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: 13-19 July, 2020

Summary of this week:

• Google to invest $10Billion in India
• Google integrates Gmail and G-Suite
• Major Twitter hack of celebrity accounts

Monday 13 July 2020

Google to invest $10billion in India.

MIT researchers advance the state of the art in untangling tangled tangles. Finally, a practical use for this stuff.

Seth Godin's thoughts on excluding others to our own harm. "But in our modern world, a world built on community, connection and the magic that comes from combining ideas, the opposite is true. When people deprive others of education and opportunity, they’re not helping themselves, they’re depriving themselves of the benefits that would come from what others would end up contributing. We don’t benefit from treating others poorly, we pay for it...This is one reason that the faux scarcity of famous colleges is so toxic. Because we don’t have to exclude and sort to help people move forward, yet we do."

Another trend that is being accelerated in the year of the virus: the plutocrats are buying and selling citizenship to avoid travel restrictions. The nation state falls by the wayside.

Most-used programming languages: R makes a big jump from this time last year. And Visual BASIC is still in the top 20.

Tuesday 14 July 2020

Microsoft will release its newest version of Flight Simulator in the middle of August.

It appears that the humble pencil, with a high graphite content in the lead, can be used to create medical sensors. Draw on paper, stick on your skin, and there you have it. Simple. Brilliant.

Microsoft lays off more persons at MSN in favor of machine-generated news stories.

Google has created courses that will be online. Data Analytics and Project Management are two of the course series. Google considers completing a six-month series to be the same as a four-year college degree. 100,000 scholarships are available.

This story must be important as it is all over the Internet: Ford shows the 2021 Bronco.

Wednesday 15 July 2020

Fear and loathing in Washington D.C. over who counts (verb).

AMD moves into the market of selling processor for workstation-class computers.

How did stuffy old Mitre become a sexy, sleek, James Bond organization? Who at Mitre paid Forbes to describe them this way?

Google Cloud announces that its BigQuery engine will allow developers to query databases the cloud systems from Amazon and Microsoft.

Google Cloud announces the first two security services in what appears to be a line of them. The first two are Confidential VMs and Assured Workloads for Government.

A look at Google's ATAP (Advanced Technology and Projects) organization.

"A hack is a professional who doesn’t care. The hack has been beaten up enough times that he has emotionally disconnected."—Seth Godin

No surprise here: Federal government agrees to let foreign students keep their student visas even though they take no in-person classes.

Real news that is not news: Google searches point to Google products before pointing to products of other companies. Well, duh?

In legal and financial news, Apple doesn't have to pay the governors of Ireland $15Billion. Such cases bring about all sorts of speculation by those of us who speculate rationally. $15Billion is a large chunk of money. Bribe the judge with $1Billion (a rational sum) and save $14Billion. Either side could have done so. That is unethical, but rational.

Thursday 16 July 2020

Google merges its Docs etc. with Gmail, Chat, Meet, etc. Maybe this will all work.

Zoom shows a video teleconferencing hardware device that will be here real soon now.

In the year of the virus, this is one of the better humor entries.

Friday 17 July 2020

Warned, but did not listen. You deal with China, you tread carefully. “Corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple have shown themselves all too willing to collaborate with the (Chinese Communist party),”—US Attorney General William Barr.

Twitter was supposed to be for fun. Then a hack. Now members of Congress want to investigate. Investigate? Twitter?

Got about $10,000 for a camera? Leica has one.  Blackmagic has a video camera that shoots 12K at 60FPS.

Michelle Obama begins her campaign for President 2024.

In the year of the virus, impending change accelerates. British Airways retires its 747s. Simply no passengers.

Saturday 18 July 2020

How GitHub put 21TeraBytes of open-source software (a little from me) in the arctic vault.

Our law enforcement is (no so) secretly using the Sabre travel system to track the movements of criminals and others.

How "big tech" companies perform simple marketing campaigns through newspapers, oooops, I mean web sites. Somehow this has become a horrible thing to inflict on the rest of us.

How the software engineers at Google write design documents. These are useful and used.

It is easy to impersonate law enforcement officers. This is a brewing catastrophe in America.

Researchers have built little "gopro" style cameras they attach to beetles. Did the beetles consent?

Yet another industry that is booming in the year of the virus: the video gamers.

Researchers "steal" files from Iranian government hackers and release the Iranian training videos. Of course governments worldwide try to hack into the systems of other governments.

A closer look at the Dell XPS 13. Buy this. We live in an age where no one is fired for buying a Dell.

Sunday 19 July 2020

The art of taking a nap that helps you think.

It was an inside job. Twitter admits that its own employees played a major role in the great hack this week. It was a matter of time. The money for cheating is much larger than the salaries.

The burger-flipping "robot" makes a comeback at White Castle in Chicago.

We have a new monster lurking out in the hallway—the asymptomatic superspreader. Let the witch trials begin.

Since we are all wearing masks, $40 gets us a mask that transcribes what we say onto someone else's smartphone. It also translates eight languages.

"The alternative is to be local, creative, energetic, optimistic, trusted, innovative and hard to replace."—Seth Godin

Getting ready to write. The Journal. Look back at your journals and find stories and books and non-fiction articles and ... many lives.