What I Read In 2021

TL;DR: Too much Twitter

I have been trying to wean myself off of doomscrolling Twitter, but it's hard, especially when I have such interesting people in my feed. But I did manage to read some books.

• The Salvation Sequence by Peter F. Hamilton: I finally finished the trilogy (Salvation, Salvation Lost, The Saints of Salvation). It took me quite a while as these are long books – much too long, actually. Hamilton follows the same mode of storytelling that he has in the last couple of series he's written, describing a spacefaring human civilization interspersed with a separate storyline in another very different setting. I almost gave up on the series partway through the second book and ended up skimming a lot through the last. I'm not sure I'll read anything more by him unless he comes up with something very different and shorter.
• The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Here's what I said earlier in the year: "It's a brilliant and important book in many ways, but not a great novel. Parts of the story are chilling and compelling, but other parts are more like a treatise on non-capitalist economic policy - an important subject, but not one that makes for easy reading. I found myself skimming a lot. I did find the last third of the novel quite engaging and liked that he ended on an optimistic note, an optimism that I do not share."
• The Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross: I reread this series in the new omnibus editions (The Bloodline Feud, The Traders' War, The Revolution Trade) in preparation for reading the Empire Games sequel trilogy and thoroughly enjoyed it. Reading it straight through made it much easier to follow the many plot threads and appreciate Stross' world-building skills, which are considerable. The series starts out as a fairly straightforward portal fantasy and morphs into a rich, complex alternate worlds thriller. Highly recommended.
• Enpire Games and Dark State by Charles Stross. These are the first two books in the sequel series to The Merchant Princes. I'm halfway through Dark State as I write this and enjoying it very much. It's set about 17 years after the previous series and so far is a tense spy thriller with musings on the future of the panopticon surveillance state. 
• Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael D. Leinbach and Jonathan H. Ward: This is the story of the effort to recover the remains of the Columbia Space Shuttle and her crew from the swamps and forests of Texas and Louisiana. It's a fascinating story and one that deserves to be better known. 
• The Sandman: Season of Mists and A Game of You by Neil Gaiman: These are the fourth and fifth books in Neil Gaiman's epic series. I enjoyed them and will get back to the series next year.
• Dune: The Graphic Novel, Volume 1 by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson: This is the first of what will probably be three graphic novel adaptations of Frank Herbert's classic novel. I liked this a lot and am looking forward to the rest of them. Herbert and Anderson added some material that wasn't in the original novel (I assume it came from Frank Herbert's notes) that helped to deepen the characterization. 
• House Atriedes, Vol. 1-6 by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson: This is a graphic novel adaptation of the authors' Dune prequel series. I like the artwork in this one more than the Dune graphic novel, which I found somewhat bland. 

In thinking about it, I realized that I did read rather more than I thought at first. Most of the books I read were long. Not counting the graphic novels, I figure they totalled about 4500 pages. That's the equivalent of about 20 normal books. So I don't feel quite as guilty about neglecting my reading. 

As for next year, after I finish the Empire Games trilogy, I plan to read the last three books in The Expanse series. After that, I want to finish Alastair Reynolds' Revenger series and read Inhibitor Phase. I may take another crack at N. K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, which I tried to read a while back and couldn't get into. Finally, I have several year's best anthologies, some of which I started browsing through but haven't fully read, that I really should finish. 

So Much For That Idea

The Bussard ramjet is an interstellar drive, proposed by physicist Robert W. Bussard in the 1950s, that would harvest interstellar hydrogen to feed a fusion rocket. It's been a staple of science fiction ever since (see stories by Larry Niven and Vernor Vinge in particular). 

Unfortunately, a recent study shows that it isn't practical.  

Their results were something of a “good news, bad news” situation. Consistent with what Fishback proposed, a “static ‘slowly-varying’ magnetic field is capable of funneling interstellar matter and guiding it into a fusion reactor. In this way, a consistent acceleration of one Earth gravity (1 g) can be sustained until relativistic speeds are achieved. However, when they calculated the size of the magnetic funnel, that’s where the bad news began.

To achieve a thrust of 10 million newtons (N) – equivalent to twice the main propulsion of the Space Shuttle – the magnetic field would need to be 4000 km (2485 mi) in diameter. Even worse, the field would need to be 150 million km (93 million mi) long to adequately capture and funnel ISM material into the ship’s fusion reaction. This is equivalent to the distance between the Sun and Earth, also known as one Astronomical Unit (1 AU).

I guess it's time to start looking at warp drives again.  

Featured Links - December 29, 2021

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

• How to Survive a Killer Asteroid. "The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs would probably have killed you too—unless you were in the exact right place and had made the exact right plans."
• Our Ladies of the Perpetual High. "How a New Age order of feminist nuns is reimagining spiritual devotion and trying to heal the world — one joint at a time."
• After hiatus, Machines Dream return with surprise album. If you like early Pink Floyd or Genesis, you should give this band a listen.
• The best free video editing software. "The best free video editing software to make movies without spending a thing."

Merry Christmas and All That

It's almost Christmas and it's time for me to take a break from blogging. It probably won't be a white Christmas this year, here in this part of the Great White North. That doesn't bother me at all because it means I might be able to get out and walk, which is not a good idea when there's snow and ice on the sidewalks. 

I may post something next week or maybe not. In any case, I should be back here after the New Year.

I hope you enjoy whatever holidays you celebrate and the company of your family and friends. In lieu of a Christmas card, here's a picture of our cat, CJ, in the Christmas tree

The New York Times Year In Pictures 2021

It's not quite the end of the year, but year-in-review articles and photo galleries are already coming out. The New York Times has published its year-in-pictures gallery for 2021 and it is excellent. All pictures are captioned and many have notes from the photographer. I spent more time than I should have viewing it.  

There are many dramatic pictures of course. This is one of the most striking.

2021 Hugo Award Winners

The winners of the 2021 Hugo Awards were announced Saturday night at DisCon III, the 79th World Science Fiction Convention. It was a solid group of winners. I was especially glad to see The Coode Street Podcast finally win a Hugo for Best Fancast. I've been listening to and enjoying it for years.

Here are the fiction winners.

Best Novel: Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

Best Novella: The Empress of Salt and Fortune, Nghi Vo (Tordotcom)

Best Novelette: “Two Truths and a Lie”, Sarah Pinsker (Tor.com 6/17/20)

Best Short Story: “Metal Like Blood in the Dark”, T. Kingfisher (Uncanny 9-10/20)

Best Series: The Murderbot Diaries, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

Featured Links - December 20, 2021

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

• The best science images of 2021. "A helicopter on Mars, human–monkey embryos, volcanic ash and more." From Nature.
  
• Astronomers Capture Best Views Yet of Stars Moving Around Our Local Black Hole. "One star is orbiting the black hole at 5,431 miles per second, which is 0.03% the speed of light."
• How to Remove Unwanted Pre-Installed Apps on Android Without Root. "Got a load of pre-installed apps on your phone that you don't want? Here are two easy ways to get rid of them—without needing to root your phone."
• Psychologists say that America is going through what Carl Jung warned us would eventually happen -- a mass delusion. Well at least 40 percent of Americans, anyway. 
• How to Use CSS Selectors to Style Your Web Page. "CSS selectors are one of the most important parts of CSS. They give you the ability to target HTML elements on your web page that you want to style."
• Why Paxlovid is a Just-in-Time Breakthrough. "The first potent anti-Covid pill will be a big help." Production of this pill should be ramped up and not just in the US.

Photo of the Week - December 19, 2021

Sunset on Frenchman's Bay. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 16 mm., F8, 1/600 second, ISO 400, -1 stop exposure compensation, Provia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - Pink Floyd - Live, Lyon 12 June 1971, Tokyo 16 March 1972

Pink Floyd recently released a bunch of live recordings from 1971 and 1972,  before Dark Side of the Moon took off and became one of the best-selling albums of all time. I was lucky enough to see them at the Ford Auditorium in Detroit on their first Dark Side of the Moon tour, and it was an amazing show. 

Today's recording is from two concerts. The first from Lyon, France features some of their psychedelic early material*. The second part, from Tokyo, Japan is an early performance of DSOTM. Flip the order around and you get most of what I saw in Detroit. 

Pink Floyd became one of the biggest touring acts, selling out arenas and stadiums around the world, but their later shows didn't have anywhere near the impact that they had when seeing them in a relatively small hall in 1972. They were one of the very few musical acts that actually scared me with their music (Echoes, if I remember correctly. It felt like a seance that was making contact with something primeval). 

*If, like me, you are a fan of pre-DSOTM Pink Floyd, do check out Nick Mason's Saucerful of Secrets. I missed their previous Toronto appearance in 2020, so was excited to find out that they will be on tour again in early 2022 with a Toronto date in January. Unfortunately, because of the current COVID-19 situation, I am not going to risk going (even assuming the concert happens as scheduled, which I very much doubt).

How Jimmy Carter Helped Save Chalk River

Back in 1952, there was a partial meltdown of a research reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. It was the first such accident of its kind anywhere in the world. I had read about it in the past, but until this week I didn't know that former US President Jimmy Carter was involved in the cleanup. 

Carter was called in to lead the cleanup because of his experience building the nuclear propulsion system for the Sea Wolf submarine. He described himself as pretty excited to be leading the team responsible for the operation, as well as being one of the few authorized to go into the nuclear power plant. 

The team had an exact replica of the reactor set up on a nearby tennis court to help their work. Due to the small amount of time they were able to spend in the reactor, every second counted.

"I had only seconds that I could be in the reactor myself. We all went out on the tennis court, and they had an exact duplicate of the reactor on the tennis court. We would run out there with our wrenches and we'd check off so many bolts and nuts and they'd put them back on," he wrote in his book, Why Not the Best?

Given the tradition exposure he experienced, I'm surprised he is still with us.  

Some Tips on VLC's Advanced Features

I've been using VLC* for many years but I keep finding things that I didn't know it could do. This article points out several features of VLC that I wasn't aware of. Among others:

• Download content from YouTube
• Convert videos to almost any format
• Loop a section of a video or audio file

* VLC = Video Lan Content Media Player, an open-source app that can play virtually any video or audio format.

Typography for Developers

Although many organizations have designers on staff who take care of the aesthetic side of application development, it's often the case that developers get tasked with choosing fonts and layouts for applications. It's been my experience that most developers know little or nothing about typography, so results can be mixed.

Here's a two-hour typography course for developers from the freeCodeCamp. 

You will learn how to choose a typeface, what to look for when laying out type, how to create typographic hierarchy, how to layout type, and how to create responsive typography.

It's a good introduction to the subject and would be appropriate both for developers and technical writers who have to produce online documentation.

 

 

Featured Links - December 13, 2021

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

Ancient soil from secret Greenland base suggests Earth could lose a lot of ice. "Samples, lost for decades, rediscovered in Danish freezer." 

Finally, a Fusion Reaction Has Generated More Energy Than Absorbed by The Fuel. "A major milestone has been breached in the quest for fusion energy."

How Foundation preserved Asimov’s big ideas while bringing the story to vivid life. "Ars chats with showrunner David S. Goyer and science adviser Kevin Hand."

How to slash the shipping industry's enormous carbon emissions. "The climate crisis means we must urgently cut the huge emissions from sea transport. Engineering tricks, cleaner fuels and a return to the age of sail could all help swab the decks clean."

An absolutely bonkers plan to give Mars an artificial magnetosphere. "A torus of charged particles could give Mars a magnetic field."

Giving the Mona Lisa a Digital Makeover (YouTube) "An engineer used powerful lights, cameras, and computer software to digitally remove the varnish from the "Mona Lisa," allowing people today to see the painting as Leonardo da Vinci created it."

Tor.com Reviewers' Choice: The Best Books of 2021. There is much good SF and fantasy to read about here.

6 easy fixes for Android 12 annoyances. "Blast away Android 12's most bothersome buzzkills with these super-simple 60-second solutions."

Photo of the Week - December 12, 2021

Boats wrapped so people can spend the winter on them at Frenchman's Bay Marina. This was taken with my Pixel 4a.

Saturday Sounds - Genesis - Philadelphia - December 2, 2021

Today's post is a concert video of Genesis on their "Last Domino" tour recorded in Philadelphia, PA on December 2, 2021. It's a fan production so the audio is a good-quality audience recording and the video seems to be from multiple sources, most of which are decent quality.

I saw Genesis at Hamilton Place in Hamilton in the late 1970s and it was a very fine concert. They got to be hugely popular after that, and I lost interest in their music once they became a stadium act, but this show has a mix of early and later material and is quite enjoyable. Note that these guys are getting old and the vocals (especially from Phil Collins) are sometimes ragged. Collins' son Nic is drumming for them and is very capable. 

The lighting and staging are spectacular if you care about that sort of thing.

 

Photography Links - December 10, 2021

Here are some photography articles that I found interesting or useful.  

Taken with Fujifilm X-S10 and 16-80 mm. F4 at 80 mm., cropped and enhanced in Google Photos.

• The Quick Fix: Cataracts and the mature photographer. This will resonate with many photographers of a certain age.
• Dune Was Shot on ALEXA LF, Transferred to 35mm Film, Then Scanned Back to Digital. "The process of making Dune was pretty novel in terms of creating the imagery. The movie was shot digital (on the ARRI ALEXA LF and Mini LF), then was transferred to 35mm film, and then was scanned back to digital. All that to create the most accurate emulation possible, reducing the digital sharpness, and elevating softness. Read on about this fascinating process."
• The best Photoshop alternatives in 2021. "Capable, fast and subscription-free: these are the best Photoshop alternatives for Mac, Windows and mobile."
• How To Achieve the Optimum Exposure In Your Photos. This article has the best explanation of how exposure works in digital cameras that I have seen.
• Researchers shrink camera to the size of a salt grain. "The new system can produce crisp, full-color images on par with a conventional compound camera lens 500,000 times larger in volume, the researchers reported in a paper published Nov. 29 in Nature Communications."

Art in Practice: A Review

Art in Practice: Encountering the Buddha with the Philip Glass Ensemble is a  movie produced in conjunction with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art. It features performances by the Ensemble recorded specifically for the film, clips of an interview with Glass, and images and video from the Buddhist art collection at the museum. 

I've loved the music of Philip Glass since I first heard it in the early 1980s and I've been lucky to see him and the Ensemble perform several times. While the Buddhist art and religious objects shown in the movie are beautiful and striking, what impressed me most about the film was the performances by the Ensemble. This music is challenging in the extreme to perform and to see the members close up during the performances is fascinating. 

Music performed includes excerpts from Powaquatsi, Kundun, Akhanaten, and Satyagraha, among others. All performances are superb, especially the final piece from Act III of Satyagraha, which moved me to tears/

The exhibition, Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia, has an excellent website that is well worth spending some time to view.

New Python-Based Data Visualization Tool

I've only had to deal with multi-dimensional data analysis once in my career. That was in the early 1990s, when I was working for a now-defunct software company called Alacrity. At the time, I was their office manager, which meant that I was their bookkeeper, technical writer, inside salesperson, and general jack of all trades.

The company got a contract to build a sales analysis tool for the local office of one of the big drug companies and I got roped in to help because I was a spreadsheet jockey. We built it in Supercalc, using pivot tables, to analyse five different dimensions of sales data (something like region, salesperson, product, product category, and profit). It wasn't a huge data set and even an early PC spreadsheet could handle the data. 

Since then I've been interested in seeing how people work with large data sets, which is something that scientists have to do all the time. Nature has an article about a new Python-based data visualization tool called napari. 

napari — the name refers to a Pacific island village midway between the developers’ bases in San Francisco and Melbourne — features a simple graphical interface with a built-in Python console in which images can be rendered, rotated and manipulated in 2D or 3D, with additional dimensions, such as the succession of temporal ‘slices’ in a time series, accessible using sliders beneath the image window. If available, graphics-processing units can be used to accelerate the software. “We make sure that we actually use the computer to its full capacity,” Royer explains. (ImageJ users can also work in Python using PyImageJ; see pypi.org/project/pyimagej).

Adobe Photoshop-like layers allow users to overlay points, vectors, tracks, surfaces, polygons, annotations or other images. A researcher could, for instance, open an image of a tissue in napari, identify cell nuclei with a click of the mouse, retrieve those points in Python and use them to ‘seed’ a cell-segmentation algorithm, which identifies cell boundaries. By then pushing the results to napari as a new layer on the original image, they can assess how well the segmentation process worked.

I'm going to pass this along to a couple of my former co-workers who are doing data analysis. I'm not sure you could apply it to visualizing stock market data but you never know.  

All of Tor.com's Fiction from 2021

Tor.com, the website for the preeminent SF and fantasy publisher Tor books, publishes a large amount of short fiction every year. Here's a list of all their short fiction published so far in 2021, and it is quite a list.  

Here's just a few of the authors, ones that I am familiar with.

• Sam J. Miller
• Annalee Newitz
• Michael Swanwick
• Sarah Pinsker
• Richard Kadrey
• Lavie Tidhar
• Elizabeth Bear
• Catherynne M. Valente

Featured Links - December 6. 2021

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

Why e, the Transcendental Math Constant, Is Just the Best. "The solution to our puzzle about Euler’s number explains why e pops up in situations that involve optimality."

How to Download Anything on the Web for Free: 12 Tips and Tools. "Here's how to download anything from the web that you thought you couldn't for free... without breaking the law."

The Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest. "Where 'www' means 'wretched writers welcome.'''

Neutron switches to methane/oxygen, 1 Meganewton Archimedes engine revealed. "Rocket Lab has provided a significant update in the progress of their Neutron rocket, a vehicle aimed primarily at the small-scale interplanetary and low Earth orbit mega-constellation markets at first."

Supersonic Projectile Exceeds Engineers Dreams: The Supersonic Trebuchet. Some people have too much time on their hands. 

On the pronunciation of Omicron. The authoritative word from the OED. 

Photo of the Week - December 5, 2021

I've walked by this tree hundreds of times.  

But I never really noticed the roots.

I took both pictures with my Pixel 4a.

 

Saturday Sounds - Miles Davis - The Lost Quintet - Rotterdam 1969

Here's a rare recording of Miles Davis' Lost Quintet. The group features the core of the Bitches Brew band (Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette, Chick Corea, Wayne Shorter, and of course Mile Davis). This is a live recording from Rotterdam in 1969, after Bitches Brew was recorded but before it was released. Unfortunately, this group never recorded a studio album. 

Why You Can't Hear Movie Dialogue

I often have trouble following dialogue in movies and TV shows. I've attributed the problem to my aging ears and not having a good enough sound system (it's good but not up to current state-of-the-art). But according to this article, it may not be all my fault.

 As it turns out, the reason for poor sound is often inherent in the way the movie's sound is recorded and mixed. There are several reasons for this, which the article describes in detail. Another reason is the compression applied by broadcast and streaming services. I've noticed, for example, that Netflix usually has very good sound quality, while the sound on Amazon Prime Video can be quite variable. 

The article also discusses the sound quality (or lack of it) in cinemas. I haven't found this to be a problem, at least not in the last decade or so. (Don't get me started on projection quality, though). 

SpaceX Is Having Raptor Problems

Not long ago, the vice-president in charge of developing the Raptor engines that power SpaceX's Starship and Super Heavy booster left the company. I wondered at the time if they were having trouble producing the engines, and it turns out I was right.

Elon Musk has sent a company-wide email saying that the company's Raptor development is indeed having major problems. 

He described a dire situation the day after Thanksgiving in a companywide email, a copy of which was obtained by CNBC.

“The Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” Musk wrote.

“We face genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year,” Musk added later.

As the article linked above indicates, the company is planning a new series of Starlink satellites and needs the Starship to launch them. 

I expect more details to be coming out in the space-related press in the near future.  

Update: And as I expected, more details are coming out. Here's an article from Ars Technica with more information. 

Movie and TV Reviews - November 2021

 Here are some short reviews of things I watched in November.

Movies

• Dune - Part 1: See my review here. 
• Shang Chi - The Legend of the 10 Rings: Something different from Marvel, based on Korean mythology. I'm not a fan of Marvel's recent direction, but this one is good. (Disney+)
• Finch: The plot and background of this make no sense at all, but Tom Hanks is good and it has a cute robot. What more could you want (not!). (Apple+)
• No Time To Die: This would be a good point to wrap up the Bond franchise, which is getting pretty long in the tooth. I'll stick to rewatching the earlier movies. (VOD)
• Red Ticket: Another heist movie that doesn't hold up if you think about it too much, but it's entertaining enough for a Saturday night. (Netflix)
• Sound from the Deep: A Norwegian short film with a Lovecraftian theme. It's very tense and watchable. (YouTube)

TV Shows

• Dalgliesh: Two made-for-TV movies based on novels by P. D. James. If you like you whodunnits dark and grim, you'll like these. (Acorn TV)
• Manhunt: The Night Stalker: The second season of this show based on the career of a famous British detective and starring Martin Clunes of Doc Martin fame. It's very well done and is easily the best detective series we've seen since Line of Duty (Acorn TV)
• The Wheel of Time: I've not read the books so I can't comment on the series' faithfulness to them, but it stands perfectly well on its own. (Amazon TV)
• Cowboy Bebop: I don't remember much about the original anime series. but I enjoyed this live-action remake a lot. (Netflix)
• Invasion: This one starts out slowly with several stories being set up in several locations. It's very well done but I hope it gets moving a bit quicker. (Apple TV+)

Posts May Be Sparse in December

It's coming up to December and the holiday season. So the blog will be going on vacation sometime just before Christmas until after New Year's Day. In the meantime, I probably won't be doing a lot of posts, other than the usual link posts. 

Partly that's because of the holidays and partly various family-related things that are eating up a lot of time and energy.  

I hope things will quiet down in the new year. 

Featured Links - November 29, 2021

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

• A Famous Argument Against Free Will Has Been Debunked. "For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake."
• How experiences growing up in the Sault led to Roberta Bondar's mission in space. "A virtual gala will be held in January on the thirtieth anniversary of Bondar's eight-day space flight."
• This Company Tapped AI for Its Website—and Landed in Court. "Under pressure to make their sites accessible to visually impaired users, firms turn to software. But advocates say the tech isn't always up to the task."
• A Weekly Dose of Red Light Might Improve Aging Eyesight, Study Finds. "People given the low-cost therapy in the morning performed noticeably better on tests of their color vision."
• One Man’s Amazing Journey to the Center of the Bowling Ball. "Mo Pinel spent a career reshaping the ball’s inner core to harness the power of physics. He revolutionized the sport—and spared no critics along the way.
• Lawrence of Arabia, Paul Atreides, and the Roots of Frank Herbert’s Dune. A long and somewhat scholarly article that take a deep dive into Frank Herbert's Dune.
• A Burp or a Blast. "Seismic signals reveal the volcanic blast to come."

Photo of the Week - November 28, 2021

Here's a picture of the Portal, part of the Home Place in the Alex Robertson Park near us.  

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4, 16 mm. @ F14, 1/100 second, ISO 400, Velvia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - Gimme Shelter - The Rolling Stones - 23rd November 2021

The Rolling Stones wrapped up their latest US tour recently. Here's a very good audience recording of Gimme Shelter from their final performance on November 23rd. 

See this Rolling Stone article for more details.  

Dublin 2019 Worldcon Makes Videos Available

The Dublin 2019 World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon) has made videos of some of its programming available for viewing. They include the Hugo Awards ceremony and several panels, including ones with Joceyln Bell, Steve Jackson, Mary Robinette Kowal, and George R. R. Martin, among others. 

Videos are available on the convention's YouTube Channel. 

Accessible Payment Terminals

Being visually impaired, I sometimes have trouble using payment terminals. Some of the new models are OK, but older ones with low-contrast LCD screens are very difficult for me to read.

Moneris has introduced a new line of Moneris Core terminals with accessibility features designed to make it easier for people like me to use them. Users can touch the accessibility icon (a circled A) or the 5 key to turn on the features, which include a high-contrast screen and voice prompts. 

Here's a short YouTube video explaining how to use the accessibility features. 

I'm very glad to see that at least one terminal vendor is thinking about accessibility and I hope to see more include these features if they haven't already. 

 

The Biggest Bomb

In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union detonated the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested. At 50 megatons, it was thousands of times larger than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it could have been larger, but concerns over the spread of fallout caused the designers to scale back the size of the explosion. 

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a well-documented (with footnotes) history of the development of the bomb, often known as the Tsar Bomba. It's a rather unnerving story that highlights the craziness of those years.

In the early hours of October 30, 1961, a bomber took off from an airstrip in northern Russia and began its flight through cloudy skies over the frigid Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. Slung below the plane’s belly was a nuclear bomb the size of a small school bus—the largest and most powerful bomb ever created.

At 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon. As the bomb fell, an enormous parachute unfurled to slow its descent, giving the pilot time to retreat to a safe distance. A minute or so later, the bomb detonated. A cameraman watching from the island recalled:

A fire-red ball of enormous size rose and grew. It grew larger and larger, and when it reached enormous size, it went up. Behind it, like a funnel, the whole earth seemed to be drawn in. The sight was fantastic, unreal, and the fireball looked like some other planet. It was an unearthly spectacle! [1]

The flash alone lasted more than a minute. The fireball expanded to nearly six miles in diameter—large enough to include the entire urban core of Washington or San Francisco, or all of midtown and downtown Manhattan. Over several minutes it rose and mushroomed into a massive cloud. Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles. One civilian witness remarked that it was “as if the Earth was killed.” Decades later, the weapon would be given the name it is most commonly known by today: Tsar Bomba, meaning “emperor bomb.”

Featured Links - November 22, 2021

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

• Google's 3D Interactive Periodic Table. I wish I had this when I was studying chemistry. 
• Fauci on the next phase of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ‘insanity’ of the threats he faces for pushing masks, vaccines. Insanity is the correct word here.
• London's public toilets a serious concern, report finds. I can testify to this after having visited London a few years ago. Toronto has the same problem.
• I’ll Take My Chances on an Acid-Soaked Jimi Hendrix, "Seeing Sound with Johnny Cash and the Owsley Stanley Foundation."
• What is ‘authentic’ Chinese food? These Toronto chefs challenge the concept. "A new generation of chefs are cooking modern Chinese by mixing their parents’ culture with influences from the digital age."
• Pangea Aerospace successfully hot fire tests the first MethaLox aerospike engine in the world. This could be a significant advance.
• The chase for fusion energy. An emerging industry of nuclear-fusion firms promises to have commercial reactors ready in the next decade.

Photo of the Week - November 21, 2021

Here's a photo taken between Echo Bay and Bruce Mines, Ontario on Thanksgiving weekend, taken with my Fujifilm X-S10. I cropped and edited the original JPEG in Photoshop Express to reduce the haze and bring up the colour. (My post of last Sunday shows what the weather was like). I'm not posting details because they're not really relevant after all the editing.

 

Saturday Sounds - Grateful Dead, April 27, 1977

1977 was a good year for the Grateful Dead and many Deadheads consider it their best. I don't agree but it was certainly one of their best periods.

Here's a previously unreleased show from the Capitol Theater recorded on April 27, 1977. It's a very good recording made from the original tapes for an FM broadcast and it includes video footage. Given 1977 video technology, it's not great video, but it's been cleaned up and upscaled to 1080p, so it's watchable. 

I haven't listened to the whole show yet, but the parts I've heard are typical 1977 Dead, which means it's melodic, tight, and rocks like crazy when it's called for.

Tracking the History of Climate Vocabulary

Here's an interesting post from the Oxford English Dictionary blog about the OED's history of climate-related words. You might think that "climate change" is fairly recent usage, but it goes back to 1854. Other terms are also discussed in the article.  

In 2021, the OED embarked on a project to broaden and review its coverage of vocabulary relating to climate change and sustainability. I’d been feeding my own eco-anxiety by learning more about these topics for some years before I proposed that the OED conduct a review of its coverage. I knew that our New Words team had, over the course of the last 30 years or so, researched and covered a lot of the best-known terms, such as global warming and carbon offsetting, but this is a rapidly changing area of vocabulary. With the world spotlight coming to rest on the UK later this year at the UN climate summit in Glasgow (COP26), it is important to continue to monitor developments in this epoch-defining nexus of problems.

When OED editors are investigating the way a word or sense has been used over time, we look for examples of contextual and dateable evidence in our internal files and databases, as well as in external databases, websites, libraries, and archives.

We tend to think of climate change and sustainability as very contemporary issues, but what was interesting about researching some of the terms in this year’s update (as well as revisiting those we had already covered) was being able to put them into a historical perspective and seeing just how far back some ideas could be traced though the vocabulary, as a few examples will show.

Disaster in BC Will Have Long-Term Effects

The rains have let up, at least for now, in British Columbia, but the unprecedented rainfall of the last few days will have long-term effects. Vancouver, the 4th largest port in North America, is cut off from the rest of Canada as highways and railways are washed out. 

From the Eye on the Storm blog: 

The heavy rains fell on mountainous areas that, in many cases, had been denuded of vegetation by the destructive wildfires that ravaged the region in late June and early July. These wildfires had been fueled by a record heat wave that brought an insane temperature of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121°F) to Lytton, British Columbia – the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada. A rapid-response study from the World Weather Attribution program found that this heat wave would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” The study estimated that the event was roughly a 1-in-1000-year event in today’s climate, but added, “the observed temperatures were so extreme that they lie far outside the range of historically observed temperatures. This makes it hard to quantify with confidence how rare the event was.”

The atmospheric river also swept into western Washington, which has been doused throughout the autumn by periods of unusually heavy rain. Rainfall from September 1 through November 15 at Seattle’s Sea-Tac International Airport was 15.87″, the most ever measured for that two-and-a-half-month period in data going back to 1945. The airport’s wettest full autumn (Sep-Nov) was in 2006, with 18.61″; that record could certainly fall before month’s end.

The Vancouver Sun reports on the effects on the provinces's infrastructure, already substantially damaged by this summer's heat wave and wildfires.

Owing to several washouts and mudslides, the old southerly route — Highway 3, snaking through the Cascades, Monashees and Selkirk mountains to the Crowsnest Pass in the Rockies — is impassable. The Fraser Canyon route, northward from Hope, about 130 kilometres east of Vancouver, has been smashed by rockslides and waterfalls that burst out of nowhere from the Coast mountains over the weekend.

CP Rail is looking to divert shipping traffic via Portland, Oregon, but restoring east-west overland connections by American routes won’t be easy. Washington State is a mess, too. Floodwaters from the Nooksack River have poured across the Canada-U.S. border into the Fraser Valley. Sumas Lake, an ancient waterbody drained to create farmland back in the 1920s, is a lake again today. Thousands of people have been evacuated.

About 280 kilometres east of Vancouver by a now non-functioning road, the Tulameen and Similkameen Rivers broke their dykes and burst their banks on Monday, and the rivers are now flowing through much of the town of Princeton. The temperature is dropping below freezing, the natural gas line that heats local homes is broken, the town’s water systems are wrecked, and nobody knows when things will be “normal” again.

While Princeton was drowning, the Coldwater River was venting its rage on the town of Merritt, 90 kilometres north of Princeton, and the entire community has been shut down because of the “immediate danger to public health and safety.” Roughly 7,000 people have been ordered to make their way to emergency centres in Kamloops and Kelowna.

A post in Gizmodo looks at how the effects of the wildfires contributed to the disaster.

Wildfires burn off an important layer of vegetation that, Brent Ward, a professor of earth sciences at Simon Fraser University and co-director of the Center for Natural Hazards Research, said “captures some of the rain and can slow it down before it gets into soil.”

Wildfires can also change how the soil interacts with rainfall. “When the organic layer in the upper part of the soil burns, it creates these organic compounds that travel into the upper part of the mineral soil and kind of precipitate,” Ward said. “It’s this waxy substance, and it makes that impervious to water—we call that hydrophobic. The water, instead of kind of centering down into the soil, it can’t go anywhere. It runs off, and runs down the slope, and hits a sort of steeper slope, and it erodes a lot. The sediment that’s eroding is often enough to generate a debris flow.”

And winter is coming. 

 

Amazon Best Books of 2021: Science Fiction and Fantasy

The editors at Amazon have announced their list of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021. The list has a wide range and includes several books by new authors. Out of the twenty books on the list, these are the ones I plan to read.

• Project Hail Mary: A Novel by Andy Weir
• Leviathan Falls (The Expanse Book 9) by James S. A. Corey
• The Extinction Trials by A.G. Riddle
• A Desolation Called Peace (Teixcalaan Book 2) by Arkady Martine

Twitter Cracking Down On Bots

I use Twitter a lot. I know it has a reputation for being full of garbage, but if you curate who you follow and use the right app, it can be extremely useful. Over time, I've noticed fewer garbage posts and that may be due to the work Twitter is doing to eliminate bots.

The Twitter blog has a long post about bots and Twitter that's worth reading if you're a Twitter user. 

“There are many bots on Twitter that do good things and that are helpful to people,” said Stewart. “We wanted to understand more about what those look like so we could help people identify them and feel more comfortable in their understanding of the space they’re in.”  

Stewart’s team revealed that people found content more trustworthy if they know more about who’s sharing it—starting with whether that account is human or automated. To help address the issue of bots, Twitter recently rolled out new labels that identify bots with an “automated” designation in their profile, an icon of a robot, and a link to the Twitter handle of the person who created the bot. “Not only are we just labeling these bots, we're also saying: this is the owner, and this is why they're here,” said Stewart. “Based on the preliminary research that we have, we hypothesize that that's going to create an environment where you can trust those bots a lot more.”  

So why go to the trouble of labeling bots, instead of banning them all from Twitter?

“It's not inherently wrong to have an automated account on Twitter; obviously automated accounts don't have to be terrible. There was a vaccine bot that was really popular in New York,” said Dante Clemons, the senior product manager tasked with creating and testing these labels. She was referring to the Turbovax bot that Tweeted vaccine appointments to its 160,000 followers. “I focused on those accounts because these are the ones that can help us all reframe how we think about bots.” 

You might also want to take a look at this thread from the Twitter Safety account that has some good tips about how to tell bots from real accounts.  

A Classic Grateful Dead Show

I was listening to the Grateful Dead channel on SiriusXM on the weekend and they played an excerpt from a 1972 show that I hadn't heard before, namely November 13, 1972 in Kansas City. This one struck me immediately because of the sound quality. The show is a mix of two audience recordings; the better of the two was recorded by the Dead's genius sound tech, Owsley Stanley (aka Bear). This is EXACTLY what the Dead sounded like if you were on the floor close to the stage.

The whole show is good, but if you're a sound purist, start with the Playin' in the Band, and listen on a good pair of headphones. The Dark Star > Playin' in the Band is especially wonderful. Turn down the lights, light up, and enjoy.

Featured Links - November 15, 2021

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

• The Climate Fight Over Line 5, or the Upper Peninsula and Canada Versus Greenhouse Gas Absolutism. "A row over Line 5, an oil pipeline running from Superior, Wisconsin to Sarina, Ontario, is the biggest US climate fight you almost certainly haven’t heard of."
• This is how Venice will fall: conservation expert shares day-by-day destruction caused by rising water levels. "City will become uninhabitable if no adequate measures are taken, Mario Piana says."
• It's Time to Drain Lake Powell. "The West is in severe drought. Which is exactly why now is the moment to bypass one of the region's biggest dams and rewild Glen Canyon.".
• Fantastic photos of newly-discovered 19th-century shipwrecks at the bottom of Lake Superior. The lake can be deadly, especially at this time of year.
• Gun Violence in America Could Soon Get Worse. "It’s not just an unprecedented surge in gun sales that points to looming danger.

Photo of the Week - November 14, 2021

A very misty scene from Sylvan Valley about a month ago. I may try to dehaze this a bit in Photoshop, but I like the moody feel as it is.

 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm F4, 80 mm. at F5.6, 1/240 second, ISO 800, Velvia film simulation (probably) 

Useful Tips for Creating Charts

It's easy to lie with a chart. Not setting the axis at 0 is one thing I sometimes see. There are other mistakes that you can make that will confuse readers. 

Here's a list of tips for creating charts that was posted on the  Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, a mainly Canadian economics blog. It's a good list and I wish I had it when I was working at the TSX.

It's also a good list of things to look for in charts that you may see in news articles. If the chart makes some of the mistakes outlined in the article, it may be that the authors are trying to mislead you.

A Slingshot To Space

Rockets aren't the only way of getting payloads into space. Other methods that have been tried are balloons and giant guns. Some day maybe we'll have a space elevator. Now there's another method – a giant slingshot. 

A US company, SpinLaunch, has built a giant centrifuge that can fire a payload at more than the speed of sound. Their first test in October was successful. The idea is to give a small rocket enough velocity that a booster stage isn't required. 

SpinLaunch, a start-up that is building an alternative method of launching spacecraft to orbit, conducted last month a successful first test flight of a prototype in New Mexico.

The Long Beach, California-based company is developing a launch system that uses kinetic energy as its primary method to get off the ground – with a vacuum-sealed centrifuge spinning the rocket at several times the speed of sound before releasing.

“It’s a radically different way to accelerate projectiles and launch vehicles to hypersonic speeds using a ground-based system,” SpinLaunch CEO Jonathan Yaney told CNBC. “This is about building a company and a space launch system that is going to enter into the commercial markets with a very high cadence and launch at the lowest cost in the industry.”

It seems like a crazy idea - that centrifuge is 33 metres in diameter and spins at hundreds of revolutions per minute - but it looks like it might be a viable way of launching small payloads. Do look at the video below - it's quite amazing. 

 

Technical Communication Links - November 2021

Despite being retired for almost three years now, I still follow what's going on in the technical communication field. Here are some useful links that I've come across recently.

• Get Into the Basics of Styles in Word. If you aren't using Word's styles 0(and you should be), this article covers the basics. 
• Multip/0le Products Security Advisory. From Atlassian, if you use Confluence or any of their other products, you need to look at this.
• Now Available! Complimentary Access to the November 2021 Special Issue: Storytelling in Technical Communication. This is the academic journal of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). 
• Presentation recording -- 'Best practices in API docs: Product overviews and getting started tutorials'. A presentation by Tom Johnson.
• Do I Need a Style Guide? Good advice from Rhonda Bracey.
• Is there any more room for innovation in tech writing? Looking at some old docs, Bob Watson realizes that some things haven't changed much since 1988.

2021 World Fantasy Awards

The winners of the 2021 World Fantasy Awards were announced last weekend at this year's World Fantasy Convention in Montreal. These are the fiction awards.  

• NOVEL: Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Tor Books)
• NOVELLA: "Riot Baby" by Tochi Onyebuchi (Tordotcom)
• SHORT FICTION: “Glass Bottle Dancer” by Celeste Rita Baker (Lightspeed, April 2020)
• ANTHOLOGY: The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage Books)
•  COLLECTION: Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoka Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton (Soft Skull Press US/Tilted Axis UK)

Featured Links - November 8, 2021

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

• World's "Most Stolen Painting" Restored Centuries After It Was Made, And People Are Horrified. The headline is a bit click-baity, but it's an interesting article. 
• Trojan Source attack: Code that says one thing to humans tells your compiler something very different, warn academics. "The way Unicode's UTF-8 text encoding handles different languages could be misused to write malicious code that says one thing to humans and another to compilers."
• See what three degrees of global warming looks like | The Economist. "If global temperatures rise three degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the results would be catastrophic. It’s an entirely plausible scenario, and this film shows you what it would look like."
• How Hans Zimmer Conjured the Otherworldly Sounds of ‘Dune’. "The composer worked with a far-flung “band” of collaborators who sung, scraped metal, invented instruments and more for the score."
• Introduction to the Subterranean edition of The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells. The Murderbot Diaries is becoming one of the most popular SF series, and the latest book won a Nebula Award this year.
• Cars Are Going Electric. What Happens to the Used Batteries? "Used electric vehicle batteries could be the Achilles' heel of the transportation revolution—or the gold mine that makes it real."

Photo of the Week - November 7, 2021

Fall colours earlier this week. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4, F16 @ 20 mm., 1/100 second, ISO 1250, Velvia film simulation

30 Days of Dead Is Back

For the last several years, the Dead.net has been celebrating the legacy of the Grateful Dead with 30 Days of Dead. Each day, they release a soundboard track from the vast archives of the Grateful Dead that you can download for free. 

 As the young folks like to say, it’s time to flex your Grateful Dead knowledge and take home a high-quality MP3 download every day in November while you are at it. 30 days of unreleased Grateful Dead tracks from the vault, selected by Dead archivist and producer David Lemieux? Yes, please! The tracks are yours, no strings attached, but we hope you’ll stick around for the chance to win some sweet swag from the Dead.

If you don’t know what we’re on about, here’s the deal:

You know your Ables from your Bakers from your C's, but can your finely tuned ears differentiate the cosmic "comeback" tour from a spacey 70's show? Each day we'll post a free download from one of the Dead's coveted shows. Will it be from that magical night at Madison Square Garden in '93 or from way back when they were just starting to warm it up at Winterland? Is that Pigpen's harmonica we hear? Brent on keys? Step right up and try your hand all November long and win prizes to boot.

Free Grateful Dead music. It doesn't get much better than that. 

The Pandemic Will Have Long-Term Impacts

I don't think there's anyone reading who isn't looking forward to the end of the pandemic. I know I am. But even if the pandemic subsides, and likely becomes just another endemic disease we have to worry about occasionally, it is going to have long-term impacts. These impacts will last for years and possibly decades, as this article from Talking Points Memo suggests. 

 These all suggest that the impact of the COVID Pandemic will not only be long-lasting but likely show most in ways now only barely visible to us. The so-called ‘great resignation’ is a key example. There are all sorts of theories about why so many people are quitting their jobs. There’s at least some evidence that it’s concentrated in a relatively small number of states. But we don’t really know. All we know is that fate picked up the world like it was one of those Christmas Snow Globes, shook it hard and that afterwards things weren’t at all the same. What about inflation? Well, we know we had a global shipping system that was engineered to have very little slack or resiliency in it (just in time production and shipping) and it’s struggled to bounce back from the shock. But people are also buying more stuff. Do they have more money because of forced delays in consumption (lockdowns) or COVID relief checks? Probably. But much of this also seem tied to different consumer desires based on radically different life experiences.

Today we’re talking about inflation, ‘labor shortages’ which really seem to be code for people unwilling to work for pre-Pandemic wages and other issues that are immediate and often viewed through a short-term electoral prism. But we should have in the backs of our minds that we’re seeing shifts in mass behavior that at present we don’t really understand or understand only in the most limited ways. Social cataclysms of such duration that reach so deeply into everyone’s lives never fail to have transformative consequences that reach far into the future. This must be even more the case when they hit a society already in the midst of great social stress and instability.

Consider the following impacts:

• Deaths and illness of healthcare workers, and workers leaving the system because of stress and burnout. It takes years to train new nurses and doctors.
• The education system has the same problem.
• What are the long-term effects on children who have had their schooling interrupted for more than a year.
• Commercial real estate, which has been hit hard by the trend of office workers working remotely. 
• Social impacts of millions of people suffering from long COVID.

I could go on but I'm sure you get the idea. 

Some Thoughts on Dune: Part 1

I saw Dune: Part 1 last night at a nearby IMAX theatre. I did not think that I would ever see a film adaptation that would do the book justice but Villeneuve mostly has. 

Dune was one of the formative books for me as a teenager. I read it when it was serialized in Analog in the early 1960s and several times since and went on to read all of the Herbert-authored stories as well as several of the prequels written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I've also read the recent graphic novel adaptation, which covered about the same part of the novel as the movie. 

Villeneuve's version is better than I expected and probably about as good as we can realistically expect for a modern big-budget movie. It is epic in scope, with outstanding effects (although much of the movie's impact comes from its physical sets) and a first-rate cast. The cinematography is gorgeous, reminiscent of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, which I'm sure must have been an influence. I did find the interior scenes of the movie very dark, which I suspect was a conscious choice on Villeneuve's part, but it's not one that fits my vision of story. 

The movie covers roughly the first half of the novel. It moves quickly, especially after the first half-hour, and didn't feel like it was 2-1/2 hours long. I think it could have been half an hour longer, as there were some plot points that were dropped or given short shrift. But I'm picking nits here. 

Dune: Part 1 is the best cinematic adaptation of a major science fiction or fantasy novel since Lord of the Rings. It should appeal both to fans of the book and to filmgoers who are just looking for an entertaining evening out.

Do not miss it, and go to a cinema with a big screen (preferably IMAX). TV will not do it justice.

Movie and TV Reviews - October 2021

Here are some short reviews of things I watched in October.

Movies

• The Velvet Underground. This is a wonderful documentary about the career of seminal New York band. It also is about the New York scene of the 60s and 70s, including Andy Warhol. Definitely one of the best rock documentaries I've seen. (Apple TV+)
• Jack Irish: The Movies. Three prequel made-for-TV films that cover the career (such as it is) of Jack Irish before the events of the TV series. We should have watched these before the series. Very enjoyable, gritty Aussie crime procedurals. (Acorn TV)

TV Shows

• Jack Irish (season 3). The final season and probably the best of the three. (Acorn TV)
• Midsommer Murders (season 22). Yes it's formulaic, but the plots are twisty and we love the setting and minor characters. Nothing too heavy and goes well with crackers and cheese and wine. (Acorn TV)
• Nova: Arctic Drift. Excellent documentary about a 2019-2020 expedition that spent 10 months drifting across the Artic on an ice flow. (PBS)
• Locke and Key, season 2. We've watched about half the season so far and I'm enjoying it more than the first season. If you like Stranger Things, you'll enjoy this. (Netflix)
• Star Trek: Prodigy. A new Star Trek animated series. It seems to be aimed at a young audience, but it's worth watching for the gorgeous animation if nothing else. (CTV)

Featured Links - November 1, 2021

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

• Astronomers Have Finally Measured How Deep Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Goes. It's deeper than Earth's atmosphere.
• 7 Top Secret Features of the Free VLC Media Player. "VLC should be your media player of choice. The cross-platform tool has a bag full of secret features you can use right now." I've been using VLC for many years and didn't know about most of these features.
• Full Timeline of the Dune Universe (34,000 Years). A YouTube video that probably won't make a lot of sense unless you've read some of the books.
• John Coltrane's Unearthed 'A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle' Is A Revelation. Without This Little-Known Figure, It Wouldn't Exist. "The jazz world is heralding 'A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle,' a document of John Coltrane performing his masterpiece in 1965. But the story is bigger than Trane: It involves Joe Brazil — and the dogged archivist trying to bring his story into the light."
• Amsterdam-Rotterdam is the first European hyperloop network route. I don't see the advantage of this over current European high-speed rail.
• Portfolio of Nick Stevens on the International Association of Astronomical Artists site. There is some excellent art here.
• We Tested 6 Methods for Storing Mushrooms and Found a Clear Winner. The way I've been doing it is pretty good but it can be improved.

Photo of the Week - October 31, 2021

Here's a new addition to the Liverpool Road boatyard.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4, F8 at18 mm., 1/450 second, ISO 400, Astia film simulation

Watch the Skies!

Keep an eye on the sky tonight and tomorrow night. There may be a major auroral display, i.e., the Northern Lights, visible as far south as the Great Lakes. Lots more details are at the SolarHam site and SpaceWeather.com.

NOAA forecasters say there is an 85% chance of geomagnetic storms on Oct. 30th when a CME (described below) is expected to hit Earth's magnetic field. It could be a strong storm, category G3, which means auroras could descend to mid-latitudes--places like Kansas, Nebraska, Oregon, Virginia. The CME's arrival time is uncertain; estimates range from midday on Oct. 30th to the early hours of Oct. 31st. 

It's going to be cloudy and rainy tonight, but hopefully it will clear up for Halloween. A good display of the Northern Lights on Halloween would be cool. 

48 New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Coming in November

November looks to be a good month for science fiction and fantasy releases. Gizmodo has assembled a list of 48 books coming out next month. Big books for the month are likely to be Leviathan Wakes by James. S. A. Corey, the final novel in the Expanse series, and Termination Shock, a cli-fi novel by Neal Stephenson. I'll definitely be buying the Corey novel so I can finish the series (after I finish Charles Stross' Merchant Princes and Empire Games series). I might buy Stephenson's book, but I'll wait to see some reviews (his novels have been very hit and miss for me). 

There are several other books that look interesting.

• Marvellous Light by Freya Warske
• Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer
• Noor by Nnedi Okorafor
• Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Even Greater Mistakes by Charlie Jane Anders
• A Few Last Words for the Late Immortals by Michael Bishop
• You Sexy Thing by Cat Rambo
• Cytonic by Brandon Sanderson
• Second Shooter by Nick Mamatas

Given the current supply chain problems, if you want to get any of the books on this list in their paper editions, it would be a good idea to pre-order them. 

Some Photography Links - October 29, 2021

Here are some links about cameras and photography.

Sylvan Valley, taken with my Fujifilm X-S10 and processed in Photoshop Express

• Enhancing Fall Color (3 Tips for Lightroom and Photoshop). Video explaining how to punch up fall colours. 
• How Ansel Adams Revolutionized Landscape Photography. Adams was probably the greatest landscape photographer and black-and-white printer of all time.
• The Secret to Long Battery Life - Top 15 Tips! Good advice, especially if you have a mirrorless camera.
• Inside Hasselblad’s Factory: Assembling the Medium Format Magic. This helps to explain why Hasselblads are so expensive.
• How to Ditch Your Phone and Use Instagram on the Web Instead. "Now you can post to your Instagram on the web. Is it time to say goodbye to the time-sucking app?"
• Several major Photoshop and Lightroom updates announced at Adobe MAX. The new masking feature is really impressive. 
• The Best Landscape Photography Settings: A Guide. "In this article, you’ll discover the best landscape photography settings to take your photos to the next level."

Charles Stross, Rule 34, and AI

I'm currently plowing my way through Charles Stross' excellent Merchant Princes series in preparation for reading the sequel Empire Games trilogy. I'm about two-thirds of the way through and having trouble putting my Kindle down, despite the fact that I read the books when they came out almost a decade ago. Stross is good. 

I just came across an old (2013) post by author Randy Rucker about Stross' novel, Rule 34. It's a near-future police procedural set in Scotland and a sequel to Halting State. Among other things, there's quite a bit about AI, which was a theme in several of Stross' earlier books. 

Coming back to Stross’s Rule 34 , this book, like its loose prequel, Halting State , are quite close to the present-day world. It’s a world where some AI type behaviors have emerged among the applications that run on the Web. What do we mean by AI?

Stross observes, “If we understand how we do it, it isn’t artificial intelligence anymore. Playing chess, driving cars, generating conversational text… Perhaps we overestimate consciousness?”

He makes the point “We’re not very interested in reinventing human consciousness in a box. What gets the research grants flowing is applications.”

And, again: “general cognitive engines [are all] hardwired [to] project the seat of their identity onto you … what we really want is identity amplification.”

Rucker's comments about Stross are interesting and more relevant than ever, given the current focus on AI in everyday computing. His post is worth reading as are his and Stross' novels that deal with the subject.  

The Language of Climate Change According To the OED

The English language is constantly evolving, which keeps the dictionary of record, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) scrambling to keep up. This year, they released an update covering one of the language's current hot topics, namely climate change. (I expect to see one covering words associated with the pandemic come out sometime in the near future).

A post on the OED's blog describes the update in some detail. 

Over the course of the last 30 years or so, the OED’s editors have researched and recorded many of the best-known terms related to climate change, such as global warming, microplastic, and emissions, as well as carbon and its associated compounds.

However, language is ever evolving, and earlier this year, the OED embarked on a project to broaden and review its coverage of vocabulary related to climate change and sustainability. With the increase in climate strikes and extreme weather in recent years, it is clear that this is a rapidly changing area of vocabulary, and one that our lexicographers have been carefully monitoring.

Below we explore some of the new and revised entries added in this update (shown in bold below), as ­well as looking at language related to climate change previously recorded in the OED, and terms that we are still monitoring. We reveal some of the spikes and dips in usage we are seeing, as well as changes in the way certain words related to climate change are now being used.

If you are interested in climate change or the English language, you'll find it a worthwhile read. 

A SETI False Alarm

A couple of years ago, the Parkes Murriyang radio telescope in Australia detected a signal that appeared to be coming from our nearest stellar neighbour, Proxima Centauri. Researchers have conducted an extensive investigation and now conclude that the signal originated on Earth.  

In November 2020, and in January and April of this year, the researchers pointed the Parkes telescope at Proxima Centauri to see if they could pick up the signal again. They could not.

Eventually, the team spotted other signals in the original data that looked a lot like the 982-megahertz signal but were at different frequencies. These signals had been tossed out by the team’s automated analysis as being earthly interference. Further analysis showed that BLC1 and these ‘lookalike’ signals were all interference from an unknown source. The signals had modulated and muddied one another, much as a guitar amplifier modulates and distorts a guitar note, which is what made it so difficult to identify BLC1 as interference.

I do hope that one of these days we'll find a clear, unambiguous alien signal. But this one wasn't it.