Featured Links - May 31, 2020

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

• Chef's Top Kitchen Hacks to Make Cooking Easier. If you're spending a lot of time in the kitchen, some of these might be worth trying.
• Dino-Killing Asteroid Spawned a Huge Magma Chamber That Lasted Millions of Years. It melted a LOT of rock. 
• 'A summer unlike any other': heatwaves and Covid-19 are a deadly combination. And they don't even mention that it's likely to be a bad year for hurricanes. 
• How to use Windows PowerToys to master your PC. "I think at least one of these tools is going to make your workflow a little easier."
• Photography Life Just Released All of Their Paid Photography Courses for Free. These courses are normally $150 each.
• The Dinosaur-Killer Asteroid May Have Hit Earth at 'Deadliest Possible' Angle.Hitting at 60 degrees splashed much more material into the atmosphere.
• 5 Simple Ways to Make Your Gmail Inbox Safer. "These built-in features protect your data and can help keep your inbox tidy too."
• This economist has a radical plan to solve wealth inequality. "French economist Thomas Piketty says inequality is a political choice. The solution? Wealth taxes well beyond anything dreamed up by Bernie Sanders."

2020 Locus Award Finalists

The finalists for the 2020 Locus Awards have been announced. Winners will be announced on June 27. 

These are the finalists for Science Fiction Novel:

• The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
• The Testaments, Margaret Atwood (Nan A. Talese; Chatto & Windus)
• Ancestral Night, Elizabeth Bear (Saga; Gollancz)
• Empress of Forever, Max Gladstone (Tor)
• The Light Brigade, Kameron Hurley (Saga; Angry Robot UK)
• Luna: Moon Rising, Ian McDonald (Tor; Gollancz)
• The Future of Another Timeline, Annalee Newitz (Tor; Orbit UK)
• Fleet of Knives, Gareth L. Powell (Titan US & UK)
• The Rosewater Insurrection/The Rosewater Redemption, Tade Thompson (Orbit US & UK)
• Wanderers, Chuck Wendig (Del Rey; Solaris

Out of that list, the only one I've read is Ian McDonald's Luna: New Moon, which was excellent. I have bought the Bear and Gladstone books and will get to them eventually. 

It's a good year for Elizabeth Bear, who has nominations in the novel and all three short fiction categories and Ted Chiang, also nominated in all three fiction categories. Toronto author Guy Gavriel Kay is nominated in Fantasy Novel for A Brightness Long Ago.

Interview with Robert J. Sawyer about The Oppenheimer Alternative

SF&F author Robert J. Sawyer has a new book coming out, The Oppenheimer Alternative, an alternate history set in the dawn of the atomic age and featuring Oppenheimer and his scientific cohort as lead characters. I have the book but haven't read it yet (I need to finish William Gibson's Agency first), but if it's anything like Robert's last few books it will be both highly readable and grounded in history and science. 

File 770's Mike Glyer has a long interview with Sawyer about the book. 

MG: The Oppenheimer Alternative is grounded in your extensive research of the history of physics and atomic weaponry. I recognized some of that history but it was only quite late in the book that I recognized the science fictional departures — the alternate history. Are they present throughout, or is your goal to take readers inside the Manhattan Project as it happened?

SAWYER: The point of departure from what is established fact occurs in chapter 14 out of 57, when Edward Teller and Hans Bethe start arguing about their conflicting solar spectrographs, Bethe’s from 1938, which seems to show the sun undergoing carbon-nitrogen-oxygen-cycle (CNO) fusion, and Teller’s from 1945, which seem to show it undergoing proton-proton fusion.

But I actually don’t call the novel an alternate history; I think of it more as a secret history. None of the events it portrays are contradicted by what we know actually occurred. Instead, I’m filling in the gaps in the record. And gaps there surely are. As I mentioned above, Oppie was responsible for the notion of black holes. As Freeman Dyson wrote:

“As a direct result of Oppenheimer’s work, we now know that black holes have played and are playing a decisive part in the evolution of the universe. He lived for twenty-seven years after the discovery, never spoke about it, and never came back to work on it. Several times, I asked him why he did not come back to it. He never answered my question, but always changed the conversation to some other subject.”

And when Oppie was hauled before a security-review board, Deak Parsons, his second-in-command at Los Alamos really did go ape, declaring, in reference to President Eisenhower:

“I have to put a stop to it. Ike has to know what’s really going on. This is the biggest mistake the United States could make!”

In a bit of bad luck for Parsons — not to mention Oppie! — Parsons keeled over dead the next morning before he got in to see Eisenhower.

Even Oppie himself alluded to something huge going on behind the scenes. He really did say:

“There is a story behind my story. If a reporter digs deep enough he will find that it is a bigger story than my [security-clearance] suspension.”

So I set out to tell that story: the tale of why Oppie never commented publicly again on his astrophysics research, of the truth about what was really going that Parsons took to his grave, of the “bigger story” Oppie referred to.

There’s a thorough discussion of what’s real history and what’s my invention on my website: https://sfwriter.com/ffoa.htm

Pentagon Wants Pournelle's Rods from God

Back in the 1950s, Jerry Pournelle (who later became a best-selling science fiction writer), proposed a weapons system called Thor, also known as "Rods from God", basically a tungsten rod dropped from orbit that would hit its target with the energy of a small nuclear bomb. 

That proposal hasn't come to fruition yet, but both the United States and Russia (and likely China too) are working on hypersonic kinetic energy weapons that would have the energy of a large conventional bomb. An article in Task and Purpose looks at the current state of the technology.

The idea of kinetic weaponry — raining down inert projectiles on an enemy with deadly velocity — is far from a novel concept. The trebuchet was the backbone of successful sieges for hundreds of years, from ancient China to Hernan Cortes’ subjugation of the Aztecs; during and after World War II, airmen have occasionally deployed clusters of inert “Lazy Dog” bombs — metal cylinders traveling at terminal velocity — on the battlefields of Korea and Vietnam.

And gravity hasn’t always been necessary. For decades, militaries have used ultra-dense “kinetic energy penetrators,” also known as KEPs, specially designed shells often wrapped in an outer shell (a “sabot”) and fired at high velocity rather than dropped from the sky, to defeat defense armor. That’s the fundamental logic underpinning the U.S. Navy’s highly touted electromagnetic railgun, which can blast a 25-pound “hypervelocity projectile” with 32-megajoule muzzle energy through seven steel plates and obliterate whatever that armor is supposed to protect.

Whether dropped from the sky or fired from a cannon, the principle behind these weapons is the same: hitting the enemy with something very hard and very dense, moving very fast. And the kinetic energy projectile may become a staple of modern warfare sooner than you might think.

13 Alternatives to Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the gold standard for photo editing software. Coupled with its sister program, Lightroom, it's a powerhouse of a program. If you're a serious photographer, you've either used it or you likely want to. But it's not free, nor is it particularly cheap. Adobe has a monthly subscription, which is what I have, which is costing me about $16 Canadian a month, which is almost $200 per year. That adds up. 

There are alternatives and Creative Blog has an article that describes thirteen of them. Some are free (GIMP, Paint.net), others quite expensive (Corel PhotoPaint), and most of the rest are reasonably priced.

As for myself, I'm sticking with Photoshop for now, but if I had to switch to something else it would almost certainly be GIMP, which I have used occasionally in the past and has more features than I am ever likely to need.

A free, open-source alternative to Photoshop that's been around for donkey's years, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Today it's available in versions for Linux, Windows and Mac.

GIMP offers a wide toolset, similar to Photoshop in many ways, and is a great option if you're looking for a no-cost image editor. The interface differs somewhat from Photoshop, but a version of GIMP is available that mimics Adobe's look and feel, making it easier to migrate over if you're ditching Photoshop.

The full suite of tools is available here – everything you're accustomed to is within easy reach, including painting tools, colour correction, cloning, selection, and enhancement. The team that oversees development has worked hard to ensure compatibility too, so you'll be able to work with all the popular file formats without any trouble at all. You'll also find a very capable file manager built in, along similar lines to Adobe's Bridge.

Overall, this is a great option whether you've either got a limited budget, or want to move away from Photoshop for other reasons.

Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments with a Modern Score

This isn't a new idea -a classic silent movie shown with a modern score by well-known musicians. But I don't think it's been done before with the original Ten Commandments. Tonight there will be a presentation of Cecile B. DeMille's 1923 film, The Tem Commandments rescored by members of Flaming Lips and Los Lobos. From BoingBoing:

During Passover last month, I posted about The Ten Commandments, Cecil B. DeMille's 1923 epic silent film version of the biblical Exodus story (plus a related modern story that I never bothered to watch.) As part of tomorrow night's DAWN online celebration of the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, Steven Drozd of the Flaming Lips, Steve Berlin of Los Lobos, and drummer Scott Amendola are premiering a far out new score for the film! Watch the excerpt above. Organized by the Jewish arts and culture organization Reboot, DAWN is sure to be a wild program of music, conversations, comedy, and performances. My pal and Boing Boing contributor David Katznelson, the head of Reboot, orchestrated the new Ten Commandments musical collaboration.

Rolling Stone also has an article about it. 

A landmark epic of Hollywood’s silent era, DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was separated into two parts, the first of which told the story of Moses and the Exodus from Egypt, culminating in the delivery of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. The second, meanwhile, told a contemporary story about two brothers, one who lives his life by the Commandments, the other who doesn’t.

Drozd, Berlin and Amendola penned their new score for part one of the film. A preview clip features a mesmerizing and increasingly epic snippet of music that’s paired with the scene in which Pharaoh learns his firstborn son has been killed in the last of the 10 plagues of Egypt.

Pandemic Impact on TechComm Survey Preliminary Results

Tom Johnson has been running a survey on the impact of the pandemic on technical communicators. The survey is still open but he has enough results to provide some analysis. It's interesting reading. Some of the preliminary figures:

• 36% are working more each day
• 40% have gained weight
• 5% have lost their job
• 28% have taken up a new hobby
• 13% have been furloughed or had their salary reduced
• 41% had open headcount reduced or cut 

As he notes in his analysis, it's encouraging that only 5 percent of respondents have lost their jobs. Not so encouraging is that more than a third are working more each day. The weight gain figure is no surprise considering that almost everyone is working from home. 

Some of his concluding comments:

One reason I wanted to create this survey was to hopefully arrive at some well-thought, evidence-based conclusion about the best strategies for success in tech comm during these times. I’m not sure any specific strategies surface apart from the same strategies for career stability regardless of pandemics. I can endure the quarantine and the disruption to life as long as I have a stable job (my wife too). So I’d say the best measure you can take to make it through these times is to safeguard your job by staying as marketable and skilled as possible.

In some ways, technical writers have more assurances than other positions because many of us are the only resource in this job category at our work. In my recent survey about Developer Documentation Trends, the results found that 34% of respondents are lone writers, 31% are part of small teams with 2-4 writers, and 12% are part of teams with 5-7 writers. I think companies are hesitant to get rid of every resource for a job function.

Will the Pandemic Change Our Social Behaviour?

The pandemic is going to be a gold mine for sociologist and psychologists studying the effects of isolation and stress on human behaviour. It's too early to tell what the overall effects will be, but as this article points out, past history has some indicators. 

When Covid-19 cases began emerging in Wuhan, China, citizens in those neighboring countries and cities became hyper-vigilant about not spreading or catching germs. Memories of the SARS outbreak, which lasted from March to June, have been seared into people’s minds years after the outbreak had been contained, and that’s shaped their hygienic behavior, as Nisha Gopalan, a Bloomberg Opinion columnist in Hong Kong, recounted:

"I still compulsively wash my hands, 17 years after the outbreak. I have friends that have been using toothpicks to press elevator buttons for years. Some use tissues to open the doors of public washrooms, or carry spare masks in their handbags in case they catch the sniffles. This is all evidence of the indelible impact SARS has had on Hong Kong’s psyche."

And whereas some Americans are still grappling with orders to wear face masks — a result of mixed messaging from the government at the onset of the pandemic — the practice is almost instinctual in parts of Asia. In Hong Kong, it wasn’t just fear of catching Covid-19 that spurred the public to cover their faces. “This is a new social norm that has already been built up since the SARS outbreak in which the face mask was constructed as a sign of civic responsibility to prevent infecting others,” Judy Yuen-man Siu, a medical anthropologist at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University who studied the shifts in public opinion toward masks in the years following the outbreak, said in an email.

One thing that is different in the current pandemic is the internet and its mitigating effect on social isolation.

 In one study, he looked for signs in space of what isolated Antarctic researchers call the “third quarter phenomenon” — a period of increased stress and interpersonal tension midway through a mission as explorers acknowledge that they must endure the other half before returning home.

“We did not find evidence of third quarter phenomenon in our study of the 30 astronauts and cosmonauts,” Kanas said. “Some got depressed in the third quarter and some got depressed during the first quarter as they were getting acclimated, so there was no consistent effect.” He suggests that may be because unlike the Antarctic researchers who are isolated in an area with almost no telecommunication access, space explorers are able to connect 24/7 with their families through video calls on the International Space Station. (It probably also helps that the crew goes through extensive training beforehand and has support staff who provide brain-stimulation activities as needed.)

That’s not unlike many who are currently isolating at home and experiencing quarantine fatigue. Zoom calls and social apps have virtually connected many to the outside world. Yet the reality is that that connection can’t fully replace physical touch. When the pandemic eases, it’s possible our longing for social interaction in the physical space will have us running to friends and family, but stopping short of jumping back into crowded areas as we remain hyper-vigilant about the threat of the coronavirus.

 

 

Some Advanced Antimatter and Fusion Rocket Designs

I'm a big fan of The Expanse, both the books by James S.A. Corey and the Amazon Prime TV show based on the books. In the series, an advanced fusion rocket design enables reasonably fast travel throughout the solar system (days between planets, not months). 

Are such rockets possible? In a word, yes, and there are many different designs. For details, see Engine List 3 on the Atomic Rockets site. The content is moderately technical, but not beyond the reading level of anyone who's been reading a lot of what we used to call "hard" science fiction. I would have devoured this stuff when I was 16.

Here's the introduction to the antimatter rockets section.

These are various rocket engines trying to harness the awesome might of antimatter. While the fuel is about as potent as you can get, trying to actually use the stuff has many problems.

Generally your spacecraft has metric tons of propellant, and a few micrograms antimatter fuel. The exceptions are the antimatter beam-core and positron ablative engines.

Nanograms of antimatter fuel are injected into some matter. The energy release is used to heat the propellant, which flies out the exhaust nozzle to create thrust.

Antimatter rockets have analogous exhaust velocity limits to nuclear thermal rockets. The higher the engine heat, the higher the exhaust velocity, which is a good thing. Unfortunately once the heat level reaches the liquefaction point, the engine melts. Which is a bad thing. This limits the maximum exhaust velocity.

And yes, there is a discussion of the rockets used in The Expanse that's worth reading if you enjoy the show. (Sorry, no direct link, but it's about halfway down the lengthy page).  

Virgin Orbit Fails in First Launch Attempt

Virgin Orbit, a company founded by Sir Richard Branson, failed in its first attempt to launch a satellite into orbit. The booster was dropped from a Boeing 747 carrier jet, but "engineers had to terminate the flight", according to the BBC. 

The booster was released from under the wing of one of the UK entrepreneur's old jumbos which had been specially converted for the task.

The rocket should have ignited its engine seconds later but engineers had to terminate the flight.

Virgin Orbit's goal is to try to capture a share of the emerging market for the launch of small satellites.

It's not clear at this stage what went wrong but the firm had warned beforehand that the chances of success might be in the region of 50:50.

Oxygen XML Webinars

Oxygen XML have announced a series of weekly webinars that explain some features of their popular XML editor. Registration is free. 

The first event of the series will take place on May 27. During this live event, Alin Balasa, one of the lead developers of the project, will present various features for the Oxygen Feedback comment management platform and showcase integrating it with Oxygen XML Editor to help you continuously improve your online documentation based on feedback from your community.

Future webinars will discuss topics like HTML5, JSON and JSON Schema support, and Markdown.  

The Pandemic and a Fragile World

One of the things the pandemic has shown us is the fragility of our modern economy and the international supply chains that it relies on. These supply chains are easily disrupted by natural disasters, wars, and as we're finding out, pandemics. 

The New Yorker profiles Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a statistician, former options trader, and author, who is probably best known for his book, The Black Swan. However, although it's been called such, the pandemic isn't a black swan event; such a pandemic was entirely predictable and was predicted many times. 

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

We've seen examples of problems caused by super-optimized supply chains before the pandemic hit. A cyberattack on the Maersk shipping company disrupted commerce across the world. A fire at a resin-producing factory knocked out 90 percent of the world's production of resin used to make vinyl records. Now our reliance on Chinese factories is causing shortages of everything from drugs to smartphones. 

Taleb has some recommendations for reorganizing our economy to make it more resilient.

We should discourage the concentration of power in big corporations, “including a severe restriction of lobbying,” Taleb told me. “When one per cent of the people have fifty per cent of the income, that is a fat tail.” Companies shouldn’t be able to make money from monopoly power, “from rent-seeking”—using that power not to build something but to extract an ever-larger part of the surplus. There should be an expansion of the powers of state and even county governments, where there is “bottom-up” control and accountability. This could incubate new businesses and foster new education methods that emphasize “action learning and apprenticeship” over purely academic certification. He thinks that “we should have a national Entrepreneurship Day.”

But Taleb doesn’t believe that the government should abandon citizens buffeted by events they can’t possibly anticipate or control. (He dedicated his book “Skin in the Game,” published in 2018, to Ron Paul and Ralph Nader.) “The state,” he told me, “should not smooth out your life, like a Lebanese mother, but should be there for intervention in negative times, like a rich Lebanese uncle.” Right now, for example, the government should, indeed, be sending out checks to unemployed and gig workers. (“You don’t bail out companies, you bail out individuals.”) He would also consider a guaranteed basic income, much as Andrew Yang, whom he admires, has advocated. Crucially, the government should be an insurer of health care, though Taleb prefers not a centrally run Medicare-for-all system but one such as Canada’s, which is controlled by the provinces. And, like responsible supply-chain managers, the federal government should create buffers against public-health disasters: “If it can spend trillions stockpiling nuclear weapons, it ought to spend tens of billions stockpiling ventilators and testing kits.”

At the same time, Taleb adamantly opposes the state taking on staggering debt. He thinks, rather, that the rich should be taxed as disproportionately as necessary, “though as locally as possible.” The key is “to build on the good days,” when the economy is growing, and reduce the debt, which he calls “intergenerational dispossession.” The government should then encourage an eclectic array of management norms: drawing up political borders, even down to the level of towns, which can, in an epidemiological emergency, be closed; having banks and corporations hold larger cash reserves, so that they can be more independent of market volatility; and making sure that manufacturing, transportation, information, and health-care systems have redundant storage and processing components. (“That’s why nature gave us two kidneys.”) Taleb is especially keen to inhibit “moral hazard,” such as that of bankers who get rich by betting, and losing, other people’s money. “In the Hammurabi Code, if a house falls in and kills you, the architect is put to death,” he told me. Correspondingly, any company or bank that gets a bailout should expect its executives to be fired, and its shareholders diluted. “If the state helps you, then taxpayers own you.”

Featured Links - May 24, 2020

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

• The Weirdest Images Ever Taken on Mars. I wonder what strange things humans will see when they get there.
• Why the U.S. Is Betting It All on the Most Puzzling Particle in the Universe. More big physics for small particles.
• Before SpaceX can 'capture the flag,' an astronaut had to find it. "It might be the most high-profile, if not also the highest game of "capture the flag" ever played, but unbeknownst to many, the flag waiting to be captured by SpaceX's soon-to-be-launched first astronaut crew was briefly lost in space."
• The Bold Plan to See Continents and Oceans on Another Earth. More grandiose science, this time astronomy.
• What Happened When I Switched From Mac to Windows. "Fed up with the rising cost and declining quality of Apple laptops, I migrated to Microsoft. It has been both a total joy and a complete pain in the neck."
• Exclusive First Look at New Photograph of Blues Legend Robert Johnson. This is only the third known photo of Johnson.
• Blogging the Nebulas. Reviews of the six novels nominated for this year's Nebula award. 

Thinking About 'Accidents' in a New Way

Here's an article from the Ottawa Citizen that looks at the language we use to describe car accidents (or collisions, or crashes) and how that languages influences the way that we think about them. Language does matter.

Here’s another small but significant detail you may not have noticed reading Payne’s series: She used the word “crash” throughout (never “accident”) to describe how people suffer and die on the road. When I asked her about it, she told me she never uses accident “because that suggests it is not preventable.”

The Sandman Overture

I am not a regular reader of graphic novels, though I have read a few: Watchmen, William Gibson's Archangel, and those written by my friend, Derek McCulloch: Stagger Lee, Gone to Amerikay, and Displaced Persons, all of which are worth your time. 

That isn't due to lack of interest, but being very nearsighted, graphic novels with their small word balloons and hand-drawn text, are difficult for me to read. I discovered a while back that the format used in online distribution allows for a panel-by-panel view, which makes it possible for me to read them on my 10" Samsung tablet. 

A few months ago, I decided that it was time to read Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. I borrowed the first two books form the library and gave up in frustration after a few pages. Then I noticed that Hoopla, offered by Toronto Public Library and many other libraries, has the Sandman books as digital downloads. 

So I downloaded The Sandman: Overture, the prequel to the series, and started reading. I was blown away. In my case, it's the art by J. H. Williams III that made the most impact. I found myself staring at pages for minutes in awe at the drawing and color. It's a beautiful book, far beyond anything I've seen in a graphic novel. Gaiman's story moves along nicely and kept me interested enough that I read the book in less than a week. It was an interesting experience, at times more akin to watching a movie than reading a book. 

The Sandman: Overture is a prequel to the original series, published 17 years after the first book came out. I have downloaded the first Sandman book, Preludes and Nocturnes, and will start it this weekend. I'm looking forward to it. 

The Secret Histories of 'Catastrophe', 'Debacle', and More

'Tragedy' didn't always mean 'disaster.' Neither did 'disaster.' That's the tagline from this article by Merrian-Webster that looks at the history and etymology of some words that are all too common in the news right now. For example: tragedy.

Definition: a medieval narrative poem or tale, typically describing the downfall of a great man

Some portions of the changes in the meaning of tragedy are rather easy to understand; the word’s initial sense was concerned with a narrative poem (such as Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde). Since such poems often had endings that were other than happy it is not difficult to see how the word might come to mean “a very bad event.” Less obvious is the etymology of the word, which is thought to be a combination of the Greek word for “he-goat” and a root denoting “singing” (a possible explanation for this is that the tragedies of Ancient Greece were influenced by the Peloponnesian satyr plays, in which the satyrs in question had a goatlike form).

Strangest of All, A Free SF Anthology

Strangest of All is an anthology of science fiction stories with an astrobiological theme that was created for the European Astrobiology Institute's BEACON 2020 conference, which was cancelled because of the pandemic. However, the anthology is available for free download. 

It's mostly a reprint anthology with stories by Gregory Benford, Geoffrey Landis, and Peter Watts, among others. "The collected stories take readers on a journey to encounter life in the universe. The original nonfiction essays following each story consider our chances of finding life outside of the Earth, detecting it remotely, and learning its limits."

It's hard to go wrong here. It'd be worth getting just for the essays, much less the stories. I've read the Peter Watts story, "The Island", which is likely going to be the best in the book. 

Hundreds of Peel Sessions Online

John Peel was a legendary British DJ who broadcast on the BBC from 1967 until his death in 2004. His best known show, Peel Sessions, presented performances by thousands of bands over the years, recorded in the BBC's studios.

A feature of Peel's BBC Radio 1 shows was the famous John Peel Sessions, which usually consisted of four pieces of music pre-recorded at the BBC's studios. The sessions originally came about due to restrictions imposed on the BBC by the Musicians' Union and Phonographic Performance Limited which represented the record companies dominated by the EMI cartel. Because of these restrictions the BBC had been forced to hire bands and orchestras to render cover versions of recorded music. The theory behind this device was that it would create employment and force people to buy records and not listen to them free of charge on the air. One of the reasons why the offshore broadcasting stations of the 1960s were called "pirates" was because they operated outside of British laws and were not bound by the needle time restriction on the number of records they could play on the air.

The BBC employed its own house bands and orchestras and it also engaged outside bands to record exclusive tracks for its programmes in BBC studios. This was the reason why Peel was able to use "session men" in his own programmes. Sessions were usually four tracks recorded and mixed in a single day; as such they often had a rough and ready, demo-like feel, somewhere between a live performance and a finished recording. During the 37 years Peel remained on BBC Radio 1, over 4,000 sessions were recorded by over 2,000 artists.[32] Many classic Peel Sessions have been released on record, particularly by the Strange Fruit label. In May 2020, an alphabetised catalogue of hundreds of classic Peel Sessions others had previously uploaded to YouTube was published.[33]

Blogger Dave Strickson has created a list of Peel Sessions available online.  It's an amazing list. Here's one from the classic British folk-rock band, Fairport Convention, from 1968.

Jason Isbell & Amanda Shires Live at Brooklyn Bowl Nashville | 5/15/20 |...

I think, more than anything else right now, I miss live music. I can't imagaine what it must be like for the musicians.

Here's something to get you through the day (or night). Jason Isbell and his wife, Amanda Shires, perforning a concert at the empty Brooklyn Bowl Nashville. Most of the music is from his just released album, Reunions. Enloy!

Cory Doctorow Explains Modern Monetary Theory

SF&F author, Cory Doctorow, has a pretty solid grasp of economics and how it affects our society. In a long blog post, he has provided a good explainer on modern monetary theory. It's an important topic, especially right now, as governments are spending huge amounts of money to ameliorate the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic (or in the case of the United States, as an excuse the make their rich friends even richer at the expense of the working poor).  

If the government runs a "balanced budget" that means it's taxing as much money of out existence as it is spending into existence, leaving behind no money for the rest of us to save or spend. Balanced budgets starve the private sector of the money it needs to operate.

When that happens, banks create private money (lending money that they don't have on deposit, something that they are allowed to do as part of their deal with the national government), and then they get to charge interest for those loans.

So the finance sector hates public money – which benefits everyone – and loves private money – which benefits them. But of course, banks inevitably overspend and since they aren't national governments, they risk defaulting, so they need public money to bail them out.

Scenarios for the COVID-19 Future

This slide deck about scenario planning and the pandemic is one of the best things I've seen in a while. Take the time to read through it (46 slides with lots of text, so it's long); it's worth it. 

I'm curious as to which scenario you think is most likely. I think we can already rule out the most optimistic one. The final section, on likely impacts of the pandemic is the key section and the one to read if you don't have a lot of time. 

Astrid Kirchherr's Photos of the Early Beatles

Astrid Kirchherr, who was famous for her photos of the early Beatles, died last week. Rolling Stone has a slide show of some of her iconic photos. 

Astrid Kirchherr, who died on May 15th at age 81, was more than just a photographer whose path crossed that of the Beatles at a crucial moment. As a friend to the band in their Hamburg years, she was rumored to have talked them into trying the mop-top haircut favored by her art-school friends. "Astrid was the one who influenced our image more than anyone else," George Harrison would later recall. "It made us look good."

Technical Communication Links - May 19, 2020

Some links related to technical communication:

• New features in Oxygen 22.0. Webinar.
• Extemding the Functionality of Oxygen Using Add-Ons. Webinar.
• Register for an Adobe Special Online Event, July 15, 2020. It looks like a new version of the Technical Communication Suite is coming.
• Is Your Data Infrastructure Ready for AI? There are opportunities for techncial writers in this kind of work. 
• reuse_analyser, an AWK script that "analyzes a set of text files and generates a report of matches and near-matches. Use for reuse analysis or finding inconsistencies."
• The Case for Journal Style Guides. Written for a science journal but the advice is applicable to many organizations.

Broken Picture Links

Google has been updating Blogger recently. At the beginning of the month, they updated the Dashboard page and last week they updated the Post Edit page. I'm happy with the updates, especially that of the Post Edit page, but there are a few glitches. 

One of them breaks image links. The image appears to be fine but after publication, the link breaks. I thought they had fixed it earlier this week, but apparently not. So for now, I won't be using any images in my posts, until I find a workaround or they announce a fix. 

The other glitch (I won't call it a bug because it may be working as designed, in which case it's bad design) strips out all formatting from the HTML view. I usually work in the standard edit view, but every once in a while I need to go into the HTML to tweak something, and that makes using the HTML view very difficult. 

Off for the Victoria Day Weekend

This is a long weekend here in the Great White North. Monday is Victoria Day, in which we celebrate the Queen's birthday. It's not actually her birthday (and Victoria hasn't been the Queen for a long time) but hey, any excuse for a long weekend. It's often referred to as the May 24 weekend, more for the usage of 24 to designate a case of beer than the date. The beer should, of course, be drank by an open fire overlooking a northern lake. It's also the traditional date to get your garden planted in this part of the world. 

Given the current situation that we find ourselves in, long weekends are a bit irrelevant, but if the rain holds off, we'll be planting the garden and doing other yard work. So I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. See you all on Tuesday. 

Featured Links - May 15, 2020

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

• Elizabeth Bear: Everyone’s Utopia Is Someone’s Dystopia. Excerpts from Locus Magazine's interview with one of my favourite authors.
• How Albert Einstein's Son Tamed the Mississippi River. Multiple structures now keep the river from roaring into the Atchafalaya—but they may be inadequate against climate change. 
• Latest edition of the free RosCosmos space magazine (PDF link). Even if you don't speak Russian, there are lots of great pictures.
• Russia admits, yup, the Americans are right: One of our rocket's tanks just disintegrated in Earth's orbit. This is not good.
• News and Events from the National Eye Institute of the NIH. Articles related to vision research.
• A Bradbury Avalanche. In the centennial year of Bradbury's birth, there will be an avalanche of books and articles by and about one of SF&F's major writers. 
• A Super Lockdown Supermarionation Superconversation in 5...4...3. A conversation between SF&F writers Alastair Reynolds and Stephen Baxter about their shared love of the classic TV show, Thunderbirds.

The Dark Side of Science

Mother Jones has published an article that looks into the seamier side of science   (yes, sadly, there is a seamier side). It's especially important now to understand how science works and how it can go wrong, either because of time pressure to release research, or because of outright fraud. 

Bad science is a lot like a virus. It starts small, but if it’s shared enough times, it can cause global disruption.

You may remember a kerfuffle last month over whether it is safe to take ibuprofen to treat coronavirus symptoms. It is a prime example of how a series of unfortunate errors can lead to bad health policy. It began harmlessly, when the Lancet Respiratory Medicine, a respected journal, published a 400-word letter from a group of European researchers that raised some safety concerns about the drug. It was an opinion piece that was, according to at least one of the authors, a hypothesis, not a medical recommendation. But much of the world treated the mere suggestion as if it were derived from the results of a clinical trial. Within a week, the French health minister, followed by a spokesperson from the World Health Organization, recommended that people with COVID-19 don’t take ibuprofen. A day later, after pushback from doctors and scientists, the WHO backtracked, saying it did “not recommend against” the use of ibuprofen. The move sparked widespread confusion, and for an institution that we’re all relying on for solid information, it was not a great look. 

Good science requires time. Peer review. Replication. But in the past few months, the scientific process for all things related to COVID-19 has been fast-tracked. While that is, of course, understandable on some level—thousands are dying worldwide every day, after all—it’s not necessarily safe. What was once a marathon has been compressed to a 400-meter dash: Researchers race to deliver results, academic journals race to publish, and the media races to bring new information to a scared and eager public. And, at the same time, unverified opinions circulate widely on social media and on TV from so-called experts, which makes understanding the situation all the more difficult.

The M-19 “Gurkolyot”: A Nuclear-Powered Soviet Spaceplane

The Soviet Union accamplished some amazing feats in space, but they had even bigger ambitions. One of them was a nuclear-powered spaceplane, the M-19 “Gurkolyot”. The nuclear reactor would have heated the rocket exhaust, giving it much extra velocity, thus increasing the thrust. It would have been a monster.

Weighing in at 500 tonnes with fuel, the M-19 was a very flat, 69-meter long triangular wedge with two small sets of wings, one at the tail and one as canards near the nose. Launching horizontally from a runway, the M-19’s trip to orbit would begin with twin turbofan jet engines burning liquid hydrogen. After getting up to Mach 4, the plane would switch over to scramjet engines, also burning hydrogen. In both cases, though, the engines had Gurko’s idea behind them for a little extra kick.

The M-19 would have had a nuclear rocket engine that would take over in turn once the scramjet pushed the plane to Mach 16 and out of the appreciable atmosphere around 50 kilometers high. As the reactor was just sitting there during the turbojets’ and scramjets’ operation, Gurko reasoned, why not use it to superheat their exhaust to increase thrust? The potential increase in efficiency was considerable, and as the nuclear rocket (already more efficient than chemical rockets) would only be used for the final leg, the low inherent fuel use of the air-fed turbo- and scramjets gave the M-19 a tremendous payload fraction: the 500-tonne fully fueled plane was projected to lift 40 tonnes to LEO in its 15m × 4m cargo bay, which compares favorably to even staged rockets. Consider the Space Shuttle at 2040 tonnes and 28 tonnes of payload, or the Saturn V at 3038 tonnes and 118 tonnes of payload. To move whatever was stored in it, the bay was to be equipped with a manipulator unit, and an airlock from the crew compartment allowed EVA. Behind the bay was a large LH2 tank and, it should be made clear, no oxidizer tank. The rocket would run on raw hydrogen, while the two different types of jet would use the air as their source of oxygen.

 

Happy Birthday, Stevie Wonder

Celebrate Stevie Wonder's 70th birthday today with this wonderful concert from 1974. Too bad it's only half an hour long.

Confessions of a Lake Superior Rock Fanatic

I was lucky to be born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario at the east end of Lake Superior. I grew up wandering the lake's shore and beaches and climbing the rock bluffs overlooking the lake. Part of my souild is still there. My sister, Sharalyn, still lives in the Sault and is a rock hound. She haunts the shores, looking for interesting and beautiful rocks, of which there are many. 

Soo Today published this article by her. 

Driving our way up north, we could end up anywhere from Batchawana (great driftwood), Pancake Bay (great camping trips), Sawpit Bay (beachglass, rocks, driftwood, everything), heading up to Montreal River outlook (flat rocks here), winding up to Katherine Cove and Old Woman Bay. There are a few favorite spots but you can stop nearly anywhere along the highway and head out along a trail or forge through the bush. 

Most often it is, “Lets stop here and see”, which involves forging a trail through the bush, climbing down a ravine or a crevasse (That takes a while when stopping every foot to take a photo of mushrooms, lichen, fungi, moss). But nothing tops the satisfaction when you arrive at the shore with everything a visually stunning sight, not knowing what to point your lens at.

Verification Handbook for Disinformation and Media Manipulation

In parallel with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are suffering through an infodemic, a deluge of information and misinformation. It's critically important that we are able to filter the good stuff from the garbage and deliberately misleading that we see online. And that's true not just for pandemic-related material, but for political and scientific information, to name just two other important areas.

To help deal with this, the European Journalism Centre has published the Verification Handbook for Disinformation and Media Manipulation. You can read it online for free.

The latest edition of the Verification Handbook arrives at a critical moment. Today’s information environment is more chaotic and easier to manipulate than ever before. This book equips journalists with the knowledge to investigate social media accounts, bots, private messaging apps, information operations, deep fakes, as well as other forms of disinformation and media manipulation. The first resource of its kind, it builds on the first edition of the Verification Handbook and the Verification Handbook for Investigative Reporting.

This is the table of contents from the second section: Investigating Actors and Content.

 Investigating Actors & Content

1. Investigating Social Media Accounts

1a. Case Study: How investigating a set of Facebook accounts revealed a coordinated effort to spread propaganda in the Philippines

1b. Case Study: How we proved that the biggest Black Lives Matter page on Facebook was fake

2. Finding patient zero

3. Spotting bots, cyborgs and inauthentic activity

3a. Case study: Finding evidence of automated Twitter activity during the Hong Kong protests

4. Monitoring for fakes and information operations during breaking news

5. Verifying and questioning images

6. How to think about deepfakes and emerging manipulation technologies

I've only had a chance to skim through some of the chapters, but at a first glance it looks like an extremely valuable and useful resource. Here's a Twitter thread from Craig Silverman, Media Editor at BuzzFeed News, that touches on some of the highlights of the book.

No, Smoking Won't Keep You from Dying of COVID-19

You may have seen news of a scientific paper that seems to indicate that smoking reduces the risk of dying from COVID-19. However, that isn't the case, because the numbers used in the study don't actually imply that. This analysis shows the difficultly in evaluating statistics in systems with complex and related variables. It's written by an actual epidemiologist so I would trust this more than what you will see in the popular press (or on social media).

There’s a new paper circulating today about “risk factors” for COVID19 which is getting misinterpreted in a pretty common way: applying conclusions about causation to results obtained via methods designed only for finding correlations.

It’s time for a #tweetorial!

 Here is the study that inspired this tweetorial. 

They looked at a truly huge number of people presenting to medical care in the UK and then compared how common it was for people to die in hospital from COVID across a whoooooole bunch of different types of people.

Based on those comparisons, they highlight some characteristics which correlated with COVID death as potential having risks or benefits. 

Some agree with what we already know: eg older age, certain comorbidities. 

Others are counterintuitive: especially “current smoker” status

Why is that counterintuitive? Current smokers should be expected to, on average, have less healthy lungs than never smokers (and maybe even former smokers), and we know COVID19 can kill people by attacking their lungs.

This is where the “disease detective” skill set of an epidemiologist comes in. 

Some Language Learning Resources from OUP Children's Books

If you are at home trying to teach children and have some fun too, have a look at these language resources from Oxford University Press Children's Books. They have many learning aids, in attractive PDF files, that should keep kids busy and happy. Adults who like wordplay might find some of these appealing even if they don't have kids. For example:

• Fun with Words: Word play (PDF): Lots of fun word games. Have a dictionary ready in order to settle any disputes!
• Fun with Words: Rhyming slang (PDF): Play with Cockney rhyming slang and invent your own slang.
• Fun with Words: Riddles (PDF): Enjoy riddle-me-re word puzzles,

Moving Your Data to a New Phone

Smartphones don't last forever. The average life of a smartphone these days is probably two or three years, based on the length of data plans with providers. Batteries don't last forever and security updates are few and far between after two or three years. So it's likely you'll need to transfer your data to a new phone sooner or later. 

Mobile Syrup has a guide on how to move your data between phones. The process has gotten easier with recent releases of Android and IOS, but there are still some gotchas to be aware of. The article starts with some basic steps common to all phones (back up your data!). Following that, there are sections describing:

• Moving from iPhone to iPhone
• Moving from Android to iPhone
• Switching to a new Android Phone

The article also provides links to some brand-specific instructions; for example, moving from one Samsung Galaxy phone to another.

A Good Analysis of the Pandemic's Effects, Present and Future

I've been trying not to turn this into a COVID-19 blog; there are more knowledgeable people who are doing a better job of that and the blog format isn't really suited for news. But every so often I come across an article that I have to mention, usually because it provides some in-depth background or analysis. This article by historian Margaret MacMillian, from Saturday's Globe and Mail is one of them. It looks at the history and causes of the pandemic, the current effects, and discusses how it is likely to change our world in the future. It's a long article, but worth the time.

Sooner or later, we will come to terms with the COVID-19. It may stay with us, flaring up from time to time; it may run its course and disappear, as did the influenza at the end of the First World War; or we may be lucky enough to get a vaccine that keeps it under control. Whatever happens, though, there will be no going back to the world before the epidemic. We will be living in a different sort of “normal,” with the knowledge that there will almost certainly be another pandemic or another sort of global crisis.

So it is not too soon to start asking what we have learned. Why did COVID-19 spread so quickly? Why do some societies seem to be coping better than others? Did we overreact, or could we be doing more or different things? And what lasting effects will there be on the world?

I found this passage particularly trenchant.

What we have also been reminded of is the importance of relationships. We all know how toxic bad ones can be, but perhaps we had not realized enough how important our friends and families are to us. Or even the importance of the casual “good morning” and “what a nice day," said in passing on the streets. I find myself regularly talking – mostly on the internet – to family and close friends and catching up with those I haven’t seen for ages. We can grant a grudging thanks to COVID-19 for reminding us that we are social beings.

And we owe another grudging thanks to it for showing us how important community is, as well as the web of informal and formal institutions that bind and reinforce it. The volunteers making personal protective equipment or taking food to the elderly, the grandparents teaching their grandchildren over the internet, the entertainers creating online works – these are just the latest manifestations of a willingness to help each other, which we do not always appreciate enough in what passes for normal times. Canadian society is coping now and will cope in the future because of the wealth of groups across the country who have for years supported charities, volunteered, participated in their communities, or gotten engaged in politics.

We are also realizing the importance of good government. In too many countries, including Canada, we have undermined our civil services. “Bureaucrat” has become a word signalling disapproval and disdain. Frequent reorganizations following the latest whim of expensive management consultants have left government departments under-resourced, demoralized, unwilling or incapable of offering strong advice, and unlikely in any case to get the ear of the minister who might rely instead on political appointees. Where the brightest and the best once aspired to work for government, they now go into business or the professions. We have some rebuilding to do.

 

Featured Links - May 10, 2020

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

• LockBit, the new ransomware for hire: A sad and cautionary tale. You've probably never heard of LockBit, but that's likely to change.
• ‘A Bomb in the Center of the Climate Movement’: M. ichael Moore Damages Our Most Important Goal. Climate scientist Bill McKibben exposes the many failings of Michael Moore's latest movie. 
• How Self-Driving Telescopes Could Transform Astronomy. "Astronomers and physicists continue to pursue the answers to the universe’s deepest questions, but on many matters, including dark matter and dark energy, they are stymied. What if an autonomously operating telescope, free from human biases and complications, could find the solutions we’ve been missing?"
• Who Invented the Wheel? And How Did They Do It? The wagon—and the wagon wheel—could not have been put together in stages. Either it works, or it doesn’t. And it enabled humans to spread rapidly into huge parts of the world.
• All Hail Comet Swan, The ‘Best Comet In Years.’ It Could Soon Be Visible To The Naked Eye. Let's hope that it pans out; comets often don't.
• 7 Things I Liked About David Lynch's Dune (and 8 I Didn't). Pretty much on point. 
• 'We are living through the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene'. "Forget the butterfly effect, this is the bat effect – our stranglehold on nature has unleashed the coronavirus outbreak. And the pandemic is forcing us to rethink how to run our networked world."

2020 Aurora Award Finalists

The finalists for the 2020 Aurora Awards have been announced. The Aurora awards are the Canadian equivalent of the Hugo awards, voted on by Canadian SF&F fans, and will be announced by Calgary's  When Worlds Collide convention on August 15th. These are the awards for Best Novel. 

• Haunting the Haunted, E.C. Bell (Tyche)
• The Gossamer Mage, Julie E. Czerneda (DAW)
• A Brightness Long Ago, Guy Gavriel Kay (Viking Canada)
• The Quantum Garden, Derek Künsken (Solaris)
• Jade War, Fonda Lee (Orbit)
• Gods of Jade and Shadow, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey)

Based on online buzz and the reviews I've seen, I expect Guy Kaye to win this one. I likely won't be voting on these as my connection with Canadian fandom is pretty tenuous these days. 

Grateful Dead, May 8, 1977

Today is the anniversary of what many people consider the Grateful Dead's best show: May 8, 1977 at Barton Hall, Cornell University. I wouldn't go so far as to say it was the Dead's best show, but it's certainly in the top 10, and there are a couple of performances (Scarlet Begonias > Fire on the Mountain, Morning Dew) that have a legitimate claim the being the best performances ever of those songs. 

The show was circulating in tape trading circles for many years (decades even) before the Dead organization were able to get their hands on the master soundboard recordings (it's a long story). I had just gotten a copy before my dad died in 1992 and it kept me sane through that horrible period. The show was officially released a few years ago and you can listen to it on Spotify. If you haven't heard it, you are in for a treat. 

Canada’s Group of Seven Paintings Now Available in the Google Arts App

Google's Arts and Culture app is a good way of satisfying your art fix when you can't visit a gallery or museum in person. They've just added some paintings by Canada's Group of Seven artists from the McMichael Canadian Art Gallery to their app. If you're not familiar with the Group of Seven (and if you're not Canadian, you probably aren't), they were a group of early 20th century artists who were both hugely talented and who changed the landscape of Canadian art. Nancy and I visit the Art Gallery of Ontario's collection of their paintings every time we go there. Do take the time to have a look at the paintings in Google's app or online elsewhere; you won't regret it.

Some Android Fun for You

Modern phones are incredibly powerful gaming platforms, limited only by the small screens and touch control interfaces. That makes classic PC and arcade games, which don't have much in the way of hardware requirements, a natural for game developers to port to Android. 

Android Police have assembled a list of 40 classic PC, console, and arcade games that you can play on your Android device. 

Some modern mobile games are great, but rarely are they true replacements for the classics of old. Android has a surprisingly decent number of ported retro games from console, PC, and arcade platform, and we've gathered some of the best ones that have been released over the years. These games are true to their original forms, with existing graphics (as in, they're not updated to look and play like newer games) but if you're looking for a roundup of classic games that have received a modern makeover, we've got you covered in a separate post. A lot of these games are ones you and I grew up playing, and I've hand-selected the cream of the crop. So whether you're an old gamer like me or a new gamer who would like to check out some retro classics, I've put together this roundup just for you. For convenience, I've listed all of the games by price in order to make discovery easier. So dig in and enjoy!

I'm not a big gamer these days, sticking mostly to card games and some blockout-style games, but there are several on this list that I will probably try.  Blazing Star looks especially good.

Cell Phone Camera or DSLR?

I've been a moderately competent amateur photographer most of my adult life, at least since I got my first SLR in the 1970s and then spent five years working at a camera store, which gave me chance to work with everything from point and shoot cameras to Hasselblads. I now have several digital cameras of varying vintages, the best being a Nikon D5200 DSLR.

But I still take most of my pictures with my cell phone.

There are many reasons for that; the main one being convenience. I almost always have my phone on my person or nearby. The Nikon lives in a camera bag in my office and it's big and bulky and not as convenient to use.

SF author John Scalzi is an avid (and very good) photographer and when his DSLR died, he was wondering if he really needed a serious camera or whether he could get by with the one on his Pixel 4 cell phone. He wrote about that at length on his blog. But convenience isn't everything.

Or to put it another way: cell phone cameras have gotten good enough that they will do 90% to 95% of everything that the average person would ever want out of a camera. And that is an unalloyed good thing! Everyone should have a camera that flexible and useful to them. But if you’re an avid photographer (or a professional photographer), you spend so much more of your time than the average person in the 5%-to-10% area where cell phones fall down, that you become painfully aware of how far they have yet to go, regardless of how far they have come. This isn’t about snobbery (or more accurately, shouldn’t be) — it’s about use cases. For how I use cameras, my Pixel phone, as wonderful as the photography out of it is on a regular basis, still can’t give me everything I want and need, and it’s frustrating for me that it can’t.

As for me, I would still like a "real" camera. The Nikon is OK as far as it goes, but I find it hard to use on the fly. I lust after one of the Fuji X-series camers like the X-T30 or the new X-T4. That's probably out of my price range, but I'm keeping my eyes out for a deal on one of the older models, like the X-T20. The main reasons I'm interesed in those are the compact size and the control interface, which is similar to the film cameras that I learned photography on.

Comparing Canadian and US Responses to COVID-19

Canada and the United States have much in common, so why is the COVID-19 pandemic so much worse in the US? That's the subject of this article from vox.com. As I noted in a blog post a couple of weeks ago, the US has about 2.5 times the number of cases and deaths per capita compared to Canada.

The article describes many reasons for this; as you might expect, the key ones are the differences between health care systems in the two countries and the more coordinated response of the federal government in Canada.

The Canadian response hasn't been perfect. The spread of COVID-19 into indigenous communities, homeless shelters, long term care facilities and seniors residences, for example, is a national disgrace.

But overall, we are doing far better than the US.

But at this point in the crisis, the worst you can say about the Canadian response is that it has been basically competent — what you would expect from a country with a functioning political and health care system. The United States, by contrast, hasn’t cleared this lowest of bars. Our lack of attention to public health, poorly designed national health care system, and deep political dysfunction have contributed to the greatest public health crisis of our lifetimes.

The United States could have been in a similar situation as Canada. We have the world’s largest economy and its finest academic institutions; the Canadians show us that, had our political leadership marshaled these resources in the right ways and at the right times, some significant numbers of American lives would likely have been saved.

That’s not what happened. We now have every reason to believe that our broken political system is quite literally deadly.

The Flea Market Fabergé Egg

If I want a comfort television show, I'll often turn to Antiques Roadshow. It's fascinating to see the value of an object that somebody picked up at a flea market or had handed down through generations of a family. Usually it'll just be a few hundred or maybe a few thousand dollars. But every once in a while somebody strikes it big.

That's the storyk behind this article where a flea market trinket turned out to be a Fabergé egg, and not just any Fabergé egg, but a rare one that had been presumed lost. And it was a flea market find that had almost gotten melted down for the value of the metal.

About a decade prior, an American scrap metal dealer was perusing a flea market in the Midwest. On the hunt for metals that he could melt down and sell, he came upon a gold egg and its intricately-designed stand. Upon opening the delicate, little egg, he found a gold clock with diamond-encrusted hands. Thinking he could make at least a few hundred dollars profit by melting down the egg and its stand, and selling it, the man, who has remained completely anonymous, purchased the item for nearly $14,000. 

Despite this rather large investment, he would swiftly learn from potential buyers that the gold was not worth a fraction of what he paid for it. Frustrated, he left the egg perched on his kitchen counter, thinking he had thrown away $14,000 on a bad investment. The all-but-abandoned egg was relegated to a spot in his kitchen for years until one evening in 2012, when he started to wonder. Curiously, he Googled the name on the back of the clock that was inside of the egg: “Vacheron Constantin.” 

I'm not going to give away the value of the egg - you'll have to read the article for that - but it was a lot more than anything I've ever seen on Antiques Roadshow.

A Big Week for SpaceX, and More

It was a big week for SpaceX. Following another successful launch of their Starlink satellites, their Starship SN4 prototype passed a cryogenic pressurization test, a test that two previous iterations of the Starship failed. It's now being readied for a static fire with a Raptor engine, possibly later today.

But the bigger news was that NASA selected SpaceX as one of three companies that will develop lunar landers. Of course, the SpaceX lander will be based on Starship.

On April 30th, NASA announced that SpaceX had won $135 million to design and build a highly-customized variant of its reusable Starship spacecraft with the intention of launching a handful of space agency astronauts to the Moon in the mid-2020s. Whether or not that initial seed translates into enough funding to seriously design and build the ship SpaceX has shown off in new renders, it has already broken the ice, so to speak, between the US federal government (or at least NASA) and the company’s ambitious next-generation launch vehicle.

What isn't clear from the announcement is just how revolutionary this could be in terms of reducing the cost of putting cargo on the moon. Everyday Astronaut has produced a comparison of Starship and NASA's Space Launch System. Even with very conservative assumptions, Starship would be more than an order of magnitude cheaper than SLS.

Falcon Heavy can get a kilogram to the Moon for around $10,000 whether in reusable or expendable mode. The Saturn V is about $25,600 per kg. SLS’ best-case scenario for Block 1 once they stabilize production is around $31,500 per kg. For Block 1B, it looks significantly better at about $20,000 per kg. Starship at a single $100 million launch cannot do a TLI burn. Therefore, it will take two extra Starship refueling launches to perform such a burn. That would make the total cost $300 million. Refueled, it can send a 156-tonne payload to TLI. So, Starship’s cost per kilogram would end up costing about $2,000.

Those are some very preliminary costs and they make a lot of assumptions. In case you could not tell, we are intentionally sandbagging Starship. This is just in case the per launch price is way too optimistic. It is still by far the most economical thing on the chart.

Finally, if this proposal had been adopted, we could have had a reusable Saturn V first stage in the 1960s.

A giant helicopter, with a rotor diameter bigger than the length of a football field, capable not only of transporting a Saturn V S-1C first stage, but of actually catching it in midair as it fell on a parachute. Strike that: it did not border on insane, it was insane.

Of course, they never built their monster helicopter. They never even got money to study it. Their proposal, even if it had not been totally crazy, came at exactly the time that NASA’s budget was cresting its peak and about to head down, both because the agency had made its initial capital investments, like the launch pad facility at Cape Canaveral, and because Lyndon Johnson needed the money for other things and his budget chief recognized (correctly) that there was a lot of fat in the NASA budget. All that is left of Hiller’s proposal is a formerly working model in the company’s museum and the original unsolicited proposal submitted to NASA. Ken Spence built that model.

That would have been something to see.

2020 Edgar Awards

The Mystery Writers of America have announced the winners of the 2020 Edgar Awards. Among the winners:

• Best Novel: The Stranger Diaries by Elly Griffiths (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
• Best Short Story: “One of These Nights,” from Cutting Edge: New Stories of Mystery and Crime by Women Writers by Livia Llewellyn (Akashic Books)
• TV Episode Teleplay: “Season 5, Episode 4” – Line of Duty, Teleplay by Jed Mercurio (Acorn TV)

I rarely read mysteries, so I'm not familiar with any of the winners, but I do watch a lot of mystery and crime show TV, so I was glad to see an episode from Line of Duty win. Line of Duty is one of the very best British TV shows we've seen and is the standard by which I judge most of them.

Featured Links - May 3, 2020

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

• Research Casts Doubt on Elliptical Galaxies Being Cradles of Intelligent Life. "We live inside a spiral galaxy, but one school of thought suggests oval-shaped elliptical galaxies are most likely to host intelligent civilizations. A new paper tries to overturn this assumption by applying a classic philosophical technique used by scientists for centuries."
• Starlink Discussion - National Academy of Sciences. SpaceX explains what they are doing to reduce the visual impact of Starlink satellites on astronomy.
• A list of science fiction and fantasy books coming out in May. There are new novels by Nancy Kress, Dan Brown, and Suzanne Collings among the more well-known names.
• The Scientists Who Won't Give Up On the Warp Drive. It doesn't look like we'll have one any time in the near future.
• The 10 Best Free Ebook Download Sites. As far as I can tell, the sites mentioned are for legitimate (not pirated) and out-of-copyright titles.
• This coronavirus model keeps being wrong. Why are we still listening to it?
  "A model that the White House has relied on has come under fire for its flawed projections."
• Tracking the ‘Murder Hornet’: A Deadly Pest Has Reached North America.
  "Sightings of the Asian giant hornet have prompted fears that the vicious insect could establish itself in the United States and devastate bee populations."

Tales From the Loop Is Good

My family has been watching Tales From the Loop on Amazon Prime, and we are all enjoying it, which is unusual as we all have differing tastes (that do overlap sometimes) in TV shows. Tales is very good, understated science fiction that, if I had to come up with an elevator pitch for it, I would describe as "Ray Bradbury meets Stranger Things".

There are no aliens or monsters, although there is some weird tech that's never really explained, and sometimes bad things happen to people. But there's a pastoral feeling to the stories, reminiscent of Ray Bradbury at his best, that is quite unusual in modern SF&F television. Each episode stands alone, although are there are some links between them, and the stories are very much driven by their (often young) characters, again unusual today.

It reminds me of the excellent Years and Years that I reviewed earlier this year; although they're thematically very different, both shows dump you into their world and proceed with their stories without much explanation. It's a technique that William Gibson uses to great effect in his novels; a technique that some viewers (or readers, in the case of Gibson) may find difficult to follow, but that I like very much.

Book and Film Review has a highly favourable review of the show that echoes my feelings perfectly.

As a whole, Tales from the Loop lets its messages come through by understatement. That goes along with its overall feel. The setting is a lived-in small town, almost feudal in its social structure, surrounded by stubble fields and overgrown woods. The phones are mostly rotaries, but there are robots you can control via a pair of well-worn gloves. Even the mysterious Loop complex, source of the wonders that feed the plot, is all tube monitors and dirty concrete. There are few, if any, orchestral swells in the soundtrack telling you how to feel about what you’re seeing: it’s mostly subdued piano and recorder and strings, courtesy of composer Philip Glass (in his first television score). Unlike its most obvious predecessor, The Twilight Zone, there’s not much in this show that’s going to manipulate you into reacting to it one way or another.

That’s what makes it brilliant. In contrast to other current science fiction shows, it creates a world where human decisions matter. Take for instance Devs or Westworld, each of which falls into some version of determinism. Both shows feature an all-seeing computer that reduces humanity to bits of data, so much so that in Devs even the one choice beyond the computer’s reach leads to the literal reduction of two personalities to zeros and ones. They don’t seem to mind: better conscious simulacra than dead. The shows’ assassinations, international intrigue, and techie slickness are fun to look at, but they amount to no more than a gloss over a misanthropic tableau. Tales from the Loop is a show about people grappling with the implications of technology, not about people becoming indistinguishable from technology. Watch it if you want a little help rekindling your hope for humankind.

Good Omens Lockdown

Here's a treat, courtesy of Neil Gaiman. "Good Omens the book is 30. This is our present to all of you. It's to make people happy, because too many of us are sad. #GoodOmens30"

Technical Communication Links - April 30, 2020

Some links related to technical communication.

• How the Writing in Technical Writing Should Evolve. Good advice on how to future proof your documentation.
• Paste Tips and Tricks for Microsoft Word. A good explanation of Word's sometimes confusing copy and paste options.
• April 2020 updates for Office come with a warning. References in VBA to some types of libraries and external files could break. 
• Working as a Copyeditor: How to Look Up Language Questions. "If you don't know, look it up. If you're not sure you know, look it up. If you think you know … look it up."
• Google rolls out new sharing UI for Drives, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Forms. This might make life easier for those who have to share documents.
• DITA Open Toolkit 3.5 Released. There are some features from DITA 2.0.