WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week’s net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Well... We managed to drag out a few bits and pieces of tech-ish news for you this week. For starters there’s a US Navy laser cannon, drones, drones and more drones, the Sony hack, the Milky Way, Einstein’s papers, brain training, a selection of gadgets, and stuff on London. Just the one set of URLs – chronicling the rise and fall of ICAAN’s latest wheeze to grab power over the internet.
I may do an issue next Sunday (20 December), it depends on whether anything worth discussing happens this coming week. Frankly, on the basis of past experience, I doubt there will be. However, politicians have been known to try to slip in bad news while the population is inebriated... We shall see. Either way, I will then be off over the Christmas and New Year period, taking a well-earned break, and programming a few of my own projects. With any luck Winding Down will re-emerge, refreshed, dynamic, and revitalized on 11 January 2015.
And now for what may be the last issue of 2014... (or then again, it may not...)
Shorts:
I see that the US Navy finally has a working laser cannon installed on one of its ships, the USS Ponce, which has a 30-kilowatt laser installed. The ship is being deployed to a combat zone. Judging from the video I saw of its use, It still has a lot of development to do before it can function as a last ditch defence weapon.
However, I can see that for relatively slow moving targets like, say, a boat full of Somali pirates, it could be a pretty useful piece of kit!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/11/us_navy_deploys_poncey_laser_cannon_
ship_to_persian_gulf_war_zone/
Drones are becoming cheaper and more reliable – and flying them is becoming more dangerous, at least for other people. The latest thing to come to light is a near miss when a drone came within 20 feet of a plane landing at Heathrow airport last July. Had the drone been sucked into an engine, it could have easily caused a crash, according to a report just issued.
Unfortunately, the person operating the drone has not been found (not for lack of trying). What it will do, though, is to move us closer to a system of registration and probably licensing for drones and their operators. It’s not as though drones are likely to get more expensive in the future. Quite to the contrary, as the technology matures and they become commodities, drones are likely to become much cheaper, and so proliferate.
Ah well, it was nice while it lasted.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-30446136
And, in the meantime, here are some truly stunning pictures taken by drones in the last year.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30415475
The Sony hack, which I’m sure you’ve all read about in the national press, is a classic case of executive arrogance overriding sensible administrator security. We’ve all come across it at work. Bosses with no self-discipline who believe that the rules don’t apply to them, and insist on privileges that destroy the security of the company network.
Well now everyone can see the price with the Sony hack. Will it make any difference? Of course not. The sort of people who let in the hackers at Sony are much too arrogant to believe it can happen to them. However, they may well be forced to start taking notice when the insurers start refusing to pay out for the damage if it is self-inflicted...
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/03/business/media/sony-is-again-target-of-hackers.html
http://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/it-gets-worse-the-newest-sony-data-breach-exposes-thousands
Homework:
How much do you know about the galaxy the Sun is in, the Milky Way? Probably not as much as you think. For a start it’s actually warped, not flat! That seems to have been caused by our galaxy’s nearest neighbours – the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. PhysOrg has an interesting piece about the Milky Way, which you might like to take the time to look through. There’s material in it I didn’t know, and I took an astronomy course while I was at university...
http://phys.org/news/2014-12-facts-milky.html
Relatively good news for physicists this week. The first thirteen volumes of Albert Einstein’s papers have been published on line, and more are to come. They’re in German, but translations are available for the teutonically challenged. Well done Princeton university.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/06/albert_einstein_digital_papers_princeton/
Bad news for those trying to make themselves smarter with these various ‘brain training’ gimmicks you find online. It doesn’t work. Scientific American has an interesting report on research in this field, which makes it clear that there is no evidence of significant improvement from such schemes. On the other hand reading the article might make you smarter!
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/brain-training-doesn-t-make-you-smarter/
Gadgets:
Traditionally, this is the time of the year when all the really great gadgets come out, but to be honest I haven’t been overly impressed by the selection this year. There were a few that took my fancy, though. Some you can buy as a present for yourself (or your significant geek), others you’ll have to wait for the commercial version.
It may have something to do with the fact that we are struggling at work to get some decent video frame rates on household grade computers, but a claim by researchers at Washington University in St Louis caught my eye. It seems they’ve built a 2D camera that can capture images at a rate of 100 billion frames a second. Neat! Though I wonder how they store images taken at that rate?
http://www.gizmag.com/fastest-2d-camera-100billion-fps/35058/
Something else that’s in the works – maybe ready for next Christmas – is touchable holograms. Developed by researchers at Bristol University, they use ultrasound to create a feel to go with the hologram. Apparently they do it by finding eigenvectors and solving a regularized system. So now you know!
http://www.techienews.co.uk/9721076/bristol-university-researchers-develops-new-technology-lets-people-see-feel-holograms/
Scientific American has its own gadget guide – gadgets for mobile devices, as it happens. My favourite? OM Audio’s ONE levitating Bluetooth speaker. This sinister black orb is cool, very cool. And an honourable mention for the biker’s head up display. I could really have used one of those in my younger days when I rode a motorbike.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientific-american-s-2014-gadget-guide-10-technologies-that-boost-mobile-devices/
Another gadget you will have to wait a while for is the Berkeley Lab Laser Accelerator (aka BELLA), a table top particle accelerator. OK, it’s not as powerful as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, but you don’t need a tunnel 17 miles in diameter to run this little baby. A must for any budding sub-atomic particle scientist.
http://www.gizmag.com/berkely-world-record-compact-particle-accelerator/35118/
Perhaps you’d like something a little lighter? How about a palm sized drone? Unfortunately, you won’t be able to get one for Christmas, but there is already a prototype flying around. It’s designed and built by a team at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, and they already demonstrated the prototype on television, so maybe we will be able to buy one next year.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-30430473
Finally, here is something that really took my fancy – a Samurai Umbrella. Yes, I know, I have a warped sense of humour, but it is a true classic – just take a look!
http://www.firebox.com/product/2616/Samurai-Umbrella
By the way, did you know that Christmas was first celebrated in AD336?
http://www.christianity.com/church/church-history/timeline/301-600/the-1st-recorded-celebration-of-christmas-11629658.html
London:
Three thing for you to look at on London this week, especially if you happen to be visiting London for Christmas. The first is a site called Exploring 20th Century London. A lot of the London you see now was built in the 20th Century. Most of the suburbs were built in the 1920s and 1930s as a result of the expansion of the tube (subway to my American readers) system. Indeed the territory around the Metropolitan Line was known colloquially as Metroland.
The Second World War saw something in the region of a third of the inner city’s housing stock destroyed. That had to be rebuilt (I can still remember seeing bomb sites – gaps in lines of terraced (row) houses – as late as the 1960s when I visited London). The good thing that came out of that was that the rebuilding revealed a lot of London’s archaeological heritage.
http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/
And talking of heritage, London, of course is quite an old city, as surviving cities go. So here is a tube map with a difference. Instead of the standard station names, the stations are marked with the names of the villages and features that took there in medieval time – fascinating.
http://londonist.com/2014/12/the-medieval-tube-map.php
And finally, we go bang up to date with a bunch of pictures of the tunnelling for the new underground Crossrail project, all of which look pretty amazing!
http://www.london24.com/news/transport/16_amazing_photos_of_crossrail_s_mind_
boggling_tunnels_under_london_1_3879175
Scanner: Internet governance shambles:
US govt tells ICANN: No accountability, no keys to the internet
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05/us_government_tells_icann_no_accountability_no_iana/
Internet RFC overseer snubs ICANN and co’s web power grab offer
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05/iab_says_no_to_netmundial_initiative/
Double hammer blow to ICANN and pals’ internet power grab bid
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/03/icc_rejects_netmundial_initative/
Global Commission on Internet Governance wobbles into IANA debate
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/27/gcig_wobbles_into_iana/
US Congress in cash freeze bid to DERAIL global DNS handover
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/10/congress_attempts_to_disrupt_iana_
transition_by_withholding_money/
Acknowledgements
Thanks to readers Barb and Fi for drawing my attention to material for Winding Down.
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
14 December 2014
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/index.html.
Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.net/alan/winding/index.html.
