Everybody's doing it

Hey everybody and welcome to another episode of Space Welders. Episode 11 recorded Friday 17th July 2015. Everybody's doing it. Hey Steve, how's it going?

Hey Mike. You're overseas at the moment so this is complicated. It's slightly complicated and we've had no technical difficulties whatsoever in setting up this podcast. It's currently quarter past ten in the evening for me and for you?

It's quarter past seven in the morning and it is absolutely freezing. It's freezing in Queensland. It is a balmy 22 degrees here. Yeah, I'm looking at that.

And the locals are calling it hot. Oh true. Well it's a beautiful five degrees here and something that's unusual for Queensland listeners if you're overseas is Queensland doesn't get snow very often and we've recently around the southern border got snow. So it's actually amazing and I know we were going to talk about ice age coming but it is absolutely freezing.

It's here. It's here. Well Queensland's experiencing it but we're calling it, it's a vortex. So we've got an Arctic vortex coming so everyone's panicking and running for the hills.

But how's England Steve? England's fine. It's very nice apart from when it's not nice and rainy. I have a cold which you generally get from a 20 hour flight with 500 other people.

So if I sound a bit nasally it's not just my normal voice. I am sick. So we've also, just a quick update with the podcast as well, Steve obviously being away we'll do our best to keep recording as usual and keep consistent releases. But also thank you very much to Dale Rankin who appeared on the show last week.

Really appreciate him being on the show. Also Steve, while Steve's away everything happens, the Space Welder badges turned up and we'll work out a way of being able to get those to you. So if you guys are interested in buying some of the badges from the site we'll work out some kind of ordering system over time. So a few things happening but again thank you very much for staying with us and keeping with us on this project and looking forward to keeping going.

But apart from me waving my arms around Steve, there's someone else waving their arms around again and it's been consistent on this podcast, the clean energy and windmills. And at the moment the banks have got into the story now and it looks like they've got a few things, a few problems with the government pulling the pin on some of our clean energy investments. So the government last week said that they will no longer be financing wind and solar energy projects asking the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to instead focus on new and emerging technologies because of course wind and solar are not new and emerging technologies that need our assistance in getting them better. Which is another amazing move by our government just to completely ignore successful technologies, proven technologies which can really make an impact on our energy production in this country but let's just toss all that out won't we?

Yeah I mean if it doesn't follow his or the party's ideological view then let's not worry about it even if the science backs it up. Yeah true, well I think maybe we just focus on batteries, we just get a whole bunch of batteries and stick it in our house. How are you going to charge the batteries Mike? Elon Musk worked it out so it must be great, there's not going to be any fires caused by those things.

Keeping with the theme as well, it seems that, well and thank you very much for Dal being on the show. Just recently on the back of that the Queensland government has also announced further funding for start-ups which is a real welcome relief and so this is really going towards our point last week of if you've got an idea and you really want to progress with it then there's plenty of ways to get on with it. So there's a new tech-friendly budget, so it's a $24 million Queensland start-up program and it's also a commitment for coding in schools and other benefits along with that. So I think that's a great initiative and most people in the start-up community are really quite happy with that.

Yeah, so this is a Queensland budget thing, so Queensland government only but hopefully the other states follow suit. Yeah, so that's really if you want to get on with it, get on with it because your government's backing you there. I guess, you know, it could be people with potentially new energy ideas and new ways of generating energy. I know in Queensland we've also got access to thermo, like we've got plenty of dormant volcanoes in this state, so someone might work out a way to tap into that.

So simple things like that or grandiose ideas like that, stick my lair, my villain's lair, I welcome it. More importantly, Steve, we've had a recent visitor to Pluto and it worked out. Yeah, so New Horizons finally got there after 10 years. I think they said it was something like 17 miles off track or something, or 17 seconds late was the calculation, so 10 years, 17 seconds late, that's pretty good.

Yeah, I think it's astounding. I was actually, a while I was watching on NASA TV the actual point at which it passed and the celebrations and how everyone was jubilant over the whole thing, but the best bit has been seeing some of the really high resolution imagery coming back and I'm pretty sure because it's only got a, I think it's a less than 1K or around 1K, some of the stats on this thing. It's a 12, it was 12 megahertz or something processor on the actual craft itself. It's a very, because the technology is very old on that machine.

It's pretty low powered. I mean, that's why it shut down the other day, but it tried to do two things at once in this process. It couldn't handle it. Yeah, the transfer speed's very low.

So all the pitches it took as it was flying past, it's going to take several weeks to actually transmit, not only time for the scientists back at NASA to process them, but just the transmission of all of these images and data is going to take weeks. But there's already been some fantastic images, close-up images of Pluto, its major moon Charon, and I saw today there was a first image of one of its other moons, Nix, starting to arrive. And it's looking pretty impressive that this is the first time in human history we've ever seen Pluto this close. That's right.

By technology, that's like the iPhone was released after this machine was sent out into space. So the technology we've got on that thing is quite limited in terms of what we've got currently today in power and micro, in terms of a lot we've got for, like an Arduino's got a bit more power in terms of processing. So I think it's incredible the amount of science data we'll get out of this thing over time. But interestingly enough, Australia also in science news, I know that we're space welders and people are saying, why don't you have a space in news articles or something?

But it turns out that in Australia, we're very active in the space industry and particularly from amateur astronomers as well. Turns out that as a Perth astronomer, and this is last year in terms of news, has discovered six co-planets and many other exoplanets through the process of what's called micro-lensing. And there are plenty of amateur Australian astronomers out there who have big-ass telescopes doing the work. So I know that they put also, I think they've got the ashes of the discoverer of Pluto on New Horizons.

Yeah, well they've got a couple of grams of the ashes. There's a lot of astronomical discoveries that come out of Australia. It's probably got something to do with the fact that we don't have a lot of major cities. So you can get out of the city and you have perfectly clear skies.

I mean, I believe one of the discoveries of the Shoemaker-Levy comet that crashed into Jupiter in the 90s was Australian and an amateur astronomer that just had a telescope in their backyard. It was a bit like the movie Deep Impact when they discover a comet and run off and tell an astronomer about it and they get dual credit. Yeah, so Thayem Nguyen, or TG to his mates, has discovered a number of planets just in his backyard observatory. We don't have much light pollution in Australia, to be honest, and we've got the best opportunities for carrying out this work.

Obviously, all of the signals from New Horizons come through Canberra as well. So that's some of the things that we do for NASA is very assistive technologies like all of the radio work in order to receive signals from outer space. So we've got the best opportunity. The Parkes Telescope in Parkes, which is just outside Canberra, assisted in the Apollo missions receiving and transmitting data, and it still continues to assist NASA today.

It's part of the NASA's Deep Space Network, along with other radio telescopes at Coonabarabran and other locations around the world. So Australia is definitely, or at least used to be, much more of a forefront in the world science. Not so much recently, unfortunately. Well, yes, that's true, but that, you know, I thought my bandwidth was bad, but obviously bandwidth out at Pluto is not so great for receiving internet at 1K.

Yeah, they're going to have to put their YouTube videos to 360p, unfortunately. The 720 and 1080p videos just aren't cutting it for them. Well, listening to music, Steve, it turns out that Microsoft want to get into this streaming music game as well. So they're looking at a new music app and upgrading their music service for Xbox.

Now, if you've had an Xbox before, you already know that they do have music services available on their platform. But now on the back of some of the Apple announcements, and obviously Google and everyone else has got a streaming service, it looks like Microsoft want to get into that as well with this thing called Groove Music Pass to replace what was the Xbox music service as a 10-month streaming service. So everybody's doing it. Yeah, I mean, I can't see a point of the Xbox music or the Groove Music Pass as it's going to become.

Like, I don't know if they'll have really the library to compete with Spotify and now Apple Music. But I guess the whole point is they have a huge embedded user base already with Xbox Live that will, you know, just continue to use their Xbox to play music. Yeah, it's such a captive audience. It's just one of these things where you've got the device in the lounge room.

It's easy to plug people in. You've already got an audience. So obviously, improving their streaming services around that platform just seems like such a good idea. I guess, you know, those sorts of things.

But, you know, Microsoft have been, you know, slowly coming to the party with most things, specifically like Azure at the moment. So Azure is, if you've used Amazon Web Services, Azure is its competitor. Amazon provides you with numerous and a plethora of Lego blocks to play with to establish cloud services. And something new that Microsoft's offering, apart from just music services 360, they're offering analytical.

Well, they're adding Cortana, which is their AI to some of their analytical and machine learning at the moment. So I think it's really interesting that they're starting to bring Cortana, what they're calling Cortana Analytics Suite into their services with a front end. Like they've got Power BI at the moment, but they're also introducing a lot of machine learning and analytics or artificial intelligence into their data environment that they're trying to create with Azure for studying data using AI. So I don't think it's going to be like Cortana on the phone where you've got to ask it to do things.

I think they're just leveraging the kind of backend processing that they do to do things like machine learning and Hadoop style number crunching and things like that, because they'll have a large bank of processing behind it. Yeah. So they're really just going and saying, well, we've got machine learning that we want to bring in. There's a lot of existing machine learning tools out there, and it's mainly running R scripts for doing a lot of its analysis.

So it's just allowing you an environment to get the data easily, run an R script, punch the output to somewhere where you need it, and off you go. Not to say that there's no real Python services there. They do have Python on the platform, but nothing of equivalence. And we've spoken about Kaggle before.

If you've seen Kaggle, they provide a place where they have competitions where you can win money for writing R scripts in Python for analyzing data and finding interesting things inside of data. But what we're seeing from Microsoft is a place where you can go to their Azure now and commercially use this technology. So other services that they're also providing carrying on that theme is JigJam. So we spoke about Microsoft Garage last week, and this is following on from that.

They're producing more and more exciting new and innovative ideas, and they're really trying to be like a startup or something similar to this, I think, where they're going back to the grassroots and getting people in their own company or community and partners to come out with ideas. Project JigJam, they've been doing it for quite some time, but it's really just a productivity tool on any device. It's just recently been released, so it's sort of kind of got an instant messaging document sharing. It sounds like SharePoint, Steve.

We're getting another SharePoint for the cloud. It's SharePoint on web 2.0, or are we up to web 3.0 by now? I don't know. I've lost count.

My grandma's on web 3. So I think they're trying all sorts of things to really spray the market and see what sticks and what doesn't stick, and we heard that before. Maybe they're pivoting, Steve. Yes, they're pivoting.

Oh, by the way, I did watch an episode of Silicon Valley the other day, and they do mention pivoting, something we talked about last week with Dale, who hates the term, but I believe it's in the season final of season one of Silicon Valley, and they have to try and pivot. All the cool kids are doing it. Everyone's pivoting. That could be a new pop song.

It's a startup. It's just not a real startup-themed music, I guess. But speaking of pivoting, sadly this week, the Nintendo president had passed away. Satoru Iwata, he's passed on at 55, which is very young for anyone, really, to die, but obviously he's critical and key from developing his round from the days of the NES right through to the Wii U, so he's an incredibly talented man, and he was a programmer.

He was one of these guys that, he said, actually one of his quotes, he said, on my business card I am a corporate president, in my mind I'm a game developer, and in my heart I'm a gamer. It's one of those guys who really we all kind of aspire to be, so he worked on games like Kirby and Smash Bros, Earthbound, a lot of the early kind of big Nintendo games before becoming the president, so it's a shame that he passed away of a bile duct growth, which is quite a deadly disease, obviously, to get. So it'll be interesting to see how Nintendo copes, because they weren't doing so hot lately after the not-greatness that was E3 this year, but hopefully Nintendo can bounce back from this and keep moving onwards and upwards. Yeah, I think that Nintendo's still got a lot of stuff to give, and that's what you want in a company, like if you start up, you know, you need to be chief cook and bottle washer, and that's an inspiration, you wouldn't make one of your employees do something that you wouldn't do yourself, and this guy, most certainly because he's been able to roll his sleeves up and get in there and demonstrate, you know, this is how he thinks it should go, but also lend his shoulder to the effort, but also direct the company as a whole.

Now whether this brings about maybe a new vibe that they could explore different directions, I just think they could still do great games, but the hardware platform now is so much better, they don't need to be holding the platform back, technically. Like if they want to do near photorealistic games, then that's fine, but obviously these guys, they are gamers, so they would find a way to create an enjoyable gaming experience in the next generation. Yeah, I mean all those guys at the big head honchos at Nintendo are, I mean Miyamoto who created Mario and... Zelda, and all of those completely classic Nintendo games is the same way.

He's just a gamer and a bit of a nerd at heart and just loves what he does. Yeah, I mean, you know, he's super talented and, you know, he must be damn hot. Speaking of not hot, it sounds like everyone's saying that, and, you know, I could firmly agree with everyone, you know, feeling the temperature this morning, that we're heading for another Ice Age, Steve, within 15 years. The Telegraph put out an article this week around Earth heading for a mini Ice Age within 15 years, and that the River Thames could freeze over in the 2030s.

But we're seeing, you know, snow in places in Australia, which is just completely unheard of recently, so you'd probably think this was true. Yeah, it's bollocks. So, they're saying... It's complete rubbish.

They're saying it's something to do with the sun, swamp gas off Venus. That reflects off the UFO and doubles back in the atmosphere and lowers the temperatures somehow. So, essentially, what has come out this week is a study that was presented at a conference by Valentina Zarkova, who's a mathematician and scientist at Northumbria University here in the United Kingdom. Basically, they are predicting a 60% drop in the magnetic activity of the sun over the next few years.

Now, the sun does work on a roughly 11-year cycle of intensity, where it gets more intense and more magnetic and solar activity happens, and then it goes back down and less activity happens. And if you're into amateur radio, you would know that for sure, sunspot activity and looking at what the sun does, you know when signals are going to be best around the planet, and, you know, based on sunspot activity and the 11-year cycle already. Absolutely, and we're just coming off the back of a solar maximum over the last couple of years, where sunspot activity has been higher compared with the 11 years previous, but then, you know, it goes in a cycle and it always has and it always will. But what this study has been interpreted as is a, with a false correlation to the fact that lower magnetic activity could equal lower temperatures on Earth, which is just not true.

They're talking about a thing called a Maunder Minimum, which is about a minimum solar activity, and the last time it happened it correlated with lower temperatures in the 1500s, I believe, where things like the River Thames froze over and there were several years of lower temperatures. However, as we've said before on this show, correlation does not equal causation, and In fact, there's other people and there's an article by Phil Plait, who is the Bad Astronomer on Slate.com, which we'll link in the show notes, who basically summarizes it by saying that even if there is slightly lower solar output, it will not in any way outweigh the anthropogenic global warming that is predicted over the next few years. Anthropogenic, of course, means man-made. So this will not even put a dent in the upward trends of the worldwide warming charts.

In fact, I read an article this year that confirmed that 2014 was the hottest year on record and suggested that 2015 was heading to be even hotter. Yeah, I think, I just think there's so much foo around this. Actually, this year Bloomberg put out an amazing article, which was looking at the data over anything else and what the research, how the research fundamentally works in terms of the confidence ranges they use, various anomalies and how to weed out the anomalies. And then it basically says, well, you know, is it ozone?

Is it land use? Is it aerosols? You know, where is, where is it coming from? Is it the moon?

Is it, is it the Earth's orbit? So on and so forth. And I'll include some links and it's a great experiment. They include all of the observed land ocean temperatures, the response to climate forcings, the 850 year pre-industrial control experiments, and all the data is there.

So you can actually, it's just a bunch of CSVs and zips and so on, but all the observations are there. So you can, for yourself, go and actually put this into your favourite, you know, tool of choice, whether you like R or you like Power BI, whatever you use to process, and you can actually show for yourself the trend is actually man-made. Yeah. So all of those studies that try and separate every contribution of warming, you know, cows and solar warming and all of that, they all point to anthropogenic causes for worldwide temperature increase.

Yeah. So I think we'll see more and more of this. I know that most people who live in the here and now, I think, you know, oh God, it's obviously cold and it's going to get cold and they can run some of the articles, but... Weather does not equal climate.

Yes. That's right. Yeah. The other way to think of it, it's a system, constantly moving system, and if you put even a small percentage of change in it, how much will that ultimately cause chaotic change through the system itself?

So even if you just change one thing, it's simply going to have a spiralling effect as well. So there's other ways to consider the debate as well. Speaking of math and science, science, technology, engineering, and math, it seems that Android are producing far and far more exciting robotics initiatives. And so they've basically announced the recognition for science and technology.

And I don't know, Steve, have you played with Lego Mindstorms before? I have actually. Quite some time ago at a school excursion, we actually took a trip to UQ and played around with the Lego Mindstorms and the little computer programs you can make from it, which was actually, and I imagine it still is very similar, was actually a drag and drop block interface to program the interface that then goes and turns cogs and pulleys and all the kind of Lego-y stuff. So it was pretty cool.

So you're most of us are familiar with Lego Next or Lego Mindstorms. And before IoT was IoT, Lego was there already. And yeah, it was the forefront of this kind of thing 10 years ago. Yeah.

And if you're listening, Tonka, I'd love to work for you, even though it may be fictitious, but I'd love to work for Tonka. I think Tonka IoT would be the most glamorous job on the planet. Self-driving tipper trucks. Imagine your business card, it'd be like this beautiful glowing yellow card, maybe like Tonka Tech or something.

Yellow and black with the big bold letters. Yeah. Oh, man, that would be just so sexy. I love Lego and obviously Lego Next and Lego Mindstorms, if you're familiar with it.

But there's now competitions available, basically focused on the Android platform. And because Qualcomm's Snapdragon chipset is very powerful, you can write some complicated control programs. And there's also plenty of new actuators and motors for building some serious robotics and challenging yourself. So there's basically taking science, technology, engineering, mathematics out into a new arena, which is having not robots battle each other.

And I know that BattleBots is now on TV in the States. Have you seen that yet, Steve? I saw part of the first episode. I was very disappointed because they edited it like every other American TV show with, you know, horrible cuts to audience reactions and annoying commentators and presenters.

And I just want to see robots destroy each other. I did actually see a video afterwards on Reddit. Someone had cut together just the fights without all of the extra crap that goes on around it, which was a lot better. Well, yeah, I think it's trying to make that exciting.

I know that there's also, in a year's time, there's a Japanese and an American robot that's going to face off in some kind of weird showdown. Haven't they already done that with Hugh Jackman? Oh, but that was Rock'Em Robots. Oh, that was Rock'Em Robots the movie, wasn't it?

That's right. Yeah. Yes, but this is more focusing on students, getting kids involved, all the kids into trying to work with LEGO Next and building robots, which would compete ultimately in a competition and so on, really just trying to get people to think about it. Now, the coding tools that they're using inside of here are Scratch environment.

So you can write Java, but also they've got the Scratch programming environment and they've got a number of consistent modules that you can work with. Again, this is sort of like we're in at the moment, the very early phase, as pointed out by Dale, we're in the Model T where everyone's getting consistent blocks and swapping blocks in and out to create solutions. The important question is, Mike, can you write in Python? I'm pretty sure that the white spaces will let you down.

It's not going to work then. If you can't write in Python, it's not going to get anywhere. Java, who needs that? No one uses Java anymore.

It's just all going to go pear-shaped. Hey, guys, it seems like we're at the end of another podcast. It's a quick one this time. Steve's away in London.

You're in London, Steve. Not quite. South case. You're from the south case.

I don't talk like that. No, not like a Chokshia. It's up north. We're not going to do the accent.

No, we'll get in trouble. Yeah. So thank you very much, Steve. Thank you to our speakers as well that we've had on.

We'll try to get more as we're going and see how things go with Steve traveling around Britain. And you contact us if you want to chat to us and send us articles. I know that people have been binging the episodes and listening back to what we've been doing. I know that people wanted to communicate as well.

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