space opera. 
• His Dark Materials is a BBC/HBO co-production based on a trilogy of novels by Philip Pullman. There was a movie adaptation a few years ago that failed at the box office; this show is much, much better. I wasn't sure I was going to enjoy a fantasy with a young girl as the lead, but enjoy it I did. Pullman's complex world is perfectly realized and the longer format gives room to explore some of the darker aspects of the books. 
• For All Mankind has a simple premise, the Soviet Union beats the US to the moon. They then rub salt in the wound by landing a woman astronaut. This prompts the beginning of a new space race, with women having prominent roles. The alternate history elements are subtly developed and the technical aspects of space flight are faithfully rendered. I suspect that some male viewers are going to have trouble with the emphasis given to the stories of the female characters, as it's not common in SF&F TV shows. But it works and adds a lot of depth to the show. I am looking forward to the next season, especially after they ended the first season with Sea Dragon launch!
• Watchmen turned out to be not at all what I expected and was much better. The original graphic novel is a classic and one of the major literary works of the last part of the 20th century. Wisely, the creators of the TV series decided not to do a straight reboot, but instead created a somewhat indirect sequel to the book. It took some getting into but turned out to be an original and powerful series. 
• I'll say it right up front. The Expanse is the best science fiction television series ever. It's based on the best selling series of novels and novellas by James S. A. Corey (the pseudonym of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franks). The fourth season takes the series up the end of the fourth novel, although it incorporates elements from some of the novellas and later books. It's initially set in the a politically complex and tense solar system with well-developed and divergent societies on the Earth, Mars, the asteroid belt, and the moons of the outer planets. The science is believable, they don't ignore physical realities, and the characters are people you care about. Kudos to Amazon for taking up the series after SyFy cancelled it and keeping up the quality. 

An honourable mention goes to Carnival Row, which we watched earlier in the year. It took a while to get into it but I'm looking forward to the next season. I would have included the fourth and final season of The Man in the High Castle with the five shows above, but we didn't get around to watching it before the end of the year. It's next on our list. 

Is Sqribble a Rip Off?

I got an email today for a piece of software called Sqribble. Although billed as being for ebook creation, it appears to output only PDFs.  I hadn't heard of it before and the claims sounded quite incredible.

This is unbelievable…

New revolutionary technology has JUST been launched that allows you to INSTANTLY create professional Ebooks, Reports, Guides, Lead Magnets, Whitepapers, and digital info-products AUTOMATICALLY, and “ON-DEMAND”… at a push of a button!

So I did a bit of googling and found this. 

Competition is good!  Seriously I believe that competition in any industry strengthens the market, validates what you are doing and accelerates innovation.

When someone clones software, wraps a new skin on it, adds some bells and whistles and launches it as ’Never been seen before, amazing software’ – this is not innovation.  This is effectively stealing.

So the creators of Designrr are claiming that Sqribble is basically a cloned rip off of their software. If you get the email that I got, you probably should ignore it. 

Quantum Computing Is Making Big Strides

I haven't paid much attention to what's happening with the development of quantum computing. Up until recently it seemed like more of a laboratory curiousity than anything else. But that's changing, as this article from Discover Magazine points out.

Engineers test the accuracy of quantum computing chips by using them to solve a problem, and then verifying the work with a classical machine. But in early 2019, that process became problematic, reported Neven, who runs Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab. Google’s quantum chip was improving so quickly that his group had to commandeer increasingly large computers — and then clusters of computers — to check its work. It’s become clear that eventually,  they’ll run out of machines. 

Case in point: Google announced in October that its 53-qubit quantum processor had needed only 200 seconds to complete a problem that would have required 10,000 years on a supercomputer.

Neven’s group observed a “double exponential” growth rate in the chip’s computing power over a few months. Plain old exponential growth is already really fast: It means that from one step to the next, the value of something multiplies. Bacterial growth can be exponential if the number of organisms doubles during an observed time interval. So can computing power of classical computers under Moore’s Law, the idea that it doubles roughly every year or two. But under double exponential growth, the exponents have exponents. That makes a world of difference: Instead of a progression from 2 to 4 to 8 to 16 to 32 bacteria, for example, a double-exponentially growing colony in the same time would grow from 2 to 4 to 16 to 256 to 65,536. 

That's impressive. I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing quantum computers for home and business use. It might be time to start investing in companies that make liquid helium cooling systems.

Holiday Hiatus

Christmas is coming in a few days. I'm going to take a week or so off from blogging to do all the usual Christmas things. I may be back before New Year's or maybe after.

Here's a picture for you to look at in the meantime.

I hope you all have a pleasant holiday and best wishes for the coming year.

We'lre Toast 18

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 part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• The Last of the Arctic's Old Sea Ice Is on the Verge of Vanishing. Only 1.2 percent of ice in the Arctic Ocean is older than four years.
• America After Climate Change, Mapped. The maps are pretty, as long as you don't think too much about what they mean.
• Degraded soils mean tropical forests may never fully recover from logging. This probably is true for Canada's boreal forests. 
• New ice river detected at Arctic glacier adds to rising seas. "We really didn't expect to see this."
• Carbon Dioxide Could Make it Harder to Think. It looks more and more like an Idiocracy future.
• 2019 wasn't just protests and Fleabag: It was the year a climate truth bomb dropped. To quote Bruce Cockburn: "Some people don't see the light until it shines through a bullet hole."

Politics 

• False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. I cannot understand how anyone who considers themselves a Christian can support Trump.
• This Is How A Society Dies. We've just seen Britain kick over the stool. All that's left now is the twitching. And it will be the same in the US next year when Trump gets re-elected.

Technology

• SUV shaming: I care about climate change, so why am I driving an SUV? Yes, why, when they're so bad for the environment?
• Unraveling the Secret Origins of an AmazonBasics Battery. This illustrates the complexities of modern global supply chains and why they can be bad for the environment.
• Flood of Oil Is Coming, Complicating Efforts to Fight Global Warming. Canada is a big part of the problem. 

Videos from an Astounding 90 Years of Analog Symposium

City Tech, the New York City College of Technology, CUNY recently held a symposium titled "An Astounding 90 Years of Analog Science Fiction and Fact". From their website:

It was a great success! We had over 100 attendees comprised of scholars, writers, editors, fans, and City Tech students and faculty. The partnership between Analog Science Fiction and Fact and City Tech helped the event grow and reach new audiences, and the combination of scholarly presentations, an editors’ roundtable, and writers events–a writers’ roundtable and the keynote by SF writer Mike Flynn made the event speak in powerful and engaging ways to the many different attendees.

Were I living in New York, I'd definitely have attended, but I'll have to settle for the videos of the talks and Q&A sessions, which they've very kindly put up on their website for fans of Analog to view. I count myself among them; discovering Analog (and back issues of Astounding) was one of the high points of my teenage years. 

Tips for Research Writing

Writing scientific research papers has much in common with the type of writing I did as a technical writer, requiring accurate and clear presentation of complex information. This article describes five common mistakes in research writing and explains how to fix them.

This part applies to almost any knid of writing:

Your results may be complicated, but your writing shouldn’t be. You may think that obscure words or complicated sentences make you sound clever but it is far more effective to use simple language that your reader will understand and enjoy reading. 

Disappearing Stars

Stars shouldn't just disappear. They do explode and can turn into neutron stars, black holes, and nebulae, but they don't just go out. But a new study claims to have found roughly 100 stars that have done just that.

A comparative analysis of historical and contemporary astronomical data has resulted in the discovery of approximately 100 star-like objects that unexpectedly vanished. These strange occurrences are likely natural, but scientists say alien technology is a remote possibility.

They start off as dim red dots in the night sky. But then they start to get brighter—anywhere from several to thousands of times brighter. And then they disappear, vanishing from sight in typically less than an hour.

What makes this study notable is that the authors don't rule out the possibilty that they could be detecting signs of alien civilizations.

 Fascinatingly, the researchers devoted significant space in the new study for a more radical possibility: the activities of extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). Of course, invoking the alien card is often a good sign that scientists are flummoxed—something seen repeatedly over the course of astronomical history. But that doesn’t mean they should refrain from raising this possibility, and this case is no exception.

As the authors speculate, the dots of red light could be powerful lasers used for interstellar communication or heat waste emanating from Dyson spheres—hypothetical megastructures that envelop entire stars.

Featured Links - December 17, 2019

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

• How to Use the Linux Command Line on Android With Termux. This could be useful the geekier among us. 
• Why Are So Many Gen Z Kids Becoming Furries. Furry culture is hitting the mainstream. 
• ‘Hurricane Truthers’: Bonkers Conspiracies Are Putting Lives in Danger. As Jerry Pournelle said: "Think of it as evolution in action."
• The Next Nuclear Plants Will Be Small, Svelte, and Safer. There has been some discussion about using this kind of reactor in isolated areas of Canada.
• Tweak These Google Chrome Settings to Level Up Your Browsing. I've been using Chrome for years and didn't know about some of these.
• The Witcher Guide: Who's Who, What's What, and Which Is Witcher. I will be referring to this often, I think.

Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?

SF author Charlie Stross just gave a talk about artificial intelligence to the IT Futures conference held at the University of Edinburgh. He's posted the transcript on his blog.

Stross has given more thought to the future of society and technology than just about anyone I can think of and this talk distills some of the ideas that have been influencing his books over the last decade or two. I found this part especially intersesting.

Let's get back to the 90/9/1 percent distribution, that applies to the components of the near future: 90% here today, 9% not here yet but on the drawing boards, and 1% unpredictable. I came up with that rule of thumb around 2005, but the ratio seems to be shifting these days. Changes happen faster, and there are more disruptive unknown-unknowns hitting us from all quarters with every passing decade. This is a long-established trend: throughout most of recorded history, the average person lived their life pretty much the same way as their parents and grandparents. Long-term economic growth averaged less than 0.1% per year over the past two thousand years. It has only been since the onset of the industrial revolution that change has become a dominant influence on human society. I suspect the 90/9/1 distribution is now something more like 85/10/5 — that is, 85% of the world of 2029 is here today, about 10% can be anticipated, and the random, unwelcome surprises constitute up to 5% of the mix. Which is kind of alarming, when you pause to think about it.

And this:

 Companies don't literally try to pass the Turing test, but they exchange information with other companies — and they are powerful enough to process inputs far beyond the capacity of an individual human brain. A Boeing 787 airliner contains on the order of six million parts and is produced by a consortium of suppliers (coordinated by Boeing); designing it is several orders of magnitude beyond the competence of any individual engineer, but the Boeing "Chinese Room" nevertheless developed a process for designing, testing, manufacturing, and maintaining such a machine, and it's a process that is not reliant on any sole human being.

Where, then, is Boeing's mind?

I don't think Boeing has a mind as such, but it functions as an ad-hoc rules-based AI system, and exhibits drives that mirror those of an actual life form. Corporations grow, predate on one another, seek out sources of nutrition (revenue streams), and invade new environmental niches. Corporations exhibit metabolism, in the broadest sense of the word — they take in inputs and modify them, then produce outputs, including a surplus of money that pays for more inputs. Like all life forms they exist to copy information into the future. They treat human beings as interchangeable components, like cells in a body: they function as superorganisms — hive entities — and they reap efficiency benefits when they replace fallible and fragile human components with automated replacements.

Technical Communication Links - December 15, 2019

Some links related to technical communication.

• What is Application Guard and what it means for Office 365? A new security feature for Office.
• Recordings from the DITA-Open Toolkit Day held in Brussels last month. 
• Can New York Plug All Its Subway Holes Before the Next Storm Hits? Good on the MTA for taking action.
• Presentations from the Adobe TechComm Roadshow Canada, held in September. 
• How to Write Good Commit Messages: A Practical Git Guide. This might be useful if your shop uses git, especially if you use it for docs. 

Some Best Of Lists

This is the time of year for annual "best of" lists. Since its the end of a decade, we'll get an extra set of lists for the decade. This post is compilation of some of those lists so I can check out some of the entries later. I will probably update this list during the last part of the month, so you may want to check back later for updates.

• The 100 Best Albums of the 2010s (Rolling Stone)
• The 100 Best Songs of the 2010s (Rolling Stone)
• The 50 Best Albums of 2019 (Rolling Stone)
• The 50 Best Songs of 2019 (Rolling Stone)
• 20 Best TV Shows of 2019 (Rolling Stone)
• The 25 most binge worthy TV shows of 2019 (Now Magazine)
• The 11 Best (and 6 Worst) TV Shows of 2019 (io9/gizmodo)
• 25 Best America and Country Songs of 2019 (Rolling Stone)
• Rob Sheffield's Top 20 Albums of 2019 (Rolling Stone)
• The 50 Best Movies of the 2010s (Rolling Stone)
• The Best Toronto Albums of 2019 (Now Magazine)

Inside the Burning of the Amazon

Rolling Stone magazine is not what it used to be, but buried in the fluff pieces about the latest musical sensation they still manage to publish some amazing in-depth articles about politics and the environment,

The Lawless Frontier at the Heart of the Burning Amazon is the best piece of journalism I've read on the burning of the Amazon rain forests. I was just going to include it in the last We're Toast link post, but it's too good to bury it with a bunch of other links.

I’m on a highway called BR-163, a rutted road from hell that has been in some state of construction since Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship 40 years ago. I’m deep in the northern state of Pará — 1,500 miles from the Atlantic coast, and a three-day drive to Rio de Janeiro. For the past two hours we’ve been navigating potholes the size of moon craters and swerving around a caravan of tractor-trailers. Winding south through the Xingu basin, BR-163 starts in Santarém, a muggy port city on an Amazon tributary, and ends 1,000 miles south, in Brazil’s breadbasket, the state of Mato Grosso. Literally translated as “thick jungle,” Mato Grosso is where Colonel Fawcett disappeared looking for the Lost City of Z. Now almost entirely denuded, a lot of it looks like Kansas. 

The road we’re traveling points to Brazil’s future as a commodities superpower. No country exports more soy and beef than Brazil. We pass hundreds of trucks headed to the Amazon port, loaded with soy, where they will unload on tankers sailing for Europe and China. Ten degrees from the equator, BR-163 is a dividing line of sorts, a demarcation point between the natural world and what seems to be its destiny: an industrialized monoculture that creeps further north every year.

As a result, BR-163 has become notorious — few areas of the Brazilian Amazon have seen more rapid deforestation over the past 10 years. I’ve been told that if I want to understand the forces that are driving the destruction of the world’s most important curb against climate change, this is the place to go. 

It's a vivid, powerful article that avoids the sensationalism of some of the recent coverage and dives deep into the complexities of life in the Brazilian frontier. Fair warning: You may find it depressing. I did. 

More Tips for Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides

Googles apps, especially Docs, Sheets, and Slides, look simple on the surface, but they have features that might not be immediately obvious. This Gizmodo article has 21 tips for these apps to help you streamline your work and use them to their fullest.

Scanning through the list, I found a few that I wasn't aware of. I ddin't know that Sheets has a macro recorder and that you can use IFTTT (If This Then That) to create automatic feeds and simple dashboards.

We're Toast 17

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 part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• Climate-heating greenhouse gases hit new high, UN reports. Head of World Meteorological Organization says ‘no sign of a slowdown, let alone a decline’.
• Nestlé Is Sucking the World’s Aquifers Dry. And its not just using all that water that's a problem-what happens to all those bottles, and where does the plastic come from? 
• Cracks in Greenland's Ice Sheet May Be Making It More Unstable. Water flowing under the ice sheet may destabilize it.
• Will Buffalo Become a Climate Change Haven? "With climate change, the world is going to suck, but Buffalo may suck less."
• Oceans running out of oxygen as temperatures rise. I am pretty sure that this has been predicted, and it's definitely not good if verified. 
• The Florida Keys flooded for 10 weeks straight and rising oceans could make this the new normal. "Scientists say climate change is making king tides higher and longer lasting."
• Coal Is Dead But China Is Reviving It. This is a big step backward. 
• Can We Survive Extreme Heat? "Humans have never lived on a planet this hot, and we’re totally unprepared for what’s to come."
• Alaska Cod Fishery Closes And Industry Braces For Ripple Effect. The cause is warm waters caused by climate change, not over-fishing.

Politics 

• Why the Impeachment Fight Is Even Scarier Than You Think. "Political scientists have studied what our democracy is going through. It usually doesn’t end well."
• The Russian hackers who hit the 2016 election have been very busy since. "New tools, tactics, and techniques show Russian hackers famous for targeting Americans have been active around the world."
• A Fight Over a 'False Solution' Is At the Center of the Madrid Climate Talks. Will they have the nerve to stare down the fossil fuel industry?

Technology

• Ruthless Quotas at Amazon Are Maiming Employees. "This holiday season, Amazon will move millions of packages at dizzying speed. Internal injury reports suggest all that convenience is coming at the expense of worker safety."
• At An Outback Steakhouse Franchise, Surveillance Blooms. Little Brother is watching you.

Why Your Android Device Needs Data Protection and How to Do That

Guest post: This is a guest post provided by techwarn.com.  techwarn.com showcases the latest tech news, reviews, and downloads with coverage of entertainment, gadgets, security, enthusiast gaming, hardware, software and consumer electronics.

Your Android phone might not be some Fort Knox for the US Government, but have you ever stopped to think of what would happen should anyone get access to your phone’s data?

It's easy to think not much is at stake. Quite frankly, we beg to differ.

What You Stand to Lose in An Android Data Hack

When you bought your Android device, you had to set it up with a Google account. The importance of this is that you get to save and back up all your files in line with such a Google account so that you can easily port phones later in the future.

At the base of that, there is one important thing you missed – everything about you might be on that Google account.

This means a single hack could grant anyone access to your Google Photos app, and there is no telling what they would find there. Suddenly, all those pictures you thought had been buried away will come to the surface again. Even the ones you deleted from your device might have been backed up on Google Photos before you removed them yourself.

That is putting things mildly.

A hacker could plant malicious codes on your unit instead, and you might not know until it is too late. Imagine what would happen if someone installed a keylogger on your phone to record all your key presses. They could easily use this data to get your passwords into different accounts, decipher your bank login details, and so much more.

Again, we know your phone is not Fort Knox, but you do see why you must  protect the data on it anyway?

Protecting your Android device

Fortunately, Google has put some security measures in place to keep hackers at bay. Unfortunately, these measures from Google are the bare minimum, and they can be gotten around with the right skills and motivation.

That is why you should build on the existing security protocols to make your data safer. Here’s how:

1) Keep Google’s security settings

As we said above, your phone comes with some security settings out of the box. It is expected that you leave them be so that you don’t expose yourself. Some of these security settings are:

• Prevention of app installations from unknown sources – This functionality is built into your Android phone to ensure apps from anywhere other than the Play Store don’t make it onto your device. That is because Google has checked the apps it allows onto the Play Store for malware and certified them, but won’t be able to help you when you go installing an app from anywhere else.
• Keeping the device grounded – Your OEM knows how much power and performance you should get from your unit, and they have worked that into the OS. However, some people feel the need to root the device to get more speed, power, and performance out of it. 

While you would surely get that, know that it is at risk of voiding your warranty and leaving the system open to attacks it could have otherwise warded off.

2) Update Often

This goes in two ways – system and application.

Sometimes, you might get a notification from Google or your OEM of a pending update you should attend to. Many either disregard this message or wait a long time before they get the update at all. The same goes for when you receive notifications to update your apps to a newer version.

While it is true that updates are sometimes sent to improve the aesthetics of apps and the system, they are also there to ensure everything keeps running as it should. By that, we mean the updates run a maintenance check to patch vulnerabilities and address security issues that were found.

This is even more common with the higher end Android phones which get monthly security updates.

Not installing the updates as fast as they come leaves you vulnerable to attacks from hackers who know how to exploit the loophole you should have fixed.

3) Install a VPN and Antivirus

We lumped these two together so you don't think they are independent of one another.

An antivirus is great for cleaning out the viruses that must be lurking around in your device while preventing others from coming in. It could also be the difference between falling for a phishing scam/ opening malicious documents and not, so you should totally get one.

That said, they can’t handle the function of a VPN.

When you install a VPN specially optimized for the Android OS, you get protection anytime you access the Internet. Your Internet traffic is no longer everyone’s business, making it impossible for a hacker to snoop on what you are doing online.

This kind of protection comes in handy when you are browsing the web and accessing sensitive information on a free/public Wi-Fi network.

4) Use 2-Factor Authentication with all your accounts

Enabling 2-Factor Authentication (2FA) on your online accounts keeps your accounts from getting hacked because of weak or repeated passwords. 2FA is a method for platforms to confirm your identity before letting you log in. With 2FA enabled, you will be prompted for a secondary one-time password that’s only shared with you either via an SMS or an authenticator app. This confirms to the platform that you are not an imitator.

Why is 2FA necessary? Most people stick to the same password across all of their accounts, be it banking, email, online shopping, and so on. If the password is ‘pwned’ in a data breach with any of the platforms, all of your accounts would be compromised. 2FA keeps that from happening. While it’s always a good idea to use unique strong passwords everywhere, having 2FA saves you from losing your accounts all at once in the unfortunate event of a ‘pwn’.

Wrap Up

Alongside making sure you have 2FA enabled on your accounts, keeping a strong password, and backing up your files regularly, your Android device will be prepared to face any attack that might come its way.

Featured Links - December 8, 2019

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

• 24 Google Docs Templates That Will Make Your Life Easier. Some of these should be useful and it's easier using a template than designing from scratch.
• (Almost) Every Sci-Fi/Fantasy TV or Movie Adaptation in the Works Right Now. So much to watch, so little time.
• Gamma-ray laser moves a step closer to reality. A small step; it will be years before there's any practical application of this.
• Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe. "Connor Krukosky is an 18-year-old college student with a hobby of collecting vintage computers. One day, he decided to buy his own mainframe...an IBM z890. This is his story." If you have 45 minutes to watch the video, it will probably be the best 45 minutes of your week. 
• Thoughts on trolls, bots, and anti-vaxxers. Tips on handling them from Crawford Kilian, author and publisher of the H5N1 blog. 
• Dogs may be smarter than we think — and can benefit our health in ways we don't realize. "Studies show our four-legged friends can identify more words than previously thought and even help us learn."

All of Tor.com's Short Fiction for 2019

The Tor.com website has become one of the major venues for publishing short science fiction and fantasy. This year they published 13 novelettes and 22 short stories, all of which you can read for free on their website.

To make it easier, they've collected links to all of the stories on one page. Here you'll find stories by some of the top writers in the field, including Mary Robinette Kowal (winnter of this year's Hugo and Nebula awards), Annalee Newitz, Rich Larson, Michael Swanwick, Seanan McGuire, and many others. Check it out. How can you go wrong?

A Game of Moons

I just finished reading Luna: New Moon, the first book in Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy, and I can't recommend it highly enough. McDonald is one of the best SF writers currently publishing. His books are complex, fast paced, and highly literate.

McDonald is getting some serious recognition with this trilogy. The Guardian published a review of Luna: New Moon by Adam Roberts, himself an SF writer of some note.

As with the physics of the environment, so with the socioeconomics of lunar life. McDonald’s world of lunar colonists is dog-eat-dog, or indeed dog-push-dog-out-of-airlock. Rival families compete to exploit lunar resources: the rich prosper and the majority poor go to the wall. Helium-3 is plentiful, and mining it provides cheap energy for Moon and Earth both. Five family-owned corporations, or “dragons”, dominate, and although they operate within the law, they are all mafia-style organisations. Lunar law is rather looser than earthly varieties: lawyers challenge other lawyers to to-the-death physical combat in open court, possession is much more than nine-tenths of the law, and a general frontier town ethos obtains.

The story largely concerns the powerful Corta family, originally from Brazil, ruled by the fierce but dying matriarch Adriana Corta. Her first-born son and heir, Rafa Corta, is a hothead, the Sonny Corleone of the novel; his younger brother Lucas, calmer and a better tactician, is more Michael Corleone. The Cortas are effectively at war with the “Mackenzie Metals” family, originally from New Zealand. After somebody tries to assassinate Rafa with a cyberengineered fly, and when the Cortas snatch a lucrative new mining property from under the noses of the Mackenzies, matters heat up fast. There’s a lot of intrigue, some violence, rather more sex – healthily polymorphous and energetic, this – and all the pleasures of a cut-throat soap opera in space: a sort of Moon-Dome Dallas.

I'm not sure Dallas is the best comparison; Game of Thrones would be better as McDonald's story has similar depth and quality. 

Recreating Early Educational Computing Devices

Back in June I posted about a replica of the Minivac 601, a 1960s toy intended to teach digital circuit design, that was produced by my awesomely talented cousin, Michael Gardi.

Mike has been busy since then and has come up with more replicas of these early devices.

First here's a 3D printed replica of the Digi-Comp II marble computer. "Intended as an aid for teaching computer concepts, the Digi-Comp II can count, perform basic arithmetic, and obtain either the "1's" or '2's" complement of a number. The device can be run in auto mode where the balls are released automatically after each step of an operation until the operation is complete, or in manual mode where the user initiates each step."

Then there's the GENIAC (Electric Brain) Replica. "GENIAC, which stood for "GENIus Almost-automatic Computer", was an educational toy billed as a "computer" sold from 1955 through the sixties for about $20. Designed and marketed by Edmund C. Berkeley, with Oliver Garfield, it was widely advertised in science and electronics magazines. GENIAC provided many youths of the day with their first exposure to computer concepts and Boolean logic."

And then there's the CARDIAC (CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation) Replica. "The CARDIAC Instructable presented here is not a computer, it's a  device to help you understand how a computer works. You the user will: decode instructions by sliding panels up and down, move the program counter "lady bug" from one memory location to the next, perform the duties of an arithmetic logic unit (ALU), read inputs from one sliding strip, and write output results to another (with a pencil). Along the way you will you will learn the internal workings of a typical Von Neumann architecture computer. Some fairly sophisticated programs can be executed (by you manually remember) on the CARDIAC. Stacks, subroutines, recursion, and bootstrapping for example can all be demonstrated."

Finally, here's his latest and likely most sophisticated project, the Digi-Comp 1 Redux. He says:

Today's Instructable is a little different. It's a brand new machine that is a "mashup" of the following classics: 

• Digi-Comp I: My new design is mostly based on the mechanics and "programming model" from this machine.
• Digi-Comp II: The look and feel of the new machine came from both my Digi-Comp II replica and the Digi-Comp I.
• Minivac 601: From the Minivac 601 I used the old telephone switchboard patch cord mechanism to connect the solenoids to the proper logic elements.
• GENIAC Redux: The GENIAC Redux replica used magnetic reed switches and magnets to implement the logic elements. My new design follows suit.

I wanted my new machine to have the wonderful ascetic of these vintage models that I know and love. I want people to believe that it could in fact have been from the 50's or 60's. However since it is not a replica I didn't feel compelled to limit myself to the technologies of the era. What does this mean? Read on and find out. 

If you want to try building one of these, you will need a 3D printer and a moderate amount of mechanical ability and tools. They would probably be ideal projects for a high school computing class or computer group.

SpaceX Closing Florida Starship Site

SpaceX has had two sites building its new Starship prototypes, one in Boca Chica, Texas and one in Cocoa Beach in Florida. It now looks like the Florida site is being shut down, possibly temp;orarily, and important hardware is being moved to Texas.

Combining the appearance of Starship hardware on GO Discovery just yesterday and reports of major Cocoa layoffs, it’s all but certain that the Starship components on Discovery are going to head to Boca Chica, Texas. Schlang’s source also indicated that all affected employees were given the option to transfer to Boca Chica or Hawthorne, a prime indication that this abrupt change in plans is more a strategic move than a financial one. With any luck, most affected employees will be able to transfer to Florida pad operations or Boca Chica, although such a major and abrupt change is likely a no-go for anyone with major ties to South Florida.

According to the article, SpaceX will focus on Starship development in Texas, at least for the Mk3 prototype. Future development in Florida will likely take place at the main SpaceX site, removing the need to transport the vehicle over public land.

Hubbe Advent Calendar

It's now time for Advent calendars and the Hubble Advent Calendar is my favourite. Check it out each day before Christmas to see a gorgeous new image of our amazing universe.

Things May Be Slow Around Here

We're now entering the holiday season. I have a lot of things to do before Christmas, so posts may be sparse for the next month or so. I expect that you will have better things to do than read this anyway.

Featured Links - December 1, 2019

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

• How to set up a two-factor authentication app on your smartphone. 2FA apps are more secure than SMS messaging.
• Holland Aims To Bring Back Its Starry Night. We need to follow their lead.
• Thousands of medieval manuscripts now online in full color through digitization project. Yet another internet time sink. 
• We Tried 8 Methods of Cooking Bacon and Found an Absolute Winner. See if you can guess what gave the best results. 
• Trends and Technologies Shaping Our Tomorrows. An interview with one of my favourite SF authors, Ian McDonald. 
• High Fructose Corn Syrup Has Been Quietly, Deceitfully Renamed. This is important to know if you want to stay healthy.
• The Cold Hard Truth About Icing Your Injuries. I've always found heat to be more effective.

Free SiriusXM and Phish Concert Broadcast

I just found out about this. SiriusXM is having a free listening period right now, which means you can listen to it on your computer or phone (over the Internet) for free, or if you have a SiriusXM compatible radio in your car, it should work too.

What's great about this is that Phish are playing a concert in Phiiadelphia on Tuesday night, December 3, and it will be broadcast live on SiriusXM's Phish Radio, channel 29. The free listening period ends at midnight on the 3rd so you should be able to catch the whole concert.

Is Galaxy's Edge Too Alien?

I'm not a big Star Wars fan; I've seen all the movies, of course, (some more than once), and I am enjoying The Mandalorian, but it's not a big part of my life the way much "real" science fiction has been.

That being said, from what I've read about it I would probably enjoy visiting the Disney theme park's Galaxy's Edge. I think it's extremely cool how they've made it so immersive. Unfortunately, it seems that it may be too immersive for the casual Disney visitor.

The Batuuan terminology used by cast members for real-world conventions has slowly but surely faded out—going to one of the stalls in the marketplace might still get you a “Bright Suns” instead of a “Hello,” but you’ll be asked if you’ve got an Annual Pass discount instead of a credit reduction these days. If you’re looking to find Savi’s workshop, the place where you can build your own lightsaber, castmembers no longer engage in the sly wink that all the workshop sells is “scrap,” in order to mask its true purpose from the watchful eyes of patrolling Stormtroopers. Instead, they’ll just tell you the Lightsaber Shop is thataway and it’s 200 bucks plus tax for the pleasure.

It’s easy to see why these changes are happening, even just six months after Galaxy’s Edge opened. Your average Disney or Star Wars fan isn’t coming to Disneyland to do the sci-fi equivalent of dressing up at a Renaissance Faire. They wanna ride the ride, buy a t-shirt with Baby Yoda on it, and maybe eat one of those sausage wraps they’ve heard so much about (Ronto, what’s a Ronto?). They want to be in a theme park, like the rest of Disneyland, not necessarily within a galaxy far, far away. The theming is nice, but having to engage with it on the level Disney first envisioned Galaxy’s Edge with—some of which has yet to materialize, like a reputation system built using the Disney Play app’s functions throughout the land that would see cast members react differently to you depending on who you were aligned with—is an abrupt ask for people, especially considering nowhere else in Disneyland operates like that.

So it sounds like if you are a Star Wars or science fiction fan and you are planning on visiting Galaxy's Edge, you should do it soon, before they dumb it down to the same level as the rest of the Disney properties. 

Alice's Restaurant

I wasn't going to do a post about Thanksgiving, being that we Canadians celebrated it six weeks ago, but someone posted a link to Arlo Guthrie's Alice's Restaurant on my Facebook feed and I just had to share it.

Those of you of a younger generation may not have heard this. If not, you are missing one of the signature pieces of 1960's music. It is still hilariously funny, especially if you are in the proper state of mind 😁.

There is also a film version, directed by the great Arthur Penn. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be up on Netflix or Amazon Prime (at least in Canada) or I'd watch it again tonight.

Update: Here's a good interview with Arto Guthrie about his current life and plans for the future.

The 25 Most Anticipated SFF Books of 2020

It's the time of year again where we start to see both best of the year lists and lists of what people are looking forward to next year. I'll probably end up posting a few of both, but for now here's a list of the most anticipated science fiction and fantasy books of 2020.

I honestly don't know how I am going to keep up with the flood of interesting books. I've become much more selective in my book buying because I'm not reading that many books right now; most of my reading time is devoted to newspapers, magazines, and articles from the web. That being said, these are the books that I would like to read.

• Docile by K.M. Szpara (Tor.com Publishing, March 3)
• The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin (Orbit, March 24)
• The Relentless Moon by Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor Books, July 14)
• To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Christopher Paolini (Tor Books, September 15)

Not on the list, are the next Laundry Files book by Charles Stross and the third book in Peter F. Hamilton's Salvation trilogy which I will be buying as soon as they come out.

Can Worker-Owned Apps Fix the Gig Economy?

Despite being retired, I've so far resisted the temptaion to sign up with one of the gig economy apps. I'm not desperate enough yet to need to earn slave labour wages for my work. That might change down the road, though I hope not.

From what I've read, the gig economy seems to be a hot bed of exploitation. So what's the solution? Could it be co-ops? That's what this article suggests.

Professor Trebor Scholz of the New School estimates that there are currently 400 projects under the platform cooperativism banner. A recent conference he helped organize in New York City brought together 150 speakers from 30 different countries.

Their shared goal is to create “concrete alternatives” for workers “who are not protected, and actually assaulted by deteriorating labour rights that were hardly there in the first place,” said Scholz.

Oriol Alfambra and Nuria Soto, two former Deliveroo food couriers from Barcelona, attended the conference to share Mensakas, a worker-owned delivery app. Alfambra and Soto started Mensakas in 2018 with other couriers who were fired during a union organizing campaign. They launched their app with the support of a crowd-funding campaign and government grant.

Co-ops have been around for a long time in other fields. There are housing co-ops in Toronto, farming co-ops, and credit unions. I hope to see this movement take off in the gig economy.

Some Music to Give Thanks For

Since my American friends and family will be celebrating Thanksgiving this week, I thought I'd post some music to give thanks for.

Last week, I saw the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (or rather a very small subset of it) perform the chamber music version of Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring. The full symphonic suite is probably the better known version, but the ballet scoring has been my favourite since I first heard a recording of it in the 1980s. It's a delicate, soaring piece of music and the TSO's rendition was sublime. Here is a nicely recorded version performed by New England Conservatory Contemporary Ensemble on April 8th, 2014.

On Saturday, I saw the Metropolitan Opera's simulcast of Philip Glass' opera, Akhnaten. It was a spectacular production both for the music and the opulent and often surrealistic staging. I've come to the conclusion that this is Glass' masterpiece and the one work of his that is guaranteed to become a part of the standard operatic repertoire. The video below of Hymn may be the most beautiful piece of music Glass has written. I believe the video is from a production by the Jacobs School of Music, Indiana University in 2013.

Finally, something old and yet new. In the early 1990s, the Grateful Dead made an abortive attempt to record a studio album of new material that they'd been performing live. Largely due to Garcia's health and drug problems, the sessions never went anywhere. Now the Grateful Dead organization has released the album, Ready or Not, culled from live performances. Songs include Liberty, Eternity, Corrina, and Days Between, which is probably the highlight of the album. I wouldn't say it was the Dead's strongest effort, but it's a nice coda to their recorded career.

Technical Communication Links - November 25, 2019

Some links related to technical communication.

• Large and In Charge: How the US General Services Administration (GSA) uses DITA and the flexibility of Adobe FrameMaker to deliver content faster.
• Best Practices for Writing Policies and Procedures. I spent a lot of time doing this, and I think this is a good overview.
• How the Dumb Design of a WWII Plane Led to the Macintosh. At first, pilots took the blame for crashes. The true cause, however, lay with the design. That lesson led us into our user-friendly age—but there's peril to come. 
• Google is bringing its Smart Compose feature to Docs. I hope it can be turned off. 
• XML Mind's free DITA Converter has been updated to version 3.7. It's an open source alternative to the DITA Open Toolkit. 
• Age Structure. Data visualizations can be an important part of technical communication and these ones are exemplary.

Featured Links - November 24, 2019

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

• Electric cars are changing the cost of driving. If you want a forever car, buy a Tesla. . 
• Death In Paradise Is All Too Frequent For Visitors To Hawaii. It's a beautiful place but it can be deadly if you aren't careful. 
• Why the world is running out of sand. And all the sand in the deserts won't help. 
• Ticketmaster's Anti-Scalping Technology Actually Helps Scalpers, Not Fans. Unfortunately, the article doesn't suggest any real solutions.
• What If Space-Time Were 'Chunky'? It Would Forever Change the Nature of Reality. It may be possible to test if space-time is quantized. 
• Some notes on Project Medusa, a variant of the Orion nuclear-pulse spaceship that works by firing bombs ahead of the spacecraft.
• The Future, Unevenly Distributed: William Gibson's Neuromancer At 35. Gibson's classic novel has aged well. 

Our Social Fabric Is Decaying

Yesterday a 36-year-old woman was killed as she cycled along Stevenson Road in Oshawa. The driver who hit her fled the scene and several drivers drove around her as she lay on the road. Both my wife and I were shocked, saddened, and appalled by this. We have stopped and helped people who were in distress and I can't imagine not doing so. Our social fabric is fraying.

According to Durham Regional Police, several motorists drove around Tingey as she lay dying on the pavement before someone used their vehicle to block traffic until emergency crews arrived.

"Many vehicles before police arrived, were driving around the party, the victim on the floor, failing to stop, failing to render assistance to that victim," Const. George Tudos said at the scene. "When we received the call, just prior to four, this is when the female was located, so we don’t know when the exact collision took place."

We're Toast 16

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 part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• America's Leading Medical Groups Declare ‘Public Health Emergency’ Over Climate Change. This is no surprise, but the article lays it out in grim detail.
• Drug resistance likely to kill 400,000 Canadians by 2050, report predicts. And our governments continue to stick their heads in the sand when it comes to funding healthcare. 
• The Amazon Is Fucked Under Brazil's President, New Data Confirms. The Amazon burns while Bolsonaro fiddles.
• New Report Finds Costs of Climate Change Impacts Often Underestimated. The costs of externalities are always underestimated.

Politics 

• The EPA Amends Its 'Transparency' Proposal to Somehow Be Even More Terrible. The War on Science continues.
• This Ohio Bill Gives Students Religious Exemptions for Facts. They can exempt all they want, but the cold hearted universe won't care. 

Technology

• The Untold Story of the 2018 Olympics Cyberattack, the Most Deceptive Hack in History. How digital detectives unraveled the mystery of Olympic Destroyer—and why the next big attack will be even harder to crack.
• Hikvision Markets Uyghur Ethnicity Analytics, Now Covers Up. More dystopian tech. What's next, a facial recognition system for detecting Jews.?
• Ghost ships, crop circles, and soft gold: A GPS mystery in Shanghai. File under "why we can't have nice things". 
• My Fight With a Sidewalk Robot. A life-threatening encounter with AI technology convinced me that the needs of people with disabilities need to be engineered into our autonomous future.

56 Years Ago Today

56 years ago today was one of the most traumatic days in American history. This is the John F. Kennedy memorial in London, UK. 

Drive-By Truckers Announce New Album

Bookmark January 31, 2020. That's the day the Drive-By Truckers, America's best rock band, release their new album, The Unraveling. You can get a taste of it by listenning to the first single, "Armageddon's Back in Town".

With song titles like "Rosemary With a Bible and a Gun", "Thoughts and Prayers", and "Babies in Cages", it should continue the politically aware tone of their recent work. And if the single is any indication, it'll rock like nobody's business.

Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math

A group of physicists have discovered a hitherto unknown mathematical relationship that can be used to explain how neutrinos change state. What makes this story interesting is that the mathematical relationship is fairly simple (at least in terms of higher math) but previously unknown.

The physicists — Stephen Parke of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Xining Zhang of the University of Chicago and Peter Denton of Brookhaven National Laboratory — had arrived at the mathematical identity about two months earlier while grappling with the strange behavior of particles called neutrinos.

They’d noticed that hard-to-compute terms called “eigenvectors,” describing, in this case, the ways that neutrinos propagate through matter, were equal to combinations of terms called “eigenvalues,” which are far easier to compute. Moreover, they realized that the relationship between eigenvectors and eigenvalues — ubiquitous objects in math, physics and engineering that have been studied since the 18th century — seemed to hold more generally.

Although the physicists could hardly believe they’d discovered a new fact about such bedrock math, they couldn’t find the relationship in any books or papers. 

The article does a good job of explaining the significance of the discovery and you don't need to have a math or physics degree to understand it. It's also a great example of good science communication. 

SpaceX Starship MK1 Fails During Pressure Tests

The SpaceX Starship MK1 suffered a major failure today during tank pressurization tests. The top bulkhead blew off the vehicle which was surrounded by large clouds of cryogenic vapour.

The cryogenic liquid – likely liquid oxygen or liquid nitrogen – was carried by the wind and dispersed over the launch complex.

The top bulkhead was seen landing nearby, but its precise location is unknown.

The bottom tank bulkhead appeared to fail as well. A second cloud of vapor appeared out of the base of the vehicle at the same time that the top ruptured – signaling that the entire internal tank structure may have failed.

Elon Musk tweeted that SpaceX would move on to construction of the MK3 version which incorporates many design changes.

Spaceflight is hard. That's why they test, test, test.

Update: More details, including a statement from SpaceX, in this article.

The Untold Story of the Secret Mission to Seize Nazi Map Data

I have read about the Allied efforts to capture German rocket scientists and their rockets at the end of World War II. But there's a lesser known story about a mission to seize high-resolution maps and geodetic map data that I'd never heard about until reading this story in Smithsonian.

The fighting for Aachen was fierce. American planes and artillery pounded the Nazi defenses for days. Tanks then rolled into the narrow streets of the ancient city, the imperial seat of Charlemagne, which Hitler had ordered defended at all costs. Bloody building-to-building combat ensued until, finally, on October 21, 1944, Aachen became the first German city to fall into Allied hands.

Rubble still clogged the streets when U.S. Army Maj. Floyd W. Hough and two of his men arrived in early November. “The city appears to be 98% destroyed,” Hough wrote in a memo to Washington. A short, serious man of 46 with receding red hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Hough had a degree in civil engineering from Cornell, and before the war he led surveying expeditions in the American West for the U.S. government and charted the rainforests of South America for oil companies. Now he was the leader of a military intelligence team wielding special blue passes, issued by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, that allowed Hough and his team to move freely in the combat zone. Their mission was such a closely guarded secret that one member later recalled he was told not to open the envelope containing his orders until two hours after his plane departed for Europe.

In Aachen, their target was a library.

It's a gripping story that goes on to describe the implications of the mission, which carried on well into the 1950s. It would make a great movie.

What Your Cat Really Does at Night

We don't let our cats outside, but we have friends who do, and occasionally they disappear for long periods of time. According to a study conducted in Australia, their cats might be wandering for as far as three kilometres from home at night.

Here's a map of one cat's excursions:

No wonder bird populations are declining.

A Couple of Shuttle Videos

It's beem a few years since the last flight of the Space Shuttle but I still see interesting articles and videos about it coming up in my various news feeds. Here are a couple of videos worth watching. 

First, the STS-1 Columbia "Resource Tape" (FULL Flow, Arrival, Launch, Post Landing. "Kindly donated to NASASpaceFlight.com a tape recording of the full STS-1 Resource Tape, which covers all of the STS-1 milestones, some parts not seen on the internet before." Video quality is very early 1980s, in other words, not great, but the footage is fascinating none the less.

The second is STS-134 Ascent Imagery Highlights from the final flight of Endeavour. "Space shuttle Endeavour and the STS-134 crew begin the journey to the International Space Station on May 16, 2011. Video quality on this one is very good and there are some spectacular scenes. 

One of the great regrets of my life is that I never got to see a Shuttle launch, or any other launch, for that matter. 

Confounds the Science

The song "Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel is one of the great political songs of the 1960s. Here it's been updated for our post-truth era in a parody called "Confounds the Science" by Don Caron and Linda Gower. It's brilliant. 

Here's some of the lyrics:

Hello darkness my old friend.
It’s time for him to tweet again,
but first he’ll have to check in with fox news
‘cause that’s the only place he gets his clues.
That’s how things get planted in his brain,
where they remain,
and it confounds the science. 

The problem is he’s not alone.
He tweets to people on his phone
that global warming is a giant hoax
perpetuated by the liberal folks,
and he hires people that all think the same,
that play his game
and it confounds the science.

New Books From Jerry Pournelle

Science fiction author and computer journalist Jerry Pournelle died a couple of years ago, but there's some good news for fans of his fiction. I count myself among them.

Two new books by Pournelle are being published.

Jerry’s son Alex has asked that we let you know of exciting book news for fans of Dr. Jerry Pournelle’s fiction. The “Best of Jerry Pournelle” is available now, and “Marmelukes 4” is available for pre-order with publication set for 2 Jun 2020. Both are available now on Amazon, use the links below. (The Amazon book page for Marmelukes’ title needs to be corrected to show as book 4.)

I will be buying both. 

Featured Links - November 17, 2019

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

• Researchers 3D-Printed Plastic Cubes With Complex Patterns That Make them Bulletproof. This could have implications for a wide range of industries - bulletproof is only a small part of the technology.
• How the Dumb Design of a WWII Plane Led to the Macintosh. At first, pilots took the blame for crashes. The true cause, however, lay with the design. That lesson led us into our user-friendly age—but there's peril to come. 
• Database of 200+ smartphones that can run Linux (unofficially). You can make an older phone useful again, but it's not for the faint hearted.
• 10 Shortcuts Made Possible by .new. Google's .new domains are for more than just new documents and sheets.
• How the world's biggest gun helped solve a long-standing space mystery. Conducting important research into the origins of space debris.
• Cars in Bright Colors Aren't As Popular As You May Think. I've been wondering why there aren't more bright coloured cars on the road and this article offers some answers. 
• New NASA study finds long-haul danger for astronauts: Blood flow in reverse. This not good news for long-term space missions.

The China Connection

The opioid epidemic has been made far more deadly by the scourge of fentanyl, a drug with legitimate medical uses, but in the wrong hands can and does kill. The New York Times Magazine recently published The China Connection: How One D.E.A. Agent Cracked a Global Fentanyl Ring, that dives deeply into the history of the fentanyl epidemic and why it's been so hard to stop the trafficking in this drug.

It starts with the overdose death of 18-year-old Bailey Henke in Grand Forks, ND. The investigation of his death eventually led to the shutting down of a global drug trafficking ring that had its roots in the illicit chemical factories of China and the shady shell companies of Hong Kong and had spread across the United States and Canada.

I found it an absolutely riveting story that shows how one dedicated investigator can make a huge impact. It also shows why we still need organizations with the resources and reach of the New York Times to cover something like this in depth. and at length. This is Pulitzer Prize-quality reporting and I recommend it highly.

How to Send a Website to Your Kindle to Read Later

I don't like reading long articles on my computer. It's much more convenient and easier on my eyes to read on my Kindle. Fortunately there are several ways to do this.

I use two methods for doing this.

First is the official Amazon Send to Kindle extension. It's great for sending individual pages directly to your Kindle or phone (assuming you have the Amazon Kindle app installed).

The other way is Pocket, a very useful read later service. If you use Firefox, you'll find it directly incorporated into the browser; for Chrome you will have to use an extension. To get your articles from Pocket to the Kindle, you need to use a third-party tool called P2K that sends the articles in batches. You can configure how many articles you want to send and when to send them.

The Make Use Of article lists other tools that you can use, which I haven't tested as the two above fit my needs.

Why Is 80x24 a Terminal Display Standard?

Scine the earliest days of computing, 80 characters by 24 or 25 lines has been a standard dor textual terminal displays. My first computer, an IBM PC purchased in 1983, had an 80 x 25 CGA display driving a monochrome graphics monitor. I could play Flight Simulator, but the character display was horribly ugly. When I got my first full-time technical writing job, I spent most of my time on an IBM mainframe terminal, with a similar display.

It's easy to understand why terminals used an 80 character line as that was the standard for the punch cards used in data entry. But why 24 lines? The reasons are less clear, but likely go back to the primitive technology of the 1960s and 1970s.

The technology in the 3270 was a generation more advanced than the 2260, replacing vacuum tubes and transistors with hybrid SLT modules, similar to integrated circuits. Instead of sonic delay lines, it used 480-bit MOS shift registers.27 The 40×12 model used one bank of shift registers to store 480 characters. In the larger model, four banks of shift registers (1920 characters) supported an 80×24 display. In other words, the 3270's storage was in 480-character blocks for compatibility with the 2260, and using four blocks resulted in the 80×24 display. (Unlike RAM chips, a shift register size didn't need to be a power of 2. While a RAM chip is arranged as a matrix, a shift register has a serpentine layout (below) and can be an arbitrary size.)

IBM provided extensive software support for the 3270 terminal.28 This had an important impact on the terminal market, since it forced other manufacturers to build compatible terminals if they wanted to compete. In particular, this made 3270-compatibility and the 80×24 display into a de facto standard. In 1977, IBM introduced the 3278, an improved 3270 terminal that supported 12, 24, 32, or 43 lines of data. It also added a status line, called the "operator information area". The new 32- and 43-line sizes didn't really catch on, but the status line became a common feature on competing terminals.

Earlier terminals used a technology called sonic delay lines. I don't think that I'd ever heard of this until I read this article, and if you want to see just how primitive the memory technology of the days was, read this article.

Just for comparision with current tech, I'm writing this looking at a 28" monitor capable of 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution (although I have scaled it back to 1920 x 1080) displaying millions of colours. It's been less than 40 years since my monochrome 320 x 240 CGA display.

Free Microsoft Word Templates

If you have to do anything remotely complicated in Microsoft Word, you can save yourself a lot of time by using a template instead of building your document from scratch. Make Use Of has published a list of six sites where you can get free Word templates.

Out of the six sites, there are two that I would recommend:

• Microsoft itself, in Office templates and themes. Given that this is a Microsoft site, you are likely safe from nasty code lurking in the background of your template. It's organized category, events and occasions, and application.
• Word Templates for Free Download offers a large selection of Word templates, neatly organized by category and with good descriptions.

If you want to do it yourself, here's a post that I wrote a few years ago about how to create a Word template from scratch.

Red Moon

I've been watching the new TV series, For All Mankind, and enjoying it. The series begins with the Soviet Union landing a cosmonaut on the moon just before Apollo 11 and goes on from there. As a piece of drama, I've found it a bit predictable, but the alternate history is very well worked out.

This isn't the first, or possibly the best example, of an alternate history of the space program. Barnes and Noble's Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog has published an article listing several examples.

Out of the seven stories they've picked, I've read five, which is not a surprise considering I'm both a spaceflight junkie and a fan of alternate histories. The best known and most recent is Mary Robinette Kowal's The Calculating Stars, which deservedly won both the Hugo and Nebula awards this year, and its direct sequel, The Fated Sky.

Out of the other stories, I recommend Stephen Baxter's Voyage, a richly detailed story of a mid-80s US mission to Mars and Warren Ellis' and Chris Weston's Ministry of Space, which imagines a British space program.

We're Toast 15

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 part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• Everything Burns. A personal perspective on the California wildfires.
• Climate crisis: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’. Statement sets out ‘vital signs’ as indicators of magnitude of the climate emergency
• ‘Forever Chemicals’ Are in Your Popcorn—and Your Blood. Food packaging can contain a group of chemicals called PFAS, which have been linked to immune, thyroid, kidney, and reproductive health problems.
• The Lawless Frontier at the Heart of the Burning Amazon. Inside the battle for the forest's future — and ours — as Brazilian ranchers and farmers vow to protect their way of life at any cost
• 'Alarming' loss of insects and spiders recorded. Insects and spiders are declining in forests and grasslands across Germany, according to new research.
• Poorly planned Amazon dam project 'poses serious threat to life'. As if the Amazon doesn't have enough problems.

Politics

• TPM's Deep Dive On the Conservative Deep State. If you want to understand why the world is going to hell in a handbasket, read this.
• The most important document you may ever read. Russia hacked the 2016 election and they will do it again.
• How Trump could cancel the 2020 election. I've been worried about this scenario ever since he was elected.

Technology

• Unravelling the Secret Origins of an Amazon Basics Battery. One of Amazon’s smallest and most popular products has a surprisingly large footprint,
• Does Everything Become Evil. If a company can abuse a technology in the quest for more profit, it eventually will.
• FPL wants to run Turkey Point’s nuclear reactors for 80 years. Regulators grant a key OK. A nuclear power plant that's right at sea level and uses canals of sea water for cooling. What could possibly go wrong?

Featured Links - November 10, 2019

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

• SpaceX Starship: Elon Musk outlines an ultra-low price tag for launches. Cost per ton could be two orders of magnitude lower than it is now.
• The case for breaking up Disney. The Disney of your childhood has morphed into a soulless corporate monster.
• All the best free Photoshop brushes. Top-quality free Photoshop brushes to save time and add flair to your work.
• Dog Learning to Talk By Using a Custom Soundboard to Speak. My mother-in-law's border collie could understand at least as many words as the dog mentioned in this article.
• What's up with all the concert ticket scams on Facebook? This article could save you some money. 
• The Laser Weapon Is Really, Really Finally Here. Pew, pew, pew, boom!

The Novels That Shaped Our World

The BBC has published a list of 100 novels that have shaped our world. The list was assembled by a panel of British writers, curators, and critics. It's divided into categories, such as Identity; Adventure, and Coming of Age.

Looking through the list, it's clear that my literary experience is rather limited; I've never heard of half of the books or authors they picked. On the other hand, many of the titles are commercially successful books, many of which have been made into movies.

These are the titles chosen for the Life, Death & Other Worlds category:

• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
• Astonishing the Gods by Ben Okri
• Dune by Frank Herbert
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
• The Chronicles of Narnia by C S Lewis
• The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett
• The Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula K Le Guin
• The Sandman Series by Neil Gaiman
• The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Overall, it's a reasonable list. I'm surprised Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale isn't on it, although they did include Orynx and Crake.

Internet Archive's MS-DOS Game Collection

Here's some Friday fun for you. The Internet Archive has a collection of thousand of old MS-DOS games, dating back to the early days of personal computing. Thanks to Moore's Law and advances in computer emulation over the last three decades you can play them at your convenience in your browser.

Software for MS-DOS machines that represent entertainment and games. The collection includes action, strategy, adventure and other unique genres of game and entertainment software. Through the use of the EM-DOSBOX in-browser emulator, these programs are bootable and playable. Please be aware this browser-based emulation is still in beta - contact Jason Scott, Software Curator, if there are issues or questions. Thanks to eXo for contributions and assistance with this archive.

I've looked at a few of these and it's interesting to relive the earliest days of my computing career. Those of you who grew up with more powerful computers may not realize just how primitive the early games were.

It's fun just to browse this archive, even if you don't play any of the games (figuring out how some of them work may be a challenge).

Free Fonts That Are OK for Commercial Use

Back in July I posted about Bitter, a free font that's designed for online reading. However a reader pointed out that not all fonts are licensed for commercial use and suggested this list of fonts that are.

If you’re on the hunt for free fonts for your business needs, you’ve probably hit some roadblocks along the way. Many design websites suggest a plethora of “free” fonts, only for the fine print to hit you hard: “free for personal use only.” Or you find fonts that are free to use, but you have to pay a monthly fee to access the download websites.

I’ve done extensive digging and found 70+ fonts that offer free licenses for commercial (and personal) use.

Keep in mind, some licensing terms might limit what you can do (no repackaging or reselling fonts, for example), but otherwise, you’re in the clear when it comes to standard usage of these fonts.

The article also offers tips on font design and usage and includes screen shots of the more than 70 fonts listed.