Off for Canada Day

Tomorrow, July 1, is Canada Day. It'll be a bit more subdued than usual this year because of the pandemic – no free outdoor concerts (they'll be online) and no fireworks (ditto). But it's still our national holiday and I plan to celebrate in the traditional fashion with a barbecue and beer. 

So I'll be back here Thursday, possibly fatter and with a hangover.

What Happened To Olympus?

I posted last week about the news that Olympus was selling off its camera division, ending 101 years of being a major camera manufacturer. Now the British magazine, Amateur Photographer, has looked at the history of Olympus and what led up to this decision. It's clear that Olympus made a lot of missteps well before this, and coupled with the downturn in camera sales because of smartphones and then the pandemic, the money just wasn't there any more. 

But here, perhaps, we come to the nub of the problem. Its often-bizarre product-line decisions were just the visible tip of an iceberg of corporate mismanagement that hit the world’s headlines in 2011 with a major financial scandal in which eye-watering losses of over £1 billion were revealed. Add to this the fact that the camera division is only a small part of a much larger business for which the main focus is the lucrative medical equipment sector, and you can see how things might have gone wrong.

With any luck the new owners of the Olympus brand will be blessed with much better management. It will clearly need to slash costs but hopefully not in its R&D department, where it has a talented team who have introduced some great innovations over the years, from live view, to dust reduction to a hand in the mirrorless camera itself.

The important thing to emphasise here is that the new owner clearly sees a future for the brand, and I see nothing in this announcement to stop you from buying into the Olympus system, if you were planning to, or to jump ship if you’re already an Olympus user.  It would be tragic if Olympus were to go the way of Pentax, a brand with a once proud heritage that now exists in name only and is more associated with spectacles than cameras.

BTW, if you are into photography, do try to seek out Amateur Photographer. It's one of the few weekly camera and photography magazines around, and it's full of great and inspiring photography as well as informative articles on camera gear and photographic technique. If your library offers Press Reader, you can find it there. 

DEC H-500 Computer Lab Reproduction

My cousin, Michael Gardi, has been busy since retiring, producing reproductions of educational computing devices from the 1960s. I've previously posted here (and here) about some of his projects. 

He has just completed a new one – a reproduction of the DEC H-500 Computer Lab. 

Many people reading this will be familiar with the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) lines of PDP machines. I would guess though that far fewer have encountered the H-500 Computer Lab. Launched in the late 60's the H-500 was part of a COMPUTER LAB curriculum to introduce students and engineers to digital electronics. It's not surprising that DEC would undertake this since more than half of it's PDP machines at the time were installed in educational institutions.

The machine itself shipped with a wonderful workbook that contained a complete course in digital electronics. Together the COMPUTER LAB package was intended to accompany courses in binary arithmetic, Boolean algebra, digital logic or computer technology. While not a true computer, the H-500 could be "wired" to perform many of the underlying operations of a true computer using a point-to-point patch cord mechanism.

 

Building this is not for the fainthearted; you'll need access to a 3D printer and some basic carpentry and electronic skill. (Mike is far beyond me in both those areas). It would be a wonderful project for a high school computing class. 

There's also an article about it on Hackaday.

2020 Locus Award Winners

The winners of the 2020 Locus Awards have been announed. The awards are voted on by readers and subscribers of Locus, the news magazine of the science fictiona nd fantasy field. Locus, of course, has published the list of winners and finalists. 

Some of the winners:

• Science Fiction Novel: The City in the Middle of the Night, Charlie Jane Anders (Tor; Titan)
• Fantasy Novel: Middlegame, Seanan McGuire (Tor.com Publishing)
• Horror Novel: Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Marlon James (Riverhead; Hamish Hamilton)
• Novella: This Is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone (Saga)
• Novelette: “Omphalos”, Ted Chiang (Exhalation)
• Short Story “The Bookstore at the End of America”, Charlie Jane Anders (A People’s Future of the United States)

This Is How You Lose the Time War also won a Nebula award earlier in the year and is a nominee for the Hugo award. Ted Chiang continues to win awards. He doesn't publish much but it seems almost every story he writes wins an award. 

Featured Links - June 28, 2020

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

• Why Massive Saharan Dust Plumes Are Blowing Into the US. "Every summer, an atmospheric event propels desert dust thousands of miles across the Atlantic. This year is particularly bad, and timed terribly with Covid-19."
• For the First Time Ever, Astronomers Spot Light From a Black Hole Smash-up. "Black holes aren’t supposed to leak any light when they smash into each other—or at least that’s what physicists thought." 
• NASA Grants First Funds To Look For Signs Of Alien Life Using "Technosignatures". We should be able to detect pollution from hundreds of light years away.
• The 25 Most Anticipated SFF Books for the Rest of 2020. Mostly fantasy, though these days the lines between science fiction and fantasy are getting quite blurry.
• How the Coronavirus Will Reshape Architecture. "What kinds of space are we willing to live and work in now?"
• When Hollywood finally noticed the web: What it got right and oh so wrong. The Net. Hackers. Johnny Mnemonic. Twenty-five years ago, cinema met cyberspace in a riot of funky fashion, cool music and surveillance paranoia.

Communication Breakdown

I admit to having been somewhat smug in comments about how Canada is handling the COVID-19 pandemic, at least in comparison with the United States and the UK. However, it's becoming clear that we could have done, and could be doing much better. This article from the Globe and Mail doesn't pull any punches in detailing the failures that occurred in the early days in the pandemic. Soundtrack for the article: Led Zeppelin's "Communication Breakdown".

Dr. Taha declined to comment on his e-mails, but when asked whether he ever reached out directly to the Public Health Agency of Canada, he said he believed he was following the proper channels in reporting his concerns to officials with Ontario’s Ministry of Health, Public Health Ontario and the Council of Medical Officers of Health, all of whom he understood to be in regular consultation with their federal counterparts.

The lack of clarity over where to raise these dire warnings speaks to the wider dysfunction within the Canadian health care system. The communication breakdown was felt most acutely in Ontario where, according to more than 15 senior medical officials – including individuals in hospital leadership positions, infectious-disease specialists and microbiologists – some of the most important doctors in the province were so frustrated and perplexed by the province’s lack of action that, by mid-February, they were holding secret strategy sessions to brainstorm ways to get through to decision makers. On testing guidelines, on laboratory capacity, on protective gear, on the need to start watching for community spread – Ontario’s health care system was lost. Apoplectic with fear and frustration, senior doctors sent messages and petitions to the ministry. Tensions finally culminated with a March 13 letter to Premier Doug Ford from the Ontario Hospital Association, imploring the government to take action.

The frustration of Ontario doctors reflects a concern expressed by experts across the country during this pandemic; a feeling that the scientists and doctors most qualified to craft a public health response went largely ignored.

Music from the Soo

I grew up in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario on the border between Canada and the US and Lake Superior and Lake Huron. At the time, the Sault (or Soo, as it is more informally known) was more isolated than it is now. That might have been a good thing, because there was a vibrant music scene. 

I moved away, but have always remembered the quality and liveliness of the music at the time. The music continued, of course, and if you want a sample of what it's like now you can listen to The Borderline, an online radio station featuring music from and about the Soo and the Algoma region. I recommend it highly. 

How the Virus Won

I'm not generally a big fan of animated infographics, but the New York Times is one organization that does them right. Their latest explains how the coronavirus spread in the United States. It's a remarkable article. Notes at the end contain links to the information sources they used if you want to dig deeper. (Tip: Don't try reading the article on your phone; it really needs to be viewed on a large monitor). 

Unfortunately, it also makes it very clear that the governments of the US have dug themselves into a very deep hole. I don't think they're going to get out of it without a lot more sickness and death – most of which could have been avoided if they had acted quickly and rationally.

Musings of a Graphic Novelist

Today I have a guest post for you. 

I’ve been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series of graphic novels recently, reading them on my Samsung tablet. A while back, I tried reading the print editions, but couldn’t read the small text. Reading on the tablet lets me either zoom in on a page or switch to panel-by-panel mode in which I view the panels sequentially in a magnified view. From a reader’s perspective, the experience is quite different from reading a book; it’s rather like watching a movie in slow motion. 

This led me to wonder what writing a comic or graphic novel is like from the writer’s perspective. It just happens that I know an author who has written several graphic novels: Derek McCulloch, author of Stagger Lee, T. Runt, Gone to Amerikay, and Displaced Persons. So I asked him: “When you are writing a graphic novel, do you see it textually like a book or script, or do you see it cinematically, like a movie?” 

Derek responded to me on Facebook with a long and very interesting answer that was far more detailed than I expected. He’s kindly let me republish it here. I hope you’ll find it as interesting as I did. And once you’ve finished it, go buy his books. You won’t regret it. 

Derek said:

So, yes this is something I’ve thought about a time or two. And I’ll add another element to the question…somebody once said to me that writing a comics script is really more like writing a stage play than a screenplay. Having done all three with varying claims to professionalism, I don’t think that’s true. But I’ll get to that later.

My unhelpful overall answer to the original question is “Neither and both.” I’ll say I don’t see ANYTHING textually when I’m writing. More than anything else, I HEAR it. Dialogue, prose, stage directions, lyrics, panel descriptions, the whole megillah—this crap I’m writing right now—all of it mediates through my internal narrator/character voices, which determines, well, everything about the words I set down. It’s where the rhythm comes from, and it’s how I arrive at my eccentric punctuation choices. And when I’m writing anything narrative—comics, plays, short stories, screenplays, sometimes but not always songs—what I’m thinking about is who the people are I’m writing about, and where they are emotionally in the moment at hand.

Mechanically, all three kinds of scripts (comics, screenplays, and stage plays) have a lot in common. They consist of dialogue and stage directions and that’s it—and only the dialogue makes it onto the page as written (if you’re lucky). And assuming you’re, like me, a writer only—not an artist or a director or an actor or whatever—the magic is in watching your collaborators take those non-dialogue parts of the script, filter them through their own understanding and experience and creative process—and make them live and breathe as something that isn’t at all what you had in mind. If you’re really really lucky—and I often have been in this regard—it retains your truth but is richer and stronger and more powerful for having added someone else’s.

So, yes, mechanically they’re similar. But a writer has to understand that each of these three kinds of scripts bears a different relationship to the final product for which it stands as a blueprint. All three media (comics, stage, screen) combine words and images to tell a story. But the “image” part of the experience is vastly different between the three, the key differences falling under the categories of “point of view” and “motion.”

In a play, obviously, the point of view (for each audience member) is fixed. A stage is a flexible tool and can be moved and transformed in a vast variety of ways…and there are just as many ways to pull the theatrical experience out of the stage, into the audience, behind the audience, up in the rafters, whatever. I once saw a play in San Francisco where the actors were in rooms in a hotel and the audience was across the street on steps, watching them through binoculars and listening to them with headsets. But the essential default is that you’re in a seat in a theatre, and however far from the stage you are, from whatever angle you’re viewing it, that’s what you see. You have a single frame, the action moves within it, and though your eye can be directed by lighting and blocking and various elements of stagecraft, the creators’ control over what you do and don’t see in a given moment is comparatively limited.

In film (or television), control is consistently exerted over what you see and how you see it. Your scope of vision, your perspective and point of view, the length of time you dwell on any one sight, all of it is determined according to the choices of the director and the cinematographer and the film editor. Film is rife with visual storytelling tools unavailable on stage; zooms and pans and juxtapositions and cuts and transitions of different kinds propel and focus the story in ways unique to that medium.

The visual language of comics draws from both these traditions. The individual panel is a fixed tableau, just like a stage set…but it’s only a single element on a page designed using a visual grammar that in many ways draws on that developed for film. Every artist in the history of comic books (though not necessarily the history of comics) was influenced by film, but it’s Will Eisner who is often considered the one who brought “cinematic storytelling” to the medium. That’s wrong, I think…it’s more accurate to say that Eisner revolutionized the way cinematic storytelling is used in comics. It’s kind of interesting…to me, anyway…that Will Eisner started The Spirit at roughly the same time Orson Welles made Citizen Kane. Both took visual tools and techniques that had long existed and set about joyously expanding the limits of what could be made from them. What they could be made to do.

I think what makes film and comics sibling media, though…and what makes them more like one another than either is like the stage…is that both depend, in some sense, on the illusion of persistence of vision. In film, the illusion is invisible, the 24 frames per second viewed as separate images only in the editing room or the film school class. In comics, the illusion’s right there on the page for all to see…there are only three or four or five or six (or if I’m writing it, seven or eight or nine or ten) panels on a page, and you can see each one individually at a glance…but once immersed in reading the story, the reader’s mind will join those panels together into a continuous sequence.

It’s that tension between the macro design of the page and the micro design of the individual panel that is the unique storytelling tool of the comics medium, and the ways an artist can use that tension to implicate a reader in the telling of a story are endless. Film has jump cuts and smash cuts and so on…comics the heady gap between panels—and the even headier gap that comes with the turn of a page—which can moments or centuries, inches or light years. And there’s a duality that can be done in comics and only comics—a page designed by a master of the form can be viewed in its totality as a single organic entity, and in its component pieces (the panels) as a linked series of separate images.

Oh, I remembered another thing I meant to talk about, which is how writers for all three media absolutely must have actors who can deliver performances that sell the character and the story and the words. In stage and screen, obviously, the actors are the actors. In comics, the actors are the artist, the director, the cinematographer, the film editor, the lighting crew, hair, makeup, costumes, everything but craft service. Really, you should send them food. But for me, for the kind of thing I write and the concerns I have about telling my story, what I worry about most is the actors. There are comics artists who have entire careers without ever learning anything approaching subtlety in the art of acting on paper…whose single and consistent mode is to play not just to the balcony, but to the balcony of a whole other theatre on the other side of town…everything BEYOND BIG, whether called for by the scene or not. What I want is an artist who can deliver the small moments as clearly and as truthfully as the big ones…who can communicate visually that a character is, say, kind of disappointed in something they’ve just heard but doesn’t want to rock the boat by letting on.

And again, I’ve been pretty lucky in this regard. Colleen* in particular can tell stories with body language and a look in the eyes…and can also deliver on the more customary operatic scale. That’s pretty rare, in my experience. *(Collen Doran was the artist for Gone to Amerikay)

And now I’ve wandered so far afield chasing a train of thought that I’ve forgotten the original question. But maybe some people with greater knowledge and different perspectives will have something to say.

Note: If you're interested in a more thorough (and infinitely more informed) look at the nuts and bolts of how the medium works, get yourself a copy of Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. It uses comics to explain comics in a very lucid way.

Derek's portion of this post is copyright © Derek McCulloch 2020.

Eye on the Storm Weather Blog Is Up

I posted earlier in the month that the wonderful Category 6 blog on the Weather Underground site was being shut down. Fortunately, there is a replacement run by Dr. Jeff Masters. The Eye on the Storm blog is now up and running on the Yale Climate Connections site. Unfortunately, there's no comment section – a feature that made Category 6 so interesting and timely –  but that should be coming later in the summer.  

Today's article is a detailed examination of the Saharan dust layer that is currently affecting the Caribbean and southern United States. 

If you are serious about reliable weather and climate news from a reputable source, Eye on the Storm should be at the top of your bookmarks list. 

Predicting When Online Hate Will Turn Into Violence

Ever since reading Isaac Asimov's Foundation series as a teenager, I've been fascinated by the idea of using mathematics to predict large-scale social trends. That has turned out not to be possible at the level that Asimov was writing about, but people's behaviour can be mathematically modelled at a smaller scale. For example, how traffic responds to an accident on a freeway can be modelled using the mathematics of fluid dynamics.

British physicist, Neil Johnson, is using mathematics and physics to help understand how hate-filled discussions in online groups can boil over into real-world violence. 

Johnson believes these transformational shifts within collections of people, which bring individuals closer to a reckless act, are analogous to the phase transitions materials undergo upon changing their physical form. Familiar examples include the curdling of milk as it switches from liquid to solid, or the boiling of water as it changes from liquid to gas. If you place a pot of water on a lighted stove, figuring out which molecule will be the first to vaporize would be impossible (and pointless). That first molecule is no different from any other, except for being in the right place for making bubbles. What matters is knowing that the burner’s turned on — and realizing that if it’s kept on, more bubbles will rise to the surface. Matters can come to a boil in the human sphere as well, Johnson’s studies have indicated, if online hate groups are allowed to expand and fester without restraint.

Johnson recognized this pattern: He’d seen it many times during his regular academic studies in physics. As he and his colleagues reported in Physical Review Letters in 2018, the sudden appearance and expansion of pro-ISIS groups followed a progression perfectly described by gelation theory — an area of physics and chemistry that explains how liquids congeal, first into disparate clumps and then into a large cluster, or gel. The curdling of milk is, again, a familiar example. “I get a gallon from CVS, and it seems fine until one day big clumps appear out of nowhere,” Johnson notes. At that point, the process is irreversible, he adds. “You can’t uncurdle milk.”

Gelation theory is old hat in physics, but Johnson made the crucial observation that the process of milk coagulation can be characterized by the same kinds of equations that charted the upsurge of ISIS groups. Apparently, online extremism and curdling milk obey the same mathematical rules and exhibit the same exponential — and, hence, unruly — growth. Humans may not be particles, but in this case they can be just as predictable. 

I think he's on to something here. You only have to look at history to find examples of events, relatively minor in themselves. have caused sudden social transformations.  

A Radical Space Shuttle Design

I'm fascinated by some of the design proposals that were being made in the 1960s and 1970s for boosters and for what eventually became the Space Shuttle. I thought I'd seen most of them by now, but every once in a while something new pops up and here's one of them - a shuttle design by, of all companies, Chrysler, and it's a doozy. 

Chrysler realized that in order to stay in the game, it would have to propose a Shuttle of its own design, competing with other aerospace giants such as Boeing, Grumman, and Lockheed. The result was one of the most unusual looking spacecraft ever proposed. It was also unconventional in its operation, having a single-stage powered by unusual aerospike engines that landed itself ballistically back on earth. 

It was called the SERV, and if it was built, it would've had SpaceX beat by more than five decades.

It really was a radical design, and I highly recommend watching the short video that accompanies the article. 

I can't believe that I never heard of this, given how much I've read about the space program since I was a kid.

 

Olympus Is Getting Out of the Camera Business

Olympus has announced that it is getting out of the camera business. The company has been producing cameras in the Micro Four Thirds format, which uses a smaller sensor than the more popular APS-C format and is about one quarter the area of full-frame sensors used in professional gear. However, the Olympus cameras have been popular with sports and wildlife photographers, because of their smaller size and extended reach created by the smaller sensor. (A 50 mm. lens on an Olympus camera effectively functions as a 100 mm. telephoto). 

In a press release issued today, Olympus says that following due diligence it will sell its imaging business to Japan Industrial Partners by September 30, 2020. With Olympus’ exit from the camera game, the company will refocus its efforts on its medical and industrial imaging products, while JIP (which is the same company that took over Sony’s Vaio PC business in 2014) looks to restructure Olympus’ camera division into a new “efficient and agile” company that can “realize its self-sustainable and continuous growth.”

However, while Olympus is removing itself from day-to-day operations of its former camera business, it’s influence may not disappear completely, as Olympus says it will help operate the new camera company with JIP as JIP looks to preserve things like the “OM-D” and “Zuiko” branding.

This transition could be especially important for anyone with a Micro Four Thirds camera, which is a camera format that has been jointly managed by Olympus and Panasonic since its creation back in 2008. However, with Olympus now getting out the camera market and Panasonic having found success with its recent line of full-frame mirrorless cameras, it quite possible that Olympus’s exit from the camera world could also result in the death of the Micro Four Thirds standard sometime in the not-too-distant future.

It could be a tough time for camera manufacturers, as phone cameras continue to get better and better. I've heard rumblings that Nikon could be in trouble, for example. And the pandemic is affecting both production and marketing of new equipment.  

What Minnesota’s Protests Are Revealing About COVID-19 Spread

It seems that the recent protests in Minnesota and some other states didn't contribute materially to the spread of COVID-19. Infection rates among people who attended the protests are around 1 percent, which is about what epidemiologists would expect in the general population. This has implications for pandemic planning. 

Still, these early numbers are welcome news to Roger Shapiro, a professor of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “When I hear a 1 percent positivity rate, that’s encouraging to me that these protests are not representing new hot spots,” he says. That’s because 1 percent is around the background level of community transmission that might be expected if one were to test a large sample of randomly selected people.

Though Shapiro supports the protests, he was worried about their potential to seed new chains of infection. So why didn’t they? His hunch is that two things protected protesters against disease transmission more than some scientists expected: wearing masks and being outdoors. “I think we would have seen a very different situation with fewer masks and indoor events,” says Shapiro.

The article was published before Trump's recent rally in Oklahoma. It will be interesting to see whether there is a spike in cases in Tulsa, where the rally was held indoors and few people wore masks. We'll probably know by the weekend.  

Some Good News for Libraries

There's some good news for libraries. According to research conducted by Batelle, a private non-profit R&D company, common library materials should be safe three days after being exposed to coronavirus. In other words, if libraries leave returned books quarantined for three days, they should be OK to reshelve. 

Scientists put the coronavirus on the cover of hardcover books, the cover of paperback books, plain paper pages inside a closed book, mylar protective book cover jackets, and plastic DVD cases.

After just one day in an environment with conditions similar to a typical air-conditioned office space, the virus was undetectable on the covers of both types of books and the DVD case. After three days, the virus was undetectable on the paper inside a book and mylar book jackets.

“If they get a book back from the public, they simply have to quarantine it for three days in a temperature-controlled area,” Richter says, “and the virus will naturally die on its own.”

Profile of Colson Whitehead

Over the last decade, Colson Whitehead has become one of America's pre-eminent novelists, winning the Pulitzer prize twice for his novels The Underground Railroad and The Nickel Boys. The Observer has published a long profile of him, in which he discusses his novels and the current state of politics in the United States. 

As we speak, the uncertainty of lockdown has been fractured by the protests that have erupted in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. It is, I say, an interesting time to be speaking to a novelist whose most recent narratives explore America’s racist history and its long shadow. 

“Well, if you choose to write about institutionalised racism and our capacity for evil,” he says, “You could write about 1850 or 1963 or 2020 and it all applies unfortunately. It’s ongoing and it will be ongoing for many years.” He does not sound that hopeful about change. “Well, as I’ve been writing about it over the last couple of years, I’ve also been living with these periodic conversations about police brutality. They get very loud, and then grow quiet again, and then become louder when something else happens. In a way, that’s been my whole life, but especially over the last couple of years. So, just on a personal level, to have it become this immediate and to see it now affecting my kids’ lives in a different way has been exhausting.”

Extremists Are Using Vehicles as Weapons

NPR describes a disturbing trend – extremists using vehicles to attack protestors. There have been at least 18 charged with deliberately ramming into people. 

The 20 people facing prosecution in the rammings include a state leader of the Virginia Ku Klux Klan, as well as a California man who was charged with attempted murder after antagonizing protesters and then driving into them, striking a teenage girl. Video footage of some attacks shows drivers yelling at or threatening Black Lives Matter protesters before hitting the gas. 

 "The message they're trying to send is, 'You need to get out of the street and stop these protests,' " Weil said. "They're trying to intimidate the most recent wave of BLM protesters, to stop their movement."

The last rash of vehicle rammings occurred in 2015 and 2016, Weil said, when the "Run Them Over" meme was popularized in far-right circles in response to Black Lives Matter protests and demonstrations against the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline.

Featured Links - June 21, 2020

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

• Development of a Universal Waste Management System (PDF link). More than you ever wanted to know about the new toilet for the International Space Station.
• Adobe Flash Is Actually Going To Die This Time, For Real. Adobe will stop updating Flash at the end of this year.
• A Twitter thread cataloging police brutality in the US since May 30. As of June 18, it was up to over 500 incidents. 
• We Can Protect the Economy From Pandemics. Why Didn't We? "A virologist helped crack an impossible problem: how to insure against the economic fallout from devastating viral outbreaks. The plan was ingenious. Yet we're still in this mess."
• There's A Little Hole In Your Eyelid That You Probably Never Noticed. What's It For? Despite having had many, many eye checkups, I never knew this.
• Big Oil Is Scared Shitless. Good. Let's keep them on the run.

Black Lives Matter In a Haven For White Supremacists

Harrison, Arkansas is a small town in the Ozarks, notable for being a haven for white supremacists. Yet it too, held a Black Lives Matter protest. This is a powerful, moving, and in the end, hopeful story. 

HARRISON, Ark. — I arrived here 10 days after George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer, sparking massive protests around the country. The historic Harrison town square, with its memorial to the Confederate war dead, was already closed to traffic as I drove into the area. Civilian men with military-style rifles and sidearms peered into approaching cars as if it were a border checkpoint.

Armed men and a few women, some carrying American or Trump 2020 flags, were posted up around the square and on rooftops, waiting. A few patrolled the sidewalks as if it were an insurgent village. It was eerily quiet. I started to think maybe the protesters weren’t actually coming.

Then a source texted “on the move to the square,” and I started recording video. I grew up in Arkansas and have reported from this town for years, and I was almost stunned by what I witnessed next. Coming down the hill toward the courthouse was a lone Black man, dressed in tactical gear, wearing a green military backpack and carrying a shotgun strapped with bullets. Marching behind him was a large group, almost all white people, waving protest signs and chanting “I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe, silence is violence.”

Here was a Black Lives Matter rally in one of the country’s most notorious havens for white supremacists.

Heat Wave in Siberia

Via The Guardian, some alarming news about the weather in Siberia. It's hot. Yes, it is summer, but the temperatures therea (as high as 30C) are unprecedented. 

Robert Rohde, the lead scientist at the Berkeley Earth project, said Russia as a whole had experienced record high temperatures in 2020, with the average from January to May 5.3C above the 1951-1980 average. “[This is a] new record by a massive 1.9C,” he said.

In December, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, commented on the unusual heat: “Some of our cities were built north of the Arctic Circle, on the permafrost. If it begins to thaw, you can imagine what consequences it would have. It’s very serious.”

Thawing permafrost was at least partly to blame for a spill of diesel fuel in Siberia this month that led Putin to declare a state of emergency. The supports of the storage tank suddenly sank, according to its operators; green groups said ageing and poorly maintained infrastructure was also to blame.

Wildfires have raged across hundreds of thousands of hectares of Siberia’s forests. Farmers often light fires in the spring to clear vegetation, and a combination of high temperatures and strong winds has caused some fires to burn out of control.

Swarms of the Siberian silk moth, whose larvae eat at conifer trees, have grown rapidly in the rising temperatures. “In all my long career, I’ve never seen moths so huge and growing so quickly,” Vladimir Soldatov, a moth expert, told AFP.

None of this is good news, and it doesn't bode well for Canada's north.  

How To Succeed At Technical Writing, or ....

Guest Post: This is a guest post by Jack DeLand who has been active in the technical communication field since I started in the 1990s. It was originally posted to the Techwhirl mailing list. 

… An Old Tech Writer Fades Away

I’m guessing that, given the estimated age of the readers of the list, you probably don’t remember me. I was a speaker and trainer back in the 90’s, when “online Help” as it was called then was roaring to life. We changed things. I gave away many hours of free advice, and I do believe I helped the movement grow. I had passion then, as I do now. Neil Perlin was a contemporary of mine back in the WinHelp days, and I’m sure you know him now. Scott Boggan, too, before he ascended to management. He was a craftsman, and so was I. Would you like to read my advice? Take what you like, and leave the rest; YMMV; yada-yada.

Here it is: Get out!

Get out of this trade if you expect recognition in a corporate environment. Next to training, you are in the most expendable employee group. You will never receive your full value; it just doesn’t happen. You know this at heart. It’s dispiriting, but it is a fact of life. A manager will cut three writers to save one good programmer. I’m sure that there are tech writers working for enlightened companies, where things are different. It won’t happen for most of you. Can you live with that? You get only one shot, so far as I can tell. Up to you.

But I love tech writing, you say. Well, bully, but what to do? Become a consultant and make some decent money. This does not mean become a “freelancer”. A freelancer works for an hourly wage. Never ever work for an hourly wage if you can possibly avoid it.  (Sometimes, to land a good project, you will have to go through an “approved vendor”, i.e., job shop. I made $68.00 an hour doing this 20 years ago for an auto company. The agency billed me out at $95.00 an hour, which returned them $50,000 more than I saw that year. That’s why.)

As a consultant, you are selling the client the solution to a problem. How big is the problem? THAT is the question, and it all depends on the customer’s experience of pain, or rather pain level. At a level of 8 or better, throwing in a consultant begins to appeal. I made lots of cash on one project because I proposed a more costly but more comprehensive solution. I sold Help as a “meat and potatoes” system that could easily be added to with multimedia training or whatever. My total project hours were less than 200; I subcontracted the writing and did the Help system design and implementation myself. If I had bid at 40 or 50 bucks an hour, I would have given away a quarter million in profit. I did not. The client improved their order processing time immensely, and made a large ROI. Proof positive that good consulting is a win-win.

High-level, big-dollar consulting is highly competitive. An enlightened client knows who the key players are and their strengths. Get to be the best in your specialty. That is the essence of capitalism – the striving to become better drives improvement across the board. You may not become The Best (who can say what that is?), but you will become better. It was always my goal to become the best Help author in the world. Still trying.

There is a LOT of study involved in becoming a good consultant. I come at it from an internship in change management, in which we practiced transformative change in groups. Lots of role playing and strategizing, helping people realize their power. But you will never become great unless you find something that grabs you creatively, and that cannot be taught, only felt.  Once you find that thing, whatever it is, ride that pony till it drops. [Note: No animals were harmed in the typing of this post.]

You may be trying for a certain effect in CSS, for example, that will lead you into JavaScript and then into … who knows? If it doesn’t feed your innards, then that’s not IT.  If you find yourself coming up with more and more new solutions and clever ideas as you go and you never want to stop because it’s all coming to you in a rush, then that’s IT. I have been involved in tech writing of one sort or another for decades, and I learned for myself that the old adage is true: do what you love and the money will follow. Also, network like crazy. And most importantly: give it away. I never succeeded so well as when I gave away knowledge for free.

If you’re wondering what’s next for me, I am developing a site to be called www.howtoreadpoe.com, but am using my sandbox for prototyping now: www.jackdeland.com.  Anyone with an interest in Edgar Allan Poe is highly encouraged to drop by. It has images and texts of some rare manuscripts, direct from some of the top libraries in the country. Free.

Why Is the Cooper Black Typeface So Popular?

Here's a neat video about the history of the Cooper Black typeface. Even if you don't know what it is, you have seen it – everywhere. It's used in ads, album covers, store signs, and newspaper headlines.

The video is quite entertaining, even if you're not a typeface nerd like me. 

The Peripheral Is On Sale

Bargain alert. The ebook of William Gibson's 2014 novel, The Peripheral, is on sale (Amazon and Kobo) for $2.99. If you haven't read it, now's your chance. 

IMHO, it's the best science fiction novel of the last decade. I just finished re-reading it, so that's a current and informed opinion. 

I hope to do a combined review of it and his new novel, Agency, which I am now reading.

TorCon 2020 Recap

Science fiction conventions have been one of the casualties of the pandemic. A few events (like the Nebula Awards weekend and the forthcoming Worldcon in New Zealand) have gone or will go virtual but that hasn't been that common. Most conventions are just postponed or cancelled. 

Last weekend Tor books held a virtual convention with panel discussions and readings called TorCon 2020 (No relation to the TorCon World SF Conventions held in Toronto). 

You can view videos of most of the events on the Tor/Forge blog. At a minimum, I'll be viewing the conversation with V. E. Schwab and Neil Gaiman and the panel with Cory Doctorow and Nnedi Okorafor. 

Ophthalmology in 2020

Being extremely nearsighted, I've become quite used to visiting the ophthalmologist and having my eyes examined. But I haven't thought much about the technology that the doctors use to examine my eyes. This "advertorial" from Nature, is a good explanation of modern medical techniques for examining the eye. 

The article is written to promote the Moorefield Eye Hospital in London, UK. I recognized the name immediately, as it's where our eye doctors told us to go if my wife or I had eye problems while visiting London. As it turned out, it was within walking distance of our hotel. 

I hadn't realized that retinal photography was such a recent invention (1980s). I'm fortunate that techniques like OCT scans (also a recent invention) have been developed in my lifetime.

Some TV and Movie Reviews

I don't think that we're watching more TV shows or movies than we did before the pandemic started, but our tastes may have changed a bit. We're tending to avoid really grim, intense shows. Here's some short reviews of what we've been watching over the last couple of months. In no particular order:

• The Vast of Night: The first feature film from director, Andrew Patterson, is a UFO-themed story set in the late 1950s. It's a promising debut. We liked the writing and acting, especially Sierrea McCormick, who plays a teen working as a phone operator for the local police, and Jake Horowitz, who plays a radio DJ. Recommended. (Amazon Prime)
• In Flight: The story of a jumbo jet racing west trying to avoid some unspecified solar catastrophe. We gave up after three episodes. (Netflix)
• Upload: Nathan Brown (Robbie Arnell) has his personality backup uploaded into a cheesy VR world after he's killed in a car accident. There's some biting satire about technology and late-stage capitalism. We've only watched three episodes of this so far, but might go back to it. (Amazon Prime)
• Animal Kingdom: The story of a young man who moves in with his grandmother and uncles after his mother ODs. The family turns out to be a truly nasty bunch of petty criminals. We gave up after three episodes. Too grim and the characters were just too unlikable. (Netflix)
• Dead Still: An Irish photographer makes a good living photographing the recently deceased for their families but gets involved in some mysterious deaths. It has a nice mix of serious crime drama and dark comedy with some macabre touches. Recommended. (Acorn TV)
• And Then There Were None: A modern adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel. This turned out to be darker and more intense than we expected, but it is good, if somewhat contrived (it is Agatha Christie after all). (Acorn TV)
• Pie in the Sky: Henry Crabbe, a police detective, is trying to retire so he can fulfill his dream of running a restaurant. Light British crime drama with more than a touch of humour. It turned out to be one of our favourite series, mainly due to the acting of Richard Griffiths (Henry Crabbe) and Maggie Steed (Margaret Crabbe). The lighter parts largely revolve around food and the restuarant business. (Acorn TV)
• Lovejoy. A long-running series about a shady antiques dealer. Lovejoy is played by Ian McShane, the Mr. Wednesday of American Gods, and the main reason for watching the show. More light British crime drama. (Acorn TV)
• NOS4A2: This is based on the fantasy novel by Joe Hill, about a young woman who has a gift for finding things. Unfortunately, some things should be lost forever. We're about halfway through the series and liking it a lot. It's reminiscent of American Gods, with its fantastic elements in a modern setting, but I think we like this more. (Amazon Prime)
• Tombstone: My son recommend this 1990s western, which we had never seen, and we liked it a lot. It holds up better than Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, or the original The Magificent Seven, both of which we also watched recently. 

We do miss watching the Toronto Blue Jays though.

Featured Links - June 14, 2020

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

• Noah ’40’ Shebib Is Racing to Fix the Damage. The producer and engineer is Drake’s right-hand man, and the sonic architect behind a decade of pop music. Now, he’s finally fighting back against a disease that could take away everything
• Pentagon War Game Includes Scenario For Military Response To Domestic  Gen Z Rebellion. This one may be closer to reality than they thought.
• Guy Whose Photo Broke Android Phones Just Wanted to Capture a Beautiful Sunset. Don't use wide HDR photos as wallpaper on your phone if you have a Pixel or Samsung.
• Coronavirus Researchers Tried to Warn Us. "Before the pandemic hit, they struggled to get funding that might have hastened treatments for COVID-19."
• Climate worst-case scenarios may not go far enough, cloud data shows. "Modelling suggests climate is considerably more sensitive to carbon emissions than thought."
• Dark Energy May Be Incompatible With String Theory. "A controversial new paper argues that universes with dark energy profiles like ours do not exist in the 'landscape' of universes allowed by string theory."

Conspiracy Theories and the Civil War

Just because earlier periods didn't have the internet and social media doesn't mean that they were immune to some of the scourges of social media, including conspiracy theories. In fact, as this Atlantic article shows, conspiracy theories about the abolitionist movement were a direct cause of the Civil War. 

In The Atlantic’s first abolitionist article, titled “Where Will It End?,” Edmund Quincy reflected on how that kind of racist and conspiratorial political culture fed on silence and misinformation. “The slaveholders, having the wealth, and nearly all the education that the South can boast of,” he wrote, “create the public sentiment and … control the public affairs of their region, so as best to secure their own supremacy. No word of dissent to the institutions under which they live, no syllable of dissatisfaction, even, with any of the excesses they stimulate, can be breathed in safety.”

The antebellum South stands as a cautionary tale about what can happen when conspiracy theories are projected from a state’s highest platforms: by the richest men, the highest-ranking officials, the most widely read publications. Their lies were pervasive, permeating the South through decades of speeches and articles and pamphlets. Contradictory voices were dismissed as less-than-human or demonized for inciting mass murder. The false narrative became the foundation for a real regime.

It's something to keep in mind when you are browsing through your Facebook or Twitter feeds.

 

A Deep Dive Into Rocket Engine Design

If you've been paying attention to what SpaceX has been doing recently, you'll know that they are testing both a new rocket and a new rocket engine. That engine, named the Raptor, is more than twice as powerful as the Merlin engine used in their Falcon 9 booster, and burns liquid methane instead of kerosene. That's notable for several reasons, which are explained in detail in this long article from the Everyday Astronaut. 

Fair warning: the article is moderately technical and gets into the nerdy details of rocket engine design. If you're a visual learner, there are lots of pictures, charts, and diagrams. For space nerds like me, it's absolutely fascinating. 

Here’s where we get into specifically why SpaceX sees Methane as an important, or even a necessary part of their companies future.

SpaceX’s ultimate goals are to develop a system capable of taking humans out to Mars and back over and over. The Mars atmosphere is CO2 rich, combine that with water mining from the surface and subsurface water on Mars through electrolysis and the sabatier process, the Martian atmosphere can be made into Methane fuel! So you don’t have to take all the fuel you need to get home with you. You can make it right there using Mars’ resources.

This is called in-situ resource utilization or ISRU. Now you might be thinking, well if there’s water, can’t you just make Hydrogen on the surface of Mars for your fuel? Well, yes, but one of the biggest problems with Hydrogen and long duration missions is the boiling point of Hydrogen. It takes serious considerations to maintain Hydrogen in a liquid state necessary to be a useful fuel.

So for SpaceX, methane makes a lot of sense! It’s fairly dense meaning the rockets size remains reasonable, it’s fairly efficient, it burns clean and makes for a highly reusable engine, it burns relatively cool helping expand the lifespan of an engine, which again is good for reusability, it’s cheap and easy to produce and can be easily produced on the surface of Mars

If you'd prefer a video, there's a video version of the article on their YouTube channel. I highly recommend subscribing to it; they produce some of the best space-related videos I've seen.

 

Will the November Election End in Chaos?

Here's a nightmare scenario. The result of the November US election hinges on the state of Michigan. Poll results give the state to Trump, but the mail-in vote swings the state to the Democrats. Trump refuses to acknowledge the mail-in results, claiming fraud, and come January stages his own inauguration ceremony. 

That's one of the possible results discussed in this interview with Amherst College law professor Lawrence Douglas, author of the book, Will He Go? It's not comfortable reading. 

Sean Illing

It feels almost pointless to ask this question, but I’ll do it anyway: Are you confident that our constitutional system can handle what’s potentially coming in November?

Lawrence Douglas

No. I have incredible respect and admiration for our constitutional system, but I’ll go back to one of the points you made, which is that the system really assumes that political actors have absorbed the norms that make the system work. But if you have a president who ignores those norms; if you have a party that ignores those norms, that continues to facilitate the rejection of those norms; and if you have a fractured media universe that rewards the president for rejecting those norms, then we’re in a very dangerous situation.

The only real way to avoid this is to make sure we don’t enter into this scenario, and the best way to do that is to ensure that he loses decisively in November. That’s the best guarantee. That’s the best way that we can secure the future of a healthy constitutional democracy.

Weather Underground Category 6 Blog To Close

It's not often that the closure of a blog makes the Washington Post, but that happened when it was announced that the Weather Company (now owned by IBM) would be shuttering its popular Weather Underground Category 6 blog. I've been reading this blog since I first heard about it around the time of Hurricane Katrina. Since then it's been my (and many, many other's) go to site for news about weather, climate change, and tropical storms, both in North America and around the world. The comment section was the place to go whenever a major storm hit as the the updates from the community gave a real-time picture of what was going on. 

For weather enthusiasts, one of the most recognizable casualties of the cuts is the shuttering of Weather Underground’s Category 6 blog, started by Weather Underground co-founder Jeff Masters in 2005.

The blog has been a centerpiece of the Weather Underground website, which is a hub of weather forecasts, data and maps. Masters, who holds a doctorate in meteorology and served for four years as a flight meteorologist for NOAA’s Hurricane Hunters, co-founded the company in 1995 and sold it to the Weather Company in 2012.

Most recently, the Category 6 blog has been run by meteorologist and weather journalist Bob Henson, who is among those laid off. Henson confirmed that updates to the blog will cease after June 22, when he departs.

Fortunately, both Masters and Henson will be writing regularly for the Yale Climate Connection site with a blog named "Eye of the Storm". The Tropical Tidbits site is also worth a look. 

How Will Orchestras Resume Their Concerts?

I occasionally attend symphony concerts, usually when I can get a steeply discounted ticket as the regular prices are out of my comfort range. In two years, I've been to four. But right now, they're on hold. 

It's unclear how orchestras will resume their schedule as long as the pandemic continues. As this article from Wired points out, there are issues that affect both the health of the musicians and the economic health of the orchestras. (How will they survive if the audience is reduced by two-thirds due to social distancing rules?) That remains to be seen.  

Some orchestras, like the Berlin Philharmonic, have streamed concerts, but the experience is less than ideal for both the musicians and the audience. 

Last month, members of the Berlin Philharmonic returned home to their concert hall after weeks of isolation. They sat onstage in a loose constellation, dispersed according to local virus regulations. Only 15 players could be onstage at a time. The strings sat two meters apart. The woodwinds and brass sat five meters apart—on account of them blowing great quantities of air during a global respiratory virus pandemic, without the benefit of masks. They played music by Ligeti, Pärt, and Barber. And at the end of the performance, they bowed, smiling vaguely into an empty, silent hall. A classical music critic for The New York Times, watching the performance live from his apartment, described it as “awkward” but “also inspiring.”

However, that may be the only way out for some orchestras, espeically if they can charge for viewing the stream.  

AudioMass, An Web-Based Audio Editor

Back in the day, when I was trading tapes of concert recordings, I often did some editing to clean up the audio. My tool of choice was Audacity, an open source audio editor, which I still have installed on my PC. Over the years, Audacity has become more powerful over the years, and it's probably overkill for many people.

I've just found out about a simpler alternative, AudioMass. Like Audacity, AudioMass is open source, but it's web-based and runs in a browser. AudioMass offers a decent selection of editing tools and effects. 

I like it a lot. The included effects are more than sufficient for my needs and despite running in a browser window, performance is quite snappy. I didn't see any options to add tracks, so you're probably not going to record a band with it, but if you just need to make some edits on a file for a podcast, it should do just fine. 

A Note About the RB Digital App

A while back, I posted about how I read magazines and newspapers online from the library, with the RB Digial app being my favourite choice for reading magazines. 

However for the last month or so, I've been having issues with the RB Digital app. I prefer to read longer articles in the app's text mode, but I kept getting a dialog box asking me to select the article I wanted to view but with nothing to select. On my computer, it worked the way it was supposed to. I contacted support and they suggested uninstalling and reinstalling the app, which fixed the problem. I thought I had done that already, but I must have gotten muddled and forgot. 

There was an upgrade to the app in mid-May and I suspect that it has problems installing over the old version, because I had the same problem on both my phone and tablet. I'm glad I got it working again because it's a good app and TPL has a wide selection of magazines to choose from.

Early Photography and VU Magazine

If you are interested in the history of photography, you may have heard of VU Magazine, an influential French magazine that published many famous (and soon to be famous) photographers in the 1920s and 30s. The Pulp Librarian has a Twitter thread about the magazine with some of the classic photos. 

You can find out a bit more about the magazine on the MOMA site.

A Virtual Tour of the ISS

I've used Google Arts and Culture to take virtual tours of museums and art galleries, but I had no idea that they also have a virtual tour of the International Space Station (ISS). As this Gizmodo article points out, they have many more space-related resources. 

If you have kids and want to take them on a virtual summer vacation to the ISS, Google Arts & Culture also has an interactive article featuring 10 out-of-this-world facts about the ISS. This includes stuff kids will be interested in, like how the astronauts filter their urine to turn it into drinking water, and all the ways human bodies change when spending long periods of time in space.

Beyond that, the Space Exploration page on Google Arts & Culture contains a variety of other space-related information, photos and interactive virtual exhibits. These include an inside look at the moon landing on July 20, 1969, other historic images from space travel of the past, a tribute to women who have gone into space, information on Galileo and space exploration, Canada’s development of the Avro Arrow, a day in the life of a cosmonaut and an exhibit on the Viking Mars Mission.

If you want to find out more about what some of that stuff in the ISS is (and to the untrained eye it looks cluttered and confusing), YouTube has many tours created by astronauts, including Canada's own Chris Hadfield.

 

Technical Communication Links - June 8, 2020

Links related to technical communication

• Progressive Disclosure Controls: From docs.microsoft.com, a discussion of when and how to use progressive disclosure in a user interface or online documentation. Sometimes they aren't always appropriate.
• Register for Adobe's DITA World 2020 online conference which will be held in October. Registration is free. 
• MDITA_tools. Scripts to convert Markdown into Lightweight DITA or full DITA.
• Why You Need to Understand Software Requirements as a Software Engineer. They are also important to technical writers, and can offer a writer a career path to being a business analyst.
• Become a typography nerd in under 10 minutes. Everything a beginner needs to know about typography. This is a good one-page summary with examples.
• 9 tips to write for clearer translation when your audiences don’t speak English. Been there, done that. Some good advice here.
• Why are technical writers often treated as such an unimportant part of a company? Every time I've been to a technical writing conference, people talk about this. 

Featured Links - June 7, 2020

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

• How to Organize Your Amazon Kindle: 7 Tips and Tricks to Know. I've used most of these to keep my Kindle organized. Collections are especially useful.
• How To Ditch Facebook: A Guide | Part 1: Hit Them In The Wallet. If you are unhappy with Facebook, you can follow some of the steps outlined in this article. 
• Stanley Kubrick’s Rejected Monolith. I wonder how many people who see the sculpture know that it was a rejected monolith design from 2001: A Space Odyssey. 
• Gene Cernan's sapcewalk was 54 years ago (Twitter thread). I had heard he ran into problems, but had no idea how bad they were (his suit ripped, for one thing).
• What computer and software is used by the Falcon 9? (Reddit discussion). I've wondered about this myself. I would love to see their documentation. 
• Three Reasons Stocks Are Rising. "In the time that U.S. deaths have increased from 100 to more than 100,000, the S&P 500 has gone up 20 percent."
  
• Image Scrubber Lets Protestors Post Photos Without Fear Of Reprisals. "A new tool allows Black Lives Matter protestors to quickly wipe sensitive data from digital photos."

A Snapseed Tutorial

Snapseed is a powerful image editing tool from Google available for Android and IOS. I've been using it for years and it's my goto tool when I need to touch up a photo on my phone. It's very easy to use once you cotton on to the minimalist interface and quite powerful. 

lifehacker.com has a tutorial that explains how to use some of the more advanced features like perspective correction and image healing. Google has added several new tools to the app in the last year or two that I wasn't aware of; even though I use the app every week, I didn't now about some of these features.

If you're a masochist, you can use Adobe's apps to edit your photos, but Snapseed is much easier to use and has more than enough features for most users. 

It Looks Like the Jackpot May Have Started

I've been re-reading William Gibson's excellent 2014 novel, The Peripheral, in preparation for reading his new novel, Agency. One of the ideas in The Peripheral that is especially striking right now is the Jackpot, which (as described in Wikipedia) "begins in the middle of the 21st century as a combination of climate change and other causes, followed by a series of droughts, famines, pandemics, political chaos, and anarchy. 80% of the global human population dies off. "

So now here's a long and well-researched article from Australia about the current state of climate change and its likely effects over the next few decades. It makes a good case for thinking that we are at the beginning stages of the Jackpot. 

Schellnhuber, one of the world’s leading authorities on climate change, said that if we continue down the present path “there is a very big risk that we will just end our civilisation. The human species will survive somehow but we will destroy almost everything we have built up over the last two thousand years.”

Schellnhuber said in a recent interview that the IPCC report stating we could stay below 1.5°C of warming was “slightly dishonest” because it relies on immense negative emissions (pulling CO2 out of the air) which was not viable at global scale. He said 1.5°C was no longer achievable but it was still possible to stay under 2°C with massive changes to society.

If we don’t bend the emissions curve down substantially before 2030 then keeping temperatures under 2°C becomes unavoidable. The “carbon law” published in the journal Science in 2017 found that, to hold warming below 2°C, emissions would need to be cut in half between 2020 and 2030.

Steffen told Voice of Action that the three main challenges to humanity – climate change, the degradation of the biosphere and the growing inequalities between and among countries – were “just different facets of the same fundamental problem”.

This problem was the “neoliberal economic system” that spread across the world through globalisation, underpinning “high production high consumption lifestyles” and a “religion built not around eternal life but around eternal growth”.

Given the current state of world affairs, I do not see any likelihood that we can cut carbon emissions by half in ten years. So then we are faced with a wild, downhill ride.

Steffen told Voice of Action he believes collapse “will likely not come as a dramatic global collapse, but rather as overall deterioration in many features of life, with regional collapses occurring here and there”.

“For example, it appears that the USA is entering a long period of decline in many aspect of its society, with a potential for a more rapid collapse in the coming decade,” said Steffen.

Samuel Alexander, a lecturer with the University of Melbourne and research fellow at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, told Voice of Action that the coming collapse would not be a single black or white event.

“With respect to civilisations, what is more likely is that we have entered a stage of what JM Greer calls ‘catabolic collapse’ – where we face decades of ongoing crises, as the existing mode of civilisation deteriorates, but then recovers as governments and civil society tries to respond, and fix things, and keep things going for a bit longer,” said Alexander.

COVID-19's "Long-Haulers"

I've beome a big fan of the The Atlantic's COVID-19 and political coverage, especially the articles written by Ed Yong. They've just published another one by him, about COVID-19's "long-haulers", people who get sick stay sick, with a v ariety of sometimes unusual symptoms. 

For vonny leclerc, day one was March 16.

Hours after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson instated stringent social-distancing measures to halt the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, LeClerc, a Glasgow-based journalist, arrived home feeling shivery and flushed. Over the next few days, she developed a cough, chest pain, aching joints, and a prickling sensation on her skin. After a week of bed rest, she started improving. But on day 12, every old symptom returned, amplified and with reinforcements: She spiked an intermittent fever, lost her sense of taste and smell, and struggled to breathe.

When I spoke with LeClerc on day 66, she was still experiencing waves of symptoms. “Before this, I was a fit, healthy 32-year-old,” she said. “Now I’ve been reduced to not being able to stand up in the shower without feeling fatigued. I’ve tried going to the supermarket and I’m in bed for days afterwards. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced before.” Despite her best efforts, LeClerc has not been able to get a test, but “every doctor I’ve spoken to says there’s no shadow of a doubt that this has been COVID,” she said. Today is day 80.

1've been seeing anecdotal reports about this for quite a while now, but Yong's article is the best summary of the situation I've seen so far. It should give everyone pause, and even more reasons to practice social distancing and proper hygiene. Note that many of the people mentioned in the article are young, not the oldsters like me who are most at risk. 

In this Washington Post article, the two authors discuss their experience with post-viral illness (not from COVID-19) 

Tying into Yong's article is this one from Medium.com, which posits that COVID-19 may be primarily a disease of the blood and not a respiratory infection. 

An infection of the blood vessels would explain many of the weird tendencies of the novel coronavirus, like the high rates of blood clots. Endothelial cells help regulate clot formation by sending out proteins that turn the coagulation system on or off. The cells also help ensure that blood flows smoothly and doesn’t get caught on any rough edges on the blood vessel walls. 

“The endothelial cell layer is in part responsible for [clot] regulation, it inhibits clot formation through a variety of ways,” says Sanjum Sethi, MD, MPH, an interventional cardiologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center. “If that’s disrupted, you could see why that may potentially promote clot formation.”

Whatever the final outcome of research into the disease, it's clear that six months into the pandemic, there's a lot we don't know about it.  

Deepfakes Are Getting Better and That's Bad

Since the advent of photographic editing applications like Photoshop, it's been possible to edit photos so that the changes aren't apparent to the naked eye, although it's possible for specialized software to detect the changes. In the last year or so, it's become possible to do the same kind of manipulation with video, and that has serious social implications, most of which are not good. 

Forbes has a long article that looks at what are now known as deepfakes and their implications. It's a good article, and worrisome.

The amount of deepfake content online is growing at a rapid rate. At the beginning of 2019 there were 7,964 deepfake videos online, according to a report from startup Deeptrace; just nine months later, that figure had jumped to 14,678. It has no doubt continued to balloon since then.

While impressive, today's deepfake technology is still not quite to parity with authentic video footage—by looking closely, it is typically possible to tell that a video is a deepfake. But the technology is improving at a breathtaking pace. Experts predict that deepfakes will be indistinguishable from real images before long.

“In January 2019, deep fakes were buggy and flickery,” said Hany Farid, a UC Berkeley professor and deepfake expert. “Nine months later, I’ve never seen anything like how fast they’re going. This is the tip of the iceberg.”

Today we stand at an inflection point. In the months and years ahead, deepfakes threaten to grow from an Internet oddity to a widely destructive political and social force. Society needs to act now to prepare itself.

Tracking Hoaxes And Misleading Posts About The Nationwide Police Brutality Protests

If you use social media to find out what's happening with the protests over the death of George Floyd, you'll likely have seen some that were disinformation or outright hoaxes. In the heat of the moment, it's very hard to winnow out the truth from a sea of misinformation especially when that misinformation is being spread by sophisticated agents with an aim to create chaos. 

Buzzfeed has assembled a page that lists many of the problematic posts that have been coming across social media. As I write this late Wednesday afternoon, there are 45 items. I recommend bookmarking the page for later reference as the list is sure to grow. 

Here's how they categorize items on the list, along with an important piece of advice:

Before passing on any online rumor, take the time to verify it. This can be done by checking how recently an account has been created, keeping a close eye on information from news outlets, or searching online to find another source.

How to read this post:

UNVERIFIED: Claims that have no concrete evidence either confirming or refuting them. This type of claim has either no sources or no evidence, and is based on conjecture with no original reporting behind it. Treat this kind of information with healthy skepticism and wait to see how it develops.

MISLEADING: Posts that take a real occurrence out of context, for example miscaptioning a video or photo from the protests. This can also include images that are presented at a deceptive angle or descriptions of events that cherry-pick facts. Avoid spreading or engaging with this type of post.

FALSE: Reporters or reliable sources with direct knowledge have contradicted this information on the record, or it is refuted by unimpeachable evidence. Examples include images or videos filmed at a different time or location but presented as recent, demonstrably false claims, and websites masquerading as news outlets publishing untrue information.

Do take some time to look through the list. While some of the items are obvious fakes, there are many that could be hard to spot without some digging. 

What Will Happen to Toronto's PATH?

Earlier this winter, if you were walking up Bay Street on a cold weekday, you could be forgiven for thinking that something was wrong. Where were all the people? They were there but twenty feet under the sidewalks in Toronto's underground PATH network. Every day, hundreds of thousands of downtown workers would flood the kilometres of corridors lined with shops and food courts. During my 30-odd years of working in Toronto's financial district, I got very familiar with the PATH. It was great for shopping and keeping out of inclement weather, whether it was winter's cold or heat, humidity, and rain in the summer. 

Now it's deserted and the stores and restaurants are hurting. 

From Bloomberg: 

To get an idea of the long recovery ahead for Toronto’s financial district, take a walk through the vast subterranean pathways that connect the city’s skyscrapers.

Covid-19 has turned the food court under the Brookfield Place office complex into a ghost town. Single chairs sit at empty tables, passenger-less escalators climb desultorily upward, and the click, click, click of a woman’s heels is all that can be heard in what is normally a cacophony.

 “It’s depressing,” said Subway franchise owner Ani, who declined to give his last name. Just one customer showed up in the first 15 minutes of lunch hour on a recent week day. “I feel horrible like everyone else. I miss the business. I miss the customers.”

In the years leading to 2020 B.C. (Before Covid), some 250,000 people a day would descend into the PATH to shop or grab a bite in the more than 30 kilometers (19 miles) of halls and subterranean plazas that snake under North America’s second-largest financial district. But as banks sketch out plans for an eventual return to their offices, the future looks a lot more bleak for the network below.

It's likely that workers will slowly trickle back to the office towers. What will remain of the businesses in the PATH remains to be seen, but there will almost certainly be fewer of them. 

Why Did Starship SN4 Explode?

On Monday, SpaceX's prototype Starship SN4 exploded in a spectacular fireball that destroyed both it and the test stand it was mounted on. This happened about a minute after a successful static firing of its Raptor engine.

According to Teslarati.com, the cause of the explosion was likely related to the umbilical that connects the rocket to the liquid methane supply. It may have failed to reconnect properly after the static fire, releasing a cloud of explosive methane gas at the base of the rocket. 

Shortly after a post-launch briefing celebrating and discussing SpaceX’s inaugural astronaut launch on May 30th, Reuters reporter Joey Roulette was able to ask Musk about Starship SN4’s spectacular demise the day prior. The SpaceX CEO was quoted saying that “what we thought was going to be a minor test of a quick disconnect ended up being a big problem”, confirming suspicions based on careful analysis of public views of the explosion that it was caused by issues with Starship’s ground support equipment (GSE).

 In Musk’s statement, “quick disconnect” (QD) refers to an umbilical port that connects a launch vehicle to GSE, enabling the loading and offloading of propellant and fluids, clamping down the rocket, and providing a wired telemetry and communications link for ground controllers. QDs must perform all those tasks while also being able to rapidly release and disconnect, allowing the rocket to lift off while still protecting its sensitive ports for ease of reuse.

Given that SpaceX already has one Starship prototype close to fully built and two others under construction, this likely won't hold up their test program for very long.  

New SF&F Books for June

The publishing industry is still functioning (sort of) and books are still being published. Here's a list of SF&F books being published in June. 

These are the ones that look interesting:

• Broken Genius by Drew Murray. FBI Agent Will Packer is called in to investigate a murder at a comics convention specifically because the victim has ties to Will’s pre-bureau career as a tech CEO. He soon discovers that shadowy Dark Web operatives may also be involved in the crime. (June 2)
• Final Cuts: New Tales of Hollywood Horror and Other Spectacles by Ellen Datlow. Josh Malerman (Bird Box), Garth Nix, Richard Kadrey, Kelley Armstrong, and more contribute to this collection of 18 original horror stories inspired by movies and TV. (June 2)
• Devolution by Max Brooks. The author of World War Z returns with this account of “the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre,” a fast-paced tale of Bigfoot terror—told via diary entries, interviews, and other sources—that unfolds deep within a remote Pacific Northwest forest. We’ll have an interview with Brooks up on io9 later this week. (June 16)

Not on the list, but worthy of special mention is Robert J. Sawyer's The Oppenheimer Alternative. The ebook has been available since April, but the official release date is today, so you can get your hands on a paper copy should you prefer that format. I have it and will get to it after I finish reading William Gibson's Agency. 

The Failure of the Proctocracies

Crawford Kilian, who publishes the excellent H5N1 blog (which I've been following for many years), has posted an opinion piece in which he discusses how different types of governments have responded to the pandemic. I think he's hit the nail on the head with this one. He didn't coin the term "proctocracy", incidentally, although it's the first time that I've encountered it. I will be using it more often. 

If we can draw conclusions from today's numbers, it's that proctocracies (governments run by assholes) respond abysmally  to pandemics. Parliamentary democracies may or may not do well. But governments run by competent people, democracies or autocracies, can get their countries through the first wave with minimal casualties.

How to Cop-Proof Your Phone

Here's some advice on how to cop-proof your phone if you are planning on attending a protest. It's probably a good idea to follow some of these tips anyway, given that *45 has basically declared martial law and open season on anyone who is out on the streets. And don't think it can't happen to you - a lot of innocent people got caught up in the G20 police riots in Toronto a few years ago. 

Note that the legalities regarding search in the article are for the US and may be different for Canada or other countries. From what I've seen coming across my feeds over the last few days, the authorities aren't paying much attention to legalities anyway, so be careful. 

Richard Stuverud - Memories in Kodachrome

In the normal course of affairs, I'd probably never have heard of Richard Stuverud and his recently released album, Memories in Kodachrome. I don't follow the indie music scene and unless somebody like Rolling Stone or Relix wrote about it, I'd never have heard of it. But my long-time friend, Derek McCulloch, wrote the lyrics for most of the songs, so I had to give it a listen, and I'm glad I did. 

Memories in Kodachrome is full of catchy melodies and pithy lyrics. I've listened to it a few times now, and I can't get some of the melodies out of my head. Stuverud has a way with a catchy melody and McCulloch's lyrics complement the songs perfectly – catchy power pop with a bite. It's one of the best albums I've heard this year, up there with the new albums by Phish and Drive-By Truckers. 

Here's a snippet from one of my favorite songs on the album:
"October Surprise".

Half-empty glass sitting on the shelf

Some half-empty promise I could make

With a little frosting on your fingertips

You pull the candles from the cake

And all at once I see how the story ends

The story right there in your eyes

I can see the big plot twist comin up

I can see

The October surprise

The band, consisting of a host of Bay-area musicians, delivers punchy rock seasoned with a variety of instrumentation that occasionally veers into country and psychedelia. I've been trying for days to figure out who they remind me of and it finally hit me - Graham Parker and the Rumor around the time of Squeezing Out Sparks. I'd love to hear this performed live. 

Stuverud has released the album on Bandcamp at a very reasonable price. It's also up on Spotify and likely other streaming services. While you're listening to it, read McCulloch's lyrics (viewable on Bandcamp), then check out his graphic novels, especially Gone to Amerikay (which was inspired by a Pogues song). 

2019 Nebula Award Winners

The 2019 Nebula Awards were announced last night at the 2020 Nebula Awards Conference (yes, I'm confused too, and I had to double check that the dates were correct). The awards are voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). This year, both the conference and the awards ceremony were virtual. You can watch the recording of  the awards ceremony on this Facebook Live page.

Winner of the Novel award was A Song for a New Day, by Sarah Pinsker. The Novella award was won by "This Is How You Lose the Time War", by Ottawa author Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.