We're Toast 4

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

• Hurricanes are strengthening faster in the Atlantic, and climate change is a big reason why, scientists say
• Met Office: global warming could exceed 1.5C within five years
• World's food supply under 'severe threat' from loss of biodiversity
• A World Without Clouds. "A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century."

Politics

• How Neoliberalism Is Normalising Hostility. 
• How Trump's Swamp Works Now. That swamp is looking pretty deep.

Technology

• The urgent threat of hormone-disrupting chemicals to our health and future

Yes, Blockchain Can Be Hacked

There's a perception in the tech community that blockchain technology can be a panacea for common security problems. That turns out not to be the case, as this article in Technology Review points out. Blockchain systems can be hacked, and sometimes in new and novel ways. 

In total, hackers have stolen nearly $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency since the beginning of 2017, mostly from exchanges, and that’s just what has been revealed publicly. These are not just opportunistic lone attackers, either. Sophisticated cybercrime organizations are now doing it too: analytics firm Chainalysis recently said that just two groups, both of which are apparently still active, may have stolen a combined $1 billion from exchanges.

We shouldn’t be surprised. Blockchains are particularly attractive to thieves because fraudulent transactions can’t be reversed as they often can be in the traditional financial system. Besides that, we’ve long known that just as blockchains have unique security features, they have unique vulnerabilities. Marketing slogans and headlines that called the technology “unhackable” were dead wrong.

That’s been understood, at least in theory, since Bitcoin emerged a decade ago. But in the past year, amidst a Cambrian explosion of new cryptocurrency projects, we’ve started to see what this means in practice—and what these inherent weaknesses could mean for the future of blockchains and digital assets.

If you own any cryptocurrencies, or you work on a blockchain-based project, you should read this article. 

The Mirrorworld Is Coming

If you've been paying any attention to trends in technology, you'll know that augmented reality is big and getting bigger. So far, the best example is probably Pokemon Go, where imaginary creatures are overlaid on your phone's view of the world around you. Google has announced that Maps will support overlaid directional information sometime soon.

What's keeping the technology back right now is the difficulty and cost of producing a display that can overlay information on our view of reality. Google Glass was one of the first viable products, but outside of some niche markets like airplane maintenance, it hasn't taken off. But what will be possible in five or ten years? That's the subject of this article from Wired: AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld.

EVERY DECEMBER, ADAM Savage—star of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the hype and backlash that have dogged the product, Savage describes an epiphany he had while trying on the headset at home, upstairs in his office. “I turned it on and I could hear a whale,” he says, “but I couldn’t see it. I’m looking around my office for it. And then it swims by my windows—on the outside of my building! So the glasses scanned my room and it knew that my windows were portals and it rendered the whale as if it were swimming down my street. I actually got choked up.” What Savage encountered on the other side of the glasses was a glimpse of the mirrorworld.

The mirrorworld doesn’t yet fully exist, but it is coming. Someday soon, every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld. For now, only tiny patches of the mirrorworld are visible through AR headsets. Piece by piece, these virtual fragments are being stitched together to form a shared, persistent place that will parallel the real world. The author Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map exactly the same size as the territory it represented. “In time,” Borges wrote, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” We are now building such a 1:1 map of almost unimaginable scope, and this world will become the next great digital platform.

Kevin Kelly isn't the first author to use the term "mirrorworld"; it's been used in fantasy novels for some time. But in this article, he's redefined it. If you read one article on technology this year, make it this one.

Using Word's Wildcard Search Option

The search feature in Microsoft Word is very powerful. As well as standard string searches, you can use wildcard characters and regular expressions to perform complex searches and
replacements. For a detailed explanation of wildcard searches in Word, with many examples, see Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word by Jack Lyon. Examples below are from that book.

To enable wildcard searches in Word:

1. Open the Find and Replace dialog box. From the Find drop down menu in the Home tab of the ribbon, choose Advanced Find or press CONTROL+H.
2. In the Find and Replace dialog box, click More. The Search Options pane opens.
3. Select the Use wildcards check box. Note that this check box also enables the use of regular expressions in searches and replacements.

Basic wildcard searches use the ? and * characters.

• ? finds any single character: “b?t” finds “bat”, “but”, and “bet”.
• * finds any string of characters: “b*d” finds “bad”, “bead”, and “beard”.

More complex searches and replacements are possible using regular expressions with the following wildcard characters:

• [ ] finds one of the specified characters: “b[ai]t” finds “bat” and “bit” but not “bet”.
• [-] finds any single character in the specified range (which must be in ascending order): “[l-r]ight” finds “light”, “might”, “night”, and “right” (and “oight”, “pight”, and “qight”, if they exist).
• [!] finds any single character except those specified: “m[!u]st” finds “mist” and “most” but not “must”; “t[!ou]ck” finds “tack” and “tick” but not “tock” or “tuck”; [!x-z] Finds any single character except those in the specified range; “t[!a-m]ck” finds “tock” and “tuck” but not “tack” or “tick”.
• {n} finds exactly n occurrences of the previous character or expression: “re{2}d” finds “reed” but not “red”.
• {n,} finds at least n occurrences of the previous character or expression: “re{1,}d” finds “red” and “reed”.
• {n,m} finds from n to m occurrences of the previous character or expression: “10{1,3}” finds “10”, “100”, and “1000”.
• @ finds one or more of the previous character or expression before something else: “me@t” finds both “met” and “meet”; “me@” (without the “t”) finds only “me” because nothing comes after it.
• < finds the beginning of a word: “<inter” finds “interest” and “interrupt” but not “splinter”.
• > finds the end of a word: “in>“ finds “in” and “main” but not “inspiring”.

A few things to note:

• With wildcard searches, Word automatically matches case.
• The following characters must be escaped with a backslash (\) when used as characters in a search: ? * [ ] { } ( ) < > ^ \.
• The Find whole words option is not available in wildcard searches.
• You should always turn off track changes before using wildcard searches. Bad things may happen to your document if you don’t.

Some useful links:

• Finding and Replacing Characters Using Wildcards on the Microsoft Word MVP FAQ site.
• Find and Replace using wildcards by Graham Mayor.
• Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word by Jack Lyon

Some Talks with SF Authors

Here are a couple of videos featuring prominent science fiction authors.

First Gregory Benford with Freeman Dyson (both are scientists, Dyson is not an SF author as far as I know). The talk is titled "Forseeing the Next 35 Years—Where Will We Be in 2054?"

Next, David Brin in "Let Them Contact Us First".

Then Cory Doctorow at Devcon4.

Finally, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi talking about their recent books:

Baseball Has Become an Exercise in Tedium

Baseball is the only sport that I watch regularly. One of the things I like about it is its measured pace, but in recent years it's gotten too measured. I don't mind it that much if I'm watching at home, where I am usually reading something at the same time, but it can get annoying at the stadium, when you're trying to figure out if the game will end before you have to leave to catch a train home.

I'm not the only person who finds the modern game too slow. Jack Todd of the Montreal Gazette published a spectacular rant about it last fall. Here's his description of a World Series game from 1957.

The game moved along, much as I remembered. Using my stopwatch, I had timed modern pitchers taking between 30 and 45 seconds to release the ball. But here was veteran lefty Warren Spahn delivering pitches to the Yankees at roughly 15-second intervals.

I had to time the top of the third inning four times on my stopwatch before I was certain the timing was correct: In that half-inning, Spahn went through a murderer’s row of Yankees (Tony Kubek, Hank Bauer and Mickey Mantle) in a grand total of one minute and 10 seconds. Spahn threw five pitches: two to get Kubek, one for Bauer, two for Mantle. All ground balls, three batters retired in less time than it takes some hitters today to adjust their batting gloves.

I'll try not to think about this too much when I'm watching games later this year.

New JavaScript Features Make Text Processing with Regex Easier

There is an update to JavaScript, otherwise known as ECSMAScript. The latest version, ECMASCript 2018, or ES2018, includes enhancements to regular expressions (regex) that should simplify text processing. Smashing Magazine covers the new features in some detail.

ES2018 continues the work of previous editions of ECMAScript by making regular expressions more useful. New features include lookbehind assertion, named capture groups, s (dotAll) flag, and Unicode property escapes. Lookbehind assertion allows you to match a pattern only if it is preceded by another pattern. Named capture groups use a more expressive syntax compared to regular capture groups. The s (dotAll) flag changes the behavior of the dot (.) metacharacter to match line break characters. Finally, Unicode property escapes provide a new type of escape sequence in regular expressions.

I don't have FrameMaker, so I can't say if any of these new features are available in ExtendScript, but if not I would hope they'll make it into the next major version.

The Rise of the Super-Tall Skyscraper

I'm often boggled by the rate of development in Toronto and the height of some of the new office and condo towers, some of which are now topping out at over 300 metres. But Toronto has yet to see anything like the super-tall skyscrapers that are now rising in New York, many along the edge of Central Park.

The Guardian has a long article about the new developments in New York and how they are affecting the city. It's a good article and if you're into architecture, they've included lots of links to interesting tidbits.

Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds.
These towers are not only the product of advances in construction technology – and a global surfeit of super-rich buyers – but a zoning policy that allows a developer to acquire unused airspace nearby, add it to their own lot, and erect a vast structure without any kind of public review process taking place. The face of New York is changing at a rate not seen for decades, and the deals that are driving it are all happening behind closed doors.

Featured Links - February 24, 2019

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

• A Small Island Town Prepares for a Major Earthquake. Life in the Cascadia subduction zone.
• The Nastiest Feud in Science. This was mentioned in The Ends of the World, which I read recently.
• Understanding JSON in JavaScript. A good tutorial on a very common data format.
• Take Full Advantage of Google Docs With These 11 Add-Ons. I used some of these at the TMX.
• Good Timing. An article about the forthcoming Good Omens TV series based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
• Finding Lena, The Patron Saint of JPEGs. The face that moved a trillion images. 

Death-Cap Mushrooms Are Spreading Across North America

When I was young, I used to go mushroom picking with my dad. We'd find a logged area in the bush, and look for mushrooms growing in the stumps, But I was just along for the ride; my dad usually didn't let me pick anything because he (probably rightly) didn't think I'd be able to identify which ones were safe to eat.

I don't know what mushrooms growing in Northern Ontario fifty years ago were dangerous. I do know there were some that he pointed out that you had to avoid. I don't think that any were what's known as the death-cap mushroom, which is now spreading throughout North America. Its dangers and spread are documented in this article from The Atlantic.

Between a sidewalk and a cinder-block wall grew seven mushrooms, each half the size of a doorknob. Their silver-green caps were barely coming up, only a few proud of the ground. Most lay slightly underground, bulging up like land mines. Magnolia bushes provided cover. An abandoned syringe lay on the ground nearby, along with a light assortment of suburban litter.

Paul Kroeger, a wizard of a man with a long, copious, well-combed beard, knelt and dug under one of the sickly colored caps. With a short, curved knife, he pried up the mushroom and pulled it out whole. It was a mushroom known as the death cap, Amanita phalloides. If ingested, severe illness can start as soon as six hours later, but tends to take longer, 36 hours or more. Severe liver damage is usually apparent after 72 hours. Fatality can occur after a week or longer. “Long and slow is a frightening aspect of this type of poisoning,” Kroeger said.

I think if I were living in Vancouver, I'd avoid wild mushrooms completely. 

Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Among Us?

Last month, I linked to a New York Times article called The Insect Apocalypse Is Here about the world-wide catastrophe about to happen to insect populations. As it happens with science articles in the mainstream press (even the Times), the actual situation may be more nuanced, although still grim.

In The Atlantic's article, Is The Insect Apocalypse Really Among Us?, Ed Yong takes another look at the situation.

I spoke with several entomologists about whether these claims are valid, and what I found was complicated. The data on insect declines are too patchy, unrepresentative, and piecemeal to justify some of the more hyperbolic alarms. At the same time, what little information we have tends to point in the same worrying direction. How, then, should we act on that imperfect knowledge? It’s a question that goes beyond the fate of insects: How do we preserve our rapidly changing world when the unknowns are vast and the cost of inaction is potentially high?

Both articles are worth reading.

2018 Nebula Finalists Announced

The finalists for the 2018 Nebula Awards have been announced. The Nebulas are voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The winners will be announced at the 2019 Nebula Conference in Los Angeles on May 18.

These are the finalists for best novel:

• The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
• The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
• Blackfish City, Sam J. Miller (Ecco; Orbit UK)
• Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik (Del Rey; Macmillan)
• Witchmark, C.L. Polk (Tor.com Publishing)
• Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)

I would be quite happy to see The Calculating Stars win. It's the only one of the finalists that I've read and is definitely award calibre. I was disappointed to see that Ian McDonald's wonderful "Time Was" didn't make the ballot for best novella. However, I'm glad to see that several Canadian authors made the list. Thanks to Robert J. Sawyer for pointing out all of the Canadians:

• C.L. Polk of Calgary in best novel for Witchmark
• Kate Heartfield of Ottawa in best novella for "Alice Payne Arrives"
• Kelly Robson of Toronto in best novella for "Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach"
• Kate Heartfield  in game writing for The Road to Canterbury
• And this year's already announced Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, William Gibson

The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway

When I was in London last year, one of the things that impressed me the most was the Tube system. Where we were staying near Regents Park, we were within a 15 minute walk of four Tube stations on several different lines. Now there's a new line, the Elizabeth line, part of what's known as CrossRail, a more than 100-kilometre line crossing London from east to west, built at a cost of more than 15 billion pounds.

The 15 Billion Pound Railway is a five-part documentary about building the Elizabeth line.

If you have any interest in transit or engineering, this is a must see. It is amazing to see the size and complexity of a project like this under construction, and the precision with which it was built. One of the most impressive segments was about running a 1,000 ton tunnelling machine over a running Tube line station with a margin of literally centimetres.

The episodes are occasionally cheesy and there's too much repetition (a problem with most TV docs these days) but are very watchable. I was also impressed by the number of women in senior roles on the project.

All five episodes are on YouTube.

Can't Open a Word Template in Office 365

I am still using Word 2013, but I am considering upgrading to Office 365 (more for the free storage than the new Office features).  I just came across a post by Rhonda Bracey on her CyberText Newsletter blog about a problem she was having with Office 365 and Word templates. I'm posting this for future reference.

Just a quick note about repairing Office 365—you don’t get a Repair option in the list of programs, despite the user interface text telling you so. Instead, you have to click on Change, say Yes to allow the app to make changes (if asked), then choose Quick Repair from the list. It only takes a few minutes. Once the repair was done, my IT guys told me to reboot the PC, which I did, then I tested the repair by successfully opening normal.dotm. 

Some Interesting Science Links

Here are some interesting science articles.

• Diagnosing 'art acne' in Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. "Novel hand-held tool detects, maps and monitors destructive pimple-like protrusions in precious works of art"
• The Government's New Weather Model Faces a Storm of Protest. Introduced after three years of development, it can't accurately forecast temperature or snow fall amounts.
• Extra dimensions, black holes, and vacuum decay, oh my. "There are several ways the Universe could end, some dramatic, some pathetic, some just outright weird. My personal favorite is vacuum decay, in which the Universe succumbs to an expanding bubble of unimaginable destruction that arises from what could be described as a manufacturer's flaw in the fabric of the cosmos"
• Planck's Constant and the Nature of Light. "This new definition of Planck's constant leads to a much simpler interpretation of light which can be modeled using the same mathematical construct (e ^ iφ =cos(φ)+isin(φ)) as all other oscillating wave phenomenon."
• New Map of Dark Matter Spanning 10 Million Galaxies Hints at a Flaw in Our Physics. "An invisible force is having an effect on our Universe. We can't see it, and we can't detect it - but we can observe how it interacts gravitationally with the things we can see and detect, such as light."

How Much Does XML Publishing Cost?

When looking at XML publishing, it's tempting to focus on tools. Get the latest whizbang authoring system and all will be well. But there are many other costs to implementing a new authoring and publishing system, they vary by size of organization, and not all are easy to quantify.

Sarah O'Keefe at Scriptorium has published a white paper that looks at the costs of XML publishing. It covers several different scenarios, from a small writing group to the full enterprise.

The estimates provided here are intended as general guidelines. They include items such as:

• Software licenses, such as a content management system, authoring tools, linguistic analysis, translation management software, and others
• Software installation and configuration
• Content conversion services (but not employees rewriting content internally)
• Content strategy development
• Information architecture and content modeling
• Content systems architecture and implementation
• Training

 I like that she itemizes what the paper doesn't cover, but are still real costs that you will have to consider; for example: lost productivity during the transition and IT resources to install, configure, and maintain a new system.

I wish I'd had this paper as a guide a few years ago.

Amazon Alexa and the Search for the One Perfect Answer

I purchased a Google Home last year, primarily to use play music, but I've also found it handy to get a quick answer to a question. If I was searching online, I'd get a page of results, but voice search implies that there is one correct answer. How does Google (or Amazon if you're using an Alexa device) determine which answer to tell you?

That's the subject of this article from Wired. It turns out to be a complex problem with some interesting implications that are worth thinkng about.

The command that big tech companies have over the dissemination of information, particularly in the era of voice computing, raises the specter of Orwellian control of knowledge. In places such as China, where the government heavily censors the internet, this is not just an academic concern. In democratic countries, the more pressing question is whether companies are manipulating facts in ways that benefit their corporate interests or the personal agendas of their leaders. The control of knowledge is a potent power, and never have so few companies attained such dominance as the portals through which the vast majority of the world’s information flows.

The rest of us, meanwhile, may be losing the very skills that allow us to hold these gatekeepers to account. Once we become accustomed to placing our faith in the handy oracle on the kitchen counter, we may lose patience with the laborious—and curiosity-stoking, and thought-­provoking—hunt for facts, expecting them to come to us instead. Why pump water from a well if it pours effortlessly from your faucet?

Teachers Call for Support Against Classroom Violence

Unless you know a teacher, you may not know about classroom violence against teachers. Just in case you're wondering, I do. It is happening, a lot, and it's a real problem. Yesterday's Sunday Edition on the CBC had a documentary about this problem. It was quite chilling.

If you're thinking about thugs and gangs in high school, think again. Teachers are getting attacked by kids in kindergarten and lower grades.

Educators say incidents of verbal and physical violence by students targeting staff and fellow classmates are leaving them exhausted — and they're calling on governments and school boards to provide more support.

Sherri Brown, director of research and professional learning at the Canadian Teachers' Federation (CTF), describes the current state as an "escalating crisis."

Last year, the national organization compiled the results of a survey conducted for the Elementary Teachers' Federation of Ontario (ETFO). The online survey, which polled its 81,000 members, found that 70 per cent of Ontario elementary teachers reported experiencing or witnessing violence during the 2016-17 school year.

Verbal threats, physical assault and incidents involving weapons were among the most frequently reported, according to Brown.

As well as the article on the CBC site, I recommend listening to the documentary, which is in the first hour of the program.

Featured Links - February 17, 2019

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

• Scientists Are Investigating Building a Space Station Inside a Giant Asteroid. Having just watched a documentary on the CrossRail project, I think they may be underestimating the difficulty of tunnelling.
• Meet Oklo, the Earth’s Two-billion-year-old only Known Natural Nuclear Reactor
• Why an Amazon Router Freaks Me Out. What's good for Amazon may not be good for you.
• No, the problem isn't "bad coders". "We need languages with guard rails."
• Why David Saint-Jacques Could Be Canada's Last Astronaut. I certainly hope not.
• The Birth of the Death Star. Art from the artist who inspired it.

Now We Have Deep Fakes for Text

The ability to fake what humans do or produce is beginning to get scary – scary enough that the creators of a new text-generation algorithm aren't going to release it.

That quality, however, has also led OpenAI to go against its remit of pushing AI forward and keep GPT2 behind closed doors for the immediate future while it assesses what malicious users might be able to do with it. “We need to perform experimentation to find out what they can and can’t do,” said Jack Clark, the charity’s head of policy. “If you can’t anticipate all the abilities of a model, you have to prod it to see what it can do. There are many more people than us who are better at thinking what it can do maliciously.”

To show what that means, OpenAI made one version of GPT2 with a few modest tweaks that can be used to generate infinite positive – or negative – reviews of products. Spam and fake news are two other obvious potential downsides, as is the AI’s unfiltered nature . As it is trained on the internet, it is not hard to encourage it to generate bigoted text, conspiracy theories and so on.

I could see this eventually being used to generate non-fiction, like user guides. (There go technical writing jobs). Give it a spec sheet and it should be able to write a press release, so marketing copy writers are out of work. Ditto writers of trash romance and science fiction. Welcome to the unemployed future. You can join your auto worker friends on the dole.

A FrameMaker Resource I Should Have Used

I used Adobe FrameMaker as much as possible at TMX, especially for long or complex documents that I owned and didn't have to share their content with developers or analysts. I automated some of my work with FrameScript and later ExtendScript, and used add-ins from various sources. And I got a lot of good advice from Adobe's FrameMaker forums and the Framers mailing list.

I'd have been more productive if I'd looked at the FrameUsers.com web site. I used it many years ago, but it had gone stale. I didn't know that it had been revived and updated.

If you use FrameMaker, it's definitely as site you'll want to look at. There are lists of tools and a techniques page with some advanced tips. I found a large collection of free ExtendScripts that would have been useful.

Watch Sting's Performance in Oshawa Today

Sting gave a free performance in Oshawa today in support of the GM workers who are about to lose their plant and their jobs. Some of the performance was from his musical, The Last Ship, which is showing in Toronto over the next month. I've heard the soundtrack album and it's quite good.

You can watch the entire performance on the CTV News web site.

New Tool Protects From Deepfakes

Last month I posted about fake news and deep fake videos on the Internet. All is not lost; developers are working on tools that can identify deep fakes and protect videos from tampering.

Called Amber Authenticate, the tool is meant to run in the background on a device as it captures video. At regular, user-determined intervals, the platform generates "hashes"—cryptographically scrambled representations of the data—that then get indelibly recorded on a public blockchain. If you run that same snippet of video footage through the algorithm again, the hashes will be different if anything has changed in the file's audio or video data—tipping you off to possible manipulation.

I don't think this is a universal solution (there probably isn't one), but it's a start.

How To Become a 10X Technical Writer

I must have gotten really behind current development practices, because technical writer, Tom Johnson, used a term I wasn't familiar with - a 10X technical writer. It's based on the term "10X engineer", meaning someone who is 10 times as productive as other engineers. (I doubt very much that there is anyone that good, although I could see someone being three times as productive).

In any case, he has five tips for becoming more productive. Based on my own experience, they're all good, but the first two are especially worthwhile.

• Record your meetings with engineers to listen again later. I did this often and he's right. No matter how good you are at taking notes, you can't possibly get every detail that an engineer is giving you in real time.  A recorder can. 
• Respond quickly to emails and messages. Doing so should give the impression that you are approachable. Again, based on personal experience with developers and project managers, I think he's right.

There's more in his article. It's aimed at technical writers, but could apply to many other jobs. 

How To Telll If a Dented Can Is Safe

It's not unusal to find dented cans on a supermarket shelf. Usually, the store's staff will remove badly dented cans, but how do you know that a dented can is safe to use. This article has some advice and a link to a guide that can help you.

Now if you want to get really technical about dented cans, let’s roll up our sleeves: Not all dents are created equal. Side dents with no large edges or creases? Probably not a risk. Side dent over a seam? Risky. Bottom dent on a can with no bottom seam? Not risky. Bottom dent on a can with dual top and bottom seams? Risky. You can take a look at what I’m talking about with this handy visual guide to can denting (really) from Colorado’s Weld County Department Of Public Health & Environment. Even after all those photos and denting dissection, the agency ultimately urges caution: “When in doubt, throw it out!”

Printing a List of Comments in Word

Word’s comment feature can be a good way of noting unresolved issues or problems in a document. Often, you may want a list of the comments in a document for review.

To print a list of comments:

1. In the ribbon, select the Reviewing tab.
2. In the Display Markup list, select All Markup.
3. In the Show Markup list, ensure that Comments is selected and Formatting, Ink Annotations, and Insertions and Deletions are cleared.
4. In the ribbon, choose File > Print.
5. In the Print what list, select List of Markup.
6. Click OK. A list of the comments in the document is printed.

I should also note that Paul Beverley's excellent Macros for Editors book contains several macros for printing comments in different formats. 

How To Add Google's New Themes to Chrome

Google has just introduced several new themes for Chrome that offer both dark and coloured options. The themes will change the colour of the Chrome UI elements but don't affect the web pages that Chrome is displaying. For that you'll need an extension like Dark Reader.

LifeHacker has a handy guide to enabling the new themes, including screen shots. Some of theme are pretty lurid. I am now using the Slate theme, which uses a combination of dark blue and black. Along with the Dark Reader extension that I've been using for a while, it makes web browsing much easier on the eyes.

Incidentally, if you use Windows 10, you can use dark mode in some of the apps. This is especially handy in File Explorer.

2018 Asimov's Readers' Award Finalists

Like Analog, it's sister magazine, Asimov's Science Fiction has an annual readers' poll. They've announced the finalists for 2018 and put up links to PDF versions of the stories so you can read all of them for free. Winners will be announced at a later date.

These are the novella finalists:

• 3-adica—Greg Egan (September/October)
• Bubble and Squeak—David Gerrold & Ctein (May/June)
• Bury Me in the Rainbow—Bill Johnson (March/April)
• In the Lost City of Leng—Paul Di Filippo & Rudy Rucker (January/February)
• Joyride—Kristine Kathryn Rusch (November/December)
• The Rescue of the Renegat—Kristine Kathryn Rusch (January/February)

It's pretty hard to go wrong here with several hundred thousand words of free science fiction form the magazine that's been leading the field for the last three decades.

Free Online DITA Conference

On of the regrets I have about my career as a technical writer is that I never got to implement DITA. (If you're not a technical writer, you can probably skip the rest of this). DITA, or Darwin Information Typing Architecture, is a methodology for creating structured content. In a nutshell, it lets you separate your content from its format, which makes it possible to re-use your information in different places and in different formats.

Later this month, there's a free, online, DITA conference called Learning DITA Live. Over four days there will be sixteen sessions covering various aspects of DITA. From a quick look over the session topics, it doesn't look like any of these will be super-technical; after all, there's only so much geekery you can cram into an hour. But they've assembled a high-powered list of presenters, so the sessions should be worthwhile, and you can pick and choose which ones you want to view.

As for me, despite the fact that I'm retired, I'm still interested in some of the sessions, especially the one on Lightweight DITA, which is something normal humans might be able use.

Sessions will be recorded, so you should be able to view them later.

Digging Deep into the QuadrigaCX Collapse

Recently, the CEO of Bitcoin exchange QuadrigaCX died suddenly. Normally this wouldn't rate more than a paragraph in the business news pages, but all of the exchanges Bitcoins were stored on his laptop, which was encrypted with a password that only he knew.

There may be more to the story than that. BetaKit reports that there are indications that at least some of the money may be missing, not lost in what's known as a cold wallet.

As BetaKit reported last week, James Edwards, also known as Crypto Medication, an analyst behind crypto blog Zerononcense, said he reviewed the exchange’s claims based on an examination of publicly available transaction histories and determined that QuadrigaCX never lost access to its Bitcoin holdings, rather the missing sum was inaccurate. More recently, another analytics firm, Elementus Group, traced the exchange’s ether holdings, and came to the same conclusion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

It's quite the story. Personally, I find it hard to believe that there wasn't a copy of that password stored somewhere. But then again, I worked at a stock exchange, where there were multiple levels of controls and security.

I should note that BetaKit was founded by my nephew, Douglas Soltys, who has turned it into the major source of news for Canada's startup tech sector.

Another Presto Snafu

Regular riders of the GTA's GO Transit system are well aware of the Presto fare card's failings. But the Toronto Star has pointed out yet another one, and this one's a doozy.

The UP Express, AKA UPX, is a half-billion-dollar train that runs between Toronto's Union Station and Pearson airport along GO Transit's Kitchener line. Two stops are shared with GO Transit stations. The Presto card readers on the UPX side of the station are separate from the GO Transit readers and they don't talk to each other.

Let's say you get on the UPX at Bloor station and tap on using a GO Transit Presto reader, which is green. You get off at Pearson and tap off on a UPX Presto reader, which is silver. One trip, right? But you are going to get charged for two, and to make matters worse, the GO fare charged will be for the full Kitchener line, because you didn't tap off (on a GO reader).

The simple solution would be to connect the two systems, right? But that's not the Presto way. They're going to fix it with a better "user experience".

Ferguson said Metrolinx is “working to improve the user experience” and is launching a pilot initiative at Union “to test out designs that would better visually distinguish the two types of machines.”

According to Olivier St-Cyr, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto’s faculty of information and an expert in user experience design, public-facing technical systems that rely on people to correctly interpret visual cues like signage are often the least effective.

He argued it would be ideal to just have one type of machine, but if that’s not possible Metrolinx could design a system that prevents people from choosing the wrong device. For example, he suggested that if possible the devices could be programmed to reject a customer’s payment if they end their journey by tapping their card on a different colour device than the one they started with.

I can't wait to see what Metrolinx comes up with. In the meantime, if you have any friends or family taking the UPX, make sure they know about this little quirk.

Astronomy: A Free Open Source Textbook

Astronomy is a free, open source textbook designed for introductory astronomy courses.

The book begins with relevant scientific fundamentals and progresses through an exploration of the solar system, stars, galaxies, and cosmology. The Astronomy textbook builds student understanding through the use of relevant analogies, clear and non-technical explanations, and rich illustrations. Mathematics is included in a flexible manner to meet the needs of individual instructors.

The copyright date is 2016 so it won't be quite up to date, but it's still a good resource if you want to find out some basic information about an astronomical subject. You can read the book online or download it in PDF, iBooks, or Kindle formats. 

 

Tribute to the Jeffereson Airplane

Here's a tribute to my favourite band of my teenage years, the Jefferson Airplane. It's from the Lockin Festival in 2015 and features original Airplane members Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady. It's a pro-shot video with soundboard sound and they do a decent job of recreating the classic Airplane sound.

It's a pretty high-powered band. As well as Jorma and Jack, they have G.E. Smith on 12-string, Larry Campbell on several instruments, Theresa Williams on vocals, and Bill Kreutzman on drums on the final songs.

2018 AnLab Award Finalists

The Analytical Laboratory, otherwise known as AnLab, is a long-runnning readers' poll in Analog Science Fiction and Fact magazine. Readers vote on their favourite stories and articles and the winning authors receive a bonus. There's also an annual poll and the finalists for 2018 have been announced and posted online as PDF files.

These are the finalists for best novella.

• A Stab of the Knife—Adam-Troy Castro (July/August)
• Blurred Lives—Adam-Troy Castro (January/February)
• Harry and the Lewises—Edward M. Lerner (September/October)
• The Last Biker Gang—Wil McCarthy (May/June)

There's a few hundred thousand words of good and free SF here. Dive in. 

Featured Links-February 10, 2019

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

• Someone Uploaded Child Pornography to a Blockchain Ledger, and It's Almost Impossible to Delete
• A Guide to CSS Support in Browsers. It's better than it used to be but there are still problems.
• Chrome Extension Offers Distraction-Free YouTube Experience. Worthwhile just to turn of autoplay.
• How to Handle the Baron Harkonnen in a Modern Dune Adaptation. 
• Saudi Arabia: Tryin
• Digitizing the OED: the making of the Second Edition

We're Toast 3

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

• Ancient Plants Reveal Arctic Summers Haven't Been This Hot in 115,000 Years
• Glaciers Are Retweeting. Millions Rely on Their Water. 
• And Now the Weather: Mars-Like with a Chance of Apocalypse
• With $32 Trillion in Assets, Investors Demand Immediate Action On Climate Change
• A hole opens up under Antarctic glacier–big enough to fit two-thirds of Manhattan
  

Politics

• This website is a nightmare this week ..., a Twitter thread from Ben Collins about social media and the nature of reality.
• A Twitter thread on how money laundering works. It explains a lot of things about today's political world.
• Food Shocks Are Causing Hunger to Spike. Climate change isn't the only cause.
• Britain's Post-Brexit Future May Stink. I do hope they come to their senses.
• World's 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam
• Russian-Style Kleptocracy Is Infiltrating America.
  

Technology

• The way we eat could doom us as a species. Here’s a new diet designed to save us.
• Controversial experiments that could make bird flu more risky poised to resume

Clean Your Car's Roof!

We had a scare on the 401 coming home from my eye checkup. A basketball-sized chunk of ice and snow came off the top of a van and hit our windshield right in front of me. It shattered and didn't do any damage to the windshield but it was a substantial impact and did scare us. A couple of minutes later we almost got hit by another chunk coming off another vehicle.

For fuck's sake people, CLEAN THE TOP OF YOUR VEHICLES BEFORE YOU GET ON THE ROAD!

Webster's Dictionary of English Usage Ebook

In my post about Dreyer's English, I bemoaned the fact that Merriam Webster's Dictionary of English Usage wasn't available as a Kindle ebook. Yesterday, I thought to look for it an Google Books and yes, there is an ebook version there. It's not an ideal edition though, as it's produced from a scan of the first 1989 edition and not the later 1994 edition, which is the one I have sitting beside me. The file format is a PDF hag-ridden with Adobe Digital Editions DRM.

It's just usable on my Samsung Galaxy S8 phone, but perfectly readable on my PC and should be fine on a tablet. You can search it and add notes and bookmarks. Given the small size of the print in my hardbound edition, the Google Books version will be more usable for me, although I would prefer a proper EPUB or Kindle version.

This is one of the best books you'll find on English usage (well, American English) and the Google Books price of $8.86 (Canadian dollars) is very reasonable. Right now, you can also get $5 credit on book purchases over $5, which reduces the cost to that of a cup of coffee. You can't go wrong.

Is Line Editing a Lost Art?

In my career as a technical writer, I've had to do a lot of editing; probably half my job was editing material submitted to me by developers and other subject matter experts. But the editing was largely copy editing, not really substantive structural editing. In fiction, that's the purview of the line editor, a somewhat misleading term.

This article explores the role of the line editor in modern fiction, and it turns out to be an important one. Unfortunately, it also seems to be a dying art, as modern publishers downsize and merge.

The truth—and the history—is complicated. Science fiction writer Samuel Delany has reflected that in a career that started in 1962 and spans to the present, he has only had one true line editor for fiction, Ron Drummond. Delany thinks the “marathon reading” done by acquisitions editors “tends to blunt just those finer sensibilities needed to get inside a text and take it apart from within in order to make useful suggestions for improvement that the writer can hear and respond too.” The mode of acquisition is one of decision: this book works, it will sell. For Delany, that mode is similar to a writing workshop style of criticism, which will “list toward the generalized and effect-oriented, rather than toward the specific and causally sensitive.” These criticisms are not invalid, but they “refer to a memory of the text, not the actual experience of reading the text—which is what the writer, writing, is always more or less skillfully modulating and manipulating.”

Two New and Worthwhile Chrome Extensions

I've come across a couple of Google Chrome extensions that are worth a look.

The first is an extension for the desktop version of Chrome called Password Checkup. When you visit a site to which you have to log in, it scans your login credentials against a database of (several billion) credentials known to have been compromised. If they have been, you get a warning and an opportunity to change them before logging into the site. See this Mobile Syrup article for more details.

Password Checkup is a Google product, and I'm surprised it's not built right into Chrome instead of being offered as an optional extension. (That might also make it usable in the Android version of Chrome, which AFAIK doesn't support extensions). Offhand, I can't see any reason not to use this.

The second is NewsGuard, which performs a similar function for news sites and links to news articles.

As you browse the news, you’ll see the NewsGuard icon next to news links on search engines and social media feeds, such as Google, Bing, Facebook and Twitter. Green rated sites follow basic standards of accuracy and accountability. Red rated sites do not. Blue rated sites refer to platforms, orange rated sites indicate satire sites, and gray rated sites are those we are in the process of rating and reviewing.

Obviously, you have to have some trust in the people who are doing the rating. You can easily see how a site rates by clicking on the NewsGuard icon. For example, the Daily Mail site gets an 'X' on three of the nine criteria, while the Washington Posts gets an OK check mark for all nine. InfoWars gets a red icon because it fails all five of the credibility criteria. If a site isn't rated, the icon is grey and you have the option of submitting it for review.

I like NewsGuard a lot, especially because its rating icon shows up in news articles posted to Facebook, which is notorious for spreading fake news and disinformaton.

Why Are Glasses So Expensive?

I just ordered a new pair of glasses. They cost me almost $700. As part of the deal, I got a second pair free, so I ordered new reading glasses as the second pair.

My glasses are nothing out of the ordinary. Since having cataract surgery more than a decade ago, my prescription went from ridiculous (-19) to slightly strong. They're standard bi-focals, not even progressive. There's nothing special about the reading glasses either; I've been using off-the-shelf glasses from Costco and Walmart for a while. The frames for both contain maybe two ounces of metal, made with some precision, but nothing that can't be mass produced cheaply.

So why are they so damned expensive? I could understand it when my classes had coke-bottle lenses made from high-refraction glass, but the ones I have now are plastic lenses that are moulded, not ground.

The LA Times explains why in a long article. It turns out that pretty much the entire industry is owned by one company. So there's no competition and no incentive to drive prices down. Not only do they own the companies that make the glasses–they own the companies that sell them to you. It's a nice and very profitable racket.

What the Vision Council probably didn’t want to get into is the fact that for years a single company, Luxottica, has controlled much of the eyewear market. If you wear designer glasses, there’s a very good chance you’re wearing Luxottica frames.

Its owned and licensed brands include Armani, Brooks Brothers, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, DKNY, Dolce & Gabbana, Michael Kors, Oakley, Oliver Peoples, Persol, Polo Ralph Lauren, Ray-Ban, Tiffany, Valentino, Vogue and Versace.

Italy’s Luxottica also runs EyeMed Vision Care, LensCrafters, Pearle Vision, Sears Optical, Sunglass Hut and Target Optical.

Just pause to appreciate the lengthy shadow this one company casts over the vision care market. You go into a LensCrafters retail outlet, where the salesperson shows you Luxottica frames under various names, and then the company pays itself when you use your EyeMed insurance.

A very sweet deal.

Time for some anti-trust regulation, me thinks.

Deleting Tables in Word While Track Changes Is On

Track Changes is a useful feature in Word, but it can have some unintended results. One of them is finding blank pages in your document that apparently can't be deleted.

Consider the following scenario.

You have a document with a table or tables at the end of your document. You have Track Changes on. You select the tables and delete them. While doing more revisions, you turn Track Changes off. Later, you print your document and find that you have three blank pages at the end. All appears well in Normal view but Print Layout shows three blank pages, and no matter what you do you can't delete them.

What happened is that Word didn't actually delete the tables — it deleted the text, but left the tables in the document with the deletion marked as a change. You can't see the deleted tables because you have Track Changes off. The only way to get rid of the tables is to turn Track Changes on and accept the change.

You shouldn't see blank pages (or sometimes blank spots) in a document where a table has been deleted.

To avoid this problem, cut the table rather than deleting it. Cutting a table (Home > Cut, or CTRL+X) opens a confirmation dialog box that tells you that the change won't be marked as a revision.

Updade on the Cuban Meteor

According to NASA, the meteor that exploded over western Cuba on Saturday exploded with an energy of about 1.4 kilotons. That makes it a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than the Chelyabinsk meteor.

This article from Gizmodo has more details.

The object that exploded over Cuba was likely much smaller, probably around the size of a van. Cuban media reported that locals found what they believed was what remained of it after it burned up in the atmosphere in the form of small, black rocks around the size of a mobile phone. Only minor property damage such as shattered windows—probably from the sonic boom generated by the object surpassing the speed of sound—was reported to have resulted, with no injuries.

2018 Locus Recommended Reading List

Locus, the news magazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, has just published their recommended reading list for 2018. The list includes novels in several categories, short fiction, and related works.

The list is a good guide to what's likely to be on this year's award ballots. As well, many of the short fiction stories are linked to online versions that you can read for free.

As usual, I haven't read many of the cited novels (just two: Elysium Fire by Alastair Reynolds and The Calculating Stars by Mary Robinette Kowal), although there are a handful more that I plan on buying eventually.

A Good Consumer Site

I've just come across site called MousePrint.org, that's full of useful consumer-related information. I especially liked the Downsizing category, which shows how companies are (sometimes deceptively) reducing the size of their products. 

“Mouse print” is the fine print in advertising, in a contract, or on a product label, often buried out of easy sight. In the worst cases, the mouse print changes the meaning of, or contradicts the primary claims or promises being made. Sometimes, the catch is not even disclosed. In other cases, the fine print is merely an unexpected surprise for the reader. Fine print is not inherently illegal. But, advertisers are not safe from false advertising claims merely because an ad discloses the truth in some minimal manner. A staff attorney for the Federal Trade Commission once said, “mouse print is for rats, so avoid it.”

The website, MousePrint.org, turns advertising on its head by focusing on an ad’s asterisked fine print footnote rather than the headline. It also examines the often overlooked small print on product labels and contracts. A new ad, product, or contract is featured every Monday. The goal is to help educate the public about the catches or “gotchas” in disclaimers, and to encourage advertisers to abandon the motto, “the big print giveth, and the little print taketh away.”

For my Canadian readers, I should note that Mouse Print is a US-based blog, so the specific examples cited may not apply to Canadian packaging. But it's still worth reading, if just to see some of the sleazy ways companies try to deceive consumers.

The Canadian Style Is Online

I first encountered The Canadian Style when I was working at James Lorimer Publishers in the mid-80s (as a bookkeeper; I had no editorial role). It was first published in 1985 by Dundurn Press and became the gold standard for answering questions about Canadian style. A second edition was published in 1997, and it's sitting here on my desk, right beside my monitor.

The purpose of the guide has not changed: to provide solutions, in a readily accessible format, to problems regularly encountered by both professional and occasional writers. The recommendations are based on national and international standards, the opinions of authorities on editorial style, and a survey of current policy and practice in government communications.

Thanks to Robert J. Sawyer, I have found the online version of The Canadian Style. It is published by the Translation Bureau of  Public Works and Government Services Canada. It still shows a 1997 copyright date, so I assume it's the text of the second edition, without updating. That's unfortunate, given how much language has changed in the last 20 years, but it still remains a useful guide.

As a technical writer who spent a lot of time figuring out how to present content online, the web interface makes my teeth itch. For example, the table of contents doesn't appear in the side bar until you click on Search by Chapter. I'd love to run the text through the latest edition of WebWorks ePublisher.

Still, it's a useful book, even if somewhat dated, and I've added it to my bookmark bar. The print version and a Kindle version are available on Amazon if you want one of the more traditional formats.

Featured Links - February 3, 2019

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

• John Schoenherr, a short biography of the great SF illustrator.
• Could Past Global Climate Have Been Changed by an Eruption ... in Scotland
• Jonathan's visit to the Chernobyl reactor control room
• Which condiments need to be refrigerated. This is a handy guide. 
• Japanese Manhole Cover Festival Coming to Tokyo. Yes, really, and with manhole cookies.
• Disinformation Threat: Osprey. A detailed look at how botnets are influencing politics in Britain.

BREAKING NEWS! Almost Chelyabinsk-Scale Meteor in Cuba

There has been a large meteor event over Cuba. From the video linked in the article, it seems to have been almost the same scale as Chelyabinsk.

Update: There are several videos on YouTube. The meteor was visible over the Florida Keys and exploded in the sky over western Cuba. It was not as large as the meteor that exploded over Chelyabinsk, but it was big enough to create a sonic boom that broke windows. I've corrected the name of Chelyabinsk, which I had wrong.

New Heinlein Novel Coming

Well, this is unexpected and exciting news. From a Facebook post by Shahid Mahmud.

A New Robert A. Heinlein Book to be Published Based on Newly Recovered Manuscript.

The complete text of a new book by Robert A. Heinlein has been recovered and restored and will be published by Phoenix Pick in November 2019.

Rockville Maryland. February 1, 2019

Phoenix Pick recently announced that, working with the Heinlein Prize Trust, they have been able to reconstruct the complete text of an unpublished novel written by Robert A. Heinlein in the early eighties.

Heinlein wrote this alternate text for “The Number of the Beast.” This text of approximately 185,000 words largely mirrors the first one-third of the published version, but then deviates completely with an entirely different story-line and ending.

This newly discovered text also pays extensive homage to two authors Heinlein himself admired: Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. “Doc” Smith, who became a good friend. Heinlein dedicated his book “Methuselah’s Children” to Smith, and partially dedicated “Friday” to Smith’s daughter, Verna.

The alternate text, especially the ending, is much more in line with more traditional Heinlein books, and moves away from many of the controversial aspects of the published version.

The title will likely be Six-Six-Six.

It will be quite interesting to see what this book is like, especially in comparison to The Number of the Beast, which is generally regarded as Heinlein's worst book.

For those of you who are new to this blog, I should note that Heinlein changed my life, quite literally. I discovered him, and science fiction, when I was in grade school and a school librarian handed me Red Planet after I had read all the science books in the school library. It led to a life-long love affair with science fiction and almost certainly my current marriage. So you will likely see more about Heinlein and Six-Six-Six here in the future.

What I Read: January 2019

I managed to finish a couple of books this month, with one more that I got half way through on and gave up.

• Once There Was a Way, by Bryce Zabel: An alternate history of what might have happened if the Beatles hadn't broken up. See my full review.
• The Ends of the World by Peter Brannen: This is a history of the Earth through the five great mass extinctions plus the one we're living through now. It is a wonderful book. The subject matter can be grim but Brannen brings it to life in a way that few authors could. You feel like you're living in the prehistoric worlds he describes. It's one of the best science books I've read.
• Black Chamber by S. M. (Steve) Stirling:  I really wanted to like this book. I knew Steve when he was living in Toronto in the 80s and have been reading his books since he started publishing. But I couldn't finish this one. It's an alternate history in which Teddy Roosevelt ends up as president during World War I. There is a plot but it's buried in page after page of pointless description and turgid historical detail. The editor in me wanted to go through it with a blue pencil, but that's hard to do on a Kindle. For Steve's fans (and he has many) only. 

Now reading:

• Nemesis Games by James S. A. Correy
• Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee
• The Year's Best Science Fiction 34th Annual Collection by Gardner Dozois