After the Presentation

School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, degree-day afternoon.

Quote of the Day

“You go Uruguay and I’ll go mine.”

• Groucho Marx (in Animal Crackers)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman | Louisiana 1927

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why Doctors hate their computers

Fabulous New Yorker essay by Atul Gawande.

My hospital had, over the years, computerized many records and processes, but the new system would give us one platform for doing almost everything health professionals needed—recording and communicating our medical observations, sending prescriptions to a patient’s pharmacy, ordering tests and scans, viewing results, scheduling surgery, sending insurance bills. With Epic, paper lab-order slips, vital-signs charts, and hospital-ward records would disappear. We’d be greener, faster, better.

But three years later I’ve come to feel that a system that promised to increase my mastery over my work has, instead, increased my work’s mastery over me. I’m not the only one. A 2016 study found that physicians spent about two hours doing computer work for every hour spent face to face with a patient—whatever the brand of medical software. In the examination room, physicians devoted half of their patient time facing the screen to do electronic tasks. And these tasks were spilling over after hours. The University of Wisconsin found that the average workday for its family physicians had grown to eleven and a half hours. The result has been epidemic levels of burnout among clinicians. Forty per cent screen positive for depression, and seven per cent report suicidal thinking—almost double the rate of the general working population.

Something’s gone terribly wrong. Doctors are among the most technology-avid people in society; computerization has simplified tasks in many industries. Yet somehow we’ve reached a point where people in the medical profession actively, viscerally, volubly hate their computers.

This is long, long but worth every minute. Gawande writes beautifully about medicine, but this is also one of the most insightful pieces I’ve read about the institutional impact of software.

What’s going on in China?

From the (really impressive) Tech newsletter put out by Tortoise Media:

In the most recent data, youth unemployment in China reached 19.9 per cent, an historically high rate. A faltering birth rate is being compounded by record unemployment and Tencent has not been exempt from the wave of layoffs that have swept the global technology sector. The company reported that – alongside its first ever fall in sales – it also saw the first quarterly drop in the size of its workforce, which fell by 4.7 per cent. China’s young, dynamic and technologically savvy workforce is being alienated. Its population is ageing, and the rewards of globalism on which it has relied in the past are dwindling to nothing. At the centre of its once burgeoning technology sector is Tencent.

Hmmm… There’s trouble ahead for Xi Jinping.

About that Citroen DS19…

Some time ago I wrote that when we’re in France I’m always on the lookout for a DS19 that’s been carefully restored. We didn’t see any this year, but one lives in hope.

And then, mirabile dictu!, a generous reader pointed me at this:

A DS19 that has not only been beautifully restored but electrified.

Electrogenic is a company formed by Steve Drummond and Ian Newstead, based near Oxford, specialising in converting classics to electric power. The pair have previously electro-converted a Triumph Stag and a Morgan Plus 4.

“Repowering classic cars with all-electric drive brings a number of benefits, from ease of use to reliability and performance gains. But with our conversions, the aim is always to enhance the original characteristics of the car. In this respect, the Citroën DS was ideally suited to an electric conversion – the silent powertrain adds to the serene driving experience and fits perfectly with the character of the car,” said Drummond at the unveiling of this, the DS Electrogenic.

The thing about the DS19 was that it was originally supposed to have an innovative air-cooled six cylinder engine. But,

Budget hang-ups at Citroën meant that the planned air-cooled flat-six engine (let’s sit back, quietly, and reflect upon that for a moment…) was binned. In the end, the DS used a mildly revised version of the old Light 15 ‘Traction Avant’ 1.9-litre four-banger. Ever after, the DS was an astonishing car in search of an appropriate engine.

Well, now it’s an astonishing car with a proper electric motor.

My commonplace booklet

Words of Advice to Motorists

“At the rise of the hand of policeman, stop rapidly. Do not pass him or otherwise disrespect him. When a passenger of the foot hove in sight, tootle to him melodiously at first.

If he still obstacles your passage, tootle him with vigour and express by word of mouth the warning, Hi, hi’.

Beware the wandering horse, that he shall not take fright as you pass him. Do not explode the exhaust box at him. Go soothingly by, or stop by the roadside till he pass away.

Give big space to the festive dog that makes sport in the roadway. Avoid entanglement of dog with your wheel spokes. Go soothingly on the grease-mud, as there lurk the skid demon. Press the brake of foot as you roll around the corners to save the collapse and tie-up.”

• Advice in an English-language newspaper in Tokyo.

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Gondola

We’re reading Colm Tóibín’s The Magician, his fictional re-imagining of the life of Thomas Mann, at the moment, and have just got to the point where the subject makes his first visit to Venice, where he is immediately struck by the fact that the gondolas, with their shiny black splendour, remind him of hearses. And then I remembered this shot from one of our visits to the city and went digging for it in my archive.

Quote of the Day

”The secret of happiness is not doing what we like but in liking what we do”

• J.M. Coetzee

Yeah, but it’s not the only secret.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Professor Longhair & His New Orleans Boys | Mardi Gras In New Orleans

Link

Long Read of the Day

The approaching tsunami of addictive AI-created content will overwhelm us

Terrific blog post by Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve). It’s a much more extensive analysis of the upsides and downsides of ‘AI’-powered text-to-graphics engines like DALL-E than I was able to do in my Observer column last Sunday. His argument is that humans are not ready for the coming deluge of video, audio, photos and even text generated by machine learning designed to grab and hold our attention. If you’re new to this important subject and want to see where it’s heading, can I suggest that you start with the column and then move to Charles’s essay?

Closer to the machine: an elegy for the humble gear-lever

Nice piece by Ian Bogost which will appeal to petrolheads. His car doesn’t have an automatic gearbox and he likes it that way. Manually changing gear makes him feel that he is operating his car, not just driving it. That’s why he’s had what the Americans call “stick shifts” for the last 20 years. But he senses that manual transmission is doomed, and not just by the move to EVs.

The manual transmission, however marginal it has become during the smartphone age, remains a vestige of direct, mechanical control. When a driver changes speeds, their intention can be fruitfully realized in gratifying action, meshing literal gears. Even when your hand slips and the gears grind, the device still speaks in a way you can understand.

To lament the end of the manual transmission is to eulogize much more than shifting gears. When the manual dies, little about driving will fall away that hasn’t already been lost. But we’ll lose something bigger and more important: the comfort of knowing that there is one essential, everyday device still out there that you can actually feel operating. Even if you don’t own a stick, or if you don’t know how to drive one, its mere existence signals that a more embodied technology is possible—that it once was common, even—and that humans and machines really can commune. The stick shift is a form of hope, but it’s one we’ll soon have left behind.

Yep.

My commonplace booklet

Bull charges into bank but omits to make a deposit

You think I’m joking? Well, this is from The Times of Israel:

Financial institutions normally welcome a bull market, but workers at Bank Leumi in the central city of Lod were not amused on Monday when an angry bull bashed into several cars in their parking lot before charging through the hallways.

The bull’s owner, a resident of the city, was called to the bank offices to help extract the bovine. Video showed several people baiting the bull, trying to get it to charge down a corridor and into a makeshift trap they had made that would allow them to tie a rope around it.

The Lod Municipality said a city-employed veterinarian eventually stunned the bull to make it easier to restrain him…

The report includes an hilarious video of amateur toreadors trying to lure the animal into a trap.

The good news, as Quartz observed, is that it was a bank rather than a china shop.

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The Bundle

Berlin, December 2016

Quote of the Day

”When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.”

• Czesław Miłosz

Makes me think of Thomas Mann and Buddenbrooks

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Julie Fowlis & Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh | Dá bhFaighfinn Mo Rogha de Thriúr Acu

Link

Hollywood Inn, Co. Wicklow: Scottish Hebrides singer Julie Fowlis & Kerry singer Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh singing ‘Dá bhFaighfinn Mo Rogha de Thriúr Acu’ (0:00), Dhannsamaid Le Ailean (1:24) & Cairistion’ Nigh’n Eoghainn (2:16) with accompaniment from Éamon Doorley (Bouzouki) and Martin Ross.

Long Read of the Day

Joan Bakewell: ‘Life hasn’t got duller as I’ve got older. Less thrilling, perhaps’

She is one of my heroines, and this profile by my colleague Tim Adams does her justice.

Joan Bakewell sees David Attenborough from time to time. He has only one question for her: “Are you still working?” And, of course, she is. When we meet for lunch she is just about to embark on her fifth series of Landscape Artist of the Year for Sky – “Bake Off with oils” – that sees her “galloping around the country” from Loch Fyne to Broadstairs. She puts in 12-hour shifts beginning at seven in the morning – “by 7pm they know I’m ready for a drink”. She’s also in the House of Lords two or three days a week, when it is sitting, and she’s the president of Birkbeck, University of London. And then there are always new committees to chair, books to write. One of the reasons that Bakewell has long been such a seductive voice for the possibilities of ageing is that she has never shown the slightest interest in being past it.

She breezes into her chosen restaurant, the Orrery on London’s Marylebone High Street, already full of talk and smiles as she sits down, having done a bit of shopping downstairs in the Conran shop. The Orrery has the decor of a Dignitas clinic, white and hushed, with good linen and sharp cutlery and pristine glassware, but Bakewell brings with her a life-affirming attention. She is, you immediately forget, 89. She orders precisely – mozzarella to start and salmon fillet, water – and then gets on with the real business of lunch, conversation. Before our starters arrive we have discussed the voodoo nature of Nadine Dorries (“she sticks pins into stuff she doesn’t like”), the leadership prospects of Andy Burnham (“very impressive in person”), food fads (“I’m done with sourdough, give me a nice sliced white loaf”), the similarities between Liverpool in the 1960s and Quattrocento Florence (“creativity became infectious”), and the little pot of cod liver oil and malt that Bakewell always keeps in a drawer to remind her of stolen spoonfuls of comfort during rationing…

I’ve known her ever since I was the Observer’s TV critic many years ago. There’s only one word to describe her: life-enhancing.

The cost of convenience

My OpEd in last Sunday’s Observer. In our Gadarene rush into the Internet of Things we are busily creating an attack surface of near-infinite dimensions.

Ever since people started to worry about computer safety, the issue has been framed as striking a balance between security and convenience. Up to now, convenience has been winning hands down. Take passwords. Everyone knows that long, complex passwords are more secure than simple ones, but they’re also hard to remember. So, being human, we don’t use them: in 2021, the five most commonly used passwords were: 123456, 123456789, 12345, qwerty and password.

In the era of mainframe computers and standalone PCs, this kind of laxity didn’t matter too much. But as the world became networked, the consequences of carelessness have become more worrying. Why? Because there is no such thing as a completely secure networked device and we have been adding such devices to the so-called Internet of Things (IoT) on a maniacal scale. There are something like 13bn at the moment; by 2030, the tech industry thinks there might be 30bn.

The conventional adjective for these gizmos is “smart”. They can be “hi-tech” items such as smart speakers, fitness trackers and security cameras, but also standard household things such as fridges, lightbulbs and plugs, doorbells, thermostats and so on. From a marketing point of view, their USPs are flexibility, utility and responsiveness – in other words, convenience.

But smart is a euphemism that tactfully conceals the fact that they are tiny computers that are connected to the internet and can be remotely controlled from a smartphone or a computer…

Do read the whole thing

My commonplace booklet

The rent for the five-bedroom Georgian mansion overlooking St James’s Park featured in yesterday’s edition is… £10,000 per week.

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Riverside

The Rhone at Arles on a lovely Summer evening.

Quote of the Day

“Men are the only animals who devote themselves assiduously to making one another unhappy. It is, I suppose, one of their godlike qualities.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Liam Clancy | And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda

Link

First time I’ve heard this. Explains why my Aussie and NZ friends take Anzac Day so seriously.

Long Read of the Day

The Evolutionary Mystery of Menopause

Fascinating essay in Nautilus by David Barash, an evolutionary biologist who has specialised in animal behaviour and is now emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

Around age 50, women stop ovulating, a biological mystery because reproduction is the sine qua non of evolutionary success, and yet menopause occurs at an age when women often have a few decades of healthy life ahead of them. Men keep producing sperm (albeit fewer and less viable) into their eighth and even ninth decades. For women, it’s not about becoming unable to make eggs, since every girl is born with all that she will ever have, which await maturation and release. The “how” of menopause is well understood; it is brought on by a dramatic reduction in endocrine hormones, notably estrogen.

But why has selection favored this rapid and consequential decline, causing women’s endocrine machinery to poop out when it does? What are the ultimate, evolutionary reasons? If you like mystery stories, you’re in for a treat. Mark Twain noted that it was easy to stop smoking; he’d done it hundreds of times. It’s easy to explain menopause; there are many hypotheses, albeit fewer than a hundred. There is now a leading candidate, the grandmother hypothesis, which I first described in Nautilus in 2016, and which has been reinforced by two new studies…

Not my field at all. But I found it interesting. Hope you do too.

AI-generated art illustrates another problem with technology

Yesterday’s Observer column…

It all started with the headline over an entry in Charlie Warzel’s Galaxy Brain newsletter in the Atlantic: “Where Does Alex Jones Go From Here?” This is an interesting question because Jones is an internet troll so extreme that he makes Donald Trump look like Spinoza. For many years, he has parlayed a radio talkshow and a website into a comfortable multimillion-dollar business peddling nonsense, conspiracy theories, falsehoods and weird merchandise to a huge tribe of adherents. And until 4 August he had got away with it. On that day, though, he lost an epic defamation case brought against him by parents of children who died in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre – a tragedy that he had consistently ridiculed as a staged hoax; a Texas jury decided that he should pay nearly $50m in damages for publishing this sadistic nonsense.

Warzel’s newsletter consisted of an interview with someone who had worked for the Jones media empire in its heyday and, as such, was interesting. But what really caught my eye was the striking illustration that headed the piece. It showed a cartoonish image of a dishevelled Jones in some kind of cavern surrounded by papers, banknotes, prescriptions and other kinds of documents. Rather good, I thought, and then inspected the caption to see who the artist was. The answer: “AI art by Midjourney”.

Ah! Midjourney is a research lab and also the name of its program that creates images from textual descriptions using a machine-learning system similar to OpenAI’s Dall-E system…

Read on

Marina Hyde on Britain’s next Prime Minister, Ms Truss

Gloriously acerbic Guardian column:

For now, Truss maintains the remorselessly upbeat demeanour of a holiday rep who regards herself as the life and soul of the booze cruise, and whose lower back is tattooed with the Chinese symbols for “Only depressing people get depressed”. The overwhelming vibe you get from her campaign appearances is that she is going to make destitution fun for people. The logic puts me in mind of the Depression-era dancehall marathons epitomised in They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, where desperate competitors are given the opportunity to twirl, then lurch, then stagger their way out of poverty. Or to death – whichever comes sooner.

The fact that Liz will take over a country whose own sewage is literally lapping at its shores feels too on the nose – an image so hammily overdone it could have been crafted by recidivist newspaper columnist Boris Johnson. Which, in a more literal way, I suppose it was. We’re both the sick man of Europe and the dirty protest of Europe. Johnson – who wouldn’t dream of swimming in his own excrement, either literally or metaphorically – is currently on his second foreign holiday in a fortnight, displacing whole hogsheads of the Aegean in the cause of not giving a toss about what happens to the country he let down in the way he has always let everyone down in the end…

My commonplace booklet

From Saturday’s Financial Times.

Guess the weekly rent. Answer tomorrow.

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The Little Mermaid

Famous statue in Copenhagen. This photograph was taken by my wife while I was pontificating in the National Library.

Quote of the Day

“I never was a boy, never played at cricket; it is better to let Nature take her course.”

• John Stuart Mill

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Concerto No.5 in F-Minor for Harpsichord and Strings (BWV 1056) | Largo | Maria Joao Pires

Link

If you want a peaceful start to your day, then this is the right accompaniment.

Long Read of the Day

On Rich Friends and Poor Friends

Extraordinary memoir by Rob Henderson.

Is making the right kinds of friends the secret to upward mobility? Did having friends who—like me—grew up in poor and dysfunctional environments lead me to make bad decisions in my own early life? And if I had remained friends only with my childhood cohort would I remain poor?

A new book called Friends: Understanding the Power of our Most Important Relationships, by the evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar, and some recent studies about how one’s childhood fri influence one’s income later in life, have caused me to look at why my earliest friends once meant so much to me—and to reflect on why we have drifted so far apart.

Now in his 70s, Dunbar has an almost melancholic sense of the nature of our friendships. Most friendships are “fickle things,” he writes but “special friendships are very few in number.” They are “the ones with whom we shared the ups and downs and traumas of early adult life, whose advice we sought in those moments of deep crisis, the ones we sat up with late into the night,” he says. “It’s as though this small number of special friendships are carved in stone into our psyches precisely because we engaged in such intense, emotionally passionate interactions.”

I can attest to that truth…

Do read on, it’s terrific.

My commonplace booklet

Quick ripostés

I admire people who are quick on their feet, and collect anecdotes about them.

Here’s one about Robert Menzies, once Prime Minister of Australia, and a formidable politician. When he was campaigning in an election once a woman shouted “I wouldn’t vote for you if you was the Angel Gabriel!”

Menzies turned to her, beamed, and said:

“Madam, if I were the Angel Gabriel, you would not be in my constituency.”

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Fishing, not phishing

Quote of the Day

“Conscience: the inner voice which warns us that someone may be looking.”

• H.L. Mencken

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder and The Village | She Runs Hot

Link

There’s a lovely version of this that Cooder did just with David Lindley, but I can’t find it. Growl.

Long Read of the Day

The efficiency movement

Marvellous essay by Rob Miller on the way all modern societies have been shaped by their worship of efficiency. It’s basically an engineering mindset (I’m an engineer, so I can say that, though I long ago gave up believing that efficiency was the only thing that mattered.) And, we discovered during the pandemic, it’s our obsession with efficiency (e.g. in global supply chains) that has made our so-called ’civilisation’ so fragile.

Well worth your attention.

Reading it, two thoughts came to mind.

• Efficiency is obviously important in many contexts. But there are some where it’s vital to sideline it. For example, our criminal justice system, with (a) its assumption of innocence until proved guilty, and (b) its insistence on due process, is woefully inefficient. It’d be much more efficient just to lock up suspects on the say-so of the Chief of Police. But democracies don’t do that because they have values that trump mere efficiency. In that case, inefficiency is a feature, not a bug.

• The most persuasive account I’ve found of how engineers’ obsession with efficiency (and its fellow-conspirator, optimisation) came to dominate the world is System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot by Rob Reich, Meehan Sahami and Jeremy Weinstein. Alas, they’re better at diagnosing the illness than finding a cure. C’est La vie.

My commonplace booklet

 Why I Am Not a Painter

by John Mancini on McSweeney’s…

Toulouse-Lautrec died at thirty-seven. Van Gogh died at thirty-seven. Goya did not become famous until he was in his forties, at which time he also went deaf. Beyond the evidence of his paintings, little is known of the peasant Bruegel’s life. Duchamp gave up art for chess. In Tangier, Matisse contemplated suicide. Gaugin attempted suicide. Caravaggio threw stones at police officers. Derain was killed by a car. “There is something shameful,” said Degas, “about being known.”

“Impossible to get rid of him,” Picasso said of Degas. Giorgione died in his thirties. El Greco died broke. Vermeer died in debt to the baker. De Kooning ate a cigarette. “Everything he knew about art he got from me,” Michelangelo said of Raphael. “Ignorant,” he called Leonardo. “The only person who has the right to criticize me,” Matisse said of Picasso. “I have reached the happy age of impotence,” said Delacroix…

Right, that’s it! I’m selling my watercolour set on eBay. It’s tough enough trying to be a photographer.

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Analog Surveillance

A ‘listening door’ used by the East German regime in the pre-1989 era. Photograph of an exhibit in the (unmissable) Stasi Museum in Berlin. Note the number of batteries required! Poor quality image because it was behind a glass screen.

Quote of the Day

“What’s a thousand dollars? Mere chicken feed. A poultry matter.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Duke Ellington | The Single Petal Of A Rose

Link

Long Read of the Day

Electric Vehicles Are Way, Way More Energy-Efficient Than Internal Combustion Vehicles

Really useful summary of some recent research by the Yale Climate Connections project.

TL;DR version: in a fossil-fuel powered vehicle around 80% of the energy in the fuel is lost in engine and related inefficiencies. In an EV only about 11% of the energy is lost.

The details are interesting though, so worth a read.

My commonplace booklet

And while we’re on the subject of surveillance…

Link

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Floral dance, anyone?

Hanging on a wall in Aups.

Quote of the Day

”Pardon my long preamble. It’s like a chorus-girl’s tights — it touches everything and covers nothing.”

• Gertrude Lawrence

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder | How Can A Poor Man Stand Such Times And Live?

Link

Thanks to John Newman for the suggestion.

Long Read of the Day

We Ignored Salman Rushdie’s Warning

Sobering blog post by Bari Weiss.

I have spoken on the same stage where Rushdie was set to speak. You can’t imagine a more bucolic place than the Chautauqua Institution—old Victorian homes with screened-in porches and no locks, a lake, American flags and ice cream everywhere. It was founded in 1874 by Methodists as a summer colony for Sunday school teachers. Now, it attracts the kind of parents and grandparents who love Terry Gross and never miss a Wordle. It is just about the last place in America where you would imagine an act of such barbarism.

And yet as shocking as this attack was, it was also 33 years in the making: The Satanic Verses is a book with a very bloody trail…

Weiss reminds us of the way prominent writers stood firm in support of Rushdie in 1989. Her piece includes a nice picture of Susan Sontag, Gay Tales, E.L. Doctorow and Norman Mailer at a ‘Writers in Support of Salman Rushdie’ event in New York in 1989. I guess what she’s hinting at is that it’d be harder to muster that kind of courageous support now. But perhaps that’s just her grinding an anti-woke axe.

Still, it’s worth a read, given what’s happened.

Footnote: Writing in yesterday’s Observer, Kenan Malik succinctly expressed what I think Weiss was getting at:

Penguin, the publisher, never wavered in its commitment to The Satanic Verses. It recognised, Penguin CEO Peter Mayer later recalled, that what was at stake was “much more than simply the fate of this one book”. How Penguin responded “would affect the future of free inquiry, without which there would be no publishing as we knew it”.

It’s an attitude that seems to belong to a different age. Today, many believe that plural societies can only function properly if people self-censor by limiting, in the words of the sociologist Tariq Modood, “the extent to which they subject each other’s fundamental beliefs to criticism”.

Exclusive or not, this is one Clubhouse I was happy to leave

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In March 2020, a new app suddenly arrived on the block. It was called Clubhouse and described as a “social audio” app that enabled its users to have real-time conversations in virtual “rooms” that could accommodate groups large and small. For a time in that disrupted, locked-down spring, Clubhouse was what Michael Lewis used to call the “New New Thing”. “The moment we saw it,” burbled Andrew Chen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, “we were deeply excited. We believe Clubhouse will be a meaningful addition to the world, one that increases empathy and provides new ways for people to talk to each other (at a time when we need it more than ever).”

The app could not have come at a better time for social media, he continued. “It reinvents the category in all the right ways, from the content consumption experience to the way people engage each other, while giving power to its creators.” His firm put $12m of its (investors’) money behind Chen’s fantasies and followed up a year later with an investment that put a valuation of $1bn on Clubhouse, which would have made it one of the “unicorns” so prized by the Silicon Valley crowd.

This endorsement by an ostensibly serious venture capital firm undoubtedly helped to boost the hype about Clubhouse, but the main drivers – snobbery and elitism – had little to do with funding…

Do read the whole thing.

Video of the Day

Marvellous recent talk by Huw Price on how and why the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, which he co-founded, came about. Existential risks are events of very low probability which, if they were to occur, would pose an existential risk to human society. For many years, these were ignored (and sometimes ridiculed) by conventional science, so in setting up a scholarly centre to study them the first problem Huw and his colleagues had to solve was how to make the subject academically ’respectable’. The fact that the Centre now thrives is a reflection of how successful they were in doing this.

The talk is 23 minutes long, and worth your time IMHO.

Full disclosure: I know and admire Huw, and also was able to observe CSER evolve from the very beginning because it was incubated in CRASSH, the interdisciplinary research centre in which our Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy is based.

My commonplace booklet

A Brooklyn Bar menu generator

Link

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