Featured Links - July 31, 2023

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

Wild flowers

• archives.design: "A digital archive of graphic design related items that are available on the Internet Archives."
• The Ed's Up - An Ending .... Ed Yong is one of the best journalists out there. I didn't know he had a newsletter, but I've just subscribed. 
• Spatial biology is lighting it up. "A rapid fire chain of discoveries are illuminating health and disease."
• That Which Copyright Destroys, ‘Pirates’ Can Save. 'There’s an interesting post on TorrentFreak that concerns so-called “pirate” subtitles for films. It’s absurd that anyone could consider subtitles to be piracy in any way. They are a good example of how ordinary people can add value by generously helping others enjoy films and TV programs in languages they don’t understand.'
• A beautiful, broken America: what I learned on a 2,800-mile bus ride from Detroit to LA. "Gone are the small, clean, cheap motels and public spaces where anyone can find a place to nurse a cup of coffee. Yet the camaraderie of the Greyhound is hanging on." 
• 2023 World Fantasy Awards Finalists. The awards will be presented during the World Fantasy Convention in Kansas City at the end of October.
• Here's What 'Oppenheimer' Gets Right--and Wrong--about Nuclear History. It gets a lot of things right, but not everything. 

Photo of the Week - July 30, 2023

This week's photo is from up north when we went to Nancy's family's get together last weekend. I love the tall trees up there. This was taken with my Pixel 4a.

Tall trees in the summer heat

 

Saturday Sounds - Evenings at the Village Gate - John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy

A live recording of John Coltrane that lay in the vaults of the New York Public Library for almost 60 years has finally been released. Evenings at the Village Gate: John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy contains five songs from a run of performances at the Village Gate in New York in the summer of 1961. They were recorded by the club's sound engineer using a single microphone hung above the stage to test the club's sound system. The recording quality is not up to studio standards but the performances sizzle. 

From All About Jazz: 

There are five tracks on the album. On the first four—"My Favorite Things," "When Lights Are Low," "Impressions" and "Greensleeves"—Coltrane plays soprano. He is heard on tenor only on the closer, "Africa" (the only non-studio recording of the tune known to exist). Dolphy plays flute on the opening "My Favorite Things," alto saxophone on "Africa," and bass clarinet elsewhere. "When Lights Are Low" is a showcase for Dolphy, who takes an extended solo, followed by a much shorter one from Coltrane.

It was during this engagement at the Gate, and later at the Vanguard, that Coltrane and Dolphy received the censure of the jazz establishment—they were actually called "anti-jazz" in Downbeat magazine. It is hard to reconcile the opprobrium with what one is hearing on either the Gate or Vanguard recordings, even allowing for the passage of time; one may reasonably construe that non-musical factors, primarily concerning race and politics, were in play among the naysayers.

To be fair, it is easy to imagine that someone who had last heard Coltrane play "When Lights Are Low" as a member of Miles Davis' quintet (as on Davis' 1956 Prestige album Cookin') might have needed smelling salts on hearing his performance with Dolphy at the Gate. It is worth remembering, too, that Coltrane's Africa/Brass (1961), which featured Dolphy, had yet to be released when the Gate recordings were made. This meant that "Greensleeves" and, more to the point, the turbulent "Africa," were likely to be new to many people in the audience, as would be Dolphy himself to some of them. And some audience members may well have been at the club on the strength of Coltrane's current radio hit "My Favorite Things." But the vibe in the room is palpably onside. If the gatekeepers did not get it, it sounds like the paying customers did. 

The Last Days of Dead and Company

Dead and Company, the latest incarnation of the Grateful Dead, finished their "Final Tour" in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. I resisted the temptation to watch the webcasts of the final shows; I'm too old to sit up until 2:00 a.m. watching a concert on TV, though I would have gladly gone to see them play if they had deigned to come to Toronto.

I don't have the emotional connection to Dead and Company that I had to the Grateful Dead, who I saw eight times over three decades. The music I heard from them over the years before COVID hit seemed aimless and unfocused. But something changed over the last couple of years and the shows this year were as good as most of the Dead shows I attended. They had obviously jelled as a band. You can judge for yourself; go to relisten.net and pick a recent show. 

Sadie Santini Garner was able to follow Dead and Company on the last part of their tour and saw the final ten shows. She writes about her experience in The Ringer. It's one of the best essays I've read about the Dead, their music, and the scene that's grown up around them. 

But over the course of eight years and 235 shows, Dead and Company performed several miracles. They lasted longer than any post-Garcia configuration of Grateful Dead members—a genuine feat considering the level of animosity and manipulation among those surviving players—and consistently played to crowds that rivaled those the Dead drew in the heady gate-crashing days of the late 1980s and early 1990s, when they were the biggest touring act in the country. Those bigger crowds in turn rekindled the parking-lot scene that has been part of Dead culture since the late 1970s at a scale not seen since the days of Garcia. Though they fastidiously refused to expand it, Dead and Company developed a genuinely new way of performing and presenting what is almost certainly the greatest and most dynamic songbook any American rock band has ever produced.

But perhaps most important, they maintained and ultimately solidified the legacy of the Grateful Dead—not so much as a band but as the originators of a distinct form. Though it may seem unlikely when artists of their generation are selling off their catalogs for nine digits, no rock band of any era will be remembered as fondly as them. Most musicians understand their primary medium to be the studio recording, which makes sense—you can maintain control in the studio, and the songs are placed on a gallery wall and can be admired like paintings. They are, essentially, finished. But by understanding their music as something that should be made fresh night after night for new fans, year after year and decade after decade, the Grateful Dead suggested that their songs are never complete. There is no final version; there’s not even a definitive live version.

Is the Gulf Stream In Trouble?

A recent paper by researchers in Denmark has been getting a lot of notice this week. Here's the abstract. The key point is the last sentence.

The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions.

From the New York Times (paywall-free link):

Were the circulation to tip into a much weaker state, the effects on the climate would be far-reaching, though scientists are still examining their potential magnitude. Much of the Northern Hemisphere could cool. The coastlines of North America and Europe could see faster sea-level rise. Northern Europe could experience stormier winters, while the Sahel in Africa and the monsoon regions of Asia would most likely get less rain.

Something to consider. London is about 4 degrees south of Moscow's lattitude, not quite 300 miles. I shudder to think of what winters would be like in Britain without the warming effects of the current Atlantic currents.

Not all scientists trust the research. From The Guardian:

Prof Niklas Boers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, revealed the early warning signs of Amoc collapse in 2021. “The results of the new study sound alarming but if the uncertainties in the heavily oversimplified model [of the tipping point] and in the underlying [sea temperature] data are included, then it becomes clear that these uncertainties are too large to make any reliable estimate of the time of tipping.”

Prof David Thornalley, at University College London, UK, agreed the study had large caveats and unknowns and said further research was essential: “But if the statistics are robust and a relevant way to describe how the actual Amoc behaves, then this is a very concerning result.”

It's probably too early to say whether the study is accurate, but the fact that there's enough evidence to lead researchers to their rather scary conclusion is concerning and should strengthen the case for more rapid reduction in carbon emissions.  

 

A Couple of VBA Add-Ins

Microsoft Office applications have a powerful programming language built-in, Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). This allows users to write macros to automate tasks and build quite sophisticated add-ins. VBA is easy to learn, but figuring out Word's (for example) object model can be difficult.

Recently I've come across a couple of VBA add-ins aimed at help users to program in VBA.

Code VBA extends VBA's programming environment to make it much easier to find commands and their options. For example, it provides:

• Context sensitive IntelliSense lets you select code from a shortcut menu. Here you may use an existing variable or constant or declare a new variable, select from existing names, obtain property values or call a VBA function that will return a value of the required type. In case of Set(ting) an object variable, it presents all possible sources for you to select from. When you need to specify a condition, it lets you use select using from the above those that return a boolean value and the Condition Builder.
• Starting from an Object, cascading menus move you down the application's object model to apply the required actions: set properties, start methods, loop collections, and so on.
• Tooltips explain what classes and procedures do and give direct access (F1) to the relevant documentation on Office MSDN online. In case of properties of available objects, the actual value is also displayed.

There's much more.  Coce VBA is available for all Office versions from 2010 through 2023 and sells for 69 USD per application (with a discounted bundle for the all five  Office applications). 

Rubberduck is a free and open source IDE add-in for VBA that provides code inspections, annotations, navigation tools, auto-completion, refactoring, unit testing and more. There's also a VBA style guide. 

If I were still writing macros for Microsoft Word, I'd probably want both of these tools. As it stands now, if I need a macro I look for it in Paul Beverley's wonderful Macros for Editors collection.

They Paved Paradise

I've been reading Christopher Brown's Field Notes newsletter for a while now. He's a lawyer and science fiction author living in Austin, TX and his newsletter is focused on the environment and social issues in his area. His latest issue had a passage that resonated strongly with me after having to live with municipal and provincial governments that seem hell-bent on paving over every bit of green land they can get their hands on. 

Maybe a few neighborhood teens would have helped us back here in Austin Thursday, when our City Council granted final approval of the rezoning of the Borden Dairy site frequently featured in this newsletter’s rambles, where a local developer and the private equity funds that bought Borden out of bankruptcy propose to develop a giant mixed-use project on 20 acres, half of which are currently an empty lot, next to a 43-acre wildlife sanctuary on the Colorado River, with 120-foot buildings in a major migratory bird corridor. We had a dozen young people come out to testify at first reading in May, but their pleas fell on deaf ears, even before we learned we had been disenfranchised by a maneuver that compelled our district representative on the Council to recuse himself. The fight is not yet over, but the fix is in. Trying to persuade municipal officials that their imperative for growth and infill needs to be balanced against the protection of wild green spaces is a quixotic undertaking—just ask the hundreds who turned out last month in Atlanta to try to stop the razing of an urban forest to build a police training base.+

He also pointed out an article in TIME by another science fiction author, Jeff VanderMeer, whose books have a strong environmental focus. The article, Florida’s Environmental Failures Are a Warning for the Rest of the U.S., Brown says: "In a powerful, comprehensive, urgent and elegiac work of reportage, Jeff marries the lyricism of nature writing with deeply researched public policy journalism, and TIME gave him room to really tell the full story behind what the “secret history of loss” underway there and all over the country, and the planet—the destruction of wild life that goes on outside of our range of vision. Highly recommended." 

Pink Floyd Performing With Frank Zappa

My YouTube feed keeping popping up some amazing goodies. Today's is a film, professionally shot, of Pink Floyd performing Interstellar Overdrive with Frank Zappa sitting in on guitar. I don't know exactly when or where it was filmed, but I'd guess 1969 at a festival in Europe. It is a spectacular performance. I've always preferred pre-DSOTM Pink Floyd to the later material and this is a classic.

Featured Links - July 24, 2023

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

Marina on the Talbot River

The Misery: Return of Measles. "Low vaccination rates in London are an opportunity for the old scourge."

A new, thin-lensed telescope design could far surpass James Webb—goodbye mirrors, hello diffractive lenses. "A light, cheap space telescope design would make it possible to put many individual units in space at once."

Emergency lights and sirens on ambulances may do more harm than good. "Theoretically, lights and sirens save lives by parting seas of traffic to rush patients to hospitals as fast as possible. But research into them echoes Mecklenburg’s takeaways: About 5% of EMS patients benefit, clinically, from quicker transports. Meanwhile, lights and sirens have been found to only save seconds or minutes at most — and almost triple the chance of crashing with a patient onboard."

Insider: Fujifilm X-H2 Teardown and Disassembly. This is a fascinating look at what makes up a modern digital camera. The complexity and amount of computer circuitry is remarkable.

We have no idea if pesticide protections for bees actually work — a serious issue for conservation. "A new study shows pesticide research is biased towards honeybees, which could negatively impact other bee species."

"VC qanon" and the radicalization of the tech tycoons. We need a 99-percent wealth tax that kicks in after $10,000,000 or so.

People are getting fed up with all the useless tech in their cars. "If you’ve ever let out a string of curses while fumbling to control your car’s air conditioning because it’s buried under several menus in a dang touchscreen, you’re not alone. At a time when car companies are racing to outdo each other by slathering more and more tech onto their products, people are getting increasingly fed up with their car infotainment systems."

Infant deaths surge in Texas after abortion ban. "The increase in deaths reverses a nearly 10-year decline." Predictable and predicted. 

Photo of the Week - July 23, 2023

This week's picture is from a boat ride on the Talbot River, part of the Trent Canal system, taken yesterday with my Pixel 4a. It's a lovely area and I wish I hadn't forgotten to bring my camera. 😔 

On the Talbot River near Bolsover

Saturday Sounds - Mike Haggith - All the Best In All You Do

Mike Haggith is a musician and songwriter whose day job is being an airline pilot. He spent several years living in Sault Ste Marie and was the kickoff act in the Sault's Rotaryfest concert, when he dislocated his knee during the second song. He'd just released his latest album, All the Best In All You Do, earlier that day.

I'd not heard of Haggith before this, but I'm glad I just discovered his music. He's a talented songwriter and performer and the album is classic, melodic rock. I think you'll enjoy it. 

Photography Links - July 21, 2023

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

Garlic scapes, taken with my Pixel 4a

• Focus Stacking on Steroids. "With the advancements in camera technology and software, focus stacking has never been easier. You can now even stack complex woodland photos without significant difficulty. In this article, I share how to approach such scenes."
• Our top 13 Google Photos editing tips and tricks to help you get the best smartphone photos. "Don't dismiss Google Photos as an average photo editing app." And it just keeps getting better.
• *PRECISION* Masking in Lightroom & Adobe Camera Raw 14 (YouTube video). "The new Luminance and Color Range Masks in ACR 14 and Lightroom are the biggest improvements to the Raw workflow since 2017!  We have so much power at our fingertips now, I almost can't believe this is possible at the Raw level."
• Fireworks 101: How to take great fireworks photos, even if you're a beginner. I should have read this before Canada Day. 
• Generative Fill in Photoshop: The Essential Guide. "Have you heard about the new Generative Fill tool in Photoshop? It’s given professional and amateur photographers quite a lot to talk about, and for good reason; thanks to Generative Fill, you can create realistic digital art using simple text prompts."
• Top tips for how to get creative with analogue film photography. "There's no better way to get the vintage look than with film." 

Losing Your Job to ChatGPT

I've seen anecdotal reports of people blaming their job loss on AI tools like ChatGPT. Emily Hanley is a copywriter who apparently lost her job because customers were using ChatGPT instead of hiring a human. She's the subject of this article in BusinessWeek.  

The majority of my freelance assignments came through a single agency working with several brands. When the assignments stopped coming, I emailed my editor/boss to ask if I'd been fired or if all the brands had just voted me off the island, "Survivor" style.

The good news was it wasn't me, but the real reason made me wish it had been.

Clients were simply unwilling to pay for copywriting any longer unless that writer could also provide email management and a funnel-building system, most likely because of the newfound popularity of ChatGPT. Most of my clients were small businesses, startups, and young brands, which are typically the first to adapt to new technology to cut costs — aka me.

I've not heard of this happening to any technical writers, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me, given the rapacious nature of modern business. If you know of any tech writers who lost their jobs to AI, please leave a comment.

If this article is accurate, it will likely be a temporary situation. Researchers have found that the quality of output from Large Language Model systems like ChatGPT has declined over time. It may yet be the end for humans.  

There’s been plenty of speculation online about whether ChatGPT is getting worse over time. Over the last few months, some regular ChatGPT users across sites like Reddit and beyond have openly questioned whether the GPT-4-powered chatbot is getting worse, or if they’re simply getting wiser to the system’s limitations. Some users reported that when asking the bot to restructure a piece of text, the bot would routinely ignore the prompt and write pure fiction. Others noted that the system would fail at relatively simple problem-solving tasks, whether that’s math or coding questions. Some of these complaints may have partially caused ChatGPT engagement to dip for the first time since the app came online last year.

Setting Up the Quick Access Toolbar in Microsoft Word

The Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) is a very useful feature of Microsoft Word and the other major Office applications. Based on my own observations, it's one that not many people know about or use. It's a user-customizable toolbar that sits either above the ribbon in the title bar or just below the ribbon. If you configure it properly, you can hide the ribbon most of the time and save quite a bit of screen real estate, which is especially handy on wide-screen monitors.

This is a screen grab of Word 365 after setting up the QAT and hiding the ribbon. 

QAT with only Ribbon tabs showing

Microsoft buries the QAT setup in the options menu, but once you find it, it's easy enough to set up. These instructions are based on Word 365, but the setup hasn't changed much since Word 2007*. 

1. Open any Word file. 

2. Open the File menu and click Options.

3. Click Quick Access Toolbar. The Customize Quick Access Toolbar dialog box appears.

My QAT commands 1/2

4. From the Choose commands from list, select a command, then click the Add button to move it to the Customize Quick Access Toolbar list.

5. Optionally, use the dropdown of the Choose command list to filter the commands by ribbon tab, macros, or all commands.

6. To hide the command labels, clear the Always show command labels checkbox. 

6. Once you are done, click OK to save your QAT. The QAT appears in the title bar above the ribbon. 

To change the position of the QAT or to hide it, click the arrow at the right of the QAT and select the appropriate command. 

My QAT commands 2/2

Once you have a QAT that's customized to your needs, you'll wonder how you got along without it. 

* Per this article from Thurrott.com, Microsoft tried to remove the QAT from Office 365, but had to reinstate it after complaints from users. 

How Software Specifications Really Work

I spent quite a bit of my technical writing career helping development teams with their software specifications. We had all sorts of them: functional specifications, architecture specifications, design specifications, and so on. My role was mostly editorial and also to maintain the documentation library for projects. 

It became clear very quickly that there was often a disconnect between what was in the specifications and what finally got built and rolled out. And the reason for that was almost always a difference in expectations between the business and product managers on one side and the development teams on the other side. 

Here is a rather acerbic post by David Gerard about software development and specifications that came across my Mastodon feed recently. The whole post is worth reading, but I'm just going to quote this bit, which is especially accurate and quite brilliant.

The purpose of a specification is to nail down the vague hopes and dreams of the business unit that’s just seen a fat, juicy market opportunity. In this case, they wanted a magical flying unicorn pony that ejaculated rainbows. The spec went into quite some detail about the desired properties of the wing feathers.

What they ended up with, of course, was a retired seaside donkey that had been tarred and feathered, a cornetto stuck on its head and fed food colouring and laxatives.

Needless to say, I am now following his Mastodon account.

Featured Links - July 17, 2023

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

Downtown Port Hope

Sorry, Elon: Chinese Company Becomes the World's First to Launch Methane Rocket to Orbit. "The Zhuque-2 rocket beat other methalox-fueled rockets, such as SpaceX's Starship, to orbit."

When Norman Rockwell Got Woke: The Story Behind 'The Problem We All Live With'. "In the 1960s, America's most famous artist defiantly transformed himself from an inadvertent white supremacist into a radical civil rights activist."

‘Heart-stopping’: censored pages of history of Elizabeth I reappear after 400 years. "British Library uses new technique to uncover passages of Camden’s Annals, the first official account of Elizabeth’s reign." 

The Top 14 Android Secret Security Codes You Need to Know. "Looking for the best Android secret codes and hacks? Here are the top USSD codes to sharpen your smartphone's security and privacy." I've had an Android phone for more than a decade, and I didn't know about these codes.

Potential Setback for Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin as Rocket Engine Explodes in Test. "The company's BE-4 engine is meant to power ULA's Vulcan Centaur rocket, the inaugural flight of which has already been delayed several times."

Stunning Wet Bulb Temperature Update. "The Danger Zone is Far Lower Than We Thought." This is important to know considering the extreme hot weather that many of us have been experiencing.

Microsoft Announces a New Default Font, Aptos. It's about time; I dislike Calibri.

Photo of the Week - July 16, 2023

These are some daisies growing in our backyard. We have many other flowers but I've had a soft spot for daisies since seeing 2001 half a century ago. I used the Flower setting in the X-S10s Scene Mode options for this one. It generally gives me better exposures than trying to set things manually. I cropped this in Photoshop Express and removed a couple of distracting spots in the background. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 74 mm., F4, 1/950 second, ISO 160, Astia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - Tedeschi Trucks Band - June 24, 2023

This weeks Saturday Sounds post is the Tedeschi Trucks Band from the Fox Theater in Atlanta recorded on June 24. It's a fan production with good quality video shot from a tripod up front and a superb audience recording, one of the cleanest I've heard (I first thought it was a soundboard; it's that good). 

Tedeschi Trucks played the Budweiser Stage in Toronto a couple of nights ago and I'm regretting not going to see them. Unfortunately, the venue is horrible to get to by transit at this time of year because of the preparations for the Molson Indy. This is an excellent peformance and I envy any of you who got to see them this summer.

We're Toast 41

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.

Dying branches

• June 2023 was the world’s warmest June on record. "June featured unprecedented Canadian heat and wildfires, record-low Antarctic sea ice, and a strengthening El Niño."
• New disinformation series promotes terrain theory pseudoscience. "So, basically, it's a disinformation extravaganza grounded in "terrain theory," which is a widely debunked ideology that denies that germs cause disease. If you didn't know that there are growing numbers of people who don't believe in germ theory, surprise!" Semmelweis must be spinning in his grave.
• The Rise of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) Omicron Subvariant Pathogenicity. "We show that the rise of Omicron pathogenicity is exponential, and we have modeled the case fatality rate of the next major subvariant as 0.0413, 2.5 times that of the Alpha strain and 60% of the original Wuhan strain which caused the greatest morbidity and mortality during the pandemic."
• ‘Frankenstein Chemicals’ Are Even Worse Than ‘Forever Chemicals’. "PFAS get a lot of attention, but there are other compounds in our drinking water that are more dangerous — and much more common."
• We’re Building Things Based on a Climate We No Longer Live In. "NOAA precipitation estimates that engineers and planners use to design bridges, roads and other infrastructure are decades out of date because of climate change."
• Catastrophic climate 'doom loops' could start in just 15 years, new study warns. "Climate "tipping points," such as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or the collapse of the Greenland ice sheet, could come within a human lifetime, scientists have said."
• The hard right and climate catastrophe are intimately linked. This is how. "As climate policy is weakened, extreme weather intensifies and more refugees are driven from their homes – and the cycle of hatred continues."
• ‘Absolutely stunned’: Sperm counts are falling faster than ever. 'Chemicals in tin can linings, cosmetics, nail polish, teflon pans and flame retardants on cushions have been linked to a steep decline in sperm counts and a potential “crisis in human reproduction”, Australian fertility specialists have been warned.'

Is Heinlein's Future History Coming True?

In 2017, David Brin wrote an essay called Looking back at Heinlein's Future History - coming true before our eyes. I wrote a blog post about it then, and I'm posting about it again, because it's even more relevant now. 

Heinlein has fallen out of favour these days, and there are some valid reasons for that, but he was right about the threat of religious fundamentalism and its link to authoritarianism. This is from the afterword to his collected Future History stories. 

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so, and will follow it by suppressing opposition, subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young, and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics. This is equally true whether the faith is Communism or Holy-Rollerism; indeed it is the bounden duty of the faithful to do so. The custodians of the True Faith cannot logically admit tolerance of heresy to be a virtue.

Nevertheless this business of legislating religious beliefs into law has never been more than sporadically successful in this country – Sunday closing laws here and there, birth control legislation in spots, the Prohibition experiment, temporary enclaves of theocracy such as Voliva’s Zion, Smith’s Nauvoo, and a few others. The country is split up into such a variety of faiths and sects that a degree of uneasy tolerance now exists from expedient compromise; the minorities constitute a majority of opposition against each other.

Could it be otherwise here? Could any one sect obtain a working majority at the polls and take over the country? Perhaps not – but a combination of a dynamic evangelist, television, enough money, and modern techniques of advertising and propaganda might make Billy Sunday’s efforts look like a corner store compared to Sears Roebuck. 

Throw in a Depression for good measure, promise a material heaven here on earth, add a dash of anti-Semitism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Negrosim, and a good large dose of anti-“furriners” in general and anti-intellectuals here at home, and the result might be something quite frightening – particularly when one recalls that our voting system is such that a minority distributed as pluralities in enough states can constitute a working majority in Washington."

He was right to be worried about it when he wrote this in the early 1950s, and we should be worried about it now.

Manuskript: An Open-Source Tool for Writers

Update: I've fixed the link to Manuskript. Sorry.

I came across an interesting tool while browsing through my Mastodon feed the other day. It's called Manuskript and it bills itself as an "open source tool for writers". 

At first glance, it seems to be similar to Scrivener, which several writers I know by. It's designed mainly for writing fiction, though it does have a "Simple" mode for non-fiction like documentation or research papers. 

If you write fiction and don't want to lay out around $100 CDN for Scrivener, Manuskript might be worth a look. 

The Curse of Disinformation

I've posted quite a bit about disinformation and misinformation; I've even set up a blog topic for tracking posts about it. 

Sadly there's more to it than just reading something online that is false or misleading. Disinformation, and the organized campaigns that spread it and often result in harassment, can have major effects on people's lives. Here are some examples.

Canada Day fireworks

'Murderers' and 'Criminals': "Meteorologists face unprecedented harassment from conspiracy theorists." 

The '15-minute city' conspiracy spreads to Canada. "The concept of 15-minute cities — where a person's daily needs in a city are accessible within a 15-minute walk, bike or transit ride from their home — is a few years old. It's been picked up by many cities to guide urban planning and design. But in recent months, the 15-minute city idea has also been seized on by people who fear it's an elaborate conspiracy to limit individual freedoms, mobility, and to create barricaded sectors to keep them trapped." 26-minute podcast.

He Wanted to Unclog Cities. Now He’s ‘Public Enemy No. 1.’ (gifted-no paywall) "Researchers like Carlos Moreno, the professor behind a popular urban planning concept, are struggling with conspiracy theories and death threats."

After Elon Musk, Joe Rogan vaccine Twitter brawl, scientists say ‘vile rhetoric & misinformation’ is forcing them off the platform. "Scientists have long used Twitter. Now, they question its future as a tool for sharing medical information."

Death threats and harassment: 2024 election workers already are scared. "A new NPR investigation shows that election workers nationwide are already bracing for threats as the 2024 presidential race looms."

A vaccine scientist says being tag-teamed and dogpiled on by Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and RFK Jr. all at once has been 'overwhelming'. 'Hotez became the target of widespread ire after he tweeted in support of a Vice article published on Friday titled: "Spotify Has Stopped Even Sort of Trying to Stem Joe Rogan's Vaccine Misinformation." That episode featured presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who discussed his conspiracy theory-fueled stance on vaccines during a three-hour episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.'

Disinformation researchers under investigation: what’s happening and why. "Researchers who study how disinformation spreads are under investigation in the United States for allegedly helping to censor conservative opinions about COVID-19 vaccines and government elections. Jim Jordan, a US representative for Ohio, is leading the charge against the scientists. He is also one of the Republican leaders who have suggested that the Democrats have stolen the 2020 presidential election from former president Donald Trump, and who have made unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud."

Converting Images to Editable Text in Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word has some neat tricks under its hood, and one of them is the ability to convert PDF files to editable text. I've used this feature a few times and found it works reasonably well, though of course your results will vary depending on how the document is formatted. 

If you don't have access to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, you can use Word to convert an image to text by saving it as a PDF file first. This article from Make Use Of explains how in detail using a photo of two pages from a book as an example. It is a bit roundabout but it should work in most cases. 

Featured Links - July 10, 2023

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

A rose from our front yard

• Local historian shares fascinating story of Toronto's first-ever cat. Yes, Toronto had a first cat, all the way back in 1793.
• Here are the 2023 Hugo Award Finalists. "Award ballots are generally a good barometer for the state of a community." Some good observations on the Hugo finalists from Andrew Liptak. Also on the subject, see this from John Scalzi.
• Real Engineering's deep dive on the "questionable engineering" of Oceangate's Titan. "Here is a fifteen-minute explainer by Real Engineering, a well-loved YouTube channel, on the many problems with the Titan submersible. Real Engineering offers precise, easy-to-understand analysis, and as writer/narrator, Brian McManus is a composites design engineer and offers a fantastic view of what went wrong."
• The world just broke a stunning slew of heat records. Why right now? "There’s more than one factor at work as our warming planet kicks into overdrive."
• Is A.I. the Future of Astrology? (no paywall) This doesn't surprise me. When I was in university (before personal computers), a friend programmed horoscopes on the university mainframe.
• Science activism is surging – which marks a culture shift among scientists. "With colleagues, we recently reviewed and summarized a growing body of studies examining how scientists are mobilizing for social activism and political protest. We also surveyed 2,208 members of the Union of Concerned Scientists Science Network to learn more about scientists’ political engagement. Here is what we have found so far."
• Scams upon scams: The data-driven advertising grift. "Digital advertising is a scam from top to bottom. In fact, it’s several scams stacked on top of each other, wearing a trenchcoat, and some of the foundations of fibs are so effective that otherwise reasonable people entirely buy into them."

Photo of the Week - July 9, 2023

The photo this week is of lilies in our backyard. I used the Flower setting in my camera's scene mode and the Astia film simulation to avoid oversaturating the colours in the bright sunlight. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 32 mm., F4, 1/250 second, ISO 200, Astia film simulation

Will Threads Kill Twitter?

Here's a good analysis by Alasdair Munro of what it would likely take for Threads to become a viable successor to Twitter. 

The increasing hostile, ad filled timelines and difficulty finding trustworthy, timely and relevant information have hugely damaged Twitters value. Threads is the first real competitor capable of capturing enough relevant audience to become a rival environment. Usability needs to be fixed fast - especially desktop use and a chronological timeline only of people you follow. If this happens, it has a real chance of scaling and becoming more like Twitter felt 5 - 10 years ago. A safer space for professionals to discover and discuss cutting edge developments in their fields, and to follow world events from trusted sources in near-enough real time.

He makes some good points but ignores two key issues:

• The amount of personal data that you share with Meta when you sign up
• The fact that ownership by Meta is a single point of control; in other words, it's not (yet) federated.

I'm staying away from it for now and likely for quite a while. 

Saturday Sounds - Midnight Special - June 10, 1977

I used to watch Midnight Special religiously when it was broadcast in the '70s. Some of the shows have been cropping up on YouTube and this week's Saturday Sounds post is a classic from 1977 featuring Little Feat with a stellar lineup of guests: Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt, and Jesse Winchester. The show also includes performances by Weather Report and Neil Young. The video quality isn't great (what do you expect from 1977 video) but the sound is OK and the performances are great. Enjoy!

Windows 11 Field Guide – An Essential Resource

I finally replaced by decade-old HP PC with a new PC, a custom build from our excellent local computer store, United Computers. It is blazing fast, quiet, and has enough horsepower to run current games and do anything else I'm likely to want to do. 

I briefly entertained the idea of switching to a Mac, but I have too much experience with Windows to want to switch, and Nancy and I have no Apple hardware. So I got the new PC with Windows 11 Pro. My feeling, after a week of installing and configuring the most essential software, is that I'd rather have stuck with Windows 10 had that been possible (it wasn't). 

Windows 11 is easier to use that Windows 10, at least in some respects, and harder in others. The harder parts come with increasing complexity. What annoys me the most is that there are often multiple ways of accessing a feature or changing a setting. That's just bad UI design. It may be inevitable, given the history of Windows and the need to support legacy applications, but it's still a pain to deal with.

What has REALLY helped is Paul Thurrott's Windows 11 Field Guide. Thurrott is a tech journalist, host of the long-running Windows Weekly podcast, and has been covering Microsoft and Windows for over 30 years. The Guide is published on his website,  thurrott.com, requires an subscription to access, and is continually updated.

I can't emphasize this enough: it is worth every penny. Already, in just a week, it has more than justified the $55 (US) cost of an annual subscription. Subscribers also get access to more articles and other benefits, but the big one is the Guide.

Even if you don't want to subscribe, there's quite a bit of useful content available on the website, including forums that cover a range of topics, not just Windows. 

With the demise of Twitter, and probably Reddit, thurrott.com is an even more valuable resource. Check it out. 

2023 Hugu Awards Finalists

The finalists for the 2023 Hugo Awards have been announced by the Chengdu Worldcon, the 81st World Science Fiction Convention, which will be held in Chengdu, China later this year. The awards are nominated and voted on by  attending and supporting members of the convention.

These are the finalists for Best Novel:

Legends & Lattes, Travis Baldree (Cryptid; Tor)

Nettle & Bone, T. Kingfisher (Tor; Titan UK)

The Spare Man, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)

The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Del Rey; Jo Fletcher)

Nona the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir (Tordotcom)

The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi (Tor; Tor UK)

Out of the six finalists, I've read only The Kaiju Preservation Society. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't consider it Hugo material. A couple of books I expected to be on the list (The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler and Babel by R. F. Kuang) didn't make it, but that's not unusual. 

Movie and TV Reviews - June 2023

Short reviews of movies and TV shows we watched in June.

Movies

• Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. Light, humourous fantasy. I never got into D&D, so can't comment on any relationship to the game, but I did enjoy the movie. (Amazon Prime)
• Tetris: I put off watching this because I thought the story of a video game being marketed wouldn't be very interesting. I was wrong. It was an enjoyable movie with a visual style that harkens back to the days of the 8-bit video game. Somewhat overdramatized though, I suspect, after reading the history of the game on Wikipedia. (Apple TV+)

TV Shows

• Silent Witness (season 21): When we started watching this, I didn't realize that the first season was shown in 1996 and there were 25 more. We didn't want to work our way through all of them so jumped ahead to season 21. It's a good show but occasionally quite grim. (Amazon Prime)
• The Gryphon: A German fantasy series with either subtitled or a decent English dub. I would like to see another season as the first left quite a bit hanging.
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season 2): Old Star Trek in new clothes. This is probably the closest to the original series of any of the remakes. It still feels old and formulaic. 
• The Gallery: The Mandalorian, season 1. I watched episodes 4 and 5 of this, which focus on the technology that LucasFilm and Disney developed to produce the show. It is remarkable tech that melds VR, AR, and gaming engines together to help the production team visualize what the final images will look like in real time. 

Featured Links - July 5, 2023

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

This week's post is a bit later than usual because of the Canada Day and Independence Day long weekends, so I've got a few more links than usual.

Soon to be a monster home

• A Stratospheric wind anomaly is developing over the Equator, expected to impact the Weather along the El Nino in the next Winter Season. "A large-scale atmospheric phenomenon is currently changing its phase high in the atmosphere. Called “the heartbeat of the atmosphere,” it has a known effect on the Winter weather and will combine its influence with the El Nino event to impact the weather patterns in the 2023/2024 Winter season." This is one of the best articles about climatology and weather that I've seen in quite a while.
• AI Is Writing Lots of Code—How Good Is It? "With so much excitement about the technology’s potential—and wild speculation about how it could take over the world—subtler and yet more substantive evidence of how AI deployments are working out could be overlooked. Just about everything in our future will be underpinned by software—and if we’re not careful, it might also be riddled with AI-generated bugs."
• The Space Race may already be won. "SpaceX is using Apple’s business model to assert its will on both commercial space and governments."
• Tonga Eruption Triggered A Record-Smashing 11-Hour Lightning Marathon. "The light show broke several records including the largest lightning rings ever observed."
• Welcome to Mars! Caltech’s Jaw-Dropping, 5.7 Terapixel Virtual Expedition Across the Red Planet. "Caltech has used data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to create the highest-resolution global image of Mars ever, a 5.7 terapixel mosaic. The mosaic is designed to be accessible to everyone, from scientists to schoolchildren and the general public, and captures cliffsides, impact craters, and dust devil tracks in stunning detail."
• Why the CDC’s New Mask Guideline Proposal May Actually Imperil Frontline Workers. "The decisions some of these public health people are making are not getting better. They’re getting worse." I cannot believe that health authorities are still not acknowledging the effectiveness of and need for N95 masks in healthcare settings. 
• Cosmography of the Local Universe. If you want a true understanding of just how insignificant we are in the cosmic scheme of things, look at Figure 8 in this article.
• How Samuel R. Delany Reimagined Sci-Fi, Sex, and the City. "A visionary novelist and a revolutionary chronicler of gay life, he’s taken American letters to uncharted realms."
• Smelling Plastic? Millions Are In the Path of the Smoke Plumes. "No, there isn’t a pile of tires on fire nearby; what you smell is smoke from the wildfires."
• Who killed Google Reader? "Ten years after its untimely death, the team that built the much-beloved feed reader reflects on what went wrong and what could have been."