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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 9, 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

Phew! Another copy of Winding Down is ready for the press (well, its digital equivalent, anyway). This week, to go with your first tea/coffee/soda/cocktail/whatever, we offer material on Wal-Mart v. Amazon, International Day Against DRM, Roman concrete, author Lewis Carroll, elections and voting, a weighty issue affecting the kilogram (sorry, couldn’t resist that...), zombie sculptures, and pictures of submarines of all shapes and sizes. And, as a bonus, in the Scanner section there are URLs pointing to material on Windows 10 Defender killing off other people’s anti-virus software, the return of vinyl music, suing inanimate objects, quieter sonic booms, damping down airport noise with style, and Tesla building a very large battery (probably just as well Samsung didn’t try for the contract).

Well, I literally sweated over writing this issue. You see, we don’t do air-con in this country, because it’s never hot enough to justify it. Most of this week the temperature has been in the high 80s. In spite of which, the weather forecast continues to predict rain, and has even issued potential flood warnings.

The Brit general Archibald Wavell once commented that all the important battles of history were fought in the dark, in the rain and on the junction of four map sections. We Brits know all about that, here in the UK, because we live at the junction of four major weather systems! This does make weather forecasting, how shall I put it, ‘interesting’. Probably the most famous UK weather forecast was this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnxjZ-aFkjs which immediately preceded the worst storm to hit south-east England for 300 years!

Shorts:

Wal-Mart are really trying it on. Worried by the fact that they are losing retail business to Amazon, they have written to their suppliers saying that if they want to do business with Wal-Mart, then the suppliers can’t use Amazon’s Web Services. Wal-Mart claim this is because they don’t want sensitive info relating to Wal-Mart on a competitor’s computers. The consensus, though, is that they are trying to ensure that their suppliers don’t spend money on a competitor.

Frankly, I don’t think they’ve got a snowflake in hell’s chance of succeeding, given that AWS is the leading cloud computing company. If they do actually try to push this one, rather than just rattling sabres, they could end up with a dearth of goods to sell!
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3201977/cloud-computing/pick-that-cloud-lose-our-business-what-to-do.html
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/23/amazon_responds_to_walmart_boycott/

July 9th (today) is International Day Against DRM, part of a campaign supporting the unrestricted right to use your own copies of published works. I thoroughly approve of this policy. I have little truck with those publishing companies that claim they would go bust if they went DRM free. There are publishing companies out there whose DRM policies prove exactly the opposite.

For instance (yes, I -always- get asked to give an example in discussion on book DRM) take technical computer publisher Manning Publications. They not only sell DRM free e-books, but when you by a p-book (aka the dead wood version) you get the DRM-free e-book version free! I was sufficiently impressed by them that I put my name down as a manuscript reviewer. No, I don’t get paid for it – it’s a volunteer job, all I get is a free copy of the book when it is published, and a thank you in the acknowledgements. The other example I use is Baen Books – purveyors of fine Science Fiction. And Baen are not obscure – they have some of the finest sci-fi authors in their stable of writers.
https://www.defectivebydesign.org/
http://enews.manning.com/q/-1mbQRAcb-eeOrIQLBJcR9SCwCoTKYued0eTArSRmBXpRO5QaiLKOF6Sr
http://www.baen.com/t-faq [It’s the 2nd FAQ – AL]

Homework:

I’m not exactly fond of the brutalist construction material, concrete, but I was fascinated to learn that while the modern version decays (not fast enough for my taste), the version used by the Romans just gets stronger. Roman marine concrete in particular is still standing some 1,500 years after it was used. It seems the secret lies in the fact that the Roman flavour uses volcanic ash as a constituent. The ash then, over time, reacts with seawater to produce very strong threads of minerals running through it.

The longer it’s in seawater, the stronger it gets. Nice detective work by the researchers who figured out what was going on. However, I can only hope they don’t come up with a way to similarly strengthen concrete that isn’t in seawater. The thought of 1960’s architecture lasting one and a half thousand years or more into the future doesn’t exactly fill me with enthusiasm!
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jul/04/why-roman-concrete-still-stands-strong-while-modern-version-decays

One of my all-time favourite authors when I was a child was Lewis Carrol. I thought ‘Alice in Wonderland’, complete with John Tenniel’s drawings, was marvellous. It truly fired up my imagination. Years later I designed a promotion puzzle for my game ‘Federation 2’ around the poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. But what I didn’t know until recently was that Carroll actually wrote up the Alice story in longhand with his own illustrations as a Christmas present for Alice Liddell, on whom Wonderland’s Alice was based! Now you can take a look at the original online thanks to the British Library’s online collection. A fascinating piece of history.

PS: Those of you who had Longfellow’s ‘Song of Hiawatha’ (it’s the one that starts: ‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee, By the shining Big-Sea-Water’) inflicted on you at school will be amused by Carroll’s tongue in cheek version entitled ‘Hiawatha’s Photographing’!
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/alices-adventures-under-ground-the-original-manuscript-version-of-alices-adventures-in-wonderland
http://people.virginia.edu/~bhs2u/carroll/hia.html

While the question of ‘election hacking’ has been very much in the news of late, the solution is very clear: election officials have to stop being in denial about the security of their voting equipment (all of it, not just some of it). They need to stop believing the claims of the makers , and the relevant authorities need to take a leaf out of the book from the sort of scrutiny that Las Vegas gambling machines have to undergo. Technically it’s not difficult, and it’s probably not even all that expensive.

Voting is important, even though there is a tendency not to turn out because it’s too hot, too cold, too wet, other things that are urgent, or you never got round to registering. Some people do need it explained to them that ‘liking’ Hillary Clinton or the EU on Facebook does not count as a vote! If you don’t vote then you can’t complain about the result, although the political establishments and the media seem to think that a massive display of childish tantrums will overturn results they don’t like. “I wanted Hillary to win/Brexit to fail”. <Stamps foot, screws face up and bawls head off.>

All these shenanigans, though, are obscuring a more serious problem with how we vote in elections. I am referring to the problem of remote voting. That includes both online voting and postal voting. Postal voting is probably a necessary evil if people are genuinely going to be away from home on polling day, though here in the UK the rules were relaxed so anyone can get a postal vote.

Online (aka internet) is different. This is being promoted by hipsters as being the cool way forward man, like more people will vote, get with it. It’s not cool, and it shouldn’t be considered the way forward, because, like all forms of remote voting, it violates the first rule of privacy – you vote in private so no one else can see you vote. When you go into the voting booth under the supervision of the polling clerk, no one else can see how you vote. If you vote on a home computer it’s possible for someone to stand over you and see what you vote. No end to end encryption or any other technical process can prevent that.

And why is the privacy so important? Because in the voting booth no one can intimidate or bribe you into voting for a specific candidate. They can try, outside, but they can never actually see how you vote. And that is one of the most important parts of voting in a democracy.
[No URLs for this]

Geek Stuff:

Moves are under way to re-define the kilogram! Currently it’s defined in terms of a block of platinum and iridium, and has been since 1879. Lots of things have happened in science since that time, and the proposal now is to define it in terms of the Planck constant. No, I’m not going to explain exactly what the Plank constant is. Just take it from me that it’s one of the fundamental constants, and it doesn’t change (which is why it is called a constant*), and with a clever piece of apparatus we can get our kilogram.

The kilogram is the last of the SI (metric) units to be redefined in terms of physical constants, though I suspect things will change again sometime in the next 150 years!
http://newatlas.com/planck-constant-redefine-kilogram/50311/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck_constant

Pictures:

If you are into zombie games and pictures, you might like to take a look at these sculptures from Japanese artist Nagato Iwasaki, made from driftwood. Definitely something I wouldn’t like to run into on a dark and stormy night!
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2017/06/19/the-eerie-humanoid-driftwood-sculptures-of-nagato-iwasaki/
http://nagato-iwasaki.com/

Want to see some pictures of submarines, past, present, and future? New Atlas has an interesting collection, starting with the tiny USS Holland, the first submarine in the US Navy, through to the behemoths under design at the moment.
http://newatlas.com/future-submarines-modern-warfare/49896/

Scanner:

Microsoft admits to disabling third-party antivirus code if Windows 10 doesn’t like it
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/20/microsoft_disabling_thirdparty_antivirus/

Sony Japan to spin up vinyl production after nearly 30-year break
http://newatlas.com/sony-vinyl-plant-reopens-japan/50316/

Why does the U.S. Government sue inanimate objects?
https://consumerist.com/2017/07/06/why-does-the-u-s-government-sue-inanimate-objects/

Concorde without the cacophony: NASA thinks it’s cracked quiet supersonic flight
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/27/concorde_without_the_cacophony_nasa_
thinks_its_cracked_quiet_supersonic_flight/

Buitenschot Land Art Park
http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/buitenschot-land-art-park

Tesla is building the world’s biggest battery in Australia
http://newatlas.com/tesla-powerpack-australia-biggest-battery/50382/


* And, no I'm am not going to get into the argument about whether the universal constants have, in fact, remained constant over the life of the universe...

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
9 July 9017

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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