“2020 – what a year!”
“Can’t wait for 2021.”
You’ve likely heard or used similar references yourself.
For me, as a columnist, the year began innocently and typically enough, with pieces on scams, data breaches, new TV technologies, and the like. A fellow parishioner had been tricked into paying for non-existent troubles on his wife’s iPad. Fortunately, he phoned me and we went through some strategies that ultimately led to a reversal of the fee he’d paid.
That same week came word that the main operator of medical diagnostic services in B.C., Life Labs, had suffered an attack on its core database, in principle exposing customer data, and in some cases diagnostic data, to hackers. We still don’t know the final outcome of the Life Labs hack but several privacy commissioners were recently unflinching in their condemnation of the company and called for legislation to permit them to levy strong punitive financial penalties for these sorts of cases.
However it was a column I wrote in early February that leaves me with chills as I look back at it. I set out to write about the little that was then known about a new virus that had recently come to light. It didn’t even have the name we’ve since come to use for it. However, even at that early juncture there was already debate about masks.
My primary purpose for that column was to deal with some of the irrational behaviour that was developing even then, and to point people to a little-known website that has since become the primary source of statistical data on what we now know as COVID-19. My editor assigned the story a rather prescient headline: “Ignore coronavirus rumours and seek out facts.”
Just two weeks later some 300 million students around the world were out of school, although our own school closures were still a month or so away.
That little-known web site, run by Johns Hopkins University, became a mainstay on TV newscasts for the next few months. I know I consulted it several times a day myself, even tweeting an evening snapshot of the primary screen every day for about two months.
COVID-19 featured in multiple subsequent columns. Some focused on new technologies driving the work/learn from home movement mandated by governments. Teleconferencing service Zoom was rather prominent due to its security missteps. An interview with longtime teacher and technology advocate Vicki Davis was among my most read columns of 2020. She eloquently described how she was able to migrate her school, essentially overnight, from face-to-face teaching and learning, to work-from-home.
As the year progressed there were columns on cell phone rate plans, underscoring the perennial love-hate relationship Canadians have with their communications utilities, and on internet providers duking it out in the courts over the meaning of terms used to convey delivery speeds (think PureFibre vs. Fibre+).
Another widely read column, reprinted in other publications as well, was my description of a project by radio amateurs to launch balloons on round-the-world journeys while transmitting their location with very-low-power, self-made transmitters. At the time of this writing the team behind the project had another balloon aloft and travelling eastward with the jet stream over Egypt.
Also popular was a column on the celestial show put on by Comet NEOWISE, the first comet visible here under city light conditions in quite a few years. As this column appears, hopefully skies will be clear for a once in decades planetary conjunction, the solar system’s two giants, Jupiter and Saturn, appearing so close together they are being tagged as the equivalent of the Christmas star. Watch for that closest approach early in the evening of Dec. 21.
Closing out the year was a series of columns on space, particularly the 20th anniversary of continuous habitation aboard the International Space Station, and about one of the many projects from visionary Elon Musk – his Starlink project to deliver internet service across the globe, particularly to underserved areas, by satellite.
Starlink has been controversial with astronomers, who claim that the planned-for tens of thousands of satellites, will forever ruin the night sky and attempts to study it. Efforts to mitigate those concerns may be working and Starlink has commenced commercial operations in the northern U.S. and Canada.
Musk’s SpaceX venture continued to capture public attention with ever more spectacular launches and rocket recoveries, and in early December the company launched iteration 8 of its Starship rocket. This was the first high altitude launch of the craft, and Musk had rated the chances of completing all the objectives at around 30 per cent. The rocket made a bit of a spectacular landing, with a huge fireball. Musk was unflappable, saying the test produced all the data needed for the next iteration. Some time before 2030 we will be talking about the first Starship mission to Mars, carrying up to 100 passengers.
As has been the case for several years now, search giant Google released lists of popular terms and names looked up by Canadians during the year. I was expecting to see the name of the outgoing president of the United States at the top of the “People” list but was surprised to see instead Kim Jong Un, followed by Joe Biden.
Less surprising was to see “Coronavirus” and “CERB” topping our searches for news.
In the “How to…” category we wanted to know how to apply for EI and how to make hand sanitizer.
Those last two, coupled with “How to cut your own hair,” really underscore the opening words of this column: 2020 – what a year!
Follow me on Facebook (facebook.com/PeterVogelCA), on Twitter (@PeterVogel), or on Instagram (@plvogel)