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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: June 9, 2013

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news

by Alan Lenton

A mixed bag this week: free Google research papers, dumb 'smart' TVs, pictures of London from the air, the Oklahoma tornado, China's new supercomputer, global warming and CFCs, BMW computers, and the Saker S-1 - a Mach 0.99 private jet. URLs include Elon Musk's Hyperloop , turning cement into metal, Fedora for the Raspberry Pi, and the NSA/NSL/PRISM revelations.

I was originally intending to cover the PRISM stuff in more depth, but the fact is that there has been so much coverage in the conventional and blogging media, that anyone who hasn't noticed it is probably living on Mars. In case you do live on Mars there is a collection of relevant URLs in the Scanner section.

So, on with the show...

Shorts:

I'm impressed by one of Google's latest moves. The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) recently announced that authors of papers it publishes (and it has a high reputation for the quality of its papers) can pay to have their papers made available to the public free of charge in perpetuity. Google has announced that it will pay these fees for all articles published by Google research, making them free to the public. The same also goes for articles published by the IEEE. Good move on Google's part. Well done.
https://plus.google.com/+ResearchatGoogle/posts/hWLFVigce9v

Do you have a 'smart' TV? Well, I have bad news for you. When it comes to security, your smart TV is really, really, dumb. Problems include WiFi eavesdropping, fake analytics, content redirection, fake news tickers, Bitcoin mining and more. Even worse, your smart TV can be used to attack and compromise your local area network and the other computers on it. I can't even offer you a way of fixing the problems, since the manufacturers didn't choose to put in any controls for customers to change the security of the TVs. Hopefully this will be rectified soon, while there are still relatively few of these dangerous devices connected to the internet.
http://mherfurt.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/security-concerns-with-hbbtv/

The BBC has just released a set of stunning pictures of London taken from a helicopter. Take a look, I guarantee you won't be disappointed. The first one is my personal favourite.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-22716262

China is in the middle of building a new supercomputer, the Tianhe-2, aka Milkyway-2. The specs recently leaked out, and they look impressive - very impressive. With 384,000 CPU cores and 48,000 accelerator cores, not to mention 1,024,000 GB of memory, this beast will be fast, probably the fastest in the world, once it's completed. And, it runs a version of Linux known as Kylin Linux, which already runs on its predecessor, the Tianhe-1A. I suspect that once this monster fires up, the West is going to have more than a little catching up to do.
http://www.33rdsquare.com/2013/06/chinese-milkyway-2-supercomputer-specs.html

Homework:

The Oklahoma tornado was pretty extensively covered at the time. The people in the area will be living with the consequences for some time, although the newsies have moved on elsewhere. However, I thought you might like to have a look at some time lapse footage of the Oklahoma tornado. It gives you some idea of just how terrifying the whole thing is. Also, on a somewhat less lethal, but related topic, the second URL is footage of a number of dust devils whirling around in car parks and towns. I had no idea dust devils were so big, I thought they were just swirls of wind in odd corners. I guess you can tell that we don't really have anything like that on this side of the big pond!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AXz1_F88n14
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyjr3KgVJ04&NR=1

Ah yes, global warming. It's caused by human generated carbon dioxide, I'm told. Indeed it's so important that a whole pile of government funded industries have been built around its assumptions. But what if it's wrong? What if it isn't carbon dioxide that's causing the problems? Heresy!

One of the most significant papers I've come across for a long time has recently been published in the International Journal of Modern Physics B. It's by Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, biology and chemistry in the University of Waterloo's Faculty of Science, and it makes a persuasive case that global warming is not, in fact, caused by carbon dioxide, and that it's caused by CFCs.

Those of you with longer memories may remember CFCs. They used to be used a lot in refrigerators and air conditioning units. It was discovered that they were responsible for the hole on the ozone layer over the Antarctic, and steps were taken internationally to reduce CFC use. That effort was largely successful, and the level of CFCs has been steadily reducing since.

In a nutshell, what Professor Lu shows in his paper is two things. First that if you look at the data between 1850 and 1970, which is a period prior to the use of CFC, and adjust the temperature to compensate for fluctuations in the sun's radiation, the global temperature remained flat, when, according to conventional theory it should have risen 0.6 degree centigrade, because of the extra carbon dioxide from the industrial revolution. Secondly, that the rise in temperature between 1970 and 2002 shows a linear correlation with the amount of CFCs in the atmosphere. It also indicates that the reduction is CFCs in the atmosphere in the last decade may well be the reason why temperatures have stopped rising, something which conventional theory can only dismiss as 'random fluctuations'.

Of course, Professor Lu could be mistaken, and I don't doubt that plenty of people whose jobs depend on 'climate change' will be moving into the attack in the near future. A lot of people, many of them highly placed in both the academic and political communities, have reputations to defend. To my mind, though, like any science, a theory that explains things better, and makes predictions, is more valuable than one which has to resort to randomness in its explanations of unexpected phenomena.
http://phys.org/news/2013-05-global-chlorofluorocarbons-carbon-dioxide.html#nwlt
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S0217979213500732

For Geeks:

How would you like to be the owner of a style icon that would be the envy of all other geeks? You would? Fine. Take a look at BMW's latest offering, then - the M8 compact PC tower. This little baby, designed by BMW's DesignworksUSA group, together with board maker ASRock, will make you the envy of the LAN party!
http://www.gizmag.com/bmw-m8-gaming-pc-tower/27760/

Of course, to complete the effect, one should really fly in to LAN parties in one's private jet. And, as it happens, I have just the jet for you. Unfortunately, it's still only in the design stage at the moment, but it looks like it will be worth the wait. It's the Saker S-1 military style jet, and, for those in a hurry it will be capable of Mach 0.99. It's not a luxury jet in the sense of having waitresses serving cocktails at takeoff, etc. It's a personal two seater method of getting from A to B very fast in an extremely classy and lethal looking piece of kit...
http://www.gizmag.com/saker-s-1-personal-jet-mach-099/27759/

Scanner: Other stories

How does Elon Musk's Hyperloop work?
http://www.gizmag.com/how-does-elon-musk-hyperloop-work/27757/

Researchers turn cement into metal
http://phys.org/news/2013-05-cement-metal.html#nwlt

Fedora cooks up new Linux for Raspberry Pi
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/05/27/fedora_pidora_linux_for_raspberry_pi/

NSA/Obama/NSL/PRISM/et al
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/08/technology/tech-companies-bristling-concede-to-government-surveillance-efforts.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/07/prism_plan_for_nsa_surveillance_of_internet_companies/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/06/politicians_defend_nsaright_to_snoop/
http://gizmodo.com/anonymous-just-leaked-a-trove-of-nsa-documents-511854773
http://googleblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/06/what.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2013/jun/07/obama-cyber-directive-full-text
http://www.businessinsider.com/washington-post-updates-spying-story-2013-6

Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb, Fi and Asti 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 June 9013

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.

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