WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
We have returned! And this week we have a nice mixed bag of pieces for you. We start with the Turing Prize for this year, and then move on to a ship tunnel in Norway, debugging fake news on Snopes, all about Przybylski’s Star, fixing a video so Google’s AI wrongly identifies it, autonomous cars and pedestrians, and pictures of the world’s largest tunnel borer at work. In the scanner section we have URLs pointing to material on ISPs and privacy, free certification authorities, Amazon and tax, falling e-book sales, a dishwasher bug, and 375,000 free images. And, of course, in the Coda section, we have the final instalment of our curtain rods saga. What more could you want?
Next Sunday is the first Sunday after the first Full Moon occurring on or after the March equinox – also called the vernal equinox. The significance of this? That’s how they figure out when Easter Day is. That probably says something about the early Christian church’s ability to absorb and assimilate other religions! In any case that means that there will be no Winding Down , but we will be back – hopefully more consistently – the week after (April 23).
PS: For Fedders – I’ve nearly got my new Linux machine software installed and built – fighting in Fed soon, I hope.
Shorts:
Nice to see that this year’s Turing Prize is going to Tim Berners-Lee for the invention of the World Wide Web. The Turing Prize is the computing equivalent of the Nobel Prize, and this year is the 50th year in which it have been awarded. The prize is funded by Google and is awarded by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM).
A fitting tribute indeed.
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/99/10658.html
I see that the Norwegians are planning to build a ship tunnel over a mile long through the Stad Peninsula. New Atlas has an interview with the tunnel’s project manager. If the project comes off it will both save ships sailing time and enable them to avoid a particularly bad section of the coastline. I’m going to be watching out for this one – the engineering is going to be very interesting.
I have been through a canal tunnel that’s even longer than this projected one – the 1.6 mile Harecastle tunnel in the UK. It takes between 40 minutes and an hour to pass through it. I was driving the boat at the time, and I have to confess that I was wringing with sweat by the time we got out at the other end!
http://newatlas.com/stad-ship-tunnel-interview-terje-andreassen/48480/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypnoGdsp8cA
Homework:
I’ve written in the past about the usefulness of Snopes.com in checking out stories on the net. Sweden has been somewhat in the news recently, so I thought it would be useful to draw your attention to a three part piece on their investigation of claims by politicians about violence in Sweden. Since the investigation was carried out before the most recent incident, it doesn’t cover that at all.
The investigation centred around three issues raised by politicians in other countries over the past months. They were :
1. Is Sweden the ‘Rape Capital’ of the World?
2. Are Refugee Men Overrepresented in Swedish Crime?
3. Does Sweden Have ‘No-Go Zones’ Where the Police Can’t Enter?
The conclusions were that the stories were either false or mostly false.
I think it’s worth reading the stories, though you should maintain a healthy cynicism while you do so. In particular, it struck me that most of the investigatory work was done in conjunction with the police, who, of course, have their own agenda. Nonetheless, on the whole, I’m inclined to go along with the conclusions of the Snopes investigation.
http://www.snopes.com/2017/04/05/crime-sweden-three-part-series/
On a somewhat more distant topic, I thought I’d draw your attention to an excellent couple of articles on the AstroWright blog about a very unusual star called Przybylski’s Star. Apparently, it’s full of unusual substances with short half-lives. And it’s old enough that all traces of the stuff should have vanished long ago.
There are various theories put forward for the cause of this, but the one I like best is that an alien civilisation is dumping its nuclear waste into the star! The articles are a very interesting read and written in a way that you don’t have to be a techie to understand.
PS: Good luck with pronouncing the name!
http://sites.psu.edu/astrowright/2017/03/15/przybylskis-star-i-whats-that/
Geek Stuff:
Hmmm... Bit of a setback for Google’s TensorFlow video classification AI. It turns out that it’s very easy to fool, just by inserting a false frame in every 50th frame. Google, to judge from their blurb, had plans to use this to identify ‘terrorist’ videos. Ah well, back to the drawing board!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/04/googles_video_ai_is_trivially_trollable/
There’s an interesting piece on the Scientific American web site about how pedestrians will ‘defeat’ autonomous vehicles. One of the reasons it’s interesting is that it’s looking at the issue from the point of view of pedestrians, rather than car passengers or other cars. Coming, as I do, from a country that doesn’t have any laws against ‘jaywalking, I was immediately drawn to the piece.
The main argument of the author is that different cities always have their own informal rules about when you can cross the street, and, since the rules are both unwritten, known only to the locals, and different for each city, autonomous vehicles in cities are going to have problems, and eventually the traffic will grind to a halt! (No change there, then, if London is anything to go by.)
I think that what we actually need in cities is moving sidewalks, but for that we need and cheap workable anisotropic material that is liquid in the horizontal direction and solid in the vertical direction...
Definately worth a read.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-pedestrians-will-defeat-autonomous-vehicles/?WT.mc_id=SA_SP_20170327#sa_body
Pictures:
Seattle has been boring. Boring tunnels, that is, I hasten to add! The world’s largest boring machine, named Bertha (not to be confused with Big Bertha, which was a very heavy cannon used by the Germans in World War I) has just finished boring a tunnel under Seattle. Needless to say, a camera equipped drone was on hand to record the event, resulting in an impressive set of pictures.
Take a look, this sort of thing doesn’t happen very often!
http://newatlas.com/world-largest-boring-machine-breakthrough/48767/#gallery
Scanner:
Minnesota, Illinois rebel over America’s ISP privacy massacre, mull fresh info protections
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/30/states_rebel_against_isp_internet_history_grab/
Free public certificate authorities: Nice idea, big flaw
http://www.infoworld.com/article/3185484/security/free-public-certificate-authorities-nice-idea-big-flaw.html
Amazon dodges $1.5bn US tax bill: It’s OK to run sales through Europe out of IRS reach – court
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/24/amazon_wins_tax_case_irs/
Ebook sales continue to fall as younger generations drive appetite for print
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/14/ebook-sales-continue-to-fall-nielsen-survey-uk-book-sales
Dishwasher has directory traversal bug
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/26/miele_joins_internetofst_hall_of_shame/
You can now use 375,000 images from the Metropolitan Museum for free
http://mymodernmet.com/metropolitan-museum-of-art-open-access/
Coda: The Adventure of the Devil’s Curtain Rods (Part 2)
The story so far: The new curtain rods have gone AWOL under mysterious circumstances...
A week later, there was a ring at the door. We opened it, but there was no one in sight. However, there was a long thin package leaning against the garden gate. It was battered, and the ends had obviously been opened and then re-taped shut. I ventured out into the street. Leaves rustled on the trees, in the distance a car horn sounded, but there was no sign of our mysterious deliverer.
We moved the package inside and carefully cut it open. It was our missing curtain rods – but where had they been for the last week? And why had they been returned to us in such a mysterious manner? More to the point, why did the cat fluff herself up and hiss at the package when we brought it in? [cue sinister music] The mystery remains to this day...
“It’s easy, Holmes,” said Watson. “Clearly, the thief suffered a crisis of conscience and anonymously returned the stolen goods.”
“An interesting theory, my dear Watson,” Holmes replied, “but you missed an important point. The husband and wife are a Brit and a Yank.”
“I don’t see that it makes a difference,” objected Watson.
“Surely Watson it’s obvious,” was Holmes riposte. “This was a joint operation by the CIA, the NSA, the FBI and GCHQ, to exchange the curtain rods for a bugged set of rods so they could access the latest issue of Winding Down before it was officially published!”
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 April 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.
