Featured Links - October 31, 2022

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

Fall colours

• Octavia Butler's Kindred to premiere on Hulu on December 13. Another adaptation of a major SF&F novel to look forward to.
• Mystery Cosmic Storms Left Their Mark in Tree Rings, Scientists Say. Six spikes in Earth’s radiation levels, recorded in tree rings, may represent an unknown extreme astrophysical event.
• My experience with transit in other cities shows Toronto is getting ripped off by the TTC. The article compares Taipei to Toronto, but based on my experience, Toronto also falls short when compared to London.
• Welcome to hell, Elon. "You fucked up real good, kiddo. Twitter is a disaster clown car company that is successful despite itself, and there is no possible way to grow users and revenue without making a series of enormous compromises that will ultimately destroy your reputation and possibly cause grievous damage to your other companies."
• The Peripheral Storyboards Episodes 1-2 (PDF link). Thanks to director Vincenzo Natali for making these available!
• How to read a controversial preprint paper on Covid’s origins. "A trio of researchers claimed they found likely evidence that the virus that causes Covid-19 was synthetic. And then scientists went to work picking the theory apart."
• Doctor Who was created by a Canadian. "Here's a big long wild thread about the guy from Toronto who created one of the most quintessentially British shows. And how he ended up as a possible target for kidnapping by the FLQ."

Photo of the Week - October 30, 2022

Here's a picture from one of my morning walks, taken with my Pixel 4a. The flowers are finally dying off. It's been a warm October, but winter is finally coming.

Fading flowers

 

Saturdau Sounds - Simon and Garfunkel - Granada TV 1967

Here's another gem that cropped up in my YouTube feed: Simon and Garfunkel filmed in a performance broadcast by Granada TV in Manchester in March 1967. The black-and-white video is about what you'd expect from 1967 (I don't think it's been upscaled) but the audio is fine. Paul and Art are clean cut and incredibly earnest by modern standards but there's no denying the purity of their harmonies and the quality of the songwriting.

Photography Links - October 28, 2022

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

Old anchor at Frenchman's Bay Park

• What's the Best Aperture for Headshots and Portraits? " Although depth of field is often discussed in portrait photography, the conversation tends to center around background bokeh. In this article and the accompanying video, however, I would like to address depth of field as it relates to the face itself and attempt to answer the question as to which aperture is best for photographing faces."
• Optimize Your Lightroom Photo Editing with These Tips and Tools. "This article teaches how some basic tools can help elevate the Lightroom workflow challenges and fatigue you might face. Together with these tools, you’ll become far more efficient in your editing workflow with a bit of practice and know-how."
• The Exposure Triangle: A Beginner’s Guide. "How important is exposure in photography? What are the components of exposure? What is the “Exposure Triangle”? These are the questions I will attempt to answer in this introductory article about ISO, aperture and shutter speed — the components of achieving a properly exposed photo."
• Compact Wide-Angle Metalens Camera Eliminates Bulky Glass Optics. "The development in metalens technology continues, and researchers have designed a new compact camera that takes high-quality wide-angle photos and eliminates the typical bulk of optics."
• Vivian Maier: Anthology review – the eccentric nanny with an eye for a picture. I saw an exhibition of her photography a few years ago. She was a remarkable street photographer. 
• How to Get Started With Macro Photography: A Beginner's Guide. Macro photography is your ticket into the unseen, small world around us. How will you utilize this incredible photography technique?
• Google Photos makes it easier to pull text from your snaps. "Deeper Google Lens integration en route."

I'd Druthers Not

I got this piece of anti-vax, anti-Trudeau, pro-Russia, conspiracy-laden garbage in the mail a couple of days ago. 

DRUTHERS "News"

Considering there is no advertising, I was curious about who is putting up the money for this trash. Googling the publisher's name, Shawn Jason (Laplante) brought me to this article from December 2020 on the anithate.ca website.

Current funding for the paper is coming from a mixture of sources, including crowdfunding, ad and merchandise sales. Laplante states on his GoGetFunding page that $3,000 is all that is needed to produce and distribute 25,000 copies, and that $5,000 would enable him to complete a publishing run of 50,000. For the upcoming January 1st edition, he has raised $1,680 as of December 6. Assuming all the supporters who advertised their business ventures in the first edition paid for the space, he brought in approximately $1,125 through advertising sales. 

Laplante, who appears to be based in Toronto, writes in his first editorial that Druthers’ creators are “explorers of truth” who “love and care for all of humanity.” While this may be what he would like people to believe, it is not the case.

According to the paper, current circulation is 200,000 so, despite not having any advertising, they're getting a chunk of money from somewhere. There is a website too - I won't post the link but Google will find it if you want. 

Friends have told me that they've seen it distributed for free at some subway stations in Toronto. My copy showed up with flyers in my mail; oddly my next-door neighbour didn't get a copy.

It appears to be just another manifestation of the anti-vax, conspiracy-laden right-wing media space. My copy is going straight into the recyle bin. 

The Peripheral: First Impressions

I've made no secret about how much I like William Gibson's novel, The Peripheral. IMHO it's the best science fiction novel of the century to date. So I was more than a little apprehensive when I heard that it was being adapted for streaming; I've seen too many promising projects turn into crap. 

Based on the first two episodes of Amazon Prime's adaptation, I needn't have worried. It's brilliant. 

First, it's true to both the basic storyline of the novel and to the characters, especially that of Flynne, ably played by Chloë Grace Moretz. She's exactly as I had imagined her from the novel. And the other characters are just as well done. The showrunners (interviewed here) have done a great job of both portraying the future setting and technology that Gibson envisions while adding new plot elements that aren't in the novel but still feel just right. 

The show could still go off the rails in future episodes, but I'm very happy about what I've seen so far. And from what I've read on Twitter, Gibson likes it too. 

I am very much looking forward to the rest of the season. If you've watched it, what do you think?

 

Ticketmaster is Evil and Destroying Live Music

I've tried to get tickets to some concerts recently, but have had to give up in frustration because of the stratospheric price required to get a decent seat. Nancy and I are both fans of John Mellencamp (we saw him at the late Maple Leaf Gardens not long after we started dating), and were excited to see that he was coming to Massey Hall next June. But the only seats we could even consider were in the Gallery (top level, steep, and with obstructed leg room) which ruled them out for us. Better seats were well out of our price range, more than $300. For that amount of money, I could buy his entire CD catalog.

And don't get me started about Elton John tickets. 

Ticket prices have been escalating for years. I can understand that big concerts can be expensive stage, but it seems to have gotten much worse since the merger of Ticketmaster and LiveNation in 2010. 

In a new video, Cory Doctorow looks at the current state of the concert industry and why it's as bad as it is. It's pretty damning. It's on the More Perfect Union web site, and I can't see a way of embedding the video here, so you'll have to click the link. There is a transcript too, thankfully. 

Ticketmaster and Live Nation, which is the same company, but we’ll get to that later, can basically do whatever they want because they’ve seized control over every aspect of the live music industry by creating a monopoly. 

This ticketing cartel has the power to destroy venues and artists who refuse to work with them, and even have their own resale platform where they encourage and incentivize ticket resellers to gouge fans.

All of these exploitative practices make Ticketmaster executives very, very rich. Live Nation CEO Michael Rapino made $70.6 Million in 2017. That’s one of the largest CEO pay packages ever. But here’s the twist: this entire monopoly was helped along and enabled by our elected leaders.

 

Featured Links - October 24, 2022

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

Overlooking the marsh

• How a Single Human Hair Nearly Halted a SpaceX Launch. "A strand of hair briefly disrupted the recent SpaceX Crew-5 launch, showcasing the perils posed by even the most innocuous of objects."
• Strong and Stable! Scottish SFF author Charlie Stross weighs in on the current chaotic state of politics in the UK. 
• Part of lost star catalog of Hipparchus found lurking under medieval codex. "Multispectral imaging revealed hidden original text on Codex Climaci Rescriptus."
• Lost something? Search through 91.7 million files from the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. "Discmaster lets you sift through 11 terabytes of CD-ROM and floppy disk archives."
• Addressing Putin’s Nuclear Threat: Thinking Like the Cold War KGB Officer That He Was. "The unfortunate reality is that Putin can’t be stopped without significant costs, but allowing him to normalize the use of weapons of mass destruction would start the inevitable clock to a direct and possibly catastrophic US-Russian conflict. "
• Endothelial dysfunction in COVID-19: an overview of evidence, biomarkers, mechanisms and potential therapies. "SARS-CoV-2 infection primarily affects the pulmonary system, but accumulating evidence suggests that it also affects the pan-vasculature in the extrapulmonary systems."
• Did cars kill urban life? "You can’t have cities without civility."

Photo of the Week - October 23, 2022

I took a walk through Alex Robertson Park yesterday. The colours are a bit past their peak, but still beautiful.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. WR at F5.6. 1/500 second, ISO 640, Velvia films simulation

Saturday Sounds - Legend of the USS Titanic and Jack Johnson

Back when I was in university, Detroit's wonderful underground FM station, WABX, often played a long, twisted, talking blues song about the Titanic and the great black boxer, Jack Johnson. Thanks to Google and YouTube, I finally tracked it down, so to speak. It's "Legend of the USS Titanic", by Jaime Brockett. I don't think I've heard it since the early 1970s and it's very much as I remember it. If you listen to the whole song, you'll understand why it was so popular with a certain segment of the progressive radio audience of the time.

To go along with the mention of Jack Johnson, here's Miles Davis's 1970  album, Jack Johnson. I don't see it mentioned much when people talk about Mile's music of the period, but it deserves more attention. It's loud, intense, and angry music played by a powerhouse band.

 

We're Toast 30

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Autumn leaves (yes, it's a metaphor)

• As Himalayan Glaciers Melt, a Water Crisis Looms in South Asia. Warmer air is thinning most of the vast mountain range’s glaciers, known as the Third Pole because they contain so much ice. The melting could have far-reaching consequences for flood risk and for water security for a billion people who rely on meltwater for their survival.
• Iran's Internet Blackouts Are Part of a Global Menace. "Repressive regimes are teaching each other how to control protesters' web access with increasingly surgical precision."
• Melting Glaciers Could Unleash Long-Frozen Viruses Onto New Hosts. "As the planet warms, pathogens buried for millennia are more likely to re-enter the environment and potentially infect new species."
• Politics for Sale. "Citizens United lets billionaires set the terms of debate."
• Preparing for Republican Debt Blackmail. "Democrats should do whatever it takes to block extortion."
• Britain is Sleepwalking into Societal Collapse. As long as the Conservatives remain in power, Britain is screwed. 
• The astounding impact and reach of long Covid, in numbers and charts. "Something about Covid causes a significant portion of people to experience symptoms long after the initial sickness – so what do the studies tell us?"
• Scientists discover mechanism that can cause collapse of great Atlantic circulation system.  "This latest discovery suggests the weaker AMOC will cause anomalous subsurface warming at high latitudes of the North Atlantic, which will melt glacier sea snouts in Greenland. Ultimately, this could lead AMOC to collapse, exacerbating the climate crisis with major repercussions."

How the Miltiary Uses Science Fiction

Military science fiction is almost a genre of it's own, going back at least as far as Heinlein's Starship Troopers. But it works the other way, with the military using science fiction as a tool to help envision the shape and scope of future military conflicts.

In his excellent Transfer Orbit newsletter, Andrew Liptak looks at how the US military "is growing a cottage industry of sci-fi writer consultants to help it predict the nature of tomorrow’s conflicts." The article contains links to several documents produced by the US military as well as a link to "Crisis in Zefra" written for the Canadian military by Toronto SF author, Karl Schroeder. 

Science fiction is an ideal framing device for military strategists — not only as a way to envision potential futures, but also as a method of information delivery. In the late 1990s, the Canadian Defense Force (CDF) launched a foresight project called Future Force, designed to help leadership of the country’s army envision what the security environment in the year 2025 might look like. To accompany the report, which was published in 2005, the CDF tried something new — it commissioned science fiction author Karl Schroeder to write up a fictional take on its findings in the form of a short novella, Crisis in Zefra, which would distill the report’s findings into something that people might actually read. “The problem was that these scenarios existed in the form of massive, complex reports, and they weren’t very useful in that form,” Schroeder says. “So the task that they set themselves was to find a way to make it easily digestible for the rank and file and also for people who might become the officers of tomorrow.”

In Crisis in Zefra, a squad of Canadian peacekeepers gets caught in a violent street battle and utilizes swarms of drones, next-generation body armor, threat detection systems, and advanced weapons. Schroeder’s story anticipated some of the problems that things like cellphones pose on a battlefield, years before they entered widespread use. Since Schroeder wrote Zefra, numerous other organizations have also begun to tap into science fiction.

It's a fascinating article and I will definitely read some of the documents he's linked to. I suspect the current war in Ukraine will provide a lot of fodder for future efforts. 

How the James Webb Telescope's Images Get Processed

The images from the James Webb telescope are truly amazing. Even more amazing, is too see what they look like in the raw format recorded by the telecope's instruments before they are processed. The Toronto Star has a very detailed article that explains how astronomers process the raw data to produce the gorgeous images that we see. I found it interesting that the process is similar to what I would do in Adobe Lightroom for a poorly exposed picture from my camera although the pixel-by-pixel calibration is far beyond anything I could contemplate doing.

For all the meticulous precision that went into the JWST’s design and construction, the data coming from it, in its rawest form, is uneven.

Images have to be corrected for imperfections inherent in the cameras themselves.

Cosmic rays hitting the telescope can create static in the detectors of its cameras, which is corrected for, in part, by capturing multiple versions of the same image.

And even the pixels — the smallest photosensitive units of the telescope’s detectors — themselves have different sensitivities; one of the more than one million pixels in the JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), for example, might be more sensitive than its neighbour, and less sensitive than another neighbour.

Thankfully, the JWST engineers have a solution for that — a complete calibration map of how to compensate for the variations in each pixel in every instrument on the Webb telescope.

Featured Links - October 17, 2022

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

Fall colours

Building a better hurricane ‘cone of uncertainty’. "How can current ways of depicting uncertainty in hurricane forecasts be improved?"

Xbox’s Accessibility Showcase is such an important initiative. "Hosted by Canada's Steve Saylor, the second-annual event is an enlightening look at the importance of accessibility."

Firefox Relay gives you a burner phone number to give out online. "Relay's phone number masking can help protect your privacy."

The Ultimate Guide to Wondrous Independent Bookstores. "We think book havens are heaven." I would love to visit some of these.

Reading Freely. Yet another library caught in the sighs of the wacko right-wing Christian fascists. 

Space-Age Magus. " From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?"

Microsoft takes AI image generation mainstream, strolling into ethics minefield. "Microsoft sidesteps AI-powered art debate, embraces image generation as a tool for creatives."

Photo of the Week - October 16, 2022

We've had a sudden shift in the weather pattern, from warm, dry, and mostly sunny, to cool, wet, and cloudy. So here's a picture of some of the last blooming flowers we'll see for a few months. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm/F2.8 WR at F8, 1/180 second at ISO 640, Velivia film simulation.

 

Saturday Sounds - Steeleye Span - Rockpalast 1975

Steeleye Span is of the great British folk-rock groups that were popular in the 1970s. They are still performing, although according to the Wikipedia article Maddy Prior is the only remaining original member. I saw them perform at Convocation Hall in Toronto sometime in the mid-70s and it was one of the most memorable concerts of that period. 

Here's an excellent performance recorded in 1975 for the German Rockpalast TV show. 

Available for the first time is this unique and intimate performance from June 1975. 

It was recorded for the German TV show Rockpalast. This is a very rare live performance from the ‘classic’ line up of Steeleye Span and shows the band in their prime in great quality. 

It was filmed a few months after the 'Commoners Crown' album was recorded so features tracks from that album including the epic Long Lankin plus Little Sir Hugh and Demon Lover. 

The band went into the studio with Mike Batt to start recording 'All Around My Hat' the month after this performance.

Note that there was no crowd, this was a Made For TV Session and as it was not broadcast in full, this version has not had the applause (etc) edits added in. 

 

You can find out a lot more about Steeleye Span here.

Recycling Office Towers

Having lived in Toronto for more than a decade and worked there for close to 40 years, I'm used to the construction in North America's fastest-growing major city.  According to a CBC radio report I heard the other day, there are more than 250 construction cranes poking up from the city's skyline.

That construction often involves destruction, because older buildings have to be torn down. As the city gets denser, often that's more than just knocking down an old strip mall or small commercial building. Sometimes it means taking down, or at least gutting, a multi-storey office tower. (I've worked in two 10-storey buildings that were eventually stripped down to the structural steel and rebuilt). 

What happens to all that material? In past years, much of it would end up in landfill sites, or in Toronto's case, get dumped off the Leslie Street spit to create new land. But environmental concerns are forcing developers to consider recycling the material from old buildings. The New York Times has a fascinating article* on how buildings are being recycled and new buildings designed so their eventual demolition will be more environmentally friendly. 

In recent years, concern about waste and the climate has led cities like Portland, Ore., and Milwaukee to pass ordinances requiring certain houses to be deconstructed rather than demolished. Private companies in Japan have spearheaded new ways of taking high-rises down from the inside, floor by floor. China promised to repurpose 60 percent of construction waste in its recent five-year plan. But perhaps no country has committed itself as deeply to circular policies as the Netherlands. In 2016, the national government announced that it would have a waste-free economy by 2050. At the same time, the country held the rotating Council of the European Union presidency, and it made circularity one of the main concepts driving the industrial sector across the bloc. Amsterdam’s city government has set its own goals, announcing plans to start building a fifth of new housing with wood or bio-based material by 2025 and halve the use of raw materials by 2030. Cities like Brussels, Copenhagen and Barcelona, Spain, have followed suit.

Even in the Netherlands, though, creating a truly circular economy is challenging. Nearly half of all waste in the country comes from construction and demolition, according to national statistics, and a stunning 97 percent of that waste was classified as “recovered” in 2018. But most of the recovered waste is downcycled — that is, crushed into roads or incinerated to produce energy. A 2020 report by the European Environment Agency pointed out that only 3 to 4 percent of material in new Dutch construction was reused in its original form, which means that trees are still being cut for lumber and limestone still mined for cement.

* I've gifted the article from my subscription so it should be in front of the paywall.  

Plain English Pays Off

I've been a fan of the "plain English" methodology for a long time and tried to use it in my technical writing. It makes intuitive sense to me that simpler writing is easier to understand, especially for non-technical readers. 

An article in the Harvard Business Review summarizes some of the academic research into the benefits of clear writing, and shows that it can have a financial impact.  

The cost of bad writing stems from the way the brain works. Science shows that if you don’t give the mind a stimulus that’s appealing — a piece of good writing in this case — it fails to respond with pleasing neurochemicals that motivate people to read further. If you do, you trigger a release of dopamine and other chemicals that hook readers — and keep them reading. 

To be sure, scientists don’t know all the secrets of better motivating readers. Most research on fluency relies on correlation. Correlation between readability and financial gain can suggest a cause-effect relationship but doesn’t confirm it. The current crop of studies had an advantage in this respect. Three of them studied the year-over-year upgrading of disclosures as the SEC rule went into effect in 1998. This onetime event tended isolate readability as a factor, and the data for this period did suggest fluency causes financial gain. 

I struggled many times to convey the benefits of clear communication to upper managers. I wish I'd had this article to wave under their noses.

Adobe Updates FrameMaker and RoboHelp

Now having been retired for almost four years, I haven't been closely following developments in the technical communication field. But my ears perked up when I received an invite to an Adobe webinar for updates to their key technical communication software, FrameMaker and RoboHelp.

FrameMaker was my authoring tool of choice in my last couple of jobs. While Word improved steadily over the years, FrameMaker had it beat hands down in several areas, especially when it came to really large, complex documents. While Word (with the assistance of ThirtSix Software's excellent SmartDocs add-on) could handle 300-page docs, I would never have considered it for maintaining the documentation library for the TSX Quantum Trading Engine, which ran to something over 1500 pages across several documents and was produced in both print and online formats. FrameMaker had a clunky interface compared to Word, but it was stable and fast. 

Adobe updated Frame, as it's affectionately known among tech writers, several times over the last decade, but the last few updates have been somewhat underwhelming. Unfortunately, the latest falls into that category. There are no major product features, just tweaks like being able to have table and header rows in different colours, some additions to search and replace, faster performance in searches, and so on. I have long wished for an update to Frame's typography engine, perhaps by adopting the excellent typography of Adobe InDesign, but no such luck. 

RoboHelp, FrameMaker's companion product for producing online content, also received an update. I can't comment much on that because I haven't used  RoboHelp since before Adobe bought the product. But based on the webinar, updates looked relatively minor. I should note that Adobe completely revamped RoboHelp in the previous release, something I was hoping to see with Frame. Maybe in 2024?

I didn't watch the part of the webinar about Adobe Experience Manager Guides, an online documentation and publishing tool that ties into the Adobe Experience Manager content management system. From what I can see of the information on the product page, it looks slick and may be the wave of the future. 

As for my current situation, I'm still using Word 2013 for the few documents I need to write. I'll be looking at upgrading to Office 365 next year as Office 2013 will be reaching end-of-life. Or maybe I'll just start using LibreOffice, which is free and would more than meet my current needs.

Featured Links - October 11, 2022

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

Frenchman's Bay Marina

• From BQ.1.1 to XBB and beyond: How the splintering of Omicron variants could shape Covid’s next phase. "What’s different, at least for now, is that there’s not one variant pushing the wave. Rather, scientists are tracking a bevy of new forms of Omicron, which are jockeying with each other as they compete to become the next dominant strain. Scientists are monitoring more than 300 sublineages of Omicron, World Health Organization officials said this week."
• Stick A Note — It’s life-changing! "No, really … life-changing." I have not tried this yet, but it does look like it could be useful.
• How does anorexia affect eyesight? "The eyes, like any other organ, need proper nutrients to function. People living with anorexia nervosa (AN) typically don’t consume enough food to fully nourish their bodies. This malnutrition leads to physical changes and complications, including to the eyes and vision."
• The Ultimate Guide to Wondrous Independent Bookstores. "We think book havens are heaven." Some of the bookstores shown in the article are truly awesome.
• The Chemin de Fer Glissant in Chicago. Unearthing a bit of lost transportation history.
• 2022 A Space Odyssey. "Turns out, yes, you can walk with Velcro shoes. Slowly, very very slowly." A cool video from Italian astronaut Samantha Critoforetti. 
• This Is Life in the Metaverse. "Every hour of the day and night with the gamers, parents, insomniacs, preteens and aspiring comedians who are the earliest adopters of the immersive, three-dimensional internet that Mark Zuckerberg has bet the future of his company on."

Happy Thanksgiving and All That

It's another long weekend up here in the Great Soon-to-Be White North.  On Monday, we celebrate Thanksgiving (harvest comes earlier up here than it does south of the 49th). So I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. I'll be back on Tuesday.

I'll leave you with a picture (from my Pixel 4a) that's a true sign of autumn. Taken last Friday, it shows several salmon swimming upstream to spawn in the Ganaraksa River in downtown Port Hope. There are at least three salmon in the lower left of the picture, but there were quite a few more in the river. 

Here's a wider view of the river.

  

We're Toast 29

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Invasive plants in the hydro marsh

Incel Communities Are Reportedly Engaged in a ‘Brothers-in-Arms' War Against Women. "The report analyzed more than 1 million posts from a leading incel forum and found a 59% uptick in keywords associated with acts of mass violence."

The Coming Deluge: Russia’s Looming Lost Decade of Unpaid Bills and Economic Stagnation. "Russia faces a litany of long-term economic challenges that will hobble its growth potential but likely won’t be severe enough to force far-reaching political change."

Libraries Across the US Are Receiving Violent Threats. "Librarians and patrons believe the threats were part of a coordinated effort to limit information access, and come amids a recent wave of book bans."

The Drying Up of Europe’s Great Rivers Could Be the New Normal. "From the Danube to the Loire, these lifelines for the continent’s economy are running low after five months of brutal drought and years of dry weather."

Fossil Fuel Industry May Be Seriously Undercounting Greenhouse Gas Emissions. "A new study finds that a process meant to get rid of methane resulting from oil and gas production may be far less effective than previous estimates."

The Monsoon Is Becoming More Extreme. "As the world warms over decades, rainfall will increase. The monsoon will become stronger — and less predictable."

Megadrought in the American south-west: a climate disaster unseen in 1,200 years. "The west is now in uncharted territory, as once singular conditions become the norm. Its mightiest reservoirs – Lake Mead and Lake Powell – are at record low levels and steadily shriveling. Prolonged, triple-digit heatwaves are making cities like Phoenix, Arizona, and Las Vegas, Nevada, almost unlivable during summers. And wildfires now spark year-round as parched forests and grasslands are more primed than ever to burn."

Hacking Google Video Series

Thanks to Steve Gibson and the excellent Security Now podcast for tipping me off to this 6-part video series, Hacking Google.  Produced by Google, it shows the security teams that are responsible for keeping Google, and large parts of the internet, safe from hacking. If you're interested in computer security, or it's part of your job, you'll want to watch this.

Movie and TV Reviews - September 2022

 Short reviews of TV shows we watched in September. No movies this month, too many shows to watch, not to mention baseball games.

TV Shows

• House of the Dragon: I ranted about how bad the first episode was, but the show has improved quite a bit since then. It is certainly better than Rings of Power. It still isn't as good as the early seasons of Game of Thrones, largely because it's too focused on one family, and an aristocratic family at that. (Crave/HBO)
• Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power: There is some serious eye candy in this show, but no heart or soul. It shows how limiting the original source material was. (Amazon Prime)
• Darby and Joan: Another Australian drama, mostly worth watching for the scenery, which is occasionally the star of the show. (Acorn TV)
• Bloodlands: This one was pretty grim, for reasons I won't go into because it would be a major spoiler. It was well done but very grim. (Acorn TV))
• Recipes for Love and Murder: A light crime drama set in South Africa. Like Pie in the Sky, another crime series we enjoyed, the central character is a cook and there's a lot of mouth-watering food. (Acorn TV)
• The Cleaner: We watched two episodes of this when our Rogers internet was acting up and we had to resort to regular TV. We won't go back to it. (CTV)
• Hidden Assets: This is one of the better shows we've watched recently. It's a crime thriller set in Ireland and Antwerp. Very twisty and intense. They set it up for a second season, which we will happily watch. (Acorn TV)
• The Good Karma Hospital: A fish out of water story about a British doctor who goes to work in India after a breakup. Chaos and some hilarity ensue. I should note that it was filmed in Sri Lanka, which is something like filming a series about British boarding school life in Quebec. If you like Doc Martin or The Heart Guy, you would like this.  (Acorn TV)

Featured Links - October 3, 2022

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

A classic Thunderbird

• ‘Bit of panic’: Astronomers forced to rethink early Webb telescope findings. "Revised instrument calibrations are bedevilling work on the distant Universe."
• Working With Robert Jordan's Papers. "It you don’t know, the Wheel of Time series of books contains some 14 million such words, but the materials that Jordan used to compose them are far, far more numerous. And, word-hoarder that he was, he saved an extraordinary amount of these materials. This. Is. Awesome."
• Our Democracy Is in Trouble, but We’ve Been Here Before (With Heather Cox Richardson). "Make no mistake, America’s experiment in popular sovereignty is in jeopardy. Here’s how this moment compares to past crises."
• Putin sees himself as engaged in an existential war with the West. "The most important strategic decision a wartime leader must make is determining the nature of the war they are fighting. With Putin’s most recent announcement, it looks ever more as though Moscow sees the conflict in Ukraine as part of an existential struggle against the West."
• Margaret Atwood Doesn't Think We're Doomed. "Doomerism is not helpful." I hope she gets the Nobel this year. 
• Reservoir population ecology, viral evolution and the risk of emerging infectious disease. "Which viruses in animal reservoirs are at risk of emerging in human populations? Key parameters include: average lifespan of host, rate of viral mutation, and the virus causes persistent infections and/or a transient immune response in the reservoir host."
• Artificial intelligence reduces a 100,000-equation quantum physics problem to only four equations. "The work, published in the September 23 issue of Physical Review Letters, could revolutionize how scientists investigate systems containing many interacting electrons. Moreover, if scalable to other problems, the approach could potentially aid in the design of materials with sought-after properties such as superconductivity or utility for clean energy generation."

Photo of the Week - October 2, 2022

Here's another photo taken down by the lakeshore in Alex Robertson Park. It's a lovely walk along the trails through the park. This scene should be quite a bit more colourful in a couple of weeks.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm F2.8 WR at F8, 1/640 second, ISO 640, Velvia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - Richard and Linda Thompson - January 10, 1980 - Hamburg

YouTube's algorithm has problems but every once in a while it surfaces a real treasure. This week it's a 1980 concert from Richard and Linda Thompson filmed at Hamburg Germany's Rockpalast (or Markthalle, depending on whether you believe YouTube or setlist.fm). I'm guessing it was filmed for TV, as were quite a few of the Rockpalast shows. 

The setlist features many classic Thompson songs ("For Shame of Doing Wrong", "Strange Affair", "Don't Let a Thief Steal Into Your Heart", "I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight") along with a few covers. The band (featuring Fairport Convention alumni Simon Nicholl and Dave Pegg) is tight and both Richard on guitar and Linda on vocals are spot on. 

Incidentally, if you search YouTube on "Rockpalast" you'll come up with a long list 70s and 80s concerts, including Elvis Costello, The Police, Procul Harum, and Peter Gabriel.