We're Toast 22

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

• The New Frontiers of Farming Come With Huge Climate Risks. Opening new territory for farms may have unintended consequences.
• Antarctic temperature rises above 20C for first time on record. "Scientists describe 20.75C logged at Seymour Island as ‘incredible and abnormal’"
• Coronavirus: Go Forth and Multiply. A sobering and worrisome article.
• The Climate Crisis Is Causing 'Dramatic' Changes In the Pacific Arctic. "Nowhere is safe from the climate crisis, but some regions are suffering more than others. The Pacific edge of the Arctic Ocean is one of those regions, and it’s changing in big, scary ways."
• Preindustrial 14CH4 indicates greater anthropogenic fossil CH4 emissions. This result indicates that anthropogenic fossil CH4 emissions are underestimated by about 38 to 58 teragrams CH4 per year, or about 25 to 40 per cent of recent estimates. 

Politics 

• Trump's war on truth takes a dangerous turn as he attacks the media's coronavirus coverage. Nature doesn't care what Trump thinks or says. People will die because of his lies and budget cuts to health and science.
• Covid-19 Will Mark the End of Affluence Politics. The possibility of a global pandemic will reveal our inability to make and distribute the things people need—just in time for a presidential election.
• Qanon Deploys 'Information Warfare' to Influence the 2020 Election. "The conspiracy movement lost its online home when 8chan was shut down. Followers migrated to other sites—and have set their sights on the presidential race."

Technology

• Hackers Could Shut Down Satellites—or Turn Them into Weapons. "The use of off-the-shelf components means bad actors can easily look for vulnerabilities."

When a Disaster Announcement Goes Wrong

In mid-January, residents of Ontario were woken up by an emergency alert from the Provincial Emergency Operations Center (PEOC), the provincial government agency that "is mandated to plan and coordinate the offsite response to a nuclear or radiological emergency." The alert referred to an an unspecified incident at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station and advised people to wait for further instructions. It quickly became apparent that the alert was issued in error, but it took almost two hours for an all-clear message to be issued. The incident resulted in a judicial inquiry and you can read their report here.

This is one of several parts that jumped out at me when I read it.

The PEOC only maintained templates with pre-scripted messaging for nuclear alerts. The Provincial Nuclear Emergency Response Plan (PNERP) required that nuclear emergency bulletins be pre-scripted for each reactor facility and notification category, as far as practical. The alert issued in error included a pre-scripted template maintained by the PEOC for the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station.

The PEOC did not have a pre-scripted template for an “End Alert” message on January 12, 2020.

Both PEOC alerts sent on January 12, 2020 were issued in English only. The PEOC did not have any French language templates. The PEOC did not initiate emergency translation procedures to issue either alert in French.

Identical pre-scripted templates were used on both the Alert Ready live and training systems. No distinctive labelling such as “EXERCISE, EXERCISE, EXERCISE…” was used on the training system.

Having worked as a technical writer, documenting emergency procedures for a large, complex system, I took one look at their report and went "OMG, who wrote those procedures". The flaws were immediately obvious to anyone who has had any experience with, or training in, process and procedures for handling systems failures. Good communication is a key part in responding to any disaster, and this is a classic example of how to mess it up.

I have to assume that the actual nuclear plant operating procedures are better. Given the plant hasn't melted down yet, I think that's a reasonable assumption. (Also I know who worked on documenting those procedures, and they are extremely competent).

In the interests of transparency, I should note that I live within a couple of kilometers of the plant, and any problems with the plant are a matter of no little concern.

Another Word Virus to Worry About

Word viruses have been around for more than 20 years. I remember when Daleen got hit by Melissa in 1999. Of course it was a VP who openned the infected document and not one of the lowly peons working in the cubicle farm. Ever since then, the advice has been not to open Word documents, especially if you receive them as an attachment in an unsolicited email.

Now there's another one, ObliqueRAT (a suitable and ominous name).

From Office Watch:

A new type of infected Word document is doing the rounds with the name ObliqueRAT with a few new tricks. 

ObliqueRAT is similar to an earlier nasty CrimsonRAT but has a range of infection capabilities and is encrypted. 

The infected Word documents usually arrive via email and are password protected.  Presumably the password is in the email. 

Why password locked?  Encrypting the document makes it a lot harder for anti-virus/security system to analyse the contents.

It's a cruel world out there. Be careful. 

Writing With Precision

Precision is important in technical writing, or any other kind of fact-based writing (news stories, for example). Often that means replacing subjective words with something that's more detailed or precise.

Erika Konrad explains what this means in Reader Awareness, Subjectivity, and the Flu, published by TechWhirl's Tech Writer Today Magazine. It's especially relevant today, what with the fog of disinformation surrounded the current coronavirus outbreak.

Some typically subjective words to watch out for are adjectives and adverbs, But remember all words, even the word “wash” can be subjective. That is, when we think of “wash,” we do not all have the same idea:  our scrubbing speed, pressure, soap amount, and water temperature might vary.

The CDC offers a solution for the subjectivity of the word “wash”: 

1. Wet your hands with clean, running water (warm or cold), turn off the tap, and apply soap.
2. Lather your hands by rubbing them together with the soap. Lather the backs of your hands, between your fingers, and under your nails.
3. Scrub your hands for at least 20 seconds. Need a timer? Hum the “Happy Birthday” song from beginning to end twice.
4. Rinse your hands well under clean, running water.
5. Dry your hands using a clean towel or air dry them.

How Silicon Valley Ruined Work Culture

Here's a spot-on article from Wired about how the work environment of Silicon Valley has spread to more traditional companies. I saw this happen at the TSX when they moved into a new office. Frankly, it drove me crazy. At least they had the sense to let us keep our own desks; if they'd gone to a "hotel" setup, I'd probably have quit.

Fewer people have been more vocal opponents of this 24/7 work culture than Dan Lyons, a former journalist who left the newsroom to work at startups in the mid-2000s. The experience was so jarring that he soon quit his tech job—and then parlayed it into a job writing for the television series Silicon Valley, which appears to be an absurdist parody to anyone outside of the tech world, and like a too-real portrait to many people inside of it. Lyons likes to poke fun at the absurdities of tech work culture, and his 2018 book Lab Rats chronicles all of the bizarre corporate workshops and cultural institutions that have come to define work in Silicon Valley: mandatory “Lego play,” an obsession with open offices, the reframing of firing as “graduation.”

Lyons believes these new-agey corporate practices, along with perks like free snacks or beer on tap, are simply a misdirection from something rotten at the core. He blames worker unhappiness not just on Silicon Valley’s work culture but also on its business model—one he calls “shareholder capitalism.” The modern tech company is obsessed with growth and profit, at the expense of its employees and to the benefit of its investors. Some lucky employees might have stock options, but most don’t, and even then it’s a small percentage of the money flowing back to investors. The perks, then, function like trick mirrors, “a way to distract employees and keep them from noticing that their pockets are being picked.” David Heinemeier Hanson, father of the programming language Ruby on Rails, has called this “trickle-down workaholism” the result of “trying to compress a lifetime’s worth of work into the abbreviated timeline of a venture fund.”

Worst of all, the tech world has managed to recast this workaholism for someone else’s profit as something desirable: “hustle culture.” It’s replaced the 9-to-5 with “the 996”—that is, 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week. Take it from Elon Musk: Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.

The Best of Philip Glass' Operas

I've been a fan of Philip Glass' music ever since I first heard it sometime in the early 1980s. I've seen him perform in various settings at least half a dozen times (I've lost track). Over the last few years I've been lucky enough to see his "Portrait" trilogy of operas performed live and in simulcast from the Metropolitan Opera.

Glass is an incredibly prolific composer but I didn't realize how many operas he's written until I saw this article in the New York Times that attempts to pick some of the best of the roughly 30 he's written. They've restricted the list to compostions after Akhnaten, the last of his Portrait triliogy, first performed in 1983.

His sound, with its flowing arpeggios and churning rhythms, has remained easily identifiable through the decades. Yet Mr. Glass’s best works for the stage — including the eight below, written between 1987 and 2014 — have managed to color that trademark style in fresh hues. Each has been recorded on his Orange Mountain Music label, whose CD editions also include librettos.

It's a wide-ranging list and although I might quibble with a couple of the choices, it serves as a good introduction to Glass' later operatic works,  although I don't think there's anything there that compares with the beauty or majesty of Satyagraha or Akhnaten. The Times has thoughtfully embedded Spotify playlists into the article so you can judge for yourself.

The Mandalorian's Ground-Breaking Special Effects

Here's an article about the ground-breaking effects tech used in filming The Mandalorian. I thought the series looked incredible and this article explains why. Make sure you watch the video that goes with the article.

Indeed. Working with Epic Games, the studio behind the Unreal Engine (aka the thing that powers Fortnite), along with Bluff at ILM and cinematographer Greig Fraser, who had done a lot of work shooting LED screens on Rogue One, and other tech companies like video card maker Nvidia, Favreau and his team at Golem Creations developed a new virtual production platform that allows filmmakers to generate digital backdrops in real time, right in front of the camera. The tech, now called StageCraft and available to filmmakers everywhere, allowed the directors on each of The Mandalorian’s eight episodes to film in every part of the galaxy without ever having to leave Manhattan Beach Studios in Los Angeles.

The Problem With Birds and Glass

Glass windows and birds are not a good match.

A personal anedote: I was visiting my mother a couple of years ago and a bird hit her front window. She said that this had been happening often recently. She had aa couple of glass butterflies hanging in the window, and I realized that the birds were thinking they were food. After we removed the butterflies, the bird hits stopped.

Unfortunately, you can't remove a glass building, although as this article and podcasst point out, there are some measures that can be taken to reduce the severity of the problem.

Window strikes are among the most serious threats to birds in North America, killing an estimated 1 billion birds every year. In New York City, between 90,000 and 230,000 birds die annually from collisions with the city’s buildings, according to NYC Audubon. But recent legislation requiring bird-friendly glass on new construction offers a hopeful precedent.

This has come up in my area as well. We live near Frechman's Bay, which is a major bird habitat, and more than one developer has been trying to put condos up along the shore. So far, local opposition has prevented this, and the effects of a tall building on migratory birds has been one of the factors cited by the opposition to the projects. 

Eight Reliable Fact-Checking Sites

In the post-truth age that we seem to be living in, being able to ascertain the truthfulness of news or social media posts has become a vital skill. Here is an article reviewing eight fact-checking sites that should be part of your daily routine.

Out of the eight sites listed in the article, I only knew of three  (Snopes, Politifact, and FactCheck.org). The article also lists some other sites that are useful but have editorial biases that kept them out of the main article.

Also, this graphic (PDF link), courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, is worth printing and keeping in view when reading the news online.

Featured Links - February 23, 2020

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

• PetaPixel.com, a good photography site with news, reviews, and tutorials.
• Mathematicians Solve an Enduring '42' Problem Using Planetary Supercomputer. Interesting not just for the problem, but how they solved it.
• A Twitter thread on hacking hotel TVs that have their HDMI ports disabled. Useful advice for frequent travellers.
• Unlocked Recordings. An archive of out-of-print vinyl recordings, mostly classical, on the Internet Archive.
• The new Microsoft Edge: 10 rules to take control of your browser. "The default settings for Microsoft's new browser could stand a little tweaking. Here's how to get rid of annoying notification prompts, block trackers, customize the new tab page, and more."
• Canadian Flag into Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Some advice for my Canadian readers. 

Yes, There Is Hope For Us 2

This is 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

• How Likely Is The Worst-Case Climate Scenario? The worst case scenarios may not be as likely as some think, but the picture is murky.
• Can legal action force governments and businesses to respond to climate change? "Legal challenges related to climate change are a fast-growing trend."
• ‘Air is cleaner than before the Industrial Revolution’: a best case scenario for the climate in 2050. 
• The End of Australia as We Know It. "What many of us have witnessed this fire season feels alive and monstrous. With climate change forcing a relaxed country to stumble toward new ways of work, leisure and life, will politics follow?"

Politics

• Climate denial has destroyed the libertarian movement. Good riddance.
• Vienna’s New Weapon in the War on Cars: Concert Tickets. "In an effort to cut vehicle emissions and boost public transportation, Austria’s capital will reward car-free travel with free access to museums and concerts."
• Federal court rules that Scott Pruitt’s sham EPA can’t ban scientists from its scientific advisory board. It’s always comforting when the American legal system prevents the American legal system from legally screwing over Americans.
• JP Morgan economists warn climate crisis is threat to human race. Big money is starting to get worried. 

Technology

• Why American Farmers Are Hacking Their Tractors With Ukrainian Firmware. A dive into the thriving black market of John Deere tractor hacking.
• SpaceX Starship factory eyes cutting-edge industry solutions for inspiration. They're looking at off-the-shelf technology for building water tanks. 
• Electric Cars Are Better For the Environment Than a 50 MPG Gas Car. This holds true even if you consider the emissions it takes to produce the electricity that runs them.

2019 Nebula Finalists Announced

The finalists for the 2019 Nebula Awards have been announced by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The awards are voted on by members of SFWA and will be announced in May.

These are the finalists for Best Novel.

• Marque of Caine, Charles E. Gannon (Baen)
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow (Redhook; Orbit UK)
• A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (Tor)
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher)
• Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tor.com Publishing)
• A Song for a New Day, Sarah Pinsker (Berkley)

I've not read any of these, although I have bought A Memory Called Empire and it's in the queue on my Kindle.

More On Boeing's Dysfunctional Development Culture

During the last year, I've published seve6ral posts and linked to several articles about Boeing and the 737 MAX disaster. Taken together, they reveal a company that's in serious trouble on a number of fronts, including their Starliner spaceship that suffered several software glitches on a recent test flight.

Now, Gregory Tavis, a writer and pilot, has published another long article that dives deep into Boeing's flawed development culture. He doesn't think that Boeing can recover from the mess its in.

Recent headlines speak in vague terms about Boeing’s inability to get the two autopilots communicating on “boot up.”  Forensically, what that means is that Boeing has made an attempt to create a functional electronic corpus collosum between the two, so that the one in charge can access the sensors of the one not in charge (see “One little problem…,” above).

And it has failed in that attempt.

Which, if you understand where Boeing the company is now, is not at all surprising.  Not surprising, either, is Boeing’s recent revelation that re-certification of the 737 MAX is pushed back to “mid-year” 2020.  Applying a healthy function to Boeing’s public relations prognostications that is accurately translated as “never.”

For it was never realistic to believe that a blindered, incompetent, empathy-desert like Boeing, which had killed nearly four hundred already, was able to learn from, much less fix, its mistakes.

Apollo 15 Was a Mess

Here's a Twitter thread about the travails of the Apollo 15 mission. I was especially interested in this because in 1982 I interviewed one of the astronauts, Jim Irwin, who died of a heart attack in 1991.

Apollo 15 was a mess. It went so poorly that NASA never flew any of its crew again. A thread recounting a few of the many fuckups that almost brought the whole shit down (plus one really, really dumbass move).

 En route to the Moon, the range meter in the lander broke, sending shards of glass floating around the delicate cabin.

Then, a leak sent water floating through the command module. The crew had difficulty finding it as their drinking supply gradually beaded out from behind panels covering thousands of miles of wiring.

Hacking the Apollo 14 Guidance Computer

An article I saw online recently said that your average USB charger has more computing power than the Apollo Guidance Computer, the computer used by the Lunar Modules on their trips to the moon. While this is true in a strictly technical sense, it is misleading. Despite their incredibly limited hardware, the Apollo computers were extremely sophisticated devices and their software presaged many aspects of modern computer platforms.

ArsTechnica recently published an article that does a deep dive into the Apollo Guidance Comptuer used on the Apollo 14 mission. It also explains the problem that the astronauts ran into during the mission that could have caused an unplanned abort and describes how NASA's programmers on Earth were able to use a clever hack to fix the problem.

The idea that a single errant switch could derail a lunar landing attempt was unacceptable. After the mission, a new variable in the AGC code was introduced that allowed the crew to "mask out" (that is, to ignore) the Abort and Abort Stage pushbuttons. The scenario assumed that a failing switch would be recognized well before the descent began, and commands could be entered in time to prevent an inadvertent abort. Like the fix used for Apollo 14, this would make initiating an abort through a pushbutton impossible, and any urgent situation would have to be performed on the Abort Guidance System.

The nearsighted landing radar fix was even more straightforward. The radar is placed in one of two positions during descent, depending on whether the LM is in P63 or pitched nearly vertical in the approach phase of P64. On Apollo 14, the radar likely encountered some noise in its signal, perhaps from an overly strong return from the surface or a reflection of a side lobe from the spacecraft. This caused the radar to switch away from the desired long-range setting to its short-range mode. The range selection circuits we modified so that the radar could not switch between modes unless it was correctly positioned. Easy peasy.

The recovery from Apollo 14’s Abort switch failure can only be described as brilliant and heroic. But the most important enabler of this effort was that the software, while fiendishly complex, could be understood by a small team of developers. Modern hardware and software, with its extensive protection schemes, virtualization and dynamic program management simply would make such a simple hack impossible. Faced with a comparable problem today, even if the fix were trivial, the solution likely would require large amounts of code to be recompiled, tested and uploaded to the spacecraft. This may not be possible given the short timeframe necessary to save the mission.

In the end, Apollo 14’s fix truly represented the “Spirit of Apollo," where talented teams made the impossible happen.

It's a long article, but if you have any interest in the history of the space program or early computing, you'll want to read it.

How Not To Design Car Software

SF author Charlie Stross has described cars as computers that drive you around. Modern cars are full of sensors and computerized systems, even the dashboard displays are now screens instead of mechanical dials. But there's another layer that can be added to that – a cellular data connection.

Apparently this is now the thing with some car rental services, at least in parts of the United States. You might think that it wouldn't impair the use of the car, but you'd be wrong, as some of these systems won't let you start the car without a data connection. I find this rather mind boggling myself, as it's not hard to find areas in metropolitan Toronto that have dead spots, and certainly if you drive 100 km. outside of the city the odds are you'll lose connectivity, even on some major highways.

Apparently whoever designed the software for Gig Car Share assumed that cellular service is now universal, as Kari Paul found out the hard way.

today in sharing economy struggles: our app powered car rental lost cell service on the side of a mountain in rural California and now I live here I guess

it appears that although I do not have enough cell service to start up my only means of transportation I do have enough to live tweet my struggle so thanks for tuning in I will be here indefinitely

apparently in 45 minutes to an hour a tow truck will come to move us three miles down the road where there is cell service so we can start our car the future is dumb

Amazon Tracks All Your Taps On Your Kindle

I was surprised to find out that Amazon tracks all of your taps on a Kindle. This was discovered by reporter Adrianne Jeffries and reported on Twitter.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have been surprised; there must be a mechanism for Amazon to be able sync your reading position between devices. The Verge discusses this in more detail.

It turns out that Amazon has a few answers to that, some more convincing than others. The main feature Amazon claims it needs the data for is the Kindle’s “Whispersync” functionality that allows for a reader to sync their exact place in a book between different devices, along with notes, highlights, and bookmarks. By tracking when you turn pages and which books you’re reading, Amazon says it can properly track where you are in a book and keep that data in sync. Amazon also says it uses the specific data here to power its “Reading Insights” features for tracking reading goals and celebrating milestones (sort of like fitness tracking, but for reading).

A more compelling answer is that Amazon uses insights from the data it collects to improve the Kindle software as a whole. “For example, we noticed that readers were tapping pages backwards and forwards in frequent succession, likely trying to flip back and forth between pages and reference different parts of a book. To address this, we have built several navigation features, including Page Flip and the ability for customers to continuously scroll through their book when reading.”

If this creeps you out, you can request that Amazon delete your personal data and then turn off Whispersync in your Kindle's settings, but you will lose the ability to keep your books or documents in sync between devices. 

Pulsars Were Discovered By a US Airman Before Scientists Found Them

The discovery of pulsars (rotating neutron stars) has been credited to UK scientists Jocelyn Bell Burnell and her supervisor Antony Hewish, a discovery that won Hewish (but not Bell Burnell, sadly) the Nobel prize.

Now an 81-year-old US airman, Charles Schisler, has revealed that he detected pulsar signals before Bell Burnell and Hewish, and even reported the discovery to scientists at the University of Alaska, but the discovery was never recognizd, partly because his work was classified.

Schisler says he first noticed a faint blip on his radar as he used the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System to watch the skies over Siberia for any signs of an attack.

He noted the signals repeatedly after that and soon realised that they were happening four minutes earlier every day. This told him they must be extra-terrestrial because the stars rose four minutes earlier every day due to the Earth’s motion around the Sun.

Schisler drove to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks to meet an astronomy professor who identified the source of his blips as the Crab, the tattered remains of a supernova blast, 6,300 light-years away.

he following months, Schisler recorded more celestial radio signals and believes most were pulsars. However, he did not appreciate how special his observations were until he heard of the UK astronomers’ discovery on his short-wave radio. Hewish later won the Nobel Prize for the find while his research student Bell Burnell, controversially, did not.

I'm surprised this story hasn't been more widely reported.

A Quick Way to Dodge and Burn in Lightroom

Many years ago, I learned how to print my photos in a darkroom, including how to dodge and burn an exposure to get more detail in light and dark areas, though I have to admit that I never used the technique much. Now, with digitial photography, techniques that took hours of experimentation in a darkroom are trivially simple to do on a computer using tools like Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom.

Here's an article about a simple technique for dodging and burning in Adobe Lighroom, explained by Photographer and educator Serge Ramelli. It does look like it could be a real time saver. I'm posting it here mostly so I can find it again later, but if you are a digital photographer and use Lightroom, you should take a look at it.

Ride with VirZOOM

I am not a big fan of virtual reality tech. I'm much more interested in the applications of augmented reality. But I have come across one VR application that is really cool - it's called VirZOOM.

Basically it's a set of sensors that you hook up to an exercise bike. You can then put on a VR headset and ride your bike through Google Street View settings. This is seriously cool. If you want to get an idea of what it looks like, watch this short video (Twitter link).

They also have games if you are into  that.

Technical Communication Links - March 2, 2020

Some links related to technical communication.

• What's New In Oxygen XML Editor 22. "Version 22 of the Oxygen XML Editor provides numerous new features, updates, and improvements that focus on productivity, performance, efficiency, and simplicity for XML authoring, development, publishing, and collaboration."
• United Nations Editorial Manual Online. This could be useful for those writing for an international audience.

Technical Communication Links - February 17, 2020

Some links related to technical communication.

• The 5 Cs: Simple strategies for effective technical editing. The 5 Cs of technical writing applied to technical editing.
• How I recreated a Polaroid camera with CSS gradients only. It is remarkable what you can do with CSS. 
• Sometimes Dragons, a blog focusing on technical writing and development from KellyAnn Fitzpatrick.
• Agile as Trauma, a good article for those of you suffering in an agile development environment. 
• More Analysis and Diagnosis, a video from Paul Beverley about some of his incredibly useful macros for Microsoft Word.

Featured Links - February 16, 2020

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

• Hacking lockers at a hotel or AirBnb. A Twitter thread exposing what can happen when the default admin password isn't changed. 
• Inside the Bowling Alley's Mechanical Heart With the Guy Who Keeps It Beating. Maintaining the machines that wiped out a teenage career. 
• Trump's New 'More American' Air Force One Is A Disgrace To The Name. If you want to see what it looks like, you'll have to open the article. I'm not posting it here.
• Twenty Lessons on Fighting Tyranny From the Twentieth Century. These are worth keeping in mind as you read the daily news.
• NASA  Releases Remixed Version of Iconic 'Pale Blue Dot' Photo. It's amazing the difference 30 years of improvements in image processing technology can make.
• 5 Excellent Free Lessions to Learn the Basics of Photography. These could be worthwhile, even if you just use a smartphone.
• Carol Kaye: The Boss of the Bass Guitar. An interview with the legendary session musician. 
• What are the Best .onion Sites & How to Access Them Safely in 2020. Some useful tips here. 

Understanding the Language of The Expanse

I've been enjoying both the book and TV versions of The Expanse, James S. A. Corey. One feature is the invented language spoken by the Belters, the inhabitants of the asteroid belt. I had assumed it was a polyglot language made up from bits of Eastern European and Romance languages, but it turns out to be quite a bit more complex (and rigorously developed) than that, as this article points out.

The two most easily identifiable (to me) non-English languages involved in lang belta appear to be German and Spanish, with que/ke, pendejo, agua, nichts, dir, and bist. Other source languages include French (bien, dieu), Japanese (shikata ga nai), and Mandarin (dui ), along with other languages that I didn’t recognize because I don’t know them. These languages blend together, so you get things like “sabez nichts” (know/s nothing), “bist bien” (am/are good), and “kept top bunk á dir” (for you). I don’t know how many real-world creoles are composed of a lexifier plus five or more substrate languages (I think the one McWhorter mentions with the most substrate languages is Mauritian Creole French, at six substrates), but it is certainly possible, especially in a space-future where people from dozens of countries are thrown together and have to communicate.

Lang belta shows some features of creoles, and, given what I’ve read about the size of the worldbuilding bible for this novel series, it’s likely they did the research (A+). For the TV adaptation, they recruited the linguist Nick Farmer to consult and develop the creole further (see the Ars Technica post linked above), and he put his linguistic skills to work imagining what curses and insults people would use in space and how body language would look.

Assessing the Teck Frontier Oilsands Projcet

The Canadian federal government has to make a decision on whether to approve the Teck Resources' Frontier oilsands mine project.

This is a controversial project. It will have significant environmental impacts, add to Canada's carbon emissions, and provide significant employment and tax revenue. But do the benefits outweigh the costs?

That's the subject of this article from the CBC, which tries to lay out the costs and benefits, and cut through the significant spin put on the project by both its supporters and detractors. One thing that the article emphasizes, and this is important, is the difference in revenue between what was forecast when the project was proposed in 2011 and what would be realized based on current prices

Moving from a 2011 oil price forecast to a current equivalent would reduce expected revenues from the Frontier project (all else equal) by about a quarter, while reducing taxes, royalties and return on capital each by about a third.

If oil prices follow the $65 plus inflation break-even cited by the Canadian Energy Centre, that would reduce revenues by almost two thirds, and taxes, royalties and returns to investors by about three quarters.

At today's oil prices, plus inflation, revenues would be reduced by three quarters relative to 2011 forecast levels, and taxes, royalties and returns on capital would be reduced by about 95 per cent.

My own take on it: the project should not be approved, and all future oilsands development should be halted.

Changing Our Perspective On Time

Humans tend to be short sighted when it comes to planning for the future. Few of us look generations ahead, past our deaths, out into periods of time familiar to historians. That can have some serious consequences, as we're finding out when trying to deal with climate change.

The Long Time is an attempt to change that. It deserves your attention.

A few weeks ago, the IPCC released a report about climate change so devastating that some of its authors were in tears at the launch. It highlighted how our actions now will determine the kinds of lives future inhabitants of the planet will have, and ultimately whether they will have lives at all. We hold immense responsibility for the future, yet in these times of apocalyptic news cycles, it can feel that everything is extremely urgent but happening too fast to change. We hold immense power, yet feel impotent. In the face of global anxiety, we put our heads down and our horizons get closer and closer. The problem is that the tunnel vision of short-term thinking is leading to decisions that might mean we are only left with a short term as a species.

We’ve started the Long Time project as we believe that: Our capacity to care about the future is crucial to our ability to preserve it, developing longer perspectives on our existence will change the way we behave in the short term, and art and culture will be crucial to making the much needed transformative shift in attitudes and behaviours. Here we explain both why and how, proposing five paths to safeguarding the long-term…

 

Spy Cats

There was some serious craziness going on during the Cold War and there's hardly a better example than the CIA's Project Acoustic Kitty, which tried to train cats as spies. Yes, it was a real project.

Cats are small, stealthy, and people who aren’t cat lovers will likely ignore a stray without a second glance. For the CIA in the 1960s, this meant cats were the perfect animals to be trained as spies.

The idea was born from B. F. Skinner’s work in operant psychology and behaviour modification. Burrhus Frederick Skinner was an American Psychologist who believed that an animal’s behaviour could be predicted and shaped through behavioural reinforcement in a controlled environment. The bulk of his work relied on what’s become known as a “Skinner Box.”

I wonder if any of the researchers were cat owners. As someone who has been living with cats for about 20 years, I cannot imagine how anyone with any experience with cats could have thought that the idea of training them was workable.

Polarization and Conservatives in Canada

It's patently obvious that the political spectrum in the United States is highly polarized; there isn't any middle any more. What's not as obvious is that this is happening in Canada, although with more political parties to deal with, it's somewhat less visible. Where it is most noticeable is the shift of the Conservative party from just right of centre to far right.

Macleans looks at what has happened to the Conservatives in Canada in some detail.

Yet the Conservative moderate-centre has all but disappeared. Largely, the so-called Red Tories have left the party and gone elsewhere. There is no “extremist wing”—that’s imaginary. Fundamental changes have shaped the base of the party that reflect differences in outlook, preferences and values from the great majority of Canadians and have little to do with what someone thinks about gay pride parades. As in the U.K. and the U.S., authoritarian or ordered populism has polarized Canada into two incommensurable camps.

The numbers are scary.

EKOS Research found that four years ago, there was a 10-percentage-oint gap between Liberals and Conservatives who selected climate change as the top issue of political concern. That gap is now 46 percentage points.

More than 90 per cent of Canadians who identify with the political centre-left, which is 65 per cent of adult citizens, think that Canada now has a climate emergency (they don’t believe that it’s coming, but that it’s here now.) For people who identify as Conservative or People’s Party supporters, the figure is less than 30 per cent. Four years ago, there was a 20-percentage-point gap between Liberals and Conservatives on trust in science. That exploded to a 40 per cent gap following the last election.

Since 2012, the incidence of Conservative voters who think Canada is admitting “too many” visible minorities as immigrants has swollen from 47 per cent to 70 per cent . Meanwhile, the corresponding incidence of Liberals agreeing there are too many has dropped from 35 to 15 per cent. A modest 12 per cent gap has also expanded to a massive 55 per cent gap.

How Another Nation Does Political Hearings

The recent impeachment hearings in the United States were appalling if you have any respect for political process. But it doesn't have to be that way, as this Twitter thread describing a political hearing in Denmark points out.

I went to an obscure hearing today in the Danish Parliament. It blew my mind, not because of the substance, but because the US Congress has totally warped my view of hearings. And I’m just dorky enough to do a thread about it. 

 First of all, there was a dais in the hearing room, just like any congressional hearing, except the politicians weren’t on the dais. The six experts who were testifying were on the dais. Can you imagine? As if the hearing was about them and not the politicians? 

 The politicians were sitting in the front row of the audience. They all stayed in their seats for the entire hearing. And do you know what they did? They listened! I was in the second row and I didn’t see any of them look at a phone or talk to an aide at any time. 

 Actually, there was one politician on stage, the committee chair. She welcomed everyone, told the witnesses they would each have 10 minutes, then didn’t say anything until one witness asked for an extra minute. She said no. I swooned. 

A Short Story Tutorial

Mary Robinette Kowal won the Best Novel Hugo award last year for The Calculating Stars, the first book in her Lady Astronaut series. She's written a few short stories as part of that series including, "Articulated Restraint", which Tor.com published last year. 

For her birthday, she's given a gift to her fans. She's published her notes and some of the drafts of the story to explain her train of thought when she was wriring. It's a short tutorial in how to write and edit a short story from an accomplished professional writer.

Today, I reached Level 51 Human and am spending it at my parents’ surrounded by writers on a mini-retreat. I’m going to do some serious cooking tonight, but meanwhile, I have a party favor to share with you.

I thought I’d show you the evolution of a story, from initial seed to published product. A lot of times, people compare their work in progress with someone else’s finished product. Don’t do that, even if the finished product is your own.

The story is Articulated Restraint, which came out last year.

Now, I’m going to suggest that you start this by reading the finished story and then we’ll jump back to the beginning. Why? Because I want you to see how many really cool ideas didn’t make it into the final version and how you totally don’t miss them at all.

A Viral Alarm

This is long but important essay. When reading it, consider not only the current situation in China, but what could happen in the United States or Britain, with their current, dysfunctional and incompetent governments (or Ontario, for that matter), where competent people have been replaced by political sycophants.

To provide some context, this is from the translator's introduction.

In July 2018, the Tsinghua University professor Xu Zhangrun published an unsparing critique of the Chinese Communist Party and its Chairman of Everything, Xi Jinping. Xu warned of the dangers of one-man rule, a sycophantic bureaucracy, putting politics ahead of professionalism and the myriad other problems that the system would encounter if it rejected further reforms. That philippic was one of a cycle of works that Xu wrote during a year in which he alerted his readers to pressing issues related to China’s momentous struggle with modernity, the state of the nation under Xi Jinping and the mixed prospects for its future. Those essays will be published in a collection titled Six Chapters from the 2018 Year of the Dog by Hong Kong City University Press in May this year.

Although he was demoted by Tsinghua University in March 2019 and banned from teaching, writing and publishing, Xu has remained defiant. His latest polemical work—“When Fury Overcomes Fear”—translated below, appeared online on February 4, 2020 as the coronavirus epidemic swept China and infections overseas sparked concern around the world.

Against All Odds

With all the news about the novel coronavirus outbreak, it's easy to forget that just recently an outbreak of an even more deadly disease, Ebola, was sweeping through several countries in Africa. Now it's largely under control, thanks to the development of a vaccine led by Canadian scientists.

The story of how that vaccine was developed and finally approved for use is an indication of what it will take to get a virus for the coronavirus into the hands of health workers.

It is a feat that built on the work of scientists in multiple countries on three continents who toiled in obscurity for years. And it ensured that when future outbreaks strike, health workers have a crucial new tool at their disposal.

“This vaccine … from the beginning to the end — it should have never happened. On so many levels … against all odds, it made it,” said Kobinger, now director of the Infectious Disease Research Center at Laval University in Quebec. 

This is how it happened.

Featured Links - February 9, 2020

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

• Free and Cheaper Options to Photoshop, Illustrator, and Other Adobe Creative Software. They don't list alteratives to FrameMaker though. 
• FBI director warns of ongoing Russian ‘information warfare’. It's happening in Canada too; just take a look at the source of some of your memes on Facebook or Twitter.
• DeHumanize. A thought-provoking post from the master of thought-provoking, Peter Watts.
• Release the Muons! Physics Breakthrough Will Lead to a New Kind of Particle Collider
• Transport and Energy Module: Russia's new NEP Tug. Plans for a Russian nuclear-powered space tug. AFAIK, the US has no plans for something like this. 
• The 10 most groundbreaking avant-garde albums of all time. Listen if you dare. 

Fake News and the Coronavirus

BC author, Crawford Kilian, publishes the excellent H5N1 blog, which despite its dated title, is my goto source for news about disease outbreaks. He also publishes occasional articles on the news site, The Tyee, such as this one about fake news about the coronavirus outbreak, which seems to be spreading faster than the disease itself.

A couple of days ago, searching for coronavirus news, I found a story claiming that China’s coronavirus death toll as of Feb. 1 was somewhere around 25,000, out of 150,000 cases. The official figures at that point were 304 deaths out of 14,380 cases. The story was on a site called CCN.com, reporting mostly on digital currencies and sports with a dash of regular news. (CCN stories have appeared on the main page of the Google News aggregator, which says something about the credibility of either CCN or Google’s algorithms, as we shall see.)

CCN based its report on one in the English-language newspaper Taiwan News. The Taiwanese story said that daily coronavirus updates on the Chinese social media site Tencent had several times posted high figures that suddenly disappeared, to be replaced by much lower ones. Unidentified “netizens” had not only noticed the changes but had had the presence of mind to do a screengrab of one on Feb. 1.

Well, it was exciting and scary, but the report had some very dubious assumptions. I started thinking like a disaster novelist, pitching a thriller about a pandemic breaking out, to a serious editor who can see the holes in any plot.

We're Toast 21

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

• Cancel Earthworms. "The 'crazy worms' remaking forests aren’t your friendly neighborhood garden worms. Then again, those aren’t so great either."
• America’s Radioactive Secret. "Oil-and-gas wells produce nearly a trillion gallons of toxic waste a year. An investigation shows how it could be making workers sick and contaminating communities across America."
• Mayfly numbers drop by half since 2012, threatening food chain. This is not good news for the Great Lakes.
• A Surge of New Plastic Is About to Hit the Planet. A world awash in plastic will soon get slammed by more, as major oil companies ramp up their production.
• A Hotter Climate Will Kill Americans in Unexpected Ways, Study Finds. Some of the impacts of a warmer climate are not obvious at first glance.
• How Thawing Permafrost Is Beginning to Transform the Arctic. "This thawing, which could release vast amounts of greenhouse gases, is already changing the Arctic landscape by causing landslides, draining lakes, and altering vegetation."
• Are economists globally understating or overstating the cost of climate change? The higher increases in temperature could be very bad for the economy. 
• Climate Change: It’s a Buzzkill for Bumblebees, Study Finds. "Hot temperatures linked to climate change, especially extremes like heat waves, are contributing to the decline of these fuzzy and portly creatures, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science."

Politics 

• Lindsey Graham Is Quietly Preparing a Mess of a Bill Trying to Destroy End-to-End Encryption. Big Brother WILL be watching you.
• Trump has intentionally rendered our pandemic response incapable. Because Obama. 
• How the Trump administration is putting public records under threat, so history may never know the awful things they did.

Technology

• Snow and Ice Pose a Vexing Obstacle for Self-Driving Cars. Most testing of autonomous vehicles until now has been in sunny, dry climates. That will have to change before the technology will be useful everywhere.
• The Iowa Caucus Tech Meltdown Is a Warning. "t underscores just how much can go wrong when you lean on unnecessary, untested tech."

Radicalized Is a Canada Reads Finalist

Canada Reads is a contest sponsored by the CBC in which panelists debate which of five books should be the book that Canada reads. It's very popular and draws a lot of notice for the CBC and the finalists. This year, they've picked Cory Doctorow's latest book, Radicalized, as one of the finalists.

My 2019 book Radicalized has been named one of the five finalists for Canada Reads, the CBC's annual book prize -- Canada's leading national book award, alongside of the Governor General's award!

My book was nominated by Akil Augustine, a beloved Canadian sportscaster and storyteller, and he'll be championing the book through the Canada Reads process between now and March, when the winner is announced!

As Cory points out, you can read "Unauthorized Bread", one of the stories for free online at Ars Technica or listen to an audio excerpt.

I heard him read from and discuss this book last year in Toronto and I highly recommend it. 

Building a 1967 Paperclip Computer

My cousin, Michael Gardi, has a hobby of recreating digital computing educational toys from the 1960s. He's produced several so far; see this blog post for a summary.

He has a new project, a recreation of the WDC-1 computer based on the book "How to Build a Working Digital Computer" by Edward Alcosser, James P. Phillips, and Allen M. Wolk. It's sometimes known as the "paperclip computer" book, as they used paperclips for the switches.

Mike says:

There have been a few implementations based on the book over the years. A couple are pictured above. This project will document my efforts to make my own version of a "Working Digital Computer" henceforth to be called WDC-1. My intent is to use period technologies but modern building techniques like 3D printing and PCB fabrication. I will probably not use paperclips for switches.

He's completed the project and this is what it looks like.

This is a cool project and I'm looking forward to seeing it the next time I visit Mike. If you want to try it yourself, details are in his Hackaday article.

How Wuham Lost the Fight to Contain the Coronavirus

It's clear by now that the initial response, or lack of it, to the novel coronavirus in Wuhan was a major factor in the spread of the disease. Here's a long article that goes into detail about the first days of the outbreak. 

Doctors on the front lines of epidemic outbreaks always sense the danger ahead.

Zhao Lei at the infectious disease department of the Wuhan Union Hospital said he received the first patient suspected with coronavirus infection in December. The patient’s pneumonia symptoms were quite unusual, and a CT scan showed shadows in his lungs, Zhao said. Although CT scan results are not the only reference for coronavirus diagnosis, they are a key indicator. 

In the following days, patients with similar symptoms started to flood into the hospital, sometimes reaching 800 or 900 in one day, Zhao said. The hospital had to transfer more doctors and nurses to the fever clinic to treat the influx of patients. 

Several doctors raised concerns of a new strain of virus that showed stronger contagion and severity than normal respiratory infections, but they were confused by health-care authorities’ hesitance to take measures and official statements declaring the disease controllable.

Let's hope that authorities in Canada and the US are better prepared. 

Santana McLaughlin 2011

I watched a rather good concert video on Amazon Prime last night: Santana and McLaughlin Invitation to Illumination Live at Montreux 2011. It's not as intense as their 1973 tour (which I was one of the best concerts I saw in the 1970s), but still very watchable and with a high level of playing. Especially good was a version of Pharaoh Sanders' classic "The Creator Has a Master Plan" about 50 minutes into the video.

The Past and Future of Punctuation Marks

It's hard to imagine reading without punctuation marks, but that was the situation until the early Middle Ages. Modern punctuation didn't get standardized until the invention of the printing press.

All this is laid out in a rather fascinating article, Pause and Effect.

The printing press allowed the standardisation and rapid spread not only of language and its looks, but also of marks of punctuation. Enthusiastically taken up by humanists and authors across Europe, the correct use of punctuation marks became an intrinsic part of good education and breeding. Yet their ambivalent nature, halfway between speech and writing, continues to reverberate: the 16th-century English educator Richard Mulcaster called brackets, for instance, ‘creatures to the pen, and distinctions to pronounce by’. Their indeterminacy, perhaps, makes theorists of rhetoric and grammar nervous: they prescribed the use of certain punctuation marks as both elegant and reprehensible, something to do by all means – and not do under any circumstances.

The article goes on to discuss the role of puntuation in modern communication, more specifically texting and internet messaging. 

2019 Locus Recommended Reading List and Poll

Every year, Locus, the newsmagazine of the science fiction and fantasy field, publishes a list of recommended books and stories. The list for 2019 is now out. The list is compiled by Locus staff, reviewers, and professionals in the field.

Locus also has and annual Poll and Survey, which you can vote in even if you are not a Locus subscriber. The results determine the winners of the annual Locus Awards.

Looking over the Science Fiction Novels list, these are the books that either I've read, purchased, or would recomend based on reviews and my own author preferences.

• The Testaments, Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese; Chatto & Windus)
• Ancestral Night, Elizabeth Bear (Saga; Gollancz)
• Rule of Capture, Christopher Brown (Harper Voyager US)
• Perihelion Summer, Greg Egan (Tor.com Publishing)
• Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone (Tor)
• Luna: Moon Rising, Ian McDonald (Tor;Gollancz)
• The Future of Another Timeline, Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK)
• Stealing Worlds, Karl Schroeder (Tor)
• Wanderers, Chuck Wendig (Del Rey; Solaris)
• Golden State, Ben H. Winters (Mulholland; Century)

Locus has provided purchase links to Amazon for most of the books and novellas. Many of the novelettes and short stories are available to read for free on line and these are linked as well. 

Featured Links - February 2, 2020

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

• New Safety Gizmos Are Making Car Insurance More Expensive. The unintended consequences of safer cars.  
• The Pulp Librarian on the history of FORTRAN. If, like me, you learned to program in the mainframe era (using punch cards, no less), you should enjoy this. 
• House legislators want to hand NASA’s human spaceflight program over to Boeing. "Lawmakers also appear to like cost-plus contracts."
• New Mission Will Take First Peek at Sun's Poles. This is an exciting mission and the video has some spectacular graphics. 
• Hackers stole $13,103.91 from me. Learn from my mistakes. "Here are three simple ways to protect yourself from common hacks."
• Here Are the Most Common AirBnb Scams Worldwide. This article reinforces my decision not to use AirBnB. 

Free SF&F Anthology from Tor.com

The website, Tor.com, the web presence for the publishing house Tor, has become one of the major publishers of short science fiction and fantasy.  During the year, they publish dozens of stories by new and established authors.

They've collected twenty-four of those stories for 2019 into an anthology, Some of the Best from Tor.com, and made it available as a free ebook that you can download from all the major vendors. It's pretty hard to go wrong with an anthology that has stories by Elizabeth Bear, Greg Egan, Mary Robinette Kowal, Rich Larson, Seanan McGuire, and Annalee Newitz, among many others.

Given the price, (did I say, free?), you can't go wrong. Now you have something to do during the Super Bowl half-time show.