An Interesting Idea for a Novel

Author John Scalzi publishes a "Big Idea" series on his blog, in which he gives space to other authors to discuss the ideas behind their books. Today's post, by Michael Muntisav, is especially interesting.  

George Orwell once wrote “If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?”

Today we witness not Big Brother, but many people in positions of authority insisting that climate change is a hoax. If that makes your blood boil, it’s because you know those people have nothing other than their own self-interest at heart. They don’t give a damn, even about their own grandchildren.

Well what if, thirty years from now, those very same grandchildren decided it was time to hold today’s decision makers to account? That is the big idea behind Court of the Grandchildren.

By then, supercomputers will have advanced enough to tell us what the climate consequences were of every past policy decision or non-decision. There will be no gray areas. The excuses for today’s inaction will seem like parodies.

I haven't read the book, Court of the Grandchildren, but it sounds interesting, and I'm putting it on my ever-growing list of books I'll probably never have time to read but would like to. It also seems similar to some of the ideas in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. I would be interested in comments from anyone who has read either book. 

Technical Communication Links - March 2021

Although retired, I still try to keep an eye on what's going on in the technical communication field. These are links to things that I thought were worth sharing. 

• How to Set Up VS Code for Web Development in A Few Simple Steps. I wish I had been using this at the TSX. It would have saved me a huge amount of time when I was working on pages for my internal documentation portal. 
• Watch Elton John improvise a song based on Richard E. Grant's oven manual. This is hilarious. We all need some humour right now.
• The Peetles: Technical Writer. Sung to the tune of the Beatles' Paperback Writer.
• Using text strings and microcontent (podcast, part 1). "In episode 90 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Simon Bate talk about using text strings and microcontent. This is part one of a two-part podcast."
• Updating the Content Quad, by Rahel Bailie. "Content production is evolving, and with each change, we look for new ways to represent those changes. Despite not liking the term quad for its lack of semantics, I realise the usefulness of the quad style of infographic. It’s easy to visualise  information in groups of four, or divisions by four. In that spirit, I’m introducing a new quad for content."

SN11 Goes Boom!

SpaceX's Starship test program suffered another spectacular failure today, as Starship SN11 fell out of a foggy sky in pieces onto the launch pad. 

It's hard to tell exactly what happened because of the fog, but it looks like part of the Starship came off just before it hit the ground at high speed. There may have been a mid-air explosion. The official SpaceX webcast video stopped at 5:49 into the flight. A tweet by Elon Musk indicated that there may have been a problem with one of the Raptor engines on ascent; I did notice what seemed to be a fire above the engines during the ascent. 

This video posted on Twitter shows the last few seconds of the flight with sound. You can hear what seems to be a loud explosion and the sound of large pieces of metal hitting the ground. 

Fighting Scientific Paper Mills

I've posted before (and often) about the problem of disinformation, the scourge of modern social discourse. But as this article from Nature points out, it's a problem for scientific research. Paper mills, journals that exist only to bump up researchers' citation count, have existed for years. Now some publishers are fighting back.

When Laura Fisher noticed striking similarities between research papers submitted to RSC Advances, she grew suspicious. None of the papers had authors or institutions in common, but their charts and titles looked alarmingly similar, says Fisher, the executive editor at the journal. “I was determined to try to get to the bottom of what was going on.”

A year later, in January 2021, Fisher retracted 68 papers from the journal, and editors at two other Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) titles retracted one each over similar suspicions; 15 are still under investigation. Fisher had found what seemed to be the products of paper mills: companies that churn out fake scientific manuscripts to order. All the papers came from authors at Chinese hospitals. The journals’ publisher, the RSC in London, announced in a statement that it had been the victim of what it believed to be “the systemic production of falsified research”.

What was surprising about this was not the paper-mill activity itself: research-integrity sleuths have repeatedly warned that some scientists buy papers from third-party firms to help their careers. Rather, it was extraordinary that a publisher had publicly announced something that journals generally keep quiet about. “We believe that it is a paper mill, so we want to be open and transparent,” Fisher says.

The RSC wasn’t alone, its statement added: “We are one of a number of publishers to have been affected by such activity.” Since last January, journals have retracted at least 370 papers that have been publicly linked to paper mills, an analysis by Nature has found, and many more retractions are expected to follow.

Featured Links - March 29, 2021

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

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• Multiple Destroyers Were Swarmed By Mysterious 'Drones' Off California Over Numerous Nights. My first reaction was that this had to be fake news, but it appears to be well documented, and it is very strange.
• The woman who fell from the sky. "When the pandemic potentially came within a thin sheet of glass to astronauts about to lift off into space, Star City, the secretive home of Russia's space program, became a place of suspicion, fear and blame. One doctor, the leader of the town's ambulance service, found herself in a desperate situation."
• What Really Caused the Supply Chain Mess Over PPE Last Year. "Automation and complex distribution software created a nightmare scenario we’re still unpacking."
• How Science Beat the Virus. "And what it lost in the process". A great article by Ed Yong.
• Co-founded by a leader of SpaceX’s missions operations, Epsilon3 wants to be the OS for space launches. This would be so cool to work on.
• I flew the most secret MiG fighter in the world for the US Air Force: "Red Eagle pilot gives the low-down on America’s MiG-21 ‘Fishbed’"

Timeline of Climate Change

One argument that climzte change deniers often use is that the climate of the Earth is variable and has changed as much as or more than it has in modern times. This is (sort of) true, but what it doesn't take into account is the rate of the change.

The wonderful graphic from XKCD, shown in the linked IFLScience article, totally demolishes that argument. 

I've only shown the top part below as it's too large to embed here.

Photo of the Week

Dredges at the exit from Frenchman's Bay to Lake Ontario.

Pharoah Sanders' Promises Delivers

I first discovered Pharoah Sanders' music when I was in university and I've have loved it ever since. Unfortunately, his recorded output during the last couple of decades has been rather sparse, although he has been playing regularly, and I've seen him in Toronto a couple of times in this millennium. 

So I was happy to hear that he had a new album coming out and signed up to listen to a webcast of the album's premiere last Sunday. I didn't have high expectations; after all, he just turned 80 and how well can an 80-year-old play the sax? Well, I was wrong on that. Promises is brilliant and easily his best album since Message From Home released in 1996, and one of the highlights of his career.

I'm not alone in that opinion. Rolling Stone has this to say. 

Sanders’ latest — like Let My People Go, a team-up with a much younger musician, in this case Sam Shepherd, the thirtysomething electronic composer-producer known as Floating Points — drives home what a master collaborator he’s always been. Picking up on threads from the saxophonist’s late-Nineties and early-2000s work with Bill Laswell, which set his horn against dubby, spacey soundscapes, Promises, out March 26th, places him at the center of an electro-acoustic ambient-classical concerto, composed and arranged by Shepherd and featuring the London Symphony Orchestra strings. Consisting of a single, 46-minute work, the album is both startlingly minimal and arrestingly gorgeous.

Promises hinges on a crystalline melodic keyboard figure, played by Shepherd, that pulsates gently as the orchestra rises up around it. Sanders’ tenor sax murmurs on top, playing slow, searching phrases that weave in and out of the core theme. Sometimes his horn recedes, trading places with burbling synths, glinting organ, sweeping string passages, or even his own murmuring vocalization, but it always returns, adding a flavor of deep-blues pathos to the ethereal surroundings. Only sparingly, such as one during brief, stunning episode about 35 minutes in, does Sanders break into the harsh sax ululation that he’s famous for, but overall, the piece feels like a loving sonic gift to a master from a disciple, and a worthy successor to Sanders’ foundational Sixties and Seventies epics.

Promises is an album that rewards concentration and close listening. Turn down the lights, turn up the volume, and listen. You won't regret it.

 

2020 Analog AnLab and Asimov’s Readers’ Awards Finalists

Each year the readers of two of the three remaining science fiction digest magazines get to vote on their favourite stories. The editors of Analog and Asimov's have announced the finalists for the Analog Analytical Laboratory (AnLab) and the Asimov's Readers' Awards.

These are the Analog AnLab finalists for Best Novella.

• “Moral Biology“, Neal Asher (5-6/20)
• “Draiken Dies“, Adam-Troy Castro (9-10/20)
• “Flyboys“, Stanley Schmidt (7-8/20)

These are the Asimov's Reader's Choice finalists for Best Novella.

• “Semper Augustus“, Nancy Kress (3-4/20)
• “Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County“, Derek Künsken (7-8/20)
• “Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship“, Will McIntosh (7-8/20)
• “Maelstrom“, Kristine Kathryn Rusch (9-10/20)
• “Take a Look at the Five and Ten”, Connie Willis (11-12/20)

The article linked above contains links to most of the stories so you can read them for free.

I have a soft spot for the AnLab contest as Analog was the first science fiction magazine that I discovered as a teen and I read it religiously for many years. I'll be looking at this year's stories to see what the magazine is like now. 

Hacking a Toy RC Plane

I've posted before about my cousin, Mike Gardi, his projects to recreate educational computing toys from the 1960s. His brother, John Gardi, is equally talented and has been working on an interesting project of his own. He's been hacking a small remote-controlled (RC) plane to give it first-person video capability, so he can fly it while seeing the cockpit view from the plane. What really impresses me about this is that John is legally blind, and being in that category myself, I can really appreciate how hard this is. 

I recently got a new 3 channel, 65 gram RC plane that I'll convert to FPV. This build log will go through the steps on how to do that drawing on the lessons I learned modding that first plane last year.

I'll try to be as unobtrusive as possible with most of the mods I make to the plane being reversible or removable.

I think this could bring something new to the FPV realm. I decked out the cockpit to give me that visceral experience of being the pilot I so dreamed of becoming. I didn't want to fly like Superman with a clear field of view, I wanted to fly a plane from the pilot's seat!

There might even be some interesting possibilities here, like drone racing but flying these electric micro scale RC planes. Or maybe air combat with tuned lasers that shut down a plane's engines when detected.

As well as the site linked above, you can follow John's progress on Twitter. 

Canadian, British, and American Spelling

Canadian spelling can be confusing as the general rules are based on British spelling, but with some American variations thrown in. When in doubt, I usually use British spelling or check my (now aging) edition of the Canadian Press Stylebook. But the most useful resource is the website Canadian, Britsh and American Spelling.

This is mainly a resource for orthographically-challenged Canadians, although others may find it useful too.

As in most matters, Canadian spelling is somewhere on that ill-defined continuum between British and American practices. Also as in most matters, Canadian spelling is a little more flexible than either British or American spelling. While, in general, it is closer to the British, the American variant is sometimes preferred, and often either would be considered acceptable (although the British is still usually considered “more correct”).

It can even be argued that there is a regional bias within Canada: in general terms, Ontario, British Columbia and Newfoundland are usually closer to the British usage, and Alberta and the Prairie provinces closer to the American.

Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans tend to stick much more closely with the original British spelling, but Canada is much more swayed by its powerful neighbour to the south. As the influence of the heavily America-centric Internet increases we may see still further inclination towards American practices.

You can look at a list of general rules, search for words, or browse an alphabetic listing. Its design is very 1990s, but it's easy to use and useful. I've been using it for a long time and will continue to do so.

 

If Your Android Apps Are Crashing, Read This Now

My wife ran into a problem with her phone this morning that could affect anyone with an Android phone. She installed a security update and after that, some of her apps would not run. 

It turns out that a Google app called Android System Webview was causing the problem. Her security update probably installed the broken version. Google issued a fixed version of the app last night, and it should show up in your list of apps needing an update in the Google Play Store. 

After updating the app, everything was back to normal.  This article has more details. 

How COVID-19 Broke the World's Pandemic Warning System

It's clear that the world's early response to the outbreak of COVID-19 was badly flawed. A Canadian government agency whose job it had been to provide early warning of disease outbreaks had been largely disbanded the year before. Initial government response to the pandemic in both Canada and the United States was less than ideal. The declaration of the pandemic by the WHO was slow and communication was not clear, as this article from Nature points out. 

At each declaration, the WHO advises governments on how to respond to the situation at hand. For example, last January, the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said of the COVID-19 outbreak, “It is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts and promote social-distancing measures.”

Liu admits that the term PHEIC isn’t as sexy as an emotive word, such as ‘pandemic’ or ‘emergency’. But researchers and health officials chose it partly because they wanted to avoid panic while encouraging world leaders to act according to WHO advice to contain a threat, says Gian Luca Burci, an international law specialist at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, Switzerland. Burci helped to revise the regulations in 2005.

In hindsight, that reasoning appears to be flawed. Several reports note that politicians and the public mainly ignored the PHEIC declaration and Tedros's corresponding recommendations in January 2020, but started listening when the organization used the unofficial term ‘pandemic’ to describe COVID-19 in March, once it was spreading in multiple continents. Unlike the PHEIC, 'pandemic' is not a defined declaration, and countries haven't agreed to take any actions once it's used.

Let's hope that the world gets its act together before the next pandemic, because there WILL be another. 

Featured Links - March 22, 2021

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

• Here's why Substack's scam worked so well. They paid a secret group of writers to make newsletter authorship seem lucrative.
• The best sci-fi and fantasy books of 2020 to catch up with. Short reviews of some of the best SFF novels of 2020 reviewed by author Andrew Liptak. 
• California is banning companies from using 'dark patterns,' "a sneaky website design that makes things like canceling a subscription frustratingly difficult."
• A Model of the Cosmos in the ancient Greek Antikythera Mechanism. "Solving this complex 3D puzzle reveals a creation of genius—combining cycles from Babylonian astronomy, mathematics from Plato’s Academy and ancient Greek astronomical theories."
• Strength in Numbers. "Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world."
• Conservative Fanboys. "The conservative cinematic universe is folding in on itself."

Photo of the Week

I've been doing a Featured Links post every Sunday, but I'm going to move that to Monday and use Sunday for a photo post. 

This is Lake Ontario on March 12th. 

 

The Trouble(s) with Bitcoin

Bitcoin prices have been on a tear recently, with prices above $50,000 USD. There are times when I regret not mining a few coins when I first heard about it, at the point where it was possible to do it on a home PC. Now it's out of the question, although that's not just because the coins have gotten exponentially harder to mine. That computational difficulty comes with a cost; the energy used world-wide to mine cryptocurrencies now exceeds the energy usage of some medium-sized countries. 

It isn’t easy to figure out exactly how much electrical energy these ‘idling cars’ are consuming, but even the lowest estimates are eye-wateringly bad. Cambridge University seems to have done the most legwork in figuring this out, and at the moment, the annualised power consumption of bitcoin mining is 128 terawatt hours. In 2019-20, every single thing plugged into Australia’s largest main grid consumed 192.

Given the threat of climate change, it's possible to make the case that use of Bitcoin is immoral as it threatens human survival.

There are other problems, directly related to the Bitcoin distributed ledger. For one thing, it's large (about 100 GB) and getting larger. Perhaps more fundamentally, the architecture of the ledger has a fundamental flaw – it depends on people not using it for things that it wasn't designed for. 

Some years ago, people started noticing all sorts of things embedded in the Bitcoin blockchain. There are digital images, including one of Nelson Mandela. There’s the Bitcoin logo, and the original paper describing Bitcoin by its alleged founder, the pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto. There are advertisements, and several prayers. There's even illegal pornography and leaked classified documents. All of these were put in by anonymous Bitcoin users. But none of this, so far, appears to seriously threaten those in power in governments and corporations. Once someone adds something to the Bitcoin ledger, it becomes sacrosanct. Removing something requires a fork of the blockchain, in which Bitcoin fragments into multiple parallel cryptocurrencies (and associated blockchains). Forks happen, rarely, but never yet because of legal coercion. And repeated forking would destroy Bitcoin’s stature as a stable(ish) currency.

The botnet’s designers are using this idea to create an unblockable means of coordination, but the implications are much greater. Imagine someone using this idea to evade government censorship. Most Bitcoin mining happens in China. What if someone added a bunch of Chinese-censored Falun Gong texts to the blockchain?

In the long run, this may turn out to be what causes the Bitcoin bubble to burst. 

How to Spot Fake Science News

There's a lot of misinformation, disinformation, and just plain fake news out there, and much of it is about science. Some of it can be pretty hard to spot, even if you have a science education or are reasonably knowledgeable. 

This article has some good tips on how to spot fake science news.  Here's the first one.

Tip 1: Seek the peer review seal of approval

Scientists rely on journal papers to share their scientific results. They let the world see what research has been done, and how.

Once researchers are confident of their results, they write up a manuscript and send it to a journal. Editors forward the submitted manuscripts to at least two external referees who have expertise in the topic. These reviewers can suggest the manuscript be rejected, published as is, or sent back to the scientists for more experiments. That process is called “peer review.”

Research published in peer-reviewed journals has undergone rigorous quality control by experts. Each year, about 2,800 peer-reviewed journals publish roughly 1.8 million scientific papers. The body of scientific knowledge is constantly evolving and updating, but you can trust that the science these journals describe is sound. Retraction policies help correct the record if mistakes are discovered post-publication.

not validated by other scientists

How long has this work been on the preprint server? If it’s been months and it hasn’t yet been published in the peer-reviewed literature, be very skeptical. Are the scientists who submitted the preprint from a reputable institution? During the COVID-19 crisis, with researchers scrambling to understand a dangerous new virus and rushing to develop lifesaving treatments, preprint servers have been littered with immature and unproven science. Fastidious research standards have been sacrificed for speed.

A last warning: Be on the alert for research published in what are called predatory journals. They don’t peer-review manuscripts, and they charge authors a fee to publish. Papers from any of the thousands of known predatory journals should be treated with strong skepticism.

 

Should We Worry About World War III?

It's been three quarters of a century since the first (and only) time nuclear weapons have been used in anger. So far, the world has managed to avoid both a nuclear war and a nuclear terrorist attack. But how likely is that to continue?

That's the subject of this article by British author Tom Chivers. It turns out that there has been a fair amount of research into this area. 

So how likely would a real disaster be? A nuclear bomb in a city?

Interestingly, we can make a decent stab at this. Terrorist attacks, like earthquakes and meteorite strikes, follow a power-law distribution. Small ones are common, but larger ones get rapidly rarer, with (according to this 2006 paper, anyway) a scaling parameter of 2.5. That sounds complicated but it just means “a terrorist attack that’s twice as large is about 2 to the power 2.5 (about 5.5) times as unlikely”. This paper finds something similar.

If I’ve understood it correctly (quite a big if), it works out you can expect to see X terrorist attacks with Y deaths each year, where X is the total average number of attacks per year multiplied by Y^-2.5.

The 2006 paper said that between 1968 and 2005 there were about 10,000 terrorist events that killed or injured one or more victims, up to and including the 1998 Nairobi car bombs that killed at least 4,000 people. That’s about 270 a year.

So if you believe that power laws apply to human society and motivations, you can take a stab at making a prediction. I'm not so convinced myself, nor is Chivers, at least for the extreme cases. 

I'm not as worried about nuclear, radiological, or chemical attacks, at least on a large scale. The thing that scares me is a biological attack, especially now that genetic manipulation tools have become common and commercially available.  

Foor All Mankind and Deep Fakes

The technology of deep fakes is beginning to make an impact in the news and popular culture – a segment on deep fakes just popped up on the noon TV news as I was typing this. It's a disturbing and possibly dangerous technology, but it can be a boon for producers of SF television shows and movies. 

For All Mankind is an Apple TV+ show set in an alternate history in which the Soviet Union beats the United States to the moon. It's excellent; I liked the first season a lot and the second season is even better. The show makes extensive use of deep fake technology, as this article discusses in detail.

Most of these scenes are subtle, but the second season includes at least two attention-getting deepfake-assisted set pieces. In the Season 2 premiere, astronaut Tracy Stevens (played by Sarah Jones) guests on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and announces that she’s gotten remarried (much to the dismay of her blindsided ex-husband, Gordo, who’s watching at home). Later in the season, Tracy appears on the talk show remotely, but in this scene, she’s on set, sitting right next to Johnny. “We created a part of the Johnny Carson set, had to have her sit exactly where a guest would sit there, and then had to merge the two, the reality and the tape from back in the day, together,” says Nedivi.

The producers got permission to use footage from The Tonight Show, and a staffer was assigned to binge old episodes in search of one where Johnny made physical contact with a guest in a way that For All Mankind could use. (“Lucky guy,” Wolpert says of the PA who drew the assignment.) The producers struck gold with a 1983 appearance by an 18-year-old Diane Lane, in which Johnny reaches out to examine the recent high school graduate’s class ring. In the sci-fi show, he makes the same motion to scrutinize Tracy’s wedding ring.

“The hand that is taking Sarah Jones’s hand in that shot is actually an actor’s hand, and then above the arm is Johnny,” Wolpert says. “That’s one of the visual effects shots I’m most proud of, because it looks seamless to me.”

We've come a long way since Forrest Gump. 

2020 Nebula Awards Finalists

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) have announced the finalists for the 2020 Nebula Awards. They are voted on by SFWA members and the winners will be announced during the Nebula Awards Weekend, June 4-6. 

These are the finalists for the Novel award.

• Piranesi, Susanna Clarke (Bloomsbury US; Bloomsbury UK)
• The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US & UK)
• Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher)
• The Midnight Bargain, C.L. Polk (Erewhon)
• Black Sun, Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga; Solaris)
• Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

As has been the case for the last few years, the finalists have been mostly female, which is a notable change from a generation ago. I've not read any of the novels, although the N. K. Jemisin book is on my list of books to buy if it goes on sale. 

Most of the short fiction finalists are available to read (or in some cases, sampled) online. 

Whither Arecibo?

When the Arecibo radio telescope collapsed last year, the world lost the second-largest radio telescope and one of the key instruments used to monitor near-Earth objects. It will likely be years before a replacement can be constructed, assuming that funding can be found. 

For the moment, cleanup of the site has begun, at an estimated cost of $50 million (USD). 

A private contractor and experts from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center are currently conducting a forensics analysis to determine the cause of the original auxiliary cable socket failure. A separate contractor is performing the forensic investigation at Arecibo, with final reports from both contractors expected in December 2021. In addition to these efforts, the NSF is asking that an “expedited independent study” into the cause of the cable failures be completed by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.

A company that specializes in disaster cleanup and environmental remediation has been brought in to help. Soils contaminated with hydraulic oils, which were released during the collapse, are being sampled and removed. The cleanup team is also testing groundwater and surface water near the facility. A “Stormwater Pollution Prevention Plan” is in the works to “prevent sediment and pollutants from migrating offsite,” as are wildlife and vegetation surveys to help in the protection of vulnerable species, according to the report.

The report lists the preliminary cost estimates for the cleanup as being between $30 million and $50 million from now until the end of 2022.

In the meantime, some research continues on the site using Arecibo's 12-metre radio antenna and two lidar (light detection and ranging) systems. 

There is now a proposal (PDF link) to build a new radio telescope, possibly with a different design, on the site. The cost could be as much as $450 million (USD). 

For the next several years, astronomers will have to be content with using the 500-metre FAST radio telescope in China. 

A Model for a Warp Drive That Doesn't Break Physics

Warp drives have been a staple of science fiction for many years, even before they were popularized by Star Trek and Star Wars. There is some physical rationale behind them, but until recently it was thought that they require something called "negative energy", which is outside the bounds of physics as we understand it.

However, now there's a new theory that proposes that a warp drive could be built without violating our current physical models, although the engineering involved is well beyond the present state of the art. Still one can hope. 

Bobrick and Martire start with the idea of an Alcubierre warp drive, a concept developed by Miguel Alcubierre in 1994—he envisioned it as spacecraft that could contract space time in front of the vehicle while expanding it behind the craft. But such a craft would require a massive amount of negative energy, which would not be feasible for a real spacecraft. Bobrick and Martire suggest instead that a massive gravitational force could be used to bend space time. The trick is finding a way to compress a planet-sized mass to a manageable spacecraft-module size in order to use its gravity. Because of the implied difficulties, a warp drive created from the model developed by the researchers could not be built today, but it does suggest that someday it might be possible.

If You Think the Last Decade Was Bad

Back in 2013, I wrote a blog post about historian Peter Turchin, who at the time thought we might be in for a revolution by the year 2020. That didn't happen (though we did get an attempted coup in 2021) and a global pandemic instead.  

But Turchin is still studying history and he hasn't changed his mind about the likelihood of social unrest in our future. In November, The Atlantic published a long profile of Turchin. It's one of the more unsettling articles I've read recently. 

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,” he told me as we passed Mirror Lake, which UConn’s website describes as a favorite place for students to “read, relax, or ride on the wooden swing.” The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem. Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.

“We are almost guaranteed” five hellish years, Turchin predicts, and likely a decade or more. The problem, he says, is that there are too many people like me. “You are ruling class,” he said, with no more rancor than if he had informed me that I had brown hair, or a slightly newer iPhone than his. Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites over­produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

 In the United States, Turchin told me, you can see more and more aspirants fighting for a single job at, say, a prestigious law firm, or in an influential government sinecure, or (here it got personal) at a national magazine. Perhaps seeing the holes in my T-shirt, Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one. (He doesn’t view himself as a member of either. A professor reaches at most a few hundred students, he told me. “You reach hundreds of thousands.”) Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country. “You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

I would be interested in seeing a comparison of his research and that of economist Thomas Pikkety, who seems to be reaching similar conclusions from a slightly different direction.  

Featured Links - March 14, 2021

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

• ‘Green’ burials are slowly gaining ground among environmentalists. "Awareness of eco-friendly death care is low even as the industry grows."
• Japan's 2011 tsunami, then and now - in pictures. Pictures from 2011 and this year showing the extent of the reconstruction.
• Scientists solve another piece of the puzzling Antikythera mechanism. “Our reconstruction fits all the evidence... gleaned from the extant remains to date."
• Eeveryone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny. "Modern Action and Superhero Films Fetishize the Body, Even As They Desecualize It."
• Found Snapshots of a Secret 1960s Crossdressing Resort in the Catskills. A look at a hidden and lost piece of LGBTQ history. 
• How to think Bayes. "A personal take on one of the most influential British thinkers of the last three centuries (plus the usual jamboree of juicy links)"

Language, the Pandemic, and the OED

As a major historical event, you would expect the pandemic to have an effect on language, and you'd be right. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has been tracking changes to the English language since the beginning of the pandemic and continues to do research and report on the subject. 

Oxford Languages’ lexical monitoring has shown that most of the key terms related to Covid-19 are not new inventions. Some words, such as immune, infection, symptom, vaccine, and virus, form part of the basic vocabulary of many languages; others like droplet, swab, and testing are common words with medical senses that gained special significance during the pandemic; and still others are highly technical scientific terms such as basic reproduction number, case fatality rate, community transmission, herd immunity, morbidity rate, and mortality rate, which refer to complex epidemiological concepts that are now being mentioned in news broadcasts and political speeches, as they are the basis of many government decisions with untold impact on millions of lives and livelihoods.

The discourse on Covid-19 is also characterized by words and phrases referring to government and individual actions aimed at containing the spread of the virus and mitigating its social and economic effects. As personal hygiene and the prevention of infection became the main preoccupation of society, words such as disinfectant, face mask, and hand sanitizer have dominated the conversation in most languages. As the avoidance of possibly dangerous physical contact became the order of the day, phrases such as flattening the curve and social distancing, previously unknown to people other than statisticians and epidemiologists, have become part of the daily vocabulary of many languages. The English word lockdown, referring to the set of measures that many countries have taken to contain the spread of the virus by severely limiting the movement of people outside the home, has been borrowed by languages like Dutch, Filipino, German, Italian, and Telugu, while  languages such as Catalan, French, Portuguese, and Spanish prefer their equivalent forms for confinement. Languages like Arabic, Chinese, and Zulu use corresponding expressions conveying closure.

Some Useful Windows Command Prompts

I started using PCs in the dark ages of CP/M and DOS, so I got familiar with using a command line pretty early. After that, I worked on mainframe systems and UNIX/Linux systems and got even more familiar with shell commands. So I still use the command-line tool in Windows occasionally.

Although the Windows GUI has gotten easier to use over the years, sometimes it's faster just to bring up a command window and type a short command to find something out. As this article points out, this is especially true for network information with commands like ipconfig and netstat.

If you want more than the commands shown in the article, you can always install the Windows Subsystem Layer for Linux and get access to a full Linux command shell, which is more powerful than the Windows command-line interface.

Pandemic Brain Fog Is Real

If you think you're brain is fuzzier than normal (assuming you haven't had COVID-19 to account for it), you may be right. It seems like a lot of people are suffering from similar symptoms, as this Atlantic article points out.  

I first became aware that I was losing my mind in late December. It was a Friday night, the start of my 40-somethingth pandemic weekend: Hours and hours with no work to distract me, and outside temperatures prohibitive of anything other than staying in. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to fill the time. “What did I used to … do on weekends?” I asked my boyfriend, like a soap-opera amnesiac. He couldn’t really remember either.

Since then, I can’t stop noticing all the things I’m forgetting. Sometimes I grasp at a word or a name. Sometimes I walk into the kitchen and find myself bewildered as to why I am there. (At one point during the writing of this article, I absentmindedly cleaned my glasses with nail-polish remover.) Other times, the forgetting feels like someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything loose. I’ve started keeping a list of questions, remnants of a past life that I now need a beat or two to remember, if I can remember at all: What time do parties end? How tall is my boss? What does a bar smell like? Are babies heavy? Does my dentist have a mustache? On what street was the good sandwich place near work, the one that toasted its bread? How much does a movie popcorn cost? What do people talk about when they don’t have a global disaster to talk about all the time? You have to wear high heels the whole night? It’s more baffling than distressing, most of the time.

I've noticed this too but have mostly ascribed it to both old age and the lack of routine in my life after retiring. But there's no doubt that the enforced lack of outside opportunities caused by pandemic lockdowns and quarantines have made things worse. 

An Ad-Free Magnifier App for Android

On my earlier Samsung phones, I used a magnifier widget from Samsung. It was simple, ad-free, and just worked. Unfortunately, it couldn't be installed on my Pixel 4a, so I did a quick skim of the Google Play Store and installed an app called Magnifier. It worked, but was ad-supported, and after a while the ads were getting more intrusive. Then it somehow got locked into using the selfie camera and I couldn't change it. So off to the bit bucket it went.

I'm now using an app called SuperVision+. 

It's ad-free and after a week or so I've had no issues with it. And I do use it, sometimes several times a day. It has the basic controls that you would expect and a couple of nice features that I like; for example, image stabilization, and the ability to use the phone as a telescope. In other words, the magnification works on both close objects (as a magnifier) and on distant objects (as a telescope). Yes, I could use the camera app, but this is simpler. 

If there's a gotcha, it may be that the app hasn't been updated since 2018. However, it does work on my Pixel 4a under Android 11, at least for now. 

Building a 2:3 Scale VT100 Reproduction

It's likely that if you are a few years younger than me, your first computer experience was on a VT100 terminal hooked up to a DEC minicomputer. My talented cousin, Michael Gardi, falls into that category and has created a 2:3 scale VT100 terminal to go with a PDP-8 emulation kit that he purchased. 

I've been building Oscarv's (https://hackaday.io/obsolescence) wonderful PiDP-8/I (https://hackaday.io/project/4434-pidp-8i) kit. While I was sorting parts and installing software I started thinking about how I was going to access my "new" machine. Now I know that I can just SSH, telnet, or VNC into the Raspberry Pi running the show but where's the fun in that. It makes me sad now that I eventually got rid of all the serial terminals I had lying around (mostly Volker-Craig models since I live in Waterloo) because that would have been a great way to demo the 8I. When I went online looking for a vintage terminal I got a severe case of sticker shock. So I decided to do what I do and make a "front end" terminal reproduction for my soon to be completed PiDP-8/I.

It looks good and I'm looking forward to seeing it when I visit Mike, hopefully later this summer, when it's safe to travel again.  

 

Annalee Newitz' Virtual Book Tour

Author Annalee Newitz recently went on a virtual book tour to promote her new book, Four Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age. I blogged about it and some of her ideas last month and in January.  

She recently wrote about the tour and how weird it felt in her weekly newsletter.

I thought it would be really relaxing to do a book tour from home because there would be none of that airport nonsense, nor lonely hotel rooms. But instead it was equally as exhausting, but for different reasons. It’s hard to maintain energy and enthusiasm during a book reading and discussion when you can’t hear or see your audience. I missed meeting new people and visiting new bookstores; I even missed the smell of permanent markers during the signings. 

Like many of us at this point in the stay-at-home grind, I’m starting to understand fully what it means to be part of a social species. There’s a feeling you get when you’re in a room full of people, all talking and thinking about the same thing together. It’s warm and prickly and sometimes awkward. It’s a rush. It’s silly and fun. There’s a fundamental sense of purpose that I never feel when I’m alone. I miss it. I miss you. I can’t wait until we’re all hanging out together again.

She's also included links to recordings of some of the events, each focused on one of the cities described in her book. I've just listened to the reading and talk on Pompeii and it's fascinating. She also has just published an article in the New York Times that suggests that we can learn from the disaster relief program that was organized by Emporer Titus after the Pompeii disaster.

Within one generation of the eruption, many refugee families of liberti had names that were indistinguishable from their freeborn neighbors’. That made them eligible to vote and run for political office, unhampered by prejudice against people coming from slaves.

This didn’t represent a complete turnaround in Rome’s attitudes toward slavery, nor did every libertus wind up rich as Faustus and his family. But there’s no doubt that the government’s relief program changed the fortunes of marginalized people for the better and bolstered the Roman economy in the process.

We can still see our modern concerns reflected in this ancient disaster. Everyone in our nation wants a quick return to business as usual, complete with some infrastructure upgrades and new jobs. But for the descendants of slaves, and for other historically disadvantaged groups, this relief effort could also provide opportunities for social mobility. The good news is that historical evidence suggests we can have all this and more — so long as our politicians are willing to be as generous as a Roman emperor once was, some 1,950 years ago.

 

How to Create Custom Maps in Google Maps

I've been watching a lot of London walking tours recently to scratch my travel itch. Some of them come with route maps that show the route and highlight points of interest. I've idly wondered how these were done but never got around to finding out. 

This article explains how to use the Google My Maps feature of Google Maps to create custom maps. Offhand, I can't think of any use I'd have for this right now, some you reading this might find it useful. 

Google My Maps gives you access to Google Maps, as well as a lot of the information that you'll find when you use Google Maps.

In many respects, it works like Google's other cloud-based authoring tools. You can work on maps on your own, or share them with other users to work on projects together.

It even works with Google Docs so that you can organize your maps with other documents. You can also import information from Google Docs and Spreadsheets into your custom map.

Finally, while you can use shared My Maps to plan a trip with friends and family, or keep your maps for your own records, you can also embed your custom map on a website.

A Copyright Controversy

There's been a bit of a controversy going on in the publishing blogosphere and Twitterverse recently about copyright. Former Vox Editor Matthew Yglesias wrote, apparently seriously, that the term of copyright should be limited to thirty years, so that more works could come into the public domain where others could make use of them without having to pay the authors for use of their intellectual property.

They got jumped on, and for good reason. 

In his weekly newsletter, author Andrew Liptak wrote a good summary of what people have been saying about this. 

Currently in the US, the duration for copyright protection is the life of the author, plus 70 years: generally, once an author dies, the clock starts. (There are some exceptions around works written prior to 1978 which weren’t published or which didn’t have their copyrights registered). Other countries have slightly different standards, so it varies from place to place.

Yglesias’s desire to see books published 30 years ago entering the public domain in digital form has a host of problems, because it deprives authors of their creative property within their lifetimes.

Say there’s an author who publishes their debut at the age of 30, and it’s still in print and selling well by the time they’re the age of 60: they’d lose that income stream, which undermines one’s entire lifetime of work. Under that rule, John Scalzi would lose the rights to his book Old Man’s War in 2035 — which isn’t too far from now, and is apparently still a big seller. Orson Scott Card would have lost the copyright for Ender’s Game in 2015 and would lose Xenocide this year. Stephen Baxter’s debut novel Raft would enter the public domain this year. George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones is coming up on the 30 year mark in 2026.

A book might fall out of print in 30 years, but the author can still resell it — there could be new formats, new interest, new markets, etc. As Silvia Moreno-Garcia pointed out, she originally read Ellen Datlow’s anthologies when they came out in hard copy, and again when ebooks became a thing. (Read her entire thread starting here.)

There is, on the other hand, little doubt that current copyright terms are too long and mainly benefit large corporations. I think I agree with author John Scalzi, who proposed a term of life of the author plus 25 years.  

It is true that no one knows how well a book will sell in the long run — but then no one knows how well they will sell in the short run, either. Authors should have the opportunity to benefit from their work whenever (and if ever) it generates income, certainly in their life.

If you were to ask me the ideal copyright length for individuals: Life+25 (or 75 years, whichever is longer). This way I can profit from my work, and so can my spouse if I die before her. My grandkids can work for a living. Corporations: 75 years.

I'd cut the corporation term to 50 years, but Disney will never agree to that. 

I Think We're In for More Financial Chaos

I just read a deeply disturbing article in The Globe and Mail about amateur traders playing with derivates. If you don't know what they are, read the article anyway, as it explains the basics.  

One of the things I was working on in my last days at the TSX was to help the business analysts rewrite and reorganize the requirements documentation for the the trading engine – the rules that it has to follow when processing trades. The rules for ordinary trades are complex, but the rules for derivatives are a whole new level of complexity. I certainly didn't understand them and I'm not sure the BAs did either. 

On an individual level, this is playing with fire. While it's possible to make a lot of money fast, it's also possible to lose your money, your shirt, and maybe your house and life savings. People think they understand how these financial instruments work, but they almost certainly aren't aware of all the fine print, so to speak. 

So now we have a bunch of untrained people risking a lot of money on things they don't understand, complicated by the toxic effects of social media (see GameStop). The overall financial market system has long been too complex to manage and has many failure modes that are not well understood (see flash crash). Now we're adding increased volatility. 

That's bad enough. Then I read this.

Just this past week, a Wall Street investment firm launched the VanEck Vectors Social Sentiment Exchange Traded Fund, an indexed basket of securities that uses artificial intelligence to monitor the chatter about them on social media. The stock symbol is BUZZ.

Next month, a San Francisco startup plans to create a derivatives exchange on which investors can bet on yes-or-no questions – say, will Canadians have vaccines by September? Investors in the venture include Charles Schwab himself, billionaire private equity king Henry Kravis and Justin Mateen, a co-founder of Tinder, the dating app. The derivatives action is getting wilder and more speculative by the day.

,,,

Mr. Sosnoff is the Chicago-based co-founder, co-chief executive and, most importantly, house philosopher at Tastytrade, an online weltanschauung devoted entirely to retail investors who want to trade options and futures, often on margin. Mr. Sosnoff is, at this very moment, preparing to bring Tastytrade to Canada.

That will present challenges. Canada has stricter rules than the U.S. around discount retail derivatives trading. It isn’t possible to trade through Robinhood, the low-cost self-directed cellphone trading app, in Canada. It is possible to trade futures and options on Toronto-based Questrade (and on margin), but there are restrictions.

Wealthsimple, on the other hand, doesn’t offer options or futures trading at all on its no-fee app. Michael Katchen, Wealthsimple’s CEO, walks a fine line between offering clients investment advice – which a discount brokerage is not allowed to do – and keeping them away from risk. “There is nothing inherently wrong with options or margin,” he says. “The problem is, they can be very risky, especially in the hands of people that don’t know what they’re doing.”

But Canada is already Tastytrade’s second biggest audience, with 10,000 daily viewers (India is No. 3). With competitors breathing down its neck, Wealthsimple has already promised a more liberal trading platform in the near future.

I'm scared. It may be time to put a big chunk of my savings into Canada Savings Bonds or something that is locked in tight enough to survive a market crash that'll make October 1929 look tame. Because if we don't tighten the controls over derivatives trading, that's what we're going to see. 

 

Featured Links - March 7, 2021

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

• David Crosby on dinner with Joni, Phoebe Bridgers and the 50th anniversary of his haunted solo debut. "If I Could Only Remember My Name" is one of my favourite records, and I highly recommend the surround mix if you can find it.
• A Cephalopod Has Passed a Cognitive Test Designed For Human Children. "A new test of cephalopod smarts has reinforced how important it is for us humans to not underestimate animal intelligence."
• How Bitcoin's vast energy use could burst its bubble. Yet another reason not to use Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. 
• Interstellar Illusions: “Greebles” Lend Large Sci-Fi Structures a Sense of Scale. One of the lesser-known aspects of movie set design.
• NASA Names Perseverance Rover Touchdown Site “Octavia E. Butler Landing”. It goes well with the Bradbury Landing site of the Curiosity Rover.
• How Your Phone Works Behind-the-Scenes Magic to Take the Best Possible Photo. A detailed explanation of how modern cell phones take such good pictures. 

Building a Subway Station In a Crowded City

Toronto's Eglinton Crosstown LRT line has been under construction for what seems like forever. It might open next year. A large part of the line is underground, which has created massive disruption for several areas in north Toronto, especially for station construction. 

There has been an effort to minimize disruption and several stations have been built using construction techniques that are new to the Toronto area. Urban Toronto has a report about how some of the stations were constructed using "top down" or "mining" techniques that I found quite interesting.  

"At certain locations, it's sometimes advantageous to look at top-down construction. What do we mean by that? We put in shoring along the perimeter and we dig down just enough to put in the roof slab of the structure. And we build the permanent roof slab to sit on the shoring system along the perimeter. And, when that's done, we can reinstate much of the surface—the road and the sidewalks—while we're continuing to dig down to the bottom level of the eventual permanent station structure. What that allows us to do is reinstate the road surface faster, so there's less overall duration of the disruption to the community while we're building the station, so that's the primary advantage of that top-down construction.

"Basically, you dig down just enough to put the roof in, support the roof on the shoring system, and then you backfill up and reinstate the road surface while you continue to dig down below… and that construction happens underneath the road system that is now reinstated, with less disruption."

If you are interested in transit or engineering, have a look at the documentary, The 15 Billion Pound Railway, about the construction of London's Elizabeth line, parts of which should open next year.

 

How Perseverance Landed On Mars

As you probably know by now (especially if you're a regular reader of this blog), NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars about three weeks ago. You may not know just what an incredible feat of engineering and science that landing was. 

Aerospace engineer Brian Kirby has published the best explanation of the landing that I've seen yet. It's long but interesting with lots of graphics and linked videos to help visualize what was going on during each phase of the landing. 

The world rightfully gawked at the engineering prowess of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory as it successfully landed the car-sized rover named Perseverance on the surface of Mars. You might think that I, an engineer with experience working on a deep space mission, would be less impressed than most. But trust me: The spacecraft that landed Perseverance was an incredible Rube Goldberg Machine, and I’m going to explain exactly how incredible in this in-depth technical breakdown, which features testing footage, as well as NASA’s newly released video and pictures from the landing and its aftermath.

The Mars 2020 Mission has been hailed as one of the most accurate and complicated pieces of human exploration ever attempted. It traveled almost 300 million miles from Earth to hit a bullseye less than five miles in diameter on the surface of Mars.

I’ve spent hours poring over the technical details of this feat, and everywhere I look, it becomes more elegant, complex, and impressive. Let’s dig into why the team needed this level of landing precision, how the spacecraft got to Mars, and how the craft descended to the surface. Along the way, let’s look at the testing and technical teamwork needed to hit that bullseye while decelerating the rover from 12,000 mph at the top of the atmosphere to less than two mph at touchdown, all in less than seven minutes.

If you're a more visually oriented person, the PBS Nova documentary, Looking for Life on Mars: NASA Perseverance Rover Mission, is up on YouTube. It's one of the better Nova documentaries I've seen and covers both the history of the mission and the landing.  

The Gulf Stream Is Slowing Down and That's Not Good

Recent research confirms something that climatologists have long been worrying about, namely that the Gulf Stream (more formally known as the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)) is slowing down. This could have major effects on climate in the Northern hemisphere. 

“The Gulf Stream System works like a giant conveyor belt, carrying warm surface water from the equator up north, and sending cold, low-salinity deep water back down south. It moves nearly 20 million cubic meters of water per second, almost a hundred times the Amazon flow,” explains Stefan Rahmstorf from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research PIK, initiator of the study published in Nature Geoscience. Previous studies by Rahmstorf and colleagues showed a slowdown of the ocean current of about 15 percent since the mid-20th century, linking this to human-caused global warming, but a robust picture about its long-term development has up to now been missing: This is what the researchers provide with their review of results of proxy data studies.

“For the first time, we have combined a range of previous studies and found they provide a consistent picture of the AMOC evolution over the past 1600 years,” says Rahmstorf. “The study results suggest that it has been relatively stable until the late 19th century. With the end of the little ice age in about 1850, the ocean currents began to decline, with a second, more drastic decline following since the mid-20th century.” Already the 2019 special report on the oceans of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with medium confidence ‘that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) has weakened relative to 1850–1900.’ “The new study provides further independent evidence for this conclusion and puts it into a longer-term paleoclimatic context,” Rahmstorf adds.

Gizmodo's Earther blog also has an article on the subject. 

“The AMOC is at risk of collapsing when a certain level of freshwater flow into the North Atlantic from increasing ice melt in Greenland is reached,” Johannes Lohmann, one of the authors of the study, said in an email. “These tipping points have been shown previously in climate models, where meltwater is very slowly introduced into the ocean. In reality, increases in meltwater from Greenland are accelerating and cannot be considered slow.”

The study modeled the increase in freshwater flowing. Lohmann said using “a large ensemble of simulations, we systematically varied the rate of change and the ocean’s initial conditions, and investigated how the collapse of the AMOC depended on these factors.”

The models ended up showing that in some cases with a more rapid rate of change, the AMOC actually collapsed before previous predictions indicated it would. If we stick to the cup of water analogy, previous studies essentially found a full cup of hot water needed to be added to the bucket for collapse, but the new findings show dumping in the water faster means you need less than a cup to trigger the collapse. The study shows that “the safe levels of global warming before such a collapse occurs may be smaller than previously thought, and may also be difficult to predict with certainty,” Lohmann said.

Finally, if you're not depressed enough, here's an article from The Guardian, via Nature's Nature Briefing newsletter. 

 

Some Space-Related News

There have been some interesting news stories this week related to space exploration. 

To start, there are several stories about SpaceX, which continues to test its Starship prototype. It looks like a high-altitude test flight and landing attempt is planned for today. As I type this just after 8:00 a.m.,, it's already being streamed live but if past practice is any indication, the launch won't happen until later this afternoon.

The next launch of SpaceX's Starlink satellites will probably happen tomorrow after Sunday's launch was aborted just before liftoff. So far, there's been no news from SpaceX about what caused the delay. The previous launch was successful but the booster failed to land on the barge, apparently due to a leak of hot gas that caused an engine failure. 

Blue Origin, the company founded by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, has announced that its New Glenn heavy-lift launcher won't fly until 2022 (at least). Ars Technica explores the reasons behinds the delay. It sounds like Bezos bit off more than he could chew.

Instead of crawl-walk-run, Bezos asked his engineering team to begin sprinting toward the launch pad. The engineering challenges of building such a large rocket are big enough. But because New Glenn is so expensive to build, the company needs to recover it from the outset. SpaceX enjoyed a learning curve with the Falcon 9, only successfully recovering the first stage on the rocket's 20th launch. Blue Origin engineers will be expected to bring New Glenn back safely on its very first mission.

The decision to skip the "walk" part of the company's development has cost Blue Origin dearly, sources say. The company's engineering teams, composed of smart and talented people, are struggling with mighty technical challenges. And there are only so many lessons that can be learned from New Shepard—the smaller rocket has 110,000 pounds of thrust, and New Glenn will have very nearly 4 million.

NASA's Perseverance rover successfully landed on Mars a couple of weeks ago and seems to be operating as planned. The main goal of the mission is to look for signs that there may have been life on Mars millions or billions of years ago. Gizmodo profiles Abigail Allwood, who designed one of the key instruments carried by the rover.  

Allwood’s brainchild, the Planetary Instrument for X-ray Lithochemistry (PIXL, for short), is what launched her onto the Mars 2020 ballot and is one of the keys to unlocking those answers. One of seven instruments aboard Perseverance, PIXL is an X-ray spectrometer outfitted for remote operation, meaning that it uses a precise laser to isolate bits of Martian rock the size of a grain of salt for analysis. PIXL can detect 26 different elements—a veritable alphabet of Martian soil make-up—as well as how much of each element there is. It can paint a picture of the conditions on the Red Planet at the time those rocks were formed.

Finally, although it hasn't been getting much press in Western media, China has been steadily expanding its crewed space program and will begin assembling its Tiangong space station this year.

Starting in 2021, the construction of the Tiangong orbital space station is expected to be complete in 2022 after eleven missions, including three launches of different modules, four launches of cargo vehicles and four crewed launches.

This step comes after a phased approach to human spaceflight development, beginning with the uncrewed test flights of a crewed space vehicle (Shenzhou-1 to Shenzhou-4). This was followed by the launch of a crewed mission (Shenzhou-5 with one taikonaut), the launch of a space crew (Shenzhou-6 with two taikonauts and Shenzhou-7 with three taikonauts), and the execution of an extravehicular activity (Shenzhou-7).

 

Dark Side of the Moon Trivia

The classic Pink Floyd album, Dark Side of the Moon, was released almost 50 years ago this week. I was a big Pink Floyd fan at the time, having seen them twice while I was in university, and got the album immediately. It took a while to grow on me as I preferred their earlier progressive material, but there was no denying its brilliance. It was also one of the best-sounding albums ever.

It was also a great live experience, as I found out when I saw them at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. A reasonably decent audience recording of that concert can be found on the internet if you know where to look. 

Rolling Stone has a list of ten things you probably didn't know about DSOTM. You could probably have won a rock trivia quiz with some of this information. Here's one bit I did know about.

10. Proceeds from the album helped fund Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

As if Dark Side of the Moon wasn’t enough of a pop cultural landmark in itself, the album’s success was also partly responsible for the existence of the brilliantly absurd 1975 film comedy Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The members of Pink Floyd often spent their downtime during the Dark Side sessions watching Monty Python’s Flying Circus on BBC2, so when the British comedy troupe ran into difficulty raising money for their first full-length feature film, the Floyd — now flush with cash from the sales of Dark Side — were more than happy to pony up 10 percent of the film’s initial £200,000 budget.

“There was no studio interference because there was no studio; none of them would give us any money,” Holy Grail director Terry Gilliam recalled in a 2002 interview with The Guardian. “This was at the time [British] income tax was running as high as 90 percent, so we turned to rock stars for finance. Elton John, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, they all had money, they knew our work and we seemed a good tax write-off. Except, of course, we weren’t. It was like The Producers.”

 

The Golden Light (Hymn)

I was listenning to the excellent NPR podcast, All Songs Considered, and heard a piece of music that stopped me in my tracks. It's a composition by the New York bassist, William Parker, a musician I know little about. I will have to rectify that. 

 

The pianist is Mary Yamamoto and the track is "The Golden Light (Hymn)". I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.

Free Web Help From DITA

There are several commercial tools that you can use to produce web help from DITA source files, but they either require a one-time purchase or a subscription. That may rule out their use in some situations, such as contractors on a limited budget or companies that don't want to use a cloud-based or subscription service. (I ran into that myself at the TMX Group). 

Convera is a free, open-source tool that can produce web help and other formats (HTML, PDF, EPUB) from DITA source files. It uses the free DITA Converter from XML Mind in place of the DITA Open Toolkit. 

I had a look at the manual in both PDF and web help formats and it looks quite good. 

Treating Disinformation Like a Disease

It's been noted here and elsewhere that disinformation and misinformation spreads like a disease. Now researchers and companies are beginning to treat it like a disease and to try to use disease fighting techniques to combat it. 

On Tuesday, Edelman launched what it calls the Disinformation Shield, a tool that uses artificial intelligence, real-time media monitoring of the open and dark webs, and social psychology to track, identify, and defuse the next viral meme or hideous conspiracy theory that brings a major corporation to its knees. The product draws on van der Linden’s inoculation theories to try to prevent the spread of disinformation, not unlike a public-health agency would do to prevent a highly transmissible and potentially dangerous virus from rampaging through a population.

Jim O’Leary, Edelman’s head of global corporate affairs, said in an interview that disinformation was the new battleground not just for elections and governments but for the business world. Just as most of corporate America awoke to the importance of cybersecurity six or seven years ago, companies large and small now realize they can’t ignore the global information crisis. “Disinformation is not ‘the next great threat,’” he says. “It’s here today. For our clients, this has entered the realm of not ‘if’ but ’when.’”

Google Maps for Android Now Supports Dark Mode

I am extremely happy to see that Google Maps for Android now supports dark mode. 

It's very well implemented and all the labels and even small text for street names are easily readable, much more so than in the standard light mode. 

You'll find the switch to turn it on under Settings > Theme in Maps.

Note that although the article says it should work on all Android devices, I think that you need Android 11, as it has theme support. My Samsung tablet is still running Andoird 10 and it doesn't seem to be available there.

TV and Movie Reviews - February 2021

Here are some short reviews of things I watched in February. My viewing pattern has been disrupted because my wife is still spending a lot of time taking care of her mother, so I haven't been watching a lot of shows that I know she wants to see.

Movies

• Turn It Up: The Story of the Electric Guitar. Nothing earth-shaking here but it was interesting seeing the evolution of the guitar over the last century. (Amazon Prime)
• Space Sweepers. A Korean science fiction film notable mostly for its special effects. The storyline is typically silly and unbelievable. (Netflix)
• Akhnaten by Philip Glass. This was the Metropolitan Opera's glorious 2019 production of Philip Glass' third Portrait opera, which I saw in the original theatre simulcast. It does work better on the big screen. I have reservations about the staging (jugglers!?) but the music is sublime and has moved me to tears on more than one occasion (Metropolitan Opera)
• Greenland. I am so tired of disaster movies in which families get separated and then find themselves again. I had some hope that this would be better than average, but it wasn't. Some good effects, but not enough of them. (Amazon Prime)
• Anthropocene. A movie based on the photographs of Edward Burtynsky showing how humanity is ravaging the planet. It makes a powerful statement but but would likely be more effective in a cinema. (TVO)

TV Shows

• The Expanse: Season 5. The Expanse is the best science fiction TV show yet and season 5 is the best season so far. The only thing wrong with season 5 is that is was too short. (Amazon Prime)
• Fake or Fortune: Similar to the Acorn TV show, Art Detectives, in this show two art historians try to determine whether works of art are what they seem. A bit overdone, but I enjoyed it. (TVO)