WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Just a short edition this week - material on a 'dementia' computer game, wind turbines, touch screens and twitch games, techie one liners, and an exhibition of John Dee's library. URLs point to nano-tech self-assembly, lightsail space craft, and virtual money laundering.
It's been a weird week this week - getting a complete rewrite of FedTerm ready for distribution (I absolutely loath Windows installation crud), screwing up an online test supposedly designed to test my programming ability (none according to the result). For some reason it didn't occur to them to look at the publicly available source for FedTerm or Federation's Windows tool set, in spite of the fact that the URL is on my CV/resume. And then there was work on trying to track down an intermittent bug in Federation itself ... Still, I did manage to get something to you for your Sunday breakfast/dinner/teatime reading (depending on your time zone)!
Hope you like it.
Shorts:
This piece in The Washington Post sounded interesting. It's a game that people can play for which the results of how they manage are collected centrally and used to help with the diagnosis of dementia problems. Definitely worthy, it is designed to test memory and spacial navigation. I'm not convinced, however, that that is the only thing it's doing, because I think it's also testing your dexterity and reflexes.
I personally don't have much in the way of fast reflexes. I never have had, which is why I don't play twitch computer games. I play strategy games, where you need to sit and think and definitely lose if you make snap decisions! Actually, I have a similar problem with the machine the optician uses to see what the state of my peripheral vision is.
It's completely useless for me. It puts coloured dots on the screen at the periphery of your vision while you watch a dot in the middle of the screen. You are then supposed to move a cursor over the coloured dot and click on it to show that you can see it. I can never move the cursor fast enough to get there before the machine moves it onto the next dot. The machine basically says I have a bad case of tunnel vision. Fortunately, the result is so obviously wrong that I don't end up getting lumbered with potentially damaging treatment.
Inevitably one of the assistants says to me, "But you're a computer games programmer. How can you not move the mouse fast enough?" Cue heavy sigh and an attempt to explain that I spend my working day typing letters and numbers into a computer...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/05/07/two-minutes-playing-this-video-game-could-help-scientists-fight-alzheimers/
Homework:
Why do wind turbines have three blades? No, it's not a trick question. To find out the answer take a look at the URL, which is a fascinating discussion on the subject of wind turbines. I certainly learned a lot from reading it. Take a look and see what I mean. The answer? Well here's a hint - it's to do with someone using the wrong formula in the early days of wind as a source of electrical energy.
http://www.cringely.com/2016/05/06/15262/
http://xkcd.com/556/
And while we are on the subject of getting it wrong, you might like to take a look at a piece in I Programmer about why touch screens are absolutely terrible for games. It also makes some suggestions about what can be done to overcome the problem. An interesting piece, but I don't think the issues are going to be solved in a hurry, since more sophisticated hardware is going to be needed to deal with part of the problem.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/146/9701.html
Geek Stuff:
Here's a little break for some one-liners. Each year around this time the ACCU, a group of mainly C++ programmers, gets together for a four day conference. Most of the papers presented are highly technical, but a couple of evenings they have a session of five minute slots for people to do their thing. Chris Oldwood, a collector of one-liner gems used one of the slot to tell a series of techie one-liners, which he's now posted on the net.
My favs?:
"For Christmas my wife bought me some jigsaws of famous British computer scientists. When she asked how I was getting on, I replied that it was Turing complete."
"C++ comes with complexity guarantees – if you use C++ it’s guaranteed to be complex."
and finally:
"I was utterly convinced that I had found the answer to my SSL problem. In fact I thought it was a dead cert."
http://chrisoldwood.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/stand-up-and-deliver.html
London:
Here's something to go and see if you like history, science, alchemy, astronomy and astrology (among other things). The Royal College of Physicians has an exhibition called 'Scholar, courtier, magician: the lost library of John Dee'. Dee was court magician to Queen Elizabeth I. He was also a gifted mathematician and astronomer, and a spy. I think it sounds really interesting, and it's on now and until July 29th.
A note for H.P. Lovecraft fans - I doubt they have a copy of the Necronomicon!
https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/events/scholar-courtier-magician-lost-library-john-dee
Scanner:
Researchers close in on nanotech self-assembly with the discovery of 'Teslaphoresis'
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2016/04/researchers-close-in-on-nanotech-self.html
A star shot into the dark
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/2965/1
Liberty Reserve founder gets 20 years for money laundering
http://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/liberty-reserve-founder-gets-20-years-
for-money-laundering/d/d-id/1325437
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
15 May 2016
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.
