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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: July 31, 2016

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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 lightweight issue of Winding Down this week, since I’ve been busy getting ready to put in a new version of FedTerm, and its accompanying server code. Also, the stories are much lighter than the usual heavy duty selection, since it’s summer. I know that’s the case because over the last couple of months we’ve had two or three days with no rain! So for this week we’ve got the obligatory Pokethingie story, a piece about the Anderton Boat Lift (including a physics homework question), a drone’s eye view of various pyramids, and pictures of the night sky, the sun and glass mosaics. In the Scanner section URLs point to SIGGRAPH Art, 100,000 net neutrality complaints for the FCC, some animated GIFs, the US Navy as a software pirate, a US$1 billion suit against Getty, and self-folding graphene.

Next week is one of our break weeks, which will give you plenty of time to do your Anderton Boat Lift homework. So, I will returning (and marking your answers) on Sunday 14th of August. Until then, have a nice time.

Shorts:

Psst – wanna play Pokemon Go from the comfort of your own bed? Try the Necrobot app at GitHub. It feeds Poke Central with fake GPS coordinates so you can scoop up the goodies without ever having to get out of bed. Nifty!

Incidentally, if you are in Japan, using it also means that there’s less chance of you taking yourself out of the gene pool by wandering into the tsunami ravished, and dangerously radioactive, Fukushima Nuclear Exclusion Zone!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/28/botherders_fire_fake_gps_coords_at_niantic_to_collect_pokmon/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/27/tepco_pokemon_fukushima/

Homework:

Much as I hate to admit it, there’s more to visit in the UK than just London. In fact in spite of everything the philistines have managed to do to destroy evidence of our history, many interesting bits of the world’s first industrial revolution remain for all to see. Perhaps it’s because they built things to last.

For a case in point, when I was a lot younger (those were the days, etc. etc.) I used to go on holiday on the canals in the north and the midlands of the country. The canals were built before the railways and connected the main centres of the industrial revolution. Although the canals are mostly used for leisure now, and the boats are driven by diesel engines rather than pulled by horses, there are still some interesting pieces of history laying around, and I’d like to introduce you to three of them over the next few weeks.

The first is the Anderton Boat Lift. It was built in 1875 to move boats from the Trent and Mersey Canal to the navigable River Weaver, 50 feet below the canal level. Normally, the way you would do this would be to put in a massive flight of locks, but for technical reasons that wasn’t possible. The solution eventually adopted was what became known as the Anderton Boat Lift.

The Lift consisted of two cast iron caissons, each capable holding two standard canal boats, and the water to float them. The caissons acted as counter-weights to one another and were raised and lowered hydraulically. Remember this all took place in 1875, 140 years ago. Sadly, when I saw it the Lift had been shut down and neglected, but since then it has been restored and is now in regular use. So if you want to see it now you can watch it at work, and, if you are in a boat, use it.

In the meantime here is a piece of real homework for you. I mentioned earlier that the caissons acted as counter-weights. They could do this because they always weighed the same whether they just had water in them, or water plus one boat, or water plus two boats. Your homework for this week is to explain why they always weighed the same! I’ll give you the answer in the next issue if you can’t fathom it out for yourself.
https://canalrivertrust.org.uk/enjoy-the-waterways/museums-and-attractions/anderton-boat-lift

Geek Stuff:

There are innumerable videos of cities taken by drones zooming around, mostly of cities, and quite a lot of the drone owners are still trying to persuade the authorities that they didn’t know it wasn’t allowed, honest guv... What I have for you, however, are some short drone videos of ancient pyramids – in Egypt (of course), Sudan, and Mexico.

Some of them are better than others, but I thought they were worth drawing your attention to, since it’s a view of these ancient artefacts that you don’t very often get to see.
http://www.openculture.com/2016/07/a-drones-eye-view-of-the-ancient-pyramids-of-egypt-sudan-mexico.html

Pictures:

For this week’s pictures I’d like to draw your attention the 1886 catalogue of the Belcher Mosaic Glass Co of New York, which has been scanned and put online by Public Domain Review. Skip over the first three or four shown, which are just patterns, and take a look at the rest which are really cool mosaic glass windows.
http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/catalogue-from-belcher-mosaic-glass-co-1886/

If you prefer science to art (I like both), then have a look at two pictures from Astronomy Picture of the Day. The first is a panoramic picture of the night sky taken in Argentina showing all sorts of interesting things, if you know where to look. If you don’t know where to look, put your cursor over the picture to find out what’s there! The second is a an object a little closer to home – the sun, and a truly magnificent close up of a giant solar filament.
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160726.html
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap160731.html

Scanner:

SIGGRAPH Art 2016
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/200/9935.html

Special delivery: Activists drop 100,000 net neutrality complaints on FCC
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/24/activists_drop_100000_net_neut_complaints_on_fcc/

Classical Ukiyo-e come to life in animated GIFs
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2015/08/17/classical-ukiyo-e-come-to-life-in-animated-gifs/

How’s this for irony? US Navy hit with $600m software piracy claim
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/20/navy_software_pirates/

Photographer files US$1 billion suit against Getty for licensing her public domain images
http://hyperallergic.com/314079/photographer-files-1-billion-suit-against-getty-for-licensing-her-public-domain-images/

Graphene is actually self-folding origami, proclaim physicists
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/14/graphene_self_folding_origami/

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
31 July 2016

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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