It's coming up to December and the holiday season. So the blog will be going on vacation sometime just before Christmas until after New Year's Day. In the meantime, I probably won't be doing a lot of posts, other than the usual link posts.
Partly that's because of the holidays and partly various family-related things that are eating up a lot of time and energy.
I hope things will quiet down in the new year.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
Here's a picture of the Portal, part of the Home Place in the Alex Robertson Park near us.
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| Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4, 16 mm. @ F14, 1/100 second, ISO 400, Velvia film simulation |
The Rolling Stones wrapped up their latest US tour recently. Here's a very good audience recording of Gimme Shelter from their final performance on November 23rd.
See this Rolling Stone article for more details.
The Dublin 2019 World Science Fiction Convention (aka Worldcon) has made videos of some of its programming available for viewing. They include the Hugo Awards ceremony and several panels, including ones with Joceyln Bell, Steve Jackson, Mary Robinette Kowal, and George R. R. Martin, among others.
Videos are available on the convention's YouTube Channel.
Being visually impaired, I sometimes have trouble using payment terminals. Some of the new models are OK, but older ones with low-contrast LCD screens are very difficult for me to read.
Moneris has introduced a new line of Moneris Core terminals with accessibility features designed to make it easier for people like me to use them. Users can touch the accessibility icon (a circled A) or the 5 key to turn on the features, which include a high-contrast screen and voice prompts.
Here's a short YouTube video explaining how to use the accessibility features.
In 1961, at the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union detonated the largest hydrogen bomb ever tested. At 50 megatons, it was thousands of times larger than the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And it could have been larger, but concerns over the spread of fallout caused the designers to scale back the size of the explosion.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has published a well-documented (with footnotes) history of the development of the bomb, often known as the Tsar Bomba. It's a rather unnerving story that highlights the craziness of those years.
In the early hours of October 30, 1961, a bomber took off from an airstrip in northern Russia and began its flight through cloudy skies over the frigid Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. Slung below the plane’s belly was a nuclear bomb the size of a small school bus—the largest and most powerful bomb ever created.
At 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon. As the bomb fell, an enormous parachute unfurled to slow its descent, giving the pilot time to retreat to a safe distance. A minute or so later, the bomb detonated. A cameraman watching from the island recalled:
A fire-red ball of enormous size rose and grew. It grew larger and larger, and when it reached enormous size, it went up. Behind it, like a funnel, the whole earth seemed to be drawn in. The sight was fantastic, unreal, and the fireball looked like some other planet. It was an unearthly spectacle! [1]
The flash alone lasted more than a minute. The fireball expanded to nearly six miles in diameter—large enough to include the entire urban core of Washington or San Francisco, or all of midtown and downtown Manhattan. Over several minutes it rose and mushroomed into a massive cloud. Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles. One civilian witness remarked that it was “as if the Earth was killed.” Decades later, the weapon would be given the name it is most commonly known by today: Tsar Bomba, meaning “emperor bomb.”
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about:
Here's a photo taken between Echo Bay and Bruce Mines, Ontario on Thanksgiving weekend, taken with my Fujifilm X-S10. I cropped and edited the original JPEG in Photoshop Express to reduce the haze and bring up the colour. (My post of last Sunday shows what the weather was like). I'm not posting details because they're not really relevant after all the editing.
1977 was a good year for the Grateful Dead and many Deadheads consider it their best. I don't agree but it was certainly one of their best periods.
Here's a previously unreleased show from the Capitol Theater recorded on April 27, 1977. It's a very good recording made from the original tapes for an FM broadcast and it includes video footage. Given 1977 video technology, it's not great video, but it's been cleaned up and upscaled to 1080p, so it's watchable.
I haven't listened to the whole show yet, but the parts I've heard are typical 1977 Dead, which means it's melodic, tight, and rocks like crazy when it's called for.
Here's an interesting post from the Oxford English Dictionary blog about the OED's history of climate-related words. You might think that "climate change" is fairly recent usage, but it goes back to 1854. Other terms are also discussed in the article.
In 2021, the OED embarked on a project to broaden and review its coverage of vocabulary relating to climate change and sustainability. I’d been feeding my own eco-anxiety by learning more about these topics for some years before I proposed that the OED conduct a review of its coverage. I knew that our New Words team had, over the course of the last 30 years or so, researched and covered a lot of the best-known terms, such as global warming and carbon offsetting, but this is a rapidly changing area of vocabulary. With the world spotlight coming to rest on the UK later this year at the UN climate summit in Glasgow (COP26), it is important to continue to monitor developments in this epoch-defining nexus of problems.
When OED editors are investigating the way a word or sense has been used over time, we look for examples of contextual and dateable evidence in our internal files and databases, as well as in external databases, websites, libraries, and archives.
We tend to think of climate change and sustainability as very contemporary issues, but what was interesting about researching some of the terms in this year’s update (as well as revisiting those we had already covered) was being able to put them into a historical perspective and seeing just how far back some ideas could be traced though the vocabulary, as a few examples will show.
The rains have let up, at least for now, in British Columbia, but the unprecedented rainfall of the last few days will have long-term effects. Vancouver, the 4th largest port in North America, is cut off from the rest of Canada as highways and railways are washed out.
From the Eye on the Storm blog:
The heavy rains fell on mountainous areas that, in many cases, had been denuded of vegetation by the destructive wildfires that ravaged the region in late June and early July. These wildfires had been fueled by a record heat wave that brought an insane temperature of 49.6 degrees Celsius (121°F) to Lytton, British Columbia – the hottest temperature ever recorded in Canada. A rapid-response study from the World Weather Attribution program found that this heat wave would have been “virtually impossible without human-caused climate change.” The study estimated that the event was roughly a 1-in-1000-year event in today’s climate, but added, “the observed temperatures were so extreme that they lie far outside the range of historically observed temperatures. This makes it hard to quantify with confidence how rare the event was.”
The atmospheric river also swept into western Washington, which has been doused throughout the autumn by periods of unusually heavy rain. Rainfall from September 1 through November 15 at Seattle’s Sea-Tac International Airport was 15.87″, the most ever measured for that two-and-a-half-month period in data going back to 1945. The airport’s wettest full autumn (Sep-Nov) was in 2006, with 18.61″; that record could certainly fall before month’s end.
The Vancouver Sun reports on the effects on the provinces's infrastructure, already substantially damaged by this summer's heat wave and wildfires.
Owing to several washouts and mudslides, the old southerly route — Highway 3, snaking through the Cascades, Monashees and Selkirk mountains to the Crowsnest Pass in the Rockies — is impassable. The Fraser Canyon route, northward from Hope, about 130 kilometres east of Vancouver, has been smashed by rockslides and waterfalls that burst out of nowhere from the Coast mountains over the weekend.
CP Rail is looking to divert shipping traffic via Portland, Oregon, but restoring east-west overland connections by American routes won’t be easy. Washington State is a mess, too. Floodwaters from the Nooksack River have poured across the Canada-U.S. border into the Fraser Valley. Sumas Lake, an ancient waterbody drained to create farmland back in the 1920s, is a lake again today. Thousands of people have been evacuated.
About 280 kilometres east of Vancouver by a now non-functioning road, the Tulameen and Similkameen Rivers broke their dykes and burst their banks on Monday, and the rivers are now flowing through much of the town of Princeton. The temperature is dropping below freezing, the natural gas line that heats local homes is broken, the town’s water systems are wrecked, and nobody knows when things will be “normal” again.
While Princeton was drowning, the Coldwater River was venting its rage on the town of Merritt, 90 kilometres north of Princeton, and the entire community has been shut down because of the “immediate danger to public health and safety.” Roughly 7,000 people have been ordered to make their way to emergency centres in Kamloops and Kelowna.
A post in Gizmodo looks at how the effects of the wildfires contributed to the disaster.
Wildfires burn off an important layer of vegetation that, Brent Ward, a professor of earth sciences at Simon Fraser University and co-director of the Center for Natural Hazards Research, said “captures some of the rain and can slow it down before it gets into soil.”
Wildfires can also change how the soil interacts with rainfall. “When the organic layer in the upper part of the soil burns, it creates these organic compounds that travel into the upper part of the mineral soil and kind of precipitate,” Ward said. “It’s this waxy substance, and it makes that impervious to water—we call that hydrophobic. The water, instead of kind of centering down into the soil, it can’t go anywhere. It runs off, and runs down the slope, and hits a sort of steeper slope, and it erodes a lot. The sediment that’s eroding is often enough to generate a debris flow.”
And winter is coming.
The editors at Amazon have announced their list of the best science fiction and fantasy books of 2021. The list has a wide range and includes several books by new authors. Out of the twenty books on the list, these are the ones I plan to read.
I use Twitter a lot. I know it has a reputation for being full of garbage, but if you curate who you follow and use the right app, it can be extremely useful. Over time, I've noticed fewer garbage posts and that may be due to the work Twitter is doing to eliminate bots.
The Twitter blog has a long post about bots and Twitter that's worth reading if you're a Twitter user.
“There are many bots on Twitter that do good things and that are helpful to people,” said Stewart. “We wanted to understand more about what those look like so we could help people identify them and feel more comfortable in their understanding of the space they’re in.”
Stewart’s team revealed that people found content more trustworthy if they know more about who’s sharing it—starting with whether that account is human or automated. To help address the issue of bots, Twitter recently rolled out new labels that identify bots with an “automated” designation in their profile, an icon of a robot, and a link to the Twitter handle of the person who created the bot. “Not only are we just labeling these bots, we're also saying: this is the owner, and this is why they're here,” said Stewart. “Based on the preliminary research that we have, we hypothesize that that's going to create an environment where you can trust those bots a lot more.”
So why go to the trouble of labeling bots, instead of banning them all from Twitter?
“It's not inherently wrong to have an automated account on Twitter; obviously automated accounts don't have to be terrible. There was a vaccine bot that was really popular in New York,” said Dante Clemons, the senior product manager tasked with creating and testing these labels. She was referring to the Turbovax bot that Tweeted vaccine appointments to its 160,000 followers. “I focused on those accounts because these are the ones that can help us all reframe how we think about bots.”
You might also want to take a look at this thread from the Twitter Safety account that has some good tips about how to tell bots from real accounts.
I was listening to the Grateful Dead channel on SiriusXM on the weekend and they played an excerpt from a 1972 show that I hadn't heard before, namely November 13, 1972 in Kansas City. This one struck me immediately because of the sound quality. The show is a mix of two audience recordings; the better of the two was recorded by the Dead's genius sound tech, Owsley Stanley (aka Bear). This is EXACTLY what the Dead sounded like if you were on the floor close to the stage.
The whole show is good, but if you're a sound purist, start with the Playin' in the Band, and listen on a good pair of headphones. The Dark Star > Playin' in the Band is especially wonderful. Turn down the lights, light up, and enjoy.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm F4, 80 mm. at F5.6, 1/240 second, ISO 800, Velvia film simulation (probably) |
It's easy to lie with a chart. Not setting the axis at 0 is one thing I sometimes see. There are other mistakes that you can make that will confuse readers.
Here's a list of tips for creating charts that was posted on the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, a mainly Canadian economics blog. It's a good list and I wish I had it when I was working at the TSX.
It's also a good list of things to look for in charts that you may see in news articles. If the chart makes some of the mistakes outlined in the article, it may be that the authors are trying to mislead you.
Rockets aren't the only way of getting payloads into space. Other methods that have been tried are balloons and giant guns. Some day maybe we'll have a space elevator. Now there's another method – a giant slingshot.
A US company, SpinLaunch, has built a giant centrifuge that can fire a payload at more than the speed of sound. Their first test in October was successful. The idea is to give a small rocket enough velocity that a booster stage isn't required.
SpinLaunch, a start-up that is building an alternative method of launching spacecraft to orbit, conducted last month a successful first test flight of a prototype in New Mexico.
The Long Beach, California-based company is developing a launch system that uses kinetic energy as its primary method to get off the ground – with a vacuum-sealed centrifuge spinning the rocket at several times the speed of sound before releasing.
“It’s a radically different way to accelerate projectiles and launch vehicles to hypersonic speeds using a ground-based system,” SpinLaunch CEO Jonathan Yaney told CNBC. “This is about building a company and a space launch system that is going to enter into the commercial markets with a very high cadence and launch at the lowest cost in the industry.”
Despite being retired for almost three years now, I still follow what's going on in the technical communication field. Here are some useful links that I've come across recently.
The winners of the 2021 World Fantasy Awards were announced last weekend at this year's World Fantasy Convention in Montreal. These are the fiction awards.
- NOVEL: Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson (Tor Books)
- NOVELLA: "Riot Baby" by Tochi Onyebuchi (Tordotcom)
- SHORT FICTION: “Glass Bottle Dancer” by Celeste Rita Baker (Lightspeed, April 2020)
- ANTHOLOGY: The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer (Vintage Books)
- COLLECTION: Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoka Matsuda, translated by Polly Barton (Soft Skull Press US/Tilted Axis UK)
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
Fall colours earlier this week.
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| Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4, F16 @ 20 mm., 1/100 second, ISO 1250, Velvia film simulation |
For the last several years, the Dead.net has been celebrating the legacy of the Grateful Dead with 30 Days of Dead. Each day, they release a soundboard track from the vast archives of the Grateful Dead that you can download for free.
As the young folks like to say, it’s time to flex your Grateful Dead knowledge and take home a high-quality MP3 download every day in November while you are at it. 30 days of unreleased Grateful Dead tracks from the vault, selected by Dead archivist and producer David Lemieux? Yes, please! The tracks are yours, no strings attached, but we hope you’ll stick around for the chance to win some sweet swag from the Dead.
If you don’t know what we’re on about, here’s the deal:
You know your Ables from your Bakers from your C's, but can your finely tuned ears differentiate the cosmic "comeback" tour from a spacey 70's show? Each day we'll post a free download from one of the Dead's coveted shows. Will it be from that magical night at Madison Square Garden in '93 or from way back when they were just starting to warm it up at Winterland? Is that Pigpen's harmonica we hear? Brent on keys? Step right up and try your hand all November long and win prizes to boot.
Free Grateful Dead music. It doesn't get much better than that.
I don't think there's anyone reading who isn't looking forward to the end of the pandemic. I know I am. But even if the pandemic subsides, and likely becomes just another endemic disease we have to worry about occasionally, it is going to have long-term impacts. These impacts will last for years and possibly decades, as this article from Talking Points Memo suggests.
These all suggest that the impact of the COVID Pandemic will not only be long-lasting but likely show most in ways now only barely visible to us. The so-called ‘great resignation’ is a key example. There are all sorts of theories about why so many people are quitting their jobs. There’s at least some evidence that it’s concentrated in a relatively small number of states. But we don’t really know. All we know is that fate picked up the world like it was one of those Christmas Snow Globes, shook it hard and that afterwards things weren’t at all the same. What about inflation? Well, we know we had a global shipping system that was engineered to have very little slack or resiliency in it (just in time production and shipping) and it’s struggled to bounce back from the shock. But people are also buying more stuff. Do they have more money because of forced delays in consumption (lockdowns) or COVID relief checks? Probably. But much of this also seem tied to different consumer desires based on radically different life experiences.
Today we’re talking about inflation, ‘labor shortages’ which really seem to be code for people unwilling to work for pre-Pandemic wages and other issues that are immediate and often viewed through a short-term electoral prism. But we should have in the backs of our minds that we’re seeing shifts in mass behavior that at present we don’t really understand or understand only in the most limited ways. Social cataclysms of such duration that reach so deeply into everyone’s lives never fail to have transformative consequences that reach far into the future. This must be even more the case when they hit a society already in the midst of great social stress and instability.
Consider the following impacts:
I saw Dune: Part 1 last night at a nearby IMAX theatre. I did not think that I would ever see a film adaptation that would do the book justice but Villeneuve mostly has.
Dune was one of the formative books for me as a teenager. I read it when it was serialized in Analog in the early 1960s and several times since and went on to read all of the Herbert-authored stories as well as several of the prequels written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I've also read the recent graphic novel adaptation, which covered about the same part of the novel as the movie.
Villeneuve's version is better than I expected and probably about as good as we can realistically expect for a modern big-budget movie. It is epic in scope, with outstanding effects (although much of the movie's impact comes from its physical sets) and a first-rate cast. The cinematography is gorgeous, reminiscent of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, which I'm sure must have been an influence. I did find the interior scenes of the movie very dark, which I suspect was a conscious choice on Villeneuve's part, but it's not one that fits my vision of story.
The movie covers roughly the first half of the novel. It moves quickly, especially after the first half-hour, and didn't feel like it was 2-1/2 hours long. I think it could have been half an hour longer, as there were some plot points that were dropped or given short shrift. But I'm picking nits here.
Dune: Part 1 is the best cinematic adaptation of a major science fiction or fantasy novel since Lord of the Rings. It should appeal both to fans of the book and to filmgoers who are just looking for an entertaining evening out.
Do not miss it, and go to a cinema with a big screen (preferably IMAX). TV will not do it justice.
Here are some short reviews of things I watched in October.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
