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

The weekly newsletter for Fed2
by ibgames

EARTHDATE: October 29, 2017

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WINDING DOWN

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton

This week’s Winding Down is less than usual (explanation of why in a minute) . In spite of all the problems we managed to put together some material – specially picked to be more cheerful than last week’s doom-and-gloom security disasters issue. So, this week there is material on belladonna, left and right handedness, a Roman chariot/steampunk motorcycle, pictures from the Messier Astronomy catalog, there are also pictures of the new US embassy in London (a special for US readers), and an anonymous quote about program development time. URLs point to material on synthetic biology, an urban legend debunked, a thirty year evolution experiment, librarians on horseback, photographs of Napoleon’s veterans, a new telescope, and, finally, lost mobile phones.

Bleah! the first cold weekend, and our central heating and hot water goes and dies on us. That was on Friday night, and we are still (Sunday morning) without repairs, and it looks like another 24 hours before we will be able to shout at the housing co-op for screwing up. In spite of which, I managed to get a rather slimmer than usual Winding Down out by huddling over the keyboard, running several computationally intensive programs on the computer and pointing the cooling fan in my direction. I’m hoping not to get frostbite by typing fast to keep myself warm...

Homework:

‘The Medium’ has a really interesting piece about the plant Belladonna. It’s in the form of an autobiographical story. Very cleverly done. I’d be willing to bet that there are lots of snippets of information in the story that you didn’t know about! Try it and see.
https://medium.com/@joshuashawnmichaelhehe/my-name-is-belladonna-56e7c37d68b1

I’d also draw you attention to a short essay on the question of handedness by Benjamin C. Kinney, on the Baen Books web site. It’s always been a bit of a mystery why so many people are right handed, but more information is starting to become available. One of the reasons I find it particularly interesting is that I used to be ambidexterous as a child, but using your left hand for things like writing was frowned upon in those days and threats of punishment if I used my left hand eventually led to me becoming right handed. I’ve always regretted that.
http://www.baen.com/handedness

Geek Stuff:

OK, all you steampunks – lend me your goggles, so I can try out a steampunk motorbike. I’ve always wanted a steampunk motorbike, especially one with a Roman chariot side-car. This isn’t something that just sits around looking good. It build on a base of a 1981 Honda Goldwing, so it works very nicely, thank you. It’s up for sale now and is expected to sell for around US$6,000. Pocket change for a dotcom millionaire!
https://newatlas.com/steampunk-honda-goldwing-chariot-sidecar-auction/51844/

Pictures:

I have some great pictures for you this week. NASA have published a very fine selection of Hubble pictures from objects in the Messier catalog. The back ground to the catalog is fascinating. Messier was a comet hunter in the latter half of the 18th Century. He kept finding that a number of stellar objects which he at first thought were comets were not, in fact, comets.

To save ‘wasting’ time on objects he was not interested in, Messier compiled a catalog of these objects. It contains 110 astronomical object designated by the capital letter ‘M’ and a number. For instance M31 is the Andromeda Galaxy – the nearest major galaxy to our own Milky Way galaxy. Incidentally, because Messier was observing in France, all of the objects he recorded in the catalog are visible in the Norther Hemisphere.

The catalog is of interest to amateur astronomers because the nature of its compilation means that the object in it are easily visible with even a relatively modest telescope. And when you point something with the resolving power of the Hubble telescope at it... Wow!

‘New Atlas’ has made 19 of the pictures available as a single web page, which should be your first stop. The is further information and more pictures at the NASA URL.
https://newatlas.com/hubble-messier-catalog-gallery/51839/#gallery
https://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/hubble-s-messier-catalog

London:

This is a special for my US readers. The US embassy is moving from its concrete pile in London’s Grosvenor Square (Ah! Grosvenor Square, 1968, I remember it well...) to a glass pile in Battersea as part of the new development on the old Battersea Power Station site. Battersea Power Station was the Art Deco landmark on the south bank of the River Thames which appeared on the cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ album...

But I digress, the reason for mentioning this is that Londonist has a rather nice series of aerial photographs of the whole redevelopment, and there, slap bang in the middle, is the glass and steel cube that is the new US embassy. Take look, at least you will know where some of your federal tax dollars have gone!

The best photos of the embassy are the fifth and sixth ones down.
http://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/images-of-the-battersea-development-from-above?rel=handpicked

Coda:

Ask anyone in the IT business about the truth of this week’s quote!

“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” – anon

Scanner:

Six things to watch in synthetic biology
https://medium.com/neodotlife/6-things-to-watch-in-synthetic-biology-f76666c7114e

Urban Legend: Drilled Wire
https://www.snopes.com/business/genius/wire.asp

The evolution experiment that has been watching bacteria mutate for 30 years
https://newatlas.com/evolution-experiment-bacteria-thirty-years/51872/

Before the Bookmobile: When librarians rode on horseback to deliver books to rural Americans during the great depression
http://www.openculture.com/2017/10/before-the-bookmobile-when.html

Photographs of Napoleon’s veterans
http://library.brown.edu/collections/askb/veterans.php

New telescope “Gives Back the Sky” to city-dwellers
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/new-telescope-gives-back-the-sky-to-city-dwellers/

Guess how many mobile phones were lost on the (London subway) tube last year?
http://londonist.com/london/transport/guess-how-many-mobile-phones-were-lost-on-the-tube-last-year?rel=handpicked

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
29 October 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.

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