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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: January 22, 2017

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WINDING DOWN

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

We have another gripping version of Winding Down, it’s chock full of goodies for you this weekend! Well, I think that’s the case, anyway – your mileage, as they say, may vary. We have material on self-driving flying cars, 3D advertising displays, a very creepy genealogy site, sticking your head into a particle beam, a very old computer indeed, three videos featuring well known figures in the computer programming world, a nifty cartoon, a video of a rocket launch, and an exhibition of 20th Century maps. Phew! And if that isn’t enough, in the scanner section you can find URLs pointing to Facebook data questions, an obituary for Eugene Cernan (the last man to set foot on the moon), sneakiness from Adobe’s latest Acrobat update, the EU cookie policy ditched, a Gmail phishing technique, an old Apple lawsuit rears its head, and finally a video showing what it’s like to leave the solar system at the speed of light (hint: there’s a lot of space with nothing in it in the solar system).

Enjoy!

Shorts:

I suppose it had to come sooner or later – Airbus are working on a self-driving flying car. Flying cars have been on everyone’s wish list for so long (I first discovered them in James Blish’s book ‘Cities in Flight’ in 1970) that their failure to appear has almost made them a joke. However, on reflection, it seemed to me that autonomous flying taxis is an idea whose time may have come, if it can be achieved economically.

What is the main problem with autonomous road cars that’s going to be very difficult to resolve merely by better technology? It’s the mix of human drivers and autonomous cars. But there are no human controlled flying cars already in place. So it seems to me that this could well give flying cars a head start. I suspect that they may well be just ‘flying taxis’ in urban areas in the first place, but, as they say, ‘the sky is the limit’.

Definitely something to keep an eye out for.
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2017/01/airbus-at-work-on-self-driving-airborne.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-airbus-group-tech-idUSKBN1501DM
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/141805.Cities_in_Flight

I think in-shop advertising is about to move up a notch, especially when it comes to 3D displays. Holographic displays have been around for some time, but they tend to look somewhat washed out. Now there is a solution, and it was shown at the recent CES. It’s called Hypervsn. Instead of a hologram it uses rotating LEDs to produce a 3D image. The company behind it is called Kino-mo, and no, it’s not Japanese or Chinese, it’s a start-up based in London.

The advantage it has is that the image shows up very well against brightly lit backgrounds – an advertising situation in which holograms are particularly bad. Indeed the current version is definitely aimed at advertising, and it doesn’t sound like they have a consumer version in mind at the moment. I think this is definitely one to watch. There’s a couple of (2D) pictures of what it looks like at the URL. If you’re a retail sales manager, you really do need to take a look at this!
http://newatlas.com/kinomo-hypervsn-hologram/47292/

Homework:

Calling all my US readers. Do you have any idea just how much publicly accessible material is available about you? No? Even if you think you do know, then perhaps you’d better look at the article in the Washington Post about Familytreenow.com.

There’s always been a lot of information about people been available, but it’s all been in different places.

Family Tree Now brings it all together, which is a completely different ball game. There are other data brokers out there but they charge to access the data. This site is free, and can be accessed by anyone – friend, enemy or merely curious. You don’t even have to sign up for it. No wonder the Washington Post article calls it “creepy”. Fortunately you can hide your material from the masses, the article includes a link to Family Tree Now telling you how to opt out, which does seem to work.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/01/12/youve-probably-never-heard-of-this-creepy-genealogy-site-but-its-heard-all-about-you/?utm_term=.77d1d7f5d997

And now for something completely different! Ever wondered what would happen if you got hit by a particle accelerator beam? This is not something that can really be tested. Sticking a human in the path of a particle beam to see what happens is the sort of thing that is really only done by evil scientists in comic books!

However...

It just so happens that we do know of one case where it happened by accident. In 1978 scientist Anatoli Bugorski was checking some equipment in the largest particle accelerator (the U70 synchrotron) in the then Soviet Union. The safety mechanism failed (the Soviet Union was not exactly hot on safety issues) and a beam of protons travelling at nearly the speed of light passed through his head!

Bugorski didn’t feel anything, but he did see an intense flash of light. However, he did survive. Half his face is paralysed, and he suffers from seizures, but interestingly enough there’s been no sign of cancer, and his intellect remains unimpaired. My advice? Don’t stick your head in a particle accelerator...
https://aeon.co/ideas/why-we-can-stop-worrying-and-love-the-particle-accelerator

Geek Stuff:

How old do you think the world’s oldest computer is? Hint, it’s a mechanical analogue computer, not an electronic digital one.

It’s called the antikythera mechanism, and it’s 2,200 years old. To the untrained eye it looks rather like a rusty hunk of metal, hardly surprising when you realise it was stuck in wrecked ship off the Greek island of Antikythera for 2,100 of those years. It took quite a while to realise that there were gears inside this seeming lump of solid metal and corrosion. In fact it took X-Ray and Gamma-Ray imaging to tease out the details and figure out that it predicted the movement of the planets and phases of the moon.

Now you can see a virtual reconstruction of the mechanism based on the work of historian Michael T. Wright, who has built a physical re-creation of the mechanism. Really nice work – take a look for yourself!
http://www.openculture.com/2017/01/how-the-worlds-oldest-computer-worked-reconstructing-the-2200-year-old-antikythera-mechanism.html

Calling all programmers! I-PROGRAMMER have brought together three programming videos featuring key people in computer science – Alan Kay, Donald Knuth, and Bjarne Stroustrup. The Knuth one is only a couple of minutes long, but the other two are over an hour, so make sure you’ve got plenty of time before you settle in to watch them.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/82/10299.html

Now relax for a while and take a look at this cartoon about future archaeology. I think you will all appreciate its comment on current society...
http://www.networkcomputing.com/data-centers/post-hardware-footprint/1678017979

Pictures:

This week we go back a couple of months to look at an excellent short video of an Atlas V rocket launch. As well as the actual launch it features some rather nifty time-lapse photography of the roll out of the rocket and its move from its assembly area to the launch pad. Spare 2.5 minutes of your time to take a look!
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap161017.html

London:

If you are in London between now and March 1st, and you like maps, then you should consider coughing up £12 to go and see the British Library’s exhibition ‘Maps and the 20th Century: Drawing the Line’. I have the feeling that I might just dredge up the cash to go and see this one myself...
https://www.bl.uk/events/maps-and-the-20th-century-drawing-the-line#
https://www.bl.uk/maps

Scanner:

Facebook isn’t telling you how much it really knows about you
https://psmag.com/facebook-isnt-telling-you-how-much-it-really-knows-about-you-986fbe288583#.tzz825lon

RIP Eugene Cernan: Last man on the Moon dies aged 82
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/16/last_man_on_the_moon_passes_age_82/

Adobe Acrobat Reader DC update installs chrome browser extension
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/software/adobe-acrobat-reader-dc-update-installs-chrome-browser-extension/

EU tosses Europe’s cookies...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/10/brussels_announces_death_sentence_for_cookie_popup/

Highly effective Gmail phishing technique being exploited
https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2017/01/gmail-phishing-data-uri/

Dead Apple iOS monopoly lawsuit is reanimated
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/13/apple_ios_monopoly_suit_back_from_dead/

What it looks like to leave our Solar System at the speed of light
http://digg.com/video/light-speed-solar-system-travel

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
22 January 2017

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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