What I Read In 2020

It was a tumultuous year, and as a result, most of my reading was online news and articles. I am embarrassed to admit how few books I read in 2020. Perhaps I'll do better next year, if there's less political drama from south of the border, and we finally get the pandemic under control. 

So these are the few books I managed to finish this year. 

Neil Gaiman: The Sandman. I have been wanting to read The Sandman series for some time. I finally managed to read the first five books (Overture, Preludes and Nocturnes, The Doll's House, Dream Country, and Season of Mists) by downloading them from the library and reading them on my Samsung tablet. (I had tried to read the print editions and could not as the print was just too small). I enjoyed Overture the most, because the artwork was so spectacular, and found the stories in some of the third and fourth books hit or miss. I will get back to the series at some point.

William Gibson: The Peripheral and Agency. I decided to reread The Peripheral before starting Agency, and I am glad I did, as I enjoyed it more than the first time I read it. I liked Agency, but it didn't have the impact that The Peripheral did. The ending felt rushed and left me somewhat disappointed. 

Peter F. Hamilton: Salvation. This is the first book in a new trilogy by Hamilton. If you like his books, I'd recommend it, but it's probably not the place to start if you are new to his work; try Pandora's Star or Fallen Dragon instead. I enjoyed it, but was aware that there it would take a long time to get moving. Once it did, I couldn't put it down. 

Ian McDonald: Luna: Wolf Moon and Luna: Moon Rising. McDonald is one of my favourite writers and his Luna trilogy didn't disappoint. I doubt that a lunar civilization would work the way he described, but it's still a powerful and action-packed story. 

Robert J. Sawyer: The Oppenheimer Alternative. This is an alternate history written largely from the point of view of Robert Oppenheimer. It's deeply grounded in historical fact and doesn't diverge too much from our history until about halfway through the book. It's certainly one of Sawyer's better books and should be a must for anyone who likes alternate histories or historical novels, but it's not as much of a thrill ride as his previous book, Quantum Night.

Greg Rucka and Leandro Fernadez: The Old Guard.  I read this after seeing the movie on (I think) Netflix, figuring the graphic novel might be enjoyable. I preferred the movie and never finished the book. 

I tend to have several books on the go at once. This is what I'm reading now:

• Peter F. Hamilton: Salvation Lost
• Joel Selvin: Fare Thee Well
• Farah Mendlesohn: The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein
• Gardner Dozois: The Year's Best Science Fiction, 34th Edition
• Benjamin Dreyer: Dreyer's English
• Michael D. Leimbach: Bringing Columbia Home
• Brian Herber and Kevin J. Anderson: Dune, the Graphic Novel, Book 1

The Industrial Scale of SpaceX in Texas

I've been watching the daily videos of the SpaceX Starship test program in Texas that are being posted on YouTube on the NASASpaceflight channel. As well as covering the tests and launches, they show the vast scale of what SpaceX are doing in Boca Chica. 

The speed and scale of the SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy development is remarkable. I don't think there has been anything comparable since the heyday of the 1960s space programs and the Cold War. They've built a shipyard, but it's for building and launching spaceships. 

Here's a 19-minute video that includes a drive-past of a large part of the facility. The opening scenes are reminiscent of a cover from a science fiction magazine from the 1950s. 

Kudos to the NASASpaceflight team for producing these videos and to SpaceX for being so open about their test program. 

My Year In Android

The most notable development with Android this year was the success of mid-range phones from major manufacturers as flagship phones continue to be priced out of the range of most consumers. 

That directly affected me. Up until this year, I used Samsung Galaxy phones, the last being a Galaxy S8. In September, I switched to a Google Pixel 4a, and so far I'm happy with my choice. The phone is reliable, reasonably fast, and takes great pictures. I also like having the latest version of Android and getting monthly updates from Google. I thought about waiting for the Pixel 4a 5G, which has a wide-angle camera as well as the standard lens, but I was trying to save money, and I have no need for 5G service.

I don't have much to say about Android 11. It's very much an incremental upgrade from Android 10. About the best feature is the increased granularity of control over notifications. Otherwise, it just works. 

In switching away from Samsung, I had to change some of my standard apps, and others got updated for various reasons. Here are a few I especially liked.

• Blue Mail: Samsung Mail wouldn't install on the Pixel, so I had to find another email app. Blue Mail was easy to install and configure and is fast and flexible, with more features than I am likely to ever use. 
• Talon: My Twitter app of choice, TweetCaster, stopped working early in the year (it's back, now), so I switched to Talon and am quite happy with it. If you use Twitter, it's a vast improvement over the stock Twitter app. 
• Infinity: This is a front-end to Reddit and is easier to use and faster than the stock Reddit app. 
• Google Photos: Google has been adding quite a few editing features to the basic Photos app along with some AI-generated "suggestions". It works quite well and is easier to use for quick touch ups than loading up another app like Snapseed.

Finally, a thumbs down for YouTube Music. Google shuttered the Play Music app and forced an "upgrade" to YouTube Music. They've hobbled the usefulness of the app by limiting casting to the subscription version and I'm not going to pay for it. I'll stick to Spotify or use VLC to play music stored on my phone.

Featured Links - December 28, 2020

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

• America Is Having a Moral Convulsion. "Levels of trust in this country—in our institutions, in our politics, and in one another—are in precipitous decline. And when social trust collapses, nations fail. Can we get it back before it’s too late?"
• Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates. "Our study suggests that climates like those of the Pliocene will prevail as soon as 2030 CE and persist under climate stabilization scenarios. Unmitigated scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions produce climates like those of the Eocene, which suggests that we are effectively rewinding the climate clock by approximately 50 My, reversing a multimillion year cooling trend in less than two centuries."
  
• Alien Hunters Discover Mysterious Signal from Proxima Centauri. "Strange radio transmissions appear to be coming from our nearest star system. Now scientists are trying to work out what is sending them."
• Far-Right Reddit Clone Voat Has Shut Down, for Real This Time. "Voat, the abhorrent Reddit clone that became a home for toxic communities and conspiracy theories like QAnon, has shut down. Although the site has claimed to be closing before, this time it appears to be legit."
• Analysis: Some Said the Vaccine Rollout Would Be a ‘Nightmare.’ They Were Right. 'Even before there was a vaccine, some seasoned doctors and public health experts warned, Cassandra-like, that its distribution would be “a logistical nightmare.” After Week 1 of the rollout, “nightmare” sounds like an apt description.'
• The Resistance: A web comic written by Babylon 5 creator, J. Michael Straczynski.
• How author Farley Mowat smuggled a V2 rocket into Canada. I had no idea that Mowat served in Europe during World War II, and certainly never heard he was stealing V2s. It's quite a story.

Tony Rice, RIP

Acclaimed bluegrass guitarist, Tony Rice, has died at the age of 69. I fell in love with his acoustic music in the 1980s. He recorded a series of albums merging folk, bluegrass, and jazz that remain some of my favourite acoustic music. 

Born in Virginia, Rice moved with his family to Los Angeles as a child and along with several musical family members was immersed in the bluegrass scene there. Soon the family was traveling and relocating frequently, and Rice, who started playing mandolin, switched to guitar. At a bluegrass festival in North Carolina, he met the Kentucky Colonels’ Clarence White, picking up stylistic tips from him and many other musicians he would meet early in his career, including David Grisman, and developing a virtuosic flatpicking style that folded jazz and other genres into the once-rigid confines of bluegrass.

Over his career, Rice brought his one-of-a-kind picking and singing to ensembles including J.D. Crowe & The New South, David Grisman Quintet, Tony Rice Unit, and the Bluegrass Album Band, and he became known for collaborations with Ricky Skaggs, Norman Blake, Béla Fleck, Peter Rowan, Chris Hillman, and his own brothers, Larry, Wyatt, and Ronnie.

Players and fans will point to different albums in Rice’s catalog as touchstones, but Manzanita, released by Tony Rice Unit in 1979, is considered by many his masterpiece. Backed by Sam Bush, Ricky Skaggs, Jerry Douglas, David Grisman, Darol Anger, and Todd Phillips, Rice marries traditional bluegrass and folk with his wide progressive lens, creating unforgettable versions of classic jam-circle songs like “Little Sadie” and “Blackberry Blossom” that fit perfectly alongside fresher numbers like Merle Travis’ “Nine Pound Hammer” and The Delmore Brothers’ “Blue Railroad Train.”

Here's a link to Devlin, which contains some of my favourite instrumental performances of his, including songs from the sadly out-of-print Still Inside. 

Blog Hoiliday and Merry Christmas

We're coming up to Christmas, and I'm going to take a break from blogging. I'll be back here sometime after Christmas.

I hope you stay well and have a pleasant and happy holiday season. 

In the meantime, I'll leave you with a picture of our cat, CJ, in our Christmas tree.

 

Featured Links - December 20, 2020

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

How NASA Scrambled to Save OSIRIS-REx From Leaky Disaster. "The $800 million craft successfully collected precious asteroid material from a near-Earth asteroid. Then it started spilling regolith into space."

We're Not Sure Which Of These Ancient Medical Procedures Is The Worst, But My God They're All Awful. Don't read this if you are squeamish. 

How to Inspect Suspicious Links Using Your Browser's Inbuilt Tools. "If you enounter a suspicious link, check it out using the tools available in your browser."

My job reporting on QAnon and coronavirus disinformation has led to daily death threats — but we can’t give up. "Investigating conspiracies and the people who spread them led the journalist Marianna Spring to become the target for an onslaught of abuse online."

Hubble Releases 30 New Celestial Images to Celebrate its 30th Anniversary. A beautiful collection of images from one of the most important scientific instruments of all time.

Why I Write by Samuel R. Delany. "A new edition of 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘠𝘢𝘭𝘦 𝘙𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘦𝘸 has appeared with an article of mine, "Why I Write," and a detail from an extraordinary portrait by Gregory Frux, the original of which hangs in the Fales Library at NYU." 

What makes The Expanse so great: Good science, balancing epic with personal. "Ars chatted with showrunner Naren Shankar and writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck." 

Sex in Our Strange World | Why Christmas has Always Been About Sex. "From Greenland to Poland, the whole world is at it at Christmas."

A Steampunk Rover Could Explore Venus

Venus is hellish. Super hot temperatures and a crushing corrosive atmosphere have made short work of all the probes that have so far landed on the planet. But there may be a solution, even if it looks like something out of a steampunk novel.

Sauder and his engineers first considered instruments that could measure temperature and pressure using basic physical properties like thermal coefficients of expansion, mechanical seismometers, and even recording their data on a golden record that would loft up with a balloon to an orbiting spacecraft. (“Too much of a Rube Goldberg,” he concluded.) They flew Jansen to California to consult about a spider-legged walking robot, though the artist told them that his Strandbeests tend to fail on landscapes that aren’t a flat beach. Eventually, though, reality intervened. High-temperature electronics being developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio were capable of taking much better measurements than the group anticipated, beating anything a mechanical instrument could do.

One area that’s still lagging is developing cameras that won’t melt on our sister world. Mars rovers use detailed image processing for their obstacle-avoidance programs, but without the ability to take high-quality pictures, such a package would be hard to adapt for Venus. So the JPL engineers are currently developing a concept they call the Hybrid Automaton Rover-Venus (HAR-V, or Har-vee) that would essentially be a wind-driven, wheeled mobility platform capable of carting sensitive electronics around for up to 120 days. Like a boat, it could “sail” with the wind and follow the breeze to navigate.

 

When Large Gatherings Go Bad In the Time of COVID

When large gatherings go bad in the time of COVID, they go really bad.

Researchers have determined that a conference held by the firm Biogen in Boston in February may have ultimately led to 300,000 COVID-19 infections. 

A new analysis of the Biogen event at a Boston hotel has concluded that the coronavirus strains loosed at the meeting have since migrated worldwide, infecting about 245,000 Americans — and potentially as many as 300,000 — by the end of October.

The virus strains spread to at least 29 states. They were found in Australia, Sweden and Slovakia. They wended their way from a room packed with biotechnology executives to Boston homeless shelters, where they also spread widely among occupants.

Those are just the infections. How many people were killed by the virus strains cannot be reliably estimated. Nor do the figures include infections among the six million Americans who have tested positive for the coronavirus since October, as infections have spiked.

“It’s a cautionary tale,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, a genomic epidemiologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T. “When we hear these stories of clusters where 20 or 50 or 100 were affected, that does not account for what happens after.”

This dramatically shows the importance of curtailing large gatherings until the pandemic is under control; in other words, until a large enough portion of the population is vaccinated that superspreader events are unlikely to occur. 

One of the study’s more arresting findings was that within a month of the Biogen conference, the virus strain introduced there had made its way to Boston-area homeless shelters. Tests at the shelters, affiliated with the Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program, found 14 strains of the coronavirus, four of which appeared to have become superspreaders. The researchers found that two clusters of cases that resembled superspreader events were associated with the virus from the conference.

Dr. Lemieux said that offered a lesson for those who take a casual attitude toward the coronavirus. “That’s just the interconnectivity of society,” he said. “Our intuition about how disconnected we can be is not reliable. We are so connected that we don’t appreciate the linkages and interactions we have.”

Volcanoes in 2020

As I kid, I was fascinated by two things: dinosaurs and volcanoes, and I still hold that fascination to some degree. So I was glad to see Erik Klementi's post reviewing the year in volcanoes for 2020. There weren't any huge, Pinatubo-scale eruptions, but there were several that caused some havoc, at least for those living nearby. 

2020 has been quite the year. Any number of world-shattering events will be remembered for decades to come but at least we can say one thing: it wasn't the volcanoes' fault. Even as the pandemic, elections and a myriad of other things captured our attention, volcanoes kept on doing their thing this year. Most didn't make the headlines, but we can look back at some of the most active volcanoes on our planet during this past year.

In 2020, we had a lot of volcanic activity! Now, that isn't to say it was abnormal. The planet is always volcanically active. There were dozens of volcanoes active almost the entire year at some level. I won't even mention all the eruptions this year or even some of the volcanoes that had the most prolonged activity. My countdown is more about some of the most notable events at volcanoes this year.

Jazz In 2020

If you read this blog regularly, you might get the impression that all I listen to is 1960s psychedelic rock, but that's most definitely not the case. I've been a jazz fan since high school and as time goes by, I find myself listening to more and more jazz, especially after watching Ken Burns' Jazz series. 

The problem I have now is trying to find new jazz to listen to. I'm pretty familiar with the standard repertoire but discovering new music is tricky. Thankfully, Rolling Stone has published a comprehensive review article that covers jazz in 2020. There are links to artists' pages (many on Bandcamp), so you can sample their music and I suppose you can always dig around on Spotify or YouTube Music as well. 

Jazz is a web. Because of the genre’s inherently collaborative, often mix-and-match nature, singling out a supporting player we like on a given record might lead us to dozens of other sessions featuring that same artist in various contexts. Or we might pick up a certain current in the music that crops up elsewhere, unifying albums that seemed to have little else in common. In 2020, when connection of any kind was scarce, these sorts of musical hyperlinks seemed all the more precious, a way to map and marvel at the complex social networks that keep jazz exciting year after year.

Like in pretty much every other corner of the music world, there was a lot to mourn in jazz in 2020: the passing of legends such as Jimmy Cobb, Lee Konitz, Gary Peacock, and Wallace Roney; the closure of beloved venues like New York’s Jazz Standard; the news that piano titan Keith Jarrett (who put out his latest epic live solo set, The Budapest Concert, in October) may never perform in public again. But there was also a lot to celebrate: next-best-thing livestreams from the Village Vanguard and other clubs, plus virtual fests and fund-raising efforts; a new class of deserving NEA Jazz Masters; and of course a sea of new releases.

Here, then, are six paths through the year in jazz on record, with a few examples of what could be found along the way — plus Bandcamp links where applicable — demonstrating a small fraction of just how much there was to explore. You won’t find any kind of rankings below, or a survey that claims to be in any way comprehensive, but hopefully one or more of these avenues leads you to some kind of discovery. Happy listening.

There's enough music here that I'll probably still be working my way through it by the time the 2021 article comes out. The article is now in the overflow slot on my bookmarks bar for quick access. 

More Good Medical News

Not all medical news is about the coronavirus. Scientists in the United States have used the CRISPR gene editing tool to treat sickle cell disease in several patients. 

 At a recent meeting of the American Society for Hematology, researchers reported the latest results from the first 10 patients treated via the technique in a research study, including Gray, two other sickle cell patients and seven patients with a related blood disorder, beta thalassemia. The patients now have been followed for between three and 18 months.

All the patients appear to have responded well. The only side effects have been from the intense chemotherapy they've had to undergo before getting the billions of edited cells infused into their bodies.

The New England Journal of Medicine published online this month the first peer-reviewed research paper from the study, focusing on Gray and the first beta thalassemia patient who was treated.

"I'm very excited to see these results," says Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who shared the Nobel Prize this year for her role in the development of CRISPR. "Patients appear to be cured of their disease, which is simply remarkable."

It appears that the treatment may provide permanent results. If further treatments prove successful, it may lead the way to using CRISPR to treat other genetic diseases.  

The Best Science Images Of 2020

Nature has compiled a page of the best science images of 2020. Ranging from microbiology to astronomy in scale, these pictures convey the scope and scale of 21st-century science.  

OED December 2020 Update

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has published a blog post about some of the words added or updated in December 2020. As always, it's fascinating to see what gets the imprimatur of inclusion in the OED.

New words include lob boll, structural racism, and adulting. There are many others that have been updated because of changes in or additions to their meaning, including traffic, follow, and zhuzh (yes, thank The Crown for that one). 

Welcome to this December update to the Oxford English Dictionary. After the unprecedented year documented in the Oxford Languages coronavirus updates and Words of the Year, we end 2020 with a more traditional OED quarterly release, which includes over 500 newly researched and edited entries and senses, alongside a similar number of fully revised and updated entries, drawn from across the history of English and its global varieties.

Among the oldest additions in this update is a sense of the verb follow, meaning specifically to pursue a person covertly, with the aim of watching what they are doing or keeping track of their movements; it was first recorded in the Old English West Saxon version of Luke’s Gospel in the early eleventh century, but managed to give the compilers of earlier editions of OED the slip. At the other end of the chronological spectrum is deliverology, apparently coined by British civil servants as a humorous, spuriously scientific sounding name for the process of successfully (or unsuccessfully) implementing policy and achieving goals in government. First recorded in 2007 in a book by former government adviser Sir Michael Barber (who describes it as a ‘terrible word’), it’s since gone on to be adopted in political contexts outside the UK.

 

SF&F Books To Look Forward To In 2021

Tor.com has published a list of 30 science fiction and fantasy books to look forward to in 2021. Despite the list being compiled by Tor.com's Christina Orlando, it contains books from other publishers. 

First, this list is only for the first half of the year. I had to cut myself off at some point, which was incredibly difficult. But I also know there are tons of books that haven’t been announced or don’t have publication dates yet, which just means we’ll get to do this all over again over the summer! (Of course, I’m keeping an eye on titles like Victoria Lee’s A Lesson in Vengeance (August 3), Freya Marske’s A Marvellous Light (November), She Who Became the Sun from Shelley Parker Chan (July 20), Summer Sons from Tor.com’s own Lee Mandelo (September), and Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim (July 6), and I’m not gonna suggest you should put those on your wishlist now, but I’m not NOT gonna suggest that).

Second, there are no sequels or next-in-series on this list. There are so many wonderful additions to established series coming out next year, including (but not limited to) the next Murderbot, Fugitive Telemetry from Martha Wells (March 27); Arkady Martine’s highly anticipated A Desolation Called Peace (March 2) which got pushed back from 2020, causing even more anticipation; the final addition to Ransom Riggs’ Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children series, The Desolations Of Devil’s Acre (February 23); the last of Fonda Lee’s epic Green Bone Saga, Jade Legacy (September 21); and the next Dandelion Dynasty book, The Veiled Throne from Ken Liu (November 2). We’re also getting sequels from Zoradia Córdova (Illusionary, May 11), Bethany C Morrow (A Chorus Rises, June 1), Hafasah Faizal (We Free the Stars, January 19), Premee Mohamed (A Broken Darkness, March 2), Romina Garber (Cazadora, August 17), Isabel Ibañez (Written in Starlight, January 26), and Intisar Khanani (The Theft of Sunlight, March 23), Amanda Joy (A Queen of Gilded Horns, March 16), and Hannah Abigail Clarke (The Scratch Daughters, August 24)—to name a few.

Out of the 30 on the list, these are the ones that I am looking forward to. 

• A History of What Comes Next by Sylvain Neuvel (February 2, Tordotcom Publishing)
• The Infinity Courts by Akemi Dawn Bowman (April 6, Simon & Schuster BYR)
• Victories Greater Than Death by Charlie Jane Anders (April 13, Tor Teen)
• A Master of Djinn by P. Djèlí Clark (May 11, Tordotcom Publishing)
• Star Eater by Kerstin Hall (June 22, Tordotcom Publishing)
• The Witness for the Dead by Katherine Addison (June 22, Tor Books)

Happy 30th, Commander Keen

Today marks the 30th anniversary of one of the earliest computer games that I really got into, Commander Keen. I didn't really get into it until after my kids were born and I was looking for something that they could enjoy, but I definitely spent too much time jumping around in it. 

By modern standards, it's pretty primitive, but games like this still have their charms. If you want to play it, you can still get it on Steam and run it through an emulator. 

All About COVID-19 Vaccines

With the initial rollout of vaccination for COVID-19 now underway, there's been a lot of discussion about the vaccines, their safety, their effectiveness, and what widespread vaccination will mean in our daily lives.

Elemental has assembled a long (15,000 words) FAQ that attempts to answer every question you could have about COVID-19 vaccination. It's very well researched with an impressive list of sources. If you have any questions or concerns about the vaccine, this is a good place to start looking for answers. 

Google Docs Is Getting More Features

When I was working at the TSX, I had to start using Google Docs for some documentation, and it drove me crazy. It was missing basic features, like the ability to change headers and footers from one page to the next and an automatically generated table of contents. Over the last couple of years, Google has added features to the point where Docs is becoming almost usuable.

Now they've announced that Docs will finally get the ability to switch between portrait and landscape pages in the same document. Despite the snarky take of the article, this is a useful and often necessary feature for technical documentation. 

Documents created in Google Docs can now be changed between portrait and landscape orientation on a per-section basis, meaning that you don't have to make every page tall and thin just because the first page looks good that way. Microsoft Word documents that contain a mixture of vertical and horizontal pages will be able to be imported, edited, and exported soon as well.

As well, you will be able to directly edit Microsoft Word documents without having to change the format. Next year, there will be an update that allows to layer text and images and add watermarks to a document.  

It's always easier to start with a template rather than creating everything from scratch. That's especially true in Docs, which lacks som of the features that would make document formatting easier. Here's an article with links to some useful Google Docs templates for both home and business use.

 

Featured Links - December 13, 2020

Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. 

• OAA report card: Arctic is having more and more warming difficulties. Continuing rapid changes in the Arctic climate, with later fall freeze-ups and less sea-ice thickness and extent, set stage for challenging times to come.
• 9 Browser Extensions to Help You Search the Web Better. "Search results can be cluttered with ads and other less-useful information. These add-ons strip out the junk to help you find exactly what you're looking for."
• 'ISS Experience' puts viewers aboard the space station in 3D 360° VR. If I could afford a VR setup, I would definitely get this. 
• NASA weighing options for future planetary radar capabilities after Arecibo. I was hoping they would build a replacement. 
• The Virus Didn’t Defeat America, Freedom Did. Hard truth about the pandemic and the US response to it.
• Physicists Nail Down the ‘Magic Number’ That Shapes the Universe. A team in Paris has made the most precise measurement yet of the fine-structure constant, killing hopes for a new force of nature.
• What Will the World Look Like in 30 Years? Sci-fi Author Kim Stanley Robinson Takes Us There. "Robinson on his new book The Ministry for the Future, a plausible, chaotic, and hopeful novel about how the climate crisis could play out."

Using a Steampunk Rover to Explore Venus

Venus is hellish. With an atmosphere full of sulphur dioxide a pressure many times that of Earth and a surface temperature of hundreds of degrees, modern devices won't survive for long. The Soviet Union landed several probes on Venus; none of them lasted for more than a few minutes.

So how do you explore the surface? The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California may have an answer – a mechanical rover that looks like something out of a steampunk novel. 

Sauder and his engineers first considered instruments that could measure temperature and pressure using basic physical properties like thermal coefficients of expansion, mechanical seismometers, and even recording their data on a golden record that would loft up with a balloon to an orbiting spacecraft. (“Too much of a Rube Goldberg,” he concluded.) They flew Jansen to California to consult about a spider-legged walking robot, though the artist told them that his Strandbeests tend to fail on landscapes that aren’t a flat beach. Eventually, though, reality intervened. High-temperature electronics being developed at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio were capable of taking much better measurements than the group anticipated, beating anything a mechanical instrument could do.

One area that’s still lagging is developing cameras that won’t melt on our sister world. Mars rovers use detailed image processing for their obstacle-avoidance programs, but without the ability to take high-quality pictures, such a package would be hard to adapt for Venus. So the JPL engineers are currently developing a concept they call the Hybrid Automaton Rover-Venus (HAR-V, or Har-vee) that would essentially be a wind-driven, wheeled mobility platform capable of carting sensitive electronics around for up to 120 days. Like a boat, it could “sail” with the wind and follow the breeze to navigate.

Best Usenet Providers 2020

I would not be surprised if most of you reading this blog have no idea what Usenet is. Those of us who were online before the world wide web swallowed everything remember it with fondness and a few may even still be using it. 

Here's the introduction to the Wikipedia article on Usenet.

Usenet (/ˈjuːznɛt/) is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980.[1] Users read and post messages (called articles or posts, and collectively termed news) to one or more categories, known as newsgroups. Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to Internet forums that became widely used. Discussions are threaded, as with web forums and BBSs, though posts are stored on the server sequentially.[2][3]

A major difference between a BBS or web forum and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing conglomeration of news servers that store and forward messages to one another via "news feeds". Individual users may read messages from and post messages to a local server, which may be operated by anyone.

Usenet is culturally and historically significant in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as "FAQ", "flame", sockpuppet, and "spam".[4] In the early 1990s, shortly before access to the Internet became commonly affordable, Usenet connections via Fidonet's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions and other communication widespread, not needing a server, just (local) telephone service.[5]

You can also still read Usenet for Technical Writers on my (very dated) website. 

I was a major user of Usenet in the 1990s and 2000s, but eventually moved away from it. I still have a comped account with a mid-tier provider and went back into it the other day just for old-time's sake. Mozilla Thunderbird has a good newsgroup client built into it if you want to play around.

You will need access to Usenet through a Usenet provider. Android Central recently published a review comparing 10 providers. 

Do you care about old archived conversations from years past, or are you mainly looking for a torrent alternative for recent content? Are you a Usenet rookie that wants an all-in-one package, or do you just want a solitary Usenet provider so you can choose a VPN or newsreader for yourself? This guide should help answer those questions.

If you are a university student you may be able to get access through your school's network.

Good News On the Flu Vaccine Front

With all the news about COVID-19 vaccines recently, news about influenza vaccine research tends to get buried. However, research on flu vaccines continues and there is some good news to report.

Researchers have made progress in developing a universal flu vaccine that would work on most strains of the flu. It targets the stalk of the virus, an area that is common to all flu viruses and doesn't mutate often. 

Targeting the stalk is harder than it sounds, because immune memory cells built up over a lifetime of flu infections react so strongly to the conserved region of HA’s head that this response overrides production of antibodies against the stalk. Some researchers have tried to make flu vaccines that only contain HA’s stalk, but this fragment is highly unstable. To get around this problem, Krammer and colleagues made what they call chimeric HAs, which link the protein’s conserved stalk to unusual heads that are entirely new to the human immune system and don’t trigger a person’s immune memory. Only low levels of head antibodies are produced, allowing a strong new immune response to stalk to dominate. In essence, the head of the chimera is only there to stabilize the stalk.

Influenza vaccines contain three to four strains of the virus that are classified as group A, which breaks into two other divisions, and group B strains. The researchers developed vaccines made from live, weakened versions of influenza viruses or inactivated viruses bearing chimeric HAs representing only one division of group A. In the trial, 51 participants received the various vaccines and their antibodies were compared with those of 15 people who received placebos. A single shot of vaccine with chimeric HA inactivated viruses, the researchers report, “induced remarkably high antistalk antibody titers.”

The trial was only a phase I study to establish safety and measure immune responses, which means it didn’t test the ability of the vaccines to protect people from influenza. Still, when the researchers transferred human antibodies triggered by the experimental vaccines into mice and then “challenged” the rodents with the influenza virus, the mice lost far less weight than untreated mice who also were infected, suggesting the antibodies protected them. Immunologist James Crowe, who runs the vaccine center at Vanderbilt University, says the study is “a serious effort” to test the stalk antibody hypothesis and “an important first step.”

It will likely be a few years before such a vaccine can be put into widespread use. Hopefully it will come before we are faced with a serious influenza pandemic. 

Carmen's Images

Today I want to feature Carmen's Images, the online gallery of my friend, Carmen Haakstad, an artist in Grande Prairie. Carmen was the curator of the Grande Prairie Art Gallery when I lived there in the 1980s, and now that he's retired from a successful career at the college there, has been devoting more time to his painting. This is a good thing.  

My landscape series is inspired by my love of the Northern Alberta landscape where as a boy I worked on my parent’s grain farm. The paintings you will see in Carmen’s Images Virtual Gallery are oil paintings on canvas and wood.

The main difference of the two mediums is that I use the texture and grain of wood to help create an interesting composition. This allows the grain of the wood to show through thin layers of transparent oil stain.

I love trying to capture the beauty of a cloudy fall storm,the few weeks of bright summer days, or when the sea of yellow canola fields are in full bloom. 

Carmen's art captures the scale, colour, and beauty of the Peace Country. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. 

Naturally, as an online gallery, you can buy his art, and I encourage you to do so.

Who Was America's First Science Fiction Writer?

I've always thought of American science fiction as starting in the 1920s with the publication of Hugo Gernsback's magazine, Amazing Stories. There were certainly stories that we'd consider science fiction published before that, but I wasn't aware of any novels of consequence. 

The New Yorker has published an article about Symzonia, a novel published in 1820. that may be America's first science fiction novel. 

As literary landmarks go, it’s not quite Emerson greeting Whitman at the start of a great career. But this humble advert may herald the first American science-fiction novel. Although one might point to the crushingly dull “A Flight to the Moon,” from 1813, that text is more of a philosophical dialogue than a story, and what little story it has proves to be just a dream. “Symzonia; A Voyage of Discovery” is boldly and unambiguously sci-fi. The book takes a deeply weird quasi-scientific theory and runs with it—or, more accurately, sails with it, all the way to Antarctica.

“Symzonia” is narrated by Captain Seaborn, who outfits a steam vessel for Antarctic exploration and hires a crew for a voyage that he is worryingly unforthcoming about. As the sealer forges ever farther south, beyond the reach of maps, and the compass spins wildly, the crew passes a shipwreck of alien construction and becomes terrified by a mammoth beast on the shore. The rumblings of mutiny begin. “We shipped with you, sir, for a sealing voyage; not for a voyage of discovery,” his first officer complains. Seaborn presses onward anyway. “I could not tell him of my belief of open poles,” he admits, “affording a practicable passage to the internal world, and of my confident expectations of finding comfortable winter quarters inside; for he would take that as evidence of my being insane.”

But who was the real author? That turns out to be an interesting story.  

The Atlantic's Top 25 News Photos of 2020

The Atlantic has published a page of the top 25 news photos from 2020. It's got some superb and evocative photos. This is the one that hit me the hardest. 

Teaching Animals to Talk

I am pretty sure that dogs understand some human speech. However, not many humans speak bark. There are ways around that, as this article shows, by using the same technology used to help people with developmental issues or speech pathologies.  

There are plenty of reasons why we talk to our pets. Some research suggests our chattiness can be motivated by loneliness, a need to feel control over the dynamic of our relationship with them, or even just our perception of animal consciousness. It’s likely that most pet owners would simply feel weird not greeting their wagging pup at the door with a shower of “oh, hellooo”s or cooing baby-talk to their purring cat.

What’s altogether unexpected is the idea that pets might talk to us – but new research is exploring whether and how they can.

Helmed by Dr Federico Rossano, director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at the University of California San Diego, and Leo Trottier, a PhD candidate, project They Can Talk is one of the latest in a decades-long series of psycholinguistic studies seeking to document non-humans expressing themselves in language-like ways. But unlike many studies of the past, which focused on the learning capacity of a single star animal – like Koko the gorilla, Kanzi the chimpanzee, or Rico the dog – They Can Talk is an unusually large, open-source citizen science study.

More than 1,000 dogs, 50 cats and a few horses are involved in the project – with more applicants every day.

I'll be quite interested to see how this works out, especially in the case of cats. I am quite certain that both my cats understand at least a few words. As to understanding them, that might be another matter. I suspect the issue with cats speaking to us might be more inclination than capability.  

Howard Wales, RIP

Unless you're a fairly serious Deadhead, you probably don't know who Howard Wales is. The keyboardist died on Monday, December 7. He played with Jerry Garcia and members of the Grateful Dead in the 1970s and recorded several albums with them, the best of which is probably Hooteroll?, an album that I had in my collection since it was originally released. You can also find him playing with Garcia on several live albums. 

Relix published a profile of Wales in 2017. 

Wales has maintained a long and fascinating career, following his own muse while maintaining a particular commitment to improvisation in the live setting. He cites Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff as two of his early inspirations on the Hammond B3. In the mid-1960s, Wales’ prowess on the instrument led him to perform and record with such artists as: Freddie King, Lonnie Mack, The Four Tops, The Coasters and Little Anthony and the Imperials.

Wales even put in a brief stint with James Brown. However, given Brown’s controlling nature and Wales’ free spirit, this collaboration was not destined to last and the keyboard player remained with him for only four dates.

On the more adventurous side, during the same era, Wales was among the musicians who appeared on the soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s time capsule of a film, the absurdist acid western El Topo. Wales recalls that Martin Fierro, whom he first met in Texas during the mid-1960s, invited him to join these sessions (and also helped find him a job in a tortilla factory when Wales moved to California around this same time).

Jerry Garcia once stated that “Howard did more for my ears than anybody I ever played with because he was so extended and so different.”

He made some wonderful music and I highly recommend it.  

Why People Think the Election Was Stolen

I remain both astonished and appalled at the number of people who think that the US election was stolen and that Trump actually won. In the New York Times, Ross Douthat attempts to categorize the taxonomy of fraud believers. He groups them into three types.

• The conspiracy-curious normie
• The outsider-intellectual
• The recently radicalized

He offers advice for countering the arguments of each type of believer. 

The article is worth bookmarking for future reference. For myself, I don't bother arguing. If I come across this kind of craziness in my social feeds, I just block or unfriend. 

Advice on Writng Literature Reviews

Although writing scientific literature reviews is a specialized area usually reserved for practicing scientists, it is a form of technical communication. Nature has published an article offering advice from practitioners on how to write literature reviews, and much of the advice is very similar to advice I was given as a technical writer. 

The advice is grouped into these sections:

• Be focused and avoid jargon.
• Have a process and develop your style.
• Timelines and figures make a huge difference.
• Stay updated and be open to suggestions.
• Make good use of technology.

All of these apply to some degree to what we usually consider technical communication. 

Whither Brexit?

The United Kingdom is less than a month away from leaving the European Union. SF author, Charlie Stross, who is a resident of Scotland, looks at what that's likely to mean. 

If you've only been hearing about Brexit through the mainstream media (especially British media), you'll find he has a very different take on it. 

 Weird shortages will show up on the British high street almost immediately. Cut flowers, for example, are almost overwhelmingly imported on overnight ferries from nurseries in the Netherlands: expect Interflora to take a huge hit, and many high street florists to shutter, permanently. Those displays of cut flowers near the entrances of supermarkets will be a thing of the past. So will cheap "basics" ranges of canned food: they're already vanishing from supermarket shelves, in a move that is probably intended to prepare consumers for the coming sticker shock as average food prices rise 15-20% in a month.

There will be a near-crisis in Northern Ireland as more than 200 border crossings have to either carry out customs inspections or close. The Good Friday agreement is in jeopardy if free movement across the border goes. More to the point, about half the food wholesalers supplying shops in the North have announced that they're just going to give up that market, unless streamlined arrangements can be made. Some businesses will simply become non-viable: milk, for example, is in some cases currently trucked across the border multiple times between the farm gate and the dairy (as roads wind across the border) and butter or cheese processing involves movement between facilities on different sides of an arbitrary line on a map that requires VAT and duty assessment at each step. But let's ignore Northern Ireland for a bit.

In England, Nissan have already very politely indicated that they will stop producing cars in the UK in event of no deal being reached: their supply chains are integrated across the EU. One example given a year ago was that components of the transmission of a (BMW manufactured) Mini crosses the UK/EU border half a dozen times before it's bolted onto the car, as specialized operations are carried out at facilities in different nations. Brexit seems likely to impose additional manufacturing overheads of 10-20% on the automobile industry. I expect major car plants to begin to close by mid-January. We can also probably say goodbye to continued production of Airbus components in the UK—the exact same logistic headaches apply. That's a £105Bn industry and a £11Bn industry both on the brink of non-viability due to Brexit.

Featured Links - December 6, 2020

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

• Amid Covid, the Air Hazards of Gas Appliances Draw New Scrutiny. "Covid-19 has drawn new attention to indoor air pollution. Science has long considered gas appliances to be key culprits."
• Jack Kerouac: A new site devoted to the life of the Beat generation's most influential author. 
• Running a full desktop environment on an Amazon Kindle. How to run a Linux desktop on a Kindle. It'd be OK if it had a 10" screen. 
• Why You Don't Need Adobe Reader (And What to Use Instead). "Adobe Reader is bloated and slow. Here's why you don't need it and how to open PDF files without Adobe Reader."
• How Hackers Could Trick Unwitting Scientists Into Producing Dangerous Genes. "In a new letter to the editor pulled from the prestigious scientific journal Nature, a team of Israeli researchers pose a frankly wild-sounding question: could a computer hack result in a scientist being swindled into creating a piece of genetic code that’s harmful—or potentially toxic—rather than helpful?"
• How the huge displays at NASA's mission control worked. "You've seen the videos of old-school NASA mission-control from the 1960s, with those huge, wall-sized screens — which displayed bright lines showing the flight path of spacecraft, and flight data. How the heck did they do that? They didn't have wall-sized LCDs back then."

Imagining the End of Capitalism

Kim Stanley Robinson has a new novel, The Ministry for the Future, that is about climate change in the near future and how we survive it. According to Robinson, one of the things we have to do is make a transition away from capitalism into a new economic order that places a higher value on the care of our planet. 

Jacobin magazine has published a long interview with Robinson. It's worth reading on its own, even if you aren't like me, a huge fan of his work.  

I wanted to ask you about the now-famous quote attributed to Jameson, which is actually a bit of a paraphrase: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” It strikes me this book is coming out in a year when it’s become pretty easy to imagine the end of things, and that the real challenge is to imagine the beginnings of some kind of socialist system. As much as The Ministry is about the future, it suggests that those beginnings we need are already here with us now and that it’s really a matter of scaling up some of those alternatives.

I’m a novelist, I’m a literature major. I’m not thinking up these ideas, I’m listening to the world and grasping — sometimes at straws, sometimes just grasping at new ideas and seeing what everybody is seeing.

 If we could institute some of these good ideas, we could quickly shift from a capitalism to a post-capitalism that is more sustainable and more socialist, because so many of the obvious solutions are contained in the socialist program. And if we treated the biosphere as part of our extended body that needs to be attended to and taken care of, then things could get better fast, and there are already precursors that demonstrate this possibility.

I don’t think it’s possible to postulate a breakdown, or a revolution, to an entirely different system that would work without mass disruption and perhaps blowback failures, so it’s better to try to imagine a stepwise progression from what we’ve got now to a better system. And by the time we’re done — I mean, “done” is the wrong word — but by the end of the century, we might have a radically different system than the one we’ve got now. And this is kind of necessary if we’re going to survive without disaster. So, since it’s necessary, it might happen. And I’m always looking for the plausible models that already exist and imagining that they get ramped up.

The Curious History of Alphabetical Order

I've never given much thought to alphabetical order. It seems like a natural way of organizing information. But it turns out that it does have a history, and not that old a history at that. The Guardian reviews A Place for Everything by Judith Flanders, a book about the history of the alphabet and alphabetical order. The review makes the book sound quite fascinating. 

The slow rise of alphabetical order relied on many technologies coming together: the codex book (scrolls are fine for continuous reading, but rubbish for looking things up), pagination (rare in the earliest books) and the explosion of words that came with the arrival of paper and the printing press. Ultimately, Flanders suggests, the unstoppable democratisation of knowledge demanded alphabetical order. When the Word of God was contained only in churches and monasteries, there was little need for alphabetisation. But when mendicant preachers began crisscrossing Europe in the 12th century, they relied on handbooks such as Peter Lombard’s Sentences, which let them look for biblical keywords in the alphabetised index and construct ready-made sermons out of them.

Every dictionary compiler seems to have thought that he alone invented alphabetical order. Few realised its significance. Hugh of Pisa’s 12th-century Great Book of Derivations kept interrupting its alphabetical ordering of words by giving precedence to longer over smaller entries. John Balbi’s 13th-century Catholicon, another early dictionary, includes a pained entreaty about its alphabetical arrangement: “I have devised this order at the cost of great effort and strenuous application … I beg of you, therefore, good reader, do not scorn this great labour of mine and this order as something worthless.”

A Look Back at the 2020 Hurricane Season

The 2020 hurricane season, nominally from June 1 to November 30, was unusual and unprecedented in many ways. At one point or another, every mile of the U.S. Gulf or Atlantic coast was under a watch or warning. At Eye on the Storm, Dr. Jeff Masters takes a detailed look at the season. 

The 2020 season was notable not only for its record number of named storms (after breaking into the Greek alphabet by the ridiculously early date of September 18), but also for its record number of rapidly intensifying storms (10); and record number of landfalling U.S. named storms (12). Let’s not forget the record-breaking November activity – two catastrophic hurricanes hit Central America in November, including Hurricane Iota, the latest category 5 storm ever recorded in the Atlantic. At least seven hurricanes from 2020 will be worthy of having their names retired: Iota, Eta, Zeta, Delta, Sally, Laura, and Isaias – although there is still no official mechanism for retiring storm names from the Greek alphabet. The record for most names retired in one season was set in 2005, when five hurricanes had their names retired.

 If that isn't enough, Miami researcher, Brian McNoldy, has a review of the season on his Tropical Atlantic Update blog. 

A record-breaking twelve named storms made landfall in the contiguous U.S., easily surpassing the previous record of nine set in 1916. Five of those twelve hit Louisiana alone, and three of those five were hurricanes (Laura, Delta, and Zeta). The Yucatan peninsula had three landfalls, including two hurricanes (Delta and Zeta), and then there's Nicaragua. Two Category 4 hurricanes made landfall at the same location (technically seven miles apart) just two weeks apart: Eta and Iota. Iota, a mid-November storm, became the season's strongest storm, rapidly intensifying to reach Category 5 status.  Not only was it the season's only Category 5 hurricane, it made 2020 the fifth consecutive year to have a Category 5 hurricane. November 2020 was the only November to have two major hurricanes.

 

The Modern World Is Too Complex

It's getting harder and harder to understand how the modern world works. That doesn't matter directly to most of us in our daily lives, until something breaks. Then we figure out what broke and either get it fixed or replace it. 

That is much harder to do when you're talking about more complex systems, like the software that runs a stock exchange (I have some experience with that), supply chain systems that manage the inventory for a large retail chain like Walmart, or the software that runs an airline's reservation system. It's often possible to create a failure chain for a complex system, but as soon as you connect it to another complex system you are in uncharted waters.

As Tim Maughan points out in this article from OneZero, this has consequences.

The average daily trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange generally spans between 2 billion and 6 billion shares, with the average daily trading value in 2013 being approximately $169 billion. And the only way to deal with a market of this size and complexity has been a relentless adoption of automation — and the increased handing over of day-to-day analysis and decision-making to software. And in an industry like finance, which is preoccupied entirely with growth, these systems have led to an exponential increase in complexity — while human traders would traditionally average five trades a day, high-frequency trading algorithms can make 10,000 trades every second.

And those platforms of technology and software that glue all these huge networks together have become a complex system themselves. The internet might be the system that we interact with in the most direct and intimate ways, but most of us have little comprehension of what lies behind our finger-smudged touchscreens, truly understood by few. Made up of data centers, internet exchanges, huge corporations, tiny startups, investors, social media platforms, datasets, adtech companies, and billions of users and their connected devices, it’s a vast network dedicated to mining, creating, and moving data on scales we can’t comprehend. YouTube users upload more than 500 hours of video every minute — which works out as 82.2 years of video uploaded to YouTube every day. As of June 30, 2020, there are over 2.7 billion monthly active Facebook users, with 1.79 billion people on average logging on daily. Each day, 500 million tweets are sent— or 6,000 tweets every second, with a day’s worth of tweets filling a 10-million-page book. Every day, 65 billion messages are sent on WhatsApp. By 2025, it’s estimated that 463 million terabytes of data will be created each day — the equivalent of 212,765,957 DVDs.

So, what we’ve ended up with is a civilization built on the constant flow of physical goods, capital, and data, and the networks we’ve built to manage those flows in the most efficient ways have become so vast and complex that they’re now beyond the scale of any single (and, arguably, any group or team of) human understanding them. It’s tempting to think of these networks as huge organisms, with tentacles spanning the globe that touch everything and interlink with one another, but I’m not sure the metaphor is apt. An organism suggests some form of centralized intelligence, a nervous system with a brain at its center, processing data through feedback loops and making decisions. But the reality with these networks is much closer to the concept of distributed intelligence or distributed knowledge, where many different agents with limited information beyond their immediate environment interact in ways that lead to decision-making, often without them even knowing that’s what they’re doing.

It's a sobering article. At the end, Maughan writes:

So what’s to be done about all this? Over the coming months I’m going to both locate ways that we can try to increase our knowledge of the seemingly unknowable, as well as find strategies to counter the powerlessness and anxiety the system produces. Along the way I’m going to be talking to a lot of experts about everything from automated shipping and algorithmic trading to financial regulation and political resistance, as well as taking deep dives into how emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and quantum computing could make things better — or a lot worse. I hope you’ll join me as we explore how our systems work, how their complexities impact our lives, and how we can regain some agency within them.

Future articles will appear in a column called No One's Driving. I am definitely going to follow what he writes.  

You might also want to check out my blog post from May of this year, which was triggered by a profile of statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb.  

I hadn't really thought much about our modern reliance on optimization and how it affects supply chains until reading Vernor Vinge's, A Deepness on the Sky, a couple of decades ago. In this novel, an interstellar trader visits a world that by most standards would be called a paradise. But it relied on a highly optimized system for food production. A hundred and fifty years later, when the trader returned, the planet had reverted to savagery because of a series of unanticipated catastrophes. That got me thinking. 

What It Was Like To Work At Arecibo

As posted yesterday, the receiver platform at the Arecibo Observatory has collapsed, destroying any hopes that somehow the observatory could be saved.

On Twitter, Professor Lisa Harvey Smith, an astrophysicist who has worked at Arecibo, posted a thread about what it was like to work there and included several pictures of the observatory from an astronomer's perspective. 

It's interesting reading and makes me very sad that we have lost such an important tool for understanding the universe. 

A thread: I wanted to give you a sense of what a great telescope she was, so here's my Arecibo radio telescope: a guided tour. First, this is the focus cabin, where the radio waves reflected into. Housed inside were several receivers to gather the waves -> electrical signals.

Here's a view inside the focus cabin, where we were uncovering one of the receivers and putting it into place to observe hydrogen from our Milky Way.

 

DeepMind Makes a Breakthrough in Biology

Researchers using Google's DeepMind artificial intelligence (AI) tool have made a major breakthrough in biology. They have accurately predicted protein structures from their amino-acid sequence, often referred to as protein folding. 

DeepMind’s program, called AlphaFold, outperformed around 100 other teams in a biennial protein-structure prediction challenge called CASP, short for Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction. The results were announced on 30 November, at the start of the conference — held virtually this year — that takes stock of the exercise.

“This is a big deal,” says John Moult, a computational biologist at the University of Maryland in College Park, who co-founded CASP in 1994 to improve computational methods for accurately predicting protein structures. “In some sense the problem is solved.”

It's hard to overstate the importance of this breakthrough. Problems that took literally years of work to solve, could now be solved in hours or days of computer time.

An AlphaFold prediction helped to determine the structure of a bacterial protein that Lupas’s lab has been trying to crack for years. Lupas’s team had previously collected raw X-ray diffraction data, but transforming these Rorschach-like patterns into a structure requires some information about the shape of the protein. Tricks for getting this information, as well as other prediction tools, had failed. “The model from group 427 gave us our structure in half an hour, after we had spent a decade trying everything,” Lupas says.

Demis Hassabis, DeepMind’s co-founder and chief executive, says that the company plans to make AlphaFold useful so other scientists can employ it. (It previously published enough details about the first version of AlphaFold for other scientists to replicate the approach.) It can take AlphaFold days to come up with a predicted structure, which includes estimates on the reliability of different regions of the protein. “We’re just starting to understand what biologists would want,” adds Hassabis, who sees drug discovery and protein design as potential applications.

Update: Here's a Twitter thread, written by a professor of computational biology, that has a rather more sanguine take on the breakthrough. The TL;DR: 

But protein folding is not solved. Not only is it not even a well defined statement to say something like that (others have pointed out that there is a lot of subtlety in what one even means by "protein folding") but it's not even the winner for all the CASP14 proteins.

 

Arecibo's Receiver Has Collapsed

The 950-ton receiver platform of the Arecibo Observatory collapsed overnight. I haven't yet seen any pictures from the site, but the damage must be extensive and will likely make demolition and disassembly more difficult.

This is truly a sad day for astronomers worldwide. Arecibo played a key role in many major discoveries. I hope money can be found to rebuild it. I've heard estimates of about a hundred million dollars, which doesn't seem like that much. 

Update: Here is a picture from Twitter, taken by Dennis Vazquez.

A Bigger, Better Turing Machine You Can Make

I posted a while back about my cousin, Mike Gardi, who built a demonstration Turing Machine. After receiving some feedback on the original product, he's now created a bigger, better, and more collaborative Turing Machine, described here on the Hackaday site.  

This collegial dynamic is very much on display with TMD-2, [Michael Gardi]’s latest iteration of his Turing machine demonstrator. We covered the original TMD-1 back in late summer, the idea of which was to serve as a physical embodiment of the Turing machine concept. Briefly, the TMD-1 represented the key “tape and head” concepts of the Turing machine with a console of servo-controlled flip tiles, the state of which was controlled by a three-state, three-symbol finite state machine.

TMD-1 was capable of simple programs that really demonstrated the principles of Turing machines, and it really seemed to catch on with readers. Based on the comments of one reader, [Newspaperman5], [Mike] started thinking bigger and better for TMD-2. He expanded the finite state machine to six states and six symbols, which meant coming up with something more scalable than the Hall-effect sensors and magnetic tiles of TMD-1.

[Mike] opted for optical character recognition using a Raspberry Pi cam along with Open CV and the Tesseract OCR engine. The original servo-driven tape didn’t scale well either, so that was replaced by a virtual tape displayed on a 7″ LCD display. The best part of the original, the tile-based FSM, was expanded but kept that tactile programming experience.

If you want to find out more about the TMD-2, check out Mike's post on the Hackaday blog. For instructions on how to make the TMD-2, see his article on the Instructable site. Mike has included a quick start guide and an app that you can use to learn the principles of Turning machines. 

With the application running I highly recommend that you work through the TMD-2 Quick Start Guide that is attached to this Instructable. The first part will tell you how the TMD-2 application works, followed by an exercise that will teach you how a Turing machine works. At the end are some additional challenges for those that want to learn more.

TV and Movie Reviews - November 2020

Here are some short reviews of things I watched in November. My viewing pattern has been disrupted because my wife is spending a lot of time taking care of her mother, so I haven't been watching a lot of shows that I know she wants to see.

Movies

• You Only Live Twice: I don't think that even a super-villain can hide a rocket launch inside a volcanic crater. Even in 1967, somebody would have noticed. Other than that, typical early Bond.
• Diamonds Are Forever: Unlike the big spectacle of post-From Russia With Love Bond flicks, this was a return to the first, more physical Bond. Much to my surprise, I realized that I never saw this one before. I honestly don't know how I missed seeing it at some point in the last 50 years. 
• The Man Who Would Be King: Sean Connery rules in this John Houston adaptation of a Rudyard Kipling story. 
• Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds: Directed by Werner Herzog, this is a light documentary about meteors. There are a few notable moments, the meteorite hunting scene in Antarctica especially good. (Apple TV+)
• The Matrix: Reloaded: It's less philosophically interesting than the first movie, but the effects are much better. (Netflix)
• The Untouchables: This has one of Sean Connery's best performances, for which he won an Oscar, and is expertly directed by Brian de Palma. It still holds up quite well. (Amazon Prime)

TV Shows and Videos

• Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns: I finally finished watching the series and enjoyed it immensely. I may watch some of it again, just for some of the performance clips, especially from the period before the 1950s. (PBS)
• Country Music: A Film by Ken Burns: I've watched four episodes of this and am enjoying it. Country music is definitely not my favourite musical genre, but the quality of some of the songs and performances is undeniable. (PBS)
• Nova: Touching an Asteroid: Fascinating doc about the mission to bring back samples from the asteroid Bennu. (PBS)
• Nova: Kilauea: Hawaii on Fire: I rewatched this one. I visited Hawaii and Kilauea in the 1980s so this was especially interesting. The scenes of encroaching lava are terrifying. (PBS)
• War of the Worlds: Apparently there is a second season coming, which hopefully will explain WTF is going on. The first season had eight episodes, and it easily could have been cut down to three or four. Definitely not recommended. (CBC Gem)
• Classic Albums: Who's Next: If you like The Who, this is a must watch for the performance clips and track breakdowns. Favourite part - the isolation of Keith Moon's drumming on "My Wife". (Amazon Prime)

Ben Bova, RIP

That damned disease has claimed another victim. SF author and editor, Ben Bova, has died from covid-related causes at the age of 88. 

His first novel, The Star Conquerors, was published in 1959, and I remember reading it when I was still in grade school. He went on to publish many short stories before becoming editor of Analog in 1971. After leaving Analog, he wrote many novels, mostly about space exploration. From Tor.com:

Bova’s best-known works involved plausible sciences about humanity’s expansion into the universe, looking at how we might adapt to live in space with novels such as 1992’s Mars, about the first human expedition to the red planet. He followed that novel up with additional installments, forming the Grand Tour series, which explored all of the solar system’s major bodies. The latest installment, Uranus, was published in July, and was scheduled to be the first of a trilogy. The second installment, Neptune, is scheduled for release next year. The ESF notes that “the straightforwardness of Bova’s agenda for humanity may mark him as a figure from an earlier era; but the arguments he laces into sometimes overloaded storylines are arguments it is important, perhaps absolutely vital, to make.”

File 770 has a longer obituary listing some of his many carreer accomplishments. 

I met him a few times at conventions; he was a regular guest at Toronto's Ad Astra. He was always friendly and generous with his time. He even gave me a short article for my fanzine, Torus, in the late '80s. 

He will be missed. 

Merriam-Webster's 2020 Word of the Year

Merriam-Webster has announced its word of the year. To no one's surprise, it's "pandemic". 

Also, unsurprisingly, there are several pandemic-related words in the top twenty, including "coronavirus" and "quarantine". Other top words relate to this year's political turmoil.  

Merriam-Webster picks its annual word of the year based on a statistical analysis of words that are looked up on its online platforms “in extremely high numbers” and which show “a significant year-over-year increase in traffic.” The company said the first big spike in “pandemic” searches came on February 3, 2020—the day the first American COVID-19 patient was released from the hospital. That day saw “pandemic” lookups rise 1,621% above the previous year.

I would not have predicted the last two words on the list.  

Finding Biological Information In Fossils

It's long been assumed that whatever biological information was in fossils was destroyed by the process of fossilization and deep time. Now some researchers are reporting that may not always be the case.

Paleontologists are lucky to find complete sets of fossilized bones. Sometimes, they get even luckier, finding preserved impressions of delicate features like feathers. Beyond those clues, though, most of the biology of extinct species—their DNA, internal organs, and unique chemistry—has been totally destroyed by the many millions of years that separate us. Except, what if it hasn’t? Some scientists now claim they can tease much more complex biological information out of apparently mundane fossils, including things that most paleontologists don’t expect to survive over millions of years, such as skin and eggshell.

Molecular paleobiologist Jasmina Wiemann has been on the forefront of this exciting research since 2018, co-authoring papers that reveal elements of fossils that cannot be immediately seen with our eyes but can be detected through a series of complex chemical and statistical analyses. Her recent paper, published this summer with Jason Crawford and Derek Briggs, builds upon other, similar research from the past two years. She and her co-authors claim they can determine the chemical signatures of skin, bone, teeth, and eggshell. Even better, they can train anyone else in the field within approximately 20 minutes to find these ancient traces using their techniques. It’s an opportunity they hope will be widely used within museum collections the world over.

If true and verified, this is a major development in paleontology, perhaps the biggest of this century so far. It opens up whole new avenues of research. 

Howard Iron Works Museum of Printing Presses

The invention of the printing press is arguably one of the key events of the last millennium. It opened the way for the mass dissemination of information and was the dominant technology for information distribution until the mid-20th century. 

I've been fascinated by printing technology and printing presses ever since childhood. My father worked for a newspaper and I saw the evolution of printing from hot lead to computerized typesetting and offset printing first hand.  

So I am excited to find out (thanks to BlogTO) that there is a museum of printing presses not much more than an hour's drive away from where I live. The Howard Iron Works Printing Museum and Restoration facility is located in Oakville, Ontario. 

The Howard Iron Works Museum and Restoration facility is a lifelong dream of Liana and Nick Howard. The Howards are custodians of Howard Graphic Equipment Ltd., a company that is a leading edge supplier and rebuilder of printing and converting equipment. The business continues into its 48th year having started in 1967.

The museum's website is a treasure trove of printing lore. Sections are devoted to various types of printing presses in use from the 1830s to 1950s. There is an introductory page that describes the basic features of that type of press and pages for individual examples. The website includes a gallery of letterheads, which are fascinating in their own right. 

Once we're through the pandemic, I intend to head down to Oakville for a visit (by appointment only, according to the website.  

How People Got Their News

In this era of instant news and information at our fingertips, it may be hard to remember that it wasn't always this way. One or two hundred years ago, newspapers were the primary vehicle for news and great effort went into their production and distribution. 

BlogTO has an article about the history of newspaper production and distribution in Toronto in the 19th and early 20th century. It's worth reading for a bit of perspective on our information-saturated times.

I found this part especially poignant. 

At the tail end of the 19th century, Toronto was a bustling city of just over 180,000 people. A number of papers competed for readers’ attentions.

Newsstands were manned by newsboys and newsgirls. These children were often homeless, eking out a precarious living by selling newspapers, shoelaces, pencils, and shining shoes.

Sometimes, these children would take refuge in cheap lodgings in the downtown core, or at the local newsboys’ home (a charitable institution set up by George W. Allan in the late 19th century). 

Legislation by the Ontario government in 1893 aimed at providing a more stable life for the city’s homeless children by getting them off the streets, but child labour and precarious living persisted well into the twentieth century.

Featured Links - November 29, 2020

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

• The Search for Social Identity Leads to “Us” versus “Them”. "Uncertainty in the world threatens our sense of self. To cope, people embrace populism."
• The Surprising Way Keyhole Wasps Can Take Down an Airplane. "Keyhole wasps like to build their nests in tiny holes, including the openings of devices used to measure the speed of aircraft. A recent investigation shows the problem is worse than we realized."
• The new 'gold rush' for green lithium. "Lithium is crucial for the transition to renewables, but mining it has been environmentally costly. Now a more sustainable source of lithium has been found deep beneath our feet."
• My Hunt for the Original McDonald’s French-Fry Recipe. "Veteran line-cooks, experts, and die-hard fans tell the story of the fries that birthed an empire, then disappeared—until now."
• 50 Books of Speculative Fiction You Should Read — Across 18 Subgenres. This list was compiled by staff at Toronto's Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy. (Out of the 50, I've read 22 and have bought another 4 but not yet read them). 
• Patients of a Vermont Hospital Are Left ‘in the Dark’ After a Cyberattack. 'A wave of damaging attacks on hospitals upended the lives of patients with cancer and other ailments. “I have no idea what to do,” one said.'

Need Advice on Inkjet Printers

OK, hive mind. I need some advice on inkjet printers. Our Epson 835 Artisan printer/scanner is dying. We had the heads cleaned and got new cartridges, and it is still not printing some colours. It's almost 7 years old and I don't want to throw more money at it. I do have an even older Brother black-and-white laser printer that we use for basic printing but it doesn't have a scanner.

I want another inkjet printer than can print good-quality photographs up to 8x10. (The Epson uses six different colours, and the print quality is excellent).  It has to have a scanner of at least 2400 dpi that can handle slides and negatives. Cost should be under $300 if possible.

Suggestions in comments would be welcome.