Featured Links - March 31, 2019

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

• Using a Raspberry Pi as a Desktop PC: 7 Things I Learned After a Week. Yes, you can if your needs aren't to great.
• How to See if Someone is Tracking Emails They Send You. Works with Chrome or Firefox.
• Critical flaw lets hackers control lifesaving devices implanted inside patients. Scary security holes in medical implants. 
• Almost 13,000 Years Ago, a Comet Impact Set Everything on Fire. More evidence to support the Younger Dryas Impact Theory
• 9 Amazon Kindle Tips To Get More Out of Your E-Reader. If you own a Kindle, you should look at these.
• Finally, Fusion Power Is About To Become a Reality. For values of "About" > five years.
• Samsung One UI vs Stock Android: What's the Best Version of Android for Your Phone? If Rogers ever updates my phone to Android Pie, I may have more to say about this. (Update: Scheduled for April 1!)

Settings for TV Calibration

A few months ago we upgraded our main TV by buying a Vizio P Series 55" set. It has vastly better picture quality than the almost 10-year-old Toshiba set that it replaced (and the Toshiba was fairly decent for its time and we're still using it).

The Vizio comes with several presets for different types of content; out of the box, the Calibrated setting seemed to be the best. But the picture wasn't quite right, so I started looking up information on how to calibrate a modern TV. 

The most important thing was to eliminate the "soap opera effect", which is caused by the TV interpolating frames to reduce motion blur. In practice, it's not that noticeable on streamed content or cable TV, but plays hell with the picture quality on DVDs or Blu-Rays. This article covers how to turn of motion smoothing on major brands.

I made other minor tweaks to brightness and contrast levels and so far, I haven't felt the need to make too many more adjustments. I found these other articles helpful.

• Vizio P65-F1 picture settings and HDR notes
• Vizio P Series 2018 Calibration Settings
• Picture Perfect: TV Settings That Deliver the Ultimate Picture Quality

The Vizio set isn't perfect. The speakers are barely adequate and if you're serious about sound, you'll want a soundbar or full home theatre system. I haven't used the SmartCast features much at all since many of the included options (Hulu, for example) aren't avalable in Canada. We use a 4K Chromecast instead. The remote control is awkard, but there is a Vizio Android app that is easier to use.

For the price, the Vizio has a remarkably good picture, and I have no hesitation in recommending it.

Apple Now Owns the Online Magazine Market

Some time ago Apple bought Texture, an online magazine subscription service. Earlier this week they announced Apple News+, which is basically a fancier Texture with the addition of some newspaper subscriptions. Now they're shutting down Texture as of May 28th.

So, if you want a reasonably priced online magazine subscription service, you have to own an Apple device. Yes, there are public libraries with online magazine downloads (my library in Pickering offers that service), but they don't have anywhere near the selection that Apple News+ does, or the extra online newspapers.

I don't own an Apple computer or an iPad. It looks like I might have to buy one at some point, if I want to read magazines online. Because of my eyesight, reading magazines online is the only way I can read most magazines.

Perhaps Apple has plans to make a cross-platform version of News+ in the future, as they did with iTunes. So far, there's no sign that they will.

I'm not a happy camper.

Lost Trillions

In a previous life, I worked as a bookkeeper, so I have a modest familiarity with accounting principles. So that added an extra fillip of horror as I read Matt Taibbi's article, The Pentagon's Bottomless Money Pit. I knew the Pentabon's budget was an obscene, bloated mess, but OMG, it's even worse than that.

It’s illegal for any government agency to spend money appropriated for one purpose on a different program. But the military — either hilariously or horribly, depending on your perspective — created a program that algorithmically produced such violations of the law. They weren’t minor violations: Grassley has fought for years against such automatic payments, saying bureaucrats use them to “avoid violations of the Antideficiency Act — a felony.” Last year’s audit found the Antideficiency Act was one of five laws the agency violated.

MOCAS still exists, but it’s unclear how or if it’s been updated. In any case, Defense still lacks rec-ords showing that it’s paying for the right programs from the right accounts. Out of terror that it might have to return money as a result, the DoD orders its accountants to make numbers fit. 

Those DFAS accountants in the Reuters exposé were told by superiors that if they couldn’t find invoices or contracts to prove the various services spent their one-year money and two-year money and five-year money on time, they should execute “unsubstantiated change actions,” i.e., lie.
The accountants systematically “plugged” in fake numbers to match the payment schedules handed down by the Treasury. These fixes are called “journal voucher adjustments” or “plugs.”

As a result, those year-end financial statements will look like they match congressional intentions. In truth, the statements packed with thousands of plugs are fictions, a form of systematic accounting fraud Congress has quietly tolerated for decades.

If I had tried something like "plugs" when I was bookkeeping at James Lorimer or Alacrity, I'd almost certainly ended up in prison.

To paraphrase the he famous adage by J. B. S. Haldane: Now, my own suspicion is that the budget is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

Physics Does Not Play Politics

Peter Watts is a Toronto-based marine biologist, science fiction writer. and futurist. If you haven't read any of his books or stories, you're missing some of the most intense and well-thought-out SF published in the last couple of decades. I highly recommend his novel, Blindsight.

A few years ago he had run-in with the US border thugs guards that resulted in him being banned from entering the US. That hasn't seemed to affect his popularity in other parts of the world, and he's been a frequent guest at conventions and conferences in Europe. Recently, he was a guest at a conference called Designing the Future and wrote an extensive blog post about his experience there. (He doesn't blog often, but his posts are always worth reading).

I was particularly struck by this passage.

Days later, during the think-tank postmortem, one of the Human rights activists suggests that these events might benefit from having scientists on board. She does it in strangely grudging tones, though, adds “even though scientists are a pain in the ass” and that their discussions are always so “completely apolitical”. I chip in that our survival— and more importantly, the survival of the millions of species we’re dragging down the toilet with us— ultimately comes down to the laws of Physics, and Physics doesn’t care about politics.

She asks me later if I’ve read The Three-Body Problem, lets out a small whoop when I admit that I have. “I knew it! I knew when you made that comment about physics, you had to have been influenced by that book.”

Well, no. I’ve known about physics pretty much since high school. And I have to wonder about any mindset that regards the primacy of physics as such an alien concept that it could only have come from the depths of a nihilistic science fiction novel. But I am starting to see a pattern; of the eighteen people gathered here, I think I’m the only one with a degree in science. All these other polymaths— curators, activists, artists and architects— their careers center around people. The challenges they face are largely, essentially political; the solutions are political too. Their whole lives come down to negotiations, to meetings in middles. Such insights would have been invaluable back before things got this bad, back when What Has To Be Done could still fit into the set of What’s Politically Doable. But now the cascades and feedback loops have kicked in; now we’ve got to deal with Physics, and Physics does not play politics.

When your life has been spent putting people front and center, putting human welfare and happiness above all, is it any wonder that you might want to look away from a scenario in which Humans get what they deserve? Everyone in this room is looking for a desirable future. I may be the only one who defines that as a future without us. 

"Physics does not play politics." I want that on a T-shirt. 

Why Are Software Tools So Primitive?

Some years ago, I was working with a software architect on a data flow diagram for a system at the TMX. It was a pretty diagram and very complex. I was trying to use it to trace the effects of a component failure on other components. Past a straightforward single failure, it got complicated.

What I couldn't understand is why there wasn't a tool that would automate the process. It's not like the data flows were complex in themselves; into one component, out to one or two on the other side.  In this case, it didn't matter what the data was; I was just trying to trace the effects of things like component failures, network crashes, and so on.

It seemed to me that there should have been a modelling tool that would work live. Disable a connection in the diagram or a component and see what else breaks.

The developers described in this article have been thinking along the same lines.

There is an analogy to word processing. It used to be that all you could see in a program for writing documents was the text itself, and to change the layout or font or margins, you had to write special “control codes,” or commands that would tell the computer that, for instance, “this part of the text should be in italics.” The trouble was that you couldn’t see the effect of those codes until you printed the document. It was hard to predict what you were going to get. You had to imagine how the codes were going to be interpreted by the computer — that is, you had to play computer in your head.

Then WYSIWYG (pronounced “wizzywig”) came along. It stood for “What You See Is What You Get.” When you marked a passage as being in italics, the letters tilted right there on the screen. If you wanted to change the margin, you could drag a ruler at the top of the screen — and see the effect of that change. The document thereby came to feel like something real, something you could poke and prod at. Just by looking you could tell if you’d done something wrong. Control of a sophisticated system — the document’s layout and formatting engine — was made accessible to anyone who could click around on a page.

Victor’s point was that programming itself should be like that. For him, the idea that people were doing important work, like designing adaptive cruise-control systems or trying to understand cancer, by staring at a text editor, was appalling. And it was the proper job of programmers to ensure that someday they wouldn’t have to.

I learned later, working with other software architects, that there were tools that could do what I wanted; we just weren't using them at the time. I do hope that in the future more companies will. Otherwise, as the article points out, the consequences could be significant.

The Keaton Musical Typewriter

Back in the dark ages before computers and word processors, I used a typewriter. My last machine was a Smith Corona electric with a cartridge ribbon. I used to lust over IBM Selectrics with the golf ball type wheels that could type special characters by switching the type ball. But not being a musician, it never occurred to me that someone might want to type musical notation, or that it was even possible.

It is, if you have a Keaton Musical Typewriter.

At first glance, it looks cumbersome, but considering how fiddly (sorry) musical notation is, it could have been quite useful.

It’s an interesting arrangement that gives the Keaton Music Typewriter its distinctive look. In terms of engineering, thanks to a curved meter on the left that Keaton called the Scale Shift Handle and Scale Shift Indicator, it’s easy to control exactly where the notes and characters fall on the page. By moving the handle up or down a notch, the typewriter adjusts to print 1/24 inch in either direction. Moving one notch up or down will cause the character to fall one musical step either way.

In order to make sure that musicians could see where they were about to print, Keaton included a long needle next to the ribbon that leaves nothing up to chance. Interestingly, the two keyboards work in different ways with the Scale Shift Handle. The larger keyboard with the notes, scales, sharps, and flats moves freely in tandem with the Scale Shift Handle. The smaller keyboard, which contains items like bar lines and ledger lines, stays in place since these characters always appear in the same place with respect to the staff lines.

I certainly wouldn't have any use for one, but it would be quite a conversation piece. 

Video from Cory Doctorow at the Strand

Cory Doctorow is on a book tour, launching his new book, Radicalized, which is a collection of four stories. We saw him last week at the Toronto Reference Library, and enjoyed his talk. He's an entertaining and thought-provoking speaker.

Earlier that week, he was at The Strand in New York City, and the talk was recorded and is now up on YouTube. Enjoy.

I haven't read the book yet, but I probably will at some point. A couple of the stories sounded seriously interesting.

How to Use Variables in Word Documents

You can easily create variables to use in your Word documents. These variables can be for anything you want, but they’re especially useful for things that might change, such as a product name. For example, I once worked on a project where our marketing department changed the name of the product a week before the scheduled release. Fortunately, I insisted at the beginning that our writers use variables and making the change was trivial.

To create a document variable:

1. Click File. The Info pane appears.
2. Click Properties > Advanced Properties. The [Document Name] Properties dialog appears.
3. Select the Custom tab.
4. In the Name field, type a name for your variable; for example, Product.
5. In the Value field, type the value you want your variable to have, for example, SecretFileSaver.
6. Click OK.

To insert the variable in your document:

1. Choose Insert > Quick Parts > Field. The Field dialog appears.
2. From the Categories list, select Document Information.
3. From the Field Names list, select DocProperty.
4. From the Property list, select the name of your variable.
5. Click OK.

This may seem like an awful lot of work, but there is an easier way. Now that you have the variable in your document, you can assign it to an AutoText entry, so that you don’t have to go through the whole process every time you want to use it.

To create an AutoText entry for the variable:

1. In your document, select the variable.
2. Choose Insert > Quick Parts > AutoCorrect. The AutoCorrect gallery appears.
3. Click Save Selection to AutoText Gallery. The Create New Building Block dialog box appears.
4. In the Name field, type a short name for your variable, for example, sfs.
5. Click OK.

To insert the variable into your document using AutoText, type the short name and press F3.

To change your variable, follow the same steps you did to create it, but modify the name.

To update the document with the new name, choose Print Preview or Edit > Select > All and press F9.

Fighting Against Self-Checkout

I've noticed an unpleasant trend in our local Loblaws recently. Several cashier lanes have been removed and replaced by rows of self-checkout machines. Personally, I can't stand them. I don't mind checking my own books out of the library (although my wife, an ex-librarian, makes the case that it's a bad thing there too), but it's pretty clear in the case of Loblaws that they're doing it to cut labour costs as far as they can by moving them onto the backs of the consumer. And I don't like it. Why should I do their work for them, with no direct benefit to me?

Now the trend has spread to Shoppers Drug Mart stores, which are owned by Loblaws. The staff there have been pressured to move customers to the self-checkouts, and the staff don't like it.

"I am feeling terrible," said the Shoppers cashier. "I am not comfortable with pushing people to do something they don't want to do."

Workers at her store recently received a directive from head office to pull out all the stops to get more customers using the machines, she said, including leading them directly to self-checkout when they're ready to pay. 

The cashier said she suspects the company's goal is to get customers used to the technology so it can cut cashier jobs.

I should also note, as a friend pointed out, that self-checkouts can be hard to use for people with mobility issues and people who aren't technologically sophisticated.

An Investigator's Gude to LinkedIn

These days, LinkedIn is the default social media tool for professional contacts and one of the key tools for job hunting. Bellingcat has published a guide to LinkedIn, focusing on using it as an investigative tool. That's not something most of us will want to do, but there's much useful information here that should be relevant to the casual user or someone wanting to do a deep dive into a company when job hunting.

Some of the useful information you might glean from the social network for professionals include:

• Biographical details, including employment history, education and other affiliations
• Personal and work contact information
• Approximate location
• Profile photo
• Username
• Personal website
• Employer’s website
• Members of an individual’s social network

It’s important to keep in mind that all of the information listed on a profile is self-reported and can be completely made up (for example, no, David Jewberg is not the name of a senior Pentagon Russia analyst).

NYT Releases Information Management Tool

Keeping track of information is critically important for a news organization like the New York Times. To help their reporters, they developed a tool called Library, and are now releasing it as open source on GitHub.

Library is a wiki powered by a Google Docs backend. When you connect Library to a shared folder or team drive, it will traverse the documents in the folders and create your site content. Documents in Library are searchable, taggable, and can be grouped by desks or categories.

To add a page to Library, you simply create a new Google Doc, or move an existing document into the folder or team drive that powers Library. Existing pages feature a convenient link that enables quick access to the Google Docs interface for any particular document, and editing the Google Doc makes changes to the page in Library.

I've read through the documentation on the example Library site, which includes the setup instructions. It looks moderately complex to set up, but the instructions appear detailed and complete, so it might be possible for a non-programmer like me to install it. It might be a good way to create a wiki for home use by my family; once set up, it should be no harder to use than standard Google Docs. I'd have jumped on this in a minute at the TMX.

Picking the Perfect Colour Combination for a Text Editor

Programmers (and technical writers too) can be very fussy about the colour and font choices they use in their editing tools. I cannot stand editing code in an editor that uses a white background; I always set my background colour to dark blue or black and use brightly colours for syntax highlighting. (I have trouble with low contrast text). However, every has their own preferences, and it seems that many people like the Solarized themes that have appeared in the last few years.

Most of those owe their existence to designer and programmer, Ethan Schoonover, who developed the set of colours in 2010, as described in this Wired article.

"I didn't release it until I was 1,000 percent sure I loved all the colors and they were all dialed in mathematically," Schoonover says. "I had multiple monitors, some were color calibrated, others were deliberately messed up. Sometimes I showed my wife, who thought I was a little nuts."

The article goes into some of the design and colour theory behind his choice of colours. I found it quite fascinating.

The optimal amount of contrast for text on a screen is controversial; many people prefer high-contrast themes. But contrast wasn't Schoonover's only concern. He found most low-contrast color schemes lacking as well. Even the best-designed themes tended to use at least one color that appeared distractingly brighter than others. That's because the apparent brightness of a color varies depending on its background. In other words, a specific shade of blue will appear more or less bright, depending on the surrounding colors.

This phenomenon, known as the Helmholtz–Kohlrausch effect, is particularly aggravating for programmers because coding tools use color to distinguish different parts of code. In the code for a web page in a typical text editor using the Solarized Dark theme, for example, web links appear in green; the syntax for formatting, such as adding italics, is blue, and comments that developers write for themselves are gray. Ideally, the colors should help tell these elements apart, but no single element should stand out more than others.

Featured Links - March 24, 2019

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

• 16 Google Maps Tips for Android That'll Change How You Navigate. Lots here I didn't know about.
• UK's air-breathing rocket engine set for key tests. If it works, it could give us single-stage to orbit vehicles.
• Problems, Patterns and Why Every CMS Thinks It Knows What You Need. Why you (almost always) shouldn't build your own content management system.
• The Best Dark Web Websites You Won't Find on Google. Two of the sites are Sci-Hub and Pro Publica, both of which are wo
• Why an Incredible New CERN Observation Has Physicists Popping Champagne. Another major result for the LHC.
• Jethro Tull: the story behind Thick as a Brick. The story of the greatest progressive rock album.

We're Toast 5

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

• A Nearly $1 Trillion California Flood Likely to Occur Within 40 Years
• The Rapid Decline of the Natural World Is a Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change. I think that climate change contributes to some of the factors mentioned in the article, bit it's still scary. 
• Sharp rise in Arctic temperatures now inevitable – UN. Temperatures likely to rise by 3-5C above pre-industrial levels even if Paris goals met.
• Journey to Antarctica: Is This What a Climate Catastrophe Looks Like in Real Time?
• New Climate Change Visualization Presents Two Stark Choices For Our Future. It looks like we are close to a tipping point.

Politics

• The Making of the Fox News White House. Has it moved from partisanship to propaganda?
• What Do We Do About the Next Massive Natural Disaster? Are we ready?
• The Oppression of the Supermajority. America is not polarized; the public will is being thwarted.

Technology

• Triton is the world's most murderous malware, and it's spreading. This is worse than Stuxnet.
• The Science of Flow Says Extreme Inequality Causes Economic Collapse. But they'll call it fake science.
• Triton is the world's most murderous malware, and it's spreading. Like Stuxnet on steroids and it targets safety systems.

Spreadsheet Horror Stories

It's possible, although rare, for a documentation mistake to cost a company a material (in the accounting sense) amount of money or to make it the target of a lawsuit. Not so with spreadsheets, and errors in a spreadsheet can be harder to find than those in a document.

The European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group has compiled a list of spreadsheet horror stories. Some of them are pretty chilling. Here's just one example, which cost a company £185,000 because a spreadsheet posted online contained personal information:

The Information Commissioner has imposed a penalty of £185,000 on Blackpool Teaching Hospitals NHS trust, who posted spreadsheets summarising their equal opportunities performance on-line. The WHOLE of each spreadsheet was posted, including the pivot tables containing sensitive personal information about every employee. These were on line for 10 months before anyone noticed, despite the Commissioner penalising two other trusts for similar disclosures, and blogging to highlight the risks. No checks were made before uploading, “nobody knew that Excel could do things like that.”

This one cost shareholders in Tibco Software $100 million.

Tibco Software shareholders will be getting $100 million less than originally anticipated from the company’s more than $4 billion sale to Vista Equity Partners as a result of a spreadsheet error that overstated Tibco’s equity value.According to a regulatory filing, Goldman Sachs, which is advising Tibco on the deal, used the spreadsheet in calculating that Tibco’s implied equity value was about $4.2 billion. The merger agreement, reflecting that number, was announced Sept. 29.

Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a parallel documentation risks interest group. 

   

Documentation and the Boeing 737 Crashes

Poor or missing documentation is one of the factors that I've seen mentioned in connection with the recent Boeing 737 crashes. In this post, Tom Johnson looks at the issue of what needs to be included in documentation when you're documenting something that has changed or is different from competitors' products.

Although I'm not familiar with FAA-regulated flight manuals, when I read about the Boeing disaster and the lack of information around the controversial MCAS feature, my two takeaways from a documentation perspective are to ask these questions: How does this product differ from other products? and What does the customer need to know? These are challenging questions in any documentation project.

In relation to the 737 crashes, I think only the second question is relevant. From what I've read, it seems that the pilots didn't know about the troubled MCAS system and couldn't turn it off when it was overreacting. That is clearly both an issue with their training and the documentation.

What bothers me more than that is the fact that the MCAS system depended on the input from only one sensor. I'd like to know why the system wassn't designed with at least three, given that a malfunctioning sensor could bring down the plane.

Free Hot Tuna Webcast Saturday

This Saturday night, March 23, at 8.00 p.m. ET, Hot Tuna will be webcasting from Jorma Kaukonen's Fur Peace Ranch. For those of you who didn't grow up when I did, Hot Tuna is Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady from the Jefferson Airplane. If you want to hear some primo acoustic (and possibly electric) blues, tune in, turn on, and go ride the music.

It'll be on the Fur Peace Ranch's YouTube Channel.

Amazon updates cheapest Kindle

Amazon has updated the lowest-priced model of it's Kindle with a front light and Bluetooth support so you can use it to listen to audio books. In Canada, it's priced at $120 compared to $140 for the Kindle Paperwhite.

It's good that they've finally added a front light to the basic Kindle; that's something that every ereader should have. The screen resolution is lower than the Paperwhite and it has half of the memory and is not waterproof.

Given the small price differential between the two, I'd still go with the Paperwhite. It might be a harder choice in the US, where the price differential is $40.

What's New in the Next Windows 10 Update

The next semi-annual Windows update is due soon. It'll likely be called the April 2019 Update. Ed Bott has a summary of the key features in the latest test build.

I've been using Windows 10 for quite a while now and I generally have few problems with it. The upgrades that Bott covers in his slide show mostly seem like minor tweaks, without any major new features (Sandbox would be, if it worked in the Home edition that I have).

However, there are a few things that make it a worthwhile upgrade:

• What used to be Windows Defender Security Center is now just Security Center. In version 1903 it gets two interesting additions. First is a Tamper Protection setting (shown here), which alerts you if another person or program tries to change your security settings. You'll also find a unified Protection History page that shows all suspicious events (malware detected, Controlled Folder access attempts, and so on) in a single view.
• Nothing derails your concentration like a stray notification. Do you answer that email or instant message request? As before, you can suppress distractions when you're duplicating your display to make a presentation, or when you're playing a game, or during your normal sleep time. Focus Assist adds one new automatic rule in this version: run the current app in Full Screen mode to put up a virtual "Do not disturb" sign.
• The Snip & Sketch app is, slowly but surely, taking over many of the functions previously owned by the legacy Snipping Tool. In this update, it adds the much needed capability to capture a windows rather than just a full screen or an arbitrary rectangle. (For those who still prefer Snipping Tool, it's still there ... for now.)

I will probably post more about this once the upgrade starts rolling out.

The Deadly Truth About a World Built for Men

We don't normally think about design being life threatening. Design affects both form and function, and most times bad design is just ugly or an inconvenience. But when you're talking about car seats, seat belts, and air bags, design matters, and cars are designed for men.

Men are more likely than women to be involved in a car crash, which means they dominate the numbers of those seriously injured in them. But when a woman is involved in a car crash, she is 47% more likely to be seriously injured, and 71% more likely to be moderately injured, even when researchers control for factors such as height, weight, seatbelt usage, and crash intensity. She is also 17% more likely to die. And it’s all to do with how the car is designed – and for whom.

Women tend to sit further forward when driving. This is because we are on average shorter. Our legs need to be closer to reach the pedals, and we need to sit more upright to see clearly over the dashboard. This is not, however, the “standard seating position”, researchers have noted. Women are “out of position” drivers. And our wilful deviation from the norm means that we are at greater risk of internal injury on frontal collisions. The angle of our knees and hips as our shorter legs reach for the pedals also makes our legs more vulnerable. Essentially, we’re doing it all wrong.

Fixing the Expanding Cross-Reference Bug in Word

Not long before I left the TMX, I ran into an interesting problem with a Word document. It was large (around 200 pages) and complex, with many sections and subsections and cross-references to them. It was probably the messiest document I worked in my entire time at the exchange.

The poor business analyst who owned the document's content came to me one day and said that the document was acting weird. Text was appearing, apparently randomly, where it shouldn't have been.  I had seen this problem in the past, but thought that Microsoft had fixed the bug in Word 2013. Cross-references were pulling in the text from the section they were referencing. I deleted the text and rebuilt the cross-references, only to find a few days later that the problem was occurring again.

After doing some research, I found the apparent cause of the problem. It can happen when you:

1. Create a new paragraph immediately before the cross-referenced heading by putting the insertion point at the beginning of the heading and pressing ENTER, and then type, paste, or otherwise insert into the resulting new paragraph 
2. Use Outline Mode to drag other content and drop it immediately before the cross-referenced heading. The entire extent of what is dropped gets included as part of the cross-reference, which can be extremely confusing as entire sections are now repeated inappropriately in the document.
3. Paste content immediately before a cross-referenced heading.

It's not exactly a bug, but a consequence of how Word creates cross references by using hidden bookmarks. It's also worrisome, because it can be easy to miss in larger documents. Making sure that you make fields always visible can help to you to spot it when it occurs.

The article, Cross-reference Problems – Troubleshooting on the DocTools.com website has more details (including listing some other circumstances when it can happen) along with information about a tool that can fix the problem.

Are We On the Road to Civilization Collapse?

For some time, I've thought that our current civilization is in deep trouble. (See the We're Toast category on this blog for links supporting this idea).

But why? The BBC has a long article in their Futures series that details the reasons why modern civilization may be on the brink of collapse – a collapse that seems to have factors in common with all historical civilizations.

If the fate of previous civilisations can be a roadmap to our future, what does it say? One method is to examine the trends that preceded historic collapses and see how they are unfolding today.

While there is no single accepted theory for why collapses happen, historians, anthropologists and others have proposed various explanations, including:

• Climactic change
• Environmental degradation
• Inequality and oligarchy 
• Complexity
• External shocks
• Randomness/bad luck 

Each factor is explained in some detail.

It's not all bad news. Factors like social resilience and innovation can mitigate the driving forces of collapse.

The author concludes:

The collapse of our civilisation is not inevitable. History suggests it is likely, but we have the unique advantage of being able to learn from the wreckages of societies past.

We know what needs to be done: emissions can be reduced, inequalities levelled, environmental degradation reversed, innovation unleashed and economies diversified. The policy proposals are there. Only the political will is lacking. We can also invest in recovery. There are already well-developed ideas for improving the ability of food and knowledge systems to be recuperated after catastrophe. Avoiding the creation of dangerous and widely-accessible technologies is also critical. Such steps will lessen the chance of a future collapse becoming irreversible.

We will only march into collapse if we advance blindly. We are only doomed if we are unwilling to listen to the past.

I think the next couple of years will be key. We've seen the rise of right-wing, anti-environmentalist, and autocratic regimes in several countries, including the United States. If the Republican party (with or without Trump) wins the 2020 election, if the United Kingdom leaves the EU, and right-wing ideologues win power in nations like Canada, we will be on the road to darkness. 

Doing Science with AI

Modern science experiments can generate huge amounts of data, making computerized analysis essential for finding key data points and patterns. For example, the Large Hadron Collider produces about 25 petabytes of data per year (and that doesn't include the data that's filtered out in real time during experiments).

Now scientists are turning to artificial intelligence for help, but that raises the question of whether and where human intelligence will be needed in the future.

The deluge has many scientists turning to artificial intelligence for help. With minimal human input, AI systems such as artificial neural networks — computer-simulated networks of neurons that mimic the function of brains — can plow through mountains of data, highlighting anomalies and detecting patterns that humans could never have spotted.

Of course, the use of computers to aid in scientific research goes back about 75 years, and the method of manually poring over data in search of meaningful patterns originated millennia earlier. But some scientists are arguing that the latest techniques in machine learning and AI represent a fundamentally new way of doing science. One such approach, known as generative modeling, can help identify the most plausible theory among competing explanations for observational data, based solely on the data, and, importantly, without any preprogrammed knowledge of what physical processes might be at work in the system under study. Proponents of generative modeling see it as novel enough to be considered a potential “third way” of learning about the universe.

More on NASA's Possible Commerical EM-1 Mission

I posted last week about the possibility that NASA might use commercial boosters for the Orion EM-1 mission instead of the troubled SLS. There's been quite a bit about this in the press and on space-related sites.

One of the more informative (and somewhat speculative) pieces I've seen is this thread on Reddit's /r/spacex forum. The betting seems to be on NASA using two Delta IV Heavy boosters, although combinations of the Delta IV Heavy and Falcon Heavy have their proponents.

We'll find out in a couple of weeks, most likely.

Iodide: A New Tool for Visualizing and Documenting Data

I posted last week about the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee created the Web to help scientists at CERN create and share documentation. The Web went on to much greater things but that need still exists.

About three years ago, I posted about Jupyter, which lets you embed data, visualizations, and live code from 40 different languages into what Jupyter calls a 'notebook'. Jupyter is great for creating notebooks, but it's hard to share the information in the form of a report, for example.

Now there's a new tool from Mozilla, Iodide, that's designed to address the limitations of Jupyter and other similar tools. From the Mozilla article:

So today we’re excited to introduce Iodide, an experimental tool meant to help scientists write beautiful interactive documents using web technologies, all within an iterative workflow that will be familiar to many scientists.

Beyond being just a programming environment for creating living documents in the browser, Iodide attempts to remove friction from communicative workflows by always bundling the editing tool with the clean readable document. This diverges from IDE-style environments that output presentational documents like .pdf files (which are then divorced from the original code) and cell-based notebooks which mix code and presentation elements. In Iodide, you can get both a document that looks however you want it to look, and easy access to the underlying code and editing environment.

Iodide is a tool designed to give scientists a familiar workflow for creating great-looking interactive documents using the full power of the web platform. To accomplish that, we give you a “report” — basically a web page that you can fill in with your content — and some tools for iteratively exploring data and modifying your report to create something you’re ready to share. Once you’re ready, you can send a link directly to your finalized report. If your colleagues and collaborators want to review your code and learn from it, they can drop back to an exploration mode in one click. If they want to experiment with the code and use it as the basis of their own work, with one more click they can fork it and start working on their own version.

As a technical writer, I like that the Explore view, where you create your content, uses a markdown-based editor that supports CSS and relies on JavaScript for the programming interface. To allow for more complex programming than JavaScript can handle, they've created interfaces for Python, which has a plethora of science- and math-based libraries, with interfaces to other languages planned for future releases.

There's a lot in the article that will matter only to scientists or developers. But there's a lot more of interest to a wider audience; for example, Iodide could be a wonderful teaching tool for high school or college math and science classes. I could have used it at the TMX to create interactive reference documentation for our job control software to pull in data from an Excel spreadsheet that was more than 10,000 rows deep. Or perhaps it could be used for API documentation with live code examples.

Iodide is an open source tool and the current release is in alpha so there are likely to be many changes. Based on what I've seen so far, I think it will become a popular tool that may find an audience outside of the audience it was designed for. If you want to use it, you can find out more at iodide.io.

Featured Links - March 17, 2019

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

• Traces of Giant, 2,700-Year-Old Solar Storm Detected in Greenland Ice
• Acoustic meta-material: a shape that reflects sound but passes light and air. This is an interesting new technology with many applications.
• The "tragedy of the commons" is a right-wing lie. What you've been taught in school about it is probably wrong.
• 8 useful CSS tricks: Parallax images, sticky footers and more. These are moderately advanced techniques. 
• 5 Lightweight Gmail Tools That Solve a Few Pesky Problems. Rename headers might be the most useful item here.
• 15 New Features We've Already Spotted in the Android Q Beta. Lots of incremental tweaks.

Sizzle Rather Than Steak from the OED

Every year the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) adds new words to its lexicon. The OED folks have created an interactive graphic that explains the process using 'OMG' as an example.

I'm not sure who they are aiming this at, but if they're trying to be trendy, they got it wrong. It's a classic example of sizzle rather than steak, smoke and mirrors signifying nothing.

There's about 20 sentences of text in the presentation, which I could normally have read in less than a minute, but it took about five minutes to scroll through the screens. The font is hard to read and on some screens was virtually unreadable because of the background graphic or screen colour. The animations were flashy but added nothing to the content.

Basically, it was a total waste of time. I expected better from the creators of the English language's primary resource.

If you want to see what words have been added to the OED over the past several years, you can go here.

The World Wide Web Turns 30

March 12 was the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. That was when Tim Berners-Lee submitted his first paper describing a networked hypertext system for sharing documentation at CERN. It took a few years for it to become reality. I first saw the Web in action sometime in late 1992, using a text-mode browser called Lynx, but it wasn't until Mosaic (the predecessor of Firefox) came out in 1993 that I saw it's potential. It was like a lightbulb going off; it was obvious that it was a game changer.

Thirty years on, Tim Berners-Lee writes about the future of the Web. He starts out by describing some of the problems that the Web is facing, and what can be done to solve them.

Governments must translate laws and regulations for the digital age. They must ensure markets remain competitive, innovative and open. And they have a responsibility to protect people’s rights and freedoms online. We need open web champions within government — civil servants and elected officials who will take action when private sector interests threaten the public good and who will stand up to protect the open web.

Companies must do more to ensure their pursuit of short-term profit is not at the expense of human rights, democracy, scientific fact or public safety. Platforms and products must be designed with privacy, diversity and security in mind. This year, we’ve seen a number of tech employees stand up and demand better business practices. We need to encourage that spirit.

And most important of all, citizens must hold companies and governments accountable for the commitments they make, and demand that both respect the web as a global community with citizens at its heart. If we don’t elect politicians who defend a free and open web, if we don’t do our part to foster constructive healthy conversations online, if we continue to click consent without demanding our data rights be respected, we walk away from our responsibility to put these issues on the priority agenda of our governments.

When Science Fiction Comes True

The idea that science fiction can predict the future is common but almost every science fiction writer will tell you that it's nonsense. For example, there were dozens, if not hundreds of stories about the first moon landing, but no one predicted it would be televised.

Still, SF does get some things write, even if it paints the future with broad brush strokes, as this New York Times article points out.

The writer Harry Turtledove tweeted a link to that article with an exclamatory comment: “Science fiction does not predict the future. Not. Not! [expletive] NOT! It uses the imagined future to comment on the real present.” Margaret Atwood often claims something similar, echoing Gibson’s protestations. Despite manifest evidence of her acute forecasts — the rise of the Christian right, in vitro meat, sexbots modeled on real people, apocalyptic climate change, live aquatic jewelry — she says: “I’m not a prophet. Honest, I’m not a prophet. If I were a prophet I would have cleaned up on the stock market years ago. … They’re saying things about ‘Oryx and Crake’ and ‘MaddAddam’ are all coming true. But that’s based on things people were already working on when I was writing the books. It’s just that I was looking for those things and other people weren’t.” Maybe science fiction’s future is actually just a lens on the present.

I should note that SF author, Charlie Stross, has repeated described how events and technology are changing so fast that his stories are being outpaced by the real world. 

I'm throwing in the towel. I probably will write another near-future Scottish police procedural by and by, but it won't be a sequel to the first two except in the loosest sense. The science fictional universe of "Halting State" and "Rule 34" is teetering on the edge of turning into reality. Meanwhile, the financial crisis of 2007 forced me back to the drawing board for "Rule 34"; the Snowden revelations have systematically trashed all my ideas for the third book.

NASA May Not Use SLS for First Orion Lunar Mission

In an abrupt change of plans, NASA's administrator said that NASA is considering using commercial heavy-lift launchers for the Orion capsule's first circumlunar mission. The original plan was to launch on the new (and untested) SLS (Space Launch System, but it's behind schedule, way over budget, and likely won't be ready for the target 2020 launch date of the Orion mission.

Both Spaceflight Now and Ars Technica have articles with details on how the new mission would work, requiring two launches of either the Delta IV Heavy or the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launchers. From Spaceflight Now:

There are no rockets currently in service capable of sending an Orion spacecraft and its service module around the moon, but Bridenstine said a pair of commercial launches could be substituted for one SLS flight. A fully-fueled Orion spacecraft is estimated to weigh around 57,000 pounds (25,848 kilograms), near the maximum lift capability of an SLS Block 1 rocket — the heavy-lift launcher’s initial configuration — on a lunar trajectory.

Bridenstine announced NASA’s new look at commercial launch alternatives to the Space Launch System after committee chairman Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Mississippi, raised concerns about new SLS delays.

“Here’s what we can do, potentially — again, we’re starting the process now — we could use two heavy-lift rockets to put the Orion crew capsule and the European service module in orbit around the Earth, launch a second heavy-lift rocket to put an upper stage in orbit around the Earth, and then dock those two together to throw around the moon the Orion crew capsule with the European service module,” Bridenstine said. “I want to be clear. We do not have, right now, an ability to dock the Orion crew capsule with anything in orbit. So between now and June of 2020, we would have to make that a reality.”

This is good news. The SLS is horribly expensive. Estimates of the cost range from 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion dollars per launch. By contrast, SpaceX charges 163 million dollars for a Falcon Heavy launch, while a Detta IV Heavy launch is just over 350 million dollars. So either option would be between one-eighth to one-half of the cost of an SLS launch. And the SLS has yet to fly.

NASA expects to make a decision on this relatively quickly, possibly within the next couple of weeks. I think they will go with the Delta IV Heavy option, because it's a known quantity and has a successful launch record, while the Falcon Heavy has only flow once.

Why Neil Gaiman Likes Toronto

The second season of American Gods is now starting on Amazon Prime. In this article, Neil Gaiman, describes why Toronto, where the show is shot, is a special place for him. I was at the World Science Fiction Convention, Torcon 3, in 2003 and saw a huge lineup of people some blocks away from the convention centre. It was for a Neil Gaiman signing. He's popular here.

“It feels very appropriate that we’re making American Gods here,” Gaiman says at an east-end studio. “Toronto was the first place where I had a mega signing. It was the first place I was recognized on the street. It was the first place I had An Evening with Neil Gaiman event.”

He pauses, then continues: “I remember coming here in 1991 and there was a line of people around the block at Silver Snail.

“I had dinner plans for 9 p.m. and I got back to the hotel at 1 a.m. I missed dinner and I was having chocolate chip cookies in the bath and thinking, ‘This is the glamorous life.’”

There's more in the article about American Gods and his thoughts on the possibility of a Sandman TV series.

An aside here. If you've been reading this blog, you know I'm a science fiction fan. Not so much a fantasy fan. But I've read American Gods and loved it. The TV series is very good, but the book is better.

Cats Are Getting Bigger, Should We Worry?

I make no secret of the fact that I like cats; we live at the sufferance of the two feline masters of our lives, McGee and CJ. Our third cat, JiJi, is now living with our daughter. Our first cat, Luna, made it to seventeen before she died three years ago.

If you've ever owned a cat (or more accurately, lived with a cat, because you don't really own them), you know that they are distinct little people, and they're very smart and sometimes quite alien. If they had opposable thumbs, the human race might be in trouble (ditto for raccoons; dogs are too nice to be a worry).

Now the Smithsonian reports that domestic cats are getting bigger, unlike the trend in most domesticated animals.

Perhaps the most surprising find detailed in a new Danish Journal of Archaeology study is the domesticated feline’s growth over time. Although most animals tend to shrink as they become domesticated (the average dog, for example, is around 25 percent smaller than its wild relative, the gray wolf), Julie Bitz-Thorsen of the Arctic University of Norway and Anne Birgitte Gotfredsen of the University of Copenhagen recorded a 16 percent jump in size between Viking Age and contemporary cats.

The reasons for this hefty increase remain unclear, but according to the study, plausible explanations include greater food availability—in the form of either human waste or a higher rate of deliberate feedings—and the shift in culture from treating cats as “fur providing and rodent catching” animals to “the present-day pet invited indoor, fed and cared for.”

It's probably nothing to worry about; after all, we are much bigger than most of our pets. But what if they're getting smarter?This is something I've wondered when I watch our youngest cat, CJ, trying to figure out how to open our bedroom door (he has figured out the door to my son'ts room, which has a defective latch). 

Off the Richter Scale

If you asked most people to name the biggest natural disaster that's likely to strike the United States, the responses would probably include the Big One (a quake along the San Andreas Fault), a land falling category 5 hurricane, or the Yellowstone supervolcano erupting. All of these are bad and the last is highly unlikely.

The worst disaster would be a megathrust earthquke along the Cascadia subduction zone in the Pacific Northwest. This would be a quake similar to the one that devastated northern Japan in 2011 or the Indonesian Boxing Day quake in 2004. Not only would there be a quake of 9.0 or greater on the Richter scale, but it would be followed by a massive tsunami that would cause devastation both along the North American coast and across the Pacific.

City Journal has published an article that looks at both the consequences of such a quake and what can be done and is being done to mitigate its effects. If you live in the Pacific Northwest, you need to read this, now.

When it happens, the earth will slip by roughly 60 feet along a rupture zone more than 600 miles long, unzipping the sea floor at roughly two miles per second and convulsing the West Coast for as long as five minutes. Bridges will fall. Wet soil will liquefy. Brick and masonry buildings will shatter. Skyscrapers built before modern earthquake codes may topple. City centers in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver will be buried beneath glass shards and rubble. Everything underground—water mains, natural gas pipes—will be crushed. Land that has bulged upward from tectonic pressure for the past 300 or so years will collapse to baseline, permanently altering the topography and plunging low-lying coastal areas into the ocean. The inland Cascade Mountains will knock the knees out from under the earthquake, but numerous landslides will occur, especially on roads built with a “cut and fill” method, where flat slabs get cut out of rock walls and smoothed over with soft fill. Just a few minutes after the quake finally stops, the second hammer blow will strike. Tsunami waves up to 50 feet high will rip the face of the coastal region clean off the map, pulverizing everything and killing everyone in their path.

Pray that it doesn't happen during the Trump administration.

Slow Cooker Curried Beef

I tried a new recipe tonight from a slow cooker cookbook called Slow Cooker Favorites that we picked up on sale at Costco — curried beef. Basically it's stewing beef, salt, pepper, flour, curry powder, paprika, onions, garlic, onion powder, basil, sugar, and tomato sauce. To make it more stew-like, I added some small potatoes and mushrooms, but skipped the carrots and celery in deference to family members' food sensitivities. I cooked it on low for eight hours, per the cookbook instructions, which might have been a little much as some of the meat was beginning to dry out. Seven hours would probably be better.

It was delicious and the beef was melt-in-your-mouth tender. I think the next time, I will brown the beef first, although the recipe didn't call for that, and it's fine without it.

If you look online, there are many variations of this. Some use coconut milk instead of tomato sauce; others use more spices for extra heat.

How Italy's Techno-Utopians Came to Power

Italy's political scene has always been complex and strange, but it hasn't gotten much stranger than the last decade, when the Five Star party came to power. A loose coalition of techno-utopians and radical leftists, it soon found itself co-opted by the alt-right and having to make choices that betrayed its radical beginnings.

Wired has a long article about how Five Star came to power and what happened after it did. It's a remarkable read and a sobering look at how easy it is to disrupt social and political norms using modern technology and social media.

ON MARCH 4, 2018, Five Star participated in its second national election. This time, Nugnes, the architect turned parliamentarian, watched the coverage on TV alongside activists and representatives in a hotel in central Naples. Unlike in 2013, everyone knew Five Star would do well. But the final results were nevertheless stunning—with 33 percent of the vote, and after just five years in parliament, Five Star had become the largest party in Italy. While her colleagues celebrated, Nugnes worried. “I just saw right away that the overall picture was very disquieting,” she says. Right-wing parties—particularly Lega—had performed well too, off the back of a fiercely anti-­immigrant campaign.

Nugnes watched uneasily as Five Star tried to form a government, seeming to go against the movement’s original “no alliances” principle. From the start, it was clear that Di Maio—who had criticized the previous, centrist government for presiding over a corrupt, NGO-run “sea taxi” service for migrants to Italy—favored a deal with Lega. Nugnes, who had made a name during the previous five years as an outspoken senator, wrote a scathing post on Facebook about the prospect of an alliance with “he who wants to end immigration,” referring to Lega’s leader, Salvini. “I wouldn’t get into the same elevator,” she went on, “or breathe the same air.”

The Future of Canadian Science

SF writer, Robert J. Sawyer, spoke at a workshop hosted by the Canada Foundation for Innovation in Ottawa in November 2018. The article has both the audio of the talk and a transcript if you want to give it a quick browse. He's optimistic about the state of Canadian science.

I think we’re at the best we’ve ever been, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to be the best we’ll ever be, in terms of Canadian science research. I think we’ve got real momentum moving forward, here. We had a Nobel Laureate in physics in 2018. We had a Nobel Laureate in physics three years prior to that. I suspect we’re going to see more and more Nobel medals coming to Canada in the sciences, and we’re also going to see more and more generations in Canadian science students staying here because there’s nowhere better to go.

Because the best place in the world to do fundamental particle research is SNOLAB. The best place in the world to do all the variety of things that you can do with a synchrotron is the Canadian Light Source. The best place in the world to do Arctic research is aboard our icebreaker Amundsen. We have, not only now the best trained minds, but also the best facilities. And what we’re going

I think he's right, and he could have cited more. We have the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo for theoretical physics and cosmology, new radio telescopes in British Columbia, the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies which is a world leader in cube sats, and the MARS Discovery District in Toronto for world-leading medical and biochemical research. And a government that thinks that science and scientists matter.

How Chinese Novelists Are Reimagining Science Fiction

Most SF readers probably didn't give much thought about Chinese science fiction. Then Liu Cixin's novel, The Three Body Problem, won the Hugo Award in 2015, and people started paying attention. The New Statesman has published a long article that looks at Chinese science fiction and how it is both similar and different to SF being published in the West.

The stories being written in China feel significant because they are emerging from a real dystopia that becomes stranger and more futuristic by the day. In “Project Dove”, for example, drones that look and fly like birds are used for surveillance. But Project Dove is not fiction – it is an actual government project. The robots are so convincing that real pigeons flock with them.

In another example, factory workers, train drivers and soldiers are made to wear devices on their heads that scan their brainwaves for signs of anger, depression or loss of concentration. The devices are monitored by artificial intelligence programmes that can recommend workers be retrained or reassigned if their emotions are not consistent with productivity goals. Such devices have been in widespread use in China for almost five years.

But for Ken Liu, the Chinese-American author who translated Waste Tide, The Three-Body Problem and the stories in Invisible Planets, it is too simplistic to see Chinese sci-fi writers as imaginative dissidents. “We do the works a disservice,” he writes, “when we focus on geopolitics alone.” Chen Quifan agrees. “There are universal feelings in science fiction, across all different cultural backgrounds,” he says. Chen has readers on several continents who email him to say that his stories about anxiety, social divisions and pollution are as resonant in the American Midwest as they are in Guangdong.

Free and Legal Movie Sites

If you don't want to pay the crazy prices that the cable companies charge for their movie channels, you can try to find movies online. I came across an article that lists the 18 best free movie sites. Note that the sites listed in the article are legal, either because they get their revenue by inserting commercials into the movies or because they are just aggregators that list and filter content from across the web. 

Canadian viewers may find that not all of these sites are available to them. For example, Crackle comes up with a message saying that it isn't available in my region and the Roku Channel will let you set up an account but again isn't available here. Viewster seems to be down for a rebuild. Still, across the sites listed in the article you should be able to find something worthwhile.

I'll add one site to this list: The Knowledge Network, which is a produced by British Columbia's public TV channel and contains many wonderful documentaries, as well as some dramas and movies. It's free but requires registration.

Featured Links - March 10, 2019

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

• A new option for treatment-resistant depression, using a drug that's a variant of ketamine.
• George R.R. Martin has 'mixed feelings' about Game of Thrones coming to an end. I do hope he lives long enough to finish the books.
• Organize Your Gmail Inbox Fast by Right-Clicking. Some useful tips on using Gmail's newly expanded context menu.
• Why CAPTCHAs Are Getting So Difficult. It's getting harder to prove you're human.
• Russia’s passive-aggressive reaction to SpaceX may mask a deeper truth. How will Russia compete with more advanced technology?
• What Might Happen if Yellowstone Were Really Heading Towards an Eruption? And no, it's not going to erupt any time in the near future.

Breaking Up Big Tech

Senator (and Democratic presidential candidate) Elizabeth Warren has announced a plan to break up big tech companies (those with revenues of more than $25 billion), to stimulate competition. It would also roll back anti-competitive mergers, such as Facebook buying WhatsApp and Amazon buying Whole Foods.

It's an ambitious plan that I like but doubt has much chance of happening unless there's a complete regime change in the United States.

Weak antitrust enforcement has led to a dramatic reduction in competition and innovation in the tech sector. Venture capitalists are now hesitant to fund new startups to compete with these big tech companies because it’s so easy for the big companies to either snap up growing competitors or drive them out of business. The number of tech startups has slumped, there are fewer high-growth young firms typical of the tech industry, and first financing rounds for tech startups have declined 22% since 2012.

With fewer competitors entering the market, the big tech companies do not have to compete as aggressively in key areas like protecting our privacy. And some of these companies have grown so powerful that they can bully cities and states into showering them with massive taxpayer handouts in exchange for doing business, and can act — in the words of Mark Zuckerberg — “more like a government than a traditional company.”

We must ensure that today’s tech giants do not crowd out potential competitors, smother the next generation of great tech companies, and wield so much power that they can undermine our democracy.

TechDirt has a rather jaundiced view of the plan:

First of all, I should note that just recently lots of people were totally up in arms over Donald Trump supposedly trying to interfere with the DOJ's analysis of the AT&T / Time Warner merger. And I'm curious if those people feel the same way about a potential President Warren announcing ahead of time -- without any actual investigation by a supposedly independent DOJ -- that it's okay to declare that they should be broken up? It certainly seems like the same form of bogus interference, even if for different reasons. The DOJ is supposed to be an independent agency for a reason. We shouldn't cheer when Donald Trump ignores that and we shouldn't cheer when any other President or Presidential candidate does it either.

Second, while I might find myself much more supportive of a more aggressive DOJ that blocks future acquisitions by these companies, I'm not sure I see how the specifically listed divestiture plans would... do much of anything (with the one possible exception of Google/Doubleclick, which I'll get to). While I'm sure that Amazon, Facebook and Google would grumble about breaking off all of the others, for the most part, all of the listed divestitures involve companies that were mostly left alone and run as separate subsidiaries, which don't necessarily have much to do with any of those companies' core business. Sure, there might be some revenue or growth hits in spinning those off, but it doesn't really change their fundamental ways of doing business. Amazon loses Zappos? Meh. It'll still sell lots of shoes and maybe ramp up its efforts there in a way that ends up making Zappos tough to sustain by itself. Google loses Waze? Well, it already has Google Maps which probably has more users anyway.

The Endless Fact Check

I've been following Daniel Dale, the current Washington bureau chief from the Toronto Star since his days covering the Rob Ford crazy town era in Toronto. Now he's known for his fact checking of Donald Trump, who may be the biggest liar in American political history. I don't know how he does it – a week of doing that would drive me insane.

Slate's The Gist podcast interviewed Dale this week. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

Donald Trump speaks many untruths every day, and someone has to track them all. Somehow that task has fallen to a Canadian. The Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale is here to tell us what counts as a lie, why details matter, and how neither the left nor the right seem satisfied with his work.

The Trauma Floor

Most of us probably don't think much about what goes on behind the scenes at Facebook. What keeps our news feeds filling up with violent images, porn, or fake news? This article is about the moderators who screen content that users have flagged for review, the toll it takes on them, and how Facebook treats them.

Collectively, the employees described a workplace that is perpetually teetering on the brink of chaos. It is an environment where workers cope by telling dark jokes about committing suicide, then smoke weed during breaks to numb their emotions. It’s a place where employees can be fired for making just a few errors a week — and where those who remain live in fear of the former colleagues who return seeking vengeance.

A Study on How Developers Use API Documentation

Documenting an API (application programming interface) is hard, and there aren't very many technical writers who can do it well. In my last job before joining the TSX, I had to document a Java API. To do it, I had to learn enough Java that I could follow the code and ended up taking an introductory programming course. I didn't learn enough about Java to write any useful code, but I did at least gain some cred with our developers.

ACM's SIGDOC has published a study on how developers use API documention based on a series of tests with developers working to solve problems based on an API. It looks like a solid piece of research and the conclusions that they've come up with make sense. If you're working on API documentation, you will want to read this.

This article contributes the results of an empirical study that examined how developers use documentation when getting into a new API. Our work is driven by the hypothesis that problems with API documentation may in part reflect usability problems, and in particular, that content and structure of the documentation sometimes do not match the expectations and work habits of developers. Consequently, for API documentation to be an effective aid in learning an API, we need to know which general strategies software developers adopt when solving programming tasks, which information they need and which information resources they turn to.

To address these issues, we conducted a study using the observation method.1 We asked developers to solve a series of programming tasks with an API that was unfamiliar to them. We then analyzed which strategies they adopted to solve the tasks, which parts of the API documentation they used, and which design features of the API documentation led to problems. Based on our findings, we propose several design guidelines that can help to make API documentation more effective.

I think the documentation we produced was good, but the company didn't stay in business long enough to really test that theory. We did, at least, follow several of the guidelines mentioned in the article, which was due in a large part to listening to the recommendations of our development team.

Apollo 11, the Movie

I've been a space nerd ever since childhood. I grew up on the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs, and watched the first moon landing on my parent's black-and-white TV.  Yesterday, I saw the new documentary, Apollo 11, in an IMAX theatre and was transported back to that hot July 50 years ago.

The movie was assembled by director Todd Douglas Miller (Dinosaur 13) and archivist Dan Rooney from previously unseen footage, much of it in large-format 65 mm. (Cinemascope), shot by an MGM film crew for a documentary that was never made. Along with that came several thousand hours of audio of the crew and mission controllers. Rolling Stone has some details on the genesis of the movie.

Apollo 11 originated with the filmmaker’s interest in a project about the last Apollo mission, 17. In search of better-quality footage than had been publicly seen, he reached out to NASA and the National Archives in spring 2017. Some 11 clips were used in a little-seen 1972 doc, Moonwalk One, but most of it — 279 reels, much of it large-format 65 mm — sat in their original metal canisters at a National Archives storage facility in College Park. Thanks to climate-controlled rooms, the footage appeared to be in good condition, but discerning what was on those government-shot reels was a challenge. “We were initially confused about some of the markings,” says Dan Rooney, head archivist at the National Archives. “Some would just say ‘Apollo 11.’ There were limited instances of another word on the can, like ‘Apollo 11 recovery.’ They were not well described.” At NASA offices in Houston, Miller also unearthed nearly 20,000 hours of audio from Mission Control and inside the capsule, capturing both the sounds of the technicians and the astronauts as they toiled away, gossiped and worked through problems. Now they just had to overcome the hurdle of actually digitizing footage that only existed on old reels.

The footage is spectacular. There are breathtaking shots of the crowds on the beach waiting for the launch (can you spot Isacc Asimove?), the seemingly endless rows of mission controllers at their consoles, and the launch itself (mixed loud enough to rattle  the screws in the auditorium). Armstrong's first steps on the moon aren't shown from the usual low-quality video feed but from an alternate angle, filmed by Aldrin from the LEM.

Miller makes good use of the audio, overlaying the voices of the controllers and crew and news coverage, some of it narrated by the late (and much missed) Walter Cronkite. There are no contemporary interviews or voice overs - it's all from the original footage. It's a great example of cinema-verité film making.

I've seen many documentaries about the space program and the Apollo missions. This may be the best. If you can't catch it at an IMAX theatre (it's in a limited run that ends today), see it at the biggest theatre you can find.

LearningDITA Live 2019 Webinars

The LearningDITA Live 2019 web conference was last week but if you missed the sessions, they've recorded them and put them up on a YouTube channel for viewing.

There's a good mix of sessions covering topics ranging from introductory to advanced. I'm particularly interested in the sesion on Lightweight DITA, which I wish had come out about five years ago. It's the only part of DITA that I think has any practical application in my new stage of life. And DITA from Markdown is just cool.

Space Nuclear Power

NASA recently ended the mission of the Opportunity Mars rover after it lost power because of a massive dust storm. That wouldn't have happened if the rover had been powered by a nuclear reactor, or even a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG).

Although NASA abandoned plans for nuclear rockets in the 1960s, they have launched planetary probes powered by an RTG. Now they're looking at launching real reactors that could power a rocket or be used in a lunar or Martian base.

This is long overdue. Fission reactors can be built large enough to not only generate electricity, which is Kilopower’s role, but also to drive an efficient rocket engine. For propulsion, the nuclear reaction can supply heat to generate electricity for ion engines or, at higher power levels, blast tons of high-speed propellant out a rocket nozzle. A high-thrust nuclear thermal rocket can haul bigger payloads for the same propellant load or lower the trip times for missions to the moon or Mars. The U.S. flew an electricity-generating, 600-watt fission reactor, SNAP-10A, in 1965. The Soviet Union launched at least 30 small reactors into low Earth orbit to provide electricity for military radar reconnaissance satellites. But these low Earth orbit satellites suffered from failures that dumped a pair of their reactor cores in the ocean and in 1978 scattered another’s radioactive debris across Canada. NASA will have to design future reactors to survive launch accidents intact and begin operations only once they are well away from Earth.

Game of Thrones Season 8 Teaser

Entertainment Weekly has a big feature article on the forthcoming Season 8 of Game of Thrones. If you're a Game of Thrones fan, you'll want to read this. It is spoiler free, BTW. It sounds like the battle for Winterfell will be absolutely epic.

“What we have asked the production team and crew to do this year truly has never been done in television or in a movie,” says co-executive producer Bryan Cogman. “This final face-off between the Army of the Dead and the army of the living is completely unprecedented and relentless and a mixture of genres even within the battle. There are sequences built within sequences built within sequences. David and Dan [wrote] an amazing puzzle and Miguel came in and took it apart and put it together again. It’s been exhausting but I think it will blow everybody away.”

“Exhausting” is quite the understatement. The episode required 11 weeks of grueling night shoots. Imagine up to 750 people working all night long for nearly three months in the middle of open rural countryside: The temperatures are freezing in the low 30s; they’re laboring in icy rain and piercing wind, thick, ankle-deep mud; reeking horse manure and choking smoke. The stars of Game of Thrones require some coaxing to get candid about their experience because nobody wants to sound like they’re whinging (as The Hound would say). But if you spend even a brief time on set you realize staging the battle was unprecedentedly brutal.

And just in time for this post, here's the final trailer for Season 8.

Watch Out For USB 3.2 Hype

You probably know that there are several USB standards, the latest of which has been known as USB 3.1. Now there's USB 3.2, but it's a bit more complicated than just a single speedier extension of the specification.

At Mobile World Congress last week, the USB Implementers Forum decided to change up the wild and crazy world of USB by renaming what’s now known as “USB 3.2"—the latest and speediest standard expected to hit PCs later this year—as well as USB 3.0 and USB 3.1.

And to make things “easy,” everything is just going to be named USB 3.2. No, we aren’t making this up. There are (or, more accurately, will be) three versions of “USB 3.2.”

• USB 3.2 Gen 1, which most call USB 3.0, transferring data at up to 5Gb per second.
• USB 3.2 Gen 2, which we’ve been calling USB 3.1, transferring data at up to 10Gb per second.
• USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, which media outlets have previously called USB “3.2,” transferring data at up to 20Gb per second.

And it's even more complicated than that, because it depends on the type of cable you're using. Read the article for the gory details. 

David Onley's Long Road to Accessibility

This winter has been a disaster for anyone with mobility problems. Sidewalks aren't getting plowed or shovelled and even if they are, there's likely a mound of snow and ice blocking them at intersections. Ontario hasn't done a great job in mandating accessiblity to start with (one of the few social policy areas in which the U.S. leads Canada) and this winter has made already difficult journeys into impossibilities for many.

Recently, the Toronto Star published a feature on David Onley, the former lieutenant-governor of Ontario. Onley, a popular TV reporter before being appointed to the vice-regal position, has been battling the effects of polio all his life. He's now completed a report on accessibility in Ontario and submitted it to the government.

He is using it to describe what he sees at ground level — and getting a hearing from the powers above. Appointed last year by Queen’s Park to conduct a formal review of accessibility in Ontario, he has just submitted his findings to the Progressive Conservative government:

ere is still a stunning disconnect for the disabled, and a growing gap in how the able-bodied perceive the reality of inaccessibility.

Onley wouldn’t tip his hand about the details of his report, which will be shared with the public later. But he didn’t disguise his disappointment.

“We still have a very inaccessible society, a built environment that is very inaccessible,” he told me. “The people who believe it’s accessible are members of the able-bodied population.”

This mirrors my personal experience. Years ago, one of my closest friends was Bob Venn, who had spina bifida and was confined to a wheel chair. He could drive, using a hand control, and almost got his pilot's license. I spent a lot of time pushing him around and got a graduate course in just how difficult a few steps could make life for someone in a wheelchair. Bob is gone now, but I've never forgotten that lesson. We need to do better.

Listen to Amanda Palmer's New Album

NPR has a First Listen feature on Amanda Palmer's new album, There Will Be No Intermission. I don't know how much longer this will be up at the link above, but it'll be released on March 8th.

 I hear echoes of singers like Laura Nyro, Alanis Morissette, Sinead O'Connor, and Regina Spektor, though I don't know if those are influencers, as much as her life and her fans, as the NPR blurb points out. It's wonderful.

The result can be exhausting, but in the best way. There Will Be No Intermission is barely a minute old when Palmer unleashes a Bill Hicks-inspired statement called "The Ride," which fills its 10 minutes with a thoughtful accumulation of details chronicling lives lived messily, purposefully, forcefully. But she also directs her focus toward angels who've guided her — most sweetly when "Judy Blume" rains praise on the titular author, whose writings helped Palmer (and millions of others) through the stormy awfulness of adolescence. And she injects her songs with compassionate messages directly to fans and friends, from a loved one about to have an abortion ("Voicemail for Jill") to listeners seeking to share her resilience in the face of criticism ("Bigger on the Inside").

Five Little Steps

Visiting a friend's apartment last night, I noticed something that made me upset. He lives in an older building in a good location (though pretty far from downtown), that's clean and well maintained with reasonable rents, at least by Toronto standards.

But there's a problem. Five little steps.

Two are on the walkway into the building.

Then there are three in the lobby.

They make the building completely inaccessible to anyone who has to use a power chair or scooter. It would be trivial to replace the outside steps with a ramp. There's about 50 feet from the sidewalk to the front of the building so the sidewalk could be gently sloped. The lobby would be trickier, but I've seen it done in other buildings. So why haven't they? It would probably have cost less than the fancy new entry access system in the lobby.

I guess people just don't care, until they end up in a wheelchair, and then it's too late.