Fed2 Star - September 23, 2018 - page 2 (of 2)

[Fiona Craig]

Fed2 Star
Earthdate September 23, 2018


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Official News part two


ON THE WEB: THE SCIENCE OF PROCRASTINATION

by Hazed

I was going to write something about this article about why people
procrastinate, but I’ll do it tomorrow…

You can read the article here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45295392


PICTURE OF THE WEEK: SOLAR FILAMENT

by Hazed

The sun is currently in a relatively inactive period of its 11-year
cycle, but back in 2012 a massive solar filament erupted into space to
produce a coronal mass ejection. The Solar Dynamics Observatory was on
hand to take a picture which you can see here:
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180916.html


WINDING DOWN

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

It’s well and truly autumn over here and the rains have set in again.
So, I bring you a soggy selection of stuff this week – I had to dry out
the bits over the fire before I could use them to give you material on
Apple and Ireland, Facebook and Equal Opportunities, a font for all
essays, an interesting take on emergency evacuations, the world’s
earliest brewery, the location of Star Trek’s Vulcan, Bohemian Rhapsody,
pictures of Hurricane Florence from space, an interactive wind map, and
some food for thought. In the Scanner section URLs point to material on
a solar observatory shut down, an internet satisfaction survey, Sony and
Bach’s music, Google sharing, coding school vs. bachelors degree, and
some screwed up US election data. Finally, the quote for this week is
from Blaise Pascal. Phew!


Shorts:

Here’s an interesting bit of news you might have missed. As you may be
aware, the big international tech companies are under fire for their tax
manipulation. Apple is one of those accused. In their case, they did a
deal with Ireland that, according to the EU competition commissioner,
resulted in an “ “an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its
European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014”.

The EU, as you can guess, is not a happy bunny. It classified this as an
illegal tax benefit, and ordered the payment of the 14.3 billion Euros
(US$16.77bn) – the tax plus interest – by Apple to the Irish government.
The EU has fairly strict rules about the payment of state aid to private
companies. Apple has, of course, been contesting the ruling in the courts.

Significantly though, this week it was revealed that Apple had paid the
money into an Irish government escrow fund, to be held until the court
case and any subsequent appeals are decided. Ironically, the Irish
government sides with Apple, and believes there was nothing wrong with
giving the Apple the tax break, and they don’t want to recover the money.

I would imagine that the Irish taxpayers have a somewhat different view
of the matter!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/19/apple_alleged_state_aid_ireland/

I see Facebook is under fire again. This time they been hauled up before
the US Equal Opportunities Commission by the ACLU and the employment law
firm of Outten & Golden LLP. It seems that Facebook’s system of
targeting adverts allows advertisers to choose who their ads are
displayed to on the basis of individual characteristics – including sex,
race and age. This enabled firms placing job adverts to discriminate
against potential employees on the basis of sex, age and race. And of
course the discrimination is very subtle, because those discriminated
against were never shown the job adverts in question!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/19/facebooks_ads_sexist/


Homework:

Here’s a little something for my younger readers – a free font that
makes your essays look up to ten percent longer than they actually are!
I have to confess that until I read this piece I had no idea that
teachers and the like were dishing out essays by the number of pages
required. The correct length for an essay is simple. It is as long as is
needed to show that you have grasped the topic, and are able to explain
it. If that only takes half a page, for instance, then so be it. Who in
their right mind wants to wade through another two and a half pages of
padding to bring it up to the three pages demanded?

A grasp of the subject is indicated by how succinct you can be, not by
how much you can ramble on. Have a look at this week’s quote for one
take on this subject!
https://www.sciencealert.com/times-newer-roman-free-font-typeface-longer-essays-10-percent

I’ve never had a lot of patience for people who don’t evacuate when they
are told to by the emergency services, because of things like the recent
Hurricane Florence. However, an article in Scientific American magazine
got me thinking, and changed my attitude somewhat.

What it argues is that the ability to pack up and leave actually assumes
that people are at a certain level of privilege. It takes money to
displace yourself to somewhere safe. You have to have the money up
front, because it’s going to take endless time and form filling to get a
reimbursement later. Not everyone knows how to get the forms, let alone
fill them in.

You become very vulnerable when you are evacuated. Not just physically,
but also in the sense that you lose the support of your community, and
if you happen to be a person with a disability, elderly or a single
parent, for instance, the problems multiply. In these sort of case I
suspect that a proper risk assessment might well point to it being safer
to stay.

I still have no patience with people who can evacuate, but choose not
to, and then complain about their losses, but I’m now much more likely
to have sympathy for those for whom evacuating poses serious problems.

I guess even an old fogey who’s set in his ways, like me, can have his
views changed by a well argued essay!
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-condemn-people-who-dont-evacuate-for-hurricane-florence/

I’m glad to see archaeologists doing something serious and dear to my
heart. They’ve found the world’s earliest brewery at a site in Israel!
It’s old enough that it even predates agriculture. The current theories
on the rise of towns is that they were a product of the needs of
agriculture and the way it was able to support more people. Clearly, in
the light of this new discovery, that’s wrong. People came together in
towns and villages to make sure that they could get a regular pint of
their favourite ale. Towns did not encourage the start of breweries,
breweries encouraged the formation of towns.

I would be the first to admit there is some dispute about this theory,
but would point out that most of its opponents are teetotallers...
https://www.sciencealert.com/archaeologists-discover-worlds-oldest-beer-brewery


Geek Stuff:

Well, what do you know. The Star Trekkies might just have been right
when they identified the planet Vulcan as orbiting the star 40 Eridani A
in the constellation of Eridanus. It turns out that there is indeed a
somewhat Earth-like planet orbiting the star, and it is within the
so-called ‘habitable zone’ where water can exist in a liquid form. Not
only that, but it looks like the planet has existed for roughly the same
length of time as the Earth – about four billion years, so there has
been time for complex life to develop.

Whether it is, in fact, inhabited, let alone inhabited by the inventors
of the ‘Vulcan Nerve Pinch’, is an entirely different matter!
https://www.sciencealert.com/star-trek-vulcan-exoplanet-40-eridani-a-hd-26965-super-earth-dharma-planet-survey

Not a Trekkie? Well, in that case how about something completely
different – Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ as played by 28 trombones.
Fantastic! They are slightly out in places, but overall it’s an amazing
achievement. Definitely not to be missed!
http://www.openculture.com/2018/09/queens-bohemian-rhapsody-played-28-trombone-players.html


Pictures:

Since much of the news over the last ten days has been about Hurricane
Florence, I thought I might draw your attention to a set of photographs
of the hurricane taken from the International Space Station by Alexander
Gerst, a German astronaut on the station.

Until I saw them I simply didn’t appreciate the sheer immensity of the
storm. Very thought provoking.
https://www.sciencealert.com/astronauts-photos-of-hurricane-florence-from-international-space-station

Given the above, I thought I would also draw your attention to the
excellent real-time wind map produced by nullschool.net. It’s brilliant,
you can centre it on wherever you like expand it, turn the globe, etc
and look at the wind pattern around your area as well as globally. I’m
checking out England at the moment. We currently seem to be in a gap
between three different systems, two coming from the Atlantic, which
implies rain, and one from the north pole – brrrrr...

When you first pull it up, or if you change the size, position, etc, it
takes a second or two to update – longer if you have a cruddy internet
supplier – just be patient. Highly recommended.
https://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=16.96,39.85,407

And being a little less serious, take a look at these pictures of a
merger of everyday life and food. Amusing!
http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2018/09/20/food-and-everyday-life-merge-in-surreal-illustrations-by-marumichi/


Scanner:

A solar observatory in New Mexico has been mysteriously shut down and
evacuated – “The FBI is refusing to tell us what’s going on.”
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-solar-observatory-in-new-mexico-was-mysteriously-shut-down-and-nobody-knows-why
https://www.space.com/41852-sunspot-solar-observatory-opening-after-criminal-investigation.html

The internet – not as great as we all thought it was going to be, eh?
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/14/pew_internet_satisfaction_study/

Sony finally admits it doesn’t own Bach and it only took a bunch of
public pressure
https://www.eff.org/takedowns/sony-finally-admits-it-doesnt-own-bach-and-it-only-took-public-pressure

So Brave: Browser biz sics Brit watchdogs on Google’s info slurpage
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/13/brave_google_eu/

Coding school vs. bachelors degree – infographic
https://www.i-programmer.info/news/150/12106.html

AI biz borks US election spending data by using underpaid Amazon
Mechanical Turks
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/09/08/election_spending_ai/


Quote for the week:

“I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had
the time to make it shorter.”
Blaise Pascal, French mathematician, physicist and moralist


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
23 September 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.