Fed2 Star - the newsletter for the space trading game Federation 2

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: August 28, 2016

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton

Lots of stuff for you this week. Tomorrow is a holiday here in England, but, even so, we’ve been slaving to bring you a nice pot pourri. We start with a warning: Windows 10 and Kindle Paperwhite don’t mix, Bing Maps places Melbourne in the northern hemisphere, NASA research goes public, Linux is 25 years old, bank data breaches, Uber losing oodles (ubles?) of money, a book called ‘Children of Time’, artificial intelligence, nuclear waste, underwater nuke explosions, the Blue Screen of Death, the Dell U3415w monitor, a collection of graphs, 1890s postcards of Rome, an amazing mural, concept cars, and Open House London. URLs in the Scanner section point you to a discussion on network history/centralisation, procrastination (that one nearly didn’t make it because I kept putting it off), T-rays, Airlander 10 crashes, robo-buses in Helsinki, and a concept bike that gives two fingers to the bike racing big-wigs.

Quite a lot, so we’d better get started...

Shorts:

Danger Will Robinson! Windows 10 and the Amazon Kindle Paperwhite book reader do not like one another. There are a significant number of reports from owners who are running the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, that plugging the Kindle into a USB port results in a Blue Screen of Death for the Windows machine.

It doesn’t happen to everyone, it seems, but I’d suggest avoiding connecting the two via USB until things are sorted out. My immediate reaction to the story was to blame Microsoft (I bet yours is too), but on the other hand my regular Kindle has been behaving erratically ever since Amazon’s last major ‘upgrade’, which was effectively compulsory. It probably is Microsoft’s fault, but there is room for a bit of doubt.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/25/windows_10_kindle_paperwhites/

OK, I admit it. I thought it was funny when Microsoft’s Bing Maps put Melbourne, capital of the state of Victoria in Australia, in Japanese home waters. I did briefly wonder if it was a protest about Australian refugee policy, but then decided that Microsoft isn’t into that sort of thing. No, it turns out that Bing Maps was using Wikipedia data, which, of course anyone can, and does, edit.

I know Microsoft are into ‘open’ stuff these days, but they’ve obviously not been at it long enough to realise that not everything open is necessarily accurate...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/21/microsoft_cant_tell_north_from_south_on_bing_maps/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/23/microsoft_lost_a_city_because_it_used_bad_wikipedia_data/

In an interesting change of policy, NASA have decided that from now on, all NASA funded authors of peer reviewed papers will be required to provide copies of their articles and the data to go onto a new NASA web portal. Very nice, and long overdue, especially given the exorbitant prices charged by many of the peer review scientific journals. The article and data (and that the data is included is particularly important for duplicating the experiments to validate them) must be sent in to NASA within one year of publication.

And just one late breaking note. NASA have realized that some of the material will be subject to export controls (like they tried with cryptography when PGP first came out). They’re thinking about what to do about that little problem, although if it’s already been published in a magazine, I would have thought that the cat is already out of the bag!
http://qz.com/762786/now-anyone-can-access-nasa-funded-research/

Linux is 25 years old this month! I’ve been using it since 1993, to develop my game, Federation 2, and for much of the time since then it has also been (and is still) used for the production version of the game. Here are a couple of pieces that might be of interest, one a quick look at how Linux changed computing (and consequently much of the world), and one a short interview with Linus Torvals, the creator of Linux.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3109204/linux/linux-at-25-how-linux-changed-the-world.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3109150/linux/linux-at-25-linus-torvalds-on-the-evolution-and-future-of-linux.html
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3109891/linux/linux-at-25-an-ecosystem-not-only-an-os.html

Now for an interesting little statistic. Did you know that a quarter of banks’ data breaches are caused by employees losing phones or laptop computers? No? Neither did I! According to a recent study, over the last ten years, only one in five leaks were caused by hacking, 14% were caused by unintended disclosure (whatever that covers), 13% by malicious insiders and lost paper records.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/25/us_bank_breaches_survey/

Very interesting. It seems Uber are believed, by those whose job it is to follow such things, to have lost something in the region of US$1.2 billion in the first half of 2016. That’s not all. It seems that subsidies to Uber drivers are the main cause of the losses. In spite of this its valuation currently stands at US$69 billion. I think Uber’s financial strategy must be to owe so much money that no one dares not ‘lending’ more in case if fails and they lose what they’ve already put in!
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-25/uber-loses-at-least-1-2-billion-in-first-half-of-2016

Homework:

I’d like to recommend a Sci-Fi book. It’s the winner of the 2016 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Novel. I’ve just finished it, and it really does justify its win. It’s called ‘Children of Time’, and it’s by Adrian Tchaikovsky. The prize is the numerical amount of the year it’s awarded in – so Mr. Tchaikovsky gets the grand sum of UK£2,016 (about US$2,650). Highly recommended.
https://www.amazon.com/Children-Time-Adrian-Tchaikovsky/dp/1447273303/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1472368265&sr=1-10&keywords=Tchaikovsky

And talking of books and authors, I’d like to draw your attention to a non-fiction piece written by John Lambshead. He has written a couple of books for Sci-Fi publisher Baen who have a section that their authors can use for short non-sci-fi piece and Mr Lambshead has taken advantage of it to write an interesting, readable, and intelligent piece on artificial intelligence. It’s for non-techies, and it won’t take all that long to read. I think you’ll like it.

PS: His ‘Wolf in Shadow’ is a nice piece of urban fantasy as well...
http://www.baen.com/quantum_consciousness

The Financial Times carried an interesting piece on the problems of keeping nuclear waste, especially the sort that needs to be kept for 100,000 years. The main problem, of course, is that humans are naturally curious – how do you keep them out for that length of time, given the ingenuity that will undoubtedly be displayed?

The piece comes up with some interesting ideas, and is worth a read. However, I strongly suspect they, and the industry, are going down the wrong route. My view is that we created this stuff by transmuting it from other stuff with a shorter half-life, so we need to figure out how to transmute it again into something with a much shorter half-life. Something that is genuinely manageable. Unfortunately, no one seems to be pursuing this track ...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/db87c16c-4947-11e6-b387-64ab0a67014c.html?siteedition=intl

While we are on the topic of nuke stuff, you might find this article on underwater nuclear explosion tests worthwhile. The first one in 1946, code named ‘Baker’, was a disaster. Not only did it prove impossible to decontaminate the ships that survived, but the attempts to do so resulted in observer ships becoming contaminated as those trying (and failing) to decontaminate target ships trekked contamination back to the observer ships.

Add to that the local now contaminated shellfish attaching themselves to the hulls of observer ships and the radiation levels started to become serious. An interesting, and somewhat frightening read.
http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/70-years-ago-the-us-military-set-off-a-nuke-underwater-and-it-went-very-badly

Geek Stuff:

Ever seen a Windows blue screen of death? Probably. But the real question is, have you ever seen one five stories high? No? Well, here’s a picture of one!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/22/fivestorey_blue_screen_of_death_spotted_in_thailand/

Now this I want! From Dell – a 34” 21:9 curved screen monitor. Apart from anything else, it means that with the built-in software I can have both my Linux development kit -and- my Windows development kit on screen at the same time! Brilliant for client-server development! Take a look (especially at the pic with two of them placed end to end).
http://www1.euro.dell.com/uk/en/business/Peripherals/dell-u3415w-monitor/pd.aspx?refid=dell-u3415w-monitor&cs=ukbsdt1&s=bsd

Want to bamboozle a non-techie boss? I have just the thing for you – a collection of wonderful graphs, taken from the book Empirical Software Engineering using R. Scroll down and see what I mean...
http://www.knosof.co.uk/ESEUR/figures/index.html

Pictures:

Have I got a treat for you in the way of pictures this week.

Let’s start with the past. How about a set of 42 wonderful postcards of Rome in 1890. They’re in the amazing Library of Congress, which has digitized them and made them available on the internet.
http://www.loc.gov/pictures/search/?q=rome&st=grid&co=pgz

Moving on to the present, Logan Hicks has just finished one of the most spectacular murals I’ve ever seen in New York’s Bowery. If you happen to be in New York City and have the time in the near future make sure you take a look – here are some pictures of it:
http://gothamist.com/2016/08/22/logan_hicks_mural_bowery.php#photo-1

And for the future? Well, why not take a look at pictures of some of the concept cars on display at Monterey Car Week 2016, which finished this week? I rather like the Vision Mercedes-Mayerbach 6, myself, although the Lamborghini Centenario Roadster has its attractions. I suspect though that having a car capable of doing 217mph would be a bit frustrating in a country with a top speed of 70 mph!
http://newatlas.com/monterey-car-week-2016-gallery/45011/pictures

London:

Are you going to be in London on the weekend of 17 & 18 September? if you are then you need to know it’s Open House London. Once a year a lot of buildings that are normally closed to the public open their doors and let the public in. Places opening their doors are both sumptuous private dwellings and public places like 10 Downing Street (home of the UK Prime Minister). Open House started in London in a small way nearly 25 years ago. Since then it has grown, and spread to places like New York, Melbourne (don’t use Bing Maps to find it), Galway, Monterrey, Madrid, Oslo, Vienna, Rome, Venice and many others.

It’s unique. Don’t miss it.
http://www.openhouselondon.org.uk/about/
http://www.openhouselondon.org.uk/important/general.html

Scanner:

Resisting the centralization of network infrastructure
https://lwn.net/Articles/697028/

The Neuroscience & Psychology of Procrastination, and how to overcome it
http://www.openculture.com/2016/08/the-neuroscience-psychology-of-procrastination-and-how-to-overcome-it.html

Is the world ready for T-rays?
http://ideas.ted.com/is-the-world-ready-for-t-rays/

World’s biggest aircraft crashes in Bedfordshire ( The aircraft I covered last week!)
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/aug/24/worlds-biggest-aircraft-crashes-bedfordshire-airlander-10

Robo-buses join the traffic in Helsinki
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/18/robobuses_join_the_traffic_in_helsinki/

fUCI concept bike flips the bird at racing rules
http://newatlas.com/fuci-specialized/39154/

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
28 August 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.

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