September 15 2014: Sixth Birthday, HTML and CSS and British Science Festival

After we had cut the cake John did a review of 2013–2014 suggesting, among other things, that people who had not already done so should take a look at the IT Stuff website.

This led into a discussion of security, passwords and the iCloud breach.

He then presented his annual review of developments in HTML and CSS which is not very much — really only the new <picture> element to provide a similar way of selecting between still image formats and resolutions as the <video> element provides for moving images. Summaries are available of the current HTML, CSS and Javacript recommendations.

This was followed by a discussion of HTML and Microsoft’s acquisition of Minecraft.

Darren described his experiences at the British Science Festival in Birmingham, among them,

• a visit to Winterbourne House and Garden where scientists had found that lavender grew more prolifically in urban than in rural sites

• a talk about the study of clothing and footwear at Vindolanda, an ancient fort which was incorporated into Hadrian’s Wall, which showed that soldiers from all parts of the Roman Empire served there and that there was a ‘brothel’ where their partners lived because they were not allowed to marry

• a talk on sentiment on the social web

• a talk on the Atacama Cosmology Telescope which is used to study cosmic background radiation and calculate the amount of cold dark matter in the universe

• a talk on the maths of blebbing, an attempt to develop a mathematical representation of the processes involved in blebbing

• a talk looking at whether human society will survive the next two centuries in the course of which it was noted that more Americans believe in Adam and Eve than do in Newtonian mechanics

• a discussion of whether there will be a broadband capacity crunch — No! It was pointed out in discussion that mobile ’phones rather than traditional computers are the main way of communicating but these are mostly feature ’phones rather than smartphones and so do not generate any income for Google — hence Google’s interest in building infrastructure in Africa.

David C reported that the ITStuff group had had a conversation with Georgina Cooke about the National Media Museum event on October 9 making the point that the National Media Museum is very good at using people but not very good at giving something back. It turns out that the October 9 event will be a one-off with no follow-up.

Past Meetings