Starship Users Guide

It sounds like science fiction. "Startship Users Guide". But it's not. SpaceX has published v1.0 of Starship Users Guide (PDF link), providing basic information about its massive Starship vehicle that may one day carry people to the moon and Mars.

SpaceX’s Starship system represents a fully reusable transportation system designed to service Earth orbit needs as well as missions to the Moon and Mars. This two-stage vehicle—composed of the Super Heavy rocket (booster) and Starship (spacecraft) as shown in Figure 1—is powered by sub-cooled methane and oxygen. Starship is designed to evolve rapidly to meet near term and future customer needs while maintaining the highest level of reliability.

Starship has the capability to transport satellites, payloads, crew, and cargo to a variety of orbits and Earth, Lunar, or Martian landing sites. Potential Starship customers can use this guide as a resource for preliminary payload accommodations information. This is the initial release of the Starship Users Guide and it will be updated frequently in response to customer feedback.

As a technical writer, I dreamed of working on something like this. 

Microsoft Announces Major Office Update

Microsoft has announced a major update to its Office 365 suites, which will be renamed to Microsoft 365. The updates will roll out on April 21st.

Word gets some notable changes.

Moving on to Word, Microsoft (finally) added the ability to give you comprehensive edits on whatever you write, similar to the way Grammarly works. Now called Microsoft Editor, it offers suggestions beyond simple spelling and grammar corrections: acronyms, clarity, formality, and even inclusiveness. For instance, if you write ‘mailman,’ it should suggest something like ‘mail carrier.’ Microsoft claims it even offers rewrite suggestions of entire sentences. I doubt it will be helpful with purposeful misspellings, unique syntax, and non-standard grammar, but for getting rid of excess ‘verys’ and ‘justs?’ Sure.

There’s also a “similarity checker,” which will tell you if your text is too close to your source material and help you cite your sources correctly. Editor will also be available in Outlook and as a stand-alone browser extension for Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome, too. According to Microsoft, the new Editor will start rolling out today, with general availability by the end of April. You will have to manually download the browser extension, though.

I am still using Office 2013 and have no reason to upgrade so I won't be doing any sort of review. At some point I suppose I'll be forced into upgrading, but for my current needs, I could probably be perfectly happy with Libre Office. 

Webinar: "Using DITA for Small Technical Documentation Teams"

For you technical writers still working, here's an announcement of a webinar that might be interesting. (Copied from an email from Radu Coravu on the dita-users mailing list, which I am still subscribed to for purely nostalgic reasons).

I'm presenting a free webinar this Wednesday, April 1, 2020, 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm ET.

The webinar is named "Using DITA for Small Technical Documentation Teams", it is hosted by CIDM and you are welcome to join if you want:

https://www.infomanagementcenter.com/product/dita-for-small-teams/

In the webinar I will show how GitHub and Oxygen XML Author can be used to collaborate on a DITA technical documentation project.

A detailed outline of what I will be presenting can be found on the Oxygen XML Blog:

https://blog.oxygenxml.com/topics/dita_for_small_teams.html

Growing Up in Quarantineland

I remember the polio epidemic. As a child, we weren't allowed in public swimming pools and I didn't have swimming lessons until I was almost a teen, after a vaccine was developed. School was a breeding ground for "childhood diseases" like chicken pox, mumps, and measles. Those of you who grew up later in the age of vaccination won't have those memories, but your children will, thanks to COVID-19.

Margaret Atwood remembers quarantines during her childhood and writes about them in the Globe and Mail.

You were absolutely not supposed to go to public swimming pools in the summer, we were told, because there might be an outbreak of polio. Carnivals then had freak shows, and quite often one of the attractions would be The Girl in the Iron Lung, who was stuck inside a metallic tube and who could not move, even to breathe: the Iron Lung did her breathing for her, with a gasping sound that was amplified over the P.A. system.

As for lesser diseases such as chicken pox, tonsillitis, mumps and the common kind of measles, kids were just expected to get them, and they did. When you were ill you were, of necessity, at home and in bed, and when you were recovering you risked boredom. No TV or video games; what you were given instead, in addition to the ginger ale and grape juice, was a pile of old magazines, a scrapbook, and scissors and paste. You cut out the more interesting pictures and pasted them into the scrapbook. One Lysol ad showed a woman up to her waist in water labelled Doubt, Inhibitions, Ignorance, and Misgivings, with the caption: Too Late to Cry Out in Anguish!

Despite the current conditions, she remains an optimist.

So plaster a virtual quarantine sign on your door, don’t let strangers in, consider yourself a potential plague vector, watch The Invasion of the Body Snatchers (again) or The Seventh Seal (again). And get out the scissors and paste, analogue or digital, or the pen and paper, ditto. If you yourself are not ill, the pandemic may have given you a gift! That gift is time. Always meant to write a novel or take up clog-dancing? Now’s your chance.

And take heart! Humanity’s been through it before. There will be an Other Side, eventually. We just need to make it through this part, between Before and After. As novelists know, the middle section is the hardest to figure out. But it can be done.

Featured Links - March 29, 2020

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

• Destroying an Incoming Asteroid is Even Harder Than Scientists Thought. "Smacking an asteroid with a bomb or a smaller asteroid should shatter it into manageable pieces, right? Wrong, a new study shows."
• Sudden Ancient Global Warming Event Traced to Magma Flood. A study has cemented the link between an intense global warming episode 56 million years ago and volcanism in the North Atlantic, with implications for modern climate change.
• The Best Sci-Fi Binges You Can Watch in a Single Day (or Weekend). You won't have to invest your life in these. 
• Windows 10 upgrade failed? Use these 5 tools to find the problem and fix it fast. Most Windows 10 upgrades and feature updates succeed without incident. But if you're encountering problems, especially with an older PC, use these tools and techniques to figure out what's going wrong.
• 12 Google Calendar Tricks You're Probably Not Using. "Can your calendar keep up with your busy schedule? These Google Calendar tips will help you and your team stay organized."
• The Best Sci-Fi and Fantasy Streaming in April. Some good (and not so good) movies and shows to take your mind off current events.
• ‘Harry Potter’ exhibit now available in Google Arts & Culture app. "This is one way to entertain families while stuck at home."
• Ozone layer repairing, redirecting wind flows, new study says. Some good news about the environment.

A 3D Tour of Frank Lloyd Wright's "Fallingwater"

Here's some beauty for you today. If you've always wanted to visit Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, here's a page with a 3D video tour and a film about the house.

In 1935, architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed Fallingwater, a house atop a waterfall in Pennsylvania. It's a beautiful house, and I've visited it several times to wander around and think, "Yeah, this is what I'd like if I had a gajillion dollars."

Here's one way to experience it from home—a 3D-rendered fly-through showing how the structure is put together. In this video, animator Cristóbal Vila shows us how Fallingwater emerges from the landscape and builds up, plus how cantilevering allows the house to rest on a very unusual foundation. Have a look (and skip to 0:40 if you don't care for opening credits).

A Virtual Tour of Expo 67

Expo 67 was a watershed moment in Canadian history, and in my life too, as visiting it on a school trip was the first time I left my home town on an extended trip. It blew my 16-year-old mind, big time.

If you want to get an idea of what all the fuss was about, you can take a virtual tour of Expo 67, viewing three short movies that cover the high points of the fair.

The 1967 World's Fair, better known as Expo 67, took place at Montreal’s iconic Parc Jean-Drapeau to mark Canada’s 100th anniversary. More than 50 million visitors came, making it one of the most successful world's fairs of the 20th century. The theme of the fair was “Man and His World,” manifested in bold and expansive installations like Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic sphere, which is still one of the park’s main attractions. Crowds were treated to performances by the biggest headliners of the day like Thelonious Monk, The Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane.

The site of Expo 67 was fully rebuilt in summer 2019; dubbed Espace 67, the park was redesigned to engage the public through every day use and a range of events. While visiting the park is not entirely possible at the moment, you can still go on a personal retrospective of the expo without leaving your home. Here are a few highlights to get you started.

Some Rules for Identifying Dangerous Emails

I suspect that most people reading this blog know how to identify dangerous emails but just in case, I'm linking to a good article from the Office Watch site about email hygiene. I've noticed an uptick in spam recently, much of it related to COVID-19, and now is not a good time to let down your guard.

Four simple clues that an email should be deleted. Among the bogus coronavirus emails was something new to us and apparently the anti-spam filters that should have detected it. We’ll use the dangerous email as an example of what to look for in a scam or virus-infected email.

NASA Scaling Back Space Programs

The coronavirus pandemic is beginning to affect NASA's space programs. Work has been halted on the James Webb Space Telescope, scheduled to be launched next year, and on the Space Launch System (no loss there, frankly). More details in this article from The Register.

Lockdown measures are in place across California, as well various other US states and countries, and that’s not a problem for NASA folks who just need a computer and internet access to work on projects. But for engineers told to stay home for their own safety, and who need to be on-site to manufacture parts or run physical tests on equipment, their work has been put on ice for the time being, and that could push back programs.

Case in point: scientists working on the James Webb Space Telescope are predominantly based in California, where Governor Gavin Newsom has ordered all of its residents – nearly 40 million total – to stay home as much as possible for the foreseeable future. As such work on the project has been paused. A deadline for experimental proposals for the observatory has been pushed back to the end of May.

Update: It's not just NASA, the ESA is postponing missions too.

Some Music From Doug McArthur

I've known Doug McArthur since the 1970s, when he was an active part of the wonderful Southern Ontario folk music scene. He's still recording and performing occasionally and has some of his music available on the web, including The Horses of the Sea, a collection of Irish-themed songs that he released last year.

He has a new project, Boots and Saddles, and you can listen to it online for free. He describes it as:

A retrospective of some country tinged music I have released over the last few years.

Most of the tunes were produced by Ian Tamblyn so there is a consistency of sound here and a chance for you to catch up on what I have been doing this century. 

If you like it, please consider supporting him by ordering one (or more) of his CDs. They are all well worth the cost (which isn't much). 

 

Museums and Galleries Online

If you miss going to the museum or art gallery right now, you may find some solace online. Here are some links.

• The Ultimate Guide to Virtual Museum Resources, E-Learning, and Online Collections. This is a BIG list resources and you might not need to go any further.
• 19 immersive museum exhibits you can view from your couch. Most of the resources are from the US, including the Smithsonian.
• These 12 Famous Museums Offer Virtual Tours You Can Take on Your Couch . "Experience the best museums from London to Seoul in the comfort of your own home."
• The History of Carrots, from the World Carrot Museum. Just to whet your appetite for gardening season. 

Featured Links - March 22, 2020

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

• Project Sandcastle. Run Android on an iPhone 7. Some people have too much time on their hands. 
• Forging Literary Artifacts. Forging in the sense of creating in this case; for example, maps in books. 
• Mind Reading and Mind Control Technologies Are Coming. We need to figure out the ethical implications before they arrive. 
• The Soviet Reach for the Moon (40-page PDF). "The L-1 and L-3 Manned Lunar Programs and The Story of the N-1 'Moon Rocket'". 
• Up Your Netflix Game With These Tools and Chrome Extensions. Better Browser is especially useful.
• Scientists: ‘Photon Ring’ Stacking Will Create Ultra-Sharp Black Hole Photos. Seriously cool and very geeky astronomy.

We're Toast 23

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.

Note: I'm putting this series of posts on hiatus for now. There's so much bad news right now that I don't think I should be adding to it, for my own sanity and yours too.

Climate Change and Environment

• Scientists Fear We Could Lose The Amazon Rainforest In The Next 50 Years. "Research published today suggests that large ecosystems such as the Amazon rainforest will collapse and disappear far quicker than previously thought once a global tipping point is reached."
• Greenland, Antarctica Melting Six Times Faster Than in the 1990s. "Observations from 11 satellite missions monitoring the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have revealed that the regions are losing ice six times faster than they were in the 1990s."
• A Second Dust Bowl Could Threaten Global Food Security. "A new study paints a scary reality: one where climate change pushes another Dust Bowl-like event to take over the Great Plains, throwing global food security into uncertainty."

Politics 

• A Trump Insider Embeds Climate Denial in Scientific Research. "An official at the Interior Department embarked on a campaign that has inserted misleading language about climate change — including debunked claims that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is beneficial — into the agency’s scientific reports, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times."

Technology

• Even a Relatively Small Nuclear War Would Cause Global Famine. "According to a new study out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, even a relatively small nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan would surely bring about global famine."

Some Things to Stream While Self Isolating

Most of you reading this blog probably have subscriptions to some streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime. You'll be able to get your fill of crappy action movies and tear jerker romcoms to pass your time while holed up in your cave during the next few weeks.

But what if you want something different, an opera perhaps, or a classic movie?  Here are some choices.

• The Metropolitan Opera is streaming full operas from their HD opera simulcast series. "All “Nightly Met Opera Streams” will begin at 7:30pm EDT and will remain available via the homepage of metopera.org for 20 hours. The homepage link will open the performance on the Met Opera on Demand streaming service. The performance will also  be viewable on all Met Opera on Demand apps."
• The final concert in Amanada Palmer's world tour, from Wellington, New Zealand. Read a review here. The concert includes a reading by her husband, Neil Gaiman.
• Lecture #7: Short Stories, from Brandon Sanderson's course "Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy", with special guest, Mary Robinette Kowal. 
• 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc., from Open Culture.
• Where to Watch Classic Movies Online: The 7 Best Sites and Services. If you have a library card, do have a look at Kanopy.
• Free concerts from the nugs.net archive, including Bob Weir and Wolf Brothers, Wilco, Widespread Panic, Dead & Company, and Drive By Truckers. 
• 15 Broadway Plays and Musicals You Can Watch On Stage From Home. Most of these are on various subscription services.

Technical Communication Links - March 19, 2020

Some links related to technical communication:

• The Manuscript Podcast, with Breno Barreto - Episode 2, How technical should a tech writer be? My opinion: very technical. 
• Content Engineering Series from simplea.com. A series of articles on different aspects of content engineering. 
• New Word Security Fixes Are More 'Interesting' Thank Usual. Microsoft has not provided many details, as usual.
• Jutoh, a program to create and edit ebooks from UK developer, Anthemion. It looks to be quite full-featured and is reasonably priced. 
• Unix Toolbox. "This document is a collection of Unix/Linux/BSD commands and tasks which are useful for IT work or for advanced users. This is a practical guide with concise explanations, however the reader is supposed to know what s/he is doing."
• 10 Great LibreOffice-only features. Not all features in the article are unique to LibreOffice, but there are some (like saving as EPUB) that MS Office doesn't have. 
• How to instantly make your front end projects look better. These tips might be useful for those producing online documentation. 

How Soviet Science Magazines Fantasized About Life in Outer Space

It's easy to forget that for many years the Soviet Union was the leading space power and their space program was a source of immense national pride. Artists reflected that pride, and also used their art as an educational tool, as pointed out in this article about Soviet space art.

Soviet illustrations, even ones with whizzing UFOs and bafflingly futuristic machines, were not drawn to entertain as much as to educate and promote the Communist project. An open letter from cosmonauts to the public in a 1962 issue of Technology for the Youth read “… each of us going to the launch believes deeply that his labor (precisely labor!) makes the Soviet science and the Soviet man even more powerful, and brings closer that wonderful future—the communist future to which all humanity will arrive.” Scientists, astronauts, and aircraft engineers were treated like legends, since outer space was such an important idea in the Soviet Union, according to Sankova. “Achievements of the USSR in the field of space have become a powerful weapon of propaganda,” she says. Soviet citizens lived vicariously through such images, and even the more surreal and fantastical visuals—living in space, meeting new life forms—demonstrated that the idea of cultural revolution need not be limited to Earth.

Much of the art shown in thie article is impressionistic, which you might think would be surprising for a communist state, but it probably harkens back to poster art from the 1920s. If you want to see more realistic Soviet space art, look up some of the art of cosmonaut Alexei Leonov on Google Images.

Get a Free Copy of Scalzi's Redshirts

A few years ago, John Scalzi won a Hugo award for his novel, Redshirts. Although the book never explicitly mentions the name, it's clearly inspired by Star Trek and the red-shirted characters who get killed off on away teams. It's a very funny book that has more depth than you might think for what starts out as a light comedy. Redshirts is the ideal book to give to your friends who aren't science fiction fans but want to explore the genre.

Until 11:59 p.m. on March 20th, you can download it for free in ebook format from Tor.com. You'll have to sign up with an email address, but you'll get to download a book a month, so it's worth it.

Cooking for the Apocalypse

As a complement to yesterday's post about stretching your food resources, here's a long Twitter thread about what to do if you have gone out and stocked up on more food than you know what to do with. It's somewhat tongue in cheek but there is good advice here.

Look at your stash-write down ideas: make x with y. Need more z to make it work. Brainstorm: rice dishes around the world: jollof, paella, jambalaya, risotto. Happy casseroles from childhood. When you are low on cycles, the thinking work is done, you got a list, start chopping.

Here’s how my brain works: OMG that broccoli needs to be eaten. We have defrosted pork chop, what with? Look, extra canned yams from Xmas. That could be baked yams w/onion, apple & sage. But not with broccoli, yuck.

Prep the yams, which bake in the oven. Cook the pork. While the oven’s already on, bake some potatoes. Lightly steam the broccoli to stop spoilage, back in the frig. Potato-broccoli soup on tomorrow’s menu. Bake extra potatoes for breakfast…get just a little ahead of your stocks

The 50 Best Science Fiction TV Shows

If you are looking for something to take your mind off our current woes, you could do worse than starting with this list of the 50 best science fiction TV shows. It's a comprehensive list, but I found the rankings somewhat idiosyncratic and there are some ommissions, for example, the wonderful British series, Years and Years.

So there are a lot of shows to enjoys. FWIW, my favourites are:

• Max Headroom
• Man in the High Castle
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• Stargate SG-1
• Babylon 5
• Star Trek: The Next Generation
• The Expanse
• Orphan Black
• The Outer Limits 
• Torchwood
• Battlestar Galactica (2004)
• The X-Files
• The Prisoner

If I had to pick the top five, they would be The Expanse, Babylon 5, and Star Trek: TNG, adding Years and Years and Star Trek: Pickard, which are not on the Rolling Stone list.

Food Is Love

People have been stocking up and panic buying all sorts of food, mostly canned or freeze dried (although there was a run on bananas yesterday at our supermarket - bananas!). But, as Elizabeth Bear points out in this article from her Patreon, there are a lot of things you can use that you might already have around the house and haven't thought of. I would print this and keep a copy handy near your kitchen.

1) Throw away nothing unless it’s actually rotten. Chicken bones and squidgy bits? Stock. Into that same pot go the onion ends, the celery stumps, the carrot bits, those little hard bits you flick off the end of the garlic. Yesterday’s bay leaf can go in there, too. It still has a little love to give. Sautee all of this until it starts to color the bottom of the pan, then deglaze it with water and a little wine if you have some and simmer it overnight. Don’t eat meat? Same process, no chicken bones.

2) Those sketchy vegetables that aren’t actually bad but just kind of unappealing? Into the soup. Sautee, add that stock you made up top, cook them for a while and then, if that wizened carrot is still not looking too great, puree. Into the pot, wrinkly green beans. Into the pot, freezer-burned corn. INTO THE POT, MUSHY TOMATO.

This is how our grandparents (and maybe our parents) used to cook.

Update: I've fixed the link to point to the proper article. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Update 2: She's written a second, shorter article with more tips.

You Should Be Reading Heather Cox Richardson

Heather Cox Richardson is a history professor who is "interested the contrast between image and reality in American politics. I believe in American democracy, despite its frequent failures." She has been publishing a daily email newsletter (also available on the web) that has some of the best analysis of current political news that I've seen anywhere. I strongly recommend subscribing to Letters from an American.

Today she delves into some of the reasons the US government has become so dysfunctional. It's not pretty.

And so, it seems the reactionaries of the 1950s got what they wanted. We have decimated our government bureaucracy and expertise, slashed taxes and the social safety net, and crippled our infrastructure, all in the name of promoting American business and the individualism that, in theory, encourages economic growth. The president, along with his enablers in the Senate, have tried to cement this ideology onto the country through the courts.

And now, the coronavirus pandemic is putting their system to the test. So far, it is failing miserably.

Featured Links - March 15, 2019

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

• When Russia and America Coöperated to Avert a Y2K Apocalypse. Yes, Y2K was serious, and even the Russians were worried.
• A Computer Science Proof Holds Answers for Math and Physics. An advance in our understanding of quantum computing offers stunning solutions to problems that have long puzzled mathematicians and physicists.
• Seattle Symphony Announces Free Video Broadcasts and Livestreams. Music to soothe the soul during troubled times.
• Fifty years of Zappa's "Hot Rats" and how it inspired the jazz-rock fusion genre. "Listening to Hot Rats today, you have to remind yourself that this was 19-freakin'-69. This was music light years ahead of its time."
• The Best Free Movie Streaming Sites. An annotated list of free and legal movie streaming sites. Not all may be available in Canada.

Yes, There Is Hope For Us 3

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

• Africa’s Biggest Bank Releases Funding Policy on Coal Projects. The lender commits to assess projects, won’t stop coal lending.

Politics

• Fossil-Fuel Subsidies Must End. Despite claims to the contrary, eliminating them would have a significant effect in addressing the climate crisis
• Lessons for the Green New Deal from the Economic Mobilization for World War Two (PDF link). "A just transition important, but don’t underestimate redistributional effects of strong demand."

Technology

• Radical Hydrogen-Boron Reactor Leapfrogs Current Nuclear Fusion Tech. This would be revolutionary, but is it for real?
• Hemp Houses are Being 3D-Printed in Australia. This is probably better for the environment than using concrete but given that they polymerize the hemp, it's not perfect. 
• 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2020. From Technology Review, a list of technologies that could make a real difference in how we live and work.
• Tesla “big battery” in Australia is becoming a bigger nightmare for fossil fuel power generators. 

New Minor Planets Found Beyond Neptune

I recently watched a rather good PBS documentary, The Planets, Ice Worlds which explored the solar system beyond Neptune. Now a team of scientists has found several hundred new minor planets at the solar system's edge. And there are probably many more.

Using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), researchers have found more than 300 trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), minor planets located in the far reaches of the solar system, including more than 100 new discoveries. Published in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, the study also describes a new approach for finding similar types of objects and could aid future searches for the hypothetical Planet Nine and other undiscovered planets. The work was led by graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and professors Gary Bernstein and Masao Sako.

The goal of DES, which completed six years of data collection in January, is to understand the nature of dark energy by collecting high-precision images of the southern sky. While DES wasn't specifically designed with TNOs in mind, its breadth and depth of coverage made it particularly adept at finding new objects beyond Neptune. "The number of TNOs you can find depends on how much of the sky you look at and what's the faintest thing you can find," says Bernstein.

The Far Side Is Back!

The Far Side, Gary Larson's wonderfully twisted comic series, finally is on the Internet. Those of you who were born after 1990 probably won't know what this means to some of us. All I can say is that you are in for a treat.

TheFarSide.com offers a deep dive into Gary’s offbeat sense of humor with The Daily Dose, an ever-changing, random selection of cartoons. Comic Collections offer a different themed collection of his classic cartoons updated weekly. You’ll also find exclusive, never-before-seen extras such as sketches straight from Gary’s personal Sketchbooks. And finally, beginning in 2020, and commemorating the fortieth anniversary of The Far Side, we will periodically unveil new work by the man himself! In truth, we really have no idea what might show up. But, on the other hand, what’s changed?

The OED and the Linguistic DNA Project Webinar

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is sponsoring a webinar that dives deep into the nature of language and how we create definitions.

Words that occur together can tell us something about meaning in language. Theories about such co-occurrence originated in the 19th century, and have been revised (and occasionally re-invented) into the 21st century. The Linguistic DNA project has designed a new computational linguistic approach to model historical word meanings by identifying and ranking a specific kind of lexical co-occurrence: co-occurring non-adjacent lexical trios in discursive spans of text.

Join Dr Seth Mehl, post-doctoral researcher at the University of Sheffield, as he shows us how this tool can be used to mine texts and identify the co-occurrence of specific lemmas, investigate the implication of these patterns on meaning, and inform the way that definitions are written and presented by the OED. For example, the tool can mine texts and identify paragraphs containing: democracy, history, and Greece, and paragraphs containing: democracy, diversity, and tyranny. A linguist can then investigate whether this distinction reflects two pragmatic meanings associated with democracy: as a virtuous ancient example of popular government, or as a threat to the early modern social order.

This new analytical technique has been applied to Early English Books Online (specifically EEBO-TCP), a collection of over 60,000 works from the 16th and 17th centuries, totalling over 1 billion words.

This looks to be fairly technical but some of my writer friends might be interested in it. The webinar is on Thursday, March 12 at 7:00 a.m. EDT.

Read the First Chapter of N. K. Jemisin's Next Novel

Author N. K. Jemisin is the first person to win the Hugo Award for best novel three years in a row. She did this for the three books of her Broken Earth trilogy. I can't comment much on the books, as I have not read them yet (they're in the queue on my Kindle), but I think that's a good enough recommendation.

She has a new book coming out later this month, The City We Became, which is the first book in an urban fantasy trilogy set in New York. You can read the first chapter for free online.

He forgets his own name somewhere in the tunnel to Penn Station.

He doesn’t notice, at first. Too busy with all the stuff people usually do when they’re about to reach their train stop: cleaning up the pretzel bags and plastic bottles of breakfast, stuffing his loose laptop power cord into a pocket of his messenger bag, making sure he’s gotten his suitcase down from the rack, then having a momentary panic attack before remembering that he’s only got one suitcase. The other was shipped ahead and will be waiting for him at his apartment up in Inwood, where his roommate already is, having arrived a few weeks before. They’re both going to be grad students at—

—at, uh—

—huh. He’s forgotten his school’s name. Anyway, orientation is on Thursday, which gives him five days to get settled into his new life in New York.

I'm already hooked.

Some COVID-19 Links

I've been following the COVID-19 epidemic closely and would like to share some of the better information sources that I've found, along with some articles with good advice and analysis.

• COVID-19 Coronavirus Outbreak page on Worldometer. There are several dashboard sites for the coronavirus outbreak, but this is the best one that I've found so far. Sections include Updates (the main page), Death Rate, Incubation, and others. 
• Crawford Kilian's H5N1 blog. I've been following this site ever since Kilian set it up as a response to the first H5N1 outbreak. It's since became a central news site for infectious diseases in general. 
• A somewhat speculative Twitter thread by Liz Specht analysing just how bad the COVID-19 outbreak could get if it continues exponential growth. 
• How might a pandemic affect US society and politics in 2020? An article that considers some of the second-order effects of a widespread COVID-19 pandemic. There are a lot of them, and they are not good. To name just one, if schools get closed, what happens to the children who rely on school meal programs?
• Epidemic Science & Health, a Twitter list of epidemiologists, researchers, public health experts, and journalists tracking COVID-19. The list was compiled by Josh Marshall, the founder of talkingpointsmemo.com.

Featured Links - March 8, 2020

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

• 
  
• 10 Useful Ways to Reuse an Old Router: Don’t Throw It Away! They can be useful, even if they aren't the most recent model. 
• Apple reveals the best Night mode photos shot on iPhone. It's hard to believe that these photos were taken with a phone. 
• How a puzzle game could help scientists find a coronavirus cure. Gamifying a cure for COVID-19. 
• Before Clearview Became a Police Tool, It Was a Secret Plaything of the Rich. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. 
• How to clean your smartphone. Important advice in times of spreading diseasse.
• Five SFF Novels Set in the Much-Maligned City of Toronto. I am surprised that I have not heard of any of these. 

How Passwords Are Cracked

Understanding how hackers crack passwords may motivate you to improve your password hygiene. This article explains how they do it. As the article points out, good password hygiene starts with using a long and strong password, but there are other things you can do.

A hash function allows a computer to input a string (some combination of letters, numbers, and symbols), take that string, mix it up, and output a fixed length string. That's why both strings above are of the same length, even though the strings' inputs were very different lengths.

Hashes can be created from nearly any digital content. Basically all digital content can be reduced to binary, or a series of 0s and 1s. Therefore, all digital content (images, documents, etc.) can be hashed.

There are many different hashing functions, some of which are more secure than others. The hashes above were generated with MD5 (MD stands for "Message Digest"). Different functions also differ in the length of hash they produce.

The same content in the same hash function will always produce the same hash. However, even a small change will alter the hash entirely.

RIP, McCoy Typner

RIP, McCoy Tyner, who has died at the age of 81. This news hurts. I was lucky enough to see him perform three times, and met him once after a spectacular performance at the Purple Onion in Toronto in the early 1990s.

I have provide some context. My late friend, Bob Venn, was responsible for turning me on to jazz when I was in high school. He was a few years older than me and we had some shared interests: airplanes, space, and music. He was aslo a paraplegic; he'd been born with spina bifida and his legs didn't work. But he didn't let that stop him from becoming a radio DJ and almost a pilot (he would have done that if it hadn't been for Transport Canada). He was one of my closest friends, and in the early 90s I decided I'd give him a birthday treat - tickets to see McCoy Tyner at the Purple Onion in Toronto.

The performance was everything I could have hoped for. Three sets of beautiful, transcendent music. We had a table about 10 feet from his piano and I could feel his crashing left-hand chords in my chest. We stayed after it was over and talked to him briefly and shook hands; you could feel his spiritual power in his hands.

Bob died a year after that - victim of a fall when he was getting out of his car after a long drive. I lost a part of my life when he died, and I lost another part tonight, hearing of McCoy's death.

Europe's Major Telescopes 'can meet satellite challenge'

Back in June of last year, I posted a link to an article that pointed out that the Starlink satellite constellation being launched by SpaceX was going to cause major problems for astronomers. From what I've been reading online, this has been the general consensus since then, but it may not be as bad a problem as first thought.

For ESO, its greatest concern centres on the Vista telescope. This is a wide-field observatory that was paid for by the UK when it joined the organisation in 2002.

It's about to be fitted with a new fibre-optic spectroscopic camera, able to capture the detailed colours of 2,400 objects simultaneously, over an area on the sky equivalent to 20 full Moons.

In the worst case, up to 30 fibres could be affected by a satellite trailing across the sky.

"Once you crunch the numbers, the numbers are not as bad as what some people feared," Dr Hainaut told BBC News. "People said 'oh no, there'll be 40,000 bright satellites in the sky? No, there won't be, simply because most of these satellites will be below the horizon, and then most of the others will be in the shadow of the Earth. That's the first bit of good news.

"The second bit of good news is that the space industry, and specifically Space X and OneWeb are talking to us. They are really listening."

Building a Starship a Week In Texas

I recently posted a link to a video showing how United Launch Alliance builds their booster rockets. Contrast this with how Elon Musk and SpaceX are now building their Starship (and soon Super Heavy) rockets in Texas. Even more incredible is that they plan to build a booster a week.

Why the hell does Elon Musk need to build so many Starships, anyway?

Because he’s actually serious about settling Mars. It’s not a joke. It’s not a con for more government money (although Musk won’t turn that down). No, Mars is the raison d’être for SpaceX. And now, in South Texas, Musk is getting close enough to Mars that he can almost taste its red dirt.

Let’s just step back for a moment to acknowledge how nuts this is. Starship is only the upper stage for SpaceX’s Super Heavy rocket, but it is arguably the most novel spacecraft ever built. No one has ever built a fully reusable rocket, and the second stage that goes into space is the hardest part. SpaceX remains a long way from making the interior of Starship habitable for humans on a journey to Mars. But even building a fully reusable vehicle that can lift 150 tons into low Earth orbit would be a marvel. That’s more throw capacity that the Apollo Program’s Saturn V rocket had.

SpaceX has already disrupted the space launch industry with their Falcon boosters. Can they do it again?

Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images Into Public Domain

The Smithsonian is one of the world's great collectors of art, artifacts, and photography. They have just put 2.8 million images online and into the public domain.

For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons to peruse and download free of charge. Featuring data and material from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, the new digital depot encourages the public to not just view its contents, but use, reuse and transform them into just about anything they choose—be it a postcard, a beer koozie or a pair of bootie shorts.

You can access the collection here.

William Gibson On the Apocalypse

William Gibson has been getting a lot of well-deserved publicity for his new novel, Agency. Here's another interview with him in which he talks about the genesis of the book and reveals some surprising details about Russia.

Gibson has a surprising story about Russia. In the late 1980s, a little-known but highly influential think tank, the Global Business Network, started bringing together experts on the future to advise governments and corporations on the decades ahead. Gibson was one of its seers. Its annual meetings would be accompanied by tours of places its futurologists wouldn’t otherwise see; one year they visited the headquarters of Visa, which Gibson was told had “tighter security than the Pentagon”. Gibson says the GBN arranged for him to meet with FBI agents who were involved with the Russian security services, and that they told him about their plan for dealing with corruption in the post-Soviet economy, a plan they called the “self-cleaning oven”. “They were simply going to let it run, let these guys kill each other off, and when things had calmed down, they’d step in.” According to Gibson, while Boris Yeltsin was in power US intelligence blithely assumed that the turf war would play out with no clear winner. “I think, in retrospect,” he says with a wry smile, “it wasn’t a very good decision.”

Status of COVID-19 In China

Here is a digest of a report by the WHO based on the findings of a team of experts who visited China. You can read the full report here (PDF link).

A few key points:

• 5% of people who are diagnosed with Covid require artificial respiratin. Another 15% need to breathe in highly concentrated oxygen - and not just for a few days. The duration from the beginning of the disease until recovery is 3 to 6 weeks on average for these severe and critical patients (compared to only 2 weeks for the mildly ill). The mass and duration of the treatments overburdened the existing health care system in Wuhan many times over. 
• The most common symptoms are fever (88%) and dry cough (68%). Exhaustion (38%), expectoration of mucus when coughing (33%), shortness of breath (18%), sore throat (14%), headaches (14%), muscle aches (14%), chills (11%) are also common. Less frequent are nausea and vomiting (5%), stuffy nose (5%) and diarrhoea (4%). Running nose is not a symptom of Covid
• Pre-existing conditions: The fatality rate for those infected with pre-existing cardiovascular disease in China was 13.2%. It was 9.2% for those infected with high blood sugar levels (uncontrolled diabetes), 8.4% for high blood pressure, 8% for chronic respiratory diseases and 7.6% for cancer. Infected persons without a relevant previous illness died in 1.4% of cases.
• Age: The younger you are, the less likely you are to be infected and the less likely you are to fall seriously ill if you do get infected

It's clear that the aggressive containment measures taken in China are working and may be the only way to control the disease, especially in its early stages. Given the abysmal state of US health care system, the epidemic in the US is likely to be far more severe and long lasting there than in China.

How ULA Builds Its Rockets

While folding laundry yesterday, I took the opportunity to watch this video on how United Launch Alliance (ULA) builds its rockets (Atlas, Delta, and the forthcoming Vulcan). If you have any interest in rockets or the space program, this is a must watch video. I would like to see the equivalent for SpaceX and its Falcon boosters; if you know of one, please leave a comment.

SpaceX Starship Prototype Fails

On Friday, SpaceX's plans for its Starship prototype hit a snag, when the vehicle suffered a spectacular failure during a cryogenic pressurization test. The vehicle actually flew about 15 metres into the air pushed by escaping gas from one of the tanks. Unfortunately, this wasn't a controlled landing and it crumpled when it hit the ground hard.

What’s unclear is what exactly went wrong with Starship SN01 and whether SpaceX expected it to fail during the test. Known as a cryogenic proof test, SpaceX pressurized the ship’s tanks with liquid nitrogen and a gas of some kind in an effort to verify its structural integrity and determine if it was safe to proceed to more risky tests. According to CEO Elon Musk, Starship SN01 was actually meant to support a full wet dress rehearsal (WDR) with liquid oxygen and methane, followed by a Raptor engine static fire test shortly thereafter.

The video is spectacular.

I don't think that this will be a major setback for SpacX. It seems clear that they didn't expect this, but their mode of working is very iterative; build a prototype, test, improve the next prototype, test more. They already have Starship SN02 in production, so expect another test in a few weeks.

The Worst-Cast Scenario for Coronavirus Is Likely

I haven't been posting much about the coronavirus outbreak, although I have been following the news closely. Here's an article that expresses my opinion fairly closely. Jonathan Quick is the former chair of the Global Health Council. In this interview from The Guardian, he expresses the opinion that the worst-case scenario for the coronavirus is likely. I think he's right.

The Covid-19 epidemic looks like it’s edging towards becoming a pandemic – that is, as the WHO defines it, “the worldwide spread of a new disease” – but the WHO hasn’t declared a pandemic yet. What are the best-case and worst-case scenarios?

The best case is that the Chinese conflagration is brought under control, the smaller “flames” we’ve seen flare up in other countries are extinguished, there’s little or no spread to new countries or continents, and the epidemic dies out. The worst case is that the outbreak goes global and the disease eventually becomes endemic, meaning it circulates permanently in the human population. 

Your feeling as to which is more likely, as of today, 27 February?

The worst-case scenario is looking increasingly likely. We’ve now seen cases on six continents, apparently “silent” – that is, at least partly asymptomatic – chains of human-to-human transmission both inside and outside China, with additional countries reporting cases within the last week – bringing the total to 47 – and new, accelerating outbreaks in Iran, Italy and South Korea. If it becomes a pandemic, the questions are, how bad will it get and how long will it last? The case fatality rate – the proportion of cases that are fatal – has been just over 2%, much less than it was for Sars, but 20 times that of seasonal flu. There are still many unknowns – we may have underestimated the period during which a person is contagious, for instance, and the variety of ways in which the virus spreads.

If you want more backing for being pessimistic, read this article (also from the Guardian) about how the horrible, predatory health system in the United States is likely to make the outbreak worse. 

This system is exactly why a 2018 West Health Institute/NORC at the University of Chicago national poll found that 44% of Americans declined to see a doctor due to cost, and why nearly a third of Americans polled said they didn’t get their prescriptions filled due to the high cost of their medicine. This is the same system that killed 38-year-old Texas public school teacher Heather Holland, who couldn’t afford the $116 co-pay for her flu medication and later died from flu complications. It’s the same system that Guardian contributor Luke O’Neil refers to as “Go viral or die trying”, in which Americans who can’t afford life-saving healthcare procedures are forced to become their own advocate and PR agency by launching a viral GoFundMe campaign to ask strangers on the internet to save their lives.

When you multiply my situation by 27.5 million, you end up with a country full of people who won’t see a doctor unless they’re extremely sick. And when you combine a for-profit healthcare system – in which only those wealthy enough to get care actually receive it – with a global pandemic, the only outcome will be unmitigated disaster. This could be somewhat remedied if the US had a single-payer, universal healthcare system, like every other industrialized nation. And as a team of Yale epidemiologists discovered in a study recently published in the Lancet, a single-payer healthcare system in the US could simultaneously save 68,000 lives and $450bn in taxpayer dollars each year.

After you've digested that, read this. "HHS Chief Azar Refuses to Vow Coronavirus Vaccine Will Be Affordable for All, Not Just the Rich." And weep for what our world has become.

Featured Links - March 1, 2020

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

• Rogue colons, endless ellipses: the worst grammar crimes in film titles. "New Austen adaptation Emma. puts the period into period dramas. What other film titles include incongruous punctuation?"
• “Dick’s Stash” and the Mystery of the “Brown-Eyed Women” Lyrics. A little piece of the Grateful Dead's history comes to light.
• China's Space Agency Reveals What It Learned from Deep Radar Probe of Moon's Far Side. The logical next step should be a high-powered radar-mapping satellite.
• Pros and Cons of a Lunar Pit Stop. NASA definitely wants to go to Mars. But does it need the moon to get there?
• A "Live Laugh Love" sign but it's the nuclear waste warning message for future generations