Third-World Britain

In a few months, Brexit will become a hard reality in Britain. The government has nebulous plans for how they will handle foreign trade and customs. 

We don't hear much about the details of how international shipping actually works, but it seems that there are standards for providing information to ports when a shipment arrives. Usually the port will be given a file that describes what's on a container ship and how that ship is loaded. Not in Britain. 

In general in the container shipping world, every ship and port in the world uses the international standardized “baplie” .edi file for receiving and reviewing the ship’s loading plan. This stowage plan is composed either by the ship’s chief officer, by a central planner, or in the cases of small ships by the local port planners.

The little squares you see are the containers stowed on the ship, and powerful software assist the ship’s chief officer in determining the safe condition, segregation of dangerous goods on board and ship’s stability on departure, and also assist the terminal planners in determining the optimal loading sequence in order to make the most of the available cranes, labor and time in relation to the yard location of the containers on the load list that need to be loaded on the ship. The ship’s agent send in advance the load list in a compatible format that is easily imported in the planning software.

Now imagine my shock when I arrived in UK to meet with my employer and see my work place, when I saw the terminal staff working on the ship’s plan using an EXCEL FILE! To this day I do not understand how a container terminal with a healthy consistent traffic does not have the technical capacity to produce or even read an .edi file! Even third world countries like Somalia have this in their port!

Whenever a ship comes to he port, they are kindly asked to send the arrival (discharge plan) in either pdf or excel format file, which is embarrassing to say the least. Whenever a ship is loading in the terminal, they will a receive an excel file on which the planners MANUALLY TYPE IN each container serial, with it’s associated weight and DG information. I don’t even know from where to start to say what a time consuming inefficient and primitive way of planning this is.

This is mind-boggling and does bode well for the future.

I would like to know if this is common at all ports in Britain, or whether it is just the one port or the one company that the author is working for. 

Impact of Satellite Constellations

SpaceX and other companies are planning on launching thousands (perhaps even tens of thousands) of satellites into low Earth orbit to provide world-wide internet and communication services. This has already had an negative effect on astronomical observations and that will only get worse in the future. 

The Satellite Constellations 1 workshop was held recently and resulted in a detailed report about the effect of these satellites on astronomy. You can download and read the PDF from here. 

From the report:

Satellites below 600 km

LEOsat constellations below 600 km are visible for a few hours per night around astronomical twilight from observatories at middle latitudes, but they are in Earth’s shadow and invisible for several hours per night around local solar midnight, with some satellites visible during the transitions. This visibility pattern causes these constellations to most heavily impact twilight observers (see the examples mentioned above). Since these orbits are closer to Earth, satellites at these altitudes will be brighter than the same satellites would be at higher orbital altitudes. The reduced range makes them more likely to exceed the unaided-eye brightness threshold if operators fail to design with this criterion in mind.

Satellites above 600 km

Satellites above 600 km are an even greater concern to astronomers because they include all the impacts mentioned above, but can also be illuminated all night long. Full-night illumination causes these high-altitude constellations to impact a larger set of astronomical programs.

Featured Links - August 30, 2020

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

• 11 Amazing Android Apps That'll Change How You Use Your Phone. The article title is somewhat hyperbolic, but some of the apps are genuinely useful. 
• Capitalize My Title. This is a handy tool for checking your heading capitalization using different formats (title, sentence, etc.).
• A measurement of positronium’s energy levels confounds scientists. "The departure from theoretical calculations eludes explanation."
• Blanked-out areas of Baidu. Maps reveal location of Chinese camps, prisons, military facilities, the lot. "This is the most exquisite example of the Streisand Effect I've ever seen. If they'd never censored it, no-one would ever have known where to look."
• Fusion boffins apply plasma know-how to building thrusters. It's an interesting idea, but there's no fusion involved, and the article has a frustrating lack of technical information.
• A California Wildfire Nea6rly Destroyed the Historic Lick Observatory. "The state’s apocalyptic blazes have burned 2,000 square miles in 10 days. Here’s how they almost claimed a 130-year-old astronomical icon."
• MobileSyrup’s printable guide to basic Google Assistant commands. This is a handy list, especially if you have a Google smart speaker or Android phone.

The Language of Protests

The language that we use to describe things can determine how people think about them. That's especially important when it comes to news and how media report on events such as protests.

The Nieman Foundation has published an article that examines the semantics of how new organizations use language and how that creates unconscious bias. 

Centering protest coverage around the impact on traffic, local businesses, and property is one way that the protest-as-nuisance framing manifests. And according to the study, that “annoyance” framing increased over time — newspapers were more likely to frame a protest as a nuisance in 2007 than in 1967. The study also found that protests over liberal causes were framed as nuisances more often than protests over conservative causes.

Why does this matter? The role of protest is to publicize grievances from people who typically exist outside of traditional power structures. It’s why freedom of assembly is written into the Constitution, along with freedom of the press. And the role of journalism is to hold powerful people and institutions accountable to the broader public. But that’s not possible if the way we report on protests is biased from the start.

It’s a bias that creeps in, for example, when we use passive voice to describe how people in positions of authority, such as police officers, are behaving but use active voice to describe protestors’ behaviors.

The protest paradigm helps explain why, on May 31, WUSA, the Washington, D.C. CBS affiliate, tweeted, “Pepper spray caused a short stampede in Lafayette Park during a peaceful march honoring George Floyd” — suggesting that the pepper spray somehow acted of its own accord. (WUSA eventually took down the tweet.)

Microsoft Word Adds New Transcription Features

Microsoft Word for Microsoft 365 had added new transcription features that look to be quite useful. As well as the dictation transcription and voice commands, Word will now transcribe recordings. I could have really used that capability in my job at the TMX Group, where I often recorded conversations with subject matter experts.

Like Google Docs, Word’s dictation feature puts whatever you say into your microphone directly on the page. Both programs are mostly accurate, but sometimes they get hung up on processing a lot of words at once and might skip a sentence or two, or get a few words wrong. The same thing happens with Otter, too, especially if there’s a lot of ambient noise. Word’s new transcribe feature is not immune to mistakes, but at first glance it seems to be more accurate than Google Docs, Otter, and even Word Dictate.

If you’re recording live via Word’s Transcribe, the tool will upload your audio file to OneDrive for processing, and then spit it back out in the side bar, complete with time stamps and the option to add in speakers’ names. From there, you can import that transcription directly into the Word doc itself with a click of a button. You can also listen back to the audio directly in Word and edit any part of the transcript the software misinterpreted.

Note that the new transcription features are only available in Word 365, the online version, not in the desktop version included with Office 2019. 

For more on this features, see this article in Office Watch.  

The First Fantasy Magazine

The first science fiction magazine was Amazing Stories, launched by Hugo Gernsback in 1926. But the first fantasy magazine was published even earlier, in January 1919, not in the United States, but in Germany. It was called Der Orchideengarten: Phantastische Blätter (The orchid garden: fantastic pages). 

The ever entertaining and informative Pulp Librarian has published a history of the magazine in this Twitter thread. 

"The orchid garden is full of beautiful - now terribly gruesome, now satirically pleasing - graphic jewelery" announced the advanced publicity. It was certainly a huge departure from the Art Nouveau of Jugend magazine, which German readers were already familiar with.

It's an interesting story and one I didn't know anything about, despite reading SF and fantasy for most of my life, and having read widely about the history of the field.

If you want to view more of the magazine, the  archives of the University of Heidelberg have full scans of Der Orchideengarten. 

Lasers, Deforming Mirrors, and Astronomy

If you follow astronomical technology at all, you know that telescopes are getting bigger. The largest mirrors in use now are between 8 and 10 metres in diameter, and three telescopes in the 30- to 40-metre range are either being planned or under construction. 

But making a mirror bigger doesn't solve the main problem terrestrial astronomers face, namely the distortions caused by the Earth's atmosphere. You can solve this by putting your telescope in space (the Hubble Space Telescope), but we can't currently orbit really big mirrors.

Astronomers, ever inventive, have found a way around that, by bending the mirrors of their telescopes or their instruments in real time to compensate for the distortion. They shoot lasers into the atmosphere to create a guide star and use that and fast, sophisticated computer programs to figure out how to deform the mirror to reverse the atmospheric distortion. 

One of the best explanations of how this works that I've found, is this Twitter thread on the People of Space account. 

In order to take full advantage of the fact that large mirrors can resolve finer details we must therefore find a way to counteract atmospheric turbulence. We can do this with a technique called adaptive optics. That's like the best prescription glasses you could wish for :-)

This is the gist of it: by taking 1000s of images per second of a star we can measure how it’s deformed at any instant. We then make the light of that star bounce off a small deformable mirror whose shape changes very rapidly to precisely counteract these distortions.

The thread is also well illustrated, worth looking at just for the pictures.

Looks like a Star Wars battle station, doesn't it?

The Differences Between Office 2019 and Microsoft 365

Microsoft has recently renamed its subscription office suite as Microsoft 365, while keeping the perpetual license version of office as Office 2019. So what's the difference between the two products?

Here's an article that does a good job of explaining what's included in the two products, the differences between their licenses, and the costs (based on US prices).

I hadn't realized the cost difference between the two products was so great. Microsoft 365, especially the Family version, looks like a pretty good deal considering it comes with a terabyte of OneDrive storage. I'll definitely be considering that if I decide to upgrade my aging copy of Office 2013. 

How To Remove Bloatware From Your Android Phone

If you have an Android smartphone that you purchased through a telecom provider, it'll likely be loaded with a bunch of apps that you don't need or use. It's also likely that you can't get rid of some of them, at least not without some extra work.

Even when a standard uninstall doesn't work, there may be ways of getting rid of the apps, either by disabling them or removing them outright. Wired has published some techniques that might help you. 

As we've said, some Android phone makers will preinstall apps that can't be removed through the usual method. If you want to completely remove apps rather than disabling them, or you come across bloatware that can't even be disabled, then a couple of more advanced and involved options are open to you.

The first is to install the Android Studio developer tool on a Windows or macOS computer—you'll find the downloads on this page. Your phone also needs to be put into developer mode, which you can do by going to About Phone in Settings and tapping Build Number seven times: This will reveal a new Developer Options menu in the System section of Settings, in which you need to enable USB debugging. (There's no harm in doing this, but it does open up a number of new options you should take care using, if you experiment with them.)

 

 

The North Pole Is Melting

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words. Pictures from a recent expedition to the North Pole show the dramatic loss in sea ice during the summer. 

The photos clearly underline how several recent climate studies, predicting ice-free Arctic summers by 2035, is not a theoretical scenario but rather an unavoidable fact.

The expedition ship Polarstern sailed from the northern Fram Strait between Greenland and Svalbard to the North Pole this week.

“I’m very surprised to see how soft and easy to traverse the ice up to 88° North is this year, having thawed to the point of being thin and porous,” said Captain Thomas Wunderlich.

“Even after passing 88° North we mostly maintained a speed of 5-7 knots; I’ve never seen that so far north,” the Polarstern captain said.

He added: “The current situation is historic.

This photo was taken at the North Pole.

 

The Year America Melted Down

Watching current events in the United States is a bit like watching the train crash in the movie, The Fugitive. You watch knowing it's going to come off the rails and you just hope the protagonist will survive.

That's something of the feeling I got from reading "The year America melted down" in Saturday's Globe and Mail. It's written by Omar El Akkad, an Egyptian born Canadian journalist, and author of American War, an excellent and very grim novel set in a near-future US that has melted down into a Syrian-style civil war.

In it he looks at the events of the pandemic along with the social and political environment. It's a solid piece of analysis, occasionally almost poetic in it's grimness. It's not easy reading, but still worth the time, although you may want to read it while sipping a stiff drink.

Meanwhile, a host of conspiracy theories and fringe internet blocs start to hijack a growing portion of the national conversation around the pandemic, taking advantage of the lack of clear government messaging and a number of contradictory statements about masks and transmission made by scientists still struggling to fully understand the new disease. Online, I watch myriad videos describing how the coronavirus is a hoax intended to distract from secret pedophile sects and Satan-worshipping “deep state” elites, and it would all be funny if it were only a handful of internet trolls that trafficked in this kind of thing. But it’s not. By the end of the summer, a supporter of QAnon – the amorphous group responsible for many of these conspiracy theories – will become the presumptive House nominee in a heavily Republican district of Georgia, all but certain to head to Congress in November. As with the Tea Party and the Birther movement and Donald Trump’s own political ascendancy, what might have been completely unpalatable to mainstream American conservatism a few years ago has found a way into the tent.

Initially buried amid the many scandals and incremental COVID-19 updates, there comes news of a different kind. Toward the end of the month, police officers in Minneapolis kill a Black man named George Floyd. One kills him slowly, choking the life out of him in broad daylight. And for a while, much of this country does not care. When a major cable news network finally runs a story about the killing, the anchor begins by apologizing for not having covered it sooner.

And then there is a reckoning.

Articles like this are why I subscibe to the Globe and Mail.  

Featured Links - August 23, 2020

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

• 81 best free fonts for designers. "Bring your designs to life with the best free fonts – all here and ready to download."
• SpaceX crushes rocket engine world record during Raptor engine test. And increased the thrust by 15 percent, and they're not done.
• "Newly-declassified" footage of the Tsar Bomba nuclear test. The footage is mind-boggling. 
• The Biggest BOOMS In Rocket History. Some amazing footage here, not quite up to the Tsar Bomba, but still impressive, along with explanations of the causes of the failures.
• Slow TV: take a 2.5 hour narrowboat cruise down an English canal. This is seriously relaxing. 
• How a minor upgrade to a little-known piece of technology helped the Allies win World War II. Can you guess what it was? I couldn't.

Plots That Don't Work Any More

It's hard to come up with a good plot right now, especially if you write in genre fiction. Everything changes so fast that an author runs a substantial risk of having events overtake their plot. SF author, Charlie Stross, knows this all too well; he's had to abandon more than one novel because he was blindsided by current events. 

He's summarized the problem of what he calls "dead plots" in a longish blog post. Here's a representative sample in which he discusses political thrillers (after he eviscerates mainstream fiction).

Moving forward, we come to some new nope-outs in fiction. First up, is using AI to rig elections. Interface, a 1995 novel by "Stephen Bury" (a pseudonym for Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George) was set in a then-near future that seems eerily prescient from today's perspective, focusing on the election campaign of a US presidential candidate with shadowy backers who has been fitted with an experimental biochip to prompt his public gestures and speech on the basis of feedback from a focus group of random voters. Of course, how you pick the training set for your AI is hugely consequential, and it's both funny and chilling to contemplate in the light of subsequent events — as is 1999's Distraction by Bruce Sterling, in which the Chairman for once missed the target by hopelessly optimistically setting the date for the USA's final political gridlock in 2044, rather than a couple of decades sooner. Again: neurocomputing, shadowy influencers and manipulators, emergent tech, and a political system that's unfit for purpose. If you put these two SF novels together with either The Whisper of the Axe or Prizzi's Glory by Richard Condon (author of The Manchurian Candidate) you basically get the American 21st Century redux. (In The Whisper of the Axe a talented African-American woman decides it's time for payback — payback for everything since 1639, that is. And in Prizzi's Glory, the third novel in the trilogy that starts with the much more familiar Prizzi's Honor, a Mafia family decide to go more-legit-than-legit and successfully take over the White House.)

All these plotlines are now dead. (Mob family in the White House? Political leader motivated by a total ideological committment to destroy their own country? AI-mediated-focus groups directing candidate public appearances? Politics causing gridlock and societal breakdown? Dead, dead, dead because they already happened, like the Moon landing.)

There's a lot more. It's an entertaining and thought-provoking novel, and may explain by so much genre fiction has turned to epic fantasy or far future space opera. 

Getting Into Responsive Web Design

As phones and other mobile devices become the main method for people to access the internet, making sure that web sites and online documentation is mobile friendly becomes more important. Responsive web design ensures that content is accessible no matter what device is used to view it. 

Most modern authoring tools now feature responsive output as one of their output options. Although they've become friendlier, and you don't generally need to delve into the code, it does help to have a basic understanding of how the technology works, just in case something breaks (and sooner or later, it will). 

freeCodeCamp has published a couple of articles about responsive web design. First, here's brief introduction to responsive web design that covers the basics. It's a good summary for technical writers who want to understand just what their tools are doing behind the scenes. If you want to understand why responsive web design came about in the first place, here's an article on the history of responsive web design and the problems it is intended to solve. 

12 Useful Chrome Extensions

Google Chrome is the most popular web browser, and one reason for that is its library of extensions. I have a few installed, and I'm always open to looking at new ones. 

This article from LifeHacker lists 12 of their favourite extensions, and there are some good ones. I've been driven crazy by ads and pop-up videos recently, and I just installed UBlock Origin, which does a wonderful job of cutting down on all the junk that web sites are trying to load these days. 

So have a look and see what you think. 

I do wish Chrome for Android supported extensions though. 

The Almost Chainsaw Maskacre

The pun in the title is deliberate.

Last weekend, in the quiet, mild-mannered city of Toronto, Ontario*, there was almost a real chainsaw massacre. Two heavily tattooed men, armed with chainsaws, attacked an anti-mask rave being held at Cherry Beach on the Toronto waterfront. 

The incident in the video took place August 9 at around 9:30 in the morning. David Sullivan, who lives in the encampment and took the video, told VICE News he was instrumental in dealing with them as they came at the crowd. He said the men showed up earlier, while the party was ongoing and he quickly recognized them. They had been going to Cherry Beach parties for years and were known to be “troublemakers,” he claimed.

Sullivan said the duo hung out until well after the official party was done and then picked a fight. This ended in a scrap between one of the chainsaw duo and a fellow partier. Several people told VICE News that, either during the fight or shortly after, the other member of the chainsaw duo was hit hard on the back of the head with something.

The two men left and returned, bloodied and enraged, with chainsaws—it’s unknown exactly where the chainsaws came from but VICE was told one of the men used them for work—and came after the group. Sullivan said he saw the chainsaw guys coming and quickly worked to get everyone out of the camp, snap the morning dancers out of their stupor so they could run, and tried to de-escalate the situation by directing them towards the equipment of the event’s DJ, Omari Taylor.

“All of a sudden I hear chainsaws revving up from the frickin forest,” said Taylor. “And I hear 'chainsaw chainsaw'! These dudes come out with chainsaws and blood on them. And they're coming towards me and my equipment!”

All I can say is that when something like this happens in Toronto (aka Toronto The Good)* then 2020 is getting truly weird. 

* Actually I'm being mildly sarcastic here. Toronto isn't that good and hasn't deserved its nickname for a while, but despite its problems, it's still much safer than most big US cities. Attacks by chainsaw-wielding, heavily tattooed drunkards are not very common.

Flying a Dragon To the Moon

The recent success of the Crew Dragon test flight has led people, myself included, to wonder if it would make more sense to use a modified Crew Dragon spacecraft for lunar missions instead of the hideously expensive Orion spacecraft that NASA has been developing for more than a decade. 

The folks at Ars Technica have been wondering the same thing and have written an article about it. 

More than a month before Endeavour returned to Earth, Zubrin and another rocket scientist, Homer Hickam, co-authored a provocative op-ed in The Washington Post titled “Send the SpaceX Dragon to the Moon.”

They cited several concerns about Orion, but the principal one is mass. At 26.5 tons, Orion and its Service Module are very heavy. Because of this girth, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket cannot even get Orion all the way into low lunar orbit with enough maneuvering capability to get back to Earth.

“We recognize the hard work that NASA and its contractors have put forth on Orion/SLS, but they have simply been left behind by more nimble commercial companies,” Zubrin and Hickam wrote. “Dragon is not just cheaper than Orion; it is much better, because it is much lighter.”

Crew Dragon has a dry mass of less than 10 tons and 50 percent more internal space than the Apollo capsule that carried three astronauts to the Moon. SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket has the capacity to lift Crew Dragon and a “return stage” into lunar orbit. There, the vehicle would dock with a lunar lander that would carry the crew to the surface while the Crew Dragon capsule remains in low lunar orbit. After sciencing on the Moon, the astronauts would use the lander to return to the Crew Dragon, fire the return stage, and come home to Earth.

Tl; DR: It's technically possible but politically fraught. 

If you have doubts about the technical issues involved in using SpaceX's technology and getting the work done by 2024, view this video.

Could Smartphones Detect Diabetes?

 Modern smartphones (and smartwatches) have sensors to monitor many aspects of our health, including heart rate and rhythm and blood pressure. But they could do more.

According to researchers at UC San Francisco, they could also detect diabetes. 

In developing the biomarker, the researchers hypothesized that a smartphone camera could be used to detect vascular damage due to diabetes by measuring signals called photoplethysmography (PPG), which most mobile devices, including smartwatches and fitness trackers, are capable of acquiring. The researchers used the phone flashlight and camera to measure PPGs by capturing color changes in the fingertip corresponding with each heartbeat.

In the Nature Medicine study, UCSF researchers obtained nearly 3 million PPG recordings from 53,870 patients in the Health eHeart Study who used the Azumio Instant Heart Rate app on the iPhone and reported having been diagnosed with diabetes by a health care provider. This data was used to both develop and validate a deep-learning algorithm to detect the presence of diabetes using smartphone-measured PPG signals.  

Overall, the algorithm correctly identified the presence of diabetes in up to 81 percent of patients in two separate datasets. When the algorithm was tested in an additional dataset of patients enrolled from in-person clinics, it correctly identified 82 percent of patients with diabetes.  

If this is proven to be effective, it could have a major impact on public health. 

Building the Sea Dragon

At the end of the last episode of the excellent Apple+ TV series, For All Mankind, there was a surprise post-credit shot of a giant rocket rising from the ocean. The rocket was the Sea Dragon, an absolutely huge two-stage booster that could have put the entire International Space Station into orbit in one launch. It would have been awesome!

For the show, the scene was created by Union VFX and they've written about how they created the scene and posted a short VFX breakdown of some of the elements. If you're into VFX stuff, it's fascinating, and even if you're not, it's worth watching for the goosebumps. 

Working with production visual effects supervisor Jay Redd, Union VFX handled the rocket scene, ultimately delivering a 4K, 2544 frame single shot of the launch from under the ocean. It was based on a Sea Dragon rocket (never built for real but part of the show’s alternate version of the ‘space race’ in which the Russians beat the Americans to the first moon landing).

To find out more about how the launch was crafted, befores & afters asked several members of the Union VFX crew about the steps involved. These included taking original previs and generating water, fire and smoke sims as well as the rocket itself, in the process generating 4 billion voxels. The team also talks about utilizing cloud rendering for the work. Check out their run-downs, below, plus Union’s VFX breakdown of the sequence.

Seven Months Later, What We Know and Don't Know About COVID-19

 It's been a bit more than seven months since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and in that time, researchers have found out a lot about the disease. There's also a lot we still don't know. (I'll leave the issue of information/disinformation) out of this for now). 

STAT News (produced by the Boston Globe) has published an overview article about the pandemic that summarizes out current knowledge, and lack of it, about the disease. One of the authors is Helen Branswell, so I think you can count on the information in the article being accurate. 

I'll list some of the topics. First what we know:

• Covid and kids: it's complicated.
• There are safer settings and more dangerous settings.
• People can test positive for a long time after they recover. It doesn’t matter.
• After the storm, there are often lingering effects.
• 'Long haulers' don't feel like they've recovered.

And what we don't know:

• How much virus does it take to get infected? 
• People seem to be protected from reinfection, but for how long? 
• It’s not clear why some people get really sick, and some don’t.

There's much more in the article. 

2020 Aurora Award Winners

The winners of the 2020 Aurora Awards were announced last weekend. The awards are voted on by members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association for science fiction and fantasy by Canadians in 2019. 

These were the fiction award winners.

• Best Novel: The Gossamer Mage by Julie E. Czerneda, DAW Books
• Best Young Adult Novel: Bursts of Fire by Susan Forest, Laksa Media Groups Inc.
• Best Short Fiction: This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, Saga Press
• Best Graphic Novel: Krampus is My Boyfriend! by S.M. Beiko, Webcomic

Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association Hall of Fame 2020 inductees were Heather Dale, Cory Doctorow, and Matthew Hughes. 

I should note that This Is How You Lose the Time War has now won all of the field's major awards: the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards, and now the Aurora. 

TV and Movie Reviews - August 2020 - Part 1

Short reviews from August 2020:

Movies

• The Tax Collector: Shia LaBeouf is not Bruce Willis. David Ayer is not Quentin Tarantino. The actors don't. 
• Rolling Stones: Stones in Exile: A documentary about the making of the Stones' classic album, Exile on Main Street. A better than average doc with some rare footage. (Amazon Prime)
• Gimme Danger: A documentary about The Stooges, who were, along with the MC5, one of the greatest rock bands to come out of Detroit. Jim Osterberg (Iggy Pop) is more articulate and self-aware than you might expect from only seeing him perform. (Amazon Prime)
• Project Power: A strange pill gives people temporary superpowers. What could go wrong? This one starts out OK but falls apart in the second half. (Netflix)

TV Shows

• Inspector Lynley: Another British police procedural, this one with an aristocrat Inspector and lower class Sergeant. Twisty plots combine with more than the usual amount of social commentary. Not for the faint hearted. (Hoopla)
• Newton's Law: A somewhat formulaic Australian legal comedy redeemed by the chemistry between the main actors. I usually don't like this kind of show, but it has been growing on me. (Acorn TV)
• Baroque: A documentary series about the Baroque era in art in architecture. It gave me a much better understanding of and appreciation for the art of the period. I would have liked more commentary about Baroque music. (Acorn TV) 
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: I've only watched a couple of episodes so far, but my reaction is "meh". I do not like the style of animation and it's just too silly and over the top for me. The Orville covers similar territory and is much better.

Featured Links - August 16, 2020

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

• Chevron Is Trying to Crush a Prominent Climate Lawyer—and Maybe the World. This article should scare anyone who believes in a safe and clean environment, climate change, and the rule of law.
• How Ole Roemer Calculated The Speed Of Light. A fundamental discovery that was made more than 300 years ago. I am ashamed to admit I have never heard of Roemer. 
• A “Stellar Sneeze” May Have Caused The Dramatic Dimming Of Betelgeuse Last Winter. So it's probably not going to go supernova soon.
• Fuck You, I'm Voting. For my US readers.
• George R.R. Martin's Controversy At the Hugo Awards Highlights a Power Struggle in Sci-Fi/Fantasy. The beloved Game of Thrones author has responded to accusations of racism and transphobia during the virtual ceremony.
• The Square Mile. London's Financial District Before and After Covid 19. "Welcome to the first iN-PUBLiC hosted online exhibition. This exhibition brings together photographers who have worked extensively within London’s renowned financial district, colloquially known as the Square Mile."

We're Living In a Science Fiction Novel

If you think things are strange right now, you're right, and you are not alone. The COVID-19 pandemic is a historic event and has changed almost every aspect of society. As SF author, Robert J. Sawyer points out in today's Toronto Star, some of these changes may be permanent. 

COVID-19 is forcing us to redefine what we mean by work, socializing, home life, vacations, economic reality, and more. Things will never go back to the way they were pre-pandemic.

And, since a reset switch is being hit across the board, people have realized, as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “the fierce urgency of now.” Carpe diem; lean in; be heard; shape tomorrow.

The surging trans-rights movement (and the backlash against “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling over her stance on this issue), Black Lives Matter, Canada finally acknowledging our horrific treatment of our Indigenous peoples: it’s all about making sure that when we come out of the tunnel into the light, it’ll be a sunnier day for everyone.

Since Robert mentions that the publicity campaign for his new novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative, is a casualty of the pandemic, I must give it a shout out. I am about halfway through the book and very much enjoying it. If the rest of the book maintains the high level of quality of the first half, it will almost certainly be Robert's best novel. I'll run a review here when I've finished reading it. But don't wait for my review - get it now. 

The Legacy of H. P. Lovecraft

Back when I was considering getting a masters degree in English literature, I wanted to specialize in science fiction and fantasy. That idea was not popular with my professors, so I dropped it. The only fantasy author that one of them even considered close to "literature" was H. P. Lovecraft. 

Lovecraft, as it turned out, became quite popular in the 1970s and 80s, and has remained influential, although his literary reputation has been tarnished by the racism and sexism in his writing. The New York Times has published an article about him that lists both his most essential stories and some recent adaptations of his work.  

Broadly — and with plenty of exceptions — Lovecraft’s stories suggest huge and unfathomable horrors lurking just beneath the surface of the mundane world. Filled with miscegenation, tentacles and unspeakable dread, his works often begin with ordinary or ordinary-seeming men drawn into extraordinary and otherworldly situations. Almost no one gets out alive or sane. His brand of weird is gooey and misanthropic, with an insistence that the universe is at best indifferent to human life and at worst antagonistic.

To adapt a Lovecraft work is to reckon with a troubled and troubling legacy — blatant racism and sexual phobias blight much of his work. Still, he remains influential, with his sinister, squishy qualities still felt across media — television, film, fiction, comics, video games, role-playing games, visual art, plushies — and multiple genres. The stomach monster from “Alien”? Extremely Lovecraft. That giant squid from “Watchmen”? Lovecraft again. The devouring Shoggoths from the “Lovecraft Country” pilot? A squelching tip of the hat.

Lovecraft influenced many modern SF and fantasy authors who have written stories in what's become known as the Cthulu Mythos. If you want a sampling, try the Cthulu Mythos Megapack ebooks on Amazon. They're cheap and contain dozens of stories by both Lovecraft and many authors from the mid-20th century. For a more modern take on him, check out Charlie Stross' Laundry Files series. 

The Rocky Marriage of SpaceX and NASA

When the Crew Dragon capsule splashed down recently in the Gulf of Mexico, it marked the consummation of a marriage between two organizations with cultures about as different as could be. SpaceX became the first company to launch astronauts into orbit, ahead of competitor Boeing, whose first test flight ran into a series of major problems. Boeing's corporate culture was much closer to NASA's, but in the end, the upstart won the race.

CNN looks at the political and cultural history of the relationship between the two organizations, a relationship that was hardly made in heaven, but turned out well in the end. 

The prevailing perception was "they're cowboys; they're dangerous; they're going to kill somebody," said former NASA astronaut Garrett Reisman, a veteran of two Space Shuttle missions who joined SpaceX in 2011 as a senior engineer, working on Crew Dragon development.

Even after SpaceX began to prove its engineering chops and was awarded multibillion-dollar NASA contracts, cultural divisions kept tensions brewing behind the scenes.

NASA repeatedly signaled that it was more confident in its legacy partner, Boeing (BA), which was developing the Starliner, a spacecraft to rival SpaceX's Crew Dragon.

As recently as 2016, NASA was planning its schedule around the idea that the Starliner would beat the Crew Dragon to the launch pad. And, as recently as last September, NASA chief Jim Bridenstine and Elon Musk were publicly sparring over whether SpaceX was paying adequate attention to the spacecraft's development.

But by the new year, Boeing and SpaceX's race to the launch pad took a clear turn. A Starliner test flight in December was riddled with missteps and left NASA and Boeing officials scrambling to figure out what went wrong. Shortly afterward, SpaceX's Crew Dragon soared through its final testing milestones, and, in the midst of a pandemic, swiftly prepared for its crowning launch achievement.

NASA officials admitted earlier this month that they had turned a more scrutinizing eye toward SpaceX and its unorthodox ways, while issues with Boeing's Starliner slipped through the cracks.

A Webinar About OED COVID-19 Updates

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many things, and one of them is the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has been updated to reflect some of these changes. If you're interested in finding out more about the updates, they are having a webinar on September 10th with some of their linguists to discuss the changes. 

Great social change tends to bring great linguistic change, and this has never been truer than in the Covid-19 crisis. 

We have seen new coinages; the adaptation of existing terms to talk about the pandemic and its social and economic impacts; and the widespread use of terms previously restricted to fields such as epidemiology and medicine. In order to take account of these developments, the OED has been updated outside of our regular quarterly releases. 

Join OED editors Fiona McPherson, Trish Stewart, and Kate Wild for a live interactive online session where they will present the rationale behind these special updates, the processes involved, and the resources used.

This session will cover:

• how the words are chosen

• inherent challenges in defining the terms

• an in-depth look at the science words we've added and updated

• an in-depth look at some of the general terms

• using corpora to track changes in language, with examples

• available information and how to access it: word frequency, wordlists 

• future developments as the pandemic-related language evolves 

• Q&A time – bring your questions to the panellists, or send them in advance to oed.uk@oup.com  

 

An Amazing Cold War Relic

News of Cold War relics still continues to trickle out of Russia. The latest I've seen is an article about the "Caspian Monster", a ground-effect jet-powered airplane that "flew" on the Caspian sea.  

On Jul. 31, 2020, Russia’s only completed MD-160 Lun class ekranoplan, towed by a tug, made its final voyage across the Caspian Sea. The trip, taking 14 hours in total, was required to move the gigantic non-operational ground effect vehicle (GEV) designed by Rostislav Evgenievich Alexeyev in 1975, from Kaspiysk naval base, where it had remained sitting unused since it was retired in the late 1990s, to Derbent, Dagestan, where it will will be put on display at the (future) Patriot Park on the Caspian Sea.

It was a remarkable machine, essentially an airliner-sized plane deisgned to use ground-effect aerodynamics to "fly"  just above the surface of the water at hundreds of miles per hour and fire ship-killing missiles. I recommend looking at the video in the article - it really is quite remarkable. 

How To Free Up Storage On Your Android Device

It looks like there's a trend in some newer phones not to include a micro-SD card for increased storage. For example, the recently announced Pixel 4A from Google doesn't include a micro-SD card, although it does come with 128 GB of storage. (I'm considering the Pixel 4A as an upgrade to my 3-year-old Galaxy S8, and storage is something I'll have to keep a closer eye on if I do get that phone).

Make Use Of has published a good article that describes several ways you can free up storage on your Android device. If you have an Android phone, especially one without expandable storage, it is worth a read.

2020 Dragon Award Nominations

The nominees for the 2020 Dragon Awards have been announced. These awards are a fan award and presented at DragonCon, usually held in Atlanta over Labour Day weekend, but virtual this year. You can sign up to vote here.

These are the nominees for Best Science Fiction Novel:

• The Testaments by Margaret Atwood
• The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
• The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz
• The Last Emperox by John Scalzi
• The Rosewater Redemption by Tade Thompson
• Network Effect by Martha Wells
• Wanderers by Chuck Wendig

I am tempted to vote for The Testaments, just because. 

Update: I was impressed by the list this year, compared to previous years, as I thought it was representative of the range of the field. Not everyone agrees, as you'll see in this article from File770. Some people need to broaden their horizons a bit. 

Eat By Date

A lot of food gets wasted because people throw it out as soon as it hits the "eat by" or "best before" date printed on the packaging. That date almost always doesn't mean that the food will spoil immediately after that date; it just means that it might not be ideal - the consistency may change or it may be drier than it should be. 

So the question is, how long past the best before date is the food safe to eat? (This question arises often in my family, especially with dairy products). 

To answer that question, you can turn to Eat By Date. 

We are a group of contributors from the kitchen and classroom communities who set out to answer the question, “How long does food really last?”. From the best ingredients to the ordinary, we provide you with a diverse and informative perspective on food shelf life, food safety, expiration dates, recipes, substitutions, food storage and more. We are focused on helping you save money, eat healthy, and debunk the myth of expiration dates on food.

The site is divided into seven categories of food: Dairy, Drinks, Fruits, Grains, Protein, Vegetables, and Other. Each category is further subdivided (for example, 29 categories under Dairy). As well, there's an alphabetical list with more products. The information includes tips on storage and how to get the most shelf life out of your food. 

This is an excellent site and I wish I'd found it a long time ago. 

In Praise of Jupiter Ascending

Nancy and I quite like Jupiter Ascending. We saw it at the theatre when it came out and have watched it a couple of times on Blu-Ray. There's more to it than you might get on first viewing, as this article points out. 

The plot, honestly, is merely a vehicle for the visual language of the world it inhabits. From Caine's little wolfen ears to the spaceships on Earth leaving crop circles, every detail is thought out, even if that thought is just "man, wouldn't this look cool?" The costumes alone warrant a watch, every battle costume is badass and every ball gown extravagant.

The script, underneath about seven layers of worldbuilding and action scenes, is a genuine statement about capitalism, the use of human life as a consumable resource, and a bit about bureaucracy. There is a lot of clunky dialogue, but it's the kind of dialogue you can chuckle at, not wince over, like when Caine explains his spliced-with-wolf DNA to Jupiter and she flirtatiously answers "I love dogs. I've always loved dogs."

If you have a big TV and a good sound system, Jupiter Ascending is a wonderful choice for a Saturday night popcorn movie.  

Lawren Harris - Canada's Mystic Artist

If you're not Canadian, it's likely that you haven't heard of the Group of Seven, a group of landscape artists prominent in the 1920s and 1930s, and who had a huge influence on Canadian art that continues to this day.

The de facto leader of the Group was Lawren Harris, born into a wealthy family, who was notable for his mystic leanings, and an occasionally scandalous lifestyle. Harris' paintings now sell in the millions of dollars. I have a print of this one handing on our rec room wall.

A few years ago, Toronto Life published a long article about Harris, with many details that I'd never heard about including the influence of Theosophy on his art.

Spiritualism had always intrigued him, and in 1918 it became a lifeline. Theosophy, which dates back to the second century, was revived and reimagined by Helena Blavatsky, the magnetic, mysterious Russo-German occultist sometimes called the Mother of the New Age. Madame Blavatsky, as she was known, co-founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 with the lawyer William Quan Judge. She was a foul-mouthed fabulist, huckster and high priestess, her body draped in Indian robes, perpetually enveloped in tobacco smoke. Through psychic transmissions from long-dead Tibetan mahatmas, she claimed to have discovered the hidden source of the world’s religions, which would guide her followers toward enlightenment.

Theosophy had no rituals per se—practising it basically meant getting together with other theosophists and talking about it—but it did have holy books, including the immense, pseudo-scientific Secret Doctrine and Isis Unveiled, in which Blavatsky details the origins of the universe and the evolution of humanity. In Blavatsky’s teachings, prayer was forbidden, an anthropomorphic god derided; true reality lay behind a dissolvable physical plane. Blavatsky borrowed a lot of her concepts from Eastern religions (the books can read like Hinduism for Dummies ghostwritten by L. Ron Hubbard), but theosophy had serious supporters, including Yeats and Gandhi.

If you are in the Toronto area, both the Art Gallery of Ontario and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection have many of his works.  

20 Essential Grateful Dead Shows

In honour of the 25th anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia, Rolling Stone has published a list of 20 essential Grateful Dead shows. The list was compiled by David Fricke and first appeared in Rolling Stone's publication, Grateful Dead: The Ultimate Guide.

Speaking as a lifelong Deadhead, I think it's a good and representative list that covers shows from 1966 to 1991. There are some obvious choices and some more obscure ones, but overall this is a stellar overview of the Grateful Dead's long strange trip through a variety of musical landscapes.

Choosing and justifying a list of essential Grateful Dead shows — 20, 200, or even 2,000 — is treacherous work. Passionate challenge from fans, especially hardcore Deadheads and veteran tape traders, is guaranteed. Endless debate over set-list minutiae is inevitable. In fact, there is only one definitive list of the Dead’s greatest concerts — and it includes every show they played, in every lineup, from their pizza-parlor-gig days as the Warlocks in 1965 until guitarist Jerry Garcia‘s death in 1995.

That long, strange trip was a continually unfolding tale of highs and trials, dedicated evolution and surrender to the moment, often caught vividly in the recording studio but told most immediately each night (or day) onstage. This list jumps and dances through the story, but it’s not a bad place to start, if you’re not in deep already: more than 40 hours of performance from key runs and one-nighters in every decade, drawn from archival releases, the vast amount of circulating recordings and my own good times with the music.

These 20 shows are genuinely essential in at least one way: If I had no other live Dead in my collection, I would be happy and fulfilled with this. Luckily, there is more. I already have lots of it. I will never have enough.

Most of the shows in the article are linked to YouTube videos of either the full show or representative songs. Fricke's comments put the shows in context and help to illuminate key performances. 

Featured Links - August 9, 2020

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

• AI-Generated Text Is the Scariest Deepfake of All. "Synthetic video and audio seemed pretty bad. Synthetic writing—ubiquitous and undetectable—will be far worse."
• 10 Hidden Modes in Windows and How To Use Them. I didn't know Windows had a God Mode!
• Why I Like Photography, by John Scalzi. This is pretty much me, except that Scalzi can afford better cameras.
• How the pandemic might play out in 2021 and beyond. "This coronavirus is here for the long haul — here’s what scientists predict for the next months and years."
• How Did I Catch the Coronavirus? "For the majority of the nearly five million COVID-19 cases across the United States, the point of infection is unknown."
• Susan Ellison - RIP and Love. Neil Gaiman writes about the late Susan Ellison, wife of Harlan Ellison.
• Virgin Galactic Unveils Mach 3 Aircraft Design. Basically a (very) supersonic business jet. 
  

Jerry Garcia's 50 Greatest Songs

Tomorrow, August 9, marks the 25th anniversary of the death of Jerry Garcia, the Grateful Dead's iconic leader and guitarist. To mark the anniversary, Rolling Stone has assembled a playlist of 50 of his greatest songs. Each song is linked to a live performance video and they span Garcia's years with the Grateful Dead. 

Needless to say it's a great list with some wonderful performances. My only complaint is that it doesn't include more from Garcia's solo career. 

Here's one of my favourites, Eyes of the World, from Roosevelt Stadium in 1976.

Friday Funny: Monkey Reads the Manual

 I have, during my many years as a technical writer, heard users called disparaging names, including "monkey". Occasionally they deserved it. In this video, the user is a monkey, and he even reads the manual.

George the monkey is curious about his new water bottle.  In this video you can see George remove a large metal water bottle from a cardboard box, unsuccessfully attempt to unscrew the lid, refer to the user manual (upside down), successfully unscrew the lid, peer into the bottle and sniff it, screw the lid back onto the bottle and immediately unscrew, and consult the user manual again.

Astronomy's Dark Year

You might think, as I did, that astronomical observatories, typically located on the top of remote mountains, would be isolated enough to be safe from the COVID-19 pandemic. But you'd be wrong, as shown by this article from Astronomy magazine. 

Large telescopes require large staffs, both to run and maintain the equipment and to analyze the data. They are usually part of universities and often aren't billeted at the observatory itself. The pandemic has forced most large telescopes to shut down or severely curtail activities. 

Through interviews and email exchanges with dozens of researchers, administrators, press officers and observatory directors, as well as reviewing a private list circulating among scientists, Astronomy magazine has confirmed more than 120 of Earth's largest telescopes are now closed as a result of COVID-19. 

Many of the shutdowns happened in late March, as astronomy-rich states like Arizona, Hawaii and California issued stay-at-home orders. Nine of the 10 largest optical telescopes in North America are now closed. In Chile, an epicenter of observing, the government placed the entire country under a strict lockdown, shuttering dozens of telescopes. Spain and Italy, two European nations with rich astronomical communities — and a large number of COVID-19 infections — closed their observatories weeks ago. 

 Even many small telescopes have now closed, as all-out shutdowns were ordered on mountaintops ranging from Hawaii's Mauna Kea to the Chilean Atacama to the Spanish Canary Islands. Science historians say nothing like this has happened in the modern era of astronomy. Even during the chaos of World War II, telescopes kept observing. 

Some smaller telescopes have been able to stay open. 

Similarly, the telescopes that make up the Catalina Sky Survey, based at Arizona’s Mount Lemmon, are still searching the heavens for asteroids. In just the past week, they found more than 50 near-Earth asteroids — none of them dangerous.

Another small group of robotic telescopes, the international Las Cumbres Observatory network, has likewise managed to stay open, albeit with fewer sites than before. In recent weeks, their telescopes have followed up on unexpected astronomical events ranging from asteroids to supernovas.  

"We are fortunate to still be keeping an eye on potential new discoveries," says Las Cumbres Observatory director Lisa Storrie-Lombardi.

But, overall, there are just fewer telescopes available to catch and confirm new objects that appear in our night sky, which means fewer discoveries will be made. 

Chambers, the Pan-STARRS telescope director, says his team has been forced to do their own follow-ups as they find new asteroids and supernovas. “This will mean we make fewer discoveries, and that we will miss some objects that we would have found in normal times,” he says. 

Some Articles About COVID-19

This week has been a big week for important articles about COVID-19. Several of them are by The Atlantic's staff writer, Ed Yong, who has been writing about the pandemic since March. I have seen mentions of a Pulitzer prize for him, and I would be very surprised if he doesn't win one. All of these are worth your time.

• How the Pandemic Defeated America by Ed Yong (The Atlantic): This is one of the two cover stories from the September issue of the Atlantic. It's about 10,000 words long but if you want to really understand the situation the United States now faces, you should read it carefully. It may be the best single article yet written about the pandemic. Keep in mind that because of the lead-times of print publication, it was written in June so is not completely up to date.
• Immunity Is Where Intuition Goes to Die by Ed Yong (The Atlantic): "I wrote a guide to the immune system—how it theoretically works, how it reacts to the new coronavirus, why it’s all so maddeningly complicated, and what we know about how long immunity lasts."
• The Atlantic's star pandemic reporter: We aren't ready for another 'generation-defining crisis' by Kerry Flynn (CNN): A interview with Ed Yong. This may keep you up at night.
• I’d Need Evidence Before I’d Get a Covid-19 Vaccine. It Doesn’t Exist Yet by Natalie Dean, an assistant professor of biostatistics at the University of Florida (New York Times). "Scientists need to show us the data. And that’s exactly what they’re working on."
  
• A Vaccine Reality Check by Sarah Zhang (The Atlantic): "So much hope is riding on a breakthrough, but a vaccine is only the beginning of the end."
• Scared That Covid-19 Immunity Won’t Last? Don’t Be by Akiko Iwasaki and Ruslan Medzhitov, professors of immunobiology at Yale (New York Times). "Dropping antibody counts aren’t a sign that our immune system is failing against the coronavirus, nor an omen that we can’t develop a viable vaccine."

TV and Movie Reviews - July 2020 - Part 2

More short reviews from the end of July. These will probably be shorter over the next couple of months as we will be watching as much baseball as possible. Then again, maybe the season will be cancelled, so who knows. 

• Endeavour, Season 7: Endeavour is the prequel series to Inspector Morse. This season takes it into 1970 and concentrates on the relationship between Morse and Inspector Thursday. This is one of my favourite series and I'm glad to see there will be a season 8. 
• Kin: "Chased by a vengeful criminal, the feds and a gang of otherworldly soldiers, a recently released ex-con, and his adopted teenage brother are forced to go on the run with a weapon of mysterious origin as their only protection." A good popcorn flick, a bit better than I expected, but still definitely a B movie. (Amazon Prime)
• The Level: "A police detective finds herself at the centre of the most dangerous case of her life when she is seconded on to the investigation into the murder of a drugs trafficker. What nobody around her knows is that she is the missing witness that the police and the killer are searching for." The plot in this one was just too implausible for belief. I lost interest after the second episode. (Acorn TV)
• The Capture: "When a British soldier is charged with a crime, the tenacious young detective handling his case begins to uncover a multi-layered conspiracy." Multi-layered doesn't begin to describe the plot. Well made and well acted, but you need to pay really close attention to follow what's going on. (Amazon Prime)
• Judy: A biopic about the later years of Judy Garland. Renee Zellweger is brilliant as a troubled Garland. It's sometimes not an easy movie to watch. (Amazon Prime)
• Deep Blue See 3: Bad sharks in a bad movie. Even a bottle of La Trappiste beer didn't make it any better.

A Stylish, Painful History

This is a guest post from Steve Hudson, aka the Word Heretic. It originally appeared on the word-pc mailing list in response to a query about customizing Word's style gallery. Steve has been active in the Microsoft Word community since the 1990s. Back in the 2000s, he was delving into the innards of VBA and Word's insanely complex object model. Here he brings us a bit of Word's history and some insights into why Word is the way it is. 

I am totally snowed under rewriting an editing tool at the moment, but this is definitely a customisable feature I am interested in including, as I need it as well. I have gone the QAT route before (with one line macros to implement the style, it’s not rocket science lol), but the customisable gallery option is available as well if you take advantage of the new properties that styles have. I have done a proof of concept on that already Howie, so I refute your ‘an add-in cannot do this’ ;-)

But then again, I am a little strange.

As I am knocking back a few vodkas, let’s get into some serious background here on this issue. Back in about 2002 when I was a Word MVP, they invited a few of us to give an online presentation of our ‘daily macros’. Of course, I had a full interface reworking of the product. Those long-timers on this list will remember those crazy days back then, RIP Maggie. Word was so damn buggy that this list was jumping, and also it was pre the modern MS forums.

Anyhow, this interface of mine included a bunch of features that we slowly see MS introducing in each version. Why didn’t they just do them all at once? Because of enterprise licencing purposes! IE: pay MS a lot of money every year, and MS promises new features every few years. So they are eking out my list of stuff. Examples include pre-made watermarks, and, pertinently, vertical toolbars at each side of the screen, as horizontal monitor space was increasing, but standard Word menus chewed up vertical space. One of these toolbars was my list of styles, as icons.

 Of course, MVP and MS staff jaws thudded to the ground as I unveiled my GUI, and MS followed up with dragging me off to Singapore to pick my brain, with my mentor in tow to keep me in check, as I am a somewhat… unique personality to be polite, or an off the rails raving heretical lunatic, to be more accurate. Whichever you feel more comfortable with :-p

Part of the outcomes from this was a whole new render engine which is why 2007+ releases have elicited a whole new range of display bugs, but also was part of smashing the numbering bugs. Another part was “How do we better present styles for use for technical writers, as compared to ordinary hacks.” Now THIS was a major departure from standard MS thinking, which is, 99% of the time, ONE SIZE SHALL FIT ALL WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT! TLDR: I have ranted against this many times but they won’t budge. They need Word Lite for Grandma, Word for most office users, and Power Word for serious technical style writers, but they won’t ever do that. Instead, we at least get second best. We get the ability to pull up some stuff that average users won’t use, to do our thing.

For Styles We Want Quick Access To, we agreed that it’s template-based, but individual documents may vary that requirement. There was no ‘editor only’ solution, which would be a hard enforced global setting. We were focussed on AUTHORING documents.

 And that is why you have what you have today.

So, skipping forward to 2007 when the new interface came out, we had these newfangled things called Task Panes, as vertical “toolbars” down both sides of the screen. We had “no control over them”, you can google up my article I spent several months fulltime developing for the MVPs that gave you as much control over these as you could have, which basically flew in the face of MS saying “You have no control at all”. When MS saw the interest this drove, they realised they had to open this up, plus they wanted to get rid of the old CommandBars approach, which didn’t fit the newly expanded interface paradigm I helped usher in.

Thus, from 2010 onwards I believe, you could develop Task Panes using XML. I dunno, about the time I finished the Word Heretic’s Task Panes article, I was already receiving grievous amounts of hate mail for “How dare you change the interface on us!” and I fled to Asia and enjoyed a delicious midlife crisis resolution for a number of years before returning to people being generally contented with a much better Word, with a whole bunch less bugs, and a more customisable interface. So I went from 2007 straight to 2016, more or less.

What did I get out of this? The satisfaction of seeing millions of Word users have their major issues SLASHED, and a whole lot less super-problematic document solutions required. Now any old MVP or experienced technical writer can help the vast majority of regular users solve their problems, and the Woodys, Rados and Heretics can relax and get back to writing or drinking beverages of choice.

And I get bragging rights, exercised once every few years pretty well exclusively on this list because this will always remain my home. Ha! Have a great day, people!

Steve Hudson
Word Heretic

Steve's post is © 2020 by Steve Hudson. 

2020 Hugo Awards Announced

The winners of the 2020 Hugo Awards were announced Friday evening by ConZealand, the 78th World Science Fiction Convention.

These are the fiction winners:

• Best Novel: A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine (Tor; Tor UK)
• Best Novella: "This Is How You Lose the Time War" by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Saga Press; Jo Fletcher Books)
• Best Novelette: "Emergency Skin" by N.K. Jemisin ( Forward Collection (Amazon))
• Best Short Story: “As the Last I May Know”,by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
• Best Series: The Expanse by James S. A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)

You can read more about the winners and the nominees on this Tor.com page. 

This year, because of the pandemic, the awards ceremony was pre-recorded and as usual it was streamed over the internet. It clocked in at over three hours, largely due to the self-indulgent hosting of George R. R. Martin and Robert Silverberg. There was more than a little controversy about the ceremony; this post by Cheryl Morgan is a representative sample.

Update: Here's a link to transcripts of most of the speeches given by the Hugo winners.

Featured Links - August 4, 2020

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

• Even the Best AI Models Are No Match for the Coronavirus. Many so-called “quantitative funds” that mine historical data to make trading decisions fared poorly in March, when stocks fell sharply amid coronavirus fears.
• The Top 40 Sci-Fi Movies of the 21st Century. I am surprised at how many of these I haven't seen.
• How to Spot—and Avoid—Dark Patterns on the Web. "You've seen them before: the UX ploys designed to trick you into spending money, or make it nearly impossible to unsubscribe. Here's what to look out for."
• A Medieval Potion Proves Its Worth as an Effective Bacteria Killer. "A 1,000-year-old recipe to treat eye infections could lead to an unorthodox way of combating antibiotic resistance."
• 11 Amazing Android Apps That’ll Change How You Use Your Phone. "There are millions of apps in the Play Store that range from addictive games to essential productivity tools to great ways to customize your phone."
• A Win10 guide for Windows Update settings. A good article from the Ask Woody newsletter.
• SDCC 2020 links from Tor.com. News and trailers about SF & fantasy as ComicCon. 
• This Algorithm Might Make Facial Recognition Obsolete. You can download it and run it on your own photos to block your image from being scraped for facial recognication databases like Clearview.

Off for the Civic Holiday Weekend

This weekend is a long weekend in Ontario; Monday is a civic holiday known here as Simcoe Day in honour of one of the founders of the province. Although I'm retired now, so weekends aren't as important as they used to be, I'm taking it off anyway. 

I'll be back to regular posting on Tuesday. 

Also, next week I will have a guest post by the Word Heretic himself, Steve Hudson. Look forward to some inside tidbits on the history of Microsoft Word.

In the meantime, enjoy this flower.