Winding Down

An idiosyncratic look at, and comment on, the week's net, technology, science and other news
by Alan Lenton
16 March 2025

This week...

We cover Pi day (the number, that is), a report on the accuracy of eight AI-driven search tools, and Ukraine’s mineral wealth. The quotes are about how long Britain has been fighting wars, a Canadian response to Trump’s attempt to add them to the USA, and an Australian comment on a baby wombat snatcher!

The picture this week is of the erupting Mount Etna, and includes an unusual feature known as a light pillar.

Scanner has pointers to material on the C++ programming language, the lurking threat to undersea cables, photographs relating to 100 years of protests in the UK, money laundering and illegal drugs, a new part of the immune system, solar farms and birds (a surprising, hopeful discovery), a beaver dam that saved a community the cost of a human built dam, Apple and UK spies (unusually Apple are the good guys in this row), reintroducing wolves in the Scottish highlands, daylight saving, and the continuing failure of Window 11 adoption...

Hopefully, you will find something of interest in this issue!

Pi Day

Last Friday was Pi Day. Here’s why this special number gets a global celebration. The number Pi is the most famous of what are known as the irrational numbers. Irrational numbers are ones that cannot be written as fractions, and Pi is a constant describing the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter. It’s 3.14 followed by a set of numbers that don’t have an ending. ScienceAlert has a fascinating piece on the number, including a song based on the first two hundred decimal places!
https://www.sciencealert.com/its-pi-day-heres-why-this-special-number-gets-a-global-celebration

AI driven search tools. I sometimes wonder whether you – my readers – are as cynical as I am over the way the big digital companies are trying to force everyone to start using their respective artificial intelligence (aka AI) tools. Well you might like to have a look at report in Ars Technica of a recent study of the accuracy of eight AI-driven search tools equipped with live search functionality.

The results were somewhat damming, to put it mildly. It turned out that the study found that the AI search engines cite incorrect sources 60% of the time! And it wasn’t just the sources, there were problems with citations and what were considered to be original sources as well. As for copyright....
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/ai-search-engines-give-incorrect-answers-at-an-alarming-60-rate-study-says/

What’s so special about Ukraine’s minerals? I was puzzled when President Trump mixed in a minerals agreement with a Ukraine/Russian peace proposal. Fortunately one of my favourite internet magazines (The Conversation), came to my aid. It seams that through a rather unique geography, Ukraine has seriously large deposits of what are know as strategic materials. That’s because, Ukraine resides on what is known as the Ukrainian Shield.

This is one of the oldest and most stable continental blocks, and so it has been able to accumulate large quantities of what are termed strategic or critical minerals. Ukraine has deposits containing 22 of 34 critical minerals identified by the European Union as essential for energy security. It has lithium, rutile, iron, titanium, manganese, Europe’s largest uranium reserves, the world’s largest proven reserves of manganese ores, and significant reserves of rare earth elements.

No wonder Trump and Musk want to get their hands on it!
https://theconversation.com/whats-so-special-about-ukraines-minerals-a-geologist-explains-251551

Quotes

“...we British consider ourselves to be a peaceful people, slow to anger and abhorring violence, only resorting to military action when all other means of conflict resolution have been exhausted. That being so, it may be somewhat difficult to explain why, in the 957 years since the Norman Conquest, England and later Britain has been at war for 578 of those years, or for rather more than sixty percent of our entire history since 1066...

“...As to whom we were fighting during those 578 years, it was just about everybody, and often several campaigns simultaneously on opposite sides of the globe. We spent only twenty-four years fighting the Germans, historically generally our allies, fifty-four years fighting the Spanish, fifty-two years fighting the Scots and 196 years fighting the French. Statistically, therefore, one year in every five we go to war with France. It is no wonder that they do not like us.”

Gordon Corrigan. Crécy (Finest Hours Book 1) (p. 4). Sharpe Books. Kindle Edition.

Perhaps someone should point this out to Mr J D Vance!

And from Canada:

“Cut the crap Donald. No Canadian wants to join you.”

Canadian New Democratic Party leader, Jagmeet Singh

A U.S. ‘influencer’ outraged the Australians by snatching a baby wombat from its mom last week...

“To take a baby wombat from its mother and clearly causing distress from the mother is just an outrage,” Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told reporters on Thursday. “I suggest to this so-called influencer, maybe she might try some other Australian animals. Take a baby crocodile from its mother and see how you go there, take another animal that can actually fight back … see how you go there.”

Pictures

Light Pillar over Erupting Etna
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap250224.html

Scanner

C++ creator calls for help to defend programming language from ‘serious attacks’
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/02/c_creator_calls_for_action/

Putin’s secret weapon: The threat to the UK lurking on our sea beds
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-3036d1db-da99-49b3-9d64-272472095d4a

Nearly 200 captivating photographs spotlight a century of protest in Britain
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/nearly-200-captivating-photographs-spotlight-a-century-of-protest-in-britain-180986174/

Money laundering plays a key role in every part of the illegal drugs industry – here’s how it works
https://theconversation.com/money-laundering-plays-a-key-role-in-every-part-of-the-illegal-drugs-industry-heres-how-it-works-251288

Scientists discover new part of the immune system
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpv4jww3r4eo

Solar farms can host up to three times as many birds as crop fields – new research
https://theconversation.com/solar-farms-can-host-up-to-three-times-as-many-birds-as-crop-fields-new-research-249551

Beavers build dam – free of charge!
https://metro.co.uk/2025/02/04/people-wanted-build-a-900-000-dam-beavers-one-night-free-22492970/

Apple ordered to open encrypted user accounts globally to UK spying
https://www.theverge.com/news/608145/apple-uk-icloud-encrypted-backups-spying-snoopers-charter

Reintroducing wolves to Scottish Highlands could help address climate emergency, study suggests
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-reintroducing-wolves-scottish-highlands-climate.html

Daylight Saving disrupts millions of Americans. There’s a better way.
https://www.sciencealert.com/daylight-saving-disrupts-millions-of-americans-theres-a-better-way

Windows 11 adoption picking up speed, but older sibling still ahead
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/03/windows_11_adoption/

Footnote:

Please send suggestions for stories to alan@ibgames.com and include the words Winding Down in the subject line, unless you want your deathless prose gobbled up by my voracious Thunderbird spam filter...

Alan Lenton
alan@ibgames.com
16 March 2025

Alan Lenton is a retired on-line games designer, programmer and sociologist (among other things), the order of which depends on what he is currently working on! His web site is at http://www.ibgames.com/alan/index.html.

Past issues of Winding Down can be found at http://www.ibgames.com/alan/winding/index.html.

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