Fed2 Star - August 19, 2018 - page 2 (of 2)
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Fiona Craig
Aug 19, 2018, 5:25:29 AM8/19/18
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Fed2 Star
Earthdate August 19, 2018
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receiving it are at the foot of the email.]
For a fancy formatted version go the Fed2 Star website:
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Official News part two
GORILLA OF THE WEEK: PEEPING KONG
by Hazed
Residents of the quiet seaside town of Dawlish in south-west England are
unhappy about a new feature of the local crazy golf course: a giant gorilla.
Gary the gorilla is a 7 foot tall fibreglass model with a very intense
stare. When it was first erected it was facing some houses, and the
owners were freaked out by the fact that Gary was staring through their
windows. They have called the statue Peeping Kong.
Eager to help the locals, the owner of the golf course turned Gary
around to face the other way. But that just meant the residents were
presented with the site of his backside – and they weren’t happy about
that either!
Watch a video of the story of Gary the gorilla and his piercing stare here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-devon-45119793/crazy-golf-peeping-kong-statue-unnerves-devon-residents
ROBOT OF THE WEEK: LEGO-BUILDER
by Hazed
Building things out of Lego is fun. So why would you want a robot to do
it for you? Well, because small models built from Lego bricks are a good
start when automating manufacturing. If the robot can pick up the bricks
without dropping them, turn them in the right direction and slot them
into place with the right amount of force, it can unlock new ways to
automate making things.
Watch a video that explains all this here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-45024268/lego-building-robot-aspires-to-bigger-things
PICTURE OF THE WEEK: PARKER SPACE PROBE LAUNCHES
by Hazed
The Parker mission to the sun took off on Sunday morning, and here’s a
spectacular picture of the rocket launching:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180815.html
WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and
science news
by Alan Lenton
This week Winding Down brings you material on Google location tracking
vs. EU GDPR, Amazon Prime advertising zapped, Project Orion, VU meters,
3D pictures of classical sculptures, the 2018 Shed of the Year pictures,
and a quote on doing more than one thing. The scanner section boasts
URLs pointing to material on more security holes in Intel chips, hatred
against the big cable companies, a claim that the printer caused
spelling errors (!), LIDAR and unmarked graves, build your own NASA
space rover, blue wine, plate tectonics, a graphene competitor, and a
WordPress hack.
Next weekend is a public holiday (akshirley it’s the Monday that’s the
holiday), so there will be no Winding Down next Sunday but we will be
back on 2 September.
Shorts:
Remember the EU’s GDPR rules, they’re the ones that laid it on the line
to the Internet big boys (and small ones) that that they have to get
explicit, informed consent from people before they can obtain and use or
sell on personal data. Well, guess who looks like being up in court soon
over their tracking of users. It’s Google, of course. They’ve been
tracking people and a number of privacy watchers consider that users are
misled and that they are not in a position to give informed consent.
San Francisco’s AP News investigation of this issue found that location
tracking continues when the user thinks they have disabled it. That’s
for various reasons, for instance user settings governing location
markers are in different places. You can pause it, but not disable it
permanently. Even if tracking is ‘paused’, it continues if you visit
Search, Maps and some of the other Google applications.
AP News also points out that the warnings provided to both iOS and
Android users are misleading. Given this litany of potential breaches of
privacy, not to mention the current climate in which people are starting
to worry about the activities of the Internet behemoths, I don’t think
it will be very long before this issue starts to wend its way through
the courts, or to be investigated by the EU Commission responsible for GDPR.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/16/google_risks_megafine_in_eu_over_location_stalking/
https://apnews.com/f60bc112665b458cb6473d7ee9492932
Amazon recently got hauled over the coals on this side of the pond by
the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA branded its
advertising about Prime ‘next-day delivery’ as being ‘misleading’. Given
that the ASA isn’t a government body, it’s a self regulatory body set up
by advertisers, there wasn’t a fine. However, Amazon were ordered not to
let the advert appear again in its current form and that Amazon was to
make it clear that some Prime labelled items were not available to be
delivered the next day.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/14/amazon_prime_ads_misleading_says_asa/
https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/amazon-europe-core-sarl-a17-408329.html
Homework:
Did you know... that in the late 1950s/early 1960s there was a project
to use nuclear bombs to power spaceships? Apparently you would need
about 1,000 of them to get a large spaceship into Earth orbit...
It was called Project Orion, and the development was carried out by
General Atomic, a division of General Dynamics. They never did get
permission to use nuclear explosives, but they did manage to prove it
was possible by using scaled down models and chemical explosives.
However, by the middle of the 1960s people were becoming much more leery
about exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and the experiment was
canned by its funders.
Nonetheless, the idea is still around, especially for starships and the
like. It also crops up in science fiction, for instance in Niven and
Pournelle’s ‘Mote in Gods Eye’, the protagonists discover asteroids that
have been moved into new orbits using the technique. Have a look at the
URL, which has the full story of the Orion Project.
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/13/project-orion-detonating-nuclear-bombs-for-thrust/
Geek Stuff:
Many years ago, when I was managing a rock band, I was standing next to
the mixing desk watching the sound engineer at work and I remember
watching the needles on the little VU meters at the top of the controls
for each channel flickering dementedly, and wondered exactly what it was
they were actually registering. Well, thanks to the Hackaday site, I now
know! And it’s a bit complicated, so I’m not going to try and explain it
here – just call up the URL, they give a nice clear explanation.
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/09/the-vu-meter-and-how-it-got-that-way/
Pictures:
If you like classical sculptures, or even if you would just like to see
some very classy examples of how to do good 3D digitization, I’d
recommend that you take a look at the work done on the Medici collection
of sculptures. Between the 15th and 18th Centuries the House of Medici
acquired a huge number of classical sculptures. A good selection of them
are on display are the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
Now some of them are online as part of a very well done 3D digitization
project. If you think about it, it makes sense. High grade 2D pictures
are fine for images of paintings, but for objects like vases and statues
you need 3D pictures. An excellent, and good example of the use of
modern technology.
https://www.digitalsculpture-uffizi.org/
And now for something completely different, Here in the UK it’s,
apparently, 2018’s Shed of the Year competition time, and New Atlas have
put together a gallery of the shortlists for the various categories. I
particularly liked picture 102 in which the coffee table next to the
chaise longue features not only a plate of cookies, a jar of home made
marmalade, and a retro style transistor radio, but also a large tin of
Cuprinol garden paint!
Since this particular tin of paint appears in a number of improbable
places in some of the other pictures as well, it suggests to my keen
analytical mind that the competition is being sponsored by the
aforementioned paint company. Take a look for yourself!
https://newatlas.com/2018-shed-of-the-year-shortlist/55888/#gallery
Oh, and incidentally, I’d like to take the opportunity to make it clear
that we don’t use sponsors, or take in donations for this rag – not even
from garden paint people!
Scanner:
Three more data-leaking security holes found in Intel chips as designers
swap security for speed
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/14/intel_l1_terminal_fault_bugs/
Everybody hates their cable company, unless the company is Google, or
the city, or a tiny mom-and-pop
https://boingboing.net/2018/08/09/party-like-its-1982.html
Head of education letter littered with mistakes, blames ‘IT printers’
for bad spelling
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/10/devon_county_council_blames_it_for_bad_spelling/
LIDAR shown to be a powerful new tool in the hunt for missing murder victims
https://www.sciencealert.com/lidar-unmarked-graves-murder-victims-forensic-science
Build your own NASA space rover: Here are the DIY JPL blueprints
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/02/nasa_open_source_rover/
French wine: Red, white and now blue
http://www.euronews.com/2018/08/01/french-wine-red-white-and-now-blue
Plate tectonics: Necessary for habitability?
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/08/08/plate-tectonics-necessary-for-habitability/
Move over, graphene: Iron ore mineral becomes newest 2D material
https://newatlas.com/hematene-2d-iron-material/55670/
How a hack on 10,000 WordPress sites was used to launch an epic
malvertising campaign
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/30/malvertising_wordpress/
Quote for the week:
“The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.” –
Samuel Smiles, writer
From The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Coda:
As I mentioned in the intro, next weekend in the UK is what is known as
a Bank Holiday. This one, the August Bank Holiday was first defined in
the Bank Holidays Act of 1871. At that time it was defined as the first
Monday in August. That lasted a mere 100 years, and in 1971 it was moved
to the last Monday in August. Bank holidays are proclaimed each year by
Royal proclamation – definitely one of the most important royal duties!
There are 8 public holidays a year in the English calendar (Scotland is
slightly different). This may sound a lot, but you might like to reflect
that until 1834 the Bank of England observed no less that 33 saints days
and religious festivals as bank holidays...
Finally, it is a British tradition that it always rains on Bank Holidays!
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
19 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.
Earthdate August 19, 2018
[This is a subscription mailing list. Details about how to stop
receiving it are at the foot of the email.]
For a fancy formatted version go the Fed2 Star website:
http://www.ibgames.net/fednews/current/index.html
Official News part two
GORILLA OF THE WEEK: PEEPING KONG
by Hazed
Residents of the quiet seaside town of Dawlish in south-west England are
unhappy about a new feature of the local crazy golf course: a giant gorilla.
Gary the gorilla is a 7 foot tall fibreglass model with a very intense
stare. When it was first erected it was facing some houses, and the
owners were freaked out by the fact that Gary was staring through their
windows. They have called the statue Peeping Kong.
Eager to help the locals, the owner of the golf course turned Gary
around to face the other way. But that just meant the residents were
presented with the site of his backside – and they weren’t happy about
that either!
Watch a video of the story of Gary the gorilla and his piercing stare here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-devon-45119793/crazy-golf-peeping-kong-statue-unnerves-devon-residents
ROBOT OF THE WEEK: LEGO-BUILDER
by Hazed
Building things out of Lego is fun. So why would you want a robot to do
it for you? Well, because small models built from Lego bricks are a good
start when automating manufacturing. If the robot can pick up the bricks
without dropping them, turn them in the right direction and slot them
into place with the right amount of force, it can unlock new ways to
automate making things.
Watch a video that explains all this here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-45024268/lego-building-robot-aspires-to-bigger-things
PICTURE OF THE WEEK: PARKER SPACE PROBE LAUNCHES
by Hazed
The Parker mission to the sun took off on Sunday morning, and here’s a
spectacular picture of the rocket launching:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180815.html
WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and
science news
by Alan Lenton
This week Winding Down brings you material on Google location tracking
vs. EU GDPR, Amazon Prime advertising zapped, Project Orion, VU meters,
3D pictures of classical sculptures, the 2018 Shed of the Year pictures,
and a quote on doing more than one thing. The scanner section boasts
URLs pointing to material on more security holes in Intel chips, hatred
against the big cable companies, a claim that the printer caused
spelling errors (!), LIDAR and unmarked graves, build your own NASA
space rover, blue wine, plate tectonics, a graphene competitor, and a
WordPress hack.
Next weekend is a public holiday (akshirley it’s the Monday that’s the
holiday), so there will be no Winding Down next Sunday but we will be
back on 2 September.
Shorts:
Remember the EU’s GDPR rules, they’re the ones that laid it on the line
to the Internet big boys (and small ones) that that they have to get
explicit, informed consent from people before they can obtain and use or
sell on personal data. Well, guess who looks like being up in court soon
over their tracking of users. It’s Google, of course. They’ve been
tracking people and a number of privacy watchers consider that users are
misled and that they are not in a position to give informed consent.
San Francisco’s AP News investigation of this issue found that location
tracking continues when the user thinks they have disabled it. That’s
for various reasons, for instance user settings governing location
markers are in different places. You can pause it, but not disable it
permanently. Even if tracking is ‘paused’, it continues if you visit
Search, Maps and some of the other Google applications.
AP News also points out that the warnings provided to both iOS and
Android users are misleading. Given this litany of potential breaches of
privacy, not to mention the current climate in which people are starting
to worry about the activities of the Internet behemoths, I don’t think
it will be very long before this issue starts to wend its way through
the courts, or to be investigated by the EU Commission responsible for GDPR.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/16/google_risks_megafine_in_eu_over_location_stalking/
https://apnews.com/f60bc112665b458cb6473d7ee9492932
Amazon recently got hauled over the coals on this side of the pond by
the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). The ASA branded its
advertising about Prime ‘next-day delivery’ as being ‘misleading’. Given
that the ASA isn’t a government body, it’s a self regulatory body set up
by advertisers, there wasn’t a fine. However, Amazon were ordered not to
let the advert appear again in its current form and that Amazon was to
make it clear that some Prime labelled items were not available to be
delivered the next day.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/14/amazon_prime_ads_misleading_says_asa/
https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/amazon-europe-core-sarl-a17-408329.html
Homework:
Did you know... that in the late 1950s/early 1960s there was a project
to use nuclear bombs to power spaceships? Apparently you would need
about 1,000 of them to get a large spaceship into Earth orbit...
It was called Project Orion, and the development was carried out by
General Atomic, a division of General Dynamics. They never did get
permission to use nuclear explosives, but they did manage to prove it
was possible by using scaled down models and chemical explosives.
However, by the middle of the 1960s people were becoming much more leery
about exploding nuclear weapons in the atmosphere and the experiment was
canned by its funders.
Nonetheless, the idea is still around, especially for starships and the
like. It also crops up in science fiction, for instance in Niven and
Pournelle’s ‘Mote in Gods Eye’, the protagonists discover asteroids that
have been moved into new orbits using the technique. Have a look at the
URL, which has the full story of the Orion Project.
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/13/project-orion-detonating-nuclear-bombs-for-thrust/
Geek Stuff:
Many years ago, when I was managing a rock band, I was standing next to
the mixing desk watching the sound engineer at work and I remember
watching the needles on the little VU meters at the top of the controls
for each channel flickering dementedly, and wondered exactly what it was
they were actually registering. Well, thanks to the Hackaday site, I now
know! And it’s a bit complicated, so I’m not going to try and explain it
here – just call up the URL, they give a nice clear explanation.
https://hackaday.com/2018/08/09/the-vu-meter-and-how-it-got-that-way/
Pictures:
If you like classical sculptures, or even if you would just like to see
some very classy examples of how to do good 3D digitization, I’d
recommend that you take a look at the work done on the Medici collection
of sculptures. Between the 15th and 18th Centuries the House of Medici
acquired a huge number of classical sculptures. A good selection of them
are on display are the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
Now some of them are online as part of a very well done 3D digitization
project. If you think about it, it makes sense. High grade 2D pictures
are fine for images of paintings, but for objects like vases and statues
you need 3D pictures. An excellent, and good example of the use of
modern technology.
https://www.digitalsculpture-uffizi.org/
And now for something completely different, Here in the UK it’s,
apparently, 2018’s Shed of the Year competition time, and New Atlas have
put together a gallery of the shortlists for the various categories. I
particularly liked picture 102 in which the coffee table next to the
chaise longue features not only a plate of cookies, a jar of home made
marmalade, and a retro style transistor radio, but also a large tin of
Cuprinol garden paint!
Since this particular tin of paint appears in a number of improbable
places in some of the other pictures as well, it suggests to my keen
analytical mind that the competition is being sponsored by the
aforementioned paint company. Take a look for yourself!
https://newatlas.com/2018-shed-of-the-year-shortlist/55888/#gallery
Oh, and incidentally, I’d like to take the opportunity to make it clear
that we don’t use sponsors, or take in donations for this rag – not even
from garden paint people!
Scanner:
Three more data-leaking security holes found in Intel chips as designers
swap security for speed
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/14/intel_l1_terminal_fault_bugs/
Everybody hates their cable company, unless the company is Google, or
the city, or a tiny mom-and-pop
https://boingboing.net/2018/08/09/party-like-its-1982.html
Head of education letter littered with mistakes, blames ‘IT printers’
for bad spelling
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/10/devon_county_council_blames_it_for_bad_spelling/
LIDAR shown to be a powerful new tool in the hunt for missing murder victims
https://www.sciencealert.com/lidar-unmarked-graves-murder-victims-forensic-science
Build your own NASA space rover: Here are the DIY JPL blueprints
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/02/nasa_open_source_rover/
French wine: Red, white and now blue
http://www.euronews.com/2018/08/01/french-wine-red-white-and-now-blue
Plate tectonics: Necessary for habitability?
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/08/08/plate-tectonics-necessary-for-habitability/
Move over, graphene: Iron ore mineral becomes newest 2D material
https://newatlas.com/hematene-2d-iron-material/55670/
How a hack on 10,000 WordPress sites was used to launch an epic
malvertising campaign
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/30/malvertising_wordpress/
Quote for the week:
“The shortest way to do many things is to do only one thing at once.” –
Samuel Smiles, writer
From The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
Coda:
As I mentioned in the intro, next weekend in the UK is what is known as
a Bank Holiday. This one, the August Bank Holiday was first defined in
the Bank Holidays Act of 1871. At that time it was defined as the first
Monday in August. That lasted a mere 100 years, and in 1971 it was moved
to the last Monday in August. Bank holidays are proclaimed each year by
Royal proclamation – definitely one of the most important royal duties!
There are 8 public holidays a year in the English calendar (Scotland is
slightly different). This may sound a lot, but you might like to reflect
that until 1834 the Bank of England observed no less that 33 saints days
and religious festivals as bank holidays...
Finally, it is a British tradition that it always rains on Bank Holidays!
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
19 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.
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