Technology – Page 51 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Me and Patrick talk television

Personally I thought that the recorded chat that Patrick Crozier and I did about World War 1 was better, because Patrick is an expert on that event and its times, its causes and its consequences.

Here, for whatever it may be worth, is the rather more rambling and disjointed conversation that we had more recently on the subject of television: Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, and Part VII. But, as of now, it’s a lot simpler to crank up the entire site and scroll up and down.

I’m afraid I did well over half of the talking, so cannot be objective about whether all or any of this is worth your attention. I hope Patrick is right about the worthwhileness of this conversational effort, and that if you do listen, you enjoy.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

The great Classical CD Holocaust of December 2017: The struggle continues

Bad news: water continues to drip from my kitchen ceiling. Good news: I have contrived a way to divert it onto my draining board, using the lid of one of those big transparent plastic boxes, upside down so working as a shallow water capturer, with a hole drilled into it to let the water out, this side of the shelves below, all now evacuated of course. This means that I don’t have to get up every hour of the night to empty a bucket. The water finds its way to my sink automatically. Good.

Two further bits of good news. Good, relatively speaking. Good compared to how things might have been.

One, it turns out that the paper they use to print the sleeve notes of CDs doesn’t stick to itself when wet. It does stick, a bit, to plastic. But not to another bit of paper similarly soaked. This is good news, and will significantly reduce the total damage compared to what I had feared. This was why I said “Bugger” yesterday. Unbugger.

Two, it turns out that the guy living above me, who I had supposed to be the guilty party in this, what with him finding a dodgy-looking connection in the pipe attached to his washing machine, is another victim of this atrocity, rather than its perpetrator and perpetuator. So, instead of being on my own in a fight with my neighbour directly above me, he is an ally in a battle we are both now fighting with whoever, above the both of us, is responsible for this crime against humanity. Since he is an assertive, capable, early-middle-aged, educated Scotsman, I’m very glad indeed that he is on my side rather than my potential adversary.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

New kinds of transport on newly created surfaces

This Is Why I’m Broke has recently featured a couple of new travelling things to stand on. There was the Exodeck Off-Road Skateboard:

And there were these Chariot Skates:

I realise that the Exodeck Off-Road Skateboard supposedly doesn’t need any sort of artificial surface to travel on. But, I bet a flat surface is easier. And of course a flat surface is very necessary indeed for the Chariot Skates.

And, it just so happens, there is an absolute mania for new flat surfaces sweeping across the world, in the guise of dedicated cycle tracks and newly expanded pedestrian areas. The war against the automobile continues apace, and the result will be not mere walking or cycling, but lots of new kinds of mobility, like the two pictured above.

Whenever I encounter devices of this sort in London, which I do more and more often, I try to photo them. Not always very successfully, to put it mildly. Often they’re gone before I’ve even put down my shopping, but sometimes: not. Sadly, a quick search for such a photo yielded nothing, but next time I bump into one in my archives, I’ll do another posting on this subject.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Camera not conked out – I just pressed the wrong knob by mistake

My camera is pretty good, but it isn’t ideal for me. I only use a bit of it at all regularly, the automatic bit. So if, on a rainy day, I push, by mistake, some stupid knob on it that tells it to stop being automatic, it stops being automatic. And, the automatic focussing refuses to work the way it should. That’s what happened when I thought it had conked out. It’s fine. It was simply obeying orders.

I tried photoing the relevant knobs, first with mirrors and then with my mobile, but the results of all that were a blurry mess. Have you ever tried getting a camera to photo its own arse? And photoing with my mobile is something I need daylight to do half decently.

I got a much better picture of the back of my camera by going to this.

In particular, I draw your attention to this bit:

The knob with AF/AE LOCK on it needs to be pointing at AFS/AFF, and absolutely not at MF. MF means, I presume, Manual Focus. AF means automatic focus. S and the other F mean whatever they mean.

The problem arose when, in the rain and needing to possess three hands, one to hold my bag and two to operate my camera properly, I try to look at the photo I just took. That involves pressing the button with the green arrow on it. To get back to photoing, press DISP. But, what with all the rain and the confusion and only having one hand to both hold the camera and press the knobs on it, I accidentally pushed the AF/AE LOCK knob, and got it pointing at MF. By mistake. I’m guessing this would be why the AF/AE LOCK button includes the word “LOCK”. And this works a treat. I know this now.

Anyway, the upshot (metaphorically speaking) of all this is that my camera went from photos like this, just before I met up with GD2 the day before yesterday …:

… to this, not long after that, after the knob disaster had occurred …:

… and then back to this:

… when I met up with a friend yesterday, in: Hither Green.

So, panic over.

It’s an odd feeling, partially the feeling of massive relief that I won’t have to spend Christmas trying to turn whatever guarantee came with my camera into another camera, and partially the feeling that I am an idiot and that I should pay more attention to the knobs on my camera. Delight and embarrassment all mixed up together.

This is what Americans would call a “learning experience”, and although often all that this means is “total cock-up”, in this particular case they would be right.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Googling for new planets

Incoming from Rob Fisher: link to a piece in the Independent, about machine learning applied to old telescope data is finding new planets.

Quote:

A computer was trained to look through the data from the Kepler space telescope, and look for signals that might belong to planets. And it found new planets within existing systems, by spotting signals that seemed to indicate something of interest but were too weak to have been spotted by humans.

That suggests that there might be whole worlds and solar systems hiding within the data we’ve already collected, but which we had not noticed because there are simply so many signals to pick through. Kepler has collected four-years of data from looking at the sky and 150,000 stars – far more than humans could ever look through.

So, exactly what were these weak signals?

The new planets – just like all of the thousands found by Kepler – were spotted by watching the sky for light coming from the stars. When planets pass in front of their stars, scientists can register the dimming as they go, and use the speed and characteristics of that dimming to work out what the solar system might actually look like.

Much of that work relies on pattern recognition, which until now has been done by scientists looking through the data. But the new findings are the result of work between Nasa and Google, which trained machine learning algorithms to learn to spot those patterns itself and so pick through the data much more quickly.

This is good. Keep Skynet busy with harmless hobbies.

Maybe not. Getting Skynet to compile a huge and exhaustive list of all the places in the universe where biology-based life might be, after biology-based life on this planet has been taken care of.

This is maybe how the robot holocaust will happen. We will have been telling them to “take care of” us and our fellow creatures. But they’ll have been watching too many gangster movies, and …

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Tweel

It’s been around for a while, but thanks to This Is Why I’m Broke, I have now heard about it. Rubber(-ish) tyres which don’t need inflating, and which therefore don’t suffer from punctures:

An idea first conceived by Michelin research engineers in the United States, the TWEEL is a revolutionary non-pneumatic tire that changed the configuration of a conventional tire, bringing together the tire and the wheel assembly into one solid unit. The TWEEL comprises a rigid hub connected to a shear beam by means of flexible, deformable polyurethane spokes, all functioning as a single unit.

Unlike conventional tires, the TWEEL has no air, thereby solving what had seemed to be the unavoidable challenge of chronic flat tires that plagues the landscape, construction, contracting, refuse/recycling and agricultural industries.

Yes, at present the Tweel would seem to be confined to heavy duty activities of the sort described about, where spikey and scratchy things are constantly encountered, and where even a short amount of time is a lot of money. On regular, smooth roads, the Tweel does not now make sense.

But, I wonder what effect the switch to robot road vehicles might have. Might that, in some hard-to-foresee way, create an increased demand for the Tweel? If there is one thing we can be sure of, it is that we cannot now be sure exactly what robot vehicles are going to look like, and exactly how they will go about their business. Will robot cars welcome the greater variety of terrains that Tweels would presumably make possible? Might it be better for the robot cars to have wheels that are unpuncturable, given that those wheels would no longer be guarded by human drivers? Who now knows?

More generally, it looks to me like further Tweel developments depend on improved materials, and improved materials is now something the world does very well. Simply, Tweels may become better and cheaper. That alone might cause them to replace what I am now inclined to call balloon-based wheels. But what do I know?

What I do now know is that the Tweel impresses me greatly.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A big panda (with stars in its eyes) at Victoria Station

Seeing a how this is Friday, and Friday is my day here for cats and other creatures, I don’t want to just leave it at train seats. I have an Other Creature to show to you, that I photoed earlier this evening. This was at Victoria Station, so this is also train related.

The Other Creature was, I am almost certain, a panda:

A few moments after the moment captured above, I actually asked this guy if he’d object to me photoing his panda. I said “bear”, but it didn’t matter. Not him, I said, just the bear. He was fine with this, so I took another photo, of the panda. But the above photo was better, if only because in it, the railway connection is better communicated.

And yes, the panda has stars in its eyes. How about that?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Cantilevered Thameslink seats

My journey to St Albans yesterday began rather inauspiciously. I was changing at St Pancras International, and I had hoped that I might get the chance to view the International bit, with its wide open spaces, Eurostar trains and its mighty roof. But all I did was follow the signs to “Platform B”, and that weary plod might has well have been at Green Park or Oxford Circus, for all the wide-open-spaced drama there was to be seen. And then when I was on the train, the scene outside was grim, grey and wet.

But then, I noticed the seats. The surprising thing about these was that instead of resting on the floor of the carriage, they were attached to the walls of the carriage, leaving the floor entirely unencumbered. They hovered over that floor with very little visible means of support:

Here are two closer-ups, showing the diagonal compression member that was doing all the worke:

It looked crazy, but it felt as solid as a rock. Solider in fact, when you consider the state of a lot of rocks you encounter on your travels.

What I think I see here is not so much a design for a railway carriage, as a design of a system for making railway carriages, just the way you want them. And for changing them, if you suddenly decide you want them to be different. If you wanted to redo the seating on these carriages, all you would do is undo the linear compartment at the point where the wall of the carriage nears the floor of the carriage, and make whatever changes you want. Different seats, differently spaced, whatever. The floor is untouched. If you want to change the surface of the floor, easy. When it comes to cleaning the floor, also easy.

I have a nostalgic fondness for the railway carriages of my youth, with their absurdly thick, manually operated doors, that you had to slam shut, and which all had to be shut before the train could depart. But whereas I genuinely like old cars, I cannot really mourn those old carriages. These new ones are just so much better. For starters, they are wider on the inside by about two feet, because the walls are so much thinner and because these walls curve outwards.

I also like how the latest carriages join together in a way that allows people to walk continuously through, thereby easing congestion at busy times. Here’s a rather good photo from Wikipedia which shows that. According to Wikipedia there have been complaints about there being too little leg room between the seats, and no miniature fold-down tables.

They have their reasons for imposing such discomforts. Basically, they want to enable the maximum number of commuters to be able to travel in okay comfort, rather than allow a lesser number of commuters to travel in greater comfort. Which makes sense.

My point is different. My point is that if it is later decided, perhaps in response to such grumbles, to switch to having slightly more generously spaced seats, with little fold-down tables, this would be a relatively easy operation to unleash. Newly introduced carriages could be differently configured with great ease, without needing a totally new design.

There is much to complain about in the modern world, but stuff like this just gets cleverer and cleverer.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Vinyl Empire

Indeed:

Opened in 2013. Still very much open 2017:

Photos by me this afternoon, in St Albans. Thanks to Darren and family for the hospitality.

LATER: Another blast from the past:

I remember liking that one a lot.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Shazam for art

I am trying once again to clear open windows from my computer. Two days ago I referred to something very interesting that had been hanging around for some time on my computer screen. I am now doing this again.

This photo explains it pretty well:

This appeared at Dezeen early in October, and I’ve been meaning to mention it hear ever since.

You want more? Here you go:

An app has launched that allows users to instantly identify artworks and access information about them, by simply scanning them with a smartphone.

Smartify launched at the Royal Academy of Arts in London last week. It has been described by its creators as “a Shazam for the art world”, because – like the app that can identify any music track – it can reveal the title and artist of thousands of artworks.

It does so by cross-referencing them with a vast database that the company is constantly updating.

There was a time when art galleries and museums would try to stop you taking photos, but those days are pretty much gone. It was the smartphoners what done this, because there are just too many of them to stop with their photoing, and anyway this can’t be done because you can never really tell whether they are taking photos or whether they are just doing social media with their mates or catching up on their emails. This app will end this argument for ever. People are just not going to tolerate being told that they mustn’t use this in an art gallery, and if they do use it, its use will look exactly like they are photoing. The key to stopping photoing is that you have to know when it is happening.