Winding Down
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
8 December 2024
Welcome to this fortnight’s edition of the Winding Down newsletter.
We start with a piece about statistics in the UK, and information about how the government’s statistics body holds regular free webinars to explain the numbers it researches. Moving on, but in the same genre we take a look at the word of the year. Actually it’s a two word phrase, but who’s counting!
Continuing, we look at the terrifying dangers of cuddling up to your hot water bottle (yes really!). And finally, sticking with the word ‘hot’ we have a report on mysterious hotspots around the world appearing at the ‘wrong’ places...
The quote is from the British physicist Ernest Rutherford, and there are pictures of London’s Christmas lights taken from a helicopter (really cool!), and a selection of images of Jupiter from NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
The scanner section contains URLs that point to material on the UK assisted dying bill, the sustainable Christmas tree debate, Microsoft Windows 11 still struggling, UK local councils and their software, vasectomy appointments on the increase in the USA, digital transformation, the Milky way being an ‘outlier’ of its galaxy type, and finally 3D printed housing.
That’s it, normally, but as I was typing this up, news came in about the assassination of the CEO of the USA’s biggest healthcare platform, UnitedHealthcare, so I’ve included that as a coda to this fortnight’s issue.
Oh! No it’s not. I nearly forgot. As it happens, Christmas falls conveniently this year. So, the next issue will be on 22 December, and the first issue of 2025 will be on 5 January...
Enjoy!
Alan Lenton
Exploring health by numbers
It seems to me that nearly every other email news letter I get nowadays has a section bemoaning the ‘Health of the Nation’. (That’s the UK nation, by the way.) It seems we are simultaneously too fat, too thin, drink too much, we smoke in spite of all the warnings about its hazards and tend to lead potentially unhealthy lives.
I’ve often wondered where these depressing numbers come from, so a few months ago I subscribed to the newsletter of the UK government’s ‘Office for National Statistics’...
Wow! It seems they have free webinars to talk about where all these numbers can be discussed and questions answered – just point your browser at the URL and book your web attendance to the last one of this year!
https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2024/12/05/bringing-data-to-life-get-a-healthy-dose-of-data-in-our-final-webinar-of-2024/
‘Brain Rot,’ the scourge of the chronically online, becomes Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year
Ah yes – after statistics the obvious next thing to talk about is ‘brain rot’. Never heard of it before? Neither had I, until I discovered that it is The Oxford English Dictionary’s 2024 word of the year. The definition is, “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/brain-rot-the-scourge-of-the-chronically-online-becomes-oxfords-2024-word-of-year-180985560/
The risk of using hot water bottles for warmth
Did you know you can suffer from ‘Toasted Skin Syndrome’ if you cuddle up to your hot water bottle? No? Neither did I. In fact I originally thought it was some sort of spoof. But apparently there were 5,944 burn injuries from hot water bottles in the UK between 2014 and 2023. Toasted Skin Syndrome even has a medical name ‘erythema ab igne’. You have been warned...
https://www.sciencealert.com/toasted-skin-syndrome-just-one-risk-of-using-hot-water-bottles-for-warmth
Unexplained heat-wave ‘hotspots’ are popping up across the globe
And while we are on the subject of warmth, the climate scientists are seemingly finding unexplained ‘hotspots’ around the globe. It’s not the hotspots per se that are the problem, global warming made them inevitable. No, it’s the fact that the spots are appearing in places where they weren’t predicted, and not appearing in places where they were predicted.
I guess the model of global warming currently in use need a little more refinement. Hopefully, climate scientists are up to the task!
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-unexplained-hotspots-globe.html
Quotes worth remembering:
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”
Ernest Rutherford, English Physicist
Pictures:
London’s festive lights from above – in pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/gallery/2024/dec/03/london-festive-lights-from-above-in-pictures
Check out the stunning new images of Jupiter
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/check-out-the-stunning-new-images-of-jupiter-from-nasas-juno-spacecraft-180985417/
Scanner:
How every UK MP voted on the assisted dying bill
https://www.politics.co.uk/news/2024/11/29/how-every-mp-voted-on-the-assisted-dying-bill/
Real vs fake: The sustainable Christmas tree debate
https://phys.org/news/2024-12-real-fake-sustainable-christmas-tree.html
Windows 11 market share falls despite Microsoft ad blitz
https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/02/windows_11_market_share/
UK local councils struggle with ill-fitting software despite spending billions with suppliers
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/05/local_council_tech_struggles/
Vasectomy appointments see ‘unprecedented’ increase in take-up after the 2024 US election results
https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/11/25/vasectomy-appointments-unprecedented-increase/
Why digital transformation happens to you – iterate every day or face the consequences
https://lizlutgendorff.substack.com/p/why-digital-transformation-happens
The Milky Way represents an outlier among similar galaxies, universe survey data shows
https://phys.org/news/2024-11-milky-outlier-similar-galaxies-universe.html
The 3D-Printed Affordable Housing of the Future Will Be Recyclable [but I suspect most people will want to know if it can catch fire! – AL]
https://reasonstobecheerful.world/future-affordable-housing-3d-printed-recyclable/
Coda:
As I finish this fortnight’s newsletter word is just coming in about the killing of the CEO of the USA’s United Healthcare. The healthcare system in the USA is very different from those in Europe, and that represents the different decisions made at the end of World War II. In the UK the money available was used to set up the National Health Service, in the USA the equivalent money was used to pay out a bonus to servicemen big enough to set up a small local business.
The result is what we see today. A serious crisis in the public health services of the Western Nations, though the crisis in the US version dwarfs that here in the UK. None of the countries around the world are going to solve the problems besetting their health systems easily, or cheaply, but it needs to be done if we want to maintain a healthy society.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm2eeeep0npo
Footnote:
Please send suggestions for stories to alan@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
alan@ibgames.com
8 December 2024
Alan Lenton is a retired on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist (among other things), the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.com/alan/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.com/alan/winding/index.html.
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