Free SiriusXM and Phish Concert Broadcast

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

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

Is Galaxy's Edge Too Alien?

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

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

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

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

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

Alice's Restaurant

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

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

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

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

The 25 Most Anticipated SFF Books of 2020

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

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

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

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

Can Worker-Owned Apps Fix the Gig Economy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Music to Give Thanks For

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

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

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

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

Technical Communication Links - November 25, 2019

Some links related to technical communication.

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

Featured Links - November 24, 2019

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

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

Our Social Fabric Is Decaying

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

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

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

We're Toast 16

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

Climate Change and Environment

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

Politics 

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

Technology

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

56 Years Ago Today

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

Drive-By Truckers Announce New Album

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

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

Neutrinos Lead to Unexpected Discovery in Basic Math

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

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

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

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

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

SpaceX Starship MK1 Fails During Pressure Tests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Aachen, their target was a library.

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

What Your Cat Really Does at Night

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

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

No wonder bird populations are declining.

A Couple of Shuttle Videos

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

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

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

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

Confounds the Science

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

Here's some of the lyrics:

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

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

New Books From Jerry Pournelle

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

Two new books by Pournelle are being published.

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

I will be buying both. 

Featured Links - November 17, 2019

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

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

The China Connection

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

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

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

How to Send a Website to Your Kindle to Read Later

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

I use two methods for doing this.

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

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

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

Why Is 80x24 a Terminal Display Standard?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free Microsoft Word Templates

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

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

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

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

Red Moon

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

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

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

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

We're Toast 15

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

Climate Change and Environment

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

Politics

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

Technology

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

Featured Links - November 10, 2019

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

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

The Novels That Shaped Our World

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

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

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

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

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

Internet Archive's MS-DOS Game Collection

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

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

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

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

Free Fonts That Are OK for Commercial Use

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

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

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

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

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

The Universe May Be Round

A paper analyzing data from the Planck satellite posits that the universe may be round, not flat as most cosmologists currently believe. However, as always seems tbe case with cosmology, there are other observations that contradict the Planck observations.

The universe might come in one of three shapes: open, closed, or flat. Parallel lines in an open universe will always move farther apart; parallel lines in a closed universe will eventually meet (and single lines will eventually meet up with themselves); and parallel lines in a flat universe will stay parallel forever.

Scientists already knew from Planck satellite data that mass in the universe was warping the the cosmic microwave background radiation, the farthest radiation our telescopes can see, more than the standard theory of cosmology predicted. Perhaps this is a statistical fluctuation or something wrong with the way scientists are interpreting the data—but it would be an incredibly unlikely statistical fluctuation, with less than 1 percent odds. Instead, the team led by Eleonora Di Valentino at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom posited that the observation could be explained simply by a closed universe. This change, however, would put plenty of other measurements out of agreement with Planck’s data.

I've always been fascinated by cosmology and will be following this story to see how it turns out, although it might be years before it's resolved. 

A Free SF Story From Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear is one of my favourite SF writers. I've not read any novels by her (although I have bought her most recent, Ancestral Night, which is queued up on my Kindle waiting for me to finish Ian McDonald's Luna trilogy). I have read many of her short stories, which keep getting picked for various years' best anthologies.

She has a new story in the latest issue of the online SF magazine, Uncanny. It's called "A Time to Reap", and it's a time travel story set in New England. I can't comment on it as I haven't read it yet, but if it's as good as the other stories I've read by her it will be worth your time. The story is free to read.

The magazine also has an interview with her.

Uncanny Magazine: Both mysteries and time-travel stories have a lot of elements to keep track of—suspects, timelines, where and when characters are at any given point in the story, etc. Did you find it difficult to keep track of all the elements in this story? What were the challenges and benefits of writing a murder mystery that is also a time-travel story?

Elizabeth Bear: Oh yes. This is one of the most technically challenging stories I’ve ever written (curiously, another story published this year, “Erase, Erase, Erase” in last month’s F&SF, is another) and it took me several years to write it. A big part of that was figuring out the end, and how the time travel worked, and what the outcome was for Kat.

Originally, I had thought of writing it with segments of the playscript interposed with the first-person narrative, but after experimenting with that tactic I realized that it was probably overly precious for the intimate story of a friendship between two strong, traumatized girls in mortal peril that I wanted to tell.

Hosting a Website on GitHub Pages

I haven't used GitHub at all so I wasn't aware that it could host web pages. This article in MakeUseOf explains what GitHub Pages are and how to use them.

Web hosting plans come in a variety of options and price points. There are more expensive plans that have the capacity for hosting the biggest websites in the world, but what if you just need a simple hosting solution for a simple website?

For a static website or small web apps, there are free hosting plans that can get you up and running online in a moment. They require a bit more setup than a paid host, but it’s a worthy trade-off for free.

GitHub Pages is one such option, and in this article we’ll show you how to host a simple website using GitHub Pages for free.

This post is mainly for my own reference as I need to start looking at what I'm going to do with my soltys.ca website. I don't think GitHub Pages would be a replacement for that, but it might be useful for small projects.

Croy Doctorow on John W. Campbell Jr.

Jeannette Ng touched off a storm of controversy this year when she called John W. Campbell Jr. a fascist (actually a fucking fascist) in her acceptance speech for the Campbell Award at the World Science Fiction convention. The award has since been renamed the Astounding Award.

Now Cory Doctorow has weighed in on the controversy in his column for Locus magazine and he strongly supports Ng.

So when Ng held Campbell “responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day. Sterile. Male. White. Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists,” she was factually correct.

Not just factually correct: she was also correct to be saying this now. Science fiction (like many other institutions) is having a reckoning with its past and its present. We’re trying to figure out what to do about the long reach that the terrible ideas of flawed people (mostly men) had on our fields. We’re trying to reconcile the legacies of flawed people whose good deeds and good art live alongside their cruel, damaging treatment of women. These men were not aberrations: they were following an example set from the very top and running through the industry and through fandom, to the great detriment of many of the people who came to science fiction for safety and sanctuary and community.

I discovered Astounding magazine and its later incarnation, Analog, as a teenager and read many of his editorials. I respected him as an editor but it was pretty clear to me, even as a teenager, that many of his ideas ranged from strange to repugnant. This was confirmed when I read  Astounding:  John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction by Alec Nevala-Lee. And if you don't think so, back issues of Astounding are easy enough to find and you can see for yourself.

 

2019 World Fantasy Awards

The winners of the 2019 World Fantasy Awards were announced at the World Fantasy Convention in Los Angeles on November 3.  The fiction winners were:

• Novel: Witchmark by C. L. Polk (Tor.com)
• Novella: “The Privilege of the Happy Ending” by Kij Johnson (Clarkesworld, Aug. 2018)
• “Ten Deals with the Indigo Snake” by Mel Kassel (Lightspeed, October 2018)

The site of the 2021 World Fantasy Convention was announced; it will be held in Montreal. 

I Didn't Know It Was This Hard

Get a few technical writers together and the subject will inevitably turn to flaws in the tools that they use. "Why is justification in Word so crappy?" or "You'd think that FrameMaker could do veritical text by now." You get the idea.

A lot of the complaints involve the discrepancies between what the writer sees on screen and the final output, be it another on screen format like HTML or print. I've always wondered why, with modern high-resolution displays, that what you see on screen didn't match the final output. Naively, I thought that rendering text was easy, or at least a problem that had pretty much been solved. I was wrong. 

A couple of recent articles, summarized in this post on Boing Boing, explain why it's so complicated.  

First there's Alex Beingessner's article, Text Rendering Hates You. This is the article's table of contents:

1 Terminology
2 Style, Layout, and Shape All Depend On Each Other?
3 Text Isn't Individual Characters
3.1 Text Overlaps
3.2 Style Can Change Mid-Ligature
4 Emoji Broke Color and Style
5 Anti-Aliasing Is Hell
5.1 Subpixel Offsets Break Glyph Caches
5.2 Subpixel-AA Isn't Composable
6 Esoterica
6.1 Fonts Can Contain SVG
6.2 Characters Can Be Too Damn Big
6.3 Selection Isn't A Box, And Text Goes In All The Directions
6.4 How Do You Write That You Can't Write?
6.5 Style Is Part of The Font (Except When It's Not)
6.6 There's Is No Ideal Text Rendering
7 Additional Links

Admittedly, many of the issues he describes have to do with non-English languages, including those that read right-to-left, and have cursive or ideographic characters, but anyone writing a program with an international audience will have to deal with those.

Then, what do you do if the user can edit your painfully rendered text? Robert Lord describes the complexities of editing text in Text Editing Hates You Too.  Just for a start:

That’s right, the Windows text input APIs contain 128 interfaces. I’m pretty sure there are also eight (8!) different types of locks to fix concurrency issues, although I honestly haven’t read their documentation, so don’t quote me on that. Anyway, this engineer I heard about spent a year and a half (full-time!) attempting the upgrade, and in the end, their efforts ended in failure. They ended up staying on the legacy API.

I used to have this fantasy where I'd get a few tech writer friends together in a fancy resort (with good internet access) and we'd spend a week or two designing the field's ultimate FrameMaker/Word replacement.

It's a good thing I didn't waste my money. 

Featured Links - November 3, 2019

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

• Hellvetica, the famous typeface with random spacing. It hurts my eyes. (It's kind of like the way Word justifies narrow lines of text). 
• WAV audio files are now being used to hide malicious code. Another file format is not safe; keep your audio apps up-to-date.
• How to Make a Black Hole In a Science Lab. It's only an analogy to a black hole but it's surprising how much sàcienctists can learn from it.
• How to Replace Windows 7 with Linux Mint. I am probably going to have to do this on one of my PCs.
• I Accidentally Uncovered a Nationwide Scam on Airbnb. If you use Airbnb, you should read this cautionary tale of woe.
• Margaret Atwood's Crystal Ball Is Scarily Accurate. Not who I would have expected Glamour to pick as Woman of the Year, but it's a good article.
• A baseball miracle or a deal with the devil? Nah, it was just Nationals' baseball. 

Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick

Yesterday was Blade Runner day, the day on which the movie begins, November 1, 2019. In honour of that, the wonderful Pulp Librarian has a couple of Twitter threads that are worth reading.

The first is about Blade Runner, its beginning and history after its release and how it compares to the novel. The second is about what happened to Philip K. Dick in 1974 and how it affected his life.

In February 1974 something profound and inexplicable happened to author Philip K Dick that changed his life forever. Was it an illness, a psychotic reaction, or something truly mystical?

As it's #BladeRunner day today let's look back at the exegesis of Philip K Dick...

Both of these are essays split into tweets and illustrated with appropriate movie stills and book covers.

If you are on Twitter, you should be following the Pulp Librarian. They're one of the best posters I've come across and I look forward to seeing what they post each day.

Changing the Blog Format

You might have noticed that the format of the blog has changed. I noticed that Blogger has some new features and decided to apply a new theme, Awesome Inc. Dark.

I'll be tweaking it over the next few days, so be patient if things aren't quite right. If you think something is really broken, leave me a comment and I'll try to get to it ASAP.

Weaving Books Into the Web

The Internet Archive is working with Wikipedia to integrate content from it's huge collection of scanned books into Wikipedia articles.

For example, the Wikipedia article on Martin Luther King, Jr cites the book To Redeem the Soul of America, by Adam Fairclough. That citation now links directly to page 299 inside the digital version of the book provided by the Internet Archive. There are 66 cited and linked books on that article alone. 

 Readers can see a couple of pages to preview the book and, if they want to read further, they can borrow the digital copy using Controlled Digital Lending in a way that’s analogous to how they borrow physical books from their local library.

This is a great idea and I hope it takes off. It's similar to what Google had in mind when it started scanning books a decade ago, but that project got shot down because of objections from publishers. Hopefully, that won't happen this time.