WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Another week, another Winding Down. We take a look at a new DARPA idea, Google HR, Greenland ice, computerized ‘Civilization’, navigating in space via pulsars, static electricity, a robot snowplough, and the ultimate shopping site. In the Scanner section you can find URLs to a sinister French plot to destroy the internet as we know it, teleportation, a global mercury ban, printing full sized houses, and black holes.
All in all, just a little something I threw together while waiting for the breakfast pancakes to cook...
Shorts:
The US department of mad scientists, aka DARPA, have come up with a nifty idea to solve an old problem. The problem: logistics. How do you get the necessary support equipment to troops when shooting starts a long way from home? It’s easy enough to fly out troops, but what about all their equipment? Armies have left forward supply dumps in friendly places for years, but the problem is that wars have a habit of breaking out in places that aren’t friendly, and it takes an awful lot of expensive airlift capacity to move the stuff up in a hurry.
DARPA have come up with an ingenious idea to solve this problem. Dump the stuff on the seabed until you need it somewhere nearby. At that stage you tell it you want it on the surface in a hurry, and up it pops. Well theoretically that is. The two key problems are that it’s difficult to locate and communicate with something lying many fathoms down on the sea bed (which, incidentally, makes it easy to hide), and that seawater is one of the most corrosive substances known.
However, the telecoms and oil industries have been dealing with these problems for years, so DARPA plans to hand over the problem to their undersea engineers. Maybe DARPA aren’t quite so crazy after all!
http://www.gizmag.com/darpa-falling-upward/25769/
Ever wondered why geeks consider Google such a great place to work? Well now the secret is out, via an article in Slate. The answer is, logically enough for Google: DATA, DATA, and more DATA. Google’s HR department is data driven, and they go out of their way to get more data on what makes their staff want to continue to work for them. The results are fascinating, and their staff retention schemes actually work and save them money. You can read all about it, and wish the company that employs you was equally enlightened, by pointing your browser at the URL.
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/google_people_operations_the_secrets_of_the_world_s_most_scientific_human.single.html
More bad news for the global warming doom-mongers. I’ve always said that problem with the global warming set was that they have little interest in history, and rarely go back more than a century. One of their predictions is that three degrees centigrade of warming will melt the Greenland ice sheets and raise the global sea levels by enough to drown a lot of large coastal cities.
Well now an analysis of ancient ice samples reveals that, some 120,000 years ago, the ice sheet only lost a quarter of is mass when it was subject to much higher temperatures for thousands of years. Oops! I wonder what else they got wrong?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/24/greenland_ice_sheet_simply/
Homework:
At the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) three members presented an interesting and unusual paper on a computer program designed to learn to play the computer game ‘Civilization’ by reading the manual. Drawing my attention to this read, Andrew Byro commented, “There are a few unexplored points of interest here, to my mind:
1. Which Civilization did it play - there are five main ones, ignoring all the branch-offs. How much of a difference does that make? Sounds facetious, but consider a few points. In Civ 1-4, any unit had 8 directions of movement, while Civ V simplified it down to 6. Was Civ V better written or simply simpler?
2. Is this a testament to the game itself, or to the quality of the manual written?
3. For that matter, this could arguably be a new way of testing how well a manual is written - set up the A.I. to read the manual, see how well it performs. Below a certain win percent is seen as a failure in the manual.
4. Can we springboard from this and teach an A.I. to be an effective manager of a factory/company/mining operation/space habitat? Teach it the rules, feed the data in as if it were a game, see what happens? But letting it practice with a game version would allow it to do these things and practice before it goes on a psychotic rampage killing all the humans.
James Hogan wrote a book a few decades ago about an A.I. developed at The City College of New York (go Beavers!) with exactly that intent. There, they were working with teaching an A.I. to generalize concepts, to be able to recognize similarities in two different systems (like: this is a simulation, this is real life. Learn the rules from the one to work in the other), to learn common sense as opposed to pure logic. This last one particularly came about because there was an A.I. on the moon that nearly killed people because it was logically shooting a package via railgun to comply with orders to get the package to its destination as quickly as possible.”
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/language-from-games-0712.html
How do you navigate in space? A thorny question. It’s not like the celestial navigation of early mariners - the constellations look completely different from out there, so that isn’t a possibility. You could use the position of known stars, if you can see enough of them, but what if you are half way round the galaxy and those stars are obscured? (We will leave the question of getting half way round the galaxy to our friends at DARPA). Now a team at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics has come up with a possibility.
They think it should be possible to figure out where you are to within five kilometers using X-Rays emitted by pulsars (“Hello! I’m on the spaceship, half way round the galaxy!”). The accuracy of pulsars and their time signatures give you a method of navigation a little bit like that the GPS satellites provide here on Earth. Interesting - I wonder how long it will be before we can test it out?
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=26162
Geek Stuff:
Here’s a leetle bit of involuntary advice, on video, about testing electronic devices for the effects of static. Enjoy, and thanks to reader Chandra for the URL.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtlYi1yLTVQ&feature=youtu.be
When you’ve finished the previous, shocking, story, you’ll probably have to go out and clear snow from the drive or the sidewalk. Not so for some intrepid engineers from a snowbound area somewhere in the US. They built their own ‘roboplow’ to do the hard work for them. Now that’s what I call cool!
http://www.robotshop.com/blog/roboplow-snowplow-robot-311
If you want to get lost for hours on a potential shopping spree designed to drive you wild, then try the Fab site. Warning! This a malicious ploy on my part to make you fail to notice that Winding Down is a little shorter today, after I got lost in the site for an hour or so while I should have been writing Winding Down...
http://eu.fab.com/
Scanner: Other stories
How France wants us all to pay through the nose for a broken internet
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001007.html
Mathematical breakthrough sets out rules for more effective teleportation
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-mathematical-breakthrough-effective-teleportation.html#nwlt
Global mercury ban to hit electronics, plastics, power prices
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/21/minamata_convention/
D-Shape 3D printer can print full-sized houses
http://www.gizmag.com/d-shape-3d-printer/21594/
Black holes growing faster than expected
http://phys.org/news/2013-01-black-holes-faster.html#nwlt
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, Barb, Chandra and Fi for drawing my attention to material used in this issue.
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 Spamato spam filter...
Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
27 January 2013
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.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
