Items I happen to view each day. Science, Technology, Management, Culture, and Writing

    This is my day book for this week. It is a log of things I see on the Internet.

This week: 19-25 November, 2018

Summary of this week:

• Bloomberg donates $1.8Billion to Johns Hopkins
• The value of the big tech companies falls 20%
• All of our lettuce is recalled for e.coli
• Thanksgiving Day in the US this week
• Lots of news about terrible working conditions at Amazon warehouses
• Walkouts in Europe at Amazon warehouses

Monday 19 November 2018

The Washington Post looks at some practical jokers and satirists who put their humor on the Internet. And then everyone started believing the silliness. Was Mad Magazine fake news? What happened to us?

Barnes and Noble (yes, they still exist) latest Nook reader (yes, it still exists) can now serve as a laptop computer.

Recent surveys reveal something that has always existed: we don't trust algorithms to make major decisions regarding people.

We maybe have a solution to the DB Cooper skyjacking mystery. If nothing else, we have another History Channel 60-minute show.

Michael Bloomberg donates $1.8Billion (with a B) to Johns Hopkins University. The rich schools get richer.

Europeans ask Amazon to stop selling stuff with the hammer and sickle, a.k.a., the emblem of the Soviet Union. Note to many: this symbol means the same to hundreds of millions as the swastika and the KKK hoods. The same goes for the stars on the PRC flag.

It sounded like a good idea when we started, but NASA's big Space Launch System is outdated before it flies. Perhaps some will come to their senses and cancel it.

Tuesday 20 November 2018

Apple confirms that people walking around with backpacks with cameras on poles and logos saying "Apple Maps" are mapping walking routes for Apple maps. Transparency at its finest.

The value of Bitcoin continues to fall and is now at its lowest level in a year.

Palantir partners with Merck in a cancer data analytics effort.

FAANG stocks fall 20% (Facebook Alphabet Apple Netflix Google...a new acronym for me). Tech has lost some luster along the way.

All Americans agree: free speech hurts democracy. Uh, ur, wait, how was that survey question worded?

Apple pushes the iPad Pro as a computer, not just a tablet. There are a few shortcomings still, but we could do much worse.

At least one person has a firm grasp on the obvious about living on Mars.

It appears that it is okay to sell ads everyone, but not okay to sell "likes" which are another form of ads.

Wednesday 21 November 2018

Google releases Digital WellBeing tools for Android. Now the tech companies want to help us use the tech companies' products less.

If you are building machinery for manned space travel, it is not a good idea to smoke marijuana in public. Tip for future activities.

LinkedIn drifts farther towards Facebook et al. Is Microsoft pushing it this direction?

Nvidia, like others, does much business in China. That path to money is in peril.

Got a tough job? Work in an Amazon warehouse. There are tougher jobs (crush rocks in the Louisiana summer), but think about these folks when we order or gifts this year.

Just in time for dinner, throw away all your lettuce. Everyone throw away all the lettuce.

The Amazon-ians are already buying apartments in New York City. Realtors are already banging on doors in National Landing, or is it Crystal City?, Virginia Let the buying begin.

The advent of HTTPS has made travel WiFi use much less risky.

A Dota 2 tournament. I had no idea what this was until yesterday when I learned the grandson of an old friend made $250K this year playing such video games.

Holiday shopping Chromebook deals. Pretty good stuff.

Thursday 22 November 2018

Today is Thanksgiving Day in the US.

When worlds collide: Somali workers in a Minnesota Amazon warehouse, a.k.a., a sweatshop force Amazon to negotiate for better conditions.

In the UK, an Amazon warehouse worker has a popular and anonymous column telling of the working woes. Folks, Amazon pays little and drives hard. That is how all that stuff is easy and inexpensive to order.

By 2020, the government of China will be judging the 22million subjects of Beijing with a social credit system. Start behaving "properly" now.

Someone finally notices that Amazon.com is a lousy web site.

MIT flies a little place powered by ion wind. Of course its a stunt as the energy required to generate the wind is enormous relative to the weight of the aircraft.

Google pays lip service to the walkout organizers. Almost nothing was addressed. Then again, did anyone think anything would happen over a two-hour walkout. Walkout for two or ten months, if you can afford the cut in pay, then see what happens.

Finally, some worthwhile tech news: we have continued advances in helping the paralyzed use computer via brain implants.

The Chairman of Alphabet finally admits that the Google search engine made for the government of China violates all its ethical rules. So we await the next step.

Friday 23 November 2018

No Internet viewing today.

Saturday 24 November 2018

The conference on Neural Information Processing Systems has changed its acronym because of complaints. My first guess at the complaining was incorrect. NeurIPS not NIPS.

Sweden goes cashless with implanted microchips to pay for everything.

The New York half of Amazon's HQ2 will only have half tech jobs with the rest being admin. Where are all those tax dollars going?

This is a stupid application pictured, but integrate this little robotic arm with advances in brain controlled computing and the disabled can feed themselves. That would be a great use of technology. Let's begin the work.

There is never any hurry in government work—our USPS took a year to fix a security flaw that revealed tens of millions of our personal information.

The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network lost 2Million subscribers this year. Sportscenter? What was that?

It appears that our F-35 military aircraft are finally flying.

Our government is urging other countries to avoid Huawei's 5G systems as they are tied to the government of China.

Today is Small Business Saturday in which we are to forego some unnamed gigantic retail web sites and instead shop at a little local store that supposedly isn't tied to anything bigger than it appears.

Apple's big Black Friday weekend is just a bunch of gift cards to buy more stuff at Apple stores.

Shopping the day after Thanksgiving has now become shopping all week. The big one-day sales figures have diminished, but overall shopping is up up up spend spend spend.

Great shirt in the photo...thousands of Amazon warehouse workers in Europe walk out.

Let's talk real big business—video games. Both of the latest releases of Call of Duty and Red Dead Redemption had over $1Billion in sales in a week.

The folks at Facebook admit the obvious: they did hire a PR firm to help them with bad publicity. Shocking? No. Reality? Yes. And why did anyone think this was news? Another case of real news that isn't news.

More real news that isn't news: someone is paying someone to promote their Instagram accounts. This is called advertising for the uninitiated.

Sunday 25 November 2018

Got 12kiloWatts of power? You can run this Nvidia box and computer just about anything you want.

Why ask for references? Predictim scans potential babysitters social media accounts and uses "AI" to tell you who is good, i.e., they are too cheap to pay a person to look at the photos, so they run a computer, call it AI, and send you a canned report.

Online holiday shopping booms. $2Billion from just smartphones. Over $6Billion online total. We walked the mall Saturday and I was wondering where all the people were.

Not content with non-answers, UK's Parliament seizes internal Facebook documents via subpoena.

Somehow...companies are having elected representatives sign non-disclosure agreements about sweet deals to locate businesses. This is all illegal, I think. Public money expenditures are open to the public eye.

A good concept gone bad: academic publishing, wherein researchers share the results of publicly funded work with colleagues to advance knowledge, has become a money grab. That is a shame.

The standing desk is not going to save the world and return us all to upright-something-or-other. Just another fashion trend with enough junk science reports backing it.

Forget the silly title, this post has good, concrete advice on finding freelance writing jobs.

We enter the season for recommending gifts for writers and others. This is a pretty good list for writers.

Organization. Writers may hate it, but really, if you want to do this professionally, get it together.