Featured Links - September 19, 2022

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

The marsh on a hot summer's morning

“Word Window” in trouble with Microsoft. "Microsoft has dropped down hard on a UK teacher with a little bit of plastic helping dyslexic students read.  It seems the company can’t learn from past mistakes."

Tolkien and the Horrors of the Great War. "The First World War left a lasting impression on Tolkien.

2022 Ig Nobel Prize Winners. "The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people’s interest in science, medicine, and technology."

Imagining COVID is ‘like the flu’ is cutting thousands of lives short. It’s time to wake up. "COVID is nothing at all like the flu. It is causing a vastly worse scale of damage. We must change our tactics to dramatically cut transmission. In addition to a more vigorous campaign to increase vaccine booster coverage, we need to invest in indoor ventilation and actively promote the benefits of wearing high-quality masks in crowded indoor settings."

‘We had to leave home for a better future’: Kate Beaton on the brutal, drug filled reality of life in an oil camp. "Before work like Hark! A Vagrant made her famous, the Canadian cartoonist spent two years in the Alberta wilderness, see-sawing between boredom and fear for her safety. Now she is finally ready to tell the story."

“It’s just what I did:” First woman to drive solo around Australia in a non-Tesla EV. "It’s a simple statement that belies some hard truths. One, that there have only been an estimated 20 people to date who are known to have completed the “Big Lap” in an EV – across remote expanses of the outback with little in the way of electric car chargers."

15 Reddit Acronyms Everyone Should Know. "Feel right at home while browsing Reddit by learning these popular acron yms that Redditors use.'  Having been on the internet for about 30 years, I knew some of these, but not all.

These Mormons Have Found a New Faith — in Magic Mushrooms. "Worshippers are leaving the Church of Latter-day Saints in record numbers, and some are finding solace with an apostate band of psilocybin-loving spiritual explorers looking for God — one trip at a time."

Photo of the Week - September 18, 2022

Here's a picture of a building in downtown Port Hope, Ontario. It isn't quite the angle I wanted, but I didn't want to risk standing out in traffic to get it. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 WR at F2.8, 1/4700 second, ISO 400, Provia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - James Keelaghan - Second Hand

James Keelaghan is a Canadian singer-songwriter who now has released more than a dozen albums. Nancy and I saw him for the first time not long after we started dating in 1986. In the intervening years, we've seen him perform at least a dozen times (maybe more, we've lost track). He's a brilliant songwriter and several of his songs have become standards in the small world of Canadian folk music ("Jenny Bryce", "Kiri's Piano", "Cold Missouri Waters", to name a few). 

His new album, Second Hand, has just been released, and it's another good one. All of his albums are available for purchase on his website. History is a good place to start. And if you ever get the chance to see him perform, go. You won't regret it. 

A Deep Dive Into Text Spam

The odds are pretty good that you've gotten some spammy texts. Usually, they're pretty easy to spot, but there are some that on the surface, at least, seem innocuous. They appear to be just the text equivalent of a wrong number. But don't be deceived; there's a lot more to these, and none of it's good. 

 This is the first step in what is, at its core, an old-fashioned “romance scam,” in which the scammer exploits a lonely and/or horny person by faking a long-distance, usually romantic relationship. After the scammer has gained the trust of their victim, they convince them to transfer money, often for an investment; in some cases, the victim can be enticed into several successive transfers before they realize they’re being played.

This kind of con has proliferated over the last few years in China, where it’s called sha zhu pan, or “pig-butchering,” because the victim is strung along for weeks or months before the actual swindle, like a pig being fattened for slaughter. Originating in sophisticated online-fraud networks first developed to take advantage of Chinese offshore gamblers, the sha zhu pan scams end with targets depositing money into forex or gold trading — or, seemingly most commonly, into fake cryptocurrency platforms. (Interestingly, they’re often not “romantic” at all, and instead rely on cultivating a trusting friendship that culminates with a little bit of friendly investing advice.)

The article goes into detail on how these scams work and what's behind them. It's definitely worth reading if you value your online security.  

Generating a Video from Text

Last week I posted about AI imaging generators and how the technology "will change everything".  That's especially true for AI-generated videos. I thought that technology might be somewhat down the road, but it's already being marketed. 

Video editing software company Runway put out an awesome promotional video where it teases creating any scene that you can think of but as a video.

The video starts with an operator typing in “Import city street.” A street scene is created and then tweaked with the input “Make it look more cinematic.”

An Ode to Casey's Rubber Stamps

Rubber stamps are one of the oldest printing technologies and yes, they are still around. My first job out of university was working for a company that made them, among other printing gear, so I got quite familiar with how they were made. But nothing that Barnard Matthews made compares with the stamps made by John Casey of Casey's Rubber Stamps in New York City.  

See how stamps are made inside NYC's iconic Casey Rubber Stamps. The shop has been owned by John Casey for nearly 20 years. It's located on East 11th Street in downtown NYC. I loved watching Casey make his stamps in the video. So much care and focus goes into his process. Residents and tourists can make their own rubber stamps in the shop, too. Nothing beats handmade items, so if you're in need of some high quality stamps, you can check out the shop's site here or stop by in person.

 

A Good Magnifier App for Android

Being very nearsighted, one of the things I use my phone for is as a magnifier. Samsung has a good magnifier widget for its phones, which I used quite happily when I had a Samsung phone. Unfortunately, Google hasn't seen fit to include one for its Pixel phones.

When I got my Pixel 4a, I used an app that was called (I think) Simple Magnifier, but it hadn't been updated in quite a while and eventually I had to uninstall it. I used the camera app when I needed a magnifier (usually at least once a day) but that isn't really a satisfactory option.

I started searching again for new magnifier app and found this article that reviews eight of them. I wanted something free with basic features; I don't need fancy options like colour filters. I finally settled on an app called Reading Glasse-Free and Ad-Free. It's quite basic with just a slider for the zoom and a button to turn on the flashlight, but it suits my needs. 

Note that this is not the Reading Glasses app that's described in the article. I had intended to download that one but got the wrong app. However, based on the review, I prefer this one for its simplicity.

Featured Links - September 12, 2022

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

• Obnoxiously Large Satellite Could Mean Bad News for Astronomers Observing the Skies. "AST SpaceMobile's BlueWalker 3 is scheduled to launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on September 10." As if the Starlink satellite constellation wasn't enough of a headache for astronomers, these satellites will be much brighter.
• New Super-Powerful Solar Telescope Captures Detailed Photos of the Sun. "New Super-Powerful Solar Telescope Captures Detailed Photos of the Sun."
• September 2022 La Niña update: it’s Q & A time. "Ocean and atmospheric conditions tell us that La Niña—the cool phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern—currently reigns in the tropical Pacific. It’s looking very likely that the long-predicted third consecutive La Niña winter will happen, with a 91% chance of La Niña through September–November and an 80% chance through the early winter (November–January)."
• This Summer’s Drought Is Europe’s Worst in 500 Years. What Happened Last Time? "The 1540 megadrought brought mass suffering to the continent, but European society quickly bounced back."
• It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy. "The modern Republican Party has always exploited and encouraged extremism."
• I Was Trained for the Culture Wars in Home School, Awaiting Someone Like Mike Pence as a Messiah. "I grew up in the far-right evangelical conservative (Christofascist) movement; specifically, I was homeschooled and my parents were part of a subculture called Quiverfull, whose aim is to outbreed everyone for Jesus. I spent my teen years being a political activist. I was taught by every pastor I encountered that it was our job as Christians to outbreed the secularists (anyone not a far-right evangelical Protestant) and take over the government through sheer numbers."
• A Time of Reckoning for US Media. "Our democracy is at risk in part because our media is failing. Every rational voice with a platform–on social media, in newspapers, on TV–must speak up, make that clear, demand best practices. If not, unmoored from truth, we will soon lose the essence of what made the US great."

Photo of the Week - September 11, 2022

Here's a picture of the rather imposing water tower in Coburg, Ontario. Like many modern tall structures, it's also capped by several cell network antennae. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 27 mm. F2.8 WR at F8, 1/700 second, ISO 400, Provia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - Richard Thompson Acoustic Trio - Live From Honolulu

I've been a fan of the British guitarist and songwriter Richard Thompson ever since his days in Fairport Convention in the late 1960s and have seen him perform seven times. He's the best acoustic guitarist I've seen and right up there with the best of the electric guitarists; proficiency at that level is a rare talent. And then there are his songs; he's up there with Bob Dylan and Neil Young as one of the best of his generation.

Today's album is a live recording made in Honolulu in 2006 featuring him on acoustic guitar, fellow Fairport alumnus Danny Thompson on acoustic bass, and Michael Jerome on percussion. It's a good sample of some of Thompson's best songs. Face it: most songwriters would be lucky to write one or two songs as good as Crawl Back (Under My Stone), Misunderstood, Al Bowley's in Heaven, or Waltzing's for Dreamers. And that's only four of the thirteen songs on this album. 

Thompson is still writing and performing. If he comes your way do not miss him. You will not regret it. 

We're Toast 27

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.

Tree at the beach

This Is How You Get a Second Chernobyl — Or a Third World War. "Artillery shells are falling all around a Ukrainian nuclear plant, increasing the risk of an environmental Catastrophe.

TRUMP ALMIGHTY: Meet the Apostle of Right-Wing Christian Nationalism.  "The new Republican fringe is done with the separation of church and state. William "Dutch" Sheets has been trying to tear down that wall for decades."

A "Solar Tsunami" Could Entirely Wipe Out The Internet Within A Decade, Suggests Study. A severe solar storm could affect undersea cables that carry much of the internet's traffic.

The super-rich ‘preppers’ planning to save themselves from the apocalypse. "Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences."

Ag’s challenging future in a changing climate. "More drought and higher heat from climate change increase risks of devastating global food shock events."

Food supply and security concerns mount as impacts stress agriculture. "In recent decades, worrisome rises in drought, heat waves, and air pollution have stressed agriculture."

World on brink of five ‘disastrous’ climate tipping points, study finds. "Giant ice sheets, ocean currents and permafrost regions may already have passed point of irreversible change."

AI Imaging Tech Will Change Everything

Pardon the hyperbole in the title, but in this case, I think it's justified.

In the last few months, I've been hearing more and more about a new AI-based imaging technology (known as imaging synthesis modelling or ISM). You may have heard of programs like DALL-E 2 or Midjourney or seen some of the images that people have created using them. For example, here's a cat picture created by SF author John Scalzi using Midjourney.  

Cat by John Scalzi using Midjourney

As I person with no artistic talent other than photography, I find this quite impressive. 

Now there's a new ISM tool called Stable Diffusion that is getting a lot of notice because it's open source and can be run on a moderately powerful home PC (my son's gaming rig would have no trouble running it). And because it's open source, people are finding all sorts of interesting uses for it. Ars Technica has published a long article that looks at what Stable Diffusion can do, what people are using it for now, where it might go in the future, and some of the implications. Some of them are rather disquieting.

As hinted at above, Stable Diffusion's public release has raised alarm bells among people who fear its cultural and economic impact. Unlike DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion's training data (the "weights") are available for anyone to use without any hard restrictions. The official Stable Diffusion release (and DreamStudio) includes automatic "NSFW" filters (nudity) and an invisible tracking watermark embedded in the images, but these restrictions can easily be circumvented in the open source code. This means Stable Diffusion can be used to create images that OpenAI currently blocks with DALL-E 2: propaganda, violent imagery, pornography, images that potentially violate corporate copyright, celebrity deepfakes, and more. In fact, there are already some private Discord servers dedicated to pornographic output from the model.

But wait. There's more!

The synthesis technology used by tools like Stable Diffusion isn't limited to just images. People are already working on adapting it to video. 

 Stable Diffusion and other models are already starting to take on dynamic video generation and manipulation, so expect photorealistic video generation via text prompts before too long. From there, it's logical to extend these capabilities to audio and music, real-time video games, and 3D VR experiences. Soon, advanced AI may do most of the creative heavy lifting with just a few suggestions. Imagine unlimited entertainment generated in real-time, on demand. "I expect it to be fully multi-modal," said Mostaque, "So you can create anything you can imagine, like the Star Trek holodeck experience."

ISMs are also a dramatic form of image compression: Stable Diffusion takes hundreds of millions of images and squeezes knowledge about them into a 4.2GB weights file. With the correct seed and settings, certain generated images can be reproduced deterministically. One could imagine using a variation of this technology in the future to compress, say, an 8K feature film into a few megabytes of text. Once that's the case, anyone could compose their own feature films that way as well. The implications of this technology are only just beginning to be explored, so it may take us in wild new directions we can't foresee at the moment

Hold on to your hats, folks. To paraphrase Al Jolson: "You ain't seen nothin' yet."

A Style Guide for Sensitive Words

In my Google Chrome bookmarks bar, I have links to the two style guides I use the most: the Microsoft Writing Style Guide and the Google developer documentation style guide. I have several more in book form on the desk beside me. And in my info directory on my hard drive, there's a directory with quite a few others. I guess I'm a style guide junkie. 

I just found a new one that could be especially useful in these testy times. Language, Please is " a free, living resource for journalists and storytellers seeking to thoughtfully cover evolving social, cultural, and identity-related topics."

The most useful part of the site for most readers will likely be the Style Guidance section, which covers topics, such as class and social standing, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity. 

Here's an example from the guide:

blind / low vision: There can be a wide range of experiences among people with blindness or vision loss. Total blindness is the complete loss of sight, while low vision is significant loss of sight; legal blindness is specifically defined as having 20/200 visual acuity. Terms like “vision impairment” or “visually impaired” can be read as portraying blindness negatively. Person-first language when discussing blindness can also be used, such as the “person who is blind” or “person with low vision,” though taking into account the person’s preferred terminology whenever possible aligns your framing with their lived experience.

I will be bookmarking this site, not so much for my own writing, but to help me understand some of the terms I keep running into in my daily reading. 

2022 Hugo Award Winners

The winners of the 2022 Hugo Awards were announced Sunday at ChiCon 8, the World Science Fiction Convention. The awards are voted on by supporting and attending members of the convention and have been the pre-eminent SFF award since the 1950s.

These are the fiction winners:

• Best Novel:  A Desolation Called Peace, by Arkady Martine (Tor)
• Best Novella: A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers (Tordotcom)
• Best Novelette: “Bots of the Lost Ark”, by Suzanne Palmer (Clarkesworld, Jun 2021)
• Best Short Story: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather”, by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny Magazine, Mar/Apr 2021)
• Best Series: Wayward Children, by Seanan McGuire (Tordotcom)
• Best Graphic Story or Comic: Far Sector, written by N.K. Jemisin, art by Jamal Campbell (DC)

Arkady Martine also won the Hugo for her first novel, A Memory Called Empire, which I have and will get to eventually. N.K. Jemisin won three consecutive Best Novel Hugos for her Broken Earth trilogy. I got about twenty pages into the first book a while back and lost interest, but I will give it a second try one of these days. Far Sector looks interesting and is now available on Hoopla so I will read that in due course. 

Featured Links - September 6. 2022

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

Downtown Port Hope

• A Battle of Boos and Cheers at the Symphony. "In the early 1980s, John Adams’s Grand Pianola Music defied the seriousness of classical music. Not everyone liked that."
• Neil Gaiman on the Secret History of ‘The Sandman,’ from Giant Mechanical Spiders to the Joker. "In our epic new interview, the legendary author tells all: the status of future seasons of Netflix's chart-topping show, how he stopped the worst movie adaptation ever, how he really feels about the DC superheroes in the 'Sandman' comic book, and much, much more."
• Peter Nicholls’ “Genre Fiction: The Roaring Years” Available from Ansible Editions. If you don't know who Peter Nicholls was, then read the linked article. Then buy the book. Proceeds go to supporting the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. 
• Study raises concerns about the effectiveness of the monkeypox vaccine. "But one of the senior authors of the paper said what is clear is that people being administered this vaccine ought to be cautious about assuming they are protected against infection."
• What's the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts? 'Digging into the world of "pig-butchering" scams.'
• Years after shuttle, NASA rediscovers the perils of liquid hydrogen. "Every time we saw a leak, it pretty quickly exceeded our flammability limits." They should have listened to Jeryy Pournelle.

No Labour This Weekend

It's another long weekend up here in the Great Not-So-White North, namely the Labour Day weekend in which we celebrate the toil of the men and women who made this country great. Or something like that. 

So I will be doing things like mowing the lawn, barbecuing, and watching the Blue Jays try to keep winning. I'll be back on Tuesday. In the meantime, here's a cat picture.

McGee

Researching the Earliest Printed Books

Printing has been with us for more than 600 years but not a lot is known about the earliest printed books. Researchers are using new technology to discover more about how the earliest books were produced.  

The typed word dominates our lives today, but it’s still a relatively fresh invention in the timeline of humanity—and despite how drastically printing altered our societies, there’s still a lot we don’t know about its early history. Recently, a team of scientists put some of the earliest known printed documents through a high-powered X-ray examination at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, to better understand how these texts were produced.

The first printed documents were made in Asia using woodblocks by 600 CE, a process called xylography. Centuries later, Johannes Gutenberg used a retooled wine press and a set of metal pieces to make a couple hundred bibles using movable type, an innovation that drastically sped up the rate at which information could be printed.

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2022

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

Movies

• Elvis. We saw this at the theatre and I'm glad we did; it's made for the big screen. It's the story of Elvis Presley through the lens of the 1980s MTV generation, big, bold, and flashy, just like Elvis. I liked it a lot. 
• Prey: This has been getting a lot of buzz, which is mostly well deserved. It's certainly one of the best movies in the Predator franchise, although I found it rather implausible. 
• Inside the Mind of a Cat. This short (just over an hour) Netflix documentary is a bit too cute for its own good but does offer some useful insights into the minds of our feline overlords. 
• Samaritan: The only reason you'd want to watch this is because it stars Sylvester Stallone. It's a decent enough superhero action flick but nothing special. (Netflix)
• Top Gunn: Maverick. Another recruiting movie for the US Navy. It really is time for Tom Cruise to retire. 

TV Shows

• Star Trek Discovery (season 4). I really disliked the earlier seasons of this, but season 4 was watchable, at least. (Crave)
• A Stitch in Time: Learning about history by recreating the garments people wore in historic paintings. I found it quite fascinating. (TVO)
• The Sandman: Neil Gaiman's comic book classic finally makes it to the screen and it was worth the wait. A beautifully realized adaptation. I want more. (Neflix).
• Locke and Key (season 3). This probably should have finished after the first season. I think they wrapped it up with this season; at least I sure hope so. (Netflix)
• Monty Don's Japanese Gardens: A two-episode series touring some of Japan's best gardens. (Acorn TV)
• For All Mankind (season 3). I enjoyed this a lot, but it is getting quite implausible. Most of the space technology has had at least some grounding in reality, but they lost me with the North Korean. (Apple TV+)
• House of the Dragon. I really didn't like the first episode. The second episode was quite a bit better, so maybe there is some hope for the series. (Amazon Prime)
• Endeavour (season 8): Another excellent season of the prequel to Inspector Morse. I'm always amazed at just how much death and depravity there is in a quiet British university town. (Acorn TV)

Let Them Eat Bugs: How a Conspiracy Theory Spreads

Apparently there is a conspiracy theory floating around that the government is trying to get people to eat less meat by making us eat bugs, in the form of protein made from crickets. According to the CBC, this all started by an innocent tweet from a London, Ontario company in June. The company has built a plant to farm crickets, which are turned into protein powder that can be used by people or in pet foods. 

The conspiracy theory was fueled by a newspaper article in July that revealed that the company received several million dollars in government funding. This is hardly unusual as new industries create jobs, which is a goal of this type of funding. But somehow the idea that the government wants us to eat bugs instead of meat has spread through a network of dubious Facebook groups and alt-news sites.

The CBC article goes right back to the beginning and traces the misinformation as it spread worldwide. It's an outstanding example of tracking disinformation. 

The entire thread begins simply enough with a tweet on June 10 from the Toronto-based construction company Ellis Don, announcing it had just completed work on the world's largest cricket production facility. 

 The information was picked up a week later by Awakening Canada, a Facebook group that posts misinformation about the pandemic and conspiracy theories about the World Economic Forum.

The June 17 post was published shortly after midnight, asking: "Are you guys ready to eat some crickets welcome to communist Canada." It got 10 shares among the page's 4,600 followers. 

Eight hours later, the false information was repeated by Mike McMullen, a London, Ont., political candidate who ran for the People's Party of Canada in the last federal election, and a candidate for city councillor in this October's municipal elections. 

He posts the same Ellis Don tweet on his Facebook page with the caption, "Klaus Schwab and the WEFers must be pleased..." The post gets 29 shares among his 1,900 followers. 

Featured Links - August 29, 2022

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

Water lillies taking over the hydro marsh

• Zoom in on Webb Telescope's Biggest Image Yet. "This new view of the cosmos is even larger than Webb's previous deep field image." Watch the slideshow to see some of the details in the full image. They're amazing.
• Russian Energy Plant Is Reportedly Burning Away $10 Million of Natural Gas Daily. "The carbon emissions coming from the plant's huge daily flares are equivalent to those produced by about 1,800 gas cars in a year." Another nasty consequence of the Ukrainian invasion.
• Apollo Remastered: One man's mission to show us the Moon. "One man's quest to present the Apollo Moom missions in a way that befits their importance". Modern imaging software can make a huge difference in improving the quality of the original images.
• Anatomy of a Shot: ‘A Dream of a Thousand Cats’ from ‘The Sandman’. "Acclaimed animation director Hisko Hulsing guides us through the process of delivering the “A Dream of a Thousand Cats” bonus episode to fans of The Sandman on Netflix this month."
• Shocking Photos Show China's Historic Drought. "From factories shutting off power to relics being exposed, a record-breaking drought and heat wave are hitting China hard."
• Crimes Against Transhumanity. Chalie Stross says: "(Disclaimer: I am a transhumanist skeptic these days, not to mention a singularity curmudgeon and a critic of Mars colonization, but I still find these ideas nice to chew on sometimes.)"

Photo of the Week - August 28, 2022

Today's picture is a hibiscus from our front yard. I have been taking a lot of pictures of these flowers and I still haven't got the colour right. The camera doesn't seem to register the deep purplish red very well. Neither the phone, which I used for this picture, or my camera get it right.  I processed this in Lightroom and it's a bit closer to the actual colour but still not quite correct.

Hibiscus taken with Pixel 4a

Saturday Sounds - Syd Perry - Propaganda and Gold

Syd Perry is a young reggae musician who lived around the corner from us and went to school with my son. We've kept in touch as he's moved away from Pickering to further his musical journey. He's currently in South Africa after spending time in Jamaica, Hawaii, and Nigeria. 

If you like reggae (and even if you don't) you should enjoy his latest recording, a 5-song EP called Gold. 

He's released Propaganda as the single from the EP and produced a very fine video for it. 

As he describes it:

Propaganda is a piece that was forged out of the frustrations of being bombarded by a neo-colonial relgious state of mind that aims to convert spirutual indigenous people to a religion that has been used to conquer and enslave the minds of spiritual indigenous people. 

Co-conceptualized by Mawe YaBahari, Propaganda is a song that was inspired by interactions and experiences with people that are never satisfied until you believe what they believe. The ridicule and condemnation that can come from your own family/community for not being of their religion. And having the strength to stay firmly rooted and rise above that in the spiritually empowering and uplifting movement and livity of RasTafari. 

We're Toast 26

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.

• The Gathering Crisis. "Here is a compendium of the firehose of dismay that's been blasting me in the face for the past couple of weeks. Share and enjoy! And feel free to use the comment thread to discuss what's coming next for the UK as the vector sum of Brexit, COVID19, the energy crisis from the Ukraine war, and the worst inflationary bubble since 1980 punches us in the face."
• Long Covid is affecting millions of Americans and the consequences are devastating. 'Millions of Americans who caught COVID have gone on to develop a range of debilitating symptoms that last for weeks, months, or years—this condition is called "Post Acute Sequelae of COVID-19," or "long COVID." Last month, the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis held a hearing to discuss the "devastating health and economic impacts of long COVID."'
• Most bleak federal report yet on high-tide/sunny-day tide floods. "Remember the octopus in the Miami parking garage in 2016? Think of it as today’s modern-day canary in the coal mine."
• The dark money billionaire-funded Tea Party Patriots has an "action guide" for disrupting public health measures. "This guide was published last summer by the billionaire-funded dark money group Tea Party Patriots Action to help people defeat public health measures like mask requirements. It's probably not the entire reason we've gotten to the point of being told to just 'live with the virus' while cases and deaths rage on, but it's certainly part of the story."
• Nuclear war between two nations could spark global famine. "Even a small conflict in which two nations unleash nuclear weapons on each other could lead to worldwide famine, research suggests. Soot from burning cities would encircle the planet and cool it by reflecting sunlight back into space. This in turn would cause global crop failures that — in a worst-case scenario — could put five billion people on the brink of death."
• Google Search Is Quietly Damaging Democracy. "A series of incremental changes over the years has transformed the tool from an explorative search function to one that is ripe for deception."

Northern Ontario Dialects and Tie Plates

When I was taking a linguistics course in university, one of the assignments was to describe examples of the language specific to the region you grow up in. I didn't do very well on the assignment as it's hard to think of differences in day-to-day language between regions that are only a few hundred kilometres apart. 

TVO interviewed linguistics expert Sali Tagliamonte about the Ontario Dialects Project and northern Ontario dialects. 

I grew up in northern Ontario and as the interview points out, there are quite a few examples of language specific to that region. A common one, for example, is "camp" instead of "cottage", which is the usage that's common in southern Ontario where I live now. Another example is "packsack", which is a backpack. 

Here's one example that isn't mentioned in the interview, tie plate. In most of the world a tie plate is a piece of hardware used to fasten railroad ties to the rails. In Sault Ste. Marie, it's an Italian pastry, known everywhere else as a pizelle. 

Back in the early part of the 20th century, workers at Algoma Steel would make pizelle irons out of tie plates and the term crossed over to pastry. I had no idea it was a term local to the Sault until I started asking for them in bakeries in Pickering and was met with complete incomprehension. I have searched for an article I read years ago that explained the history of the term but haven't been able to find it. Nor is there any mention of it on the Ontario Dialects Project site, so I will contact them about it.

The Risks of Large Volcanic Eruptions

The eruption of the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha-apai volcano earlier this year was one of the largest in the last century. It seems to have kindled renewed interest in large volcanic eruptions. Here are links to a few articles that I've come across in the last couple of weeks about eruptions and the effects that they have had or may have in the future. 

• Hunga Tonga Volcano Update; This Eruption will Warm the Planet, Not Cool It. (YouTube link) "The destructive eruption of Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha'apai which occurred in January of 2022 was the largest explosive eruption of the 21st century. New research into the eruption has revealed something completely surprising; instead of cooling the planet slightly like other prior large explosive eruptions have, the eruption instead will warm it. So, why is this the case, and why is this eruption so unique? This video will answer these questions and discuss the highly explosive volcanic eruption." I should note that injection of water into the stratosphere would be an effect of a major ocean meteor strike.
• The volcanic eruption in Alaska that rocked ancient Egypt. "Researchers link an eruption in the Aleutian Islands to Nile flood failures during Cleopatra’s reign."
• Source of the great A.D. 1257 mystery eruption unveiled, Samalas volcano, Rinjani Volcanic Complex, Indonesia. "Based on ice core archives of sulfate and tephra deposition, one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the historic period and of the past 7,000 y occurred in A.D. 1257. However the source of this “mystery eruption” remained unknown. Drawing on a robust body of new evidence from radiocarbon dates, tephra geochemistry, stratigraphic data, a medieval chronicle, this study argues that the source of this eruption is Samalas volcano, part of the Mount Rinjani Volcanic Complex on Lombok Island, Indonesia. These results solve a conundrum that has puzzled glaciologists, volcanologists, and climatologists for more than three decades. In addition, the identification of this volcano gives rise to the existence of a forgotten Pompeii in the Far East."

Finally, here's an editorial from Nature that argues that new research is showing that large volcanic eruptions are more common than previously thought and we need to make more of an effort to prepare for them and combat their effects.

The massive eruption of the Hunga Tonga–Hunga Ha‘apai volcano this January in Tonga, in the south Pacific Ocean, was the volcanic equivalent of a ‘near miss’ asteroid whizzing by the Earth. The eruption was the largest since Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines blew in 1991, and the biggest explosion ever recorded by instruments.

Ash fell over hundreds of kilometres, affecting infrastructure, agriculture and fish stocks. The damage caused amounted to 18.5% of Tonga’s gross domestic product. Submarine cables were severed, cutting off Tonga’s communications with the outside world for several days; farther afield, the blast created a worldwide shockwave and tsunamis that reached Japanese and North and South American coastlines. Mercifully, the eruption lasted only about 11 hours. Had it gone on for longer, released more ash and gas or occurred in more densely populated areas of southeast Asia, or near a high concentration of vital shipping lanes, electricity grids or other crucial global infrastructure, it would have had repercussions for supply chains, climate and food resources worldwide1.

The world is woefully unprepared for such an event. The Tongan eruption should be a wake-up call. Recent data from ice cores suggest that the probability of an eruption with a magnitude of 7 (10 or 100 times larger than Tonga) or greater this century is 1 in 62. Eruptions of this size have, in the past, caused abrupt climate change and the collapse of civilizations, and have been associated with the rise of pandemics.

Update: Here's an interview with the authors of the Nature article. 

House of the Dragon - First Impressions

Well, that was disappointing. We just watched the first episode of House of the Dragon, and if that episode is typical of the series, then I very much doubt there will be a second season.

It's bad. Warmed over fantasy tropes with cringe-worthy dialog. Think back to the first episode of Game of Thrones for a comparison. That episode had everyone hooked from the beginning, and it was because of the characters. That's not the case with this show. The only character that I had any feeling for at all got killed off two-thirds of the way through the episode. 

I know it's a bad idea to judge a book by its cover, or a TV show from the pilot or first episode, but I'm not holding out a lot of hope for this one. 

Featured Links - August 22, 2022

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

Frenchman's Bay

• For All Mankind, io9 Owes You an Apology. "The Apple TV+ alternate fantasy show is so damned good—and we feel terrible about being late to the party." This show continues to surprise and delight me. It's worth subscribing to Apple TV+ just to watch it.
• Your computer is tormented by a wicked god. "Bootkits are why we can't have nice things." Another good article from Cory Doctorow. 
• You Have to Zoom in for a Full Minute to See the Galaxy in This Webb Telescope Video. "The video, made from Webb Space Telescope observations, will make you feel really small." Wow.
• A new jailbreak for John Deere tractors rides the right-to-repair wave. "Exploit now provides root access to two popular models of the company’s farm equipment."
• How to Customize Windows 10: The Complete Guide. "You decorate your office–why not your computer? Find out how to make Windows look just the way you want. Make your computer your own with free tools."
• A Watermark, and ‘Spidey Sense,’ Unmask a Forged Galileo Treasure. "One of the University of Michigan Library’s most prized possessions, which appeared to be a Galileo manuscript, is now thought to be the work of a 20th-century forger."
• How junk science got spread like wildfire. "The remarkable story of how scientists with some of the worlds biggest platforms shared a fatally flawed pre-print."

Photo of the Week - August 21, 2022

It's time for another flower picture, while they are still in bloom. Bonus: there's a bee. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 @ F8, 1/400 second, ISO 400, Velvia film simulation

 

Saturday Sounds - Phish - August 5, 2022

I've been listening to and enjoying the music of Phish since the early 1990s. Like the Grateful Dead, they're a band best appreciated live. Unfortunately, I've only seen them once, way back in 2001. They played Toronto last week and I didn't go, because I hate the Budweiser Stage with a passion (it's one of the worst concert venues I've ever attended). 

So I assuage my pain by listening to some of their live recordings. Although you can buy high-quality recordings of their performances from the LivePhish.com website, the band permits fans to record their shows and there are many high-quality audience recordings floating around the internet. The recording for this week is from the Phish Archive YouTube channel and is of their August 5th performance in Atlantic City. It's a good performance and the recording quality is about as good as an audience recording gets, so it's very listenable. 

For me, highlights are Sigma Oasis > Cities > More to end the first set and Down with Disease > Ruby Waves > Down with Disease in the second set. Enjoy. 

Android 13 Deep Dive

Much to my surprise, my Pixel 4a received an update to Android 13 this week. I was expecting the regular monthly security patch, which had been delayed, but instead, I got the full upgrade to the newest version of Android. 

Unlike the upgrade to Android 12, this one doesn't have a lot of immediately obvious changes. There are a few; for example, the media player now shows up on the lock screen, which is quite convenient. But most of the changes are buried in the menus. 

Based on first impressions, I thought that there weren't a lot of changes in this release, but I was wrong. The Android 13 Deep Dive, written by Mishall Rahman, is a HUGE document that lists all of the changes. I've skimmed through the sections listing the UI and Launcher changes and found a few things to tweak.

The deep dive is clearly written and although it is intended for developers, you can easily skip the really technical stuff. If you have a Google Pixel phone, in which case you may already have the upgrade, you'll want to have a look at this. 

Thanks to the excellent All About Android podcast for pointing this out. 

Photography Links - August 19, 2022

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

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 WR @ F8, 1/2000 second, ISO 1600, -.7 EV, Acros+Red Filter film simulation

• From Gear to Settings, How to Master Night Photography. "Night photography is a tricky thing to master. Once you’ve seen this short checklist of required equipment and mastered these basic settings, you’ll have the world seeing stars."
• Exclusive: How Nikon designed the Nikon Z fc – and why it thinks the future is retro. The Z fc is a very nice little camera. If it had been available in early 2021, I might have bought it instead of my Fujifilm X-S10. 
• Matt Kloskowski's blog. He is a "Tampa Bay based photography educator who’s day to day job is running this website, and creating courses and presets to help you with photography and photo editing." I've found many useful articles on his blog. 
• Fujifilm Film Simulations: More Than A Marketing Gimmick. A deep dive into Fujifilm's film simulations, which are one of the best features of their mirrorless cameras. 
• ISO Has Nothing to Do with Exposure: A Technical Explanation. "Photographer Chris Lee of the YouTube channel pal2tech recently released one of the most straightforward technical explanations of ISO that we’ve seen. In this 12 minute video, he explains what ISO is and, just as importantly, takes on a couple of common misconceptions by explaining what ISO is not."
• Intermediate Exposure Guide for Manual Mode Photography. "This article is intended for beginner manual shooters who are not beginner photographers. This guide may benefit people who have been shooting in manual mode and still find things a bit tricky. It assumes knowledge of how one’s camera works and the relationship between the various exposure settings. It is not a highly technical article and does not address the histogram or other advanced exposure techniques."
• How to Use Flash to Shoot Better Portraits in the Sun. "Shooting with a wide aperture for portraits with a shallow depth of field is a highly popular look, but when you are photographing in the sun with flash, you can run into impossible-to-solve exposure issues — impossible until you introduce some new techniques. This helpful video tutorial will show how to deal with strong sun in outdoor portrait situations to produce better images."

Using SEQ fields in Microsoft Word

Fields are one of those features in Word that Microsoft has tried very hard to hide. It was my experience over my technical writing career that perhaps one user in a hundred knew what they were and how to use them. That's unfortunate because they are one of Word's more powerful features. 

SEQ or sequence fields are useful for creating arrays of list items or for fixing numbering problems. This article from the excellent Office Watch site is a good introduction to SEQ fields.  

Whenever someone has a numbering or list problem in Microsoft Word, the solution usually revolves around the little known but oh so flexible SEQ code.

SEQ lets you do things in Word that aren’t possible with the numbered or multi-level list features.  Even the powerful ListNum field has to give way to the power of SEQ.

Like most Word field codes, it’s a little clumsy but it’s very flexible.  SEQ is well worth learning because it’s the key to solving more complicated numbering issues.

The {SEQ} field code lets you create almost any numbering system you need, anywhere in a document. Even mixing up different lists or sequences in ways that other Word features can’t cope with.

I often used SEQ fields to create numbering sequences that were difficult to do with Word's standard numbering features or to fix numbering that had broken. That was an all-too-frequent experience with documents that had multiple contributors. 

I wrote this article to explain how to use SEQ fields for simple paragraph numbering, but you can create quite complex numbering sequences for both headings and lists. Once you set them up, they just work, unlike Word's standard list numbering. 

The Coming California Megastorm

Although drought and wildfires have been the predominant feature of weather in California recently, the state could be facing a much bigger weather disaster in the form of massive rainfall and flooding. 

The New York Times takes a look at what they call a megastorm, a gigantic flood caused by a series of atmospheric rivers dumping unprecedented amounts of rain on the state. This has happened in the past and it will happen again in the future. But California is now home to almost 40 million people and the economic impact will be greater than the much hyped "Big One" earthquake.  

The coming superstorm — really, a rapid procession of what scientists call atmospheric rivers — will be the ultimate test of the dams, levees and bypasses California has built to impound nature’s might.

But in a state where scarcity of water has long been the central fact of existence, global warming is not only worsening droughts and wildfires. Because warmer air can hold more moisture, atmospheric rivers can carry bigger cargoes of precipitation. The infrastructure design standards, hazard maps and disaster response plans that protected California from flooding in the past might soon be out of date.

As humans burn fossil fuels and heat up the planet, we have already increased the chances each year that California will experience a monthlong, statewide megastorm of this severity to roughly 1 in 50, according to a new study published Friday. (The hypothetical storm visualized here is based on computer modeling from this study.)

In the coming decades, if global average temperatures climb by another 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, or 1 degree Celsius — and current trends suggest they might — then the likelihood of such storms will go up further, to nearly 1 in 30.

At the same time, the risk of megastorms that are rarer but even stronger, with much fiercer downpours, will rise as well.

If you think the NYT article is scaremongering, read this article from Scientific American. It describes what happened in California over the winter of 1861-1862.

Sixty-six inches of rain fell in Los Angeles that year, more than four times the normal annual amount, causing rivers to surge over their banks, spreading muddy water for miles across the arid landscape. Large brown lakes formed on the normally dry plains between Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean, even covering vast areas of the Mojave Desert. In and around Anaheim, , flooding of the Santa Ana River created an inland sea four feet deep, stretching up to four miles from the river and lasting four weeks.

Residents in northern California, where most of the state’s 500,000 people lived, were contending with devastation and suffering of their own. In early December, the Sierra Nevada experienced a series of cold arctic storms that dumped 10 to 15 feet of snow, and these were soon followed by warm atmospheric rivers storms. The series of warm storms swelled the rivers in the Sierra Nevada range so that they became raging torrents, sweeping away entire communities and mining settlements in the foothills—California’s famous “Gold Country.” A January 15, 1862, report from the Nelson Point Correspondence described the scene: “On Friday last, we were visited by the most destructive and devastating flood that has ever been the lot of ‘white’ men to see in this part of the country. Feather River reached the height of 9 feet more than was ever known by the ‘oldest inhabitant,’ carrying away bridges, camps, stores, saloon, restaurant, and much real-estate.” Drowning deaths occurred every day on the Feather, Yuba and American rivers. In one tragic account, an entire settlement of Chinese miners was drowned by floods on the Yuba River.

This enormous pulse of water from the rain flowed down the slopes and across the landscape, overwhelming streams and rivers, creating a huge inland sea in California’s enormous Central Valley—a region at least 300 miles long and 20 miles wide. Water covered farmlands and towns, drowning people, horses and cattle, and washing away houses, buildings, barns, fences and bridges. The water reached depths up to 30 feet, completely submerging telegraph poles that had just been installed between San Francisco and New York, causing transportation and communications to completely break down over much of the state for a month.

Busting the World's Biggest Child Porn Site

Most people, myself included, would probably assume that busting child porn sites would be the job of the police or national organizations like the RCMP in Canada or the FBI in the US. Many of these sites hide behind the supposed anonymity of electronic currency transactions using Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. But these transactions aren't anonymous and they can be traced with the right software, as the owners and customers of the world's largest child porn site found out to their dismay when they got taken down by the IRS.

This article from Wired reads like a true crime novel and is absolutely fascinating in how it peels back the layers of obfuscation used by criminals. It's also chilling in what it reveals about the people who upload and use the videos on these sites. It's a long read but well worth the time.

Ultimately, from the beginning of the case through the year and a half that followed the server seizure, global law enforcement would arrest no fewer than 337 people for their involvement with Welcome to Video. They also removed 23 children from sexually exploitative situations.

Those 337 arrests still represented only a small fraction of Welcome to Video’s total registered users. When the US team examined their copy of the server data in Korea, they had found thousands of accounts on the site. But the vast majority of them had never paid any bitcoins into the site’s wallets. With no money to follow, the investigators’ trail usually went cold.

If not for cryptocurrency, in other words, and the years-long trap set by its purported untraceability, the majority of the 337 pedophiles arrested in the Welcome to Video case—and their rescued victims—likely never would have been found.

2022 Aurora Awards

The 2022 Aurora Awards have been announced by the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association during the When Worlds Collide convention in Calgary.

These are the fiction winners.

• BEST NOVEL: Jade Legacy, Fonda Lee, Orbit
• BEST YOUNG ADULT NOVEL: Walking in Two Worlds, Wab Kinew, Penguin Teen
• BEST NOVELETTE/NOVELLA: The Annual Migration of Clouds, Premee Mohamed, ECW Press
• BEST SHORT STORY: “The Mathematics of Fairyland”, Phoebe Barton, Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 129
• BEST GRAPHIC NOVEL/COMIC: It Never Rains, Kari Maaren, Webcomic 

Featured Links - August 15, 2022

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

A flower basket in our backyard

• Welcome to assistive and adaptive technology. "The future of technology is in your hands, hands-free."  
• The Origins of Covid-19 Are More Complicated Than Once Thought. "Scientists used painstaking research, genomics, and clever statistics to definitively track two distinct strains of the virus back to a wet market in Wuhan."
• Provenance of 'deprecated' (in the programming sense). 'What are some early uses of "deprecation" in computer science? When did the word enter common usage in the field of programming? Are there any particularly well-known examples of early deprecations (perhaps in Unix or Linux?)'. It's interesting that the usage common in software development is still not in the OED, though it is in Merriam-Webster.
• If You Live on the East Coast, Your Mission Is to Squash These Bugs. "The invasion of the spotted lanternflies is intensifying, and if you haven't been doing your part to kill them, it's time to step up."
• Behind the Scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Strangest Blockbuster in Hollywood History. "Despite delays, maxed-out budgets, radical re-writes, and some early bad reviews, Stanley Kubrick’s outer-space epic went on to set records and propel a generation of cinema lovers—a big gamble of a movie that still resonates 50 years later."
• A Journey to the Center of Our Cells. "Biologists are discovering the true nature of cells—and learning to build their own."
• The Dangers of China’s Decline. "As China’s economic miracle fades, its leaders may become more inclined to take risks." This article seems particularly trenchant in light of the recent kerfuffle around Pelosi's visit to Taiwan.

Photo of the Week - August 14, 2022

Here's a patch of wildflowers from my walk through the park down to the lake earlier this week. I am told they are Queen Anne's Lace.  I was experimenting with different film simulations, and I like the look given by  Classic Neg. I also tried Velvia, but the flowers got lost in the green grass. 

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at F11, 1/340 second, ISO 400, Classic Neg film simulation.

 

Saturday Sounds - The Sadies - Colder Streams

The Sadies are a Toronto band that I've been listening to for quite a while. They have a twangy, guitar-driven sound that reminds me of the early Byrds, especially with the psychedelic influences. From all accounts, they're a great live band, though I've never seen them perform.  

Sadly, Dallas Good, one of their founding members, died earlier this year. Their new album, Colder Streams, was completed before his death, and it's excellent. For a more detailed look at the band and the album, see this review from Paste magazine.

Climate Change Could Get a Lot Worse

It's pretty clear that climate change is beginning to have large effects on our lives, despite the fact that we are nowhere near the 1.5C or 2.0C that is often cited at the threshold that we need to avoid. But how bad could it get? 

Here's an article from Gizmodo that summarizes the results of a recently released research paper. Both are worth reading, although I wouldn't recommend doing so just before going to bed. (I was going to save this for another We're Toast post, but it really deserves more attention).

The signs right now are pointing to us being able to avert the types of disasters laid out in this report. The IPCC in its report earlier this year outlined specific pathways to help avoid 2 degrees of warming; if all nations stick to their existing pledges under the Paris Agreement, we’re on track for just a 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.24 degrees Fahrenheit) increase. Still, the worst case if we don’t meet these targets could be really bad. Politically vulnerable nation states share a “striking overlap” with areas that have the potential to see extreme heat. The paper also outlines what it calls the “four horsemen” of “the climate change end game”: vector-borne diseases, famine and undernutrition, extreme weather, and global conflict. These four factors, the paper states, could be exacerbated by other climate impacts, like sea level rise, as well as enhancing other non-climate risk factors like inequality and misinformation.

And if you are a praying person, pray that the Republicans don't win the 2024 election in the US.  

 

How Companies Are Abusing VFX Artists

If you are a fan of special effects (VFX)-laden movies, you should read this article about how big movie companies are abusing VFX artists and the consequences that it has for movies.

I've heard quite a bit over the years about how digital gaming companies have turned into sweatshops forcing their developers to work ridiculous and dangerous hours to finish games. It seems that the same pattern is happening with the companies that produce the special effects for movies, especially the films produced by Marvel. 

“[Marvel] is the worst example of a lot of the problems in the industry,” said Sam. “It would be one thing if sometimes it was really bad, sometimes it wasn’t… But with Marvel, it seems like every single time it’s the same thing. So, one, they tend to be as bad as you’re going to get and they’re consistently that bad.”

Hector recalled that during the last Marvel project he worked on, “from my very first day on the project, up until we delivered the shots, we were working overtime and weekends. It was just months of literally being nailed to my desk.” He laughed as he said this, almost like he hated to admit it.

“Even up until the last week or so they still weren’t sure what they wanted this gigantic set piece to look like. We were still doing concept art.” Hector said. Concept art is supposed to be the first thing you nail down before you start working on the pieces that will eventually be composited together to make up the shot. “And various parts of this sequence had already gone through the entire pipeline. You’ve got lighting renders, effects simulations, matte paintings, and animation.” All of this, ready to go, and Marvel still hasn’t approved concept art.

It's a sad situation and I don't know what will change it, short of government intervention. 

How the Webb Telescope's Images Are Processed

In one of the dumber controversies on the internet, people are arguing that the colour in the images are fake. 

Duh. Well of course they are, in the sense that the Webb telescope is imaging colours that the human eye can't see, namely the infrared portion of the spectrum. So the colours in the images that have been released are assigned by the scientists and technicians who process the images to bring out the most detail and show the features in their best light (sorry). 

This article does a good job of explaining what the telescope actually sees and how the images are processed. 

“I think there’s some connotations that go along with ‘colorizing’ or ‘false color’ that imply there’s some process going on where we’re arbitrarily choosing colors to create a color image,” DePasquale said. “Representative color is the most preferred term for the kind of work that we do, because I think it encompasses the work that we do of translating light to create a true color image, but in a wavelength range that our eyes are not sensitive to.”

Longer infrared waves are assigned redder colors, and the shortest infrared wavelengths are assigned bluer colors. (Blue and violet light has the shortest wavelengths within the visible spectrum, while red has the longest.) The process is called chromatic ordering, and the spectrum is split into as many colors as the team needs to capture the full spectrum of light depicted in the image.

“We have filters on the instruments that collect certain wavelengths of light, which we then apply a color that is most closely what we think it will be on the [visible] spectrum,” said Alyssa Pagan, a science visuals developer at the Space Telescope Science Institute, in a phone call with Gizmodo.

Featured Links - August 8, 2022

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

Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies

• The U.S. Is Dry, Dry, Dry. "Most of the country is experiencing drought as of early August, and millions are under water use restrictions."
• How to properly clean your eyeglasses like they are delicate camera lenses. I should follow the tips in this article. 
• China could shift to fully reusable super heavy-launcher in wake of Starship. "China’s launch vehicle makers appear to be designing a fully reusable version of the Long March 9 super heavy-lift rocket needed for future megaprojects."
• JWST Shows Gas Around A Supermassive Black Hole Like Never Before. "An in-depth view of the core of one of the galaxies in Stephan’s Quintet has revealed the incredible capabilities of JWST."
• ‘Frankly it blew my mind’: how Tron changed cinema – and predicted the future of tech. "From cyberspace to AI, Steven Lisberger’s 1982 sci-fi classic was way ahead of its time. The team behind it explain how they made a game-changer."
• Default Windows 10 Settings You Should Change Right Now. "If you're not upgrading your computer to Windows 11, you can still improve your experience by changing these default settings."

Photo of the Week - August 7, 2022

Here's a hibiscus from my late mother-in-law's yard, taken with my Pixel 4a.

Saturday Sounds - Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder - Get On Board

Get on Board is a lovely, down-home blues album from two of the greats, Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder. Both of these guys have been around for a while and listening to this album feels like walking in an old pair of comfortable shoes. 

Review: The Genesis Machine

The Genesis Machine: Our Quest to Rewrite Life in the Age of Synthetic Biology, by Amy Webb and Andrew Hessel

If you want a non-fiction book that reads more like a science fiction novel, The Genesis Machine is for you. It's the authors' contention that the current state of modern biological science, referred to as synthetic biology is at roughly the same state as communications technology when Alexander Graham Bell conducted the first public demonstration of the telephone. 

Given that premise, they go on to show just how synthetic biology could change our lives, both for the better and the worse. I'm not as familiar with biology and medicine as I am with physics and astronomy, but I had no problem following their argument. The book is well written and compelling and occasionally rather scary in its implications.

I recommend it highly to anyone who is interested in science and wants a window into our future.

Featured Links - August 3, 2022

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

Swans on Frenchman's Bay

• Deepmind's Releasing AI Predictions for Virtually Every Protein Known to Science. "The expanded database increases the number of known, cataloged proteins by over 200x, from 1 million structures to around 200 million structures."
• 170-Year-Old Coded Newspaper Messages Linked To Hunt For Infamous Franklin Expedition. Coded messages began appearing in The Times from 1850-1855. Turns out, they were related to the hunt for the infamous Franklin Expedition.
• Plotting the Future of the Most Storied Studio in Jazz. "The New Jersey recording space built in 1959 by Rudy Van Gelder is filled with history. Can it regain its glory without getting stuck in the past?"
• How Netflix’s The Sandman Brings the Neil Gaiman Masterpiece to Life. "Neil Gaiman and David S. Goyer walks us through the making of Netflix's adaptation of iconic DC comic book series The Sandman." I am really looking forward to this.
• 10 Common Mistakes First-Time Linux Users Make. "Improve your initial impression of Linux by learning more about the most common mistakes new users make."
• Meet the Exotic Dancer Who Went Undercover to Take Down Domestic Terrorists. "In an exclusive interview, Rebecca Williams reveals her identity and details her work with the ATF to help investigate a racially-motivated bombing, bringing its white supremacist perpetrators to justice."

Movie and TV Reviews - July 2022

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

Movies

• West Side Story: I've liked West Side Story ever since seeing the movie when I was in high school. (I'm not a big fan of musicals, but this is one of the handful that I like). I wasn't expecting much from the remake, but I was wrong. It's wonderful. While the music and the dancing are top notch, it's the cinematography that blew me away. This is a movie that I could watch without the sound and still enjoy. I really regret not seeing it on the big screen. (Crave)
• The Fifth Element: We watched this on BluRay the night Rogers died when we couldn't stream anything. It's just as dumb as I remember it, but it has a satirical edge that I missed the first time through. Better the second time around. 
• The Gray Man: We were looking for a mindless action flick for Saturday night and thought this might be suitable. Unfortunately, my bad movie self-defence mechanism kicked in and I fell asleep halfway through. It's a standard action thriller but the Russo brothers have opted not to light half the scenes, which made it unwatchable for me. I don't know why so many current movies are so dark, but it's really beginning to grate on me. (Netflix)
• Last Night in Soho: I was looking forward to seeing this as it had gotten good reviews and I wasn't disappointed. What starts out as a typical coming-of-age movie (young woman goes to the big city to find fame and fortune) turns into a gripping exercise in psychological horror. It's a brilliant, bravura piece of filmmaking. (Crave)

TV Shows

• The Hidden Life of Pets: The series swerves over into "too cute for words" territory occasionally but I still enjoyed it. It's not just about dogs and cats, though they get their place, but birds, rodents, and reptiles are also featured. (Netflix)
• Brokenwood Mysteries, season 8: More in the continuing Aussie detective series (filmed in Australia, set in New Zealand). Light entertainment but we are enjoying it. (Acorn TV)
• Monty Don's Adriatic Gardens: Venice, Croatia, and Greece are featured in this series of gardening travelogues. I have no urge to visit Venice, but Croatia and Greece are another matter. (Acorn TV)
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Well, it got better as the season progressed and the last couple of episodes were OK. Still, I just don't see the point of trying to reboot a tired and used-up idea. (Crave)
• Grantche5ster (season 7): It amazes me how such a small English village can have so many murders, and that there are any eligible females that vicar Will has not yet slept with. (PBS Masterpiece)