The Biggest Telescopes Are Reopening

In August, I posted about how the pandemic had caused most big observatories to halt observing. Now, more than nine months into the pandemic, observatories are beginning to reopen. This is good news.

After more than six months of COVID-related closures, observational astronomy is largely getting back to work.

Many of the world’s biggest telescopes have reopened their domes in recent weeks, returning their gazes to the heavens for the first time since the pandemic forced a global shutdown of observational astronomy in March. Other major telescopes expect to reopen soon. 

This wave of reopenings was buoyed by declining COVID-19 cases in Chile, especially in the Atacama Desert, a region home to many world-class observatories. U.S. officials who manage telescopes in Hawaii and Arizona say they’re also beginning to resume operations, largely thanks to significant changes in their workflows. 

If major observatories continue to come back online — and remain open — it will end an unprecedented dark era in astronomy. After all, even during World War II, America’s observatories kept a close eye on the skies. 

All is not rosy, however. As the article points out, observations have been drastically affected by travel restrictions and maintenance (for example, cleaning the huge mirrors) cut way back because of staff shortages.

Some Google Drive Settings to Look At

Google Drive has become the collaboration platform of choice for many people. So it's wise to have a look at some of the settings, especially since Google keeps updating the product and adding new features.

MakeUsOf has an article that describes some of the settings that you should have a look at. Most of them are tips that might make the tool easier to use or that change how it integrates with other applications. 

A few of the more important ones:

• Use files offline
• Check your app permissions
• Set apps for specific file types

Find and Replace Inside Field Codes in Word

Field codes are one of those features that I think many, if not most, users of Microsoft Word don't know about and never use. However, there are situations where they come in handy and can save you a lot of time.

The Office Watch website has an article that explains how to use search and replace in field codes to perform a common task – changing the destination of a URL In Word, URL's appear in a HYPERLINK field. 

As the article points out, there are some limitations on this technique, so it's worth reading even if you already know how to use field codes. And if you don't, you'll learn something useful.

How We Discovered Water On the Moon

This week's discovery of signs of water on the Moon has received quite a bit of coverage in the mainstream media. Most of it has been pretty superficial. 

Kudos to the New Yorker for publishing an article that clearly explains how the water was discovered, who made the discovery, and what it means. 

It was a ten-hour flight from takeoff to landing, wheels up just after 6 p.m., from Palmdale, California, out over the Pacific. For the first nine hours and forty minutes, Casey Honniball, a twenty-seven-year-old planetary scientist, didn’t have much to do. She took a nap, ate a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and used her laptop to work on research proposals. The plane seemed bigger than usual—almost all of the seats had been removed, along with much of the fuselage’s interior panelling—and it was very cold and very loud. In the main cabin, which looked like mission control, her fifteen fellow-passengers worked at alternating intervals behind giant computer consoles. A large blue rotating fixture, resembling a bank-vault door studded with scientific instruments, dominated the plane’s rear wall. It was the interior half of an eight-foot-wide infrared telescope, its mirrors angled out the left side of the plane and into space. Honniball watched its hydraulic counterweight move subtly and ceaselessly, compensating for turbulence.

Can Lab-Grown Brains Become Conscious?

 Can lab-grown brains become conscious? That's the question raised by this Nature article, and it's not a silly question. 

I can think of at least two recent science fiction novels (by Charles Stross and Peter Watts) that have used lab-grown brain tissue as part of a neural network or computing device, but I hadn't heard that researchers were growing "miniature brains" in the lab.

In Alysson Muotri’s laboratory, hundreds of miniature human brains, the size of sesame seeds, float in Petri dishes, sparking with electrical activity.

These tiny structures, known as brain organoids, are grown from human stem cells and have become a familiar fixture in many labs that study the properties of the brain. Muotri, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), has found some unusual ways to deploy his. He has connected organoids to walking robots, modified their genomes with Neanderthal genes, launched them into orbit aboard the International Space Station, and used them as models to develop more human-like artificial-intelligence systems. Like many scientists, Muotri has temporarily pivoted to studying COVID-19, using brain organoids to test how drugs perform against the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

But one experiment has drawn more scrutiny than the others. In August 2019, Muotri’s group published a paper in Cell Stem Cell reporting the creation of human brain organoids that produced coordinated waves of activity, resembling those seen in premature babies1. The waves continued for months before the team shut the experiment down.

This type of brain-wide, coordinated electrical activity is one of the properties of a conscious brain. The team’s finding led ethicists and scientists to raise a host of moral and philosophical questions about whether organoids should be allowed to reach this level of advanced development, whether ‘conscious’ organoids might be entitled to special treatment and rights not afforded to other clumps of cells and the possibility that consciousness could be created from scratch.

If any of you reading this are writing, or thinking of writing, science fiction novels, there's probably a lifetime of ideas in this one article.  

Supercluster: A Great Site for Space Information

There's a new site that's worth checking out if you're interested in space exploration. Supercluster "is focused on stories of spacecraft, astronauts, and space exploration." 

There are three main sections.

Stories is just that, a collection of stories about space exploration. A few examples:

• Falcon 9 Transits the Sun While Mars Watches On
• Keeping ISS Astronauts Safe at 4.76 Miles per Second
• The Case for Building a SETI Observatory on the Moon

In Launches, you can view details of future and past launches. The past launches archive lets you filter the thousands of launches by categories like Military, Science, or Failure.

Astronauts is a database of all 580 humans launched into space (as of this date). Each entry includes photographs and thumbnail information about the person's mission, crewmates, and so on. You can filter on a large number of categories including viewing all non-humans launched into space, like dogs and primates. 

This is a wonderful site and could be a serious time sink for any space buffs. It's visually striking, loads fast, and is fun to browse. I'd like to see more information provided for the astronaut biographies, other than just an excerpt from Wikipedia, Given that it's a new site, there may be more information added in the future.

Image Stacking Tutorial

Image stacking is a technique that astronomers use to combine several frames of a video or several photographic images to reduce noise and improve sharpness. Although it's been used for many years, with powerful computers and easy-to-use software, it's made it possible for amateur astronomers to produce images that rival the quality of those from large ground-based telescopes or even the Hubble Space Telescope.

The video below is a short tutorial from Carolina Sky Astronomer that shows how it's done using off-the-shelf software. The difference between the original and final images is remarkable. 

Some Podcast and Video Reviews

Here are some podcasts and short videos that I think are worth watching.

• Beyond the Tech interviews SF author Charles Stross. "Have you ever thought about how science fiction informs our ideas about the future? I talk with one of my favorite sci-fi writers, Charles Stross), about predicting tech trends, bioscience research, and more."
• Robert J. Sawyer: Oppenheimer and the Bomb. On "The Agenda" on TVO, Sawyer talks about his new novel, The Oppenheimer Alternative" and the life of Robert Oppenheimer. 
  
• A Chat with Mary Robinette Kowal: The Hugo and Nebula winning author talks about writing, her Lady Astronaut series, and her collaboration with Brandon Sanderson.
• Why SpaceX' Starship Won't Have an Escape System: Another great, in-depth exploration of space technology from the Everyday Astronaut.
• Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac Live 1968-1970. Some performance footage featuring the late Peter Green from the early Fleetwood Mac.
• How low voter turnout could lead to an election crisis. A short and grim video about what would likely be the worst outcome of the November US election. 
• Enter Sandman (Metallica) 2020 Halloween Light Show. This is totally over the top. Some people have too much time on their hands.
• How to plant garlic. Mine is planted. Is yours?

 

Featured Links - October 25, 2020

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

• New Climate Warnings in Old Permafrost: 'It’s a Little Scary Because it’s Happening Under Our Feet.' "A new study shows a few degrees of warming can trigger abrupt thaws of vast frozen lands, releasing huge stores of greenhouse gases and collapsing landscapes."
• State of the climate: 2020 on course to be warmest year on record. "While this year will be memorable for many reasons, it is now more likely than not that 2020 will also be the warmest year for the Earth’s surface since reliable records began in the mid-1800s. This is all the more remarkable because it will lack any major El Niño event – a factor that has contributed to most prior record warm years." 
• Interview with Elizabeth Bear (Ancestral Night). She is one of my favourite SFF authors. Her new book, Machine, is just out.
• Brexit and the Dismal Reality of 'Take Back Control'. Will Britain have to re-join the EU?
• Debunking the False Claim That COVID Death Counts Are Inflated. "President Trump, a congressman and conspiracy fantasists have repeated the myth. But three kinds of evidence point to more than 218,000 U.S. deaths."
• Is Venus a living hell? Conversation with astrobiologist David Grinspoon. Life on Venus might be more likely than life on Mars.

Core Dump Is 17

Today is Core Dump's 17th birthday; my first blog post was October 24th, 2003. 

This blog has been through a few iterations. I started out on Blogger. In 2010, I switched over to WordPress hosted on my own site. I took a hiatus of about a year starting in 2017 because I was having problems with the site and didn't have the time to resolve them. In 2018, after being laid off from the TMX Group, I set up the third iteration back on Blogger.

I do this mainly for my own satisfaction. I like writing and sharing things that interest me, and it's nice to know that there are a few people out there who read it and share my interests. It's also a time capsule of 17 years of my life and occasionally a handy reference. 

I am not terribly happy with Blogger as a platform. I started using it for Core Dump 3.0 because it was easy to set up, and I didn't want to go through the process of setting up a new WordPress installation on my own site. However, in the last couple of years, I've found it limiting, and I'm considering moving it onto WordPress.com. 

It's likely that I will also retire www.soltys.ca, although I will keep the domain.

Stay tuned. 

COVID-19 And Surfaces, Again

It's time to take another look at whether COVID-19 is spread from surfaces. We're now more than half a year into the pandemic, and there hasn't been any widespread indication that the disease spreads from contact with surfaces. Note the key word here: widespread. Yes, it can be contracted by surface contact, but the risk is generally low, unless you're someplace like a hospital ward.

Wired has published an article that summarizes the latest research. 

Low risk is not, of course, no risk, she adds. There are high-touch objects that merit disinfection, and places like hospitals need clean rooms and furniture. People at high risk from Covid-19 may want to take extra precautions. But the best advice for breaking that object-to-nose chain, according to all the health experts I spoke with: Wash your hands.

Goldman, too, had come to similar conclusions months before all this additional research came out, and US public health guidance followed right along with him. Since his Lancet paper in July, the focus on fomites has waned, and has been replaced by a focus on person-to-person transmission through respiration. The shift was based on epidemiological evidence. Experts knew all along that droplets passed by sneezing, coughing, or speaking were likely an important mode of transmission—that’s just how respiratory viruses tend to move. Over time, it became clear that aerosols, which remain suspended in the air, can better explain why so many infections seemed to be passing between people who did not directly interact, but could have shared the same indoor air. That’s why public health officials now emphasize mask wearing and ventilation. The CDC’s most recently updated guidance, from early October, holds that “spread from touching surfaces is not thought to be a common way that Covid-19 spread.” For those reasons, or perhaps out of fatigue, the scrubbing became less scrupulous over the summer.

At this point, it probably makes more sense for places like schools and stores to put more effort into ensuring that their ventilation systems are clean and recirculating as much fresh air as possible, rather than spending time and money on deep cleaning.

Still, it's prudent to wash your hands thoroughly and often and wear masks indoors in public. 

Tom Lehrer's Songs Are Now in the Public Domain

Tom Lehrer, the famous satirical songwriter, has released all of the lyrics for his songs into the public domain. They're available here.

I, Tom Lehrer, and the Tom Lehrer Trust 2000, hereby grant the following permission:

All the lyrics on this website, whether published or unpublished, copyrighted or uncopyrighted, may be downloaded and used in any manner whatsoever, without requiring any further permission from me or any payment to me or to anyone else.

Some lyrics written by Tom Lehrer to copyrighted music by others are included herein, but of course such music may not be used without permission of the copyright owners. (The translated songs may be found in their original languages on YouTube.)

In other words, all the lyrics herein should be treated as though they were in the public domain.

In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music and publish or perform their versions without fear of legal action.

I hope this results in new versions of some of his classic songs. Here's one of my favourites: "We'll All Go Together When We Go". 

Ed Berguiant, RIP

Ed Berguiant, one of the great type and logo designers, has died at the age of 92.

Even if you don't recognize the name (his Benguiat font is well known among typographers, but I don't see it in the list of fonts on my PC), you will have seen some of the logos that he designed during his long career. (Ford, the New York Times, the Planet of the Apes movie). 

The New York Times has published an appreciation of his life and work. I recommend watching the embedded video of him talking about his work. 

Mr. Benguiat understood the intricacies of a typeface in a way that today’s computer users, with countless fonts at their disposal, generally do not. He knew that a successful design wasn’t merely in the shaping of individual letters; it was in things like the spacing between those letters. And he knew that what looks good on a computer screen might not work when blown up to the size of a marquee or a billboard.

“At three feet high, the serif of a face like Bodoni is going to be two inches thick,” he told Macworld in 2001, referring to a popular typeface. “Someone has to fix it. I get called to do that.”

 

Typing Special Characters in Word

I've known for a long time, that you can type special characters in Microsoft Word by holding down the ALT key and typing the ASCII code. For example, ALT+0233 types an accented letter e, like this: é. 

However, since the advent of Unicode, there are a lot more special characters, and now we have emojis in common use. These all have Unicode codes, if you can find them. The Symbol dialog in Word will display the ASCII or Unicode code for the symbol you select. Or you can get it from a third-party app or a website like the emoji list from Unicode.org. The code for the older man emoji,👴, is 1F474.

To insert this in Word, type the code and press ALT+X. Your cursor should be at the end of the code. If the code directly follows text without a preceding space, highlight it, then press ALT+X. 

Note that the appearance of the character depends on the font you've selected. If all you get is a blank rectangle, it means that your font doesn't support that character, so you will need to use a different font. 

Update: As was gently pointed out by one of my readers, this post was inspired by a message thread on the word-pc mailing list. I've been a member of that list since the Dark Ages and have found it an invaluable resource. 

Adobe DITAWORLD 2020 Recordings

Adobe DITAWORLD 2020, a free online conference focused on DTIA, Adobe products (natch), and content management was held earlier this month. You can now view the recordings of the presentations online. You'll need to sign in with an Adobe ID. 

From October 6–8, 2020, Adobe was hosting the fifth Adobe DITAWORLD Online Conference. We offered a comprehensive program with the world’s leading Technical Communication, Marketing, DITA©, Content Management, and Content Strategy experts about DITA, Adobe FrameMaker, Adobe’s DITA CCMS (XML Documentation for Adobe Experience Manager). Thought leaders and practitioners who know what they talk about. Who were telling fascinating stories and delivered hard facts. And all session recordings are available for free now.

The program had a wide range of topics, from high-level strategic approaches to very practical sessions and industry presentations. We showed how Adobe is helping enterprises around the world to connect the dots between Technical Communication and Marketing Communication and how our customers and partners are using them to create intelligent customer experiences with intelligent content.

These are some of the presentations that look like they might be worthwhile watching. (I am not interested in talks that are pep talks on how great DITA is or why content matters). 

•  Content as a Corporate Asset: Lessons Learned: Migration to DITA During Corporate Acquisitions
• The Electronic Code of Federal Regulations: Mapping and converting a custom XML structure to DITA
• Consistent Structure, Consistent Style: Controlled Language in a Controlled Environment
• Building the Brain: XML Documentation for Scalable Technical Knowledge

The Red Pill Overlap

There is a phenomenon that I've noticed for a while; people who are into "New Age" things like crystals, oils, yoga, extreme diets, and so on, but who are also Trump supporters. I can't wrap my head around that. There's just too much of a disconnect between the differing philosophies (if Trump can be said to have a philosophy). 

The New Yorker recently published an article that delves into this in detail, using The Matrix as a framework. The author hits the nail squarely on the head. 

The overlap is organized around 5G, vaccines, and the right to not have the government tell you what to do. The shared and now oddly bi-partisan conspiracy reasoning style perceives itself as skeptical, independent, open-minded and brave.

But it is actually something I call “freshman skepticism.”

Freshman skepticism arises in that magical place where a lack of general knowledge, critical thinking, and scientific understanding, collides with paranoid speculation, fallacious reasoning, and glib over-generalization.

It is driven by an in-group emotional conviction that all experts, career public servants, scientists, government agencies, and the “mainstream media,” are part of a complicated, evil, miraculously co-ordinated yet conveniently vague and ever-morphing plot.

This many-headed Hydra born of a preconceived dark emotional mood ever-seeking an ad hoc explanation, is given life by a small army of loud Quixotic renegade heroes trying to find the impossibly convoluted myth they feel destined to play out.

Only YouTube “researchers,” conspiracy websites, alternative doctors, and fringe voices know the truth, even though they may disagree on the details. Still, the true and revelatory shape of the meta-narrative Hydra is there somewhere.

It’s like the specter of an evil Virgin Mary visible from just the right angle, there — in the negative space created in the overlapping patterns suggested by otherwise contradictory stories dug up from the dark unconscious of their paranoid prophetic psyches.

There. 5G!

I have, unfortunately, some personal experience with people who think like this, and the explanation is perfectly accurate.  

Update: I re-watched The Matrix over the weekend. It is remarkable how much of modern conspiracy theories like Qanon owe to that movie. 

Featured Links - October 18, 2020

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

• 4chan Just Solved A Decades-Old Mathematical Mystery. And no one knows who the author of the proof is. 
• Android Ransomware Has Picked Up Some Ominous New Tricks. "While it's still far more common on PCs, mobile ransomware has undergone a worrying evolution, new research shows."
• The great unravelling: 'I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse'. "It breaks my heart to watch the country I love irrevocably wounded because of the Australian government’s refusal to act on climate change."
• Tesla Solar Roof 15kW installation completed in 4 days: Time-lapse video. I wonder how well it would work covered in 30 cm. of snow?
• The Dangers of Cynical Sci-Fi Disaster Stories, by Cory Doctorow. "I’m changing how I write fiction—for the benefit of the real world."
• QAnon: how a paranoid delusion is growing in the UK. "An American conspiracy theory popular with Donald Trump supporters has spread to Britain, radicalising level-headed people and turning them into fantasists."

Mars In Opposition

Mars is in opposition this week, which means it's at the point in its orbit where it's closest to the Earth. This happens every couple of years, but this time it's particularly close. It won't look this bright until 2035. 

Here are a couple of pictures taken with my Pixel 4a in Night Sight mode.

I am going to have to get myself a tripod for my phone so I can take advantage of the Astrophotography mode.

Covidiocy In Action

People do stupid things sometimes, but the pandemic seems to be increasing the incidence of stupid actions, at least in certain segments of society. Let's call it "covidiocy".  

Here's a particularly good example from the state of Utah.

On social media, in rallies and at campuses across the state, growing groups of Utahns are declaring that they won’t get tested for COVID-19 — even if they have symptoms.

Some say they don’t want to contribute to the rising numbers that could push their schools to close. Others don’t want to be forced to quarantine for two weeks. A few suggest the results wouldn’t be accurate anyway and insist the severity of the pandemic is a hoax. And one state lawmaker is refusing because he worries it would put him “on the radar” if he tests positive.

“The health department doesn’t need to know if I’m sick or not,” said Rep. Mark Strong, a Republican from Bluffdale.

These individuals are Utah’s test deniers. And public health officials worry that they’re making the state’s already bad situation with the virus worse. Just one anti-tester, they warn, has the potential to cause significant amounts of spread without any way to trace where it’s coming from — or any way to control it.

Wildfires Are Leaving People In the Dark

Imagine that you are living somewhere near a wildfire. It's windy, smoky, and you can see the glow of a fire over the hills nearby. You check your cellphone to see if you need to evacuate. but there's no signal. The fire has taken out the nearby cellphone tower. 

That's become an all too common situation as wildfires, fueled by climate change, grow and become more intense. 

On August 20, environmental photographer Stuart Palley set out for Guerneville, a small town in Northern California’s Sonoma County that was facing an existential threat: The Walbridge Fire, sparked by lightning, had exploded across the rugged hills to the north. For Palley, it was a standard assignment. He was to spend several days shadowing a team of firefighters in order to document the inferno up close.

There was just one problem. As soon as Palley arrived in Guerneville, his cellphone lost service. It would remain out for the next two days while he was in town, making what was already a tough job even tougher. Palley wasn’t able to send updates to his editor during the day or tweet information on the fire. On his first day there, he had no way of getting in touch with the fire battalion chief he was supposed to meet up with.

“I literally had to drive around and ask people where he was, and go hunt him down,” Palley told Future Human. “I was completely in the dark.”

Being in the dark, communications-wise, is something of an occupational hazard for Palley, who has been photographing wildfires professionally for nearly a decade. Once or twice a year, he finds himself working in an area where mobile networks have gone dead due to a power outage or fire-damaged infrastructure. With more wildfires spreading into urban areas packed with cell towers, power lines, and cables transmitting data, the outages, he says, have gotten worse in recent years. Unfortunately, the fires causing them are expected to become even more frequent and severe in the future.

Do You Know What a Scutoid Is?

Do you know what a scutoid is? Until today, I didn't and until just recently nobody else did either. That's because it's the name of a shape that exists in nature but somehow had never been formally defined or named. 

 This is what they look like.

Until last week, the world of science was unaware of the scutoid. The scutoid is a basic three-dimensional shape, like a cube or a sphere but not like either of those things. It’s more like a column with half of one end lopped off at an angle; popular accounts have described it as a twisted prism, although that’s not so helpful. “It’s a prism with a zipper,” Javier Buceta, a biophysicist at Lehigh University and one of the scutoid’s discoverers, told me excitedly. This was also not so helpful.

What matters is that mathematicians had never before conceived of the scutoid, much less given it a name. What matters even more is that scutoids turn out to be everywhere, especially in living things. The shape, however odd, is a building block of multicellular organisms; complex life might never have emerged on Earth without it. Its existence, Buceta said, “allows you to understand the fundamentals of morphogenesis and development—how cells act together when they’re forming and developing.”

This is what nature came up with but mathematicians some missed.

Picture an upright column with five sides: two pentagons, one at the top and one at the base, attached point-to-point by five lines. And, um, suppose this pentagonal column is a tent and that one of the vertical edges, where two of the five faces meet, is a zipper. Now unzip it from the bottom, to midway up, and fold back the flaps: you’ve created a triangular face and turned the pentagonal floor into a hexagon. From the side, it looks as if a wedge of the column has been sliced away. That columnar shape—five-sided at the top, six-sided at the bottom, minus a triangular wedge—is a scutoid. 

Happy 80th Birthday, Pharoah Sanders

I can't let this go by without commenting. Today is the 80th birthday of Pharoah Sanders, who is unquestionably the greatest tenor saxophonist in the history of jazz.  

I first heard his music when I was in university and his album, Karma, came out. I fell in love with it instantly. Actually, love isn't the right term. His music touched my soul - it was a religious experience. Since then, I've listened to everything by him I could get my hands on and managed to see him perform four times. It's not enough. 

Here's a tribute to him from the LA Times.

Best known for his transcendent work with John Coltrane in the mid-1960s and for an astounding eight-year solo run for Impulse Records starting in 1966, Sanders helped define the so-called spiritual jazz movement. Merging percussion-heavy free jazz with meditative ideas influenced by Eastern religion, chants and Sanders’ dynamic, smooth and occasionally skronky tone, his music on albums including “Karma,” “Tauhid” and “Black Unity” stormed psyches with a set of complex, structurally fluid instrumental ideas. Decades later, Sanders’ output continues to resonate with generations of creators, most notably the L.A. scene that birthed Flying Lotus, Kamasi Washington, Madlib, Carlos Niño and Terrace Martin.

“He’s probably the best tenor player in the world,” fellow horn player Ornette Coleman told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2006.

But don't just take Coleman's word for it. Listen to this: "The Creator Has a Master Plan".

 

Featured Links - October 13, 2020

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

• Russian Design for a Reusable Rocket Sure Looks Familiar. It looks a lot like a Falcon 9, but not as capable. 
• A Thousand Years Before Darwin, Islamic Scholars Were Writing About Natural Selection. "Professors are starting to orient Charles Darwin within a rich history of people from all cultures who have grappled with the mechanisms of life."
• Shelved: Bill Evans' Loose Blues. "An album that took five months to record sat in the vault for 20 years before finally getting pressed to vinyl."
• Grapefruit Is One of the Weirdest Fruits on the Planet. "From its name, to its hazy origins, to its drug interactions, there’s a lot going on beneath that thick rind."
• China’s Mars-bound probe returns self-portrait from deep space. "China’s space agency has released images captured by a small camera ejected from the country’s first Mars-bound spacecraft, showing the probe in deep space as it nears the halfway point of its seven-month journey from Earth to the Red Planet."
• Three Scenarios for the Future of Climate Change. "The events of the next several millennia hinge on actions that will be taken by the time today’s toddlers reach adulthood."
• We Shot Our Film with a $600 Camera, 3 Lights, and No Budget (and Still Got Distribution). If you want to know how to shoot a feature film on the (real) cheap, this article will tell you one way to do it. 

Taking the Weekend Off

It's Thanksgiving weekend up here in the Great Orange North, a time for raking leaves, enjoying the last warmth of the sun, and feasting with family and friends. The last part may be somewhat curtailed by the pandemic, but it still looks to be a mostly pleasant weekend, which I'll be taking off from blogging. 

I'll be back on Tuesday with another Featured Links post.

In the meantime, enjoy these flowers.

In Praise of The Shockwave Rider

John Brunner was a British science fiction writer who, in the 1960s and 1970s, wrote some of the most powerful and prophetic novels the genre has produced. Although he didn't always get the technological details right, he consistently nailed the social effects of technology. His best books, like Stand on Zanzibar and The Shockwave Rider are still readable, unlike many more well-known novels from that period. 

In Factor Daily, Gautham Shenoy has written an appreciation of The Shockwave Rider, a book that I've read three times, and would happily read again if I had the time. I recommend reading both it and novel, as well as Brunner's other major works. 

Over the course of a writing career spanning a little over forty years, John Brunner wrote almost sixty novels. Of these, four books considered to be his best, stand out for their prescience. Each one is set roughly about fifty years into the future at the time of their writing. Each one deals with a specific problem that he thought the world would face: The Hugo Award-winning 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar (that dealt with an overpopulated world), 1969’s The Jagged Orbit (interracial tensions), 1972’s The Sheep Look Up (ecological disaster), and last but not the least 1975’s The Shockwave Rider about identity, freedom and the power of controlling information in a world grappling with rapid change and ‘information overload’.

Today, The Shockwave Rider is hardly discussed and chiefly remembered for two things. Firstly for Brunner’s coinage of the term ‘worm’ to describe a program that propagates itself through a network, and for describing a computer virus before there were viruses. Secondly, for being one of the precursors of the cyberpunk genre. As per the author Bruce Bethke, who coined the term ‘cyberpunk’, Brunner’s Shockwave Rider, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, and even Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination all were important antecedents of the thing that became known as cyberpunk fiction.

The Shockwave Rider deserves more. For it is amongst the few science fiction books of yore that you could lay your hands on, read and feel like it was written about what you, we, are going through on an everyday basis. Prescient? Yes. Definitely one of the more disturbing tomorrows (our today) as imagined in the past, with its depiction of a world immersed in e-communication, topped up with surveillance, where control of information and data is tantamount – and essential – to controlling people and societies.

New Security Alerts from Google

Google has been working on their security alerts with the goal of making them both harder to ignore and easier to understand. FastCompany explains what you'll see if Google detects that your account is in danger of being compromised.  

Ultimately, the bullseye was inspired by what the security team saw was going on inside Google Photos, which was using a similar badging effect on avatars. (Instagram takes a similar approach in adding a ring UX to avatars, too, to signal a user has new updates to their stories.)

The effect is that, when you open your email or docs, you will absolutely notice your own face blinking red back at you. You will be drawn to tap on it. And from there, you will be instructed what to do next. But this prominent avatar takeover is about more than getting your attention. It also protects you from phishing—from bad actors pretending to be Google to get your password via email or text—by design.

From what I've seen recently, especially after setting up my new Pixel 4a, Google has stepped up its game when it comes to account security, and this is a good thing. 

Converging Crises in 2020

We've known for a long time that climate change was going cause all sorts of crises – fires, floods, famine, and disease being the most prominent. People tend to think of these as something that will happen in the future and as one-off events. But climate change is a crisis multiplier. Bad things happen on top of other bad things and then cause more bad things to happen. 

As this article in Rolling Stone points out, 2020 is the year of converging crises. 

While the fires rage and the seas swell, so too does an unprecedented pandemic that’s killed more than 200,000 people in the United States and has now even reached the Oval Office. The nation is also embroiled in its most consequential presidential election — especially when you take the climate into consideration — in its history. And then there’s widespread civil unrest in uprisings over America’s chronic and unreckoned racial crisis up against rising white nationalism and unchecked police terrorism. 

That’s how you get an unprecedented wildfire season with a shortage of firefighters because so many of the prison firefighters we’d come to rely on have fallen victim to the pandemic because of prison conditions. And it’s how you get immigrant detainees  suffering in unbearable heat with no water or power in the wake of a Category 4 hurricane, or white nationalist militias setting up checkpoints in the midst of wildfire-induced chaos. Everywhere you look there’s some calamity wrapped in a tragedy inside an injustice — like nesting dolls. 

We’re used to thinking about mass incarceration or climate change or public health or reproductive rights or immigration as singular issues. That’s why, for example, when the pandemic kicked off in the United States in earnest, there was a pernicious drop in climate coverage. As I and others pitched stories about the climate crisis, we were told, again and again, that “it wasn’t the time.” And now we’re out of time.

We live today in the age of crisis conglomeration. It is no longer useful or honest or even smart to look at any of them through a single lens. Not even the ones that have become so endemic we don’t talk about them as crises, but as systems — like mass incarceration. Or the ones we’ve tucked neatly out of our line of sight, like immigration detention, which is a refugee crisis by another name. But dealing with one crisis at a time is over. Myopia is canceled. It is a luxury, and illusion, we can no longer afford. We are either looking at all of it, or we’re looking at none of it. 

N. K. Jemisin Awarded MacArthur Fellowship

Author N. K. Jemisin has been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. The fellowship, commonly known as the "genius award", is worth $625,000 USD. 

Jemisin became the first author to win the Hugo Award for all three books in a trilogy. Her Broken Earth trilogy consists of the novels: The Fifth Element, The Obelisk Gate, and The Stone Sky. Her latest novel, The City We Became, was published early this year to considerable acclaim. 

Ms. Jemisin, 48, said she typically writes under contract, meaning that her books are held to an agreed-upon timeline. But with the financial freedom that the grant offers, she said that she now has the option to forgo those strictures and write on her own schedule.

“I will write my books first and sell them as I feel like selling them,” she said. “It presents me with a lot of freedom.”

That freedom is particularly tantalizing as Ms. Jemisin writes the second book in her Great Cities series, which imagines her home of New York City as being represented by sentient human avatars. Over the past several months, the upheaval in New York has also upended the plot that she had imagined. (For one, she decided to move up a story point about the New York Police Department “going rogue and attacking the city.”)

Science Fiction to Look For - October 2020

The resurrected Amazing Stories has published a review of some of the science fiction being published this month, and it's quite an impressive list.

Unusually for review columns these days, all of the books reviewer Ernest Lilley has selected are science fiction. All of them look interesting, but there are three that I'm probably going to buy and read.

• Machine: A White Space Novel by Elizabeth Bear. I have Ancestral Space, the previous book in the series, but haven't read it yet.
• The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson. His couple of books have been first-rate, so I am looking forward to this one. 
• Attack Surface: Book 3 of 3: Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. Cory is always worth reading and this one is timely.

Amazing has been around in one form or another since 1926, and I'm glad to see it publishing quality material. 

Global Volcanism Program Image Collection

As a child and teenager, I was fascinated by volcanoes and read everything I could get my hands on about them – too much probably, as I remember having a nightmare about a volcano erupting in the parking lot of the high school near me. (This was not likely, as the Canadian Shield is one of the most tectonically stable areas in the world).  

So it's a good thing I didn't have access to the Global Volcanism Progam Image Collection, hosted by the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History. On it you'll find around 5,000 images (and some videos) of volcanoes and their effects. Major sections include Hazards and Processes, Studying Volcanoes, and Volcano Types and Features, with each major section being further divided into more specific sections. 

Here's one of my favourite images, from the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. This picture was taken from 25 miles away from the volcano.

The website includes an extensive collection of information about volcanos, including reports, databases, and other resources. As well as being highly browsable, this will be a treasure trove for students of all ages. 

Featured Links - October 4, 2020

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

Note: The photo below at Frenchman's Bay, Pickering taken with my Pixel 4a.

• The Decisive Network: Magnum Photos and the Postwar Image Market. The history of one of the most prominent photographic agencies and its influence on photography.
• SpaceX found unexpected 'erosion' on its spaceship's heat shield after its first NASA astronaut mission, so it revamped the system. They were lucky they didn't have a burn through.
• NASA Doubles Down On Nuclear Fusion Ambitions. This sounds suspiciously like cold fusion to me.
• Today in pulp... what exactly IS pulp? What does this word mean and is it important? Another interesting Twitter thread from the Pulp Librarian.
• This Overlooked Variable Is the Key to the Pandemic. It's not R.
• Fire in our future. Science magazine looks at the future of wildfires.

Canada's Future in Space

Although Canada doesn't have the capability to launch its own satellites, that doesn't mean that we aren't active in space. The ISS uses a successor to the Shuttle's Canadarm, and Canada has launched an extensive array of remote sensing satellites. Several Canadian astronauts have served on Shuttle flights and missions to the ISS, including Chris Hadfield, who was the station commander for six months. 

The director of the Canadian Space Agency recently spoke with NasaSpaceflight about Canada's history in space and plans for the future.

“The 24 years is interesting because to get policy coverage for Gateway, we had to get approval for the whole life cycle of the program,” said Leclerc.  “So not only designing and delivering, but operating Canadarm3 on Gateway as well.”

“And that reflects also the fact that this is a long-term commitment for Canada.  Gateway is the first step, and then we’re going to look and propose to Government another major contribution for lunar surface exploration and Mars.”

Exactly what those “major” contributions are will have to be seen in CSA’s proposals; however, CSA is already committed to fostering the creation of the first Canadian science experiments that will go to the surface of the Moon.

“We’ve already received funding for the next five years to develop and launch, with commercial partners, the first payloads, the first science experiments, the first Canadian science experiments that will go to the surface of the Moon,” Leclerc added proudly.

The Mars element — at the very least — likely includes a Synthetic Aperture Radar (based on technology from Canada’s ongoing RADARSAT missions) for a proposed NASA/CSA Mars Exploration Ice Mapper orbiter.  The mission would detect non-polar water regions on Mars for future robotic and human missions to the Red Planet.

Posts May Be Sparse For a While

It's been pretty busy here, and I'm getting behind on some things I should be taking care of. So I may be posting less for the next month or so. I'll try to get at least one post a day in, but can't promise I'll always have time.  

Surviving the Winter During the Pandemic

Most of us have had our social activities severely restricted during the COVID-19 pandemic, either because of lockdowns, closures of businesses and cultural events, or plain caution (if not outright fear). At least the summer months have provided opportunities for outdoor activities, but what about the winter.

Speaking as a Canadian who has lived in both Northern Ontario and Northern Alberta, I don't hate winter. I used to go cross-country skiing when it was -20C (about -4F). At my age, that would be foolhardy, and I live in a city that doesn't have conveniently located ski trails. But I can walk, as long as my city plows some sidewalks (although ice is always a problem in this part of Ontario, with its inconsistent winter weather). 

If you want to know how to handle winter, look to Norway. A recent study examined how Norwegians deal with their winters. It's especially important for people living in the northern part of the country. The study found that having a positive attitude makes a big difference. 

Leibowitz conducted her initial studies long before the new coronavirus left Wuhan – and she is realistic about the challenges of trying to see the positive in the pandemic. “A change in mindset is not a cure-all for everything,” she emphasises. It can’t simply eliminate our anxieties about the job insecurity or the fear of losing a loved one, and we should not attempt to suppress those emotions.

Even so, she suspects that adopting the positive wintertime mindset could make a second lockdown a little less daunting for those who worry about keeping their mood buoyed in the bad weather. We might recognise, for instance, that it’s a time for baking comfort food or cosy evenings curled up under a blanket in front of a box set – practising a little bit of the Norwegian koselig. And if we normally exercise on a running machine, we might try to find value in a bracing jog in the elements. Since the risk of contagion is much lower outside, we might also adapt to the Scandinavian way of outdoor socialising (lockdown regulations permitting). Tromsø, for example, has an open-air cinema, so residents can enjoy atmospheric film screenings in the eerie Arctic darkness. As the Norwegians say: “There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”

This time, we do at least have the advantage of knowing what did and didn’t work during the first lockdown, so we can be more realistic in our expectations of what we can and can’t achieve, focusing our efforts on the small actions that bring the most comfort, rather than aiming to write a bestselling novel, say.

New Study on Role of COVID-19 Super-Spreaders

The largest study yet of how COVID-19 is transmitted has revealed new information about the role of so-called super-spreaders in spreading the disease. The study was conducted in two Indian provimces and included more than 600,000 people. 

Laxminarayan and his colleagues found that just 8% of people with COVID-19 accounted for 60% of the new infections observed among the contacts. Meanwhile, 7 out of 10 COVID-19 patients were not linked to any new cases.

The finding underscores the essential role of super-spreaders in the COVID-19 pandemic: One individual or event, such as in a poorly ventilated indoor space, can trigger a high number of new infections, while others might not transmit the virus at all.

It also looked at how children can spread COVID-19.

 The study also found that although children younger than 17 were the least likely to die of COVID-19, they transmitted the virus at rates similar to the rest of the population, underscoring the idea that the disease doesn’t spare young people. One data point in particular holds implications for reopening schools: Children ages 5 to 17 passed the virus to 18% of close contacts their own age.

Antonio Salas, a Spanish researcher who has investigated the role of super-spreaders in the pandemic, said the study’s findings regarding children were important in light of “previous reports suggesting a minor role of children in the pandemic.”

In Praise of Dylon Travel Wash

This is an unsolicited testimonial for Dylon Travel Wash. Nancy and I found it in a Tesco in London a couple of years ago, after I got some olive oil on a dress shirt. It removed the stain, leaving no trace. Since then, we've ordered it through Amazon.

In the last couple of years, it's saved many pieces of clothing from a wide variety of stains, including ink, grease, and various condiments and sauces. It just works and will almost certainly remove any stain without a trace, as long as you apply it before it has a chance to set. (The stain may remain, if you've laundered and dried the clothing before catching the stain). 

It's intended purpose is as a laundry detergent for hand washing clothes while travelling, and it's fine for that, but it works better than any stain remover we've found. It's not cheap, but it's cheaper than buying new clothes.

As far as I can see, it's not available over the counter in North America, but you can easily order it from one of Amazon's British sellers. You may want to do so before Brexit takes effect at the end of next January.