Shopping Safe On Amazon

Shopping on Amazon can be convenient, fast, and may save you money. But you can also end up with a late shipment of a substandard product that you paid too much for. Wired has some good tips for getting the most out of Amazon and avoiding hassles.

Some of the tips, like trying to buy products that are sold and shipped directly by Amazon, will likely be familiar to most people. But there are quite a few more things that you can do that I wasn't aware of, as well as some suggestions for browser extensions and sites you can use to check out sellers.

NASA Still Plans to Use SLS for First Lunar Mission

I posted a while back about NASA looking to alternatives to its troubled Space Launch System for the planned first Lunar mission of its Orion spacecraft. They've now completed a preliminary review and it looks like there aren't any alternatives available that would save them time.

However, they are considering options that they may be able to exploit later. The article on NASA Spaceflight.com goes into quite a bit of detail. I do hope that they will explore alternatives to the SLS, whic is basically a boondoggle created to keep as many former Shuttle-era programs in business.

Still, the Administration is not closing the door on looking at alternate launch options for Orion, especially in light of the subsequently announced goal to land Americans on the Moon within the next five years.

“There is a solution here that could potentially work for the future,” Administrator Bridenstine said in a NASA agency-wide town hall meeting on April 1. “It would require time, it would require cost, and there is risk involved but guess what? If we’re going to land boots on the Moon in 2024, we have time and we have the ability to accept some risk, make some modifications, all of that is on the table.”

“There is nothing sacred here that is off the table and that is a potential capability that could help us land boots on the Moon in 2024.”

Web Artichtecture 101

I wish that I had had this article when I started working on documentation for large, complex systems. It would have saved me a lot of time and effort tracking down information. Also, web architecture has gotten a lot more complex since then (mid-1990s) and some of the technologies mentioned in the article didn't exist then.

Cosmology May Be In For a Shakeup

We've known for many years that the universe is exapnding. The speed of the expansion is called the Hubble constant and there are two ways of measuring it: looking at the cosmic background radiation (the embers of the Big Bang) or measuring the distance to a type of stars called Cepheid variables. The two numbers should agree, but they don't.

This is causing some consternation among cosmologists, the astronomers who study the large scale universe. The discrepancy is now several percent, which is many times observational error. So it means that there's something basic that they're missing.

"The Hubble tension between the early and late Universe may be the most exciting development in cosmology in decades," said astrophysicist Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Johns Hopkins University.

"This mismatch has been growing and has now reached a point that is really impossible to dismiss as a fluke. This disparity could not plausibly occur by chance."

Which means that there's something out there that we've missed. As a study last year deriving the Hubble Constant using black holes proposed, the acceleration could be the result of an increase in the density of dark energy.

I'll be watching developments with some interest. 

Featured Links - April 28, 2019

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

• YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant. How YouTube turned into a cesspool. 
• In praise of the Yukon Gold potato. It's a Canadian success story. 
• A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy. The rise of Candida auris embodies a serious and growing public health threat: drug-resistant germs.
• NASA and FEMA Will Simulate an Impending Asteroid Strike Next Week. It's the ones they don't detect in advance that worry me.
• How the Boeing 737 MAX Disaster Looks to a Software Developer. Design shortcuts meant to make a new plane seem like an old, familiar one are to blame.
• Better, Safer Sex: On the Hunt for a Condom People Will Actually Like. As STD rates rise, researchers are looking to reinvent the most reliable disease-preventing contraception

Who's Really Running Ontario?

Here's a Twitter thread from someone who had a late-night conversation with Doug Ford. It raises the question of who's really running this province, because Ford obvious has no clue about what his government is doing to us.

100 Writers in Canada the World Should Read

The CBC has compiled a list they call 100 writers in Canada the World Should Read with links to a page for each writer.

I've had a look at the list and most of the names are unfamiliar. I'm not sure what the selection criteria were but I found some notable omissions. The SF genre is represented by Margaret Atwood, William Gibson, Guy Gavriel Kay, and a few others, but where's Robert Charles Wilson, Peter Watts, or Robert J. Sawyer? Or out of the genre, Linwood Barclary, Linden McIntyre, or Giles Blunt?

Still, it's good to see our writers being recognized. Thirty years ago, you'd never have seen a list like this being compiled.

Book Catalog Software

I have been looking for software to help me catalog our book collection, because we want to sell off as much as we can. The bulk of it is science fiction and fantasy, with quite a few signed first editions, both hardcover and paperback.

I wanted something that I could use on my phone to scan ISBNs and have the software enter the basic data. I spent too much time today fiddling with various apps, but I think I've settled on LibraryThing. It is primarily web-based but has an Android app that I can use to scan the ISBN directly into its database, which is stored online. That makes it easy for me to edit items on the PC, which is much easier than trying to fiddle with a small phone screen. It also lets me customize how it displays lists and add tags and categories.

LibraryThing has many social features, akin to Goodreads, but I have little or no interest in that part of the application. And it's free, which is a plus.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has used it, or has other tools to recommend.

Encrypting Your Life

You may already be doing some of the things mentioned in this article, but if you aren't you probably should be.

“Only the paranoid survive.” — Andy Grove

Andy Grove was a Hungarian refugee who escaped communism, studied engineering, and ultimately led the personal computer revolution as the CEO of Intel. He died earlier this year in Silicon Valley after a long fight with Parkinson’s disease.

When one of the most powerful people in the world encourages us to be paranoid, maybe we should listen.

And Grove isn’t the only powerful person urging caution. Even the director of the FBI — the same official who recently paid hackers a million dollars to unlock a shooter’s iPhone — is encouraging everyone to cover their webcams.

But you obey the law. What do you have to worry about? As the motto of the United Kingdom’s surveillance program reminds us, “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”

Well, law-abiding citizens do have reason to fear. They do have reasons to secure their devices, their files, and their communications with loved ones.

At the very least, you should use 2-factor authentication on your online accounts where it's available, encrypt your hard drive and phone, and use the TOR network for any web browsing that you think might be at all sensitive.

We're Toast 6

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.

Climate Change and Environment

• Tall ice-cliffs may trigger big calving events -- and fast sea-level rise.
• The Climate Change Solution That Could Spark Global War. An all too plausible scenario.
• Polar Warning: Even Antarctica's Coldest Region Is Starting To Melt. Time to sell that Florida beachfront condo. 
• As the World Warms, Clouds Could Disappear—Catastrophically. I have read some differing opinions on the likelihood that this could happen.
• Canada warming at twice the global rate, leaked report finds.
• The Worst Disease Ever Recorded, especially if you're a frog.
• This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out. 

Politics

• The Chinafication of the internet continues as the UK proposes blocking any service that hosts "illegal" or "harmful" material.
• (How) American Collapse Resembles Soviet Collapse. 

Technology

• Synthetic Biology Could Bring a Pox On Us All. Probably a bigger threat than a rogue AI.

The Day the Dinosaurs Died

I continue to be impressed by Douglas Preston's science writing. He's probably best known as a novelist, both on his own and in collaboration with Lee Child. But a couple of years ago, he published The Lost City of the Monkey God, about the discovery of Mayan ruins lost for centuries in the Honduran jungle and his struggle with leptospirosis, which he contracted while writing the book. It was one of the best non-fiction books I've read in years.

Now he's written The Day the Dinosaurs Died, a long article in the New Yorker, about what may be the most significant paleontological find of all time—fossils that were buried minutes after the impact that killed the dinosaurs. The article is also a profile of the young geologist, Robert DePalma, who discovered them.

The following day, DePalma noticed a small disturbance preserved in the sediment. About three inches in diameter, it appeared to be a crater formed by an object that had fallen from the sky and plunked down in mud. Similar formations, caused by hailstones hitting a muddy surface, had been found before in the fossil record. As DePalma shaved back the layers to make a cross-­section of the crater, he found the thing itself—not a hailstone but a small white sphere—at the bottom of the crater. It was a tektite, about three millimetres in diameter—the fallout from an ancient asteroid impact. As he continued excavating, he found another crater with a tektite at the bottom, and another, and another. Glass turns to clay over millions of years, and these tektites were now clay, but some still had glassy cores. The microtektites he had found earlier might have been carried there by water, but these had been trapped where they fell—on what, DePalma believed, must have been the very day of the disaster.

“When I saw that, I knew this wasn’t just any flood deposit,” DePalma said. “We weren’t just near the KT boundary—this whole site is the KT boundary!” From surveying and mapping the layers, DePalma hypothesized that a massive inland surge of water flooded a river valley and filled the low-lying area where we now stood, perhaps as a result of the KT-impact tsunami, which had roared across the proto-Gulf and up the Western Interior Seaway. As the water slowed and became slack, it deposited everything that had been caught up in its travels—the heaviest material first, up to whatever was floating on the surface. All of it was quickly entombed and preserved in the muck: dying and dead creatures, both marine and freshwater; plants, seeds, tree trunks, roots, cones, pine needles, flowers, and pollen; shells, bones, teeth, and eggs; tektites, shocked minerals, tiny diamonds, iridium-laden dust, ash, charcoal, and amber-smeared wood. As the sediments settled, blobs of glass rained into the mud, the largest first, then finer and finer bits, until grains sifted down like snow.

 If you have any interest at all in dinosaurs, paleontology, or geography, you will enjoy this article. It's a marvellous example of science journalism that reminds me of the great John McPhee at his best.

DePalma's research has recently been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Chicxulub impact played a crucial role in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction. However the earliest postimpact effects, critical to fully decode the profound influence on Earth’s biota, are poorly understood due to a lack of high-temporal-resolution contemporaneous deposits. The Tanis site, which preserves a rapidly deposited, ejecta-bearing bed in the Hell Creek Formation, helps to resolve that long-standing deficit. Emplaced immediately (minutes to hours) after impact, Tanis provides a postimpact “snapshot,” including ejecta accretion and faunal mass death, advancing our understanding of the immediate effects of the Chicxulub impact. Moreover, we demonstrate that the depositional event, calculated to have coincided with the arrival of seismic waves from Chicxulub, likely resulted from a seismically coupled local seiche.

You'll probably want to read the paper as after you've read Preston's article. It's cleanly written and despite lots of technical details, should be comprehensible to lay readers.

Update: Here's a short video about the discovery from the PBS show, Nova.

Document360: A New Authoring and Publishing Tool

The ever intersting Tom Johnson has written a first look at a new (to me, at least) documentation tool, Document 360. From his article summary:

Document360 is a new authoring and publishing tool that spans the needs of both support teams creating KB content and technical writers creating documentation. Document360 provides a good balance of features that will satisfy both audiences. Launched in July 2017, Document360 is already growing rapidly with a robust customer base. In this post, I'll show screenshots related to many of these features and talk about the need to bridge the gap betAtween KB and tech doc content.

After reading Tom's article, and looking through the Document360 documentation (which is written in Document360), I agree with his assessment that it looks like a good tool for creating help content, especially if that content is being shared with or provided by a support group. To me, it looks like something like a cross between a good wiki (Confluence, perhaps) and a database-driven tool like ServiceNow. However, there are limitations that would have made it unsuitable for quite a bit of my documentation when I was working, like having to write in Markdown (I can't imagine having to do complex tables that way).

Why Software Projects Take Longer Than You Thnk

If you've worked in IT, you've seen it happen. A software project that seems straightforward ends up taking longer than originally estimated, sometimes a lot longer. Of course, the same is true for writing projects—sometimes the delay is because the overarching project runs into problems, other times the estimates for the writing project are just way off.

It's possible to apply statistical modelling to project planning and there may be a mathematical basis to some project delays. My university stats are pretty rusty, but the math in this article isn't that complex and seems reasonable.

Again, one single misbehaving task basically ends up dominating the calculation, at least for the 99% case. Even for mean though, the one freak project ends up taking over roughly half the time spend on these tasks, despite all of these tasks having a similar median time to completion. To make it simple, I assumed that all tasks have the same estimated size, but different uncertainties. The same math applies if we vary the size as well.

Funny thing is I’ve had this gut feeling for a while. Adding up estimates rarely work when you end up with more than a few tasks. Instead, figure out which tasks have the highest uncertainty – those tasks are basically going to dominate the mean time to completion.

What Really Happened to Vladimir Komarov

Fifty-two years ago today, Soviet cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov became the first person to die during an operational space mission when his capsule's parachutes failed to open after re-entry. Over the years, starting almost immediately after his death, there have been numerous and varying reports about what happened. For an example, see this Twitter thread, which among other things claims that Soviet Premier Kosygin spoke to Komarov as his capsule was falling to Earth.

But he didn't.

A couple of years ago, The Space Review published a two-part article (Part One, Part Two) citing Russian records and resources, including transcripts of the communication between ground crews and the capsule, to explain what really happened on that mission. It's clear from reading the article that Komarov was in trouble, almost as soon as he attained orbit, and his death was due to a design flaw in the parachute mechanism.

This current article is an attempt to use the transcripts, along with other Russian language sources, to offer a new and comprehensive account of this deeply misunderstood mission. The available evidence clearly shows that not only was Komarov not in hysterics, but that he communicated calmly and cogently throughout the mission, and only with people who he was supposed to be in touch with: cosmonaut communicators, flight directors, and chief designers. These transcripts also provide crucial detail on what exactly happened in orbit and how mission control and Komarov tried to bring a very faulty ship under control. The proximate cause of Komarov’s death was clearly a faulty parachute deployment system. But, more broadly, when Komarov boarded his spacecraft for liftoff, the Soyuz spacecraft was incontrovertibly not ready for crewed flight. And some of the blame for the tragedy must fall on three broader factors: political pressure to accomplish a mission in time for several anniversaries in 1967, the need to reassert Soviet dominance in space after a lull, and a management culture that discouraged dissenting voices.

It's a solid piece of research into a mission that should never have happened.

Stand on Zanzibar Is On Sale

Great book on sale alert. John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar is on sale for $2.99 on most online ebook stores. It's one of the best books of the 1960s and probably Brunner's best work. If you haven't read it, do yourself a favour and grab it now.

Featured Links - April 21, 2019

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

• 7 Windows Files and Folders You Can Delete to Free Up Space. Some good tips here for Windows users.
• Nike and Boeing Are Paying Sci-Fi Writers to Predict Their Futures. I know several SF writers who have successful second careers as futurists. 
• Dragonblood: Analysing WPA3's Dragonfly Handshake. The new Wi-Fi security protocol has already been hacked. 
• Designing the First Full-Time Human Habitat on the Moon. Shades of The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.
• Huawei P30 Pro Camera Review: Breaking the rules. I think this might be my next phone. 
• China Finds Phone-Wielding Tourists and Telescopes Don't Mesh

Off for the Weekend

It's Easter weekend and I don't think many people will be waiting with bated breath for my next blog post, so I'm taking the weekend off. Enjoy the spring, and I'll see you Monday or Tuesday.

Five Simple Project Management Tools

There are times when you may want to use a project management tool for a project, but a top-of-the-line tool like Microsoft Project isn't available or is overkill. This article describes five free tools that might be suitable for small or personal projects (home renovation comes to mind).

Out of the five tools, I'm inclined to recommend the one that's a Google Sheets workbook. Just make a copy in your Google Drive and away you go.

Building a Text Editor for the New York Times

I'm sure I'm not the only technical writer who has fantasized about building my own text editor or word processor. A lucky team at the New York Times got the chance to do exactly that and built an editor for use by the Times' newsroom staff. As you might expect, the Times had some requirements specific to the newspaper business, but what they built would probably keep most technical writers quite happy.

As the newsroom evolves, we envisioned a new story editor that would visually bring the different components of stories inline, so that reporters and editors alike could see exactly what a story would look like before it publishes. Additionally, the new approach would ideally be more intuitive and flexible in its code implementation, avoiding many of the problems caused by the older editor.

With these two goals in mind, my team set out to build this new text editor, which we named Oak. After much research and months of prototyping, we opted to build it on the foundation of ProseMirror, a robust open-source JavaScript toolkit for building rich-text editors. ProseMirror takes a completely different approach than our old text editor did, representing the document using its own non-HTML tree-shaped data structure that describes the structure of the text in terms of paragraphs, headings, lists, links and more.

Unlike the output of our old editor, the output of a text editor built on ProseMirror can ultimately be rendered as a DOM tree, Markdown text or any other number of other formats that can express the concepts it encodes, making it very versatile and solving many of the problems we run into with our legacy text editor.

The article goes into a fair bit of technical detail. If you're a tools geek like I am, you'll find it quite fascinating. It's notable that the editor is based on ProseMirror, an open source JavaScript toolkit, and doesn't use DITA.

G Suite Gets Office Editing

The Office Watch Newsletter reports that Google's G Suite customers will soon get the ability to directly edit Microsoft Office documents from Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. This is big news for companies that have users on both platforms.

According to Google document participants will be able to use Microsoft Office or G Suite:

” … where some members of your organization use Office while others use G Suite, this ensures seamless collaboration and eliminates the need to consider or convert file types.”

They imply that real time collaboration is possible.

“Office editing brings everyone the benefits of G Suite’s real time collaboration tools and intelligence features to Office files.”

Anyone who has tried it knows that Microsoft continues to have problems with document collaboration and real-time interaction.  Getting it to work across platforms will be ‘interesting’.

If I were still working, I'd have reservations about letting anyone mess with some of my carefully crafted Word documents, so I'll be quite interested in hearing how this works in practice. Unfortunately, I won't be able to test it myself, since it's currently only rolling out to G Suite customers.