Technical Communication Links - January 31, 2020

Some links related to technical communication.

• JetBrains Mono is a free, open source monospace font. The larger x-height lowercase characters make it easier to read.
• 11 Useful Tools to Check, Clean, and Optimize CSS Files. Given that almost every technical communication tool now uses some form of CSS, these could be useful. 
• 620 Free Online Programming & Computer Science Courses You Can Choose from to Kick Off 2020. If you need to learn some programming, this will be a useful list.
• Spacewalk Checklist (PDF link). This 27-page PDF is the checklist for a spacewalk conducted on the STS-121 mission. I'd love to have worked on this.
• What is a DITA Content Management System (CMS)? A guest post on Tom Johnson's blog by John Baker of easyDITA . 
• Learn UI design fundamentals with this free one-hour course. This could be useful for writers who have to produce online help or web-based documentation.. 

Interview With Alastair Reynolds

Alastair Reynolds is one of my favourite SF authors. I've read almost every book he's written since discovering his Revelation Space series. If you haven't read any of his books, I'd recommend starting with either his Poseidon's Children series or the novel, Pushing Ice, which starts out in a setting something like the Expanse series, but goes much, much, farther out. Two of his short stories were adapted as part of the animated Netflix series, Love, Death, and Robots.

The Estonian magazine, Reaktor, has published a long interview with him, which is reproduced on his blog.

Reaktor: In current times, there are lot of tensions and instability in world politics, not to mention major processes close to your home like Brexit. Are you affected by these debates and political games? Do you transfer and alter some aspects from current political or socio-economical events into your books? 

AR: They oppress me terribly. I’m a child of the Cold War. I grew up in the firm and certain knowledge that a nuclear exchange between the West and East was all but inevitable at some point, probably before the end of the twentieth century. I don’t know anyone of my generation who didn’t feel the same way. It was drummed into us all the time. Then, by some miracle, we escaped from under that shadow. Nuclear weapons remain a grave concern, and proliferation must be resisted, but at the same time it seemed as if we’d dodged that particular bullet, and emerged stumbling into sunlight and hope. The Berlin Wall came down. Nelson Mandela was released! The world seemed to be on a better track, one that put racism, nationalism and militarism behind us. But we all know that wasn’t to last and now we seem beset by old-world politics of the worst kind, everywhere we look. Idiots in the White House, idiots in Downing Street. The total, shaming idiocy of Brexit. I was never going to be a fan, given that I lived in the Netherlands for nearly two decades and benefited from the ease of movement of EU rules. My wife is French; her family are scattered across half of Europe. I am a European to the marrow, a Federalist, and always will be.

I don’t write in a vacuum, so these real-world factors are bound to seep into my books, by choice or otherwise. I saw House of Suns as a “post-911” book as it deals, on certain levels, with authority, retribution and the use of torture as a means of intelligence-gathering. Similar themes play out in The Prefect, and ten years later they were still echoing through Elysium Fire. That has been called a Brexit-themed book and there is some truth in that, but I started it long before the referendum, or Trump’s election. What I was most concerned about was the rise of demagoguery. I had one selfish fear, which was that the world would improve before the book came out, and the likes of Trump and Farage would be consigned to the dustbin of history. But things have only got worse. That said, I still remain a stubborn optimist in the long-run.

Why I Won't Buy an iPad

Although iPhones and iPads are popular in my family, I've steadfastly refused to use them. I have an Android phone and tablet, and I'm happy with both. I recognize that there are good things about Apple's products, but the locked down nature of the Apple ecosytem doesn't appeal to me.

Ten years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote a post on BoingBoing called "Why I won't buy an iPad, and think you sholdn't either". It got quite a bit of attention and was even quoted in Steve Jobs' biography.

He's updated the post for the tenth anniversary of the iPad, and his opinion hasn't changed much.

Then there's the device itself: clearly there's a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there's also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe -- really believe -- in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can't open it, you don't own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of "that's too complicated for my mom" (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn't too complicated for their poor old mothers).

My recent experience with my Twitter client shows the validity of the open development model; there are a plethora of Twitter clients available for Android, many more than for iOS, and many of them are free.

Cory was right ten years ago and he's still right today.

Brexit 2020

At the recommendation of SF author, Charlie Stross, I've been following Ian Dunt on Twitter. He's an editor at Politics.co.uk and a vocal and acerbic commenter on Twitter.

He's just published an article called Brexit 2020 that attempts to explain some of the consequences of the British government's inexplicable decision to leave the EU. It's written in conversation format and is both informative and entertaining, in the way that watching a slow motion movie of a train derailment is entertaining.

I saw Boris Johnson on the telly the other day.

Really? That never happens anymore.

No, it was crazy. He just popped up. It was like a Big Foot sighting. Anyway, he seemed to suggest it was all really easy. We'd get it done in a year and then be free to do whatever we want.

Yeah, that's the official narrative. But the reality is very different.

Are you suggesting that the government is making a sustained attempt to deceive the public in order to hide the fact that they have an impossible set of negotiating goals and no competence to deliver them?

Yes, I know. It's hard to believe.

I know what happens now. You start talking about fisheries and regulatory alignment and customs procedures and then I gradually lose the will to live and have to order extremely expensive whisky.

That's right, that's how this works. So here's the thing. The government wants to get the Brexit deal negotiated, ratified and implemented in eleven months, before December 31st. They were entitled to an extension but have decided not to take it. That means the deal is going to have to be proper bare-bones - a completely stripped-down set of negotiating goals.

The article goes into quite a lot of detail. The main conclusion I've drawn is that the UK is well and truly fucked although it may be a year or two before they realize just how bad the situation is.

Fun With Twitter Clients

I've just spent a few hours fiddling with my Twitter client. I use the default Twitter web client on my PC but on my Android phone, I've been using TweetCaster. Yesterday, it stopped working, giving me an error saying it couldn't connect to Twitter. Following the suggestions on their support page did no good. I ended up deleting the app's data, uninstalling, and re-installing, but it won't connect to Twitter. I can't even sign in to set up the app.

I switched back to Plume, the app I was using previously. Plume is fine as a Twitter client, although it lacks a couple of features found in TweetCaster, but the current version is a battery hog, using about 1 percent of my battery per minute.

So I started looking for a new Twitter client. The two that looked most interesting were Flex 2 and Talon. I finally settled on Talon, mainly because it is cheaper and has a compact mode that I didn't see in Flex 2. The layout is fairly customizable, although as with almost every app I've found, not customizable as I'd like. To give one example, I can display the actual time of the tweet, but it shows the time and date. I just want the time, and I'd like it displayed in bold. So far battery usage doesn't seem to be an issue.

So I'll give Talon a conditional recommendation. It's not perfect, but I don't see anything that will keep me from using it.

Update: As it turns out, the TweetCaster app is really broken and it's not just me. The developer claims that something Twitter did broke the app. Presumably it will get fixed at some point, and if it does, I may reinstall it as a backup to Talon.

Update 2: An update that fixes problem has been posted in the Google Play Store.

William Gibson and Agency

Willam Gibson's latest novel, Agency, was published last week, and it's sitting on my Kindle waiting for me to finish a couple of other things first. In the meantime, I've been reading some of the reviews and articles about Gibson. For my own future reference and your enjoyment, here are some of them.

As I noted in a post recently, I will say that I thought his previous novel, The Peripheral, was the best book of the decade, and I am going to re-read it before diving into Agency. 

• List of Gibson's upcoming appearances. 
• Discussing Agency with William Gibson. An email conversation between Gibson and Randy Rucker. 
• In William Gibson’s new novel, AI is actually the good guy.
• From the Guardian, Agency by William Gibson review – a world in an instant. An extremely perceptive review by SF author M. John Harrison.
• From the New York Times, The Darkness Where the Future Should Be. "What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?"
• Tracking Reality's "Fuckedness Quotient": An Interview with William Gibson, from the LA Times.

Movin' Right Along

Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, died recently. Like George Martin with the Beatles, Hunter was an unofficial member of the band, and it's widely acknowledged that his elliptical, Americana-tinged lyrics were a key contribution to their success.

Rolling Stone reports that the David Nelson band recently recorded, "Movin' Right Along", a previously unheard song by Hunter, and they've released it as a single in tribute to him. "Movin' Right Along" is classic Hunter and would have fit perfectly in one of the Dead's sets with songs like "Jack Straw" and "Wharf Rat". It sounds like it was written yesterday.

“It impressed me how timely it was,” says Nelson, speaking to Rolling Stone the day Iran sent missiles into Iraq. “It fits in with what’s happening now: ‘Loaded my gun and went to war/Movin’ right along/I shot left and I shot right, now listen to my song.’ Boy, that just stunned me in terms how current it was.”

The lyric is also imbued with a sense of mortality: “I’m about to blow this joint/So listen to my song/I have died to prove a point/Movin’ right along.” But Nelson insists Hunter wasn’t writing about himself. “I didn’t see it as a farewell song, and I don’t think he did either,” Nelson says. “But it’s a testament to him.”

Give it a listen.

Have a Look At Chrome's New Password Checker Feature

For some time, Google Chrome has been warning about passwords that have been identified as part of a security breach, but I hadn't realized that they've added some new checks to the features. If you use the Check Passwords feature it will also warn you about passwords that you've used more than once and weak passwords.

It might not be as good as using a password manager like LastPass, but it's certainly worth running the check. I'm fairly careful about assigning passwords to my accounts and it found more things than I expected for me to clean up.

This article from Wired explains how to use it and also mentions similar features on other browsers like Safari.

Featured Links - January 26, 2020

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

• The Coronavirus Is Already Politically Fraught. A good article from Crawford Kilian, publisher of the essential H5N1 blog.
• The Creeping Plague Of Ghastly Facadism. We saw some bad examples in London and Toronto is falling victim to it.
• Confessions of a Hate Reader, or Bad Writing Habits I Picked up from Bad Criticism. "Instead of a harsh teacher or a discouraging parent, the Critical Voice I’ve internalised is that of the nitpicking internet hate-reader."
• How to FBI-proof your encrypted iPhone backups. If you use an iPhone, you may want to read this.
• "I don't think people fully understand how dysfunctional and dangerous Facebook's political ad policy is." An important Twitter thread about Facebook. 
• N. K. Jemison's Dream Worlds. A profile of the science fiction writer who is the first person to win the Best Novel Hugo Award three years in a row. 
• The Engines That Came In From the Cold. A spectacular documentary about the Soviet moon program rocket engines that ended up propelling American rockets. 

Play the Half-Life Games For Free

I haven't been doing much gaming the last few years, but when I was, I loved Half-Life and it's sequel Half-Life 2. I haven't finished either game though, so I was excited to find out that you can play the whole Half-Life series for free until mid-March. It's a promotion for the next Half-Life game, Half-Life: Alyx, which will be released in VR format. More details in the linked article.

Yes, There's Hope For Us

This is the first in what will be an ongoing series of posts contrasting my "We're Toast" series of posts, with links to articles that suggest that we might somehow pull through the coming crisis.

Climate Change and Environment

• Shutdown of US coal power facilities saved over 26,000 lives, study finds. "Shift to gas saved more than 300m tons of planet-heating carbon dioxide as nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide levels dropped."
• Once Doomed, America's Recovering Bison Are Saving US Ecosystems. "Today some 500,000 bison have been restored in over 6,000 locations, including public lands, private ranches, and Native American lands."
• In 2030, we ended the climate emergency. Here's how. "If words make worlds, then we urgently need to tell a new story about the climate crisis. Here is one vision of what it could look and feel like to radically, colle
• How to Stop Freaking Out and Tackle Climate Change. "Here’s a five-step plan to deal with the stress and become part of the solution."
• Scientists Fight Back Against Toxic ‘Forever’ Chemicals. The ubiquitous compounds known as PFAS are nearly indestructible. But scientists are learning to split their ultra-strong carbon-fluorine bonds.

Politics

• Why the Climate Movement's Next Big Target Is Wall Street. "Climate activists are taking on a new pipeline: The one that funnels money from Wall Street into planetary destruction."

Technology

• One Of Climate Change's Biggest Contributors Is In Your Car, But It’s Not Coming From The Tailpipe. Oddly, CO2 may be our saviour here.
• Against all odds. "The inside story of how scientists across three continents produced an Ebola vaccine."

In Praise of Canadian Healthcare

This is addressed to my US readers who may have concerns about "socialized" or single-payer healthcare.

Three days ago I had surgery for a double groin hernia. It was day surgery; into the hospital at 10:30, and I was home by suppertime, doped to the gills and not feeling too much pain. Later that night my bladder seized up (a known complication). I was catheterized, drained, and sent home with a prescription within about three hours.

I am on the mend now. The pain is bearable and not nearly as bad as I feared (I am a wimp when it comes to procedures). I am off the heavy duty pain meds, and bodily functions are working if not yet optimal. Next week I go back for a followup with the surgeon.

Total cost to me so far: $40 for hospital parking and a few dollars for a bottle of mineral oil. Prescription costs were covered by OHIP because I'm a senior. No co-pays. Paperwork was just a few standard forms at the hospital.

The portion of my Ontario taxes that is set aside for OHIP is about $900 per year. I have extra coverage through my former employer that I have to pay for, but it's nothing like the costs of typical plans in the US.

Admittedly healthcare in Canada does have issues. Hospitals can be overcrowded and there are often long waits for non-urgent care or to see specialists. OTOH, it has been my experience that anything that was urgent was handled promptly.

I no longer travel to the US because of the risk of a sudden medical emergency, such as a heart attack or a stroke, that could be considered by an insurance company to fall under "pre-existing" condition.

It is a vast relief living here knowing that I am unlikely to be hit with crippling medical bills because of circumstances out of my control and that my fellow citizens enjoy at least a basic standard of care that they can count on.

Privacy, What Privacy?

If you've ever posted a picture of yourself on the internet, or photos of you have been posted, the odds are good that you are now part of a giant photographic database compiled by a secretive US startup.

The New York Times has revealed that Clearview AI has compiled a database of billions of facial images scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and other websites and has put that together with a sophisticated AI-based facial recognition system that is now being used by law enforcement and government agencies.

Privacy advocates have been warning that this would happen sooner or later and now it seems that it has. Should you be worried? Think about this:

But without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year, according to the company, which declined to provide a list. The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

And it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

I think I'm going to start searching for companies that produce makeup to confuse facial recognition systems. They should be a good investment.

How a Burning Observatory Taught Astronomers a Hard Lesson

Seventeen years ago an out of control brush fire destroyed the Mount Stromlo observatory south west of Canberra in Australia. The 74 inch reflector, several other telescopes, and the observatory's library and archives were destroyed.

It was a great tragedy for astronomy, but astronomers have learned from it.

Whilst the devastating 2003 fires destroyed a large portion of the Mount Stromlo Observatory, the rebuilding and rehabilitation of the site have come a long way since, 17 years after the horrors of that unforgettable afternoon. It’s now a thriving facility, with researchers working in labs, astronomers observing the heavens, young people attending astronomy outreach programs and even a hot-spot for adventurous mountain bikers to challenge themselves over a range of tracks leading up and down the mountain. They’re even pushing the boundaries of new technology with a facility designed to fire lasers at space debris, safely de-orbiting them to burn up in our atmosphere.

One of the most important outcomes after the fires at Mount Stromlo Observatory was the learning of fire risk management. The unfortunate events that caused so much destruction of the facility also provided an opportunity for learning – such as minimum distances between ignition material like shrubbery and the telescopes, or more administrative capabilities such as the responsibility of asset insurance hosted at research facilities.

Reading Magazines Online

I like reading magazines, but being very nearsighted, I've found it almost impossible to read most current magazines in their paper editions. It's frustrating, because one of my favourite activities used to be spending an hour our two browsing through the magazine racks at the library. (My vision changed dramatically after having cataract surgery; while my distance vision is far better, my close-up vision is worse).

Fortunately, the library has a solution. I download and read magazines on my phone, tablet, or PC.

I'm basing this post on the services offered by Toronto Public Library and my local library in Pickering, but most larger public libraries will likely have the same or similar offerings.

RB Digital

My favourite of the three services discussed in this review is RB Digital formerly Zinio Reader, which offers both audiobooks and magazines. TPL has over 500 magazines, the majority in English. Reading the magazine is similar to reading a PDF of the edition. You can zoom in to a comfortable text size and scroll through a page. Selection of magazines is by scrolling through a gallery of covers, which you can sort alphabetically, but there is no grouping by category.

What I especially like about RB Digital is the text mode feature, which converts an article to a cleanly formatted page of text, including photos, without the multi-column layout. It also has a reverse text mode (white text on a black background) which I find much easier on the eyes. This makes it easy to read magazines on my tablet or even my phone.

RB Digital works equally well on my Android phone and tablet using their app or on my PC in a broswer. You can check out magazines to your library account and check them back in when you are done. There is no requirement to return magazines, so you can build up a collection of issues. Printing is available in a browser but not in the app.

PressReader

PressReader, available at Toronto Public Library, has a huge selection of both magazines and newspapers in over 60 languages. Fortunately you can filter it by either newspapers or magazines, language, and country. You can also select magazines by category.

Like RB Digital, there is both a page view and text view, although PressReader's text view isn't formatted as cleanly as the one in RB Digital and doesn't offer a reverse text mode.

Printing isn't as convenient as it is in RB Digital and I haven't been able to figure out any way of printing more than one page at a time. Also logging in is trickier in the app as you have to be logged in first in the browser (or have been logged in during the last 48 hours). Otherwise, reading in page view is very similar to RB Digital.

Subscribers to Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper will find this familiar, because the Globe and Mail uses PressReader for their Globe2Go app.

Flipster

I haven't used Flipster as much as the other two services because it has a smaller selection of magazines. Oddly, the magazine selection at Toronto Public Library and Pickering Public Library is different. Selection is by scrolling through a list of magazines that can be grouped by category.

Like the other two services, Flipster can be used through a browser or an app on mobile devices. I think it uses a different dispaly engine because the text when zoomed in isn't as clean. There is no text view when using the browser as far as I can tell, but it's available in the app (though not with reverse text) and only works on pages that have one article.

You can print pages or the whole issue.

There Are Some Real Bastards Out There

freeCodeCamp is a nonprofit organization founded to help people learn to code. I've been browsing their website for some time and finding all sorts of interesting nuggets.

Recently their site was hacked and the founder, Quincy Larson, discovered that a hacker had used their donation system to defraud over 5,000 people. He's written an article on what happened and how he fixed the problem. It's quite a story that gives you a picture of how complex modern electronic financial transaction systems are and what can happen when they're hacked.

At the end, he offers some advice, including this.

Lesson #4: There are some real bastards out there.

"Security in IT is like locking your house or car – it doesn't stop the bad guys,  but if it's good enough they may move on to an easier target." - Paul Herbka

freeCodeCamp is open source, and has tons of security researchers who notify us of potential vulnerabilities through responsible disclosure. We are locking our proverbial doors.

But despite all our efforts, an attacker still saw us as an easier target than some of the big e-commerce sites. They were sophisticated enough to find their own zero-day vulnerability in our codebase. And they may do the same for your organization.

Never forget that you and I share a planet with villains who are willing to inconvenience thousands of people just so they themselves can make a quick buck.

Stay vigilant, friends.

Interview With Michael Chabon About Picard

Here's a long interview with Pulitzer prize-winning author, Michael Chabon, who is the showrunner for the new Star Trek series, Picard, which starts on Thursday. I have high hopes for this. It has to be better than Star Trek: Discovery. Almost anything would be better than Discovery.

And beyond that, anything you’re going to hand Patrick Stewart, he can play. It’s not like you have to write around limitations.

It’s incredible, the things he does over the course of the season. Because it’s not just him playing the Picard that you know when you think of Picard. He’s playing Picard who’s decades older, has been through a lot, has aged physically, is looking at his life in the way that someone who’s middle-aged wouldn’t. In canon in our story, Picard is I believe 92. So he’s older than Patrick is, but someone who’s been alive that long, looking at his life, is going to be behaving very differently than someone who’s however old Patrick was when he started doing TNG. Patrick had all of that. He presents the character of Picard very much as the same guy. And yet, he’s changed, inevitably. He’s older, he’s wiser, he’s sadder, he has more regrets and more to regret. All of that just emerged on day one of shooting.

Terry Pratchett's Going Postal TV Show

While browsing through the new releases on Acorn TV, I saw that they are streaming Terry Pratchett's Going Postal. It's one of three Discworld adapations that were done by SKY TV a decade or so ago. The other two are Hogfather and The Colour of Magic, neither of which are currently up on Acorn.

I should note at the outset that I've not read any of the Discworld books. This has been pointed out as a serious character flaw by several of my friends, but I've always had a strong preference to science fiction over fantasy. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed Going Postal. It's funny, satirical, quite lavish, and some of the themes that Pratchett is noted for come through strongly. I'd describe it as light fantasy, compared to something like the recent show, The Witcher, which was dark and intense. It reminded me of some of the Monty Python movies, though it's not as silly.

If you aren't an Acorn TV subscriber, they do have a free trial.

Featured Links - January 19, 2020

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

• Celebrating Captain Beefheart's birthday with a look at his masterpiece, Trout Mask Replica. An appreciation of an album that was fifty years ahead of its time.
• SpaceX's Falcon rockets might need a giant tower on wheels for US military launches. Military money talks. 
• The Cold War Plan To Build Earth's Largest Telescope. It’s the story of the largest telescope never built. (Supercluster).
• Inside the Feds’ Battle Against Huawei. How Washington went to war against the Chinese smartphone giant, and how the runaway conflict could spell the end of a single, global internet.
• 10 Minutes of Collapsing Water Towers. Some controlled demolition pr0n to lighten up your day. 
• Letting slower passengers board airplane first really is faster, study finds. "The more parallel you can make the boarding process, the faster it will go."

We're Toast 20

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

• New Climate Models Show That Clouds Could Screw the Paris Agreement. Scientists’ latest climate models show that the world is going to warm even more than we previously thought.
• The (Australian) government has been forced to talk about climate change, so it’s taking a subtle – and sinister – approach. "With its old ideology being treated with universal scorn, a new line is being embraced – and it could signal the death of the planet."
• Like Adding ‘Five to Six Hiroshima Bombs of Heat Each Second,’ Study Shows Oceans Warming at Record Rate. " A new study published Monday shows that the Earth’s oceans reached the highest temperatures and warmed the fastest since records began, highlighting the urgent need for global action to address the climate crisis before it’s too late."
• Climate Crisis And Extreme Weather Tops List of Biggest Risks Facing Humanity. "The World Economic Forum (WEF) has released its annual report on the biggest risks humanity faces given the state of the world. Extreme weather is the top risk by likelihood, while failure to address the climate crisis is the top risk in the impact category."

Politics 

• Extreme Heat Is Another Legacy of Segregation. "Racism has consequences, expecially in an era of climate change."
• Something else is out of control in Australia: climate disaster denialism. Myths about the bushfires grow online before finding their way into the rightwing press and the mouths of politicians

Technology

• Fewer in U.S. Continue to See Vaccines as Important. "A recent Gallup survey finds 84% of Americans saying it is extremely or very important that parents vaccinate their children. That matches Gallup's prior reading in 2015 but is down from 94% in 2001."
• Artificial Intelligence Makes Bad Medicine Even Worse. "A new study out from Google seems to show the promise of AI-assisted health care. Actually, it shows the threat."
• The Evil List. "Which tech companies are really doing the most harm? Here are the 30 most dangerous, ranked by the people who know."

The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation

I've been a space nerd pretty much all my life, but it's been a long time since I dealt with the actual math involved in space exploration – since I was studying math and physics in university, actually. One of the key equations involved in space exploration is something called the rocket equation, developed by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

It's not an especially complex equation, but it has some important consequences. Astronaut and ISS Expedition 30/31 Flight Engineer, Don Pettit, has written an article for NASA's International Space Station site that clearly explains some of them, and without complex math. He explains how the rocket equation determines the amount of energy required to reach different destinations and how it affects the propellants used and the design of rockets.

I found one part of the article near the end especially interesting. It turns out that if the diameter of the Earth were only 50 percent larger, we wouldn't be able to use rockets to get into space. Assuming that the makeup of the larger Earth was roughly the same as what it is now, that translates to an increase in gravity of about 3.3 times.

If the radius of our planet were larger, there could be a point at which an Earth escaping rocket could not be built. Let us assume that building a rocket at 96% propellant (4% rocket), currently the limit for just the Shuttle External Tank, is the practical limit for launch vehicle engineering. Let us also choose hydrogen-oxygen, the most energetic chemical propellant known and currently capable of use in a human rated rocket engine. By plugging these numbers into the rocket equation, we can transform the calculated escape velocity into its equivalent planetary radius. That radius would be about 9680 kilometers (Earth is 6670 km). If our planet was 50% larger in diameter, we would not be able to venture into space, at least using rockets for transport.

Imagine what life would be like on such a world, trapped forever in an impossibly deep gravity well.

Writing Effective Editorial Notes

Editors and technical writers who are doing reviews often have to include comments to the authur. This blog post has some suggestions on how to write effective editorial notes. Speaking from experience on both sides of the table, this article is spot on. This point is particularly important.

Make concrete suggestions.

The author should have no question about what you want them to do. Make it as easy as possible for the author to fix the problem. (Again, see principle #1.)

If the author’s intent is clear to you, then edit the text and leave a comment explaining the change. For example, a comment like “Wordy — please revise” is absolutely unhelpful. Edit the sentence, and if there’s a chance you’ve changed the author’s meaning, then just flag the change: “Tightened the sentence up. Please confirm I have not changed your intended meaning.”

If the text is ambiguous, then explain why and provide a number of alternative sentences in the comment — for example, “Ambiguous. If you mean X, I recommend something like ‘A,’ but if you mean Y, then I recommend ‘B.’ ”

Guide to 2020's Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Superhero TV

It's often been said that we are living in the golden age of television, and that's especially true for science fiction, fantasy, and superhero shows. i09 has just published an extensive guide to shows coming out this year. As well as new shows, it includes seasons of returning shows.

These are a few of the shows that I'll be watching or look like they might be worthwhile.

• Doctor Who (season 12): BBC America. I've seen the first three episodes of this, and I'm reserving judgement. I didn't much care for the last season, but this season looks like it might be better.
• Star Trek: Picard: January 23, CBS All Access. Hopefully it will be better than Star Trek: Discovery, which I did not like at all. 
• Locke & Key: February 7, Netflix. Based on a graphic novel written by Joe Hill, so there is some hope it will be good.
• War of the Worlds: February 16, Epix. Stars Gabriel Byrne.
• Hunters: February 21, Amazon Prime. I'm not sure it's genre, but it stars Al Pacino.
• The Boys (season two): Amazon Prime. I am not a fan of superhero shows, but I enjoyed the first season of this.
• Lovecraft Country: HBO. Based on a novel by Matt Ruff.

There's much more, but that's all I have time for.

Easily Upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 10

If you're still using Windows 7, you've probably seen messages from Microsoft about its impending end of life. After January 15, there will be no more security updates, at least for home users. Windows 7 will still keep working, but using it on an internet-connected PC will become riskier.

At least for now, if you have a registered and activated copy of Windows 7, you can probably upgrade to Windows 10 for no charge. I decided to do that last week, using the PowerShell script from this article, which performs an in-place upgrade.

To run the script there are a couple of things you will need to do. First, give PowerShell permission to run scripts. (You should remove the permission after the upgrade is complete). Also, you'll need to edit the script in Notepad or another text editor to remove extra line breaks.

I ran the script and it ran as advertised. The whole process took a bit over three hours and involved a couple of reboots. All of my applications and user settings seem to have been migrated successfully. The PC I upgraded has a ridiculously small hard drive, but I didn't have to worry as I ended up with more free space after the upgrade and performance hasn't suffered.

If you hate the default Windows 10 start menu, it is highly customizable, or you can replace it with a third-party tool that mimics Windows 7.

William Gibson Profiled

William Gibson is one of my favourite authors. I have been reading him since his reading "Johnny Mnemonic"story in Omni in 1981. His most recent novel, The Peripheral was, IMHO, the best novel of the last decade, and I have it's sequel, Agency on pre-order with Amazon.

He was recently profiled in The New Yorker, and it's one of the best articles about an author that I've read in a very long time.

Suppose you’ve been asked to write a science-fiction story. You might start by contemplating the future. You could research anticipated developments in science, technology, and society and ask how they will play out. Telepresence, mind-uploading, an aging population: an elderly couple live far from their daughter and grandchildren; one day, the pair knock on her door as robots. They’ve uploaded their minds to a cloud-based data bank and can now visit telepresently, forever. A philosophical question arises: What is a family when it never ends? A story flowers where prospective trends meet.

This method is quite common in science fiction. It’s not the one employed by William Gibson, the writer who, for four decades, has imagined the near future more convincingly than anyone else. Gibson doesn’t have a name for his method; he knows only that it isn’t about prediction. It proceeds, instead, from a deep engagement with the present. When Gibson was starting to write, in the late nineteen-seventies, he watched kids playing games in video arcades and noticed how they ducked and twisted, as though they were on the other side of the screen. The Sony Walkman had just been introduced, so he bought one; he lived in Vancouver, and when he explored the city at night, listening to Joy Division, he felt as though the music were being transmitted directly into his brain, where it could merge with his perceptions of skyscrapers and slums. His wife, Deborah, was a graduate student in linguistics who taught E.S.L. He listened to her young Japanese students talk about Vancouver as though it were a backwater; Tokyo must really be something, he thought. He remembered a weeping ambulance driver in a bar, saying, “She flatlined.” On a legal pad, Gibson tried inventing words to describe the space behind the screen; he crossed out “infospace” and “dataspace” before coming up with “cyberspace.” He didn’t know what it might be, but it sounded cool, like something a person.

 I will undoubtedly have a review of Agency here but it may be a couple of months. I intend to finish Ian Macdonald's wonderful Luna trilogy first, then re-read The Peripheral, one of the rare books that deserves a re-read.

The Guardian has just published an interview with Gibson in which he talks at length about the process of writing Agency.

Featured Links - January 12, 2020

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

• Strange Dark Matter Findings Could Rewrite the Universe's History. "Scientists believe that mysterious dark matter is key to forming galaxies in the cosmos. Now, a recent series of bizarre findings threatens to undermine everything we think we know."
• Guide to Using Reverse Image Search for Investigations. A guide to using the top reverse image search services: Yandex, Bing, and Google.
• The Strange Saga of Kowloon Walled City. "Anarchic, organic, surreal, this enclave was once among the most densely populated places on Earth."
• 8 Brilliant Search Tools Hidden Within Google Photos. Some useful tips here. 
• Average Body Temperature In The US Has Dropped Since 19th Century, Claims Study. Perhaps we are healthier than Civil War veterans. 
• The medications that change who we are. "They’ve been linked to road rage, pathological gambling, and complicated acts of fraud. Some make us less neurotic, and others may even shape our social relationships. It turns out many ordinary medications don’t just affect our bodies – they affect our brains. Why? And should there be warnings on packets?"
• The Amazon Website Is a Clunky Mess—Here's How to Make It Suck Less. Some useful tips here.

Pournelle's Law of Cables Still Holds

Update: Sigh. It's not fixed. I was working before supper and back to the old low volume output after supper. No clue. I'm leaving the post below in case anyone has suggestions on what I can do next, if anything.

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We solved an annoying problem with our home stereo and TV. We use a Google Chromecast Ultra to stream content from the basement PC to the TV/stereo. The Chromecast is plugged into the surround receiver so we get surround sound when casting. All was good until a month or so ago when we noticed that the sound level when casting from the PC was down - WAY down. If we had the sound set comfortably and switched inputs without turning it down, we'd get blown out of our seats.

I spent a lot of time trying to fix this, checking the sound settings on the PC, TV, and receiver. No dice. In talking with Nancy about it, I mentioned that there was no sound from the PC speakers and she suggested checking that everything was plugged in properly. It wasn't - the power adapter for the speakers was unplugged. I am not sure why that would make a difference, but it does.

This reminds me of one of the late Jerry Pournelle's aphorisms when he was writing for Byte 30 years ago. It's knows as Pourelle's Law of Cables. "You’ll find by and large, the trouble is a cable."

It's as valid now as it was 30 years ago.

Recovering an Unsaved Microsoft Word Document

It's all to easy to lose a Microsoft Word document, either because of a power failure or inadvertently closing the document without saving. I've known for years how to recover files from Word's Temp directory, but I must admit that I'm embarrassed to find that Word has a built-in mechanism for doing this.

If you close your Microsoft Office 2010 Word, Excel, or PowerPoint file unwittingly, quickly open the Microsoft Office program again and create a new document. Go to File > Info > Manage Versions.

In Word 2010, click on the little dropdown and select Recover Unsaved Documents. Now, select the draft and open it in a new Microsoft Word (or Excel or PowerPoint) document. Once your data recovers, select Save As, enter a document name and save it.  

The article points out difference in Office 2019 and includes information on how to customize your Auto Save settings. You do have Auto Save turned on, don't you?

We're Toast 19

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

• Climate change signals detected in global weather. "Searched for and found: climate researchers can now detect the fingerprint of global warming in daily weather observations at the global scale. They are thus amending a long-established paradigm: weather is not climate -- but climate change can now be detected in daily weather."
• The US Oil and Gas Industry's 5-Year Plan Is a Climate and Health Nightmare. "By 2025, oil and gas companies have plans to expand enough to release as much new greenhouse gas pollution as 50 new coal-fired power plants." 
• The Nightmare Climate Scenario That Keeps Scientists Up at Night. And it's basically Earth in 2020. 

Politics 

• A vast network of shadowy news sites promote conservative talking points mixed with floods of algorithmically generated "news". Another reason to look for more regulation of social media, as if we needed more. This could also have been filed under "Technology". 
• Inaction Is a Form of Action: Cory Doctorow discusses how permitting monopolies is a form of government censorship.

Technology

• Astronomers Are Increasingly Worried About How Satellite Megaconstellations Will Disrupt Science. This is a serious problem and needs immediate attention.
• Gig Life: Slaves to the Algorithm. "When the boss is an app, humans pay a price."

Some Free Alternatives to Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a good choice for corporate documents, but it may be overkill for home use. You certainly don't need all of Word's features for a letter to your kid's teacher. Fortunately there are many alternatives, as this article points out. Note that the article doens't talk about office suites like LibreOffice, WPS Office, or even Google's GSuite. (LibreOffice Writer would be my first choice as a Word alternative).

I've tested some of these over the years, although I've never found any real reason to switch away from Word. Out of the ten programs mentioned in the article, I thought that these would be worth looking at for various reasons.

• Page Four has a notebook feature that I really like. Unfortunately, the program is no longer being updated.
• LyX gives you the power and typographic goodness of LaTex behind an easy-to-use graphical interface. If I had to write a thesis, this would be my choice. 
• ThinkFree Online Editor gives you word processing features without having to download and install an application.

The State of CSS 2019

I've been a fan of and a user of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) since its introduction in the 1990s. I gave a presentation to the developers at Dow Jones Markets about HTML and CSS around 1997. In my last job at the Toronto Stock Exchange, I had to dive into the intricacies of SASS (Syntactically awesome style sheets) after Quadralay's WebWorks ePublisher adopted the technology (That was the most fun I had in my last year there.) But I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert CSS developer and there are many areas of modern CSS that I know nothing about.

So I was interested to take a browse through The State of CSS 2019 report, based on a survey of over 10,000 developers. It's both eye catching (using the latest features of CSS, if somewhat garish), interactive, and informative.

In the web development family, JavaScript has developed a bit of a reputation as the angry, rebellious teenager going through a new phase every year and telling you you're just too old to understand. CSS on the other hand has always been the studious, well-behaved kid who always stays polite and never makes a rash decision.

But don't take things for granted: despite being over 20 years old, there's signs that CSS might be going through the same tumultuous teenage years that JavaScript just went through. Flexbox! Grid! CSS-in-JS! In 2019, CSS is finally dyeing its hair pink and getting a tattoo just like it's always secretly wanted.

Parenting books won't help much with this one, but that's where we come in: we've surveyed over 10,000 developers in this first ever State of CSS survey. So join us to find out which CSS features are used the most, which tools are gaining adoption, and much more.

I need to take a closer look through this report as I need to rebuild my personal web site one of these days and I will likely use one of the major CSS framework. At the TSX I used the W3.CSS framework as it didn't need jQuery or JavaScript) but I'm leaning toward Bootstrap, which seems to be the dominant framework now.

I should give a shout out to W3Schools website, which is the best resource for web development that I've found.

Review - The Man in the High Castle

I finally finished watching season 4 of the Amazon Prime TV series, The Man in the High Castle. It's based on the 1960s novel of the same name by Philip K. Dick, although only the first season follows the events of the novel. After that, the series takes off into uncharted territory.

I've always been a fan of alternate history stories, and both the novel and the TV series are prime examples of the subgenre. The story is set in a 1960s where the Allies lost World War II and North America has been divided up into three areas. Japan controls the West Coast, Germany controls the East, and there's a small neutral zone in the mountains. A mysterious figure, known as the "man in the high castle" is distributing movies (in the novel, books) showing pictures of our world, free from Nazi and Japanese domination.

The TV series develops the setting in much more detail than the novel, especially in the second and following seasons. I was impressed with the world building throughout; every episode is full of small details that add to the verisimilitude. It is often a hard series to watch, especially when it comes to the scenes set in the US Nazi Reich. The characters are equally well developed, especially those of John Smith, the leader of the US Nazis (Rufus Sewell) his wife, Helen (Chelah Horsdal), Trade Minister Tagomi (Cary Hiroyuki Tagawa), and Inspector Kido (Joel de la Fuente).

I did find the first season somewhat confusing and the episode recaps at Vulture.com were extremely helpful. They're very detailed and function as reviews as well as recaps. I would definitely recommend them to get the most out of thiis outstanding series.

New Website for Jerry Pournelle

There's a new website to promote the works of the late SF author, Jerry Pournelle. I've been a fan of his stories since reading his first works (published under the pen name, Wade Curtis) in Analog many years ago. His collaborations with Larrry Niven, especially Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall, were best sellers and are rightly regarded as classic of the field. He was also a prominent computer journalist whose monthly column in Byte was essential reading for many years.

This review of one of his first novels, A Spaceship for the King, published shortly after his death, contains a summary and appreciation of his career. This almost exactly mirrors what I wrote about him on learning the news of his death.

Pournelle was a man of strong political beliefs. While he did not hew to any specific political doctrine, other than his own, his views often skewed far right of center. He was fierce in defending his ideas and in attacking critics, and developed a reputation as a curmudgeon on electronic media even before the Internet was as widespread and all-encompassing as it is now. Because of his politics, he was a polarizing figure within the science fiction community, drawing strong reactions from many of his peers. For myself, while I often strongly disagreed with his opinions and conclusions, I always learned something from his vigorous defense of his ideas.

The new web site is relatively sparse in content right now, but does contain links to several of his best known works, including the last novel in his popular Jannissairies series, which will be published in June.

The new site includes rare family images, never-before-told stories, over 50 years of Science Fiction Conventions, exclusive content and essays. The new site is titled Jerry Pournelle’s Chaos Manor for Science Fiction & Fact and will offer critical review of the author’s politics, science, space exploration, philosophy and activism.

In support of this new venue, there is also a new Facebook Group at https://www.facebook.com/JerryPournelleChaosManor.

Designed to stimulate discussion and make Dr. Pournelle’s writings relevant for 2020, the Facebook Group will include surveys, controversial quotes, and guided conversations. It is planned to be controversial.

I'll be keeping an eye on the site and the Facebook page for updates.

How Digital-Free Experiences Can Discriminate Against the Disabled

Here's a long Twitter thread from Sally Lait, who recently ran up against a pub's  policy that bans all digital devices. Depending on your situation and experiences, you might think this is a good idea, but it does have (probably) unintended consequences, especially for those who rely on their digital devices to help them cope with disabilities.

But what about situations where a device is genuinely essential for someone? Helping to independently read a menu if visually impaired? Quickly reading and writing to communicate if hearing is difficult? Insulin pump apps? Autistic or extremely anxious people who use their devices to recentre? Alcoholics who want to glance at an affirmation? Those needing help with English? There are myriad reasons why a device may be incredibly important to someone. Having a policy to encourage conversation is one thing. Actively policing it it another. This act can cause people to feel they have to share private reasons for why they're doing what they are. But even if they do, the answer was consistent: "I don't care. Don't come in"

This is not good. I am perfectly capable of putting my phone away during a restaurant meal, but I do often have to use the magnifier app to read the menu. So are the wait staff going to read the menu to me? Some common sense is required here. 

The Top Ten Scientific Discoveries of the Decade

I've posted some links to year-end and decade-end best of lists, but this one deserves its own post – the most important scientific discoveries of the last decade. And quite a list it is, ranging from the biggest things in the universe to the smallest.

Millions of new scientific research papers are published every year, shedding light on everything from the evolution of stars to the ongoing impacts of climate change to the health benefits (or determents) of coffee to the tendency of your cat to ignore you. With so much research coming out every year, it can be difficult to know what is significant, what is interesting but largely insignificant, and what is just plain bad science. But over the course of a decade, we can look back at some of the most important and awe-inspiring areas of research, often expressed in multiple findings and research papers that lead to a true proliferation of knowledge. Here are ten of the biggest strides made by scientists in the last ten years.

It's a remarkable list. I can't imagine what the new decade will bring. 

Millions More Books Now In the Public Domain

Due to a quirk in copyright legislation, millions of books and stores published before 1964 are now in the public domain. The trick is finding which ones are now free. This Vice article summarizes the situation and provides some links for resources for finding them.

Prior to 1964, books had a 28-year copyright term. Extending it required authors or publishers to send in a separate form, and lots of people didn’t end up doing that. Thanks to the efforts of the New York Public Library, many of those public domain books are now free online. Through the 1970s, the Library of Congress published the Catalog of Copyright Entries, all the registration and renewals of America’s books. The Internet Archive has digital copies of these, but computers couldn't read all the information and figuring out which books were public domain, and thus could be uploaded legally, was tedious. The actual, extremely convoluted specifics of why these books are in the public domain are detailed in a post by the New York Public Library, which recently paid to parse the information in the Catalog of Copyright Entries.

In a massive undertaking, the NYPL converted the registration and copyright information into an XML format. Now, the old copyrights are searchable and we know when, and if, they were renewed. Around 80 percent of all the books published from 1923 to 1964 are in the public domain, and lots of people had no idea until now.

Kudos to the NYPL for taking the initiative on this.

Out of curiousity, I did a search on Project Gutenberg for a few authors that I remember reading as a teen and found a trove of books and stories from authors like Mack Reynolds, Edgar Pangborn, and H. Beam Piper, to name just a few. Some of these aren't connected to the situation noted above, but they're still worth looking at.

2020 TV Preview

2019 was an exceptionally good year for TV shows, especially science fiction and fantasy shows, as I noted last week. Based on this article from Rolling Stone, it looks like 2020 may be just as interesting. Here are some of the shows that shold be worth watching.

• ‘The Outsider’ (HBO, Jan. 12)
• ‘Star Trek: Picard’ (CBS All Access, Jan. 23)
• ‘Hunters’ (Amazon Prime, Feb. 21)
• ‘Dispatches From Elsewhere’ (AMC, March 1)
• ‘The Plot Against America’ (HBO, March 16)
• ‘Lovecraft Country’ (HBO)
• ‘Perry Mason’ (HBO)
• ‘The Old Man’ (FX)

Featured Links - January 5, 2020

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

• US-A and US-P military satellites. Some history of Soviet nuclear powered satellites. There were a lot more than I thought. 
• Predicting the future is now possible with powerful new AI simulations. A fascinating new technology with implications for both good and evil. 
• Facts Matter. A long blog post explaining why Canada's oil production isn't as green as the industry claims. Full of boring facts, not rhetoric. 
• SpaceX's East Coast launch pad is making some serious headway. And it's quite different from any recent NASA launch pad.
• Segway Makes a Self-Balancing Stroller For Adults. I'd only use it if it had a seat belt and a face-protecting air bag.

The Anatomy of Online Bullshit in the Fog of Impending Doom

Here is a very detailed analysis of the news and social media postings surrounding the assassination of Qassem Soleimani by the US. It's mind boggling and seriously dismaying just how much disinformation is being spread about this. The article is definitely worth reading and thinking about.

Stateside and in the short term, the killing has largely acted to rally Trump’s conservative support—and trigger a tirade of criticism from many of his opponents, who worry he made an impulsive decision with little regard for its potentially sweeping consequences (and perhaps to distract from his domestic political crises). In 2020, that also means we are headed into another disinformation hell fueled by internet rumors, lies, and propaganda. Here’s some of what to watch out for.

The Tech the US Army Is Looking Forward To

The US Army has published a list of technology advancements that they are looking to seeing in 2020. Some of these look very interesting, although it may be while before they see widespread use.

The list includes research and development efforts in material science, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

Kott told Insider the research projects he selected were „the ones that had the potential for a long-term game change – something that could actually lead to a major change in future capabilities and, at the same time, that was well grounded in foundational science and technology.“

Web Development in 2020

Here's a good overview of trends in web development in 2020. It's based on a video by Brad Traversy, but if you don't have 70 minutes to watch the video, the article is a good summary.

Most technical writers working in the software industry will have to be familiar with the basics of web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and possibly more depending on what their developers are using.

He recommends starting with standard HTML and CSS, and learning newer CSS tools like Flexbox and Grid.

He says learning responsive web design in 2020 should be a given. "Every serious project that you create should look good and be completely usable on all devices."

Instead of relying on CSS frameworks like Bootstrap, he recommends you practice building your own modular CSS components that you can then re-use throughout your project.