Fed2 Star - December 3, 2017 - page 2 (of 2)

[Fiona Craig]

Fed2 Star
Earthdate December 3, 2017


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Official News part two


VIDEO OF THE WEEK: THE ICELANDIC SURFER

by Hazed

You think of surfing taking place in sunny and warm climates. Heidar
Logi breaks that trend: he is Iceland’s first professional surfer. He
surfs in freezing water, past icebergs, and by the light of the aurora
borealis.

Watch a video about the Icelandic surfer and the Northern Lights
here:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-41806051/surfing-beneath-the-northern-lights


PICTURE OF THE WEEK: JUPITER’S SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE

by Hazed

A new colour-enhanced image of Jupiter’s southern hemisphere has been
released, showing one of the massive rotating storms, a white oval which
is part of the “String of Pearls”.

The picture was taken by the Juno spacecraft last month. You can see it
here:
https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/jpl/pia21970/jupiter-s-stunning-southern-hemisphere


WINDING DOWN

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


Good Grief – it’s nearly Christmas again. At this rate it will soon be
2018... Well it’s another Winding Down, and this week we have for you
more doom and gloom for Uber, a heads up for Mac users, an extended
piece on some online courses run by Future Learn, terrestrial
anti-matter, a heavy lift drone, sunrise over the Philippine Sea, a salt
glacier, and a quote. In the Scanner section there are URLs pointing to
pieces on ten years of the Kindle, a digital pill, maps and augmented
reality, very old trees in pictures, cloud computing lock-in, quilts
from uniforms, and a 67cm Playmobil ship currently sailing the high seas.

Not a bad little haul, even if I say so myself!

I’m not sure if there will be a Winding Down next week. My study doubles
up as a guest bedroom, and our daughter is coming to stay for a week or
so. If enough material comes in before next Friday, then I will put an
issue together. Otherwise there won’t be an issue.


Shorts:

Sheesh! The chickens really are coming home to roost for Uber! The
latest thing to hit them is the discovery that Uber had a top secret
‘trade-secret-stealing-unit’. This emerged at the preliminaries in the
trades secret stealing case brought by Waymo. the judge handling the
case has delayed the start of the trial so that this can be looked into
in more detail. I’m not even going to try and explain the complicated
explanations offered – I recommend you read the piece at the second
‘Register’ URL for a blow-by-blow account!

Frankly, if I wrote a game based on this material, I would be pilloried
for writing something completely unbelievable...

In the meantime, to add to Uber’s woes, the Washington Attorney General
has filed a multi-million dollar consumer protection lawsuit, with
rumours of other states lining up to follow on. And for the cream on the
jelly on the butter on the bread, the EU’s data protection people have
set up a task force to look into the data breach last year at Uber. The
only real surprise there is that the EU bureaucrats know what a task
force is!

Anyway, here are a bunch of URLs covering the latest moves in this saga.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/judge_delays_uber_trade_secret_stealing_trial_after_discovering_company_ran_a_secret_trade_secret_stealing_operation/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/29/uber_waymo_dumpster_fire/
https://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/lawsuits-pile-up-on-uber/d/d-id/1330530
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/30/uber_hack_eu_data_protection_bods_launch_taskforce/

Calling all Mac users. There’s a serious bug in the ‘High Sierra’
version of the MacOS (v10.13.1) that lets people log in as root (the
administrator account) without a password. As you can guess, this is
quite nasty. Fortunately Apple have been very fast about getting a patch
out. You can get details of the patch from the second URL – be sure to
read the update at the end, in case you have a problem with it!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/28/root_access_bypass_macos_high_sierra/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/29/apple_macos_high_sierra_root_bug_patch/


Homework:

I’ve recently discovered Future Learn, an online course company. The
courses are free, but if you want a certificate, then they cost and you
have to pass the tests. Most of the courses seem to be at a level I
would call ‘introductory, but no concessions’. That is to say that they
are introductory, but not in any sense dumbed down. So far I’ve taken
four of the courses – ‘Forensic Science’, ‘Influenza’, ‘Public Heath in
the UK’, and ‘The Scientific Revolution’. I am lined up for another one
on the ‘R’ computing language starting next February.

The first one I took, Forensic Science was the longest at six weeks, the
others were two or three weeks long. I’d guess that I spent between
three and five hours a week on each of the courses. That covers watching
videos, reading white papers and extracts from books, doing quizzes and
such like. The technical quality of the videos varied from highly
professional, to a little on the wooden side, but all were useable, and
had sub-titling – useful if you find accents difficult to follow.

I found all of them well worthwhile. Since I’m not in the job market, I
don’t need certificates (and I am also useless at tests, my brain will
only engage for real problems that need solving for a purpose), so I
can’t comment on that aspect of the courses.

I will say, however, that I really enjoyed the courses I’ve taken so
far. The forensic one was especially good, and not only covered the
techniques, but didn’t shy away from the controversy surrounding some of
the issues it raises. The influenza course covered both seasonal flu and
pandemics, and also covered the genetics of the virus and how it changes
over the course of time. I had to work hard at that one, since I don’t
really have a biology background. I now have a much better idea of
what’s involved, and exactly why trying to predict exactly which flu
virus to make each year is such a difficult task.

The course on public health covered the period from the end of World War
II to the AIDS epidemic. I knew a little about this topic before I
started, since a former partner of mine was a doctor, and I had friends
who died of AIDS. There was also a strong sociology component – a
subject in which I have a degree (Honest. I took several years out of my
misspent youth to actually attend university!). For me this was perhaps
most useful in ‘joining the dots’ for material I already had, and for
pointing the way for further interest to take me.

Finally, there was the course on the Scientific Revolution. This was a
complete revelation. Of course I knew about the scientific revolution –
Newton (‘Principia Mathematica’ is sitting on my bookshelf as I write
this), Descartes, Boyle and the rest. What I hadn’t understood was the
way in which it was rooted in an attempt to handle questions that the
dominant medieval Aristotelian philosophy failed to deal with
adequately, and the rise of experiments to prove or disprove
explanations and theories. After finishing the course I was inspired to
go out and buy Alexandre Koyre’s book ‘From the Closed World to the
Infinite Universe’. Well, actually, I bought it online at Amazon without
moving from my seat...

Anyway to sum up – Time well spent!
https://www.futurelearn.com/

Incidentally, as we go to press, I just got an email from OpenCulture,
who now have a list of 15,000 courses from various companies, all of
which start in December, on their website. I haven’t had a chance to
look at it yet, but here’s the URL.
http://www.openculture.com/2017/12/1500-moocs-massive-open-online-courses-getting-started-in-december-enroll-today.html

I would guess that everyone has heard of anti-matter by now. Suffice to
say that when it meets regular mater there is a big explosion. Thus it
was that I was surprised to find out that anti-matter is regularly
generated here on Earth in the atmosphere. It seems that when there is a
lightning discharge bursts of gamma rays are generated, and these bursts
create reactions with the atmosphere to generate anti-matter. The
anti-matter then collides with molecules of air annihilating the
anti-matter and the air to generate... gamma rays!

This explains why no one has ever noticed the phenomena before. It all
happens so fast with gamma rays going into the reaction and gamma rays
coming out of the other end, that no one realised that there was an
intermediate step of creating and destroying anti-matter. Nice work by
the Japanese scientists who figured it out!
https://newatlas.com/lightning-gamma-rays-antimatter/52312/


Geek Stuff:

Now, this is my sort of geek toy. A gasoline powered heavy duty drone.
Capable of lifting a 400-lb payload, it can fly for up to eight hours at
a go. It’s Russian made, and looks it, but think of the possibilities!
The engine provides the lift and four small battery driven rotors
provide the stability and steering. So, if you see what looks like
flying scaffolding passing overhead, you now know what it is!
https://newatlas.com/ardn-russia-skyf-heavy-lift-hybrid-multirotor/52300/


Pictures:

NASA’s Earth Observatory has a very cool picture of sunrise over the
Philippine Sea as seen from the International Space Station (ISS) – take
a look...
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91227&src=eoa-iotd

While you’re there you might also like to take a look at their picture
of a salt glacier. Never heard of such a thing? Join the club – neither
had I. So I went and looked it up. The piece in Wikipedia rapidly
disabused me of my assumption that they were made of table salt... Even
so, they’re pretty impressive beasts. When you look at the ISS picture
remember that you are looking a lump of salt, of various kinds, eight
miles across!
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=91264&src=eoa-iotd
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_glacier


Coda:

Now here’s a quote from Facebook: “If you can’t dazzle them with
brilliance, baffle them with bullsh**.” Ooops! Sorry! I meant W.C.
Fields. Gosh! I can’t imagine what made me type ‘Facebook’...


Scanner:

Ten years of the Kindle and the curious incident of a dog in the day-time
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/24/ten_years_of_the_amazon_kindle_and_the_curious_incident_of_a_dog_in_the_daytime/

First digital pill approved to worries about biomedical ‘Big Brother’
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/13/health/digital-pill-fda.html

Legends of the scrawl: Ordnance Survey launches augmented reality tool
for maps
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/10/20/ordnance_survey_augmented_map_week/

Photographing some of the world’s oldest and wisest trees
https://hyperallergic.com/409147/wise-trees-diane-cook-len-jenshel/

CoreOS on AWS, Kubernetes, and more
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/06/coreos_kubernetes_v_world/

The wartime quilts made by men from military uniforms
https://hyperallergic.com/398931/wartime-quilts-folk-art-museum/

Shiver me timbers! 67cm Playmobil pirate ship sets sail for Caribbean
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/13/playmobil_pirates_sail_for_carribbean/


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for
Winding Down.

Please send suggestions for stories to al...@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
al...@ibgames.com
3 December 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.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at
http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.