WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
OK... A nice and chunky issue for you this week, starting with some stuff on contact lenses for the colour blind and a second type for helping to prevent blindness caused by diabetes. We then move on to the vexed issue of people winning class action cases, but not getting any of the settlement cash, followed by a look at the ongoing issue of who owns space, and a pointer to a piece on Richard Feynman. For the ultra-geeks there’s bad news on the NetHack front, and a bumper crop of pictures – New York in 1911, Paris in May 1968, Tokyo’s massive storm drain, and in case you are not impressed by all that space in the drain, pictures by M. C. Esher to get lost in! Scanner contains URLs pointing to material on Cambridge Analytica (RIP), a star heading for the solar system, more on the Equifax heist, Kilauea’s lava, Facebook’s Android app, Alexander Graham Bell’s voice, and the return of Spectre...
In the Coda section, there’s a correction to a piece in the last issue, and quote from UK former prime minister David Lloyd George
Shorts:
As someone who is both red/green colour blind and diabetic, I was please to see that scientists are working on a solution. Being even partially colour blind can be very awkward sometimes, although I’m better off than my maternal grandfather who was completely colour blind – he saw only in black and white. Now it looks possible that a new type of contact lens may help. The lens has a dye in it which blocks out some of the colours between red and green, which gives the retina a much better chance discriminating between the two colours.
So, those of you who know me personally, now know why I always wear white socks, regardless of the colour of the rest of my clothes – a decision taken long ago as a teenager after a few embarrassing cases of wearing a different colour sock on each foot!
https://newatlas.com/contact-lens-correct-color-blindness/54410/
But, as I mentioned earlier, that is not the only new contact lens under development. One of the problems with diabetes is that it can make you go blind. It’s called diabetic retinopathy, and is caused by a combination of damage to the tiny blood cells in the eye and fact that when you are asleep the darkness causes the eyes to need more oxygen, so the body tries to create more blood vessels. The article pointed to by the URL has more details for those who are not too squeamish...
Now, there is under development a type of contact lens that glows in the dark, so the oxygen guzzling dark vision mechanism in your eyes doesn’t switch on when it’s dark. It’s very clever, the lens contains tiny amounts of tritium, which give off just enough light to stop things from using so much oxygen. I’m going to be keeping a close eye, so to speak, on this one.
I can only see one problem. Tritium is an essential component of thermonuclear weapons (H-bombs) and as such you cannot import it into the USA. So, would I be arrested at the border if I try to visit family in the USA, wearing these lenses?
https://newatlas.com/glowing-contact-lens-diabetic-blindness/54353/
Good news for people involved in class action cases in the USA. The tendency recently has been for the lawyers and companies involved to claim that tracking down and making small payments to vast numbers of people is too expensive, and so the money should instead be given to a few organisations that deal in research and campaign on the issues involved. In other words, those affected never see any money. This problem has been getting worse over the last few years, and came to a head when the court (very reluctantly, as far as I can see) was forced to allow a Google deal paying out $8.5 million to the lawyers, the law schools that the lead lawyers went to, and four organizations that Google already gives money to!
Now the Supreme Court has agreed to a hearing on an appeal against the stitch up, and hopefully will roll back this pernicious behaviour.
It seems to me that a correction from the Supreme Court is desperately needed. In the case under appeal, the US$8.5 million payout was for 129 million Google users – a pitiful four cents a piece. That’s ridiculous. The purpose of a class action is (or should be) to compensate those affected, not punish the offending company. It should be the responsibility of the company to find and pay the people involved without cutting into their payments. No whining about the cost of tracking and paying the people. They obviously managed to track them in the first place, and the cost will encourage the company to be more careful in the future.
If any punishment is required, then that should be separate and left to the relevant authorities.
Grrr!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/01/ted_frank_interview_supreme_court_cy_pres/
Homework:
Who owns space? Who owns the asteroids? The various earth orbits? The moon or Mars, even?
This issue is going to become more and more relevant in the near future, given the pace of development of commercial space activities. According to the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, “The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries, irrespective of their degree of economic or scientific development, and shall be the province of all mankind.” (Article One)
Signing these sort of statements is very easy when either there are only a few states able to get into space, or some of the signers don’t seem to have a hope in hell of getting there in the foreseeable future. Only one problem. We are now in the ‘foreseeable’ future! Earth orbit is getting increasingly busy, the strong possibility of bases on the moon, maybe even Mars, is looming, and asteroid mining is definitely on the table.
And everyone wants their cut!
And this time it’s not just nation states. In some countries, the USA being the obvious example, commercial interests are not likely to entertain ‘visitors’ to an asteroid they have claimed and are mining. Lets face it – you can’t have laws without a mechanism to enforce those laws! All that, of course, is without even considering the strategic interests of the nations involved. Science fiction has long had a ball building stories around these issues, and the reality looks like it’s going to be just as tangled as sci-fi ever predicted.
Definitely something to keep an eye on, so to get you started the URL points to an interesting discussion on Space Law in 2018.
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/3482/1
This week was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Richard Feynman. To my mind he was -the- scientist of the second half of the 20th Century. Nature has an excellent piece about him, though it unfortunately misses out his critical demonstration, live on television, of the problem that caused the Challenger shuttle disaster. And he did it with just a glass of iced water and a piece of the same material that the failing ‘O’-rings were made of. All this while dying of cancer...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05082-4
Geek Stuff:
Bad news for my geeky friends, the legendary NetHack game is dropping support for floppy disks, the Amiga, 16-bit MS-DOS and OS/2. More important, however, is the news that with the latest upgrade you can now use knives and stilettos as can openers. (Note: don’t try this in real life!)
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/30/nethack_to_drop_support_for_floppy_
disks_amiga_16bit_dos_and_os2/
Pictures:
A bumper picture crop this week:
The first one is a beautifully restored eight minute trip through New York in 1911. The scenes are surprisingly easy for present day residents to recognise. Watching horses and carts leaving the Staten Island Ferry was fascinating – it never occurred to me that it must have been the case before there was mass car ownership!
http://www.openculture.com/2018/04/immaculately-restored-film-lets-you-revisit-life-in-new-york-city-in-1911.html
Those you who were teenagers in 1968 might like to take a journey back in time to look at posters from Paris in May 1968. I’m surprised at how many I can remember seeing at the time, even though I was on the opposite side of the English channel. Charles de Gaulle’s take on the issue? “How can anyone govern a nation that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”
https://digitalcollections.vicu.utoronto.ca/RS/pages/search.php?search=special%3Aparis+posters&order_by=relevance&sort=DESC&archive=0&k=&restypes=&go=prev&offset=0
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/charles_de_gaulle_398023
And for something completely different, take a look at some pictures of Tokyo’s enormous underground storm drain – the largest in the world.
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2018/05/03/go-inside-tokyos-massive-underground-storm-drain/
Finally, just to completely confuse you, here is a URL to a massive collection of digitised M. C. Esher prints. May you never be trapped in one!
https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search?f%5Bcollection_name_ssim%5D%5B%5D=M.+C.+Escher+%281898-1972%29.+Prints+and+Drawings&f%5Binstitution_name_ssim%5D%5B%5D=Boston+Public+Library
Scanner:
Zombie Cambridge Analytica told ‘death’ can’t save it from the law
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/07/zombie_cambridge_analytica_told_death_
cant_save_it_from_the_law/
A rogue star hurtling towards the Solar System is going to arrive sooner than we realised
https://www.sciencealert.com/rogue-star-gliese-710-solar-system-encounter-earlier-than-thought-1-29-mya
Equifax reveals full horror of that monstrous cyber-heist of its servers: 146 million people, 99 million addresses, 209,000 payment cards, 38,000 drivers’ licenses and 3,200 passports
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/08/equifax_breach_may_2018/
How Kilauea’s lava invades neighborhoods
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-kilaueas-lava-invades-neighborhoods1/
Sueballs flying over Facebook’s Android app data slurping
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/11/sueballs_start_flying_over_facebooks_android_data_slurp/
Particle physics resurrects Alexander Graham Bell’s voice
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/particle-physics-resurrects-alexander-graham-bells-voice
Spectre returns with eight new variants
https://www.darkreading.com/vulnerabilities---threats/spectre-returns-with-8-new-variants/d/d-id/1331723
Coda:
Last issue I mentioned that I first discovered the location of Kamchatka playing the board game ‘Diplomacy’. That should, of course have been ‘Risk’! Thanks to Richard Bartle for pointing out the error...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(game)
Quote for the Week:
David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister 1916-1922, on Irish President Eamonn de Valera, “Negotiating with de Valera ... is like trying to pick up mercury with a fork.”
de Valera’s reply, “Why doesn’t he use a spoon?”
Source, Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, Fifth dead tree edition.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Andrew, Barb, Fi and Richard 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 April 2018
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.
