Fed2 Star - July 15, 2018 - page 2 (of 2)
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Fiona Craig
Jul 15, 2018, 6:06:44 AM7/15/18
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Fed2 Star
Earthdate July 15, 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
RATS OF THE WEEK: CHEWED UP THE MONEY IN AN ATM
by Hazed
When an ATM in the Indian state of Assam stopped working, technicians
were sent to take a look at it. They opened it up and got a big
surprise… the money inside had been chewed up by rats.
Banknotes totalling to more than 1.2m rupees ($17,600) had been
shredded, and a dead rat was lying amongst the debris. See the source
link below for pictures.
Not all the money had been destroyed by rodents: the technicians managed
to salvage about 1.7m rupee
Police say that the rats probably got into the machine through a hole
used for wiring.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44539862
PICTURES OF THE WEEK: ROSETTA IMAGES OF COMET 67-P
by Hazed
All of the high-resolution images that were taken by the Rosetta probe’s
mission to comet 67-P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, as well as the underlying
data, are now available in the European Space Agency archive.
The archive browser contains images of Rosetta’s final descent to the
comet’s surface, the Philae lander, and pictures captured by the
navigation camera.
Read about the new archive here:
https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Rosetta_image_archive_complete
then click through to the archive to see all of the images.
WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and
science news
by Alan Lenton
Well, here’s another issue of Winding Down, it’s perhaps a little longer
than I managed last week, and includes material on a newly discovered
sarcophagus, a problem with professional email addresses, brain myths,
blockchains, USB cables, the end of the fabled EmDrive, and some cool
pictures. The scanner section contains material on asteroids,
archaeological revelations from the heatwave in Wales, open plan
offices, snowball Earth, the Vatican secret archives, the trolley
problem, drones and flying taxis, biometrics problems, and a possible
new antibiotic.
I counted up, and while I was ill I still managed to save over a hundred
possible stories for Winding Down. Even removing the ones that are pure
news (e.g. Congress discusses copyright extension) there’s still a lot
left. So for this and the next few issues I will be including some of
those stories in the Scanner section. That means that instead of the
usual half dozen stories in the section there will be nine or ten.
Finally, there is a quote from physicist Richard Feynman.
Shorts:
A massive Egyptian sarcophagus has been found in Alexandria (the
Alexandria in Egypt, not the one in Virginia, US of A). To add to the
mystery it’s BLACK. It was closed 2,000 years ago, and hasn’t been
opened since. Obviously the thing to do is to take it off to a museum
and open it. The problem is that it is 15 feet underground and weighs
something in the region of 30+ tons. That’s because it’s made of BLACK
marble.
Of course, all right thinking film buffs know that opening such a
sarcophagus is, to say the least, unwise. Especially a BLACK one! I, of
course, felt compelled to dig out my DVD of ‘The Mummy’ to warn you all
of the likely consequences: vile curses, man eating beetles (at least
they didn’t eat the heroine in the movie), long dead ambulatory mummies
and more. The good news is that opening it doesn’t seem to awaken Cthulu...
I wonder what would happen if you trod on the end of one of the mummy’s
loose bandages?
https://www.sciencealert.com/huge-mystery-sarcophagus-unearthed-in-egypt-alexandria
https://www.sciencealert.com/lets-just-open-the-black-creepy-2000-year-old-egyptian-sarcophagus
Oh dear! The UK’s Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) was
formed by merging the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) and the
Institution of Incorporated Engineers (IIE). Now, it just happened that
the IEE had since 1996 allowed its members to have iee.org email
addresses, which many of them used for business purposes. There is,
after all, a lot of cachet in that sort of professional address.
However, for technical reasons the IET is now closing down the address,
resulting in howls of dismay (discrete and proper business-like, howls,
of course), not merely because of the loss of a classy address, but also
because when you have been using an address for some 20+ years, there is
no way you can tell everyone who has the old address what the new one
is. I’ve had my al...@ibgames.com mail address since the 1990s, the
number of people who have it probably runs into four figures by now.
Maybe even five figures if you count the spammers :)
There’s a lesson to be learned here, though I’m not sure what it is, or
what can be done about it!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/iet_to_axe_email_alias_service/
Homework:
Science Alert has published an interesting piece debunking brain myths,
including the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. As the article
points out, it would be a terrible idea to spend so much time and energy
growing a big brain if people only used a tenth of it. Perhaps they did
the original tests on professional politicians...
Then there is the idea that we only have five senses. Actually, we may
have anything up to 21 different senses. The exact number depends on
which neuroscientist you talk to. There’s also the idea that listening
to Mozart makes you smart. This is based on an experiment carried out in
the 1950s. Significantly, no one’s been able to replicate the experiment
in the 60 or so years since.
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-no-such-thing-as-being-right-or-left-brained-and-9-other-brain-myths-we-ve-all-heard?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1
Lets talk about blockchains. For those of you who don’t know,
blockchains are what makes e-currency, like Bitcoin, work. It’s a way of
allowing verified, public and anonymous transactions to take place
safely. Everyone agrees that blockchains have a great future ahead of
them. The problem is that no one is quite sure what those applications
will be, but some very very thoughtful people are thinking about it.
O’Reilly book publishers have recently published a piece about
blockchain applications that makes interesting reading if you would like
to know more. I rather enjoyed reading it.
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/blockchain-applications
And since I wrote that piece I came across a real application of a
blockchain to trace food provenance. The UK’s food safety watchdog has
recently completed a trial of the technology to trace a meat supply
chain. This could make it a lot easier to be sure that you are eating
what you thought that you bought!
https://www.ccn.com/uk-food-safety-watchdog-successfully-trials-blockchain-in-a-slaughterhouse/
[found via ADVFN crypto newsletter]
Geek Stuff:
Ever heard of the law of USB cables? No? Well it says that no matter how
many USB cables you get, you only ever have one good one! Neat. I
spotted this on the Hackaday site, which also has an interesting piece
on false positives and fatalities in self-driving cars.
https://hackaday.com/author/hexagon5un/
Bad news for space junkies hoping for a free ride to exoplanets. The
legendary EmDrive, reputed to provide a force without expelling any
matter, has finally been laid to rest by a researcher showing where
everyone else who tried it messed up. It really is impossible, and
Newton’s third law remains intact! Yet another perpetual motion machine
bites the dust!
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-emdrive-nasas-impossible-space-engine-really-is-impossible-cc1be93f9774
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/K-12/airplane/newton3.html
Pictures:
This week some rather nice pictures from NASA’s Apod archive – the road
to Mars, a northern summer’s night, and a pre-dawn rocket launch.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180709.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180707.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180704.html
Scanner:
A huge number of asteroids could be traced back to five destroyed worlds
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-huge-number-of-asteroids-could-be-traced-back-to-five-destroyed-worlds
Heatwave unveils ancient settlements in Wales
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-wales-44746447
Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/09/the_impact_of_the_open_workspace_on_human_collaboration/
A cracking crust may have turned Earth into a giant snowball
https://newatlas.com/plate-tectonics-snowball-earth/54519/
How the mysteries of the Vatican secret archives are being revealed by
artificial intelligence
http://www.openculture.com/2018/05/how-the-mysteries-of-the-vatican-secret-archives-are-being-revealed-by-artificial-intelligence.html
The Trolley Problem has been tested in ‘Real Life’ for the very first time
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-trolley-problem-tested-in-real-life-first-time-consequentialism-deontologist
Here’s what’s needed for self-flying taxis and delivery drones to really
take off
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-whats-needed-for-self-flying-taxis-and-delivery-drones-to-really-take-off/
Biometrics: Better than your mother’s maiden name. Good luck changing
your body if your info is stolen
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/17/the_eyes_have_it/
New antibiotic found in tobacco flowers tears into superbugs
https://newatlas.com/tobacco-plant-antibiotic/54665/
Coda:
A few issues ago I drew attention to the ruins of ancient civilisations
in Cambodia. If you do plan to head out that way to have a look at the
magnificent ruins, then it’s probably worth taking a peek at the 100
Best Things to do in Cambodia in the ‘Jen Reviews’ blog.
https://www.jenreviews.com/best-things-to-do-in-cambodia/#more-11514
Quote for the week:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard Feynman (Conclusion
on the Challenger space shuttle accident)
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
15 July 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 July 15, 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
RATS OF THE WEEK: CHEWED UP THE MONEY IN AN ATM
by Hazed
When an ATM in the Indian state of Assam stopped working, technicians
were sent to take a look at it. They opened it up and got a big
surprise… the money inside had been chewed up by rats.
Banknotes totalling to more than 1.2m rupees ($17,600) had been
shredded, and a dead rat was lying amongst the debris. See the source
link below for pictures.
Not all the money had been destroyed by rodents: the technicians managed
to salvage about 1.7m rupee
Police say that the rats probably got into the machine through a hole
used for wiring.
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44539862
PICTURES OF THE WEEK: ROSETTA IMAGES OF COMET 67-P
by Hazed
All of the high-resolution images that were taken by the Rosetta probe’s
mission to comet 67-P/ Churyumov-Gerasimenko, as well as the underlying
data, are now available in the European Space Agency archive.
The archive browser contains images of Rosetta’s final descent to the
comet’s surface, the Philae lander, and pictures captured by the
navigation camera.
Read about the new archive here:
https://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Science/Rosetta/Rosetta_image_archive_complete
then click through to the archive to see all of the images.
WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and
science news
by Alan Lenton
Well, here’s another issue of Winding Down, it’s perhaps a little longer
than I managed last week, and includes material on a newly discovered
sarcophagus, a problem with professional email addresses, brain myths,
blockchains, USB cables, the end of the fabled EmDrive, and some cool
pictures. The scanner section contains material on asteroids,
archaeological revelations from the heatwave in Wales, open plan
offices, snowball Earth, the Vatican secret archives, the trolley
problem, drones and flying taxis, biometrics problems, and a possible
new antibiotic.
I counted up, and while I was ill I still managed to save over a hundred
possible stories for Winding Down. Even removing the ones that are pure
news (e.g. Congress discusses copyright extension) there’s still a lot
left. So for this and the next few issues I will be including some of
those stories in the Scanner section. That means that instead of the
usual half dozen stories in the section there will be nine or ten.
Finally, there is a quote from physicist Richard Feynman.
Shorts:
A massive Egyptian sarcophagus has been found in Alexandria (the
Alexandria in Egypt, not the one in Virginia, US of A). To add to the
mystery it’s BLACK. It was closed 2,000 years ago, and hasn’t been
opened since. Obviously the thing to do is to take it off to a museum
and open it. The problem is that it is 15 feet underground and weighs
something in the region of 30+ tons. That’s because it’s made of BLACK
marble.
Of course, all right thinking film buffs know that opening such a
sarcophagus is, to say the least, unwise. Especially a BLACK one! I, of
course, felt compelled to dig out my DVD of ‘The Mummy’ to warn you all
of the likely consequences: vile curses, man eating beetles (at least
they didn’t eat the heroine in the movie), long dead ambulatory mummies
and more. The good news is that opening it doesn’t seem to awaken Cthulu...
I wonder what would happen if you trod on the end of one of the mummy’s
loose bandages?
https://www.sciencealert.com/huge-mystery-sarcophagus-unearthed-in-egypt-alexandria
https://www.sciencealert.com/lets-just-open-the-black-creepy-2000-year-old-egyptian-sarcophagus
Oh dear! The UK’s Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) was
formed by merging the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) and the
Institution of Incorporated Engineers (IIE). Now, it just happened that
the IEE had since 1996 allowed its members to have iee.org email
addresses, which many of them used for business purposes. There is,
after all, a lot of cachet in that sort of professional address.
However, for technical reasons the IET is now closing down the address,
resulting in howls of dismay (discrete and proper business-like, howls,
of course), not merely because of the loss of a classy address, but also
because when you have been using an address for some 20+ years, there is
no way you can tell everyone who has the old address what the new one
is. I’ve had my al...@ibgames.com mail address since the 1990s, the
number of people who have it probably runs into four figures by now.
Maybe even five figures if you count the spammers :)
There’s a lesson to be learned here, though I’m not sure what it is, or
what can be done about it!
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/10/iet_to_axe_email_alias_service/
Homework:
Science Alert has published an interesting piece debunking brain myths,
including the idea that we only use 10% of our brain. As the article
points out, it would be a terrible idea to spend so much time and energy
growing a big brain if people only used a tenth of it. Perhaps they did
the original tests on professional politicians...
Then there is the idea that we only have five senses. Actually, we may
have anything up to 21 different senses. The exact number depends on
which neuroscientist you talk to. There’s also the idea that listening
to Mozart makes you smart. This is based on an experiment carried out in
the 1950s. Significantly, no one’s been able to replicate the experiment
in the 60 or so years since.
https://www.sciencealert.com/there-s-no-such-thing-as-being-right-or-left-brained-and-9-other-brain-myths-we-ve-all-heard?perpetual=yes&limitstart=1
Lets talk about blockchains. For those of you who don’t know,
blockchains are what makes e-currency, like Bitcoin, work. It’s a way of
allowing verified, public and anonymous transactions to take place
safely. Everyone agrees that blockchains have a great future ahead of
them. The problem is that no one is quite sure what those applications
will be, but some very very thoughtful people are thinking about it.
O’Reilly book publishers have recently published a piece about
blockchain applications that makes interesting reading if you would like
to know more. I rather enjoyed reading it.
https://www.oreilly.com/ideas/blockchain-applications
And since I wrote that piece I came across a real application of a
blockchain to trace food provenance. The UK’s food safety watchdog has
recently completed a trial of the technology to trace a meat supply
chain. This could make it a lot easier to be sure that you are eating
what you thought that you bought!
https://www.ccn.com/uk-food-safety-watchdog-successfully-trials-blockchain-in-a-slaughterhouse/
[found via ADVFN crypto newsletter]
Geek Stuff:
Ever heard of the law of USB cables? No? Well it says that no matter how
many USB cables you get, you only ever have one good one! Neat. I
spotted this on the Hackaday site, which also has an interesting piece
on false positives and fatalities in self-driving cars.
https://hackaday.com/author/hexagon5un/
Bad news for space junkies hoping for a free ride to exoplanets. The
legendary EmDrive, reputed to provide a force without expelling any
matter, has finally been laid to rest by a researcher showing where
everyone else who tried it messed up. It really is impossible, and
Newton’s third law remains intact! Yet another perpetual motion machine
bites the dust!
https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/the-emdrive-nasas-impossible-space-engine-really-is-impossible-cc1be93f9774
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/K-12/airplane/newton3.html
Pictures:
This week some rather nice pictures from NASA’s Apod archive – the road
to Mars, a northern summer’s night, and a pre-dawn rocket launch.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180709.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180707.html
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap180704.html
Scanner:
A huge number of asteroids could be traced back to five destroyed worlds
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-huge-number-of-asteroids-could-be-traced-back-to-five-destroyed-worlds
Heatwave unveils ancient settlements in Wales
https://www.bbc.com/news/amp/uk-wales-44746447
Open plan offices flop – you talk less, IM more, if forced to flee a cubicle
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/09/the_impact_of_the_open_workspace_on_human_collaboration/
A cracking crust may have turned Earth into a giant snowball
https://newatlas.com/plate-tectonics-snowball-earth/54519/
How the mysteries of the Vatican secret archives are being revealed by
artificial intelligence
http://www.openculture.com/2018/05/how-the-mysteries-of-the-vatican-secret-archives-are-being-revealed-by-artificial-intelligence.html
The Trolley Problem has been tested in ‘Real Life’ for the very first time
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-trolley-problem-tested-in-real-life-first-time-consequentialism-deontologist
Here’s what’s needed for self-flying taxis and delivery drones to really
take off
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heres-whats-needed-for-self-flying-taxis-and-delivery-drones-to-really-take-off/
Biometrics: Better than your mother’s maiden name. Good luck changing
your body if your info is stolen
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/17/the_eyes_have_it/
New antibiotic found in tobacco flowers tears into superbugs
https://newatlas.com/tobacco-plant-antibiotic/54665/
Coda:
A few issues ago I drew attention to the ruins of ancient civilisations
in Cambodia. If you do plan to head out that way to have a look at the
magnificent ruins, then it’s probably worth taking a peek at the 100
Best Things to do in Cambodia in the ‘Jen Reviews’ blog.
https://www.jenreviews.com/best-things-to-do-in-cambodia/#more-11514
Quote for the week:
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public
relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard Feynman (Conclusion
on the Challenger space shuttle accident)
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
15 July 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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