WINDING DOWN
An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology and science news
by Alan Lenton
Hmmm... It’s exactly a month since the last Winding Down – long enough that you probably forgot that you had a subscription to it! I guess I owe an explanation, since it wasn’t intended to be so long. As I mentioned in the last newsletter, we have spent the last month packing, moving, and unpacking. Indeed, the unpacking is still going on. Our new apartment is on the ground floor (first floor to my US readers), and overall is larger than the old apartment. It also has a real garden, with a shed – a very large shed. However, the extra space is not evenly divided. In particular the kitchen and storage spaces are much smaller. The net result of this is that I am still surrounded by boxes whose contents are going to need considerable ingenuity to pack away!
This Winding Down is consequently fairly short – my computer was not connected to the internet for a week – there were nearly three and a half thousand emails waiting for me when I finally got connected! For this version I picked up a few things I thought might be of interest from the last month, but it’s not quite as bang up to date as usual. Still, as outstanding things get fixed you can expect normal service to be resumed.
For Federation 2 players, I’m afraid it’s going to be at least another couple of weeks before I’m going to be able to sit down to serious programming, but top of the list is final tweaking and turning live the fighting code. Then there are a couple of reported, but unrelated (I hope) problems, which need looking at and fixing.
So here is this week’s short, but finally here, edition of Winding Down with material on hot stuff at Fukishima, sixteen years of the Wikipedia, one bookcase to rule them all, and a lava ‘fire hose’. The URLs in the Scanner section point you to pieces on better street lights, Yahoo security, cross-browser fingerprinting, stolen health record databases on sale – a snip at half a million US dollars, protecting Zuckerberg, and what life might be like in the recently discovered TRAPPIST-1 system. Have fun!
Shorts:
I don’t want to worry readers, but the situation at the wrecked Japanese Fukushima nuclear reactor (the one that got hit by an earthquake and a tsunami in 2011) is not getting any better. Indeed it seems to be worse that it was previously. A new radiation reading taken early last month registered 530 sieverts per hour, compared to the previous high of 73 sieverts per hour.
Now, I’m no medical expert, but when I tried looking up info on sieverts, two things stood out. First that most of the discussion was about how many milli-sieverts (thousandths of a sievert) were dangerous because of biological damage. And second that the maximum allowed dose for NASA astronauts over the entire span of their career is one (yes, one) sievert.
So, the readings now registered are pretty scary. One possible explanation could be that they are now getting near to the fuel rods. Not many people realise, that even now, six year after the disaster involving three reactors melting down, no trace of the reactor nuclear fuel rods has ever been found...
http://www.sciencealert.com/radiation-levels-in-the-fukushima-reactor-have-started-unexpectedly-climbing
http://www.cringely.com/2017/02/16/no-fracking-way-fukushima-daiichi-worse-ever/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sievert
Homework:
This January the Wikipedia was 16 years old. There’s no doubt that it’s done a lot of good. But not everything it has done is good, so I thought I’d share a piece from The Register about some of the more spectacular failures of that period. And while you are sniggering and feeling superior, it might be worth asking yourself whether, overall, you could have done better.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/16/wikipedia_16_birthday_fails/
Geek Stuff:
I bet when someone says ‘technical innovation’ you think of flashy, hi-tech gadgetry. Actually, many really important breakthroughs – like the device that locks shipping containers together, allowing masses of containers to be transported on a single ship – are far from high tech.
As I write this, I’m surrounded by Ikea ‘Billy’ bookcases. Apparently there is a Billy bookcase for every 100 people in the world, and Bloomberg uses them to compare purchasing power in different countries (US$100 plus in Egypt, less than US$40 in Slovakia).
Why are they so ubiquitous? Because they are cheap, but that cheapness is achieved without cutting quality. That cheapness is provided by tiny incremental innovations in the design and production of the bookcases – bringing them rolling off the line at a rate of one every three seconds! Have a look at what the BBC put together about the process.
And while you do that, I have two glass fronted Billy bookcases to assemble to hold my Belgian beer glass collection!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38747485
Pictures:
We return to publication with not just one picture for you, but a whole slew of them, and some videos to boot! It’s the Hawaiian volcano ‘fire hose’ and its collapse. Kilauea volcano had for a while been pouring out a fast moving stream of lava into the sea, but last month a chunk of the volcano fell in and the fire hose effect ended. It made for some amazing still shots and videos though. Take a look!
http://www.theverge.com/2017/2/4/14510106/hawaiian-volcano-created-spectacular-firehose-lava-collapsed
Scanner:
New LED array builds a better street light
http://newatlas.com/kit-led-array-efficient-street-lights/47850/
Yahoo dysfunction meant security warnings were ignored!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/02/yahoo_internal_hack_investigation_is_
daming_marissa_mayer_loses/
High-Tech, cross-browser fingerprinting
http://www.i-programmer.info/news/86/10562.html
Stolen health record databases sell for $500,000 in the Deep Web
http://www.darkreading.com/attacks-breaches/stolen-health-record-databases-sell-for-$500000-in-the-deep-web/d/d-id/1328225
Why does it cost 20 times as much to protect Mark Zuckerberg as Tim Cook?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/02/06/why_does_it_cost_20_times_as_much_
to_protect_mark_zuckerberg_as_tim_cook/
What could life be like in the TRAPPIST-1 system?
http://newatlas.com/one-big-question-trappist-life/48087/
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
5 March 2017
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.
