Off for the Canada Day Weekend

Monday is Canada Day, a big holiday up here in the temporarily warm and green Great White North. So I am taking the weekend off from blogging to indulge in traditional long weekend activities like drinking beer, eating barbecued food, watching the grass grow in my back yard, and maybe listening to some free live music. See you Tuesday.

Featured Links - June 28, 2019

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

• How Historians Can Now See Invisible Text On Ancient Manuscripts.
• Seeing Is Believing: The Fact Checker's Guide to manipulated video. From the Washington Post. 
• Gym bunnies and junkyard dogs: new words in the June 2019 update. I'm surprised at how long it takes some words to make it into the OED.
• New Video Shows How Humanity Could Spread Throughout the Galaxy. It would only take a few million years.
• The Sham of Sharehold Capitalism. It's not working. 
• Amazon Canada launches 'Prime Reading', giving members free unlimited access to books. The article title isn't quite accurate - it should be 'some books'. 

In Praise of the NFB

I in my post about streaming services yesterday, I mentioned some free video streaming services. But I missed one – Canada's National Film Board. There you'll find thousands of short films, documentaries, and feature films produced by Canadian film makers going back more than half a century.

Chris Morgan of The Outline likes it too.

The experience of binging the NFB can be vertiginous. One film will leapfrog me to another, often within my interest of Canadian social and political history, of which the NFB has plenty to offer. Indeed, it is filled with documentaries that have matched and even surpassed the fly-on-the-wall style of Primary and The War Room. Flora: Scenes from a Leadership Convention (1977) follows Canada’s first female foreign minister Flora MacDonald as she and her staff try (and fail) to make her the first female Leader of the Progressive Conservative Party and therefore the opposition. Sophie Wollock’s Newspaper (1979) is a short history of The Suburban, a sort of Breitbart for anglophone Quebec. Acadia Acadia?!? (1971) depicts student radicals of New Brunswick’s francophone minority as they demonstrate for language recognition. My personal favorite is Donald Brittain’s The Champions, a three-part saga released between 1978 and 1986 covering the rise and rivalry of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Quebec Premier and separatist icon René Lévesque. It combines talking heads, archival footage, droll narration, and a clear arc from brilliant promise to disappointment and corruption.

Facebook Is Getting Formatting

Facebook has some new tricks. I just did a post in a group I'm in and saw a pilcrow (backwards paragraph mark) beside my text. I hovered over it and got a submenu that offered H1, H2, bullet and numbered list, and quote formatting. Selecting text gives a bold and italic menu.

It only worked in the group, not in my newsfeed. Perhaps that will be rolling out later.

Back to the Bobbsey Twins?

For those of you too young to catch the reference in the title, the Bobbsey Twins were a series of novels for young readers popular when I was growing up. They were popular with librarians because they promoted the highly sanitized family values of the 1940s and 50s, not so popular with young readers who found them deadly dull.

If this article from the Guardian is correct, we may be moving back in that direction. The culture wars have hit the young adult publishing field.

These are just the latest battles in a war that seems to be escalating over who should control the way that people from marginalised communities appear in YA fiction. In August 2016, the Mexican-American author EE Charlton-Trujillo’s verse novel When We Was Fierce was delayed after several bloggers criticised its attempt to capture the voice of a black teenager. It has still not been published, and is not mentioned on Charlton-Trujillo’s website. In the months that followed, three speculative fiction novels, The Black Witch by Laurie Forest, American Heart by Laura Moriarty and The Continent by Keira Drake, attracted protests for their allegedly racist content. Forest published regardless, and with great success, despite a campaign of one-star reviews and emails to her publisher. Moriarty published, too, although Kirkus magazine, which had defended The Black Witch, downgraded and revised its review of American Heart, because it said the article “fell short of meeting our standards for clarity and sensitivity”. Drake, however, was convinced by her critics, 455 of whom signed a petition demanding that The Continent, “a racist garbage fire” according to one fellow author, be delayed to allow “additional editorial focus”. A substantially revised version appeared in March 2018.

The New Service Wars

My credit card expiry date rolled over recently, so I got sent a new card with a new expiry date. As a consequence, I had to go through my banking records and track down all my recurring subscriptions so I could update my payment information. I ended up having to create a spreadsheet for the task.

I was surprised at how much it added up to. And it will probably only get worse, as Sam Rutherford points out in this Gizmodo article. 

The beauty for companies is that once you sign you up, they’ve got you. It’s one thing not to buy another product from a specific company, but it’s another thing entirely to cancel one of your countless subscriptions, delete your account (and maybe migrate your data), and switch to another platform (assuming that’s even an option). After all, it’s just $10 or $15 a month, right? That’s nothing.

This evolution has spawned an endless variety of monthly subscription services looking to sell you crates filled with your favorite nerdy swag, foreign confections from around the world, dental hygiene supplies, and basically anything else you can imagine. It’s a subscription service feeding frenzy out there. But it’s the tech companies that have perfected this model, as they have transformed things that once seemed like everyday pleasures into services that feel more like a tax on your paycheck. It sucks. When you combine these services with monthly bills for important things like housing, utilities, and internet, suddenly, a big chunk of the disposable income you think you have vanishes into the ether at the beginning of the month.

In my case, I don't have any music subscriptions (unless you count the music part of Amazon Prime), but I have three online newspaper accounts (which will become two at some point), three online data storage accounts (again, which will be whittled down two), and three online video subscriptions (again, probably down to two as I think Netflix will be going).

So it's worth tracking all of these in detail. You might be surprised at just how much you're spending.

As an alternative to paid services, you could check out some of the networks listed in this article from Wired. If your library has it, Kanopy is especially good, with much of the Criterion Collection available.

Meet Daniel Dale

I've been following the career of reporter, Daniel Dale, since his days covering the late mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford. He's spent the last few years as the Toronto Star's Washington correspondent, where he started fact checking Donald Trump and recently turned what started out as a sideline into a full-time position fact checking Trump for CNN.

I can't imagine how he does it, but this profile in the LA Times gives some insight into how and why.

When you started this in September 2016, during the presidential race, you could have had no idea what this would end up involving, the tracking of every single lie that the man who would become President Trump would tell.

No. I did not know. At first I did not think I was going to do every single claim or every single lie. I thought I would just do it occasionally, on days where it seemed like he was being especially dishonest.

And then Michael Moore, of all people, the filmmaker, tweeted maybe five days into me doing it, saying something like, “Every single day, this Canadian journalist shames the U.S. media by pointing out every lie Trump tells.”

And I got thousands of followers from that, and I seriously thought, “Oh gosh, I have to do it every day now to satisfy these people.”

And then I thought I would probably be done with Trump, because I thought he was going to lose the election. Then, one of my first thoughts sitting there at Hillary Clinton’s so-called victory party in November 2016, election night, was, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to have to keep doing it for years now.”

I have been trying to cut down on the amount of political reporting that I read (especially from the US and the UK) to preserve my sanity, but I will keep following Daniel Dale for as long as he keeps writing. 

15 LinkedIn Profile Tips

LinkedIn has become the primary social network for professional job hunting. So it's important to have a profile that reflects your skills and sells what you can contribute to a company.

I've been putting off reorganizing my profile (it's on my to-do list, honest), but when I do, I'll be using some of the tips in this article as a guideline. I recently attended a seminar on using LinkedIn as part of my retirement package and almost all of the advice I was given is covered in more detail in the article, and more.

I've read several articles recently on tweaking LinkedIn, and this is the best and most detailed one I've found.

Featured Links - June 23, 2019

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

• 2019 Sunburst Awards Longlist, for excellence in Canadian speculative fiction. 
• A new AI tool from Adobe can detect Photoshopped faces. I'm sure we will be seeing more tools like this. 
• Rocket Lab: The small firm that launched the 3D-printed space revolution. They get better performance than with conventional machining and it's cheaper.
• An Ambitious Search for Aliens Came Up Short–so Astrobiologists Are Thinking Bigger.
• Rebuilding the Solar System with CSS. It is remarkable what you can do now with CSS.
• Everything I Learned While Getting Kicked out of America's Biggest Anti-Vaccine Conference. Think of it as evolution in action. 
• Game Changing Direct Drive Fusion Propulsion Progress. It's not the Expanse's Epstein drive, but it's better than anything we have now.

Sugarmegs

I like listenning to recordings of live music. Over the years, I've listenned to a substantial portion of the Grateful Dead's concerts, along with other jam bands like Phish. It's probably because I don't get to go out to any near the number of live concerts that I'd like to attend.

Way back in the beginning days of the Internet, I used to frequent a site called Sugarmegs.org which collected live concert recordings. At some point, I think they went down and I stopped visiting. But a chance remark by a Facebook friend led me back there and to my great pleasure I found they're still up and running. 

Sugarmegs isn't the prettiest site around; in fact it's layout is loud and pretty dated by modern standards. But what it lacks in visual flair, it makes up in content. You can browse recent uploads, an alphabetical list, or search for your favourite band. In the last few days, I've found several recordings of the Jefferson Airplane that I had not heard before, a wonderful performance from Fairport Convention at the end of May, a Richard Thompson show from his last tour, and a couple of recent Phil Lesh and Friends shows with Jorma Kaukonen. 

These aren't always the highest quality recordings. Many of the shows are of taper-friendly bands and these will generally be quite listenable. Stealth recordings and older shows, not so much. But there's enough there that you're bound to find something good. 

Say No to the Lunar Gateway

For reasons I cannot begin to understand (other than the usual political ones), NASA has come up with a plan to return to the moon by building what they call the Lunar Gateway, a space station in orbit around the moon. Herewith, some articles showing why it's a bad idea and waste of money and time.

• Lunar Gateway or Moon Direct?
• The Lunar Gateway Is a Bad Idea

Some months ago, I read an article that had a comparison of the delta-v (the change in velocity) required for NASA's Lunar Gateway (which is planned to orbit in one of the Lagrange points between the Earth and the Moon, and a standard lunar orbit. The Gateway required a higher delta-v, hence more fuel. Unfortunately, my Google skills have failed me, and I can't find the article. 

Some Links About Security

I've come across a few articles recently about Internet security that I thought were worth sharing.

• Tricky Scam Plants Phishing Links In Your Google Calendar
• Fake Office 365/OneDrive file deletion alerts, for Windows users. 
• Cautionary tale: Hijackers hijack phone number, break into man's Google account, try to steal $25K. This is truly terrifying. 

Stay safe. It's a nasty world out there.

Minivac 601 Replica

The Minivac 601 was an educational toy designed to teach digitial circuit design. It was developed by information science pioneer, Claude Shannon.

Now, courtesy of Michael Gardi (who happens to be my awesomely talent cousin), you can build your own replica.

The Instructable presented here is for a full size replica of that Minivac 601 from 1961. I have tried to remain as true to the original as possible given the technologies and resources available to me. I don't have a "vintage" unit so this replica has been constructed based on photos and from the original manuals that were available online. I have included these manuals in PDF format as part of this project. I brought these files to a local copy center and had them printed as the spiral bound booklets you can see above. I'm really happy with the results.

ClickHelp - A New To Me Help Authoring Tool

I'm familiar with the industry-leading help authoring tools like RoboHelp and Flare, but I had not heard of ClickHelp until seeing a blog post from Tom Johnson.

ClickHelp is a browser-based tool that can create documentation or online help in a variety of formats. Source content is stored on a documentation portal hosted by ClickHelp and you can also publish to their portal.

From a quick scan of their online documentation (in ClickHelp format), it appears to have most of the features that you'd expect for a modern authoring tool (reusable content, flexible import and export of several formats), conditional text, and so on).

Of course, the devil is in the details, and without experimenting with the free trial (which I would love to do but don't have the time), I can't say much more than it looks interesting. For more, read Tom's review and browse the docs online.

Accessibility Improvements In Windows 10 Build 1903

Microsoft is making some significant improvements to the accessibility features in Windows 10, Build 1903 which is rolling out to users now.

From my point of view, the biggest improvement is with the mouse cursor. As well as being able to change size, you will be able to have a coloured pointer. I generally use dark mode as much as possible, and being able to have a bright yellow cursor would be good. 

What I would really like is to have a guide circle around the pointer in a light contrasting colour. I use an application called CursorAttention to do this, bu it has issues with keeping the circle and the pointer in sync with some applications.

They've also made improvements to the Magnifier and Narrator applications. 

These are all good reasons to look forward to the new build. And I'm glad to see Microsoft paying attention to accessibility. 

Android Security: 5 Ways to Keep Your Android Phone Secure

Image from pixabay.com

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

Mobile security is generally considered to be a boring subject, but neglect it and you might pay the price of data loss, being hacked, and worst of all, e-banking theft.

Huawei has been booted off the Android OS platform because of alleged spying activities through unauthorized ‘backdoors’. Elsewhere, other data breaches, such as phishing attacks happen every day, threatening the privacy and security of Android users.

With Android devices making up the bulk of smartphones in the market today, it becomes very important to ensure the safety of your device at all times – both online and offline.

Here are several ways to beef up your basic defenses.

1 Embrace 2FA for Google accounts

Android devices have been fashioned so that everything in them is tied back to the Google accounts they are registered with. This means anyone looking to go after your data would be very interested in hacking your Google account.

Thus, it is not surprising that the first place we are starting from is the Google account.

Enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) on your accounts means that someone with only your password doesn’t get access to the account if they don’t have the other factor. Many people prefer to receive text messages (which is the most convenient but can also be the least secure) as compared to the Google Titan Bundle Key or the Authenticator app.

You can activate 2FA on your account by following this step-by-step guide.

2 Using a Strong Password

Android phones come with two form of biometric authentication. The phone comes with a fingerprint scanner or bundles a facial unlocking system.

While those are great, they could make you pass setting a strong password.

What you might not have considered is that anyone with access to your phone does not need your biometric details when they can simply crack your password. Their chances of doing that increase with how weak the password is in the first place – emphasizing why you should make it something that is not easy to guess or crack.

3 Disable App ‘Sideloading’

Google made the Play Store available so they could regulate all the apps that go onto your phone. By doing so, they take on the task of ensuring those apps are safe, secure, and do not contain any malicious code that could hurt you.

To keep the platform transparent, though, Google also kept a feature that allows you to install apps from unknown sources.

If you have enabled this feature in the past, now is the time turn it off again.

Called ‘sideloading’, installing apps from sources other than the Play Store means you don’t have any proof of the app being what it says it is. In other words, the app could contain malicious code to spy on you, steal your information, alter your device’s settings, and so much more.

If the app is not on the Play Store, you might be better off without it.

4 Enable ‘Find My Device’

It is never a good feeling when you lose your phone. You have put a lot of time and energy into setting up that phone to meet your tastes and your needs. Besides that, you have also put a lot of files and information on that phone that makes it worth more than what you paid at the store.

With ‘Find My Device’, you might have a shot at locating the unit. If that doesn’t work, though, this feature could be the only saving grace in ensuring your data doesn’t get into the wrong hands.

Google has made it possible to remotely wipe all files on the unit when you lose it. This is important for those who keep sensitive information on their devices. Because you can get most of your files from backups (we’re assuming you have backups enabled on your device), it won’t really be a loss.

Just get another device and resume your Android lifestyle as if nothing happened.

5 Get a VPN

While keeping yourself safe offline, keeping your devices safe while connected to the internet is also as important.

There are different measures by which hackers and unauthorized individuals might get access to your Android phone. Some of these tactics are, but not limited to, browser fingerprinting, man-in-the-middle attacks, rogue Wi-Fi network attacks, and so much more.

There are also companies that will track, monitor, and record your data for either personal use or sale to other companies/bodies. The Facebook and Cambridge Analytica scandal is a prime example.

Fortunately, you can use an Android VPN to encrypt your internet traffic. Coming with a slew of servers which will obfuscate your data anytime you are online, you can always get out of the ever-monitoring eyes of whoever is looking in on your internet traffic.

Wrap Up

Securing your phone doesn’t have to be an expensive or time-consuming project. With the simple tips above, you can keep your Android device safe from the prying eyes of anyone who shouldn’t be looking at your data in the first place.

Featured Links - June 16, 2019

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

• Physicists See a Quantum Leap, Halt It, and Reverse It. A significant piece of research into quantum physics. 
• The Most Beautiful Theorem in Mathematics: Euler's Identity. Some beautiful and elegant math for you.
• Why Are Ebooks More Expensive Than Paperbacks? This is something I've often wondered.
• Why Boeing May Never Recover From Its 737 Debacle. It put profit over safety. 
• Native American Women Have Are Being Sold into the Sex Trade on Ships Along Lake Superior. This has been going along for years; hopefully now it can be stopped.
• Unbuilt Tokyo: 'depthscrapers' and a million-person pyramid. More from the Guardian's wonderful Unbuilt Cities series.
• A Few Fuel for Satellites Is So Safe It Won't Blow Up Humans. Say good riddance to hydrazine.

We're Toast 8

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Climate Change and Environment

• Worlds rivers 'awash with dangerous levels of antibiotics'. This is helping to spread antibiotic resistance.
• For the Midwest, Epic Flooding Is the Face of Climate Change. America's breadbasket is underwater.
• New Report Suggests ‘High Likelihood of Human Civilization Coming to an End’ Starting in 2050. I think we will see major distruptions sooner than that.
• If Climate Goals Aren’t Met, Extreme Heat Will Kill Thousands in U.S. Cities, even northern ones.
• Groundbreaking Report Gives Us a Glimpse of the US Military’s Gigantic Carbon Footprint

Politics

• The Growing Danger of Trump's Trade War with China. Global recession is not the worst outcome.
• They Know That America Isn't Great. So they want to rig the census.
• How America could become a dictatorship in 10 years, according to Jared Diamond.
• Trump's Misguided Ban on Federal Fetal-Tissue Research Will Only Hurt Science. 

Technology

• China Telecom Swallows Huge Amount of European Mobile Traffic For Over Two Hours. Is it live or is it China Telecom?
• 'I wash all my food like crazy': scientists voice concern about nanoparticles
• Satellite Constellations Like SpaceX's Starlink Could Cause Major Problems, Astronomy Group Warns. There goes the night sky.

That Was Exciting!

Astounding: A Review

When I was a teenager, the science fiction magazines, especially Analog Science Fact Science Fiction, were my gateway drug into the worlds of science fiction. I was lucky that there was a used bookstore in the Sault that sold back issues and I was able to grab dozens of copies of Analog and its earlier incarnation of Astounding for a nickel apiece. Through them, I discovered Poul Anderson, Mack Reynolds, Anne McCaffery, Randall Garrett, Christopher Anvil, and many other authors.

For about twenty years, Astounding was the leading magazine in the SF field. Under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr. it published stories by Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, L. Ron Hubbard, Isaac Asimov, and A. E. Van Vogt, in an era that became known as the golden age of science fiction.

Astounding:  John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee is the history of that period and a biography of Campbell and his three major authors.

Although there have been biographies and critical studies of the authors before this, it's the first major biography of Campbell, who was arguably the most influential editor in the history of science fiction.

As an editor, he wanted good writing, accurate science, believable characters, and stories that logically accounted for multiple variables: "The future doesn't happen one at a time."

Campbell was controversial. His political views put him well to the right of the political spectrum, something that probably didn't help his career during the 1950s and 60s when SF made a distinct swing to the left. He was also seriously into what we'd now call fringe ideas and championed dianetics with L. Ron Hubbard, ESP and parapsychology, and the Dean drive (a purported reactionless drive that didn't work).

I am well read in both science fiction and historical and critical work aobut it, and there were things in this book that I had never heard about, for example, Campbell's correspondence with Gene Roddenberry and his influence on the original Star Trek series.

The book isn't just about Campbell; as the subtitle indicates it's also about Heinlein, Asimov, and Hubbard, and especially about Campbell's influence on their careers, which was extensive. Unfortunately, it's clear that while Campbell was instrumental in developing their careers, he couldn't grow with them and maintain the relationship that he'd established.

I would have liked to see more details on the history and operation of the magazine itself and the role of the magazines in fostering the development of the genre. It's there, but I wanted more. Still, I enjoyed this book immensely, and I recommend it highly if you have any interest in classic science ficiton.

More On the Cost of Running a Tesla

Here's an interesting tweet about the cost of running a Tesla. It cost the poster $129.09 (US dollars) to run his Tesla for 5,000 miles. Converting to metric and Canadian dollars, that's about $172.00 Canadian dollars for 8,047 kilometers or 2.1 cents a kilometer at 13 cents US per KWh. I think our rates would be comparable.

Comparing it to gas costs, our car uses about 9 litres per 100 km. At a cost of $1.20 per litre, that's $10.80 per 100 km. or 10.8 cents a kilomtre, about five times more expensive than for the Tesla.

And that doesn't include maintenance costs, which were essentially zero for the Tesla. Our first oil change, at 6,000 km. was about $50. That adds up, fast.

Google Docs Gets Compare Feature

Users of Google's G Suite platform will finally get a compare feature in Google Docs.

The newly added feature lets you compare two documents directly from the web interface. To do so, you need to open the first document in Docs, then click on Tools -> Compare Documents and fetch the version to compare it against. This will create a new file highlighting changes as suggested edits. To make it easier to recognize, you'll be asked who the differences should be attributed to, which will make the changes appear as if they were made by a particular user directly in Docs.

That's a second major feature added to Docs recently; the other being the addition of section breaks. It's nice to see Docs finally getting some (much needed) love.

Introductory Sentence Diagramming

I remember learning sentence diagramming when I was in grade school and hating it. Later, when I was in university, I found it was occasionally useful in trying to parse and understand some complex academic prose, but I never used it much after that.

It can be a useful skill for editors, and this article is a good introduction to the technique.

Now it’s important to understand that there are ten sentences patterns in the English language.

Yes, you heard that right.

THERE ARE ONLY TEN WAYS TO SAY SOMETHING IN THE ENTIRE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!

I’m sorry for the caps, I’m just always shocked by that fact.

There are only ten kinds of sentences that we can speak daily, and although it feels like we should have more (as English is usually thought of as complex), this one fact about the language is it can be simplified into just ten sentences.

Just ten sentence patterns!

There are four different kinds of verbs, and all ten sentence patterns use at least one kind of verb.

Grateful Dead Guide

I have been a Deadhead all of my adult life and was lucky enough to see them eight times. Trust me, there was nothing like a Grateful Dead concert. Over the years, I've read many of the books and articles published about them, but somehow I've managed to miss the Grateful Dead Guide.

It's a collection of essays and articles about the early years (mostly before 1975) of the Grateful Dead. It's a large site with many detailed articles about the history of the Dead. And I do mean detailed. Here's a more or less random sample.

• Bear at the Board. A history of Owsley's taping of the Dead.
• The Allmans and the Dead. They played together at more than just Watkins Glenn.
• The Dead in the Studio 1966
• Garcia's Film Soundtracks
• The Songs the Warlocks Played. The Warlocks were the first incarnation of the Grateful Dead.

How San Francisco Broke America's Heart

San Francisco has always been a special place for me. I grew up a fan of the city's psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead and the Jefferson Airplane and the countercultural movement that was centred there in the late 1960s. I finally got to visit the city in 2006, but by then it had lost much of its lustre.

Now the city seems to be falling victim to the same sort of pressures that have been bedeviling Toronto over the last decade: crazy high real estate prices, high commercial and residential rents, and income inequality driven by the tech boom.

What residents resent now is the shift to one industry, a monoculture.

“What I wanted was this flow of humanity and culture,” says editor and former nonprofit executive Julie Levak-Madding, who manages the VanishingSF page on Facebook, documenting the “hyper-gentrification” of her city. “It’s so devastating to a huge amount of the population.”

To many inhabitants, San Francisco has become unrecognizable in a decade, as though it had gone on a cosmetic surgery bender.

“I can’t tell you the number of friends who tell me how much they hate San Francisco,” says former city supervisor Jane Kim. Which is something given that she ran for mayor in the 2018 special election. (Kim came in third.) “They say it’s too homogenous.”

Too homogeneous. Too expensive. Too tech. Too millennial. Too white. Too elite. Too bro.

Toronto, by comparison, despite facing many of the same economic pressures has embraced its diversity and is now one of the most multicultural cities in the world. If you want to see what its future looks like, see pictures of crowds celebrating Toronto's Raptors as they seek an NBA championship.

Putting Ebola in Perspective

If you follow news of disease outbreaks, you'll know about the outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So far there have been more than 2,000 cases and more than 1,000 people have died.

Now the outbreak has infected the political discourse in the United States, as right-wing "news" sources are claiming that there have been cases on the southern US border with Mexico. This is, of course, completely untrue, as Crawford Killian points out. Ebolanoia has returned.

As if this kind of mendacity weren't bad enough, I'm reading Mark Honigsbaum's excellent new book The Pandemic Century, whose subtitle is "One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris." One chapter describes an outbreak of plague that hit the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles in 1924. The response of the politicians was cover-up, and the media obliged. When the news eventually got out, it also triggered alarms about imaginary hordes of diseased Mexicans sneaking across the border to infect upstanding Anglo-Saxons. 

Ninety-five God-damn years later, InfoWars and Gateway Pundit have driven spikes through the heart of any belief we might still have in progress. Yes, we've advanced scientifically and technologically and medically in countless way, but we've also dragged millions of people with us who have never abandoned their medieval view of the world ("Black plague? Burn the Jews!"). Whether they're in hostile North Kivu villages, or sitting behind keyboards anywhere in the world, they—not Ebola—are the biggest threat to global health we now face.

Featured Links - June 9, 2019

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

• Art of the Title, a site devoted to movie and TV title sequences.
• The Last Soviet Citizen. The cosmonaut who was left behind in space.
• Would You Eat a Lab-Grown Duck Breast? Inside the Alternate Meat Industry. I wonder what vegans will make of this.
• The Collapsing Crime Rates of the ’90s Might Have Been Driven by Cellphones. Only one of many effects they've had.
• Top 10 end-of-the-world novels – from Ballard to Pratchett. It's a good list but they should have included Greg Bear's The Forge of God.
• Water Worlds Could Have Mind-Bogglingly Deep Oceans, New Models Suggest. This could be the basis for some really interesting science fiction. 
• How to Organize Your Password Manager in 7 Steps. If you use a password manager, you should read this.
• How to Import and Manage Multiple Email Accounts in Gmail. I've been thinking about doing this. 

An Appreciation of Terry Pratchett

The recent broadcast of the TV adaptation of Good Omens has drawn a lot of attention to its authors, Neil Gaiman and Sir Terry Pratchett. Gaiman has been getting the spotlight, because unfortunately Pratchett died four years ago. In this Syfy article, Brian Silliman throws the spotlight back on Pratchett, who deserves it.

Personally, I had no experience with the work of Sir Terry Pratchett until I read Good Omens many years ago. After falling in love with it, I rectified that. Good Omens was my Pratchett gateway book, and after downing many of his novels, I realized there was so very much more to not only the man's work but the man himself.

Pratchett's biggest contribution to literature has been a large series of books that all take place in a realm called Discworld. It's called that because the enormous land is on a giant disc, placed on top of four huge elephants, and they stand on the back of the great turtle A'Tuin, who floats through space.

When I heard about this book series upon completion of Good Omens, I knew I had to dive in immediately. How had I never heard of these books? If I'd lived in Britain, I would have — the series routinely appeared at the top of bestseller lists until J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter came flying in to bump them down a little bit. In America, they are nowhere near as prevalent. It's a shame, because they are extraordinary.

I will admit to not having read much Pratchett. I have not read Good Omens (something I will rectify soon) and only got part way through The Color of Magic before putting it aside. I had a mistaken idea that the Discworld books were light, frothy fantasy and missed all of the depth and subtlety of Pratchett's work - something that I only came to appreciate when reading about him after his death. But if the TV adaptation of Good Omens is any indication, I have some reading to catch up on.

Designing an Acceible App

App designers could learn a lot from Moovit, a leading transit app whose designers have focused on improving accessibility features. By doing so, they've made it more usable for all users.

For users with hand motor disabilities, Moovit redesigned menus and buttons for easier use with one hand, especially on larger phones. For people who are colorblind and use color-coded transit systems, such as “the green line,” Moovit includes the name of the line, instead of just a colored dot or symbol, a space-saving practice in many maps.

The company also ensures no broken or overlapped text when a user needs to magnify the font. It partnered with Be My Eyes, an app that connects sighted volunteers with people who are blind or low-vision. It’s studying how to use a phone’s vibration and flashlight to serve users with hearing loss. And it continually works with people with a disability to improve or customize the app.

I wish more companies would do this. I use a large system font on my phone and many apps have problems with that. And some (like the RB Digital app for reading magazines), have issues with dark themes (button labels are illegible). 

Major Disease Outbreak Killing Pigs

An outbreak of Asian Swine Flu is spreading through China and south-east Asia, forcing farmers to kill millions of pigs.

The implications of the outbreak are already being felt beyond Asia. Global pork prices have risen by almost 40%, and long term it is likely to lead to more pork imports from Europe and America to meet demand, which will also push up global meat prices. Market analyst Rabobank said global pork supplies could fall by 8%.

I thought bacon prices were high when we were shopping yesterday; I wonder if it's already having an effect here. 

Google Docs Gets Sections

In May, Google started rolling out an update for Google Docs that adds section breaks to its formatting choices. You'll be able to change margins between sections. Reading their update doc, I haven't been able to figure out if it will allow a change from portrait to landscape orientation.

Insert section breaks and view section breaks in your doc

You can now insert a next page or continuous section break in Google Docs by going to Insert > Break. From here, you can select next or continuous. Note both types of breaks will start at the place of your cursor location.

To easily view where section breaks are located in your document, you can use the new show section breaks tool by going to View > Show section breaks. When Show selection breaks is enabled, you’ll see a blue dotted line where each section break is located.

Adjust margins per section

It’s now possible to use the ruler to adjust the left and right margins by section. Previously, it was only possible to adjust the margins for the entire document.

These updates are for G Suite customers. If you are using the free version of Google Docs, you'll probably have to wait a while for it to roll out.

More Testing for the EmDrive

Over the last few years, there has been some interest in something called the EmDrive – what could, if it is for real, be a true reactionless drive that could at minimum be used as a thruster on satellites and space probes. It's been tested in several countries, and some experiments seem to generate a small (micro-Newton level) thrust, but given the difficulties of measurement, the results have been inconclusive.

Now a team of German engineers has conducted a new series of tests and should be announcing their results soon.

The resolution lies in designing a tool that can measure these minuscule amounts of thrust. So a team of physicists at Germany’s Technische Universität Dresden set out to create a device that would fill this need. Led by physicist Martin Tajmar, the SpaceDrive project aims to create an instrument so sensitive and immune to interference that it would put an end to the debate once and for all. In October, Tajmar and his team presented their second set of experimental EmDrive measurements at the International Astronautical Congress, and their results will be published in Acta Astronautica this August. Based on the results of these experiments, Tajmar says a resolution to the EmDrive saga may only be a few months away.

I will be waiting with bated breath to see the results.

The Beauties Hidden in Pi

In The Beauties Hidden In Pi, mathematician Al Kayaspor gives us a tour of some of the complexities and elegance of this most interesting number. You don't need an advanced degree in math to understand the article or appreciate the beauty of π.

It was finally the weekend! After my long mathematics presentation, I came home to watch my favorite tv show, Person of Interest, to de-stress. Surprisingly, the episode was about the most famous mathematical constant, pi (π) which is equal to the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159. Mr. Finch (the main character) was acting as a substitute teacher and wrote on the chalkboard 3.1415926535. Then he asked the students, “What does this mean?”. I answered the question in my mind, thinking, “If I have a bicycle tire with a diameter of 1, then one full revolution of the bicycle tire would travel distance pi.” However, in the movie, nobody answered. Then Mr. Finch answered the question himself, saying

Pi, the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter — 3.1415926535 — is just the beginning. It keeps going forever without ever repeating, which means that contained within this string of decimals is every other number; your birth date, the combination to your locker, your social security number, etc. It’s all in there somewhere. And if you convert these decimals into letters you would have every word that ever existed in every possible combination; the first syllable you spoke as a baby, the name of your latest crush, your entire life story from beginning to end, and everything we ever say or do. All of the world’s infinite possibilities rest within this one simple circle. Now what will you do with that information; what it’s good for? Well, that would be up to you…

Although that scene was actually inaccurate, I loved it. This scene is beautiful because most teachers in the world struggle to be as good and as interesting of a teacher as Mr. Finch is here. His knowledge about the subject expands the discussion beyond the textbooks and keeps the students focused throughout the lecture.

A Few Articles About Good Omens

I watched Good Omens over the weekend. For those of you who aren't SF fans, or have had your head in the sand and have missed Amazon's massive publicity campaign, Good Omens is a six-part TV show based on the comic fantasy novel by Neil Gaiman and the late Terry Pratchett.  I enjoyed it more than any TV show I've seen in quite some time and can't recommend it highly enough.

Here are some articles about the show. If you're spoiler averse, you may not want to read them until after you've seen it.

• Neil Gaiman and Cast Reveal the Biggest Good Omens Changes Made for the TV Series
• ‘Good Omens’: Building the Bromance Between David Tennant and Michael Sheen with a Long Cold Open
• Adaptation or Not, Good Omens Is a Damned Heavenly Show.

Avoiding an Online Job Scam

On Ars Technica, Lee H. Goldberg, an unemployed writer and editor, writes about how he almost got caught in an online job hiring scam. Fortunately, he realized that something was amiss before the scammers could do him any damage. But it's obvious that someone more desperate or less careful than he was could easily have become a victim.

This is how it started:

Like most successful cons, this one involved gaining the willing consent of its victim through some combination of greed, fear, or desperation. Having been laid off several months earlier, I fell into the latter category and was ripe for the picking. When I lost the unfulfilling but steady editorial job I'd held down for the past few years, I was confident that my strong credentials and deep collection of contacts I'd made over the years would help me land a better gig within a month or two.

To my surprise, the job hunting skills I'd honed over my 20+ year career were outdated and almost useless at penetrating the layers of digital screening agents that stood between me and a potential employer. I found myself in unfamiliar territory, struggling to learn the complex Kabuki dance that today's job seekers must master in order to slip past Corporate HR's silicon sentinels and gain an audience with a carbon-based life form.

Even engaging a resume coach to help me finetune my credentials failed to break the deafening silence until an email arrived from ZipRecruiter, one of several job hunting sites I was registered with. The recruiter was responding to the application I had submitted a day earlier for a remote-work tech writer position at a biotech firm.

The article is worth reading if you're involved in the online job market and there are links to resources that offer advice on avoiding scams. It's certainly opened my eyes. 

The Levels of Edit

I first encountered the concept of levels of edit early in my technical  writing career when I came across a copy of the JPL Style Manual. The section on levels of edit has been republished as a PDF file). I found it quite helpful in organizing my work and explaining what I was doing to managers and SMEs.

Since then, there have been externsions of the original concept. The best explanation I've seen so far is the article The Levels of Edit, by Odile Sullivan-Tarazi.

Conceptions of how many “levels” of edit there are, and just what each comprises, differ across editing environments.

In general, the levels move from broader to successively finer concerns —

On up to the finer-grained, more superficial issues (hyphenation, spelling, surface-level grammar) often related to the look on the page . . .

To characteristics of the writing itself (tone, style, clarity, cohesion, coherence, parallelism, etc.) . . .

To issues of structure and organization (both inherent logic and as applicable to context and audience) . . .

The larger, foundational issues of the piece (concept, tone, purpose, audience, conceived content) . . .

She goes on to explain each level in detail as well as describing how the levels relate to each other. It's a useful article for anyone pursuing an editing career or for technical writers faced with editing as part of their workflow.

House Style and the Zombie Apocalypse

Despite the title, I don't think a house style guide will help you much in the zombie apocalypse. But this article makes a good case that it may make your job a lot easier.

Specifying a preference for one of several equally valid options helps establish your editorial authority and helps your editorial team work together. Nobody has to make the initial decision and communicate that to the rest of the team. You reap the most benefits if you use the same editors over and over—they’ll quickly adapt to your house style and use it automatically for your projects.

When I started at the TSX (now TMX Group), our marketing department had a reasonably complete style guide. That went by the wayside after corporate mergers and reorganizations and platform changes on our intranet. I used parts of it to create my own style guide, but never had the politcal clout to get it established as a departmental standard, much less a corporate one. That was unfortunate, and made my life more difficult on several occasions when I had to edit documents from other departments or had to incorporate their content in mine.

2019 Aurora Award Finalists Announced

The finalists for the 2019 Aurora Awards for the best English-language Canadian science fiction and fantasy have been announced. The winners will be announced at Can-Con 2019 in Ottawa, October 18-20.

• Armed in Her Fashion by Kate Heartfield, ChiZine Publications
• Graveyard Mind by Chadwick Ginther, ChiZine Publications
• One of Us by Craig DiLouie, Orbit
• The Quantum Magician by Derek Künsken, Solaris Books and Analog Science Fiction and Fact
• They Promised Me The Gun Wasn’t Loaded by James Alan Gardner, Tor
• Witchmark by C. L. Polk, Tor.com Publications

It's worth noting that several of the Aurora finalists have also been nominated for the Nebula and Hugo awards.

Restoring Vision in Blind Mice

Scientists have discovered a technique that apparently restores a significant degree of vision in mice that were blind. 

It was surprisingly simple. University of California, Berkeley, scientists inserted a gene for a green-light receptor into the eyes of blind mice and, a month later, they were navigating around obstacles as easily as mice with no vision problems. They were able to see motion, brightness changes over a thousandfold range and fine detail on an iPad sufficient to distinguish letters.

Being very nearsighted, I'm quite aware of the possibility of developing macular degeneration or other serious eye problems. This gives me some hope that there will be a cure, or at least a mitigation, within the next few years.

Say What You Mean

Accuracy is important when writing documentation, but it's even more important in scientific papers. This article provides advice on making sure wording in scientific papers is as accurate as possible. It should also be directly relevant to most technical writers.

Here's an example from the article.

‘These’ and ‘this’ can be vague. Make sure it is clear what these pronouns refer to. Take a look at this example:

The cytoskeleton consists of microtubules, actin filaments, and intermediate filaments. In neurons, these are called neurofilaments.

Here, it is not clear whether ‘these’ refers to all or just one component of the cytoskeleton. In fact, neurofilaments are intermediate filaments and do not contain microtubules or actin. To be perfectly clear, the sentence should read:

The cytoskeleton consists of microtubules, actin filaments, and intermediate filaments. In neurons, intermediate filaments are called neurofilaments.

Featured Links - June 1,2019

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

• ‘Wow, What Is That?’ Navy Pilots Report Unexplained Flying Objects. Truly weird.
• Inside China's Massive Surveillance Operation. The Orwellian future of surveillance is happening now in China.
• The Diceware Passphrase Home Page. A simple method for generating easy to remember strong passwords.
• 10 Common Software Architectural Patterns in a nutshell. If you doucment large software systems, you need to understand these patterns.
• 11 things my Android phone does way better than your iPhone. What he says. 
• Mystery of deadly Indonesian tsunami cracked using social media videos. They used videos to show the tsunami was caused by an undersea landslide.
• The Curious History of Crap–From Space Junk to Actual Poop. How dealing with our waste has shaped human civilization.