I've known folksinger Doug McArthur since the 1970s, when he was performing at the Knight II coffee house and other Hamilton area venues. He's still performing occasionally and recording. His latest project is The Horses of the Sea, a collection of Irish-themed songs.
I am not Irish.
Over the last few years I have become enchanted with this magnificent island. I have been taking bicycle tours along the Wild Atlantic Way and sleeping in Dublin with side trips to Dingle, Westport, Leenaune, Newgrange, Wicklow, and, always, Galway City.
I thought other stolen children might be interested in what I have found.
“Though I am old with wandering”,
I find I can still learn a thing or two…
He's very generously decided to make it free to listen to on his website. While you're listening, check out his slideshow of photos from Ireland (he's an accomplished photographer), then support him by buying one of his CDs. You won't regret it.
Earlier this week was the 50th anniversary of what many people consider the best version of the Grateful Dead's signature song, Dark Star. It ended up on the Live Dead album. To celebrate the anniversary, Relix has linked to several classic versions of Dark Star, including the one from Live Dead.
I saw the Dead eight times, but only caught one Dark Star, the last time I saw them in Hamilton in March 1992. It was wonderful. Here's a link to an audience recording of the performance.
In mathematics and physics, there's a common belief that truth and elegance go hand in hand, and the simplest choice is most likely the best. That holds true in daily life too, especially in design.
In this article, Kate Clayton argues that designers should be elegant simplifiers. She makes a good case, using her experience in the health care industry for examples.
Transparent design doesn’t mean a solution can’t be complex. At Penn, physician-researcher Shreya Kangovi’s community health worker model, IMPACT, is built from a decade of randomized controlled trials, grants, and iterations. Yet the design is a clear, straightforward workflow for nonclinicians to treat underlying determinants of health. In the school of engineering, designer Bethany Edwards created Lia, a flushable pregnancy test, which appears to be a simple paper product, the equivalent of 6 squares of toilet paper. Yet it incorporates demanding design criteria of being discreet, flushable, biodegradable, and accurate. Both designs now also have the outcome of being disruptive.
If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might have noticed that I'm a bit of a typography geek. That's a family influence; my father worked at the Sault Daily Star, working his way up from a errand boy to running the composing room. During his career, he went from setting the newspaper in hot lead using Linotype machines to computerized typesetting. By the time he retired, I was able to show him a fanzine that I produced at home using Ventura Publisher.
If you're into typography, you probably are going to want the Tiny Type Museum.
The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule is a celebration of type and printing, and an effort at preserving history for future generations to re-discover. Each custom, handmade wood museum case holds a couple dozen genuine artifacts from the past, including a paper mold for casting newspaper ads in metal, individual pieces of wood and metal type, a phototype “font,” and a Linotype “slug” (set with your own message), along with original commissioned art and a letterpress-printed book and a few replicas of items found in printing shops.
Ingredients for the museum will be sourced from active letterpress printers, type foundries, artists, and nooks and crannies where people stashed the past in the hopes of someone showing interest in preserving it. I’ll pull all of this together into a unique collection that’s impossible to find outside of a full-scale printing history museum and put it into your hands.
The museum comes with a letterpress-printed book in which I trace the nearly six centuries of development of type and printing since Gutenberg printed his Bible. This book will be the “docent” for the museum, providing insight into the stages in technological and artistic development that took place, and explaining the importance and nature of the artifacts. It will also slip neatly into a slot in the top of the museum case. (The book is available as a separate reward.)
The museum lays out the history of printing in miniature, and serves as an object of study and conversation, a teaching tool, and a time machine—offering a small, but deep, glimpse into the past to those who discover it in years to come.
I wish I could afford this, but I don't have a grand (US) to splurge on it. There are some cheaper price points, one of them being getting a PDF of the book for $10, which I might go for. It would probably be worth it just so I can explain to my kids and grandkids what my dad did.
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.
A World Without Clouds. "A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century."
There's a perception in the tech community that blockchain technology can be a panacea for common security problems. That turns out not to be the case, as this article in Technology Review points out. Blockchain systems can be hacked, and sometimes in new and novel ways.
In total, hackers have stolen nearly $2 billion worth of cryptocurrency since the beginning of 2017, mostly from exchanges, and that’s just what has been revealed publicly. These are not just opportunistic lone attackers, either. Sophisticated cybercrime organizations are now doing it too: analytics firm Chainalysis recently said that just two groups, both of which are apparently still active, may have stolen a combined $1 billion from exchanges.
We shouldn’t be surprised. Blockchains are particularly attractive to thieves because fraudulent transactions can’t be reversed as they often can be in the traditional financial system. Besides that, we’ve long known that just as blockchains have unique security features, they have unique vulnerabilities. Marketing slogans and headlines that called the technology “unhackable” were dead wrong.
That’s been understood, at least in theory, since Bitcoin emerged a decade ago. But in the past year, amidst a Cambrian explosion of new cryptocurrency projects, we’ve started to see what this means in practice—and what these inherent weaknesses could mean for the future of blockchains and digital assets.
If you own any cryptocurrencies, or you work on a blockchain-based project, you should read this article.
If you've been paying any attention to trends in technology, you'll know that augmented reality is big and getting bigger. So far, the best example is probably Pokemon Go, where imaginary creatures are overlaid on your phone's view of the world around you. Google has announced that Maps will support overlaid directional information sometime soon.
What's keeping the technology back right now is the difficulty and cost of producing a display that can overlay information on our view of reality. Google Glass was one of the first viable products, but outside of some niche markets like airplane maintenance, it hasn't taken off. But what will be possible in five or ten years? That's the subject of this article from Wired: AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld.
EVERY DECEMBER, ADAM Savage—star of the TV show MythBusters—releases a video reviewing his “favorite things” from the previous year. In 2018, one of his highlights was a set of Magic Leap augmented reality goggles. After duly noting the hype and backlash that have dogged the product, Savage describes an epiphany he had while trying on the headset at home, upstairs in his office. “I turned it on and I could hear a whale,” he says, “but I couldn’t see it. I’m looking around my office for it. And then it swims by my windows—on the outside of my building! So the glasses scanned my room and it knew that my windows were portals and it rendered the whale as if it were swimming down my street. I actually got choked up.” What Savage encountered on the other side of the glasses was a glimpse of the mirrorworld.
The mirrorworld doesn’t yet fully exist, but it is coming. Someday soon, every place and thing in the real world—every street, lamppost, building, and room—will have its full-size digital twin in the mirrorworld. For now, only tiny patches of the mirrorworld are visible through AR headsets. Piece by piece, these virtual fragments are being stitched together to form a shared, persistent place that will parallel the real world. The author Jorge Luis Borges imagined a map exactly the same size as the territory it represented. “In time,” Borges wrote, “the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” We are now building such a 1:1 map of almost unimaginable scope, and this world will become the next great digital platform.
Kevin Kelly isn't the first author to use the term "mirrorworld"; it's been used in fantasy novels for some time. But in this article, he's redefined it. If you read one article on technology this year, make it this one.
The search feature in Microsoft Word is very powerful. As well as standard string searches, you can use wildcard characters and regular expressions to perform complex searches and
replacements. For a detailed explanation of wildcard searches in Word, with many examples, see Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word by Jack Lyon. Examples below are from that book.
To enable wildcard searches in Word:
Open the Find and Replace dialog box. From the Find drop down menu in the Home tab of the ribbon, choose Advanced Find or press CONTROL+H.
In the Find and Replace dialog box, click More. The Search Options pane opens.
Select the Use wildcards check box. Note that this check box also enables the use of regular expressions in searches and replacements.
Basic wildcard searches use the ? and * characters.
? finds any single character: “b?t” finds “bat”, “but”, and “bet”.
* finds any string of characters: “b*d” finds “bad”, “bead”, and “beard”.
More complex searches and replacements are possible using regular expressions with the following wildcard characters:
[ ] finds one of the specified characters: “b[ai]t” finds “bat” and “bit” but not “bet”.
[-] finds any single character in the specified range (which must be in ascending order): “[l-r]ight” finds “light”, “might”, “night”, and “right” (and “oight”, “pight”, and “qight”, if they exist).
[!] finds any single character except those specified: “m[!u]st” finds “mist” and “most” but not “must”; “t[!ou]ck” finds “tack” and “tick” but not “tock” or “tuck”; [!x-z] Finds any single character except those in the specified range; “t[!a-m]ck” finds “tock” and “tuck” but not “tack” or “tick”.
{n} finds exactly n occurrences of the previous character or expression: “re{2}d” finds “reed” but not “red”.
{n,} finds at least n occurrences of the previous character or expression: “re{1,}d” finds “red” and “reed”.
{n,m} finds from n to m occurrences of the previous character or expression: “10{1,3}” finds “10”, “100”, and “1000”.
@ finds one or more of the previous character or expression before something else: “me@t” finds both “met” and “meet”; “me@” (without the “t”) finds only “me” because nothing comes after it.
< finds the beginning of a word: “<inter” finds “interest” and “interrupt” but not “splinter”.
> finds the end of a word: “in>“ finds “in” and “main” but not “inspiring”.
A few things to note:
With wildcard searches, Word automatically matches case.
The following characters must be escaped with a backslash (\) when used as characters in a search: ? * [ ] { } ( ) < > ^ \.
The Find whole words option is not available in wildcard searches.
You should always turn off track changes before using wildcard searches. Bad things may happen to your document if you don’t.
Here are a couple of videos featuring prominent science fiction authors.
First Gregory Benford with Freeman Dyson (both are scientists, Dyson is not an SF author as far as I know). The talk is titled "Forseeing the Next 35 Years—Where Will We Be in 2054?"
Next, David Brin in "Let Them Contact Us First".
Then Cory Doctorow at Devcon4.
Finally, Cory Doctorow and John Scalzi talking about their recent books:
Baseball is the only sport that I watch regularly. One of the things I like about it is its measured pace, but in recent years it's gotten too measured. I don't mind it that much if I'm watching at home, where I am usually reading something at the same time, but it can get annoying at the stadium, when you're trying to figure out if the game will end before you have to leave to catch a train home.
I'm not the only person who finds the modern game too slow. Jack Todd of the Montreal Gazette published a spectacular rant about it last fall. Here's his description of a World Series game from 1957.
The game moved along, much as I remembered. Using my stopwatch, I had timed modern pitchers taking between 30 and 45 seconds to release the ball. But here was veteran lefty Warren Spahn delivering pitches to the Yankees at roughly 15-second intervals.
I had to time the top of the third inning four times on my stopwatch before I was certain the timing was correct: In that half-inning, Spahn went through a murderer’s row of Yankees (Tony Kubek, Hank Bauer and Mickey Mantle) in a grand total of one minute and 10 seconds. Spahn threw five pitches: two to get Kubek, one for Bauer, two for Mantle. All ground balls, three batters retired in less time than it takes some hitters today to adjust their batting gloves.
I'll try not to think about this too much when I'm watching games later this year.
There is an update to JavaScript, otherwise known as ECSMAScript. The latest version, ECMASCript 2018, or ES2018, includes enhancements to regular expressions (regex) that should simplify text processing. Smashing Magazine covers the new features in some detail.
ES2018 continues the work of previous editions of ECMAScript by making regular expressions more useful. New features include lookbehind assertion, named capture groups, s (dotAll) flag, and Unicode property escapes. Lookbehind assertion allows you to match a pattern only if it is preceded by another pattern. Named capture groups use a more expressive syntax compared to regular capture groups. The s (dotAll) flag changes the behavior of the dot (.) metacharacter to match line break characters. Finally, Unicode property escapes provide a new type of escape sequence in regular expressions.
I don't have FrameMaker, so I can't say if any of these new features are available in ExtendScript, but if not I would hope they'll make it into the next major version.
I'm often boggled by the rate of development in Toronto and the height of some of the new office and condo towers, some of which are now topping out at over 300 metres. But Toronto has yet to see anything like the super-tall skyscrapers that are now rising in New York, many along the edge of Central Park.
The Guardian has a long article about the new developments in New York and how they are affecting the city. It's a good article and if you're into architecture, they've included lots of links to interesting tidbits.
Any visitor to New York over the past few years will have witnessed this curious new breed of pencil-thin tower. Poking up above the Manhattan skyline like etiolated beanpoles, they seem to defy the laws of both gravity and commercial sense. They stand like naked elevator shafts awaiting their floors, raw extrusions of capital piled up until it hits the clouds. These towers are not only the product of advances in construction technology – and a global surfeit of super-rich buyers – but a zoning policy that allows a developer to acquire unused airspace nearby, add it to their own lot, and erect a vast structure without any kind of public review process taking place. The face of New York is changing at a rate not seen for decades, and the deals that are driving it are all happening behind closed doors.
When I was young, I used to go mushroom picking with my dad. We'd find a logged area in the bush, and look for mushrooms growing in the stumps, But I was just along for the ride; my dad usually didn't let me pick anything because he (probably rightly) didn't think I'd be able to identify which ones were safe to eat.
I don't know what mushrooms growing in Northern Ontario fifty years ago were dangerous. I do know there were some that he pointed out that you had to avoid. I don't think that any were what's known as the death-cap mushroom, which is now spreading throughout North America. Its dangers and spread are documented in this article from The Atlantic.
Between a sidewalk and a cinder-block wall grew seven mushrooms, each half the size of a doorknob. Their silver-green caps were barely coming up, only a few proud of the ground. Most lay slightly underground, bulging up like land mines. Magnolia bushes provided cover. An abandoned syringe lay on the ground nearby, along with a light assortment of suburban litter.
Paul Kroeger, a wizard of a man with a long, copious, well-combed beard, knelt and dug under one of the sickly colored caps. With a short, curved knife, he pried up the mushroom and pulled it out whole. It was a mushroom known as the death cap, Amanita phalloides. If ingested, severe illness can start as soon as six hours later, but tends to take longer, 36 hours or more. Severe liver damage is usually apparent after 72 hours. Fatality can occur after a week or longer. “Long and slow is a frightening aspect of this type of poisoning,” Kroeger said.
I think if I were living in Vancouver, I'd avoid wild mushrooms completely.
Last month, I linked to a New York Times article called The Insect Apocalypse Is Here about the world-wide catastrophe about to happen to insect populations. As it happens with science articles in the mainstream press (even the Times), the actual situation may be more nuanced, although still grim.
I spoke with several entomologists about whether these claims are valid, and what I found was complicated. The data on insect declines are too patchy, unrepresentative, and piecemeal to justify some of the more hyperbolic alarms. At the same time, what little information we have tends to point in the same worrying direction. How, then, should we act on that imperfect knowledge? It’s a question that goes beyond the fate of insects: How do we preserve our rapidly changing world when the unknowns are vast and the cost of inaction is potentially high?
The finalists for the 2018 Nebula Awards have been announced. The Nebulas are voted on by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. The winners will be announced at the 2019 Nebula Conference in Los Angeles on May 18.
These are the finalists for best novel:
The Calculating Stars, Mary Robinette Kowal (Tor)
The Poppy War, R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
Blackfish City, Sam J. Miller (Ecco; Orbit UK)
Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik (Del Rey; Macmillan)
Witchmark, C.L. Polk (Tor.com Publishing)
Trail of Lightning, Rebecca Roanhorse (Saga)
I would be quite happy to see The Calculating Stars win. It's the only one of the finalists that I've read and is definitely award calibre. I was disappointed to see that Ian McDonald's wonderful "Time Was" didn't make the ballot for best novella. However, I'm glad to see that several Canadian authors made the list. Thanks to Robert J. Sawyer for pointing out all of the Canadians:
C.L. Polk of Calgary in best novel for Witchmark
Kate Heartfield of Ottawa in best novella for "Alice Payne Arrives"
Kelly Robson of Toronto in best novella for "Gods, Monsters, and the Lucky Peach"
Kate Heartfield in game writing for The Road to Canterbury
And this year's already announced Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master, William Gibson
When I was in London last year, one of the things that impressed me the most was the Tube system. Where we were staying near Regents Park, we were within a 15 minute walk of four Tube stations on several different lines. Now there's a new line, the Elizabeth line, part of what's known as CrossRail, a more than 100-kilometre line crossing London from east to west, built at a cost of more than 15 billion pounds.
If you have any interest in transit or engineering, this is a must see. It is amazing to see the size and complexity of a project like this under construction, and the precision with which it was built. One of the most impressive segments was about running a 1,000 ton tunnelling machine over a running Tube line station with a margin of literally centimetres.
The episodes are occasionally cheesy and there's too much repetition (a problem with most TV docs these days) but are very watchable. I was also impressed by the number of women in senior roles on the project.
I am still using Word 2013, but I am considering upgrading to Office 365 (more for the free storage than the new Office features). I just came across a post by Rhonda Bracey on her CyberText Newsletter blog about a problem she was having with Office 365 and Word templates. I'm posting this for future reference.
Just a quick note about repairing Office 365—you don’t get a Repair option in the list of programs, despite the user interface text telling you so. Instead, you have to click on Change, say Yes to allow the app to make changes (if asked), then choose Quick Repair from the list. It only takes a few minutes. Once the repair was done, my IT guys told me to reboot the PC, which I did, then I tested the repair by successfully opening normal.dotm.
Extra dimensions, black holes, and vacuum decay, oh my. "There are several ways the Universe could end, some dramatic, some pathetic, some just outright weird. My personal favorite is vacuum decay, in which the Universe succumbs to an expanding bubble of unimaginable destruction that arises from what could be described as a manufacturer's flaw in the fabric of the cosmos"
Planck's Constant and the Nature of Light. "This new definition of Planck's constant leads to a much simpler interpretation of light which can be modeled using the same mathematical construct (e ^ iφ =cos(φ)+isin(φ)) as all other oscillating wave phenomenon."
