News

Many many possible medicines are being touted as possibly being helpful in fighting COVID-19. Here’s a small list where we have some initial results or at least anecdotes: (hydroxy)chloroquine, with azithromycin or zinc: This is the “tech-bro” favorite right now, partially based on recommendations from Elon Musk and Donald Trump, two noted medical professionals. There have been a few reports on this working or not working. This article argues that an alternation of negative and positive results actually is to be expected, even if the treatment is fairly effective, which it might be.

(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on our immune system I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Wednesday, April 1st COVID-19 can only live thanks to us. Viruses cannot reproduce independently, they need our help. And our immune system makes this very hard, as aptly explained in this excellent xkcd comic:

Hello and welcome to this stream of consciousness I dare to call "the Corona Science Journal". Latest update: 30th of March 11:34 UTC. View history of this page [on GitHub](https://github.com/ahupowerdns/corona-science/commits/master) ([RSS](https://github.com/ahupowerdns/corona-science/commits/master/corona-science.md.atom)), where you can also submit changes, fixes and updates. Note: I have been unable to keep up with the latest developments as I have shifted my efforts to a Dutch-language daily blog about positive COVID-19 developments, while keeping it real.

(On this page in Dutch I post daily bits of realistic but hopeful Corona news. Here is a somehat rough translation of an article on antibodies I posted there, because I think it might also be useful for people that don’t speak Dutch). Friday March 27: antibodies on demand? Those who have read the previous posts will recall that antibodies from people who have already been cured can help us to be vaccinated temporarily, or even heal us faster from disease.

Several sites are now shipping “COVID-19 self test kits” or perhaps “Coronavirus self test kits”. These claim to detect the virus in 10 minutes based on a drop of blood. These rapid self-test kits are currently: Likely fake Even if not fake, they do NOT test for the virus, they do NOT do what you think they do Even if they do what they are supposed to, these tests have not been validated and could be wrong a lot.

Gisteren verscheen het rapport “Patiëntveiligheid bij ICT-uitval in ziekenhuizen” van de Onderzoeksraad voor veiligheid. Omdat ik een bescheiden bijdrage heb geleverd aan dit rapport voel ik me geroepen een stukje te schrijven over wat in het rapport het “ICT-fundament” wordt genoemd. Voor de volledige duidelijkheid, wat ik hier schrijf heeft niets te maken met de Onderzoeksraad en ook niet specifiek met de inhoud van het rapport. Zie het als een overdenking over bedrijfskritische ICT.

This article is part of a series on (European) innovation and capabilities. In a break from the usual GPS/Galileo, DNA and C++ posts, here is a bit on 5G and national security. It turns out that through PowerDNS and its parent company Open-Xchange, we know a lot about how large scale European communication service providers work - most of whom are our customers in some way. In addition, in a previous life I worked in national security and because of that I have relevant knowledge of how governments (your own and foreign ones) “interact” with telecommunication providers.

Welcome to the Galmon project! Our goals are to monitor the major Global Navigation Satellite Systems, including GPS, GLONASS, Galileo and BeiDou, but also Space Base Augmentation Systems like WAAS, EGNOS and GAGAN. Galmon is an open source & open data project with a community of over 30 station operators running more than 50 receivers. Some history of the project may be found in the second part of this blog post, and on this page on the big Galileo 2019 outage.

Last year I wrote a post listing what I had been doing in 2018, because it turned out it was a lot, so much that it was useful to summarise it somewhat. This year there is less to report, but people have wondered what I’ve been up to. And I’ve learned that if you leave room for speculation about your intentions, wrong answers tend to come up. This (professional) year for me mostly consisted of two things: DNS over HTTPS and Galileo.

What is life? This question keeps many people awake at night and has led to rafts of definitions, some involving features (procreation, metabolism and so forth), some involving chemistry, entropy or energy flux and some are of a more philosophical bent. A BBC article noted there are over 100 definitions of life and it claims all are wrong. And indeed it does appear to be quite a challenge - every hard and fast rule is violated somewhere in biology.

Note: This article covers a lot of well-trodden ground, although this post has the benefit of 1) being rather brief and 2) advancing slightly on from earlier work. Noam Chomsky wrote 39 dense pages of philosophy on this subject in “Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden”. Evolutionary’s leading light Ernst Meyr wrote a whole book called “What makes biology unique”. Finally, a lot of this thinking is also covered in the quite philosophical work “The way of the Cell” by Franklin M.

Dear anonymous internet user, dear corporate employee hiding behind a gmail.com address, dear “GitHub account with a single issue”, Thank you for your interest in my free software, my project or the documentation I wrote for you. I am happy to hear you want to ask a question, have a problem, or perhaps even inform me of a new requirement you have. But with some small exceptions (do read on), I’m afraid I will not be able to help you.

This page collects links to raw and live sources on how well the planet, including its vital infrastructure, is doing right now, potentially visualised attractively. But the key thing is, we want Real Data, from the most direct sources. Sources are expected to be realtime or at least updated frequently. Mere estimates of things based on questionable inputs are explicitly not welcome, no matter how pretty their output. Please submit new links or fixes to @bert_hu_bert or bert@hubertnet.

By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl This post is an excerpt of a far longer post on Galileo, its structures and the cause of the outage. Here we’ll only focus on the outage - the potential underlying reasons behind it are described in the full article. Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo and, together with a wonderful crew of developers, experts and receiver operators, have learned so much about what I now know are called ‘Global Navigation Satellite Systems’ or GNSS.

By bert hubert / bert@hubertnet.nl In this post I want to document some mostly non-technical aspects of the EU’s Galileo Satellite Navigation Network. I will also share some observations on how things are going, and perhaps how they could be improved. NOTE: A shorter version of this article, focusing only on the July outage, can be found here. Since the week-long outage in July I’ve been fascinated by Galileo and, together with a wonderful crew of developers, experts and receiver operators, have learned so much about what I now know are called ‘Global Navigation Satellite Systems’ or GNSS.

The Netherlands is struggling with a shortage of primary school teachers, which as a nice side effect means that I get ample opportunities to do technical propaganda in the name of education. This is a quick writeup of a lesson on how GPS (or in general, satellite based navigation) works. I’d like to thank Jasper Vos and Michel Dingen of OBS De Notenkraker for the opportunity & the very useful feedback on the lessons!

Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. I also want to thank Job Snijders who was of great help in writing this article. How the Internet Leaks A few weeks ago large swathes of the internet stopped working around the world. The cause was quickly found: a computer networking mistake over at a specialty metals company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Earlier that month, a similar accident took down payment terminals in The Netherlands because of a misconfiguration in a Swiss datacenter which rerouted key parts of the internet to China.

Note: For context, please see this article on the Economist Job. This is a condensed and updated version of my earlier post On the pan-genome. Towards a multi-stranded genome Given that the completion of the human genome project was announced in 2003, one could be forgiven for thinking the kinks would have been worked out by now. It turns out however that as published today, the human DNA reference sequence is neither complete nor a good description of mankind.

Over the holiday, I ran into this job advertisement from The Economist: The Economist is looking for a new Science and Technology correspondent. Knowledge of the field, an ability to write informatively, succinctly and wittily, and an insatiable curiosity are more important attributes than prior journalistic experience. Please send a CV, a brief letter introducing yourself, and an article of 600 words suitable for publication to xxxx@economist.com. The closing date for applications is August 23rd.