WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
August really is a quiet month for tech news this year. I was very tempted to manufacture some of my own this week. After all everyone else does it... However, I did manage to dredge up some interesting bits and pieces of the real thing. We start with a correction to last week’s piece on statistics, and then rapidly move onto a report on ad fraud, followed by a piece on graphene. Other material covers SpaceX and lawyers, a cool, cool, holgoram table, pictures involving lidar, some NYC pictures, and finally the issue of lentils... URLs take you to material on telecoms, supercivilizations, laser SETI, how to be anonymous online, Bluetooth Mesh, and the FBI’s spyware video.
No Winding Down next week. It’s our August Weekend holiday over here, and we want, weather permitting to organise a BBQ for the folks around here.
Errata: Mea culpa – I managed to screw up the terminology in last week’s piece on averages and broadband. To clarify. What I called the average is actually the arithmetic mean. What I referred to as the mean is properly called the median. Sorry for the confusion – comes from not checking with a statistician first. Many thanks to reader Andrew for a lengthy explanation correcting things.
Shorts:
A report just published suggests that ad fraud is totally rampant on the internet. That’s the charging of advertisers for false showing of the ads, not ads offering fraudulent goods and services, by the way! The estimate from independent researcher Augustine Fou (brilliant name, there) is that on ‘quality’ sites for every US$1 spent only 68 cents worth is actually viewed by real people. On other sites the figure drops to 7 cents of ad impressions that are viewed by real people.
Fou isn’t the only one to produce alarming figures. Consultancy Forrester recently estimated that in 2016 companies lost US$7.4 billion due to bots and the like, and that the figure will be US$10.9 billion by 2021.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/17/ad_fraud_looks_really_bad/
Homework:
I’d like to draw your attention to an interesting piece on graphene, the material famously discovered with a piece of Scotch tape! The Baen books web site has an excellent piece explaining what it is, what it can be used for, and just why it is so important. it’s a fairly long piece, but well worth a read.
http://www.baen.com/graphene
I’m sure you’ve heard of Elon Musk’s plans to colonize Mars. Probably, like me you assumed that the problems faced were all technical. Not so fast kemosabi. You forgot the lawyers!
Yes, it seems there are innumerable legal issues that could derail things, both before and after the establishment of such a colony. Here’s part of Article VI of the Outer Space Treaty:
“The activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty.”
The USA is party to that treaty (if Donald Trump hasn’t pulled out of it by the time this newsletter gets sent out) and that means the US government has a legal duty to authorise and supervise the space based activities of its citizens and corporations. Indeed, it’s already the case that you can’t launch into space without a launch license, and to get a license requires... Argggh! I don’t even want to think about the bureaucracy involved, but I invite you, my readers to take a look at the excellent Space Review article on the topic, and wonder if anyone will ever write a science fiction book about the topic!
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3286/1
Geek Stuff:
Ooooh! Take a look at this little baby for an ‘I want’ moment. It’s a multi-user hologram table. Most holograms are either fixed or can only cope with one viewer at a time. Euclideon’s offering can cope with up to four people at a time. Until now the problem has been the sheer amount of computation needed to cope with more than one person looking, and the problem of separating out the different views so that each person only gets the view appropriate to their position with respect to the model being viewed.
The former problem was solved by the company’s UD engine earlier this decade, the latter by wearing a pair of what look like sun glasses, which with small attachments on each side, enable the computer to figure out where the viewers are. At the moment it’s massively expensive (about US$47,000), but then again, 40 years ago computers were even more expensive. Nowadays you can buy an even better computer for a few hundred dollars!
http://newatlas.com/hologram-tables-euclideon/50868/
Pictures:
I’ve no doubt that most readers have seen reports now and then in the papers about discoveries using ‘imaging’ of buildings hidden in the jungle. The technique uses lidar, and for this week’s picture, I am offering no less than TWO pictures taken of the same forested area in New England. The first is an ordinary picture, the second a lidar scan.
The first shows the unrelieved canopy of the forest, the scan shows up the outlines of the farms abandoned when people moved west in the 19th century.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=90683&src=eoa-iotd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar
For my New York City readers I offer an alternative to your usual Sunday read of Winding Down for next Sunday when our publication is on holiday: 20 underground and secret NYC attractions, with pictures. The one I was most impressed with was number 14...
https://www.6sqft.com/20-underground-and-secret-nyc-attractions-you-need-to-check-out/
Coda:
The other week I pulled down a packet of green lentils from a kitchen cupboard. I pointed out to Barbara that they had reached their use by date. Should I throw them away? Apparently not. It seems that lentils last a long time – indeed some were found inside the pyramids of Egypt that were still edible after four and a half thousand years! I wonder who tested them, and what dish they made out of them? More to the point, will my lentils be edible in October 6517?
Scanner:
The telecoms industry does not exist. Here is why.
http://mailchi.mp/martingeddes/telecoms-does-not-exist-chronocomputing?
Stagnant supercivilizations and interstellar travel
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=38190ed%3A+centauri-dreams%2Feepu+%28Centauri+Dreams%29
SETI project wants to hunt laser-wielding ETs
http://newatlas.com/seti-lasers-extra-terrestrial-alien-life/50500/
To truly stay anonymous online, make sure your writing is as dull as the dullest conference call you can imagine
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/04/to_preserve_online_anonymity_make_your_writing_mediocre/
Bluetooth Mesh takes aim at enterprise IoT, but hasn’t taken flight
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3209029/internet-of-things/bluetooth-mesh-takes-aim-at-enterprise-iot-but-hasn-t-taken-flight.html
FBI’s spyware-laden video claims another scalp: Alleged sextortionist charged
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/09/fbis_spywareladen_videos_claim_another_
scalp_as_suspect_sextortionist_charged/
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
20 August 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.
