Why Are More Pedestrian and Cyclist Deaths Happening at Night?

It's a good question. Over the last few years, I've been noticing a decline in the light levels in some areas, particularly downtown Toronto. I don't know what city planners and engineers are using for lighting standards these days, but the light levels on downtown streets are not what they used to be. (And it's not just my opinion; I've mentioned this to several people who have agreed with me.)

This article from CityLabs attempts to explain why more pedestrians are dying at night. Among the reasons are over-reliance on car safety systems like collision avoidance, more large vehicles like pickup trucks and SUVs, and badly designed roads (or more accurately, roads designed for the convenience of drivers, not pedestrians and cyclists).

And wouldn't you know it; Halloween is the worst night of the year for pedestrian fatalities.

So be careful out there tonight, whether you're driving, walking, or cycling.

Android App of the Week: DecibelX

I haven't done any reviews of Android apps in a while. That's mostly because I haven't been downloading many; I have about 200 installed on my phone already. Still, every once in a while I come across something worthwhile.

Decibel X is one of those worthwhile apps. It's a noise meter and a very nicely designed one. I haven't gone through all of the options yet, and probably never will, as there are quite a few of them, some of which would be of interest only to professional audio engineers.

A few of the key features:

• Trusted accuracy: the app is carefully tested and calibrated for most devices. The precision is matching with real SPL devices
• Frequency weighting filters: ITU-R 468, A, B, C, Z
• Spectrum analyzer: FFT and BAR graphs to display real time FFT. Those are very useful for frequency analysis and musical tests. Real time predominant frequency is also displayed.
• Powerful, smart history data management:
• Recording data can be saved into a list of history records for future access and analysis
• Each record can be exported as hi-res PNG graph or CSV text via sharing services

This should be handy for measuring the volume along our street, which seems to be a haven for testosterone crazed drivers with big engines and small brains.

There is also an IOS version for those of you on the Apple spectrum.

The Peripheral Is On Sale Today

The Kindle edition of William Gibson's latest SF novel, The Peripheral, is on sale today at Amazon for $1.99 (amazon.ca price). I read this book when it first came out and I will probably read it again before his next novel, Agency, is published in January. So far, it's the book of the decade for me.

The Killing Star: A Review

Back in the mid 1990s I read a science fiction novel called The Killing Star by George Zebrowski and Charles Pellegrino. It's not giving anything away to say that it starts with almost all life on Earth more advanced than a microbe being wiped out by a rain of relitavistic projectiles launched by a supremely paranoid alien race. It starts out grim and it gets grimmer.

But along the way, the authors manage to create one of the most fascinating stories that I've read in a long time, with AIs, advanced genetic engineering bringing ancient religious figures to life, recreating the Titanic in VR, and the Fermi Paradox and why aliens should wipe out the human race. All this in a book that was written more than 25 years ago but has hardly dated at all and reads like it could have been written last year.

The Killing Star has gained some notoriety among SETI researchers; I've seen it mentioned in several articles in the last few years. It even has its own Wikipedia page. That made me want to reread it to see if my memory of the book would hold up, but it's out of print and I no longer have my paperback copy. It is available as an audiobook, which is how I ended up rereading it. I don't know why it's not in print as an ebook when so much crappier junk gets republished in that format.

I can't recommend The Killing Star highly enough. It's not a perfect book, in a couple of places it descents into goshwow space opera territory, but it has a higher idea density that almost anything current I can think of. (Vernor Vinge and Karl Schroeder come to mind here). And the ideas are beautifully worked out through the story line and main characters. If it were being published for the first time today, it would be a solid contender for the major SF awards.

Comparing easyDITA to Microsoft Word

When I was at the TSX, I spent quite a bit of time looking at DITA and trying to figure out if it made sense to make a real push for implementing it. Given that I was mostly a lone writer for my time there, I finally decided that it wasn't going to work for us, mostly due the support that I'd need in setting up a DITA toolchain. However, since then the tools have gotten smarter and easier to use and cheaper and it's now possible for a small team, or even a lone writer, to implement DITA without much third-party or internal support.

TechWhirl has published an article in which they directly compare Microsoft Word, still one of the most common writing tools, to easyDITA, a cloud-based DITA solution. They set up a small project and compared the effort and the benefits running each tool in parallel. The results were interesting:

• Most organizations fail to fully utilize the functionality available within Word.
• Nonetheless, accomplishing many of the tasks of organizing content into reusable “units” is far easier in easyDITA, which can save the typical organization enormous amounts of time and resources down the line.
• easyDITA does require training or coaching support, specifically around the tasks of creating document maps and organizing content elements. Upfront investment in training and understanding structured authoring pays off over the long-term.
• Separating the organization/structuring of content from the process of creating it is much harder to do than most organizations realize, but a system such as easyDITA allows them to create the processes that match their needs.

The last point is, I think, especially important. When considering DITA, I analysed the information in my largest project, broke the topics down into the three basic information types (concept, task, and reference), and identified information that could be reused. My final judgement was that there wasn't enough content reuse to justify the effort of moving to DITA, but mapping my topics to the DITA information types helped me reorganize my deliverables into a more logical and user-friendly structure. Had I had access to easyDITA at the time, I might have been able to make it work. 

Some Canadian SF Awards

The winners of two sets of awards for Canadian science fiction and fantasy were announced recently.

The winners of the 2019 Sunburst Awards for Excellence in Canadian Literature of the Fantastic are:

• Adult Fiction: Plum Rains, Andromeda Romano-Lax (Penguin Random House Canada)
• Young Adult Fiction: Tess of the Road, Rachel Hartman (Penguin Random House Canada)
• Short Story: “The Glow-in-the-Dark Girls”, Senaa Ahmad (Strange Horizons 1/15/18)

The winners of the 2019 Aurora Awards are:

• Best Novel: Armed in Her Fashion by Kate Heartfield, ChiZine Publications
• Best Young Adult Novel: Cross Fire: An Exo Novel by Fonda Lee, Scholastic Press
• Best Short Fiction: “Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach” by Kelly Robson, Tor.com Publications

For a complete list of Aurora awards, see File 770.

I am still waiting for Robert Charles Wilson, Guy Gavriel Kay, or William Gibson to be nominated for or win the major Canadian literary award, the Giller Prize. I suppose I should include Margaret Atwood too; she will likely win next year for The Testaments, and she has a good shot at the Nobel. 

Technical Communication Links - October 28, 2019

Some links related to technical communication.

• The Many Ways to Link Up Shapes and Images with HTML and CSS. Image maps are so 20th century.
• Dita For Publishers. A project creating tools and DITA specializations meeting the specific needs of publishers. 
• DITA Plugin Utilities. This is a collection of utilities intended to make it easier to create customized DITA grammars:
• Rewrite: a new language helper for Microsoft Word. I doubt many writers will use this. 
• Matching documentation review practices to company culture, with specific examples from Amazon.
• Perpetual Licenses for FrameMaker and TCS. Adobe is changing its licensing policies (again). 
• Learn CSS in this 6-hour free video course. If you like learning from videos, this is for you. 

Feratured Links - October 27, 2019

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

• SpaceX says Starship Mk1 will test 'skydiver' landing before the end of 2019. That will be something to see, but I wouldn't bet on the first try being successful. 
• The Internet Is for Everyone, Right? Not With a Screen Reader. Making the internet more accessible makes it better for everyone.
• “Warren Zevon’s ‘Werewolves of London’” by James Joyce, by Anthony  Sams. Since Halloween is coming up this week. 
• Researchers found evidence of Twitter troll activity in the last week of the federal election. Shocked, I am. Just shocked.
• NASA sets launch date for Starliner mission to space station. It's set for December 17 and will be uncrewed.
• MapLab: High on Lidar. More on how archaeologists are using lidar to discover ancient ruins that would be otherwise hidden from view.

We're Toast 14

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

• Wiped out: America's love of luxury toilet paper is destroying Canadian forests.  Major brands’ refusal to use sustainable materials is having a devastating impact on forests and climate, new report says.
• Hurricane Dorian Was Worthy of a Category 6 Rating. The residents of the Bahamas would probably agree.
• How Big Agriculture Is Preventing Farmers From Combattimg Climate Change. Small farms couild help save the planet, if we let them.
• New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms. We need to be better prepared for huge solar storms. 
• How Chaos Will Unfold if Trump Opens the Tongass to Logging. This is America's Amazon and Trump wants to kill it.
• Climate Change Will Cost Us Even More Than We Think. Economists greatly underestimate the price tag on harsher weather and higher seas. Why is that?

Politics

• Political Scenarios for Climate Disaster. "There is no realistic scenario for addressing climate change that does not involve a comprehensive reorganization of human societies in the reasonably near future."
• The silenced: meet the climate whistleblowers muzzled by Trump. Six whistleblowers and ex-government scientists describe how the Trump administration made them bury climate science – and why they won’t stay quiet.

Technology

• 'Almost No One Out There Thinks That Isaac Asimov's Three Laws Could Work For Truly Intelligent AI'. I think most SF wirters figured that out years ago.
• The Russian hackers who hit the 2016 election have been very busy since. They just don't give up, and I would be very surprised if they were not active in the recent Canadian federal election.
• Climate change could hasten deterioration of US bridge infrastructure. Study demonstrates need to rethink nation's priority order of bridge repair

Scrubbing the Oil Sands' Record

The results of the Canadian federal election earlier this week made it clear that the Western provinces, especially Alberta, are seriously unhappy with the environmental policies of the Canadian government. The Liberals were completely shut out of Alberta and Saskatchewan, taking no seats and losing Ralph Goodale, a key cabinet member.

One of the major disagreements between Alberta and the rest of Canada rests on the fate of the oil sands. Alberta wants pipelines to ship the output of the oil sands to the rest of the world; many Canadians, especially those in British Columbia and the eastern provinces, don't want more pipelines built and would even like to see oil sands' production phased out. 

The production of oil from the oil sands is notoriously dirty. To their credit, the oil companies have been making efforts to decrease the impact of production on the environment and improving reclamation of land. But is it good enough? That's the subject of this article in Macleans, and their conclusion is about what I expected. 

Research analyst Kevin Birn, for one, has watched investor interest in carbon footprints rapidly increase. “Three years ago, I’d get a call [from investors] every six months. Last year it was once a quarter, and this year it was once a month,” says the vice-president for North American crude markets at IHS Markit. Birn is an apt guy to ask. Last year, he produced a report—oft cited by industry—which found that, sector-wide, oil sands’ carbon intensity had fallen by 21 per cent between 2009 and 2017. Future technical improvements, his study forecast, would drop levels on an intensity basis by another fifth by 2030. (Absolute emissions, it is important to note, will still rise, due to ramped up extraction, at a time when Canada has committed to substantial reduction.)

But his paper includes one table that should temper the excitement of those talking up oil sands’ carbon-competitive edge. Of the various types of oil sands extraction he forecast out to 2030, only one type—next-generation mining projects that pre-treat oil sands before upgrading—would have emissions per barrel at the same level as the average for crude from around the world. (Birn uses as his baseline 2012 numbers for oil shipped to and processed by U.S. refineries.) And they would reach the average only in a scenario where more aggressive improvements come online in the future. Traditional oil sands mining projects, which require an energy-intensive upgrading process, would remain 7.1 per cent above average in emissions intensity, while the “thermal” operations that pump steam into wells to extract bitumen would remain 2.6 per cent worse than average in this rosier scenario.

More On the Boeing 737 Max Disaster

I've posted before (here and here) about the Boeing 737 Max disaster. Yesterday Boeing fired one of its chief executives and reported a substantial drop in quarterly earnings. There will certainly be more repercussions in the future.

Recently I've found two long and very detailed articles about the 737 Max crisis. As you might expect from the sources, they have somewhat different perspectives, but both are worth reading.

• From the New Republic, Crash Course: How Boeing's Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster. This one goes into much detail on the genesis of the 737 Max program, how Boeing's managerial culture has changed (and not for the better), Whatthe politics behind the investigation. 
• From the New York Times, What Really Brought Down the 737 Max? The article's tag line shows a very different perspective for the article: "Malfunctions caused two deadly crashes. But an industry that puts unprepared pilots in the cockpit is just as guilty."

Yahoo Groups Is Shutting Down

Yahoo Groups will soon be no more, or at least a pale shadow of its former self. Yahoo recently made the following announcement:

Yahoo has made the decision to no longer allow users to upload content to the Yahoo Groups site. Beginning October 28 you won't be able to upload any more content to the site, and as of December 14 all previously posted content on the site will be permanently removed. You'll have until that date to save anything you've uploaded.

This affects several groups that I've used over the years, including wwp-users and dita-users. There have been some attempts by users and administrators to try to archive the content of the groups or transfer them to another platform like groups.io, but at this point it's not clear how successful that will be.

This is sad news for many people, myself included, who've used the groups over the years as a source of support for sometimes esoteric topics. There's a huge amount of useful information stored in the groups' archives, and it will be very sad if access to it is lost.

10/24 Update: It looks like the frame_dev list will be moving to freelists.org and dita-users will be moving to groups.io. I haven't seen anything concrete about wwp_users, but given how moribund the group has been recently, I suspect it will die off.

John J. Audubon’s Birds of America

I'm not much of a birder - myopia makes that difficult, but I do enjoy pictures of birds, and John J. Audobon's are classics. Now you can view and download all of the 435 plates in his famous Birds of America.

John James Audubon's Birds of America is a portal into the natural world. Printed between 1827 and 1838, it contains 435 life-size watercolors of North American birds (Havell edition), all reproduced from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration. Nearly 200 years later, the Audubon prints are coming to life once again, thanks to our vibrant digital library. Roam around below and enjoy one of the most treasured pieces of Audubon's grand and wild legacy. Each print is also available as a free high-resolution download.

Needless to say the prints are gorgeous and the high-resolution scans are huge. Here's one of one of my favourite birds, the blue jay.

Using AI for Science

A while ago I linked to an O'Reilly Conference talk about using AI to help ophthalmologists to detect macular degeneration. Since then, I've found a couple more articles about how scientists are using AI to scan data and help them find patterns that they might otherwise have missed.

• Scientists are using AI to help predict disease outbreaks by "searching for the ecological and epidemiological patterns that precede spillovers—the harbingers of outbreaks that flicker to life in the wild, then trickle into humans."
• Geologists are using AI to find patterns in seismic data and "to try to demystify earthquake physics and tease out the warning signs of impending quakes."

I'm sure I could find more articles but these are the ones that I've read recently.

Featured Links - October 21, 2019

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

• Do You Have White Teenage Sons? Listen up! How white supremacists are recruiting boys online.
• How Amateur Video Is Helping Us Understand Deadly Tsunamis. The ubiquity of video cameras is helping scientists understand tsunamis.
• The Quest to Get Photos of the USSR's First Space Shuttle. It's sad to see what has happened to Buran, which was arguably better than the US Space Shuttle.
• Dust-to-Digital, a record label specializing in early, rare music. Lots of great clips on their Twitter feed.
• 10 Neat Ways to Create Beautiful Google Documents. I used some of the add-ins mentioned in this article when I was at the TSX.

Posts May Be Sparse for a While

We are having an electrical problem in our house that has affected my office. As a result I've had to move my computer into the basement and I'm working on a cramped desk and using a small monitor. So posts may be sparse until we can get things fixed and my computer back to its proper place.

Our Solar System Has a New Visitor

A second interstellar visitor has entered our solar system, a comet known as 2I/Borisov. Unlike Oumuamua, the first interstellar object detected, 2I/Borisov seems to be an ordinary comet, very similar to the ones in our solor system.

In contrast to its predecessor, though, Borisov has been noticed on the inbound leg of its solar system sojourn. Researchers estimate it’ll make its closest approach to both the sun and Earth this December, before putting both in its rearview mirror and disappearing sometime next year. “Now we get a bit longer to watch it,” says Michele Bannister, a planetary astronomer at Queen’s University Belfast.

With just a handful of observations on Borisov under their belt, many scientists remain cautious. But so far, the preliminary results seem to support an intriguing idea: The comet’s extrasolar roots may be the most exotic thing about it.

Unlike ‘Oumuamua, it’s unquestionably a comet—one that bears a striking resemblance to those that originate in our own solar system, says Guzik, who, together with his colleagues, published a report on Borisov today in Nature Astronomy. The wayfaring rock sports all the necessary accoutrement for the classification, including a bright tail and a fuzzy, luminous halo called a coma—both byproducts of ice sublimating into gas under the sun’s heat. And with its reddish hue, it would blend seamlessly into a typical cometary lineup.

A Tale of Three Nametags

I've been to many conferences and workshops over the years and seen a wide variation in nametags. Invariably the names are too small, making it impossible for me to read without sticking my nose in someone's chest. In this article, John D. Berry rants on the usability (or more often lack of it) of conference nametags.

Aside from dueling jetlags (I was only home in Seattle for five days between the two trips), this juxtaposition provided a classic opportunity to compare approaches to designing the nametags or badges for such an event. I’ve written about this before, in an article about nametags published in FontShop’s Font magazine: “The moment when the design of nametags really matters is when you’re stumbling about at an opening reception, trying to spot familiar names without rudely staring at people’s chests.” Although the organizers might consider the first purpose of a nametag or badge to be labeling someone as a paying (or non-paying) official attendee of the event, for the attendees themselves the purpose is to be able to identify individual people by name. And the distance at which you want to be able to read the name is about three meters (ten feet), well before you find yourself face to face with that person whose name you know you ought to recall.

Conference organizers, please take his advice to heart!

Thanksgiving Break

It's Canadian Thanksgiving this weekend. It's not as big a deal here as it is down south, but it's still a holiday and time to concentrate on good things like cabbage rolls, turkey, and family.

So I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. I should be back on Tuesday.

Featured Links - October 11, 2019

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

• How to Edit Any Web Page in Chrome (or Any Browser). I am embarrassed to say that I didn't know you could do this. 
• Wally Schirra Collection. More than 1,000 photos from the personal collection of one of the Mercury 7 astronauts.
• Lab-made primordial soup yields RNA bases. The chemical feat strengthens theory that the first life on Earth was based on RNA.
• A Twitter thread on the Soviet Union's Energia/Buran program. There was some information in this that I haven't seen elsewhere. 
• Decades-Old Code Is Putting Millions of Critical Devices at Risk. Many of the devices at risk will never be updated.

Hot About Hyphens

The Associated Press Stylebook is something of a bible for journalists, at least in the United States; in Canada we have the Canadian Press Stylebook, a copy of which sits on the shelf beside my monitor.

Recently, the AP decided to relax its guidelines on hyphens in compound modifiers (first period goal, for example), saying they weren't necessary when the phrase was commonly used and there was little chance of ambiguity. Prescriptive grammar pedants predictably protested and the AP backtracked slightly, as reported in Boing Boing.

After sustained outrage, the AP backtracked and reversed its advice: "We agree that, for instance, first-half run should be hyphenated. So to conform, we are returning the hyphen to the -quarter phrases. We also hyphenate first-degree murder. But we’re keeping the no-hyphen first grade student, just like high school student."

This, in turn, created more sectarian dissent from people who were still outraged over hyphens.

As a technical writer, I probably used hyphens (and the Oxford comma!) more than strictly necessary, but my main goal was to avoid ambiguity and confusion.

Read more about the controversy in the Columbia Journalism Review.

Adobe Screws Over Venezuela

Here's a good reason for avoiding cloud-based and cloud-licensed software as much as possible. Adobe, citing US sanctions, has just cancelled the licensing for all of their products in Venezuela. And they haven't given the users back their money.

Today, citing US sanctions, Adobe terminated every software license in the country of Venezuela. And because Adobe has "pivoted to the cloud," switching its software to "software as a service," that means that all the software that some of the most desperate, hard-hit people in the world paid good money for are out in the cold.

They're not issuing refunds, either.

Adobe isn't noted for their customer-friendly policies and this is a particularly egregious example of how they treat customers. You would think they're big enough to show a little spine too and stand up to inhumane US policies.

The Rise and Fall of Steampunk

If you read much science fiction or fantasy, you've probably encountered steampunk. Think of it as Victorian era history with Zeppelins and possibly steam-powered Babbage engines (mechanical computers).

I'm not a big fan though I did enjoy some novels: William Gibson and Bruce Sterling's The Difference Engine and Ian McDonald's YA Planesrunner series come to mind. I like it more as a visual metaphor; it works better for movies than novels, I think.

In Whatever Happened to Steampunk, John Brownlee looks at the evolution of steampunk and offers some reasons why it seems to have faded in popularity.

In other words, steampunk is a bit of a power fantasy: not of the technologist, but of the maker, the tinkerer, the engineer. The guys who can rebuild an engine from scratch, but who are as powerless to fix the iPhone that they just dropped in the toilet as the rest of us.

And that is exactly why steampunk took off when it did, starting around early 2003. According to Rob Beschizza, an editor at Boing Boing — one of the web’s oldest and most popular fringe culture blogs, which reported on the rise of steampunk firsthand — steampunk became popular alongside the internet’s maker movement, which itself was a response to technology’s rapid evolutionary clip.

Bob Masters Leaving Weather Underground

Dr. Bob Masters, the founder of the Weather Underground site, is leaving WU at the end of October. He'll be starting a new blog for Scientific American.

I've been reading Weather Underground, especially the Category 6 blog, for more than a decade. It's definitely one of the most, if not the most informative weather sites on the internet and I recommend it highly.

The Weather Underground site and the Category 6 blog will continue on under the direction of Bob Henson.

Simul: Online Version Control for Word

Microsoft Word can track changes in a document and it has rudimentary version control. However track changes is often unreliable forcing users to use the document comparison feature for larger or more complex documents.

Simul is an online version control system for Microsoft Word that removes some of those limitations. Documents are stored online and several writers can work on the same document simultaneously. Changes are tracked separately for each user in separate versions of the document and can be merged into the final version.

There are many other features, including commmenting, notifications, and document merging.

Simul has a free account which allows you to work on up to 10 documents. Paid accounts are reasonably priced and start at $20/month per user.

For a review from a happy user, check out writer David Muldawer on the Cool Tools podcast.

What Newspapers I'm Reading These Days

I used to be a newspaper junkie (given that my dad worked for the Sault Star, that's not surprising), but as I've gotten older I find it too hard to read the print editions of most newspapers. The print is just too small for me to manage comfortably, even with strong reading glasses. So I read their online editions, mostly on my phone or tablet.

Earlier this week I noticed that my online New York Times subscription had gone from $4.50 a month to $22. I had a promotional deal that had expired, so I decided to cancel it. When I called, they ended up offering a one year extension at the old price, so I kept it. The Times' Android app seems to have most of the content from the print edition and offers a dark mode that's easy on the eyes and a straightforward, if somewhat old school, navigation system.

I decided to cancel the Toronto Star online subscription, which is about $16 a month. I'm not finding a lot in it of interest, and I can read it through TPL's PressReader service.

Then I looked at the Globe and Mail, which I've been wanting to read for a while and is not available through PressReader. They have a promo deal for $1.50/week for a year, so I subscribed to that.

I'm impressed with the Globe's online edition. You can download it as a reproduction of the print edition in which each headline links to a more readable text-only format. Or you can go to a website, which is a proprietary version of PressReader, making it easy to scan through and read. There's no comparison in the content between the Globe and the Star; there's much more in the Globe and their articles are more in-depth (although I do prefer the Star's editorial slant).

I also have a subscription to the Washington Post through Amazon Prime. Their Android app is also quite slick, although I don't think it includes everything that's in the print edition, and my account doesn't work on their web site. At only $1.25/month, it's the cheapest of my subscriptions. I'll drop that if and when the price goes up, but at that price it's worth it just for their political coverage. It's also available on PressReader.

Speaking of PressReader, they have a huge selection of newspapers and magazines. Toronto Public Library offers it, but not the Pickering Public Library, so I'll have to keep my TPL library card active.

Featured Links - October 6, 2019

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

• The Tech Helping Dogs Learn to 'Talk' With Humans. This is seriously cool. 
• Graphics That Seem Clear Can Easily Be Misread. Misreading data visualizations can reinforce biased perceptions.
• 'Sci-fi makes you stupid' study refuted by scientists behind original research. Quality matters, not genre. I could have told you that.
• The SpaceX Starship page. I can't wait to see it fly!
• A Twitter thread about Google and the publishing industry. Worth the time to read and digest.
• This is the World’s Largest Optical Lens: It’s 5 Feet Wide and Took 5 Years to Make

Will Trump Ever Leave the White House?

With the impeachment process gearing up and what seems like daily revelations of more Trumpian malfeasance, there is a real possibility that Trump may be impeached and convicted in the Senate. But would he leave the White House? And if he didn't, what would happen.

That's the question raised by this article in the New York Times. The author spoke to several constitutional experts. Opinions varied, but the consensus seems to be that much depends on Republican senators and Fox news. Given the performance of the Republican party over the last few years, that does not leave me reassured.

In the end it will likely be the reaction of Trump's core supporters that determines the outcome.

Over and above that, Mason wrote, it’s possible that the social sorting that we have observed over the last few decades has been a gradual movement toward a real reckoning with race in American politics and society that we haven’t ever really had to face.

If, she continued, Americans were to have a true reckoning with our legacy of racial violence and bias, we should expect to see a strong backlash from the forces of white supremacy that have been in America’s DNA since the founding. An optimistic view is that we are in the beginning of this process now. A pessimistic view allows that the backlash might succeed. Either way, it is not inconsistent with Trump’s evocation of Civil War.

Fighting Trump's Smog War in California

I found this article on CityLab interesting because it shows how people, especially young people, using modern tech, can fight back against oppressive government actions that directly affect their lives and their health.

In this case, a high school student has created an air quality monitoring network that provides real-time information about the levels of dangerous airborne pollutants in Fresno, California. Fresno has some of the worst air pollution in California and will be directly affected by the Trump administration's bid override California's stricter air quality standards.

For White, the political volleying feels like a dismaying waste of time. To him, the stakes are higher than Fresno’s bad air: White also organized Fresno’s local climate strike, leading youth marchers through downtown streets to call on leaders to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming the planet. They chanted lines that he came up with: We walk as one, we breathe as one, we’re not going to stop ‘til the work is done. In an upcoming march, White plans to brandish signs asking Costa to pledge support for the Green New Deal.

After all, election results don’t always fully represent what people need or want. The San Joaquin Valley has some of the lowest voter turnout in the state. In White’s neighborhood, people feel disempowered, he said. He hopes his work will change that. Right now, he’s working with city officials to install an air quality monitor in each of the 115 square miles that make up Fresno, which will make his platform more accurate and useful. And he’s building a database that anyone can use to find air quality information. “We want to give this data to the community and let them press it to decision-makers,” White said.

We're Toast 13

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

• US and Canada have lost three billion birds since 1970. That's one in four!
• How Big Agriculture Is Preventing Farmers From Combating the Climate Crisis. Monoculture farming is not sustainable.
• 'Unprecedented Conditions' Will Rule the Oceans This Century, Striking New Report Finds. The oceans and arctic regions are being affected the most by climate change.
• Nine Million Cubic Feet of Ice May Soon Collapse in the Alps. The same thing is happening in the Canadian Rockies.
• New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms. If the Carrington event happened tomorrow, we'd be toast. 
• Could the Deadliest Wildfire in U.S. History Become the New Norm? “We now have mass-fatality wildfires—specifically civilian fatalities."
• 'I don't know how we come back from this:' Australia's big dry sucks life from once-proud towns.

Politics

• Piketty on the "Brahmin left" and the "merchant right". It's worth taking the time to read through the slide deck mentioned in the article.
• How a White Supremacist’s Haircut Became a Symbol for Hate. Far-right extremists are now using Dylann Roof’s haircut as shorthand for calls to violence.
• Trump Administration Takes the Axe to Marine Life, Invasive Species Advisory Boards. This will come back to bite them.
• The Shocking Paper Predicting the End of Democracy. Grim reading, but I feat the author is right.

Technology

• The Dangers of Delaying FAA Modernization. Grounded by mid-20th-century technology, air traffic controllers cannot handle the ongoing demands of commercial airlines and drones.
• What Would It Take To Shut Down the Entire Internet. I'd worry most about the DNS system and BGP poisoning.
• We're Not Ready for a Massive Digital Terror Attack. This from Microsoft's Brad Smith, who should know.

Ken Endacott's Microsoft Word Tools

I'm a bit of a tools junkie. I'm always on the lookout for something new and exciting. That extends to Microsoft Word, where I've installed a variety of macros and add-ons over the years.

I've just come across a new tool set for Microsoft Word, created by Australian editor, Ken Endacott. It's a set of Word templates that install a set of tools controlled from a custom ribbon. There are modules for working with styles, text editing, bullets and numbering and much more.

I haven't yet tried these out, but I will be doing so over the next month or so and will report back at some point with a more detailed review. But they do look worthwhile.



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How To Back Up Your Android Device Properly

Over the past few years, I've had more than one family member or friend lose data because they didn't have backups set properly on their Android phones. It's easy to set up once, and once you're done your key data (for most people, that will be pictures and contact information) is securely backed up to Google (or possibly Samsung, if you're using a Samsung phone).

How to Back Up Your Android Device Properly is a guide from MakeUseOf that covers several different aspects of backing up your Android device, be it a tablet or phone. (Some of the advice might also work for Chromebooks, but I don't have one so I can't verify that).

For most people, setting up backups on their Google account will be the first and most important thing to do. I should note that once you've done this, you can use the backed up data to help you set up a new device. When I recently bought a Samsung tablet, I was able to use the backup from my phone to simplify setting up the tablet.

The article also covers backing up your photos, contacts, text mesages, and other files, as well as copying your phone's files to a PC. There's also a brief description of third-party backup apps.

Don't risk losing your data. Backups are easy to set up and you'll be glad you did when your phone dies.