Royalty

I just don’t understand the furore about our Royal Family’s “emergency discussions about the Sussexes’ future”. I simply don’t care. They can do what they like. I’m not anti-royalist but I just don’t give a shit what they do and I’m staggered so many people in the country are that interested such that it’s the main news story on the BBC.

For what it’s worth, I’m in emergency discussions with my cat about the protocol she’s established for a second breakfast shortly after the first. It should be pointed out that I still remain second in line to throne of this house even if I decide to go and live in Canada. Bet that doesn’t make the front page of the BBC.

Flybe tight-lipped over collapse threat

The BBC is running an article suggesting Flybe is in trouble. If this is true and collapse is imminent (and it seems very likely) then Flybe are showing a shocking lack of morals by continuing to take bookings, whereupon they’ll leave people stranded in foreign parts and we, the taxpayers, will ultimately have to pay to repatriate them. If that happens then the CEO should do jail time. Surely it’s fraud if they know they’re going under and still take payments for flights they can’t honour.

Of course I’m only speculating on a speculative story.

An article on TechCrunch takes a long look at how cookie consents are breaching EU privacy laws and how the cookie confirmation pop-ups are merely a hindrance to people.

I’ve talked about this here, here, here (the ‘Cooke Monsters’ bit) and even here to a certain extent.

All cookies except essential session cookies should be off by default. There should be no cookie confirmation pop-ups, just a website “settings” option where you can go in and switch cookies on if you choose to.

If a site doesn’t want you there if you won’t accept their tracking and advertising cookies then they should send you to a page telling you that. That page should just have the “settings” option and you can switch some cookies on if you choose to. Alternatively, you can simply choose not to visit that site.

That’s how it should be. End of.

Samsung have recently been demonstrating something called Ballie, which is basically a ball that follows you around and controls your entire home.

Any ball that follows me around will be tripped over in short order, whereupon I’ll probably break my neck. Hence it’s a killer robot. It’s quite clever actually because we all expect killer robots to look like a T-800 and speak with an Austrian accent. Nobody expects an invasion of killer balls.

I dread to think what my cat would think of such a thing.

Anyway, watch the video and be either suitably impressed or extremely scared as you choose.

Update: You can't watch the video, sorry. Some buffoon has removed it from YouTube. It was very good, though.

Sorry to dash your hopes but when I say ‘star’, I mean the astronomical kind. Sadly, nobody has ejected Kanye West from Earth at that speed.

Astronomers have discovered a star travelling at 3,700,000 MPH (1,027 miles per second), which is about ten times faster than most stars move. They plotted its prior path and it appears to have come from the centre of the Milky Way, wherein lurks a supermassive black hole.

So how does a supermassive black hole eject a star when they’re best known for their insurmountable gravitational attraction?

Apparently it’s due to something called the Hills Mechanism, which sometimes kicks into action when a binary star system — consisting of two stars orbiting one another — gets close to a supermassive black hole.

If one of the stars in the binary system gets too close to the black hole, the ferocious gravity of the black hole will pull the star in. This takes energy away from the (three-body) system as a whole. However, thanks to the conservation of energy, the star that avoids the black hole will be given an energy equivalent to the infall velocity of the one that’s captured. The energy the surviving star receives is what results in its phenomenal speed.

The black hole ejected the star some 5 million years ago and it's travelling so fast it’ll escape our galaxy entirely within 100 million years. I look forward to seeing that happen. Astronomers have had a pretty good look at this star as it’s fairly close to us now, only 29,000 light years (174,000,000,000,000 miles) away.

With absolutely no sense of drama, astronomers have called the star S5-HVS1. It should have been called something like Ergomighty the Ejector or whatever.

Things like this make me realise how fragile our little planet is in the galactic scheme of things.

It’s important to know the shape of the universe. Maybe one day we’ll set off on a very long journey into space and we’d need to know whether we’re just going to end up right back where we started, which would be irritating.

This depends in part on the curvature of the universe and it’s easiest to think of this in two dimensions. Imagine a flat earth, like a sheet of A4. If you and I set off parallel to one another, we’d remain the same distance apart and our paths would never cross. If we drew a triangle on this flat surface, the angles would add up to 180 degrees. We’d say this had zero curvature.

Now imagine a globe. We set off parallel to one another again, but our paths would eventually cross. If we followed the latitude lines on the Earth, for example, we’d meet at the North Pole, and the angles of a triangle on this surface would add up to more than 180 degrees. We’d say this had positive curvature.

Finally, imagine a saddle (or hyperbola if you want to be scientific). If we walked in parallel on this surface we’d keep getting further apart. I have a policy of never lending money to anyone on a hyperbola because you’ll never see them again. Here, the angles of a triangle would add up to less than 180 degrees and we call this negative curvature.

It gets harder to visualise in three dimensions, which is how many space dimensions our universe has, and even harder again if we include time as the fourth dimension, but hopefully you get the idea.

There are a number of things that can influence the curvature of our universe and one of the biggest is gravity. We all think of gravity as helpfully sticking us to the planet or unhelpfully making cups of tea drop off our desks, but that pulling force also bends the fabric of space.

One of the common visualisations is to use a rubber sheet stretched over a box to represent space. Now drop a bowling ball onto the rubber sheet and you’ll see it sink into the rubber, bending it. That’s what a star or planet does to space.

For a while now, experiments have pointed to our universe being flat and having zero curvature, or as near as damn it. We get a lot of information about the shape of the universe from the Planck Space Telescope, which was launched in 2009. An instrument on that measured the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), which is the ancient glow of light left over from the Big Bang. Looking at that tells people with slide-rules a lot about the shape of the universe now and in the distant past.

However, three smart-arses have reanalysed a lot of the CMB data and claim the universe is 99% likely to have positive curvature, like a globe. They went as far as to call the whole thing a cosmological crisis.

Their work has however displeased many other scientists — presumably those with shares in a flat universe — and effigies of the three smart-arses may be burnt in laboratories across the world. The smart-arses’ analysis of the data is not in dispute but some scientists suggest this is an aberration, a statistical fluctuation and no doubt an abomination.

Other experiments still point to the universe being flat, which remains the prevailing opinion.

Anyway, you can read all about it in the article I link to. I’m concerned about how a curved universe might affect house prices, although I’m sure estate agents have more trickery at their disposal beyond the trusty wide-angle lens.

I almost feel sorry for Mark Zuckerberg. That’s a phrase I never thought I’d write, although I did carefully qualify it with an almost.

Zuckerberg had the look of a startled gazelle amongst a pack of hyenas as the House Financial Services Committee tore into him. Officially the hearing was titled "An Examination of Facebook and its Impact on the Financial Services and Housing Sectors" and his plan for a worldwide cryptocurrency, Libra, was ostensibly the subject of debate, but Congress used the opportunity to hold him to account for his many other sins too.

Committee Chairwoman Maxine Waters pulled no punches:

You have opened up a serious discussion about whether Facebook should be broken up.

Each month, 2.7 billion people use your products. That's over a third of the world's population. That's huge.

That's so big that it's clear to me, and to anyone who hears this list, that perhaps you believe you're above the law.

Zuckerberg seemed ill-prepared for the hearing, having not read a lot of the documentation sent to him in advance.

Committee member Joyce Beatty asked him:

Did you review the packet that was sent to you by this committee?

And when he refused to answer, she added:

Obviously, that's a no.

Zuckerberg was accused of having no genuine interest in civil rights, only addressing the subject as a result of the lawsuits he’s received. He didn’t even know which company Facebook employs to take care of its civil rights strategies even though it’s one of the largest civil rights firms in existence.

It was brutal and I did have a certain sympathy for Zuck. What I see when I look at him is a techie, an ideas man who’s interested in the technical evolution of those ideas but not really interested in — or capable of — the troublesome business of running a massive company. He’d probably be better off dropping into a CTO role and then employing someone who can handle things like Congress committees as a CEO. A wise visionary knows what their weaknesses are.

I don’t think he’s the devil but he has made some almighty mistakes, not least the way he has ridden roughshod over people’s privacy. But I think that’s simply because such concerns just don’t create a big enough blip on his radar. It’s careless rather than evil.

Cookie monsters

I am massively fed up with having to confirm I'll accept cookies all the time. I visit a lot of tech sites and they seem to want confirmation at least weekly. I know by clicking the default Yes, Agree or Confirm I'm giving them permission to invade my privacy at will. For all I know they can now legally come to my house and stick their finger up my bottom. They're doing it wrong of course — the cookie stuff, not the finger-up-bottom stuff — they should implement the most restrictive data-sharing settings by default, but that's another matter. I've already given them access to my colorectal system so why do they need to ask again and again and again? And again.

Staying with bottoms

I read that someone called Sophie Elise is desperate to get rid of her bum implants. I know how she feels and I asked my GP the same thing.

“You don’t have implants,” she said, “you’ve just got a fat arse.”

I shan’t be going there again.

My laundry hardware is conspiring against me. A couple of weeks ago I moaned about my washing machine’s inability to count and today my condensing drier ate one of my fleeces. It chewed up the main zip and one of the pocket zips, thus ruining it. It simply detached these zips and spat them out. This is despite already having received a verbal warning for turning every last one of my t-shirts inside out every time I use it. There will be repercussions. I will at the very least throw my toys out of the pram.