Lovely spoof, based on my favourite movie.
Springs eternal
Gone fishin’?
Street scene, Cambridge, February 2016.
Weathered
Going Dark? Dream on.
This morning’s Observer column:
The Apple v FBI standoff continues to generate more heat than light, with both sides putting their case to “the court of public opinion” — which, in this case, is at best premature and at worst daft. Apple has just responded to the court injunction obliging it to help the government unlock the iPhone used by one of the San Bernadino killers with a barrage of legal arguments involving the first and fifth amendments to the US constitution. Because the law in the case is unclear (there seems to be only one recent plausible precedent and that dates from 1977), I can see the argument going all the way to the supreme court. Which is where it properly belongs, because what is at issue is a really big question: how much encryption should private companies (and individuals) be allowed to deploy in a networked world?
In the meantime, we are left with posturing by the two camps, both of which are being selective with the actualité, as Alan Clark might have said…
The misogynistic Internet
From Sarah Jeong’s Berkman lecture on “The Internet of Garbage”.
Guess who’s missing
Anybody see where the UK went? Am I the only person in Britain with fibre to the home?
Brexit, 1997-style
This video was, I think, sent to every household in the UK in 1997. It will still resonate with some voters on June 23, I suspect.
Quote of the Day
“This case is like a crazy-hard law school exam hypothetical in which a professor gives students an unanswerable problem just to see how they do.”
Law Professor Orin Kerr, in a thoughtful and informative article on the dispute between Apple and the FBI over the San Bernardino killer’s iPhone 5.
Orion mission re-ignites moon landing conspiracy theories
Orion is NASA’s next-generation spacecraft, “built to take astronauts deeper into space than we’ve ever gone before”. The video was made to highlight the complexity of the design challenges, particularly the amount of protection needed to safeguard fragile equipment and astronauts as the craft hurtles through the Van Allen radiation belt. “Radiation like this could harm the guidance systems, on-board computers or other electronics on Orion,” says the personable narrator. “Shielding will be put to the test as the vehicle cuts through the waves of radiation… We must solve these challenges before we send people through this region of space.”
Aha! Cue moon landing conspiracy theorists. “If the moon missions were real”, says one then it seems the whole ‘punching through the Van Allen belt’ problem should have been solved over 40 years ago.”
Sadly, the problem wasn’t solved then. The Apollo astronauts were pushed through the belt on their way to the moon and back, on the basis that their exposure was brief and the amount of radiation they received was below the dose allowed by US law for workers in nuclear power stations.
Sigh. The “slaughter of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact”, as TH Huxley used to say.