Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
22 January 2023
This issue looks at the moon and finds that this week it was closer to the Earth than it has been for some time. I was forced by revelations about Tesla’s self-driving trailer’s authenticity to reopen my file on Musk, so I also took the opportunity of drawing your attention to an article in The Verge regaling the events at Twitter since he took over.
Essays looks at the economics of charging electric vehicles, and also draws your attention to an excellent essay about the Paris Commune of 1871. There is also a piece on how the Romans were able to make concrete which has lasted over two thousand years. Pictures has a nice selection of astronomical objects, and the quote is from David Lloyd George.
In the Scanner are URLs pointing to material on patent troll attacks on open source stuff, war games, aliens, a new way to refrigerate things, Big Tech’s billion dollar curse of the free, and finally, a cool new synthesizer!
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Publishing schedule: Next issue 29 January 2023
Credits: Thanks to Fi for editing, correcting errors, etc.
Updates:
A few issues ago I did say I was not going to cover the antics of Elon Musk again, but perhaps I should have added, ‘on Twitter’... Because, of course, Musk is also the boss of Tesla, and things are coming to a head there. Not only has the share price dropped dramatically, which is annoying the shareholders, to put it mildly, but in order to shift existing stock, prices of new Tesla cars have been cut, which is annoying existing owners, whose trade-in prices will also drop, making their cars less valuable.
In addition Tesla is under investigation over the safety of its ‘self-driving’ mechanism, following a series of high profile accidents, and now it turns our that the high profile movie made to show how good the self driving mechanism was, how shall I put it, less than strictly accurate...
I wonder what is going on at Space X...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/01/musk-oversaw-staged-tesla-self-driving-video-emails-show/
If you really feel you need some more Musk/Twitter stuff, go and have a look at this major piece on The Verge – it’s frightening stuff.
https://www.theverge.com/23551060/elon-musk-twitter-takeover-layoffs-workplace-salute-emoji
Astronomy:
Yesterday the Moon was at the closest a new moon has been for 992 years and it won’t be this close again for another 345 years. If the skies are clear tonight, you might just be able to spot it in it’s closeness!
https://www.timeanddate.com/news/astronomy/closest-new-moon-2023
Essays:
TechXplore has an interesting piece on charging electric vehicles (EV). It seems that most of the owners charge their EVs at home in the evening, or overnight. This, the article claims, is exactly the wrong way to go about it according to a Stanford University paper. Basically the case is that if you charged during the day, while you were at work, for instance, you could charging using renewable energy – solar and wind power.
It’s an interesting point, and well argued – take a look and see what you think, the case study is for California, but I feel sure it has wider, global, applications
https://techxplore.com/news/2022-09-cars-home-night.html
Aeon magazine has a really rather interesting essay on the role of working women in the Paris Commune of 1871. The Commune only lasted 72 days, but it became the symbol for revolutionaries everywhere, and working class women played a key role. This is an excellent piece of writing by Carolyn Eichneris, professor of history and women’s and gender studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, about an event that lit up the revolutionary movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries. The writing also restores the role women in the Commune, which often gets lost in contemporary accounts.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-to-make-a-revolution-the-1871-paris-commune
Construction:
Why was Roman concrete so durable? Much of it has lasted 2,000 years. How much of the stuff we are pouring now will be still around, let alone useable, in 2,000 years time?
For years engineers and scientists have been trying to find out just exactly what it is that makes Roman concrete so durable. Finally it looks like they might have cracked it, in more ways that one! Finally the secret has been revealed – lime clasts. These are ‘small, distinctive, millimetre-scale bright white mineral features’ which for a long time have been written off as poor quality control and/or bad mixing.
It turns out that they are the key to allowing the Roman concrete to be self-healing. Once they had this key the researchers were able to produce Roman-type concrete which automatically self-healed the cracks, and are now working on commercialising the process.
I’m impressed by the research, but ambivalent.
Do we really want concrete tenement blocks, like the ones all around us, that will last more than 2,000 years?
https://techxplore.com/news/2023-01-riddle-roman-concrete-durable.html
Pictures:
I thought it was a time for some more pictures from the ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’ (aka APOD) site, which is curated by NASA.
The first one is the Seagull Nebula – clouds of glowing dust and gas:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230119.html
There is also a really nice view of one of the Milky Ways closest neighbours, the Andromeda Galaxy:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230117.html
Moving even closer to the Earth we have a really impressive close up of a chunk of the moon:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230116.html
And finally there is a really excellent picture of one of my favourite objects – The Crab Nebula:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap230115.html
There are plenty more pictures worth looking at in APOD; see for yourself – the index is here:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/lib/aptree.html
Quotes:
This week’s quote is from the politician and UK prime minister David Lloyd George. At the time he was the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. It struck me as peculiarly apt for the current time!
“I have no nest-eggs. I am looking for someone else’s hen-roost to rob next year.”
Source: Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 5th Edition
Scanner:
Patent troll attacks against open source projects are up 100% since last year.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/patent-troll-attacks-against-open-source-projects-are-up-100-since-last-year-heres-why/
Wargames can’t tell us how to deter a Chinese attack on Taiwan—but different games might
https://www.lawfareblog.com/wargames-cant-tell-us-how-deter-chinese-attack-taiwan%E2%80%94-different-games-might
Discovering even friendly aliens could have some real risks for humanity
https://www.sciencealert.com/discovering-even-friendly-aliens-could-have-some-real-risks-for-humanity
Scientists just invented an entirely new way to refrigerate things
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-just-invented-an-entirely-new-way-to-refrigerate-things
Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech’s billion dollar curse of the free
https://www.theregister.com/2022/12/26/opinion_column_alexa/
This cool new synthesizer lets you play the keys in three dimensions for more expansive sounds
https://boingboing.net/2023/01/06/this-cool-new-synthesizer-lets-you-play-the-keys-in-three-dimensions-for-more-expansive-sounds.html
Footnote:
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
22 January 2023
Alan Lenton is a retired on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist (among other things), the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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