Photo of the Week - October 31, 2021

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

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

Watch the Skies!

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

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

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

48 New Science Fiction and Fantasy Books Coming in November

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

There are several other books that look interesting.

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

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

Some Photography Links - October 29, 2021

Here are some links about cameras and photography.

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

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

Charles Stross, Rule 34, and AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Language of Climate Change According To the OED

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

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

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

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

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

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

A SETI False Alarm

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

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

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

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

More On Best By Dates For Food

I was brought up not to waste food. At the time I was growing up, we didn't have Best By dates on food packages, so judging whether something was unfit to eat was largely a matter of common sense and sometimes trial and error. Now that we have Best By dates, we have a different problem – throwing out food that's still quite edible because it's past the date on the packaging. 

The Healthy Gem website has published a guide to foods that are safe to eat past their Best By dates. It includes advices on pasta, eggs, dairy products, meat, spices and other foods that you likely have in your kitchen. 

Most people believe that the date printed on the package is the deadline to throw it out. But according to Paul VanLandingham, member of Food and Beverage Management of Johnson & Wales University, “best by” dates refer to food quality, not safety. So you can safely eat more foods beyond their expiration dates.

If the printed dates don’t determine food safety, how do you know when to clean out your fridge? Here, we’ll go over the real expiration dates for raw meat, spices, cooking oils, and dairy products based on information provided by food safety experts.

For information about more foods, you can look at the Eat By Date webiste, which I've posted about before. 

I would like to see food packaging show a second "Eat By" date, which would show a date by which food would be safe to eat, as well as the current Best By date.  

Featured Links - October 25, 2021

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

• How to Compare Documents in Google Docs. "If you're a regular Google Docs user, there's likely to be a time when you need to compare two documents. Here's how you can do just that."
• VS Code in the Web. A very nice, lightweight, web-based version of Microsoft's Visual Studio code editor. 
• The Muslimness of Dune: A Close Reading of “Appendix II: The Religion of Dune”. A long, detailed, and scholarly look at some of Herbert's influences.
• How SpaceX ignited a new Raptor engine on Starship without an explosion. Vacuum-rated engines can explode if started at sea level, so how did SpaceX get theirs to work without blowing up?
• Observations of Exploding Star in ‘Real Time’ Deemed a Major Step Towards Predicting Supernovas. "Astronomers are calling it the 'Rosetta Stone of supernovas,' as it could lead to an early warning system for doomed stars."
• I went inside the secret airplane compartment where flight attendants sleep on long-haul flights and was shocked by its size. "Flight attendants don't enjoy the same luxury that some of their passengers do on long-haul flights. Secret compartments in the back of airplanes have bunks for flight attendants to rest."

Photo of the Week - October 24, 2021

A sunset with swans on Frenchman's Bay.

Fuji XS-10 with 16-80  mm. F4, F8 @ 43 mm., 1/340 sec., ISO 400, Velvia film simulation

 

A New Live Version of A Love Supreme

Today we have a wonderful and unexpected treat – a hitherto unknown live recording of the full "A Love Supreme" suite with Pharoah Sanders playing with Coltrane. Rolling Stone has a review.

It’s telling that some of the most memorable moments on the new John Coltrane archival release, A Love Supreme: Live in Seattle, don’t actually include John Coltrane. The original Love Supreme, the saxophonist’s legendary album-length suite of divine praise, featured his rightfully named classic quartet, with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones; this version, recorded onstage 10 months later, in October 1965, and previously unknown even to hardcore fans, augments that band with three additional players: saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Carlos Ward, both of whom double on percussion, and second bassist Donald Rafael Garrett. The studio version will always be definitive, but there’s something magical and almost transgressive about hearing a loose and rowdy septet power through the four movements of this now-canonical work.

The recording isn't perfect - the drums are too loud (RS describes them as thunderous), but the playing is spectacular. If you just want to get a taste of it, listen to "Part IV, Psalm". The beauty will make you weep.

YouTube Music has the whole album. 

Android 12 First Impressions

One of the best things about Google's Pixel phones is getting prompt updates. Today was the official release of Android 12 (and new Pixel phones), and I updated my phone to the new version of Android this evening. 

The update took a bit more than half an hour and proceeded with no issues. When the phone rebooted I had my familiar home screen layout with only a couple of minor changes. I did have to wait a bit for my weather channel and Google Fit widgets to come back to life but they eventually did. 

Google has been hyping the new "Material You" design. My reaction is generally "meh". There's a new theming engine that picks up the colours from your wallpaper and new icon designs for things like the Phone and Contacts apps. I use a pure black background as my wallpaper so Google picked light grey accent colour on darker gray for its colours, which was kind of ugly and hard to read. I changed the accent colour to light green instead. I'd prefer a wider choice of colours but I can live with it.

Initially, the biggest change I noticed was with the Quick Settings screen. Rather than icons, the new design uses oval buttons with small icons and text. I prefer the old layout as it gets more on-screen in a smaller space. The addition of device controls to Quick Settings is a nice change. To go along with that, long-pressing the power off button brings up a panel with just four choices: Emergency, Lockdownm, Power Off, and Restart. 

There are some major changes to how notifications are handled. I haven't looked at them in detail yet, but what I've seen so far seems logical. 

It's hard to be sure but performance seems to be a little zippier and my battery life may be somewhat better. Also, I seem to have a few GB more of storage than I did before the update. 

I'm not going to go into more detail on new features. There are many easy-to-find articles on the web for that. Also, some of the new features are only available on the new Pixel 6 phones.

So to wrap up, I'm happy with the upgrade, but it's not life-changing. 

I Won't Be Buying a Canon Printer

Our 10-year-old Epson Artisan inkjet printer has finally reached the end of its life, at least as a printer. I had the printer cleaned at a local shop a few months ago, but a few weeks after that, the printing went wonky again. Fortunately, I have a Brother laser printer, which keeps trundling on and on, but I can no longer print in colour.

The scanner still works fine. It's a good thing I don't have a recent Canon printer though, as newer Canon inkjet printers won't work, even as a scanner, if the ink runs out. Canon is now being sued over this reprehensible behaviour.  

 Canon, best known for manufacturing camera equipment and printers for business and home users, is being sued for not allowing customers to use the scan or fax functions in multi-function devices if the ink runs out on numerous printer models. David Leacraft filed a class action lawsuit against Canon USA, alleging the company engaged in deceptive marketing and unjust enrichment practices.

Leacraft decided to file the lawsuit upon discovering a Pixma MG2522 printer he purchased, advertised as an "all-in-one" machine, would not function as a scanner when ink cartridges are either low or empty. Moreover, faxing capabilities would not work when certain printers ran out of ink as well.

Of course, ink is not required to perform scanning or faxing documents, so the complaint stresses these features should function regardless of ink levels. As such, the lawsuit, which involves more than 100 class members, seeks at least $5,000,000 in awards.

I had considered buying a Canon all-in-one printer/scanner to replace the Epson, but now I'm certainly glad I didn't. 

If you have any recommendations for an inkjet all-in-one unit, please leave a comment. My needs are fairly basic. I want to be able to print colour photos up to 8x10 size and to be able scan and copy. If it can scan 35 mm slides, that would be a bonus. Cost needs to be under $400 CDN. 

Formatting Lists in Microsoft Word

Formatting numbered and bulleted lists in Microsoft Word can be a minefield for the unwary. Word makes it easy to use them by just clicking on one of the buttons in the formatting toolbar, but making any changes to Word's default format can produce unexpected results that are hard to correct. 

It is possible to create lists that are stable and have a format other than Word's default (for example, that aren't indented from the text margin) by using the multilevel list feature. The Office Watch website has recently published an article that explains how to do this. This is the technique that I used at the TSX. It does work and is reasonably stable, as long as you follow a few simple rules.

• Never use the buttons in the ribbon to format your lists. Instead, use the paragraph styles defined in your template. (If you aren't using a template, see this post). 
• Always paste text from another document as plain text. This is especially important if the text is part of a list. 

If you are still having problems with your list formatting, you can create numbered lists by using sequence fields. This technique requires more care when updating documents, but it is dead stable; in many years of using Word, I have never had a instance of document corruption using sequence fields. 

2021 Aurora Awards

The 2021 Aurora Awards for the best science fiction and fantasy of 2020 by a Canadian were announced at Can Con in Ottawa over the weekend. The awards are voted on by members of the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association, which basically means any Canadian SF&F fan who wnats to pay the small membership fee.

These are the fiction awards.

• Best Novel: Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Random House Publishing Group
• Best Young Adult Novel: Flights of Marigold, Susan Forest, Laksa Media Groups Inc.
• Best Novelette/Novella: “Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County“, Derek Künsken, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, July/Aug
• Best Short Story: “All Cats Go to Valhalla“, Chadwick Ginther, Swashbuckling Cats: Nine Lives on the Seven Seas, Tyche Books
• Best Graphic Novel/Comic: It Never Rains, Kari Maaren, webcomic

I didn't vote this year as I haven't read any of the nominated works. 

Featured Links - October 18, 2021

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

• Just the Recipe. "Get just the ingredients and instructions for any recipe. No life story, no popups, no email lists."
• Forget everything you learned playing Lunar Lander: Chinese boffins reveal secrets of Chang'e 5 probe's touchdown. "Landing with liquid fuel aboard made slosh-avoidance essential." 
• The Earth isn't as bright as it once was. "A lack of clouds on Earth is causing the planet to dim according to a new geophysical research letter."
• This is the real cost of Brexit. They were told about all of this and still went for it. Now they are paying the price. 
• Location Matters. A discussion of the location bids for the 2023 World Science Fiction Convention. Cities bidding are Chengdu, China; Memphis, Tennessee (USA); and Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada). UPDATE: Memphis has withdrawn from the bidding. 
• A Last-Minute Nuke to Shatter an Incoming Asteroid Could Actually Work, Study Suggests. "Models suggest 99% of an asteroid’s mass would fail to hit Earth after a disruptive nuclear strike."
• ‘I hope you die’: how the COVID pandemic unleashed attacks on scientists. "Dozens of researchers tell Nature they have received death threats, or threats of physical or sexual violence."

Photo of the Week - October 17, 2021

These are some late-blooming roses in my front yard. 

Taken with my Pixel 4a.

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid

If you read science fiction or watch SF movies, you'll no doubt have come across killer robots. Well, they're not science fiction ay more.  

The image above shows a quadrupedal robot — a Vision 60 unit built by US firm Ghost Robotics — that’s been equipped with a custom gun by small-arms specialists Sword International. It seems the gun itself (dubbed the SPUR or “special purpose unmanned rifle”) is designed to be fitted onto a variety of robotic platforms. It has a 30x optical zoom, thermal camera for targeting in the dark, and an effective range of 1,200 meters.

What’s not clear is whether or not Sword International or Ghost Robotics are currently selling this combination of gun and robot. But if they’re not, it seems they will be soon. As the marketing copy on Sword’s website boasts: “The SWORD Defense Systems SPUR is the future of unmanned weapon systems, and that future is now.”

Typos Can Cost You

Punctuation matters. An Australian man is being sued by his former employer over a Facebook post which read "employees" instead of "employee's". The distinction is that, as published, the implication is that the employer didn't pay any his employees' required pension contributions. The man claims it was a typo and he meant to type "employee's", referring to himself.

The New York Times (paywalled) has more details as well as a discussion of Australia's notorious defamation laws.

Less than 12 hours after the post was published on Oct. 22, Mr. Zadravic, who is based on the Central Coast in New South Wales, deleted it. But it was too late. Mr. Gan became aware of the message and filed a defamation claim against Mr. Zadravic.

On Thursday, a judge in New South Wales ruled that the lack of an apostrophe on the word “employees” could be read to suggest a “systematic pattern of conduct” by Mr. Gan’s agency rather than an accusation involving one employee. So she allowed the case to proceed.

 It could cost him 180,000 Australian dollars.

Electric Vehicles Must Get Lighter

Here's something I didn't know until I read this article in Nature: electric vehicles are heavier than their equivalent fossil-fuel-powered model. For example, Ford's electric F-150 will be 700 kg heavier than the gasoline version. This is not a good thing, for several reasons. 

Electrifying vehicles adds yet more weight. Combustible, energy-dense petroleum is replaced by bulky batteries. And the rest of the vehicle must get heavier to provide the necessary structural support1. The electric F-150 weighs 700 kg more than its petrol-powered predecessor. Smaller electric cars are heavier than their petrol equivalents, too (see ‘Heavier electric fleet’).

Why does this matter? First and foremost is safety. The likelihood of passengers being killed in a collision with another vehicle increases by 12% for every 500-kg difference between vehicles2. This added risk wouldn’t apply if everyone drove cars of similar heft. But until they do, the number of casualties in crashes is likely to increase as heavy electric vehicles join lighter existing fleets. Pedestrians will also be at risk. If US residents who switched to SUVs over the past 20 years had stuck with smaller cars, more than 1,000 pedestrian deaths might have been averted, according to one study3.

Heavier vehicles also generate more particulate pollution from tyre wear. They require more materials and energy to build and propel them, adding to emissions and energy use.

How big a problem is this extra weight? A rough comparison between mortality costs and climate benefits shows that it is significant. Under the energy systems operating in most countries today, the cost of extra lives lost from a 700-kg increase in the weight of an electrified truck rivals the climate benefits of avoided greenhouse-gas emissions. 

I would still buy an electric vehicle, assuming the cost came down to the point where I could afford it, but I would factor weight into my consideration when looking for one.

Featured Links - October 12, 2021

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

• Kobo's New E Ink Tablet Is a Cheaper, Smaller reMarkable Alternative. The Kobo Sage adds stylus support to an 8-inch E Ink tablet with a glowing screen.
• 5+ Google Docs Apps and Add-Ons to Boost Your Productivity and Efficiency. Several of these look useful and I will probably try them out.
• A Nixon Deepfake, a 'Moon Disaster' Speech and an Information Ecosystem at Risk. "A new video re-creates a history that never happened, showing the power of AI-generated media." 
• It’s Easier for Global Acts to Play in Russia Than in the U.S. Right Now. "Covid-19 has made U.S. visa issues even more of a headache for musicians."
• 11 Google Drive Features Everyone Should Know About. "Are you using the best features of Google Drive yet?"
• Asteroid 2021 SG came from the sun’s direction. That made it almost impossible to spot until just before it passed by the Earth. This is a problem. 

Off For the Thanksgiving Weekend

Monday is Thanksgiving up here in the Great (soon to be) White North, so I'm taking the weekend off to relax and consume turkey with family. 

I'll be back on Tuesday. 

In the meantime, enjoy this picture of our cat, CJ, just chilling in the laundry basket.

 

Some Photography Links - October 8, 2021

Here are some about cameras and photography.

• Zone Focusing: How to (Always) Capture Sharp Street Photos. This was a common technique before autofocusing cameras were developed. 
• 6 Tips to Improve Your Black and White Landscape Photography. "In this article, we share six easy-to-follow tips that’ll improve your black and white landscapes; we also share plenty of examples, so you can understand exactly what goes into a good black and white photo.
• Astrophotography time-lapse tips. Create your own astrophotography time-lapse videos by following these simple tips.
• The Surprising and Puzzling Paradox with Modern Cameras and Lenses. . Essentially, cameras are marketed to how much more work you can do in post-production vs. the other cameras out there. Why? Why are lenses marketed to show how little post-production you need to do, but cameras are designed to show how much? 
• The Godmother of the Digital Image. "The mathematician Ingrid Daubechies’ pioneering work in signal processing helped make our electronic world possible — and beat a path for women in the field."
• What is dodging and burning? Discover the roots of these curious terms, and how t.o use their digital namesakes in today’s image-editing software.

A Good New Space Site

I've come across a good site if you are interested in space exploration. Space Explored has sections covering all of the major space exploration agencies, companies, and programs. There's also a handy launch schedule, which I expect to be referring to often.  

If you want to keep up with news about space exploration, this is one of the best sites you could use. 

The Aging Protocol That Keeps Breaking the Internet

Monday's Facebook outage was just the latest in a series of major outages going back years. Although Facebook hasn't given out any technical details, other than saying that the outage was caused by an internal network configuration error, it's likely that it was caused by something called the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP). This is a networking protocol that tells routers where to route the data going into or coming out of a network. It's been around since 1989 and has been the source of many outages, including an infamous one that took YouTube off of the internet for a few hours.

This article goes into the history of BGP, which is sometimes called the "three napkin protocol" because of the way it was developed, and explains some of the reasons why it is so fragile. 

At its most basic level, BGP helps routers decide how to send giant flows of data across the vast mesh of connections that make up the internet. With infinite numbers of possible paths - some slow and meandering, others quick and direct - BGP gives routers the information they need to pick one, even though there is no overall map of the internet and no authority charged with directing its traffic.

The creation of BGP, which relies on individual networks continuously sharing information about available data links, helped the internet continue its growth into a worldwide network. But BGP also allows huge swaths of data to be "hijacked" by almost anyone with the necessary skills and access.

The main reason is that BGP, like many key systems on the internet, is built to automatically trust users - something that may work on smaller networks but leaves a global one ripe for attack.

I had to learn a little bit about BGP while I was working at the TSX, and I'm very glad that it's not something that I have to worry about in my home network.  

Update: Here's an article from Gizmodo that goes into a little more detail about what happened at Facebook and how a BGP misconfiguration caused the problem. 

Stopping Image Fraud in Scientific Papers

I've posted a fair bit here about the problem of disinformation in several areas, including scientific papers. Now a group of publishers has announced standards for images in scientific papers. 

Studies suggest that up to one-fifth of published life-sciences papers contain at least one digitally altered image. Researchers might make adjustments for relatively harmless reasons — by increasing the contrast or colour balance to show a key point more clearly, for example. But they can also use image-editing tools to create completely fake results. A photograph of an electrophoresis gel or western blot can be altered by cropping and pasting the bands into different positions, or a microscope image could be photoshopped to remove a particular type of cell.

The Committee on Publication Ethics in Eastleigh, UK, a membership organization for academic publishing, has previously produced flowcharts showing steps that editors can take if a reader or reviewer raises issues with images or data in a manuscript. But now, a working group with representatives from eight publishers, including Elsevier, JAMA, Wiley and Springer Nature, as well as industry group STM, based in The Hague, the Netherlands, have come together to create a set of best-practice recommendations for editors. 

Needless to say, this is a good thing. Now if we could just get standards for use of images and videos in political ads.  

Featured Links - October 4, 2021

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

A grey morning on the bay

• The Arecibo Observatory Was Like Family. I Couldn't Save It. "I grew up in awe of the iconic telescope. It raised me, and I helped control its fate. Could I have done more to protect it before its sudden collapse?"
• How to add a proof of vaccination shortcut to you Android home screen. "With a tap, you can pull up a digital copy of your proof of vaccination."
• GPT-3 can summarize books as well as a human can. If it can do that, I think it might put a lot of technical writing jobs at risk.
• Royal Observatory Greenwich Astronomy Photographer of the Year winners. There are some stunning photographs here.
• Efficacy of COVID-19 Vaccination on the Symptoms of Patients With Long COVID: A Target Trial Emulation Using Data From the ComPaRe e-Cohort in France. "COVID-19 vaccination lowers the severity and life impact of long COVID at 120 days among patients with persistent symptoms."
• A 19th-century artist's astronomical drawings are stunningly accurate. Compare them to NASA images today. "Today, sophisticated observatories and space telescopes snap images of the same celestial phenomena that Trouvelot captured more than 150 years ago. Here's how the 19th-century drawings compare to contemporary photos."
• Why We Need to Upgrade Our Face Masks—and Where to Get Them. "High-quality respirators such as N95s and K95s are now widely available and provide the best protection against COVID, according to experts. Why aren’t more people wearing them?"

Photo of the Week - October 3, 2021

Here are a couple of fall flowers, a morning glory growing up through a dusty miller.

This was taken with my Pixel 4a.

Libby Gets Better

Earlier this year, I posted about Overdrive's purchase of the library unit of RBdigital. This meant that the excellent RBdigital app that I used to borrow and read online magazines was replaced by Overdrive's Libby app. I found the Libby app vastly inferior and stopped using it, restricting most of my magazine reading to PressReader. I also contacted Overdrive's support about some specific issues I was having with their app.

I'm happy to report that the Libby app has been updated and some of my complaints have been addressed. 

I generally prefer to read magazines using text view with a black background and light text, since I find staring at a mostly white screen uncomfortable. They've added a navigation toolbar to the text mode screen, making it possible to move from article to article without having to go back to the PDF view. I would still like to be able to customize the text colour and brightness. 

They've also added an option to transfer your settings between different devices, and the app now syncs things like what's on your shelf and your position in magazines that you've read. This is a major improvement. 

When browsing through magazines, there is a summary screen for each issue that summarizes the contents in a little more detail than what you can glean from the cover image. 

There is now a Settings menu, which you can use to manage your notification settings and a few other aspects of the program. I don't remember what controls were there before, so I can't comment how much of this is new, but the notification options are extensive. For example, you can set up notifications to tell you when a new issue of a magazine has arrived or when your loan is about to expire, as well as setting the type of notification. 

My overall impression of the Libby app is now more positive, and I will be using it more. It's still a bit tricky to navigate in places, but that's probably more due to my lack of use rather than the design of the app itself. 

I should note that you can use the app to download ebooks and audiobooks, although I only use it for magazines. 

Movie and TV Reviews - September 2021

Here are some short reviews of things I watched in September. No movies this month - we've been watching a lot of baseball.

TV Shows

• Nancy Drew: About the only thing that is common to the original YA series is the name. This is fully adult and has a strong supernatural element, without which it probably would have fallen flat. I enjoyed it but the season stretched out the central plot much too far. (Amazon Prime)
• Jack Irish: This is a gritty, intense Australian detective drama worth watching for good writing and acting. The minor characters are especially well-drawn. It isn't all grim as there is a distinct funny side to some of the subplots, especially in season 2. If you liked Bosch, you might like this. (Acorn TV)
• My Life Is Murder: This is a lighter Australian murder mystery, set in Melbourne, which is probably the best reason to watch it. (Acorn TV)
• La Brea: So far, we've just watched one episode of this. It will be interesting to see where it goes, but I don't have high expectations, given that it's a network show. (CTV)