Fed2 Star - August 12, 2018 - page 2 (of 2)

[Fiona Craig]

Star
Earthdate August 12, 2018


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Official News part two


ROBOT OF THE WEEK: ROBOMOP

by Hazed

In a case of real life imitating Fed, commercial buildings in Singapore
may soon have robot cleaners roaming the floors, in a bid to ease the
labour shortage in the city.

Scrub 50 is a fully autonomous cleaning robot, standing just over a
metre tall. The director of Gaussian Robotics, one of the firms involved
in developing the cleaning droid, said: “It has sensors to detect which
part of the building it’s at, it sends reports after it finishes
cleaning a particular area and there’s no danger of it bumping into
people or objects because it’s equipped with laser detectors, cameras
and sensors. In the future we may get it to talk and say ‘Excuse me’.”

The Scrub 50 is also expected to work faster and more thoroughly than
human cleaners. The developers say that daily cleaning of 5,000 sq m
over a one-month period would require 300 hours of work from a human,
but the robot can do the job in 130 hours. It can also squeeze into
small spaces for more thorough cleaning.

But don’t worry about robots taking away jobs from people. The
demographics of Singapore mean that the current batch of aging cleaners
will soon retire – and young people don’t want to be cleaners these
days, so the robots will fill a gap in the labour market.

Scrub 50 is being tested in the building of one of the companies
involved, and if it checks out it will be deployed in other buildings
later this year.

Sounds great. Now when can I have one for my home?

Source:
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/meet-scrub-50-the-robot-cleaner


ON THE WEB: WHERE’S MY FLYING CAR?

by Hazed

We’ve been promised flying cars since the early days of aviation, but
still they are not here. Why not?

This article runs down some of the reasons. Chiefly what I call
“sofa-bed syndrome”. A sofa-bed is neither comfortable when used as a
sofa nor as a bed. Similarly with a flying car: merging an aeroplane and
an automobile just doesn’t produce a good design.

The article goes into a lot more detail about the design compromises and
how they could be solved – it makes fascinating reading. Take a look here:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/jun/19/flying-cars-why-havent-they-taken-off-yet


PICTURES OF THE WEEK: ASTEROID CLOSE-UPS

by Hazed

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 arrived at asteroid Ryugu recently,
and has been sending back some amazing close-up images of the asteroid.
One is taken from a distance of just six kilometres away, which means
that one pixel in the image is about 60 centimetres.

Take a look at the extraordinarily detailed pictures here:
https://gizmodo.com/japanese-spacecraft-hayabusa2-snaps-incredible-close-up-1827888381


WINDING DOWN

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


Another Sunday, another Winding Down. This week for your edification we
have material on the US tax laws and charities, the slimy nature of
smart electricity meters, generating random numbers, a car for the
terminally paranoid, some nice astronomy pictures, a couple of things to
see if you happen to be in London at the right time, and a quote about
scientists. In the scanner section there are URLs pointing to material
on ransomware, common colds, who pays for web takedown orders, a
mysterious low frequency radio signal from space [probably the toaster –
AL], privacy and security collisions, printers’ doc-tracking dots, and
finally, why paper cuts hurt so much.

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


Shorts:

The law of unintended consequences strikes again... As I’m sure my US
readers will have noticed, their tax law recently changed to allow
taxpayers to make a larger deduction for donations to charities without
having to prove it by providing paper work. Needless to say, the
taxpayers are happy, and one would have thought the charities would be
happy at having to spend less on admin. Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

It seems that now they don’t have to prove it, a lot of people are just
claiming the deduction, but not bothering to make the (relatively) small
donations they made to charities previously. This has caused serious
problems. For instance the medical non-profit group ‘March of Dimes’ has
just cancelled US$3 million in research grants, and it’s not expected
that they will be the only charity affected.

I don’t think that was what was intended when the law was drafted...
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05875-7

Here in the UK, electricity and gas supplies have long been touting
‘smart’ meters, as helping householders to keep their bills down. We
Brits are a suspicious lot, and there has been a lot of push back,
especially after it was discovered that if you had a smart meter
installed, you would never be able to go back to a standard meter. As
the Eagles so aptly put it in their song ‘Hotel California’:

“Relax,” said the night man
“We are programmed to receive
You can check-out any time you like
But you can never leave!”

Now, the real reason why the supply companies are so enthusiastic about
them has slipped out. Smart meters allow the suppliers to change the
cost of the energy every 30 minutes. In other words when there is a lot
of demand they can jack up the cost! So, this is a warning to my
non-Brit readers, because sooner or later the big energy supply
companies will try and pull the same trick on you – remember it’s not a
cool gadget, it’s an expensive gadget that will keep you paying and paying.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/personalfinance/smart-meters-will-lead-to-surge-pricing-admits-scottish-power-amid-plans-for-costs-changing-every-half-an-hour/ar-BBLhQkw


Homework:

The internet relies on cryptography to ensure, among other things, that
messages transmitted can only be read by the intended recipient. That’s
good – especially when the message is one to your bank, for instance!
However, that’s not the end of the story. To ensure that the
cryptography is working properly, it needs random numbers. Truly random
numbers, not even ‘nearly’ random numbers will do.

And that can be a real problem, because it’s very difficult to generate
true random numbers, and over the years there have been various attempts
to use the computer to generate random numbers. For instance, way back
in the 1980s my Commodore 64 used a slightly defective ‘noisy’ diode to
help generate random numbers. More recently, mouse movements have been
used as a basis, but, of course that assumes the person using the
computer is using a mouse – and moving it!

Now the web security company Cloudflare have come up with a very cool
way of generating random numbers that really does produce random
numbers. They’re using a set of 100 lava lamps to help generate the
numbers! They film the lamps continuously and use the arrangement of
pixels generated to help generate a random number.

The lamps are in their office in San Francisco, and for good measure, in
case the bad guys sneak in a camera, they also mix in the movements of a
pendulum in London and readings from a Geiger counter in Singapore.

A whole wall of lava lamps! That’s seriously cool!
https://www.wired.com/story/cloudflare-lava-lamps-protect-from-hackers/


Geek Stuff:

Right! Here’s a little something for my more paranoid readers to use
when they go shopping – remember, just because you are paranoid, it
doesn’t mean they are not out to get you... It’s the Tank XUV, Military
Edition from Rezvani. It’s definitely an SUV that is toys for the boys
to lust for: assault rifle proof armour, bullet proof glass, run-flat
tires, Kevlar fuel tank protection, built in gas masks and first-aid
kit, electrified door handles, strobe lights and sirens, night vision,
and even a smoke screen generator! Just the thing for running down to
the supermarket to pick up a loaf of bread...
https://newatlas.com/rezvani-tank-military-edition/55847/


Pictures:

This week some pictures from NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day collection.

The first is a nice picture of the Andromeda galaxy, bisected by a
streak from a meteor, which passed in front of the camera while the
photo was being taken. Very unusual.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180812.html

Next is set of successive shots of the July 27 lunar eclipse taken at
the marvellously named Gulf of Poets in Italy.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180802.html

The final picture is a nifty little animation of the solar system
demonstrating the Perseid meteor stream as it comes in from the outer
solar system and circles the sun before returning to the outer limits.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180808.html


Scanner:

Well, well, well. Crime does pay: ransomware creeps let off with
community service
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/ransomware_coinvault_community_service/

Here’s what you should actually take for a cold, according to science
[Hint: Your grandmother probably got it right! -AL]
https://www.sciencealert.com/here-s-the-latest-science-on-what-actually-works-to-reduce-the-impact-of-a-cold

Trademark holders must pay for UK web blocking orders – UK Supreme Court
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/13/copyright_blocking_orders_bt_cartier_supreme_court/

Astronomers have detected an intense and mysteriously low frequency
radio signal coming from space
https://www.sciencealert.com/astronomers-have-detected-an-intense-and-mysteriously-low-frequency-radio-signal-coming-from-space

Seven places where privacy and security collide
https://www.darkreading.com/operations/7-places-where-privacy-and-security-collide/d/d-id/1332110

German researchers defeat printers’ doc-tracking dots
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/06/27/german_researchers_defeat_printer_tracking_dots/

Science explains why tiny paper cuts hurt so damn much
https://www.sciencealert.com/science-explains-why-tiny-paper-cuts-hurt-so-damn-much


Quote for the week:

“The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers, he is one
who asks the right questions.”
— Claude Lévi-Strauss


Coda:

Those of you who are planning to visit London in the next few months
might like to take a look at an exhibition of some of the oldest photos
of London going back as far as 1840.
http://londonist.com/london/art-and-photography/these-are-some-of-the-first-photos-ever-taken-of-londoners?rel=handpicked

Alternatively, if your tastes are a little more, how shall I put it,
unusual, and you are here in October, you might like the idea of a
candlelit theremin concert in London’s Brompton Cemetery! Not for the
faint of heart, I suspect. I might even go myself... Incidentally, did
you know that Moog of synthesiser fame started off by building theremins?
http://londonmonthofthedead.com/ghostinthemachine.html


Acknowledgements

Thanks to readers Andrew, 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
12 August 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.

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