WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
This week’s offerings include a fabulous set of pictures of the Earth, more VW scandals, a ghost train, the music’s bass line, the Milky Way at 46 billion pixels, terahertz colliders, Bond gadgets, and London Plague pits. What more could you want? Well there’s also URLs to a piece about a newly discovered muscle electrical power grid, Cory Doctorow’s take on on-line advertising, how to teach about gravity, an on-line treasure trove of US law decisions, Oracle bug fixes, and finally an ISS picture of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa – the largest active volcano of Earth.
What more could you want? Microsoft? Next issue, perhaps, if people aren’t too bored with tales of their ever compounding misdeeds...
Shorts:
Remember the ‘blue marble’ picture of Earth taken by astronauts in the days when we ventured higher than low Earth orbit? Well, now it has some genuine competition from NASA’s EPIC (Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera) unit, part of the Deep Space Climate Observatory, currently a million miles away from our planet.
It’s produced a gorgeous set of four images which between then show all the Earth in its splendour, all alone in the ultimate night. Take a look, I’m sure you’ll appreciate it.
http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-satellite-camera-provides-epic-view-of-earth
The Volkswagen car scandal continues to proliferate – VW subsidiaries Audi and Porsche have now been added to the list of NOX cheats. At the same time Volkswagen has revealed that some 800,000 of its cars cheated on the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) tests. The two groups are not necessarily the same, since the CO2 cheats group includes not only diesel cars, but also some petrol engined models.
And Volkswagen senior management would still like us to believe that this is all the work of a ‘rogue’ programmer?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/02/volkswagen_defeat_devices_in_audi_porsche/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/03/volkswagen_800000_of_our_cars_may_
have_cheated_in_co2_tests/
Homework:
It’s that creepy time of the year again, but did you ever stop to think about how legends of things like ghost trains came into being?
Well, the Stockholm Metro has just such a ghost train, nicknamed ‘The Silver Arrow’. It even has its own ghost station ‘Kymlinge’! I’m not going to spoil the story by giving you a hint, so point your browser at the URL and read an un-everyday story of the history of Stockholm’s ghost train from a simple purchasing decision to a fully-fledged myth...
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-silver-arrow-the-real-ghost-train-haunting-the-stockholm-metro
Musicians have long known that bass instruments are a very important part of music, but not necessarily why. And I’m not just talking about rock music, though that’s perhaps where it’s most obvious. The Open Culture website has an interesting piece discussing research into why it’s so important, even though the bass tends to play fewer notes than the rest of a music ensemble. Take a look.
http://www.openculture.com/2015/10/the-neuroscience-of-bass-new-study-explains-why-bass-instruments-are-fundamental-to-music.html
You like things that are big? Then I’ve got just the picture for you – a 46 billion (yes billion, not million) pixel picture of the Milky Way. The image was five years in the making, and is a by-product of a search for object with variable brightness.
Of course, you probably haven’t got a 46 billion pixel monitor... So, to help, there is an online tool to let you scan through the whole thing at the gds website. Incidentally the picture at gds is a lot better quality than the one with the pys.org explanation.
http://phys.org/news/2015-10-milky-photo-billion-pixels-largest.html
http://gds.astro.rub.de/
Geek Stuff:
For those of you who would like your own particle accelerator, but lack the real estate to build your own Large Hadron Collider (not to be confused with a large hadron colada, a very alcoholic, coconut flavoured cocktail), comes good news.
It seems that a team based at MIT in the USA and DESY in Germany have discovered a way to use terahertz frequency radiation to build accelerator modules that are 100 time smaller than those in current colliders. These things are still under development at the moment, but they look promising, and if the researchers are successful in increasing the power output, will lead to all sorts of uses for which current generation accelerators are too bulky and expensive.
http://www.gizmag.com/miniature-particle-accelerator/39741/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terahertz_radiation
OK geeks, here’s what you’ve waiting for – a YouTube movie made from clips of James Bond movies, featuring Bond gadgets – 193 of them!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGCGWb6nt_c
London:
It’s the season of the mists here in the UK, and it seemed appropriate to look at something a little more gruesome than usual. So, this week I’d like to tell you about the plague pits of London. In the Great Plague 1665-6 something in the region of 100,000 people died. That’s 15% of the then population. The traditional churchyard cemeteries were soon overwhelmed, and the bodies were buried en mass in pits outside the then city boundaries.
The exact locations of the pits has not been recorded, but there is an ongoing project to locate the sites, now inside the city, which has long since expanded way past the 17th Century boundaries. Have a look at the project on the Historic UK website. It seems that there might be a downside to time travel, if you aren’t careful. Remember to take a good supply of antibiotics with you!
http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/LondonPlaguePits/
Scanner:
Muscle mitochondria may form energy power grid
http://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/muscle-mitochondria-may-form-energy-power-grid
How to save online advertising (by Cory Doctorow)
http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/23/how-to-save-online-advertising
Gravity visualized by high school teacher in an amazingly elegant & simple way
http://www.openculture.com/2015/11/gravity-visualized-by-high-school-teacher-in-an-elegantly-simple-way.html
Harvard Law Library readies trove of decisions for digital age
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/us/harvard-law-library-sacrifices-a-trove-for-the-sake-of-a-free-database.html?_r=0
Oracle fixes critical flaws in Database Server, MySQL, Java
http://www.infoworld.com/article/2995511/security/oracle-fixes-critical-flaws-in-database-server-mysql-java.html
Living large in Hawaii
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=86906&src=eoa-iotd
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
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
8 November 2015
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/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
