Can We Beat the Heat?

It's been unusually hot in North America this summer; the Pacific Northwest is currently suffering through the worst heatwave in their history, and many other parts of the continent are not far behind. It's not going to get any better in our lifetimes and will almost certainly get worse. 

In Rolling Stone, Jeff Goodell looks at how cities, where most of us live, are coping, using Phoenix as the prime example. It's grim reading. 

On a scorching day in downtown Phoenix, when the temperature soars to 115°F or higher, heat becomes a lethal force. Sunshine assaults you, forcing you to seek cover. The air feels solid, a hazy, ozone-soaked curtain of heat. You feel it radiating up from the parking lot through your shoes. Metal bus stops become convection ovens. Flights may be delayed at Sky Harbor International Airport because the planes can’t get enough lift in the thin, hot air. At City Hall, where the entrance to the building is emblazoned with a giant metallic emblem of the sun, workers eat lunch in the lobby rather than trek through the heat to nearby restaurants. On the outskirts of the city, power lines sag and buzz, overloaded with electrons as the demand for air conditioning soars and the entire grid is pushed to the limit. In an Arizona heat wave, electricity is not a convenience, it is a tool for survival.

As the mercury rises, people die. The homeless cook to death on hot sidewalks. Older folks, their bodies unable to cope with the metabolic stress of extreme heat, suffer heart attacks and strokes. Hikers collapse from dehydration. As the climate warms, heat waves are growing longer, hotter, and more frequent. Since the 1960s, the average number of annual heat waves in 50 major American cities has tripled. They are also becoming more deadly. Last year, there were 181 heat-related deaths in Arizona’s Maricopa County, nearly three times the number from four years earlier. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2004 and 2017, about a quarter of all weather-related deaths were caused by excessive heat, far more than other natural disasters such as hurricanes and tornadoes.

To go along with this article, here's a thread from Twitter that talks about the concept of "wet bulb temperature". 

Wet bulb takes a minute to grok because it's not about *heat,* per se. It's about the absorptive capacity of air. A wet bulb temperature in the mid-80s F can, and does, kill humans. Heat waves in the EU & Russia in 2003 and 2010 killed over a hundred thousand people at ~ 82 F.

I've posted before about Kim Stanley Robinson's latest novel, The Ministry for the Future. The novel opens with a heat wave in India that exceeds the web bulb temperature, and millions die. I wonder how long it will be before we wake up to hear that one the news?

 

 

Vaccinated!

Nancy and I got our second doses of COVID-19 vaccine yesterday (Pfizer, if anyone is wondering). Full immunity should kick in within a couple of weeks, and we will likely be spared the worst ravages of this horrible disease. We will, of course, still be taking whatever precautions are necessary and mandated by our healthcare professionals; no vaccine is perfect and being older, our immune systems are not as capable as they used to be. I expect we will be wearing masks for quite a while yet, at least when shopping indoors or when using public transit. 

I was struck today at how smoothly everything went. We got our shots at a community center in Scarborough and were in and out in just over half an hour. Everyone was friendly, professional, and well organized. Even the needle was (almost) painless. 

We are lucky that the pandemic happened when it did, and not twenty or thirty years earlier. We take it for granted now, but the internet and worldwide web made it much easier for scientists to share information, and then for governments to organize mass vaccination. Even little things, like the workers at the clinic using tablets to record check our identity and record our vaccination status into the provincial health system would have been much more cumbersome in 1990. 

Most importantly, development of the vaccine would have taken much, much longer. Fast, reliable, and cheap gene sequencing tools weren't available thirty years ago. The mRNA technology used in the most effective vaccines is only a few years old. 

I'll end this with a link to an article from Nature that looks at the rapid development of our COVID-19 vaccines and what made it possible. 

When scientists began seeking a vaccine for the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in early 2020, they were careful not to promise quick success. The fastest any vaccine had previously been developed, from viral sampling to approval, was four years, for mumps in the 1960s. To hope for one even by the summer of 2021 seemed highly optimistic.

But by the start of December, the developers of several vaccines had announced excellent results in large trials, with more showing promise. And on 2 December, a vaccine made by drug giant Pfizer with German biotech firm BioNTech, became the first fully-tested immunization to be approved for emergency use.

That speed of advance “challenges our whole paradigm of what is possible in vaccine development”, says Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at the University of Florida in Gainesville. It’s tempting to hope that other vaccines might now be made on a comparable timescale. These are sorely needed: diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis and pneumonia together kill millions of people a year, and researchers anticipate further lethal pandemics, too.

Go, science! 

 

2021 Locus Award Winners

The winners of the 2021 Locus Awards were announced this weekend. The awards are voted on by subscribers and readers of Locus Magazine and are considered on the genre's major awards. These were some of the winners.

Science Fiction Novel - Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)

Fantasy Novel - The City We Became, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US & UK)

Horror Novel - Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher)

Young Adult Novel - A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher  Argyll)

First Novel - Elatsoe, Darcie Little Badger (Levine Querido

Martha Wells also won the Nebula Award this year and both her and N. K. Jemisen are nominees for the Hugo Award. 

Featured Links - June 28, 2021

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

• Possible Link between ‘Oumuamua and Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. "If some UAP turn out to be extraterrestrial technology, they could be dropping sensors for a subsequent craft to tune into. What if ‘Oumuamua is such a craft?"
• Canadian telco monopolists run the show. Cory Doctorow doesn't like the Canadian government's internet policy, and I don't either. 
• Pilot Shows Off Entire Server Room That Exists In Passenger Aircraft Right Below Our Feet. There is some serious computing hardware running that airplane.
• See the Sights Along Highway 638. This looks like a beautiful drive. I do miss Northern Ontario.
• The Science Behind Grilling the Perfect Steak. "Want to learn how cooking transforms beef’s flavor? Meat scientists have the answers."
• 9/11 and 1/6. "How an American nightmare becomes real."
• Fandom superiority complex. "Every year, we get reminders about how fandom at its worst can be exclusionary and forbidden to newcomers. That's something that should change."

Photo of the Week - June 27, 2021

I know daisies are pretty common, but I like them.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 80 mm., F4.5, 1/150 second at ISO 160

Things I Didn't Know the Pixel Could Do

I've had my Google Pixel 4a phone for more than half a year now, and for the most part I'm quite happy with it. It's still very responsive with good battery life and the camera is excellent. I also like that Google provides prompt monthly updates and frequent "feature drop" updates. 

I am still finding things about the phone that I didn't know it could do, even after using it daily for nine months. This article is a good example. It takes a deep dive into the Overview screen, which you can use to switch between open apps. As the article points out, it has many other features, most of which aren't obvious. 

For example, I didn't know that you could use it to send an image to Google Lens. You can also use the Overview screen to extract images or text and share them with other apps. 

If you have a Pixel phone, take a look at the article. You may find some features you didn't know about. 

Draft IPCC Reporty Says Climate Change Impacts Will Be Devastating

A draft of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been seen by French news agency AFP, and it says that the impacts of climate change will be devastating and will be felt sooner than previously thought. 

Climate change is already taking a toll on the global economy, and forecasts predict worse to come by mid-century, according to a draft report by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), seen exclusively by AFP.

Here are some of the report's findings on economic impacts:

- Global -

Climate-boosted extreme weather events -- cyclones, droughts, flooding -- have already sapped both short- and long-term economic growth, especially in developing countries.

- Average global economic damage due to floods over the last several decades has averaged $50 billion (42 billion euros) to $350 billion annually, depending on methods of calculation

- In a worst-case scenario, if Earth's temperature rises four degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, global GDP could decline 10 to 23 percent compared to a world without warming

- Expected damages for 136 major coastal cities were calculated at between $1.6 trillion and $3.2 trillion by 2050 in a worst-case scenario without adaptation

- Storm surges enhanced by sea level rise threaten more than 40 percent of coastal nuclear power plants worldwide

- Nearly 14 percent of the world's sandy beaches face severe erosion by 2050 under a moderate greenhouse gas emissions scenario

The report will not be released officially until next Februrary but I expect to see more about it over the coming months. It seems both comprehensive and extremely worrying. 

The Troubled Flight of STS-27

The disastrous 2003 flight of the Space Shuttle Columbia is well known and eventually led to the demise of the Shuttle program. I knew that other missions had suffered tile damage from debris falling off the solid rocket boosters or external tank, but I had not heard of what happened to STS-27. That's not surprising, because it was a secret military mission. 

AmericaSpace published an article about it in 2018, which I somehow missed hearing about it. In a nutshell, debris came off one of the SRBs and struck the underside of the orbiter. The astronauts saw the damage during the mission and we're convinced they would not survive re-entry. It's a sobering and scary story. 

Early the next day, 3 December 1988, the crew awoke to worrying news. A review of launch video showed a piece of debris—probably a bit of ablative insulator—breaking away from the nose of one of the Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs) around 85 seconds after liftoff and hitting Atlantis’ fragile Thermal Protection System (TPS). If the heat shield was damaged, it could spell disaster during the fiery return to Earth and Gibson’s was instructed to use RMS cameras to acquire imagery. With mounting horror, the camera revealed white streaks of damage along the shuttle’s fuselage, evidence that the outer black coating had been stripped away by a kinetic impact. “We could see that at least one tile had been completely blasted from the fuselage,” Mullane wrote. “The white streaking grew thicker and faded aft beyond the view of the camera. It appeared that hundreds of tiles had been damaged and the scars extended outboard toward the carbon composite panels on the leading edge of the wing.”

Gibson reported the extent of the damage to flight controllers, but the response came back that the images did not look to represent a significant breach of the TPS. Worse, the astronauts’ downlinked data was encrypted for security and its slowness meant that the images received on the ground were of low quality. Flight controllers were convinced from the grainy images that the damage was not severe and that the crew were mistakenly seeing damage in conditions of poor lighting. For his part, Gibson was furious and certain that Atlantis had sustained severe damage. He told his crew to enjoy the final days of the flight. “No use dying all tensed-up,” he said.

There's a picture of the damage to the orbiter's underside in this Wikipedia article. They were very lucky to make it back in one piece.

 

Philip Glass and Circus Days and Nights

Earlier this month, I watched a new opera by Philip Glass, streamed live from the Malmö Opera in Sweden. Called Circus Days and Nights, it's a remarkable combination of opera and circus performance. Glass has used circus motifs in his operas before, r example, jugglers in recent performances of Satyagraha and Akhnaten, but in this case, the circus is the opera. 

The LA Times has published an article that looks at the opera and how it came to be and puts it into the wider context of Glass's career. 

The circus tinge to Glass’ score, which is written for a small ensemble and a dramatic accordionist, Minna Weulander, brings to mind the composer’s early studies with French composer Darius Milhaud, and especially Milhaud’s popular surrealist Cocteau ballet score, “Le Boeuf sur le Toit” (The Ox on the Roof). The Paris premiere featured circus clowns.

Glass also notably references his operatic start. Like “Einstein on the Beach,” an opera in the form of cycles, there is no real drama, just, in this case, a deepening insight into the meaning of the circus and its representation of life as repeating cycles. The opera ends where it begins, with the opening lines. Just as the circus pulls up tent, moves on and begins again.

“The traveling circus is always in motion, even when it seems to be standing still,” is another of Lax’s memorable lines that finds its way into Hwang’s libretto. The opposite is also true with Glass’ late-style music. There are parts of the new score that sound remarkably fresh, and there are patches of note-spinning, the noodling he has done a million times.

This is no place to dismiss the noodling, as it too often has been dismissed. It accompanies circus acts and operates on the level of necessary trust and love. It trusts that music need distract neither performer in a great acrobatic or juggling act nor the audience. Everyone and everything in a circus is useful and necessary.

I enjoyed Circus Days and Nights. Musically, it's not Glass's best work but as a piece of musical theatre, it's immensely entertaining. I expect it to be very popular if it ever gets performed in North America. 

A Great Lede

In journalism, a lede is "the opening sentence or paragraph of a news article, summarizing the most important aspects of the story." (Oxford Languages). Over the weekend, I came across a great one in this article from the New York Times.

PALERMO, Italy — Years after he lost his dream job in the Vatican’s Latin department, left the priesthood, came out as gay, went public with sensational accounts of rampant sex among clergy in Rome and reinvented himself as a gay rights activist and journalist with a column in Latin, Francesco Lepore returned to the Vatican to discuss a new gig.

As well as providing information, a good lede should make you want to read the rest of the story. It sure did for me.  

Toronto Symphony Orchestra 2021/22 Season

I had a phone call from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra last week, trying to get me to subscribe to a concert package or to donate. Unfortunately, I can't afford that, though I will consider going to some of the concerts if I can get tickets at a reasonable price. 

The 2021/22 season has been announced and it looks promising. They are doing many Canadian and world premieres and more new music as well as pieces from the standard repertoire. I noted two concerts in particular that I'd be interested in. One has Copland's Appalachian Spring. (I don't know if it will be the chamber orchestra version or the full symphonic suite. I prefer the former, but I would go anyway). The other is Stravinsky's Firebird. 

The full program is up on their website if you want to check it out.

 

Featured Links - June 21, 2021

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

• Plastics in the Deep Time Record. "A million years from now, the 21st century will likely be remembered for plastic more than anything else."
• TOP 20 Inventions That CHANGED Music (YouTube video). How tech has changed how we make and listen to music. 
• The Best Adobe Photoshop Alternatives in 2021. Photoshop is big, complicated, and expensive. There are alternatives.
• The Delta Variant Could Create “Two Americas” Of COVID, Experts Warn. "If you are fully vaccinated, you are most likely to be safe. But in parts of the US where few people have gotten COVID vaccine shots, the Delta variant could trigger renewed deadly surges."
• How the U.S. Made Progress on Climate Change Without Ever Passing a Bill. 'A “green vortex” is saving America’s climate future.' 
• Plastics in the Deep Time Record. "A million years from now, the 21st century will likely be remembered for plastic more than anything else."

Photo of the Week - June 20, 2021

Here's a picture of the evening sky in Scarborough. I was captivated by the blue glow in the post-sunset sky. 

This was taken with my Pixel 4a using the Hedge Camera app, which is a fork of the Open Camera app. (Open Camera is a good app, but it doesn't like my Pixel). I used it because it has manual exposure controls that the Google Camera app lacks, and the Google Camera tends to drastically overexpose in low-light settings. I set the exposure compensation to about -3 and it probably should have been about -4, but it's still a nice shot. 

I'll probably write a review of Hedge Camera once I figure out more of its settings – the interface is a bit ... quirky. 

Wiggle Words on Climate Change

The G7 summit wrapped up in Cornwall earier this week, with the leaders professing the need for action on climate change. But their statement, when looked at closely, is just smoke and mirrors, signifying nothing, as Shakespeare so aptly put it four hundred years ago. It's full of wiggle words, letting them claim progress when nothing significant is happening.

The G7 chose [checks notes] almost none of them. Instead, there were commitments to “reaffirm” hewing to the Paris Agreement, “rapidly scale-up technologies and policies that further accelerate the transition away from unabated coal capacity,” and acknowledge that decarbonizing transportation “will require dramatically increasing the pace of the global decarbonization of the road transport sector throughout the 2020s.” Notice the lack of percentages, timelines, dollar amounts, or anything resembling concrete steps. Admittedly, the G7 communique is but one document and each country’s commitment to the Paris Agreement has more details as do national budgets and other policy documents. But those details do not include, for example, when fossil fuel subsidies or exploration will end, something basically every available line of research has indicated needs to happen to avoid a climate meltdown.

 

Analyzing COVID-19 Misinformation Across Regions

Since the beginning of the pandemic,  researchers at Princeton University started collecting and analyzing misinformation about COVID-19 and the pandemic from around the world. Understanding regional trends and looking at how misinformation spread across regions will help to combat false narratives. 

Most of these stories appear to have been efforts to shape political debates. But a myriad of motivations likely prompted the misinformation we found—including people seeking ideological ends, political gain, and financial profit. An overwhelming majority—80 percent of the stories—were spread by individuals on social media such as Facebook and Twitter, while 17 percent were spread by media outlets and political figures.

It is often suggested that all politics is local; so is misinformation. Contrary to what one might expect from the globalized information environment, the salient themes in pandemic-related false narratives varied significantly across regions and countries; localized false narratives prevailed over global ones. When generating misinformation, social media users seemed to absorb a common set of COVID-19 background conditions and use them to falsify specific narratives to reflect local and regional realities.

 

Colonizing the Galaxy

It's a trope of modern science fiction that you need faster-than-light travel of some sort to establish an interstellar empire. That may not be the case, according to a recent study that used a computer simulation to model how a civilization could expand through an entire galaxy. 

The researchers found that an entire galaxy could be colonized in a billion years given expansion at very conservative sub-light speeds. That may sound like an immense length of time, but it's only a few percent of the age of the galaxy.

A simulation produced by the team shows the process at work, as a lone technological civilization, living in a hypothetical Milky Way-like galaxy, begins the process of galactic expansion. Grey dots in the visualization represent unsettled stars, magenta spheres represent settled stars, and the white cubes are starships in transit. The computer code and the mathematical analysis for this was project were written at the University of Rochester by Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback. Astronomer Adam Frank from the University of Rochester also participated in the study.

Things start off slow in the simulation, but the civilization’s rate of spread really picks up once the power of exponential growth kicks in. But that’s only part of the story; the expansion rate is heavily influenced by the increased density of stars near the galactic center and a patient policy, in which the settlers wait for the stars to come to them, a result of the galaxy spinning on its axis.

The whole process, in which the entire inner galaxy is settled, takes one billion years. That sounds like a long time, but it’s only somewhere between 7% and 9% the total age of the Milky Way galaxy.

Given that the parameters used in the simulation were extremely conservative, it's likely that it wouldn't take anywhere near a billion years. I can point to several science fiction stories that postulate slower-than-light interstellar civilizations with starships operating at speeds anywhere from .1c to near relativisitic velocities. For example, take a look at Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space series or Vernor Vinge's A Deepness on the Sky.  

I think the key point raised by the study is "Where are they?". Given that a technological civilization could expand into a significant portion of the galaxy in as little as a few million years, the galaxy could be littered with their remains, if not with active, thriving civilizations. 

How America Polarized

It's clear that the United States (and Canada, to a lesser degree) has become socially and politically polarized. I've commented about this before and will likely do so again. It's a sad and very dangerous situation.

I've been catching up on some older articles that I saved in Pocket and just read "How America Polarized" from arcdigital.media. Unfortunately, the link to the original article by Kevin Dorst is no longer working*. However, after some googling, I found this article, "How We Polarized" on his blog. It seems to be an earlier version of the arcdigial article with much of the same information in a more condensed form. 

The article has three main sections:

• In what sense have we "polarized"?
• Why do societies polarize?
• What has changed?

Dorst is a professor of philosophy, so he knows what he's talking about, but he's also one of the rare academics who can write clearly for a lay audience. This, and the other articles on his blog, are worth reading.

*If anyone can find the link to the original arcdigital article I mentioned above, please post it in the comments. 

 

SFF and Toxic Fandom

Science ficiton and fantasy fandom used to be something of a safe space for nerds, at least when I started getting involved in the mid-1980s. Yes, there were different subfandoms – primarily literary, Trek, and anime – but there was some overlap, and generally other interests were tolerated. 

That has changed. The toxic polarization that's become prevalent in the media and society in general has seeped into the world of fandom. In "Qanon for nerds": Fandom isn't immune to online radicalization Andrew Liptak looks at how SFF fancom has been polluted by the toxic aspects of modern culture. 

At their core, fans are passionate about the things that they love. There’s a bit of a truism within the Star Wars fan community: we can’t help but hate Star Wars. Long-term fans hated that Lucas went back and messed with the original trilogy in 1997 for the Special Editions. The New Jedi Order killed off Chewbacca and ruined Star Wars completely — and earned author R.A. Salvatore death threats. They hated Jar Jar Binks and the wonky and clumsy politics of The Phantom Menace. Lucas’s animated Clone Wars and pilot film was terrible and full of juvenile, irritating characters.

That mentality certainly extends beyond Star Wars. In their book, Superfandom: How Our Obsessions Are Changing What We Buy and Who We Are, Zoe Fraade-Blanar and Aaron M. Glazer note that there’s been a rise in what they call “Commercial Fandom” as companies and brands such as Polaroid, Old Spice or Coca-Cola have leaned into nostalgia and a sense of shared experience to market their products — something we’ve seen as studios work feverishly to resurrect old movie franchises for new audiences, like Blade Runner, The Terminator, Alien, Ghostbusters, Planet of the Apes, King Kong, Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, and others. Some of those reboots, remakes, sidequels, and continuations have wildly succeeded: Planet of the Apes, while quietly successful, has earned acclaim for its take on the story concept. The same can be said for the likes of the SCI Fi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica, and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy. In other cases, like The Phantom Menace, The Terminator or Alien, the results have been more mixed: films that seriously fall short of their originating entries.

Fans took notice, and with the rise of social media, it’s easy for that collective sense of dismay to spread like wildfire. When Sony announced that it was rebooting the Ghostbusters franchise with Paul Feig and an all-female cast, the backlash was fairly immediate from fans who felt that it would replace the franchise that they already loved, but also from fans who had internalized outdated and harmful ideas about gender and representation.

The article focuses mostly on media fandom, but what he discusses applies equally to literary SFF fandom (consider the Sad Puppies and Hugo Awards controversy of a few years ago as just one example). 

BTW, Liptak publishes a weekly newsletter called Transfer Orbit, which I recommend highly. There's both a free and paid version. 

Featured Links - June 14, 2021

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

• Revolutionary ‘Spaceplate’ Could Eliminate Traditional Camera Lenses. It will probably be some time before we see this in consumer tech, but it sounds promising. 
• Mega-Constellations [Like Starlink] Will Begin This Process As an Uncontrolled Experiment. Enough mass is being put into orbit that it is a significant percentage of the mass that already falls from space and burns up in the atmosphere.
• The [AI]nformation battlespace. "Artificial intelligence is coming to the battlefield: how will we prepare?"
• The Culture War: Iain M. Banks Billionaire Fans. "Why Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Love Iain M. Banks anarcho-communist space opera."
• What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About The Mysteries of Smell. "The virus’s strangest symptom has opened new doors to understanding our most neglected sense."
• The Downside to Life in a Supertall Tower: Leaks, Creaks, Breaks. "432 Park, one of the wealthiest addresses in the world, faces some significant design problems, and other luxury high-rises may share its fate." I have absolutely no sympathy for these people. 

Photo of the Week - June 13, 2021

Some petunias from our yard. This was taken with the X-S10 using the Flower scene mode. It seems to work well. 

 

Ed Yong Wins a Pulitzer

Ed Yong, whose articles for The Atlantic were essential reading for anyone following the course of the pandemic, has won a well-deserved Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. 

Yong anticipated the course of the pandemic, clarified its dangers, and illuminated the American government’s disastrous failure to curb it. “Despite months of advance warning as the virus spread in other countries, when America was finally tested by COVID-19, it failed,” he wrote in March 2020. (That story, “How the Pandemic Will End,” is one of the most-read pieces in Atlantic history.)

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

I'm glad to see I was right. 

Dissecting Corporate Garbage Speak

If you've worked in a corporate job, especially in a startup or tech company, you've probably heard phrases like "key learnings", "future-proof", or "omnichannel". You probably were able to figure out what they meant, but why should you have to when there were clearly simpler, more direct alternatives. 

Here's a long article from Vulture.com that looks at corporate "garbage speak" in detail, why it exists, and how we can fix it.  (Hiring more technical writers would be a good start.)

I worked at various start-ups for eight years beginning in 2010, when I was in my early 20s. Then I quit and went freelance for a while. A year later, I returned to office life, this time at a different start-up. During my gap year, I had missed and yearned for a bunch of things, like health care and free knockoff Post-its and luxurious people-watching opportunities. (In 2016, I saw a co-worker pour herself a bowl of cornflakes, add milk, and microwave it for 90 seconds. I’ll think about this until the day I die.) One thing I did not miss about office life was the language. The language warped and mutated at a dizzying rate, so it was no surprise that a new term of art had emerged during the year I spent between jobs. The term was parallel path, and I first heard it in this sentence: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you parallel-path two versions?”

Translated, this means: “We’re waiting on specs for the San Francisco installation. Can you make two versions?” In other words, to “parallel-path” is to do two things at once. That’s all. I thought there was something gorgeously and inadvertently candid about the phrase’s assumption that a person would ever not be doing more than one thing at a time in an office — its denial that the whole point of having an office job is to multitask ineffectively instead of single-tasking effectively. Why invent a term for what people were already forced to do? It was, in its fakery and puffery and lack of a reason to exist, the perfect corporate neologism.

The expected response to the above question would be something like “Great, I’ll go ahead and parallel-path that and route it back to you.” An equally acceptable response would be “Yes” or a simple nod. But the point of these phrases is to fill space. No matter where I’ve worked, it has always been obvious that if everyone agreed to use language in the way that it is normally used, which is to communicate, the workday would be two hours shorter.

COVID 'Lab Leak' Debate Could Damage Science - Updated

Since the beginning of the pandemic there have been rumours and suggestions that a leak at a Chinese biotechnology lab in Wuham was the real source of the pandemic. So far, this theory is unsubstantiated, as much as a theory can be in the current political climate. 

But it persists, and as this a5rticle from Nature points out, it could have damaging effects on how research into COVID and other emerging diseases is conducted.  

Calls to investigate Chinese laboratories have reached a fever pitch in the United States, as Republican leaders allege that the coronavirus causing the pandemic was leaked from one, and as some scientists argue that this ‘lab leak’ hypothesis requires a thorough, independent inquiry. But for many researchers, the tone of the growing demands is unsettling. They say the volatility of the debate could thwart efforts to study the virus’s origins.

Global-health researchers also warn that the growing demands are exacerbating tensions between the United States and China ahead of crucial meetings at which world leaders will make high-level decisions about how to curb the pandemic and prepare for future health emergencies. At the World Health Assembly this week, for example, health officials from nearly 200 countries are discussing strategies including ways to ramp up vaccine manufacturing and to reform the World Health Organization (WHO). But a US–China divide will make consensus on these issues harder to reach, says David Fidler, a global-health researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank in Washington DC. “If there’s some turning down of the geopolitical heat between these two great powers, we could create some space to perhaps do some of the things that we need to do,” he says.

Others worry that the rhetoric around an alleged lab leak has grown so toxic that it’s fuelling online bullying of scientists and anti-Asian harassment in the United States, as well as offending researchers and authorities in China whose cooperation is needed.

Update: Nature just published another article that goes into detail about what scientists know about the origins of COVID-19 and the lab-leak theory. Like the first article, it's well written and solidly researched. 

 

What We've Learned From Six Months of COVID Vaccinations

It's been about six months since COVID vaccinations started being widely administered around the world. In that time, about 1.7 billion doses have been administered. This article from Nature summarizes what we've learned about the vaccines and their effectiveness in that times. As usual with Nature articles, it's solidly researched and worth the time to read. 

“It’s absolutely astonishing that this has happened in such a short time — to me, it’s equivalent to putting a person on the Moon,” says paediatric infectious-disease specialist Cody Meissner at Tufts University School of Medicine and Tufts Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. “This is going to change vaccinology forever.”

Nature looks at what lessons have emerged during the first six months of COVID-19 vaccinations, as well as what questions still linger. Overall, the vaccine results have been extremely promising — even better than many had hoped — but researchers have concerns about emerging variants and the potential for immune responses to wane.

SpaceX Has Another Competitor

It looks like SpaceX has another competitor in the satellite launch business. Relativity Space has announced plans to build a fully reusable two-stage launcher that will compete directly against SpaceX's Falcon 9 booster. Like New Zealand's smaller RocketLabs launcher, the Relativity Space vehicle will be 3D printed. 

The company, based in Long Beach, California, revealed plans for the new rocket at the same time it announced the closure of a $650 million Series E funding round led by Fidelity. Other investors in the funding round included venture capital and equity firms, billionaire Mark Cuban, and actor Jared Leto.

The new funding round comes after Relativity announced a $500 million fundraising last November. The money will allow the company to move forward with development of the Terran R, Relativity said in a statement.

Resembling a smaller version of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket, the Terran R will stand 216 feet (66 meters) tall and measure 16 feet (5 meters) in diameter. It should be ready for launch in 2024, Relativity said.

The next-generation Terran R rocket will eventually offer commercial and government customers a “point-to-point space freighter capable of missions between the Earth, moon and Mars,” Relativity said.

The Terran R follows the development of Relativity’s Terran 1 rocket, an expendable launcher sized to place small satellites into orbit. Relativity says the Terran 1 rocket is scheduled for launch at the end of this year from Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

The Terran 1 will be capable of launching a payload of approximately 2,750 pounds (1,250 kilograms) into a low-altitude orbit.

I am surprised that they were able to get that much funding, considering that they have yet to launch a rocket. I hope that they are successful.. Competition will keep SpaceX from getting too smug.  

2020 Nebula Award Winners

SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) announced the winners of the 2020 Nebula Awards at a virtual ceremony Saturday evening. The winners of the fiction awards were:

• Best Novel: Network Effect, Martha Wells (Tordotcom)
• Best Novella: Ring Shout, P. Djèlí Clark (Tordotcom)
• Best Novelette: “Two Truths and a Lie”, Sarah Pinsker (Tor.com) 
• Best Short Story: “Open House on Haunted Hill”, John Wiswell (Diabolical Plots)  

Featured Links - June 7, 2021

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

• Canon Hails Groundbreaking 1-Megapixel SPAD Image Sensor As "The Eye of the Future". It may sound pretty low-res but SPAD sensors have virtually no noise.  
• Apple previews powerful software updates designed for people with disabilities. Apple is doing some really good work here to support people with viusal and aural disabilities. 
• oxTypewriter. "Welcome to the Wonderful World of Typewriters". 
• 7 Android and iPhone Apps to Help Planting a New Garden. "These apps will elp you in every aspect of gardening from planting to harvesting."
• English is the language of science — but precision is tough as a non-native speaker. "Scientists with a different first language could benefit from mentoring and support to help them communicate their research clearly for global audiences, argues Roey Elnathan."
• Word's Spellchecker Doesn't Flag (Continued) A handy list of words to be careful with because Word's spellchecker won't catch them.

Photo of the Week - June 6,. 2021

The new entrance to the TTC subway from Union Station, taken with my Pixel 4a. I am very glad to see this as the old entrance was a nightmare, especially when it was raining or in the winter, when it could take five or ten minutes to get through the crowd. 

 

The TV Adaptation of The Peripheral Is Shooting

 I've made no secret here about how much I enjoyed William Gibson's novel, The Peripheral, which I consider to be the best science fiction novel of the last decade. So I was glad to see this article about the television adaptation being produced by Amazon Prime Video. It is currently shooting in London, where about half of the story is set, and will being filming in Marshall, NC in the fall. 

MARSHALL - The county seat will serve as a filming location for an upcoming Amazon Prime Video show, the show's location manager announced during May 17's Marshall Town Board of Aldermen monthly meeting. 

The show, "The Peripheral," is based on William Gibson's 2015  futuristic science fiction novel of the same name.

Bass Hampton, the location manager for the project, debriefed members of the board on the show's plans. Hampton has also served as location manager for films such as "Get Out" and "The Conjuring," according to his IMDB page. 

Hampton said he started scouting locations for the show about a year ago.

... 

According to Hampton, the show is currently filming in London. The crew has already built the ReClaim Madison storefront, just one of the few locations to be used in the production, on its stage.

Reproducing One of the First Personal Computers

If you're of a certain age, and have a technical bent, you may remember the KENBAK-1, arguably the first commercial personal computer. My talented cousin, Michael Gardi, has added a 2:5 scale reproduction of the KENBAK-1 to his stable of early computer reproductions. 

On his article on the Hackaday site, he says:

So with all of this rightly deserved KENBAK-1 love out there, why am I creating yet another KENBAK-1 emulator?  The flip answer might be that I want to and I can, but that's not all of it. While all of the wonderful reproductions out there emulate the original to a tee and give a true KENBAK-1 experience, and even have some addition features like built in programs, at the end of the day you are still in many cases hand translating machine instructions and keying them in via the front panel buttons one step at a time.  And when something goes wrong, while you can step through your program one instruction at a time you only have visibility into one thing at a time on the front panel display, the instruction or a memory/register address. It gets old pretty fast. 

Where I think I can add some value is to integrate the machine code Emulator with an Assembler and a Debugger.  You will still be able to fire up my KENBAK-2/5 console to key and run your programs in native mode via the front panel. In addition you will be able to open an integrated development environment, enter in a KENBAK-1 program via assembly language and run said program using the actual console.  Similarly you will be able to step through your assembly code, set break points, and observe memory and register contents as you do. 

My other motivation for this project is that I really wanted to do a deep dive on this machine. When I looked at the Programming Reference Manual I was very impressed with the machine architecture and the instruction set. I mean an Indirect Indexed addressing mode on a machine built with logic chips. So cool.  

Some Movie Streeming Sites

Here are links to some movie streaming sites that are free although there may be intermittent ads during the films. As usual with sites like this, some content may not be available in Canada. Sites were garnered from this article, which lists more, but most don't work in Canada.

• Crackle: Movies and TV shows. "Boasting a solid array of syndicated content and original productions, Crackle is a must for any film buff. Its rotating selection varies, but you'll find quality movies across genres here."
• Popcornflix: Similar to Crackle. "Flicks are segmented into categories such as popularity, genre, new arrivals, and staff picks, making Popcornflix easy to use. With a beefy lineup and excellent navigation, Popcornflix is an awesome choice for free, legal movie streaming."
• Classic Cinema Online: "As the name suggests, Classic Cinema Online focuses on older content. Even its website aesthetic captures a decidedly retro vibe, using a backdrop of red theater curtains. You can walk through the decades here with films from the 1930s to the 1960s. There are even some silent films on offer, if you're interested in those."

Movie and TV Reviews - May 2021

Here are some short reviews of things I watched in May. It's baseball season, so there won't be as much as usual.

Movies

• Tenet: This was supposed to be the big summer blockbuster of 2020, but the pandemic got in the way. I'm not sure how much of a hit it would have been. It's an easy movie to watch as long as you don't expect anything to make any sense. Nolan needs to pay less attention to his big set pieces and more to fashioning a coherent storyline that normal people can understand in less than three viewings.
• Army of the Dead: The first third is great, the second third OK, but it falls apart in the last third. Another action flick that could have been great if more attention had been paid to the storyline. Yes, I know it's a zombie movie, but still. (Netflix)

TV Shows

• Coast Australia/Coast New Zealand: I enjoyed these series as they showed a part of the world I don't know much about and likely will never visit. It concentrates on the people living along the coasts and not so much on the scenery. (Knowledge Network)
• Midsomer Murders - Season 22: Only two episodes available until the fall, unfortunately. Still our favourite British mystery show. (Acorn TV)
• For the Love of Dogs: A series featuring a British vet who specializes in treating especially sick or broken dogs. A bit cute but it's nice to see how much care and love the animals are getting. (CBC Gem)
• Money Explained: A short series explaining the ins and outs of various financial topics. I think it's aimed at high-school students but I still learned a few things. The episode on credit cards is particularly good. (Netflix)
• Mon Sain-Michel: Resistance Through the Ages: Mont Saint-Michel is on my bucket list of places I'd like to visit but I never knew much about it's history or gave much thought to how it was built, which are all covered in this documentary. (Knowledge Network)