WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net and technology news
by Alan Lenton
Welcome to this week's edition of Winding Down. This issue is a collection of snippets that you might find interesting, useful, or amusing. We in the penthouse suite of Winding Towers do little else during the week except trawl the web for items that we think you will find edifying. Note, though, that if you treat this as a weekly news digest you will have a very strange and eclectic view of what's going on in the world!
Shorts:
If you want to try something really nifty, take a look at the Solar System Scope. The only way I can describe it is to say that it's like a digital version of an orrery, with extras. You can look at the system from different angles in the heliocentric view, look at things relative to the Earth in the geocentric view, and pretend you are in the Greenwich observatory in the panoramic view. Take a look.
http://www.solarsystemscope.com/
A fascinating little survey of 3,000 office workers has revealed that one in four office workers consider that smashing their work computer is the best way to get a new, upgraded, computer. The situation is even worse if you look at office workers whose work computers are older than the one they have at home. In this case the worker is twice as likely to consider breaking their work computer. (Interesting but not strictly relevant snippet: The average British work computer is over five years old, for Germany it's only two years...) And in passing I'd note that the French are more likely to beat up their computers than either the Brits or the Germans. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from that piece of info!
http://www.thinq.co.uk/2011/4/12/workers-will-smash-their-pcs-get-upgrade/
Something interesting happened in the EU this week. The Advocate General of European Court of Justice (ECJ) has stated in an opinion that filtering internet traffic to stop copyright infringement would violate the rights guaranteed under EU law. Basically he is saying that the law is too broad because it violates the rights of non-infringers to the privacy of communications and to the right to the protection of personal data. The Advocate General is the top EU legal eagle, and his advice is, apparently very rarely rejected by the ECJ, so it will be interesting to see what happens next.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/14/belgian_isp_does_not_have_to_filter_out_copyright_infringing_traffic/
Silicon.com has some nice pictures of data centers in unusual places (no cooling problems in the Antarctic, I understand) which are worth a flip through. I especially liked the one in the former Torre Girona chapel in MareNostrum, Spain. I guess that's where you go to worship supercomputers!
http://www.silicon.com/technology/hardware/2011/04/11/photos-the-worlds-weirdest-datacentres-39747248/#story
Homework:
Scientific American has an interesting interview with mathematical sociologist (yes, there really are such things!) Duncan Watts about the problem of people selectively ignoring failures and coming to wrong conclusions. They also discuss a recent study of Twitter and its role in viral marketing. The conclusions are, how shall I put it - interesting. I'm not going to spoil it by telling you what they are - read it for yourself...
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=duncan-watts-book
A double shot of TED videos for your edification this week. The first is Dave Meslin on why people appear to be so apathetic about their local politics, and it's brilliant. Keep an eye out for his take on what a Nike ad would look like if presented in the style of council zoning notices. A very thought provoking talk.
The second is a talk by David Christian on the history of the universe and why it matters to us now, and how that understanding can influence what we are doing in the future. It's an unusual take on how to tell the story.
http://www.ted.com/talks/dave_meslin_the_antidote_to_apathy.html
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_christian_big_history.html
Going to college later on this year? At least nowadays you don't have to be able to write in Latin and Greek, and demonstrate a knowledge of the whole of Virgil and Caesar's Commentaries, not to mention Felton's Greek Reader! The New York times has an interesting piece on what it took to get into an Ivy League university in the second half of the 19th century, when those universities competed for students. Read it and be thankful!
http://thechoice.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/remembering-when-college-was-a-buyers-bazaar/
I see that Toshiba have announced a new line of self-encrypting drives, that will invalidate the keys if the drive is removed from its housing or connected to an unauthorized host machine. It sounds great. I wonder how long it will be before courts start to consider the possession of such a drive to be proof of criminal intent?
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-04-technology-self-encrypting-type-hard-disk.html
As the final bit of the homework section I want to talk about sorting algorithms. Yep, really - wake up at the back please, for these are no ordinary sorting algorithms. To study them you use the European Folk Dancing Team, a small folk band, and some choreographers from the Sapientia - Hungarian University of Transylvania. Oh and a video camera!
The dancers (who have numbers on their costumes to make life easier for the watchers) will then proceed to dance a bubble sort and a shell sort. I was fascinated enough to actually check the bubble sort video by hand as they did it, and they really are dancing a bubble sort! I decided to leave the shell sort as an exercise for the reader...
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/150-training-a-education/2255-sorting-algorithms-as-dances.html
Geek Toys:
ThinkGeek have come up with a brilliant idea. All the broken goods they have that they can't sell, or give to charity (cause they're broken, of course...), are currently dropped into the dumpster. But... inspired by the sight of dumpster divers picking over a dumpster, they've come up with a neat idea. Give the stuff away to hardware hackers, who will cannibalize the bits that do work for their projects. Brilliant! Totally brilliant. All you have to do to be a recipient is to sign up and agree to use it for good, not evil. (I wonder if Google will apply?)
http://www.thinkgeek.com/blog/2011/03/take-these-broken-things.html?cpg=cj&ref=&CJURL=
The US navy has a new toy to play with - a high energy laser that, in recent tests, disabled a small target vessel. The navy intends to use it as a close-in defense weapon - offensive firepower will continue with more traditional methods. Unfortunately, you won't be able to just mount this little toy on your pickup - it requires a lot of electricity to power it, but, of course, one thing ships are good at is producing lots of power - electrical and otherwise. So don't expect to see the army produce a land based version soon!
http://scienceblog.com/44232/test-moves-navy-a-step-closer-to-lasers-for-ship-self-defense/
I know rumor has it that geeks don't use the shower, but here's a little something that might encourage a visit. A Psycho movie shower curtain! Just the thing to raise a shudder...
http://www.uncommongoods.com/product/psycho-shower-curtain
How would you like to possess the ultimate bar code scanner? It scans Zebras (the four legged stripy beasts, not the UK pedestrian crossings). It seems that the stripe patterns are unique to the animal, so field ecologists have developed this device to help them track the movements of the animals. The inventors are reasonably confident will also 'read' tigers and giraffes. I can just see it now. "Excuse me, Shere Khan, would you mind keeping still while I use my bar code reader?"
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42500680/ns/technology_and_science-science/
How would you like a pedometer? Not just any pedometer, but an Einstein pedometer. It's an iPhone app that tells you how much your time slowed down while you were moving. According to the theory of relativity, time experienced by you slows down when you move. Now you can figure out how much extra time you get whenever you walk! (Note to pedants: I deliberately made the explanation relatively simple...)
http://www.gizmag.com/einsteins-pedometer-app/18364/
Scanner:
Earthquake emergency drives Kiwi copyright bill: Three strikes and your city gets reconstructed?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/13/kiwi_copyright_bill/
GCHQ commits schoolboy security blunder: Now pay attention, Bond, this is the bcc button
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/11/gchq_smartphone_advice/
How phishers will use Epsilon data against you
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/how-phishers-will-use-epsilon-data-against-you-041211
The end of content ownership
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2383373,00.asp
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb, Fi, and to Slashdot's daily newsletter for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
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 Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
17 April, 2011
Alan Lenton is an on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist, the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.net/alan.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
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