A video for November 3, of all days

What Gordon Parks Saw

If you watch nothing else today, watch this. Gordon Parks was a novelist, poet, musician, composer, painter, and film director, but he was best known for his photography.

Thanks to Jason Kottke for spotting it.

Quote of the Day

“Many Things that have been printed and published, as true Relations, were only by Artifice and Imposture, Impositions upon credulous Persons.”

• Erasmus

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chuck Berry – Roll over Beethoven 1972

Link

Magical!

Long read of the Day

What kind of country do we want? Terrific NYRB essay by Marilynne Robinson. Snippet:

Without an acknowledgment of the grief brought into the whole world by the coronavirus, which is very much the effect of sorrows that plagued the world before this crisis came down on us, it might seem like blindness or denial to say that the hiatus prompted by the crisis may offer us an opportunity for a great emancipation, one that would do the whole world good. The snare in which humanity has been caught is an economics—great industry and commerce in service to great markets, with ethical restraint and respect for the distinctiveness of cultures, including our own, having fallen away in eager deference to profitability. This is not new, except for the way an unembarrassed opportunism has been enshrined among the laws of nature and has flourished destructively in the near absence of resistance or criticism. Options now suddenly open to us would have been unthinkable six months ago. The prestige of what was until very lately the world economic order lingers on despite the fact that the system itself is now revealed as a tenuous set of arrangements that have been highly profitable for some people but gravely damaging to the world. These arrangements have been exposed as not really a system at all—insofar as that word implies stable, rational, intentional, defensible design.

Here is the first question that must be asked: What have we done with America? Over the decades we have consented, passively for the most part, to a kind of change that has made this country a disappointment to itself, an imaginary prison with real prisoners in it. Now those imaginary walls have fallen, if we choose to notice. We can consider what kind of habitation, what kind of home, we want this country to be…

Trustbusting Google

Cory Doctorow’s OpEd for The Daily Beast is, finally, published — and very good it is too. Here’s a sample:

When Microsoft came to dominate 95% of the desktop, the DoJ stepped in again to punish it, and if they failed in their breakup bid, at least they cowed the Beast of Redmond so that it stopped killing startups the way it had with Netscape, allowing Google to rise.

What we didn’t understand was that Ronald Reagan had gutshot US antitrust enforcement and these were its last gasps, as it bled out over two decades.

We didn’t understand how thoroughly Reagan’s court sorcerer, Robert Bork, had transformed the consensus on monopolies.

We didn’t understand that every president that came after Reagan, right up to today, would continue to encourage monopolization under cover of the doctrine of Robert Bork, creating a world where every industry has collapsed into oligarchy.

• Five publishers

• Four studios

• Three labels

• Two brewers

• One eyewear company

and falling.

Which is why the federal Google antitrust action is exciting – not merely because the complaint threads the impossible narrow eye of Robert Bork’s needle for anti-monopoly enforcement; but because it made so many people recognize that getting Google for search dominance is like getting Capone on tax-evasion. The pretense that monopolies are good, actually, is wearing so thin that even its beneficiaries are doubting it.

Other, possibly interesting, links

• The AI Which Mistook a Bald Head for a Soccer Ball. An AI controlled camera which was supposed to follow the ball, kept following the bald pate of a linesman. Link
• Who are the most influential academics?. This websiteclaims to have objective measures for ranking scholars. Funnily enough, most of them appear to be Americans. Now isn’t that interesting.
• A new Raspberry Pi built into a keyboard.. Neat idea. There’s an informative and fair review on ArsTechnica. I’ve ordered one, out of curiosity to see how it compares with an earlier 4GB Pi I’ve been running.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

From our fen walk yesterday. Slightly over-cooked in post-processing, seeking a ‘Constable’ effect.

Quote of the Day

”Many of the greatest men who have ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived and he has beaten them all.”

• Thomas Babington Macaulay, writing about Boswell’s Life of Johnson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Salieri : Piano Concerto in C major : II Larghetto

Link

Poor Salieri has had a bad press ever since Peter Shafer’s play Amadeus (and Milos Forman’s subsequent film).

Attenborough’s testament

Last night we watched A Life On Our Planet and loved it. It’s quite moving, also, because it’s difficult not to think of it also as a kind of last will and testament. At any rate, he describes it at the outset as his ‘Witness Statement’.

The ingenuity of starting and ending with a visit to Chernobyl was very striking. In the opening sequence he portrayed it as a human mistake that made a whole locality uninhabitable. On a global level, we are embarked on a colossal mistake that will make our planet uninhabitable. And then at the end, he returned to Chernobyl to show how nature is reclaiming the place for itself, with mature trees growing round — and in some cases in — the abandoned buildings. The subliminal message was clear. The planet doesn’t need us. And it will survive us.

En passant I fell to thinking that Attenborough has become one of the most loved man in Britain and maybe in much of the West — a kind of international treasure. The only comparison I can think of at the moment is with the late Nelson Mandela.

Long read of the Day

Absolutely fascinating article by Karen Hao on how AI (well, machine-learning, actually) has cracked a key mathematical puzzle for understanding our world.

Perhaps it wasn’t for everyone but it was certainly fascinating for anyone (like me, anyway) who, once upon a time, had to grapple with partial differential equations (PDEs) — the mathematical constructs which offer powerful ways of realistically modelling important real-world phenomena (like air turbulence), but which are VERY difficult to solve using traditional methods.

So even if the article isn’t for everyone, it’s still a brilliant example of how to make arcane concepts intelligible to lay readers.

My only complaint is that the headline over the piece makes the usual mistake of conflating ‘Artificial Intelligence’ with machine-learning.

Positively the only thing today about the US election

A useful primer on US Election Law. Includes this interesting passage about the responsibilities of TV networks — whose too-early call of the 2000 election led to the subsequent chaos and the Supreme Court eventually handing the presidency to George W. Bush:

On Election Night, what we hear on the news are projections that the media is making about who will win, based upon evolving vote tallies and exit polls. When these projections give one candidate a majority in the Electoral College, media organizations call the election, and the other candidate may even publicly concede. But none of that is official.

Indeed, the “tradition” of knowing who wins on Election Night is a modern invention and a product of network television. It makes for a dramatic evening. George Washington waited two months to find out whether he had, in fact, been elected the nation’s first president. Thus, Trump’s idea that we must know the winner on election night is not grounded in law or history. And even the projections have not led to the declaration of a winner on Election Day in three of the last five presidential elections—in 2000, 2004, and 2016.

But the thing upending everything this year is COVID. Largely due to safety concerns, more people are voting early and/or remotely than in any prior election in American history, at the same time as we are experiencing unprecedented delays in mail delivery. This causes two different sets of complications: First, because of variances in when and how states count votes, early results on election night could easily be subject to what some have described as red or blue “mirages”—where the totals from particular states are quite skewed based upon whether the early reports are from particular counties, early voting, or some inscrutable combination of both. Second, it also means states will be receiving a far higher number of mail-in ballots than they are used to—many of which could well arrive after deadlines established by the legislature even if they are sent early enough so that, if it weren’t for this year’s postal delays, they would be arriving on time. None of that will matter, of course, if the winner’s margins are sufficiently large based upon undisputed ballots so that disputed ballots wouldn’t tip the scales. But if it’s a slim margin of victory, that’s where there’s the most potential for trouble—and for post-election litigation.

The moral: this could be a good time to be a lawyer in the US who specialises in electoral law. On the other hand, if Biden wins big…

Other, possibly interesting, links

• How Bertrand Russell Turned The Beatles Against the Vietnam War. Link.

• New Zealand struggles with plague of peacocks. Link. One of my favourite New Yorker cartoons shows a peacock in all his finery confronted by a sceptical pea-hen. “What do you mean, no?” he is saying incredulously.

• Texas Voters Line Up To Shoot Ballots At Local Election Range. “Texas voters lined up to begin shooting their 2020 ballots at local election ranges, sources confirmed Thursday. “It’s always nice to stare down the ol’ iron sights and make your voice heard by leaving a bullet hole on your favorite politicians,” said Cal Humphries, 54, who shouldered an AR-15 and fired multiple rounds into a sheet of paper that hung from a target retrieval system to indicate his choice in a series of down-ballot judicial races. “Being able to hit a bull’s-eye on your Senate pick is a hallowed right that our ancestors fought and died for. Just make sure you’re using the right caliber bullet, though, or your vote may be disqualified.” Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

The fens in winter

Taken on a long walk in the fens today.

Quote of the Day

”Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?)”

• Noel Coward, starting a letter to T.E. Lawrence, who had retired to public life to become Aircraftsman Brown, 338171

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bob Dylan | If Not for You

Link

Long read of the Day

An interesting  New Yorker profile of cryptographer Maxie Marlinspike, founder of Signal, the encrypted messaging service that many of us use when we need to make sure that nobody’s eavesdropping.

History repeats itself

Nick Guyatt teaches North American History at Cambridge and is a Fellow of Jesus College.

The reason Isaac Newton was at his home in Woolsthorpe when the apple fell on his head was that he had fled Cambridge to escape the plague! I bet his college (Trinity) still has its bell from that period too.

Inside the Bizarre Publishing Ring That Linked 5G to Coronavirus

A truly weird story in Vice.

An international group of scientists, some seemingly well-credentialed, have been publishing prolifically in obscure scientific journals, accruing hundreds of co-authorships over the past several years.

The only problem: most of the studies they publish don’t make any sense.

One paper, titled “5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells,” was retracted in late July after it received widespread criticism from scientists on social media for being shoddy pseudoscience. The diagrams featured clipart, and one showed two vertical arrows labeled “Tower” casting what the authors label as “Milimeter waves sic” and “Radio waves” onto a cell. An arrow exits from the cell and points at a drawing of a virus, which has been labeled “COVID-19.”

After that paper was retracted, the journal posted a notice on its original landing page saying that the article “showed evidence of substantial manipulation of the peer review.”

Having read the piece, the only conclusion I can draw is that there are more than a few hyper-qualified scientists who suffer from a variant of logorrhoea (“an excessive and often uncontrollable flow of words”) and are accommodated by a scientific publishing ecosystem which has perverse incentives and has grown too bloated to be reliable.

Thanks to Charles Arthur for the link.

Art tells a story

Dave Winer had this lovely image on his blog yesterday. It’s an artwork from a Burning Man festival. (Which I think was cancelled this year.)

He quotes a commentary on the work by a documentary film-maker, Sharon Anderson Morris:

“A sculpture of two adults after a disagreement, sitting with their backs to each other. Yet, the inner child in both of them simply wants to connect. Age has many beautiful gifts but one we could live without is the pride and resentment we hold onto when we have conflicts with others. The forgiving, free spirit of children is our true nature. Remember this when you feel stubborn.”

Dave doesn’t agree:

• Sometimes the right thing to do is to set pride to the side and renew the friendship. The child always wants to, but the adult also has a valid and important, not foolish, contribution to make — safety.

• The child can have the impulse to connect unconditionally, because there is an adult to put the brakes on if there is real danger. The child can’t exist without the adult. When we are children, the adult must be external. Later in life we will be both the child and the adult.#

• The child, as the sculpture illustrates, wants to connect, but the adult isn’t ready. It’s possible that they’ve reconciled many times, and every time the same thing happens. That’s also a pattern of humanity. So the adult is constrained by memory. The adult might narrate: “I remember this person hurt me the last time I trusted them. Every time I trusted them. So as much as the child wants to reconcile, I can’t. At some point it’s wrong to trust.”

Other, possibly interesting, links

•  New study links air pollution to 15 percent of COVID-19 deaths From Al Jazeera. Link
• Are swordfish stabbing and killing sharks? New York Times story.
• Nice experiment that shows how photographs shape the way we view history. Link

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Where the rainbows end

Sutton Gault, Cambridgeshire.

Quote of the Day

”The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes”.

• Stanley Kubrick

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Haydn: String Quartet In F Minor, Hob. III:35, Op.20 No.5 – 3. Adagio | Emerson String Quartet

Link

US politics and psychic colonisation

I’m puzzled (and annoyed) by the extent to which the US election is preying on my mind. Every day I could write a dozen blog posts about some or other aspect of it. It’s sucking the oxygen out of everything. And it’s not as though things are particularly rosy in this jurisdiction, as the country lurches through a worsening pandemic into the full-blown catastrophe of crashing out of the EU without a deal on New Year’s Eve. There’s plenty to worry — and write — about on this side of the pond. Maybe it’s because there’s a possibility that on November 3 something might change in the US, whereas we in the UK are stuck with the worst government in living memory for another four years. So we’re like long-term prisoners serving time and looking enviously over the wall at our fellow-prisoners in the US who might just be paroled on November 4.

Long read of the Day

And just as I hit the final full stop on the previous entry when what should pop up in my inbox but “The World Is Trapped in America’s Culture War” by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic .

Sharing the internet with America is like sharing your living room with a rhinoceros. It’s huge, it’s right there, and whatever it’s doing now, you sure as hell know about it.

Every country using the English-language internet experiences a version of this angst—call it the American Rhino Problem. With so many dominant tech companies headquartered in Silicon Valley, the rules of the web are set there—and by politicians in Washington. The West once sent missionaries to bring Christianity to Africa; in 2013, Mark Zuckerberg promised to “bring the world closer together” by providing internet access to millions in the developing world. (That particular project failed, but there are now more Facebook users in India than anywhere else.)

Britain, where I live, cohabits particularly closely with the American rhino, because of our shared language and history. Brits watch Friends. We read John Grisham novels. We know what a sidewalk is, even though it should be called a “pavement.” The website of the BBC, our national broadcaster, is always plastered with stories about the U.S., while Ireland, which was under British rule until a century ago and with whom we share a border, might as well be the moon. Ask 100 Britons to name the current Taoiseach, and you’ll see 99 blank faces (and one inevitable smart-ass). Ask 100 Britons to name the U.S. president, and—well, I envy anyone who draws a blank there. Please give me directions to the rock under which they’ve been living.

The British political elite loves the United States: Every political adviser here goes to sleep hugging a West Wing box set. Great stuff.

The phlegmatic British

An intriguing Covid diary entry by David Vincent.

Since late March, social scientists have been striving to measure the impact of the crisis on what in the second world war was called ‘morale’. I have discussed some of their findings in earlier posts.

The two most useful studies are managed by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), and a Nuffield-funded research group at University College London (UCL). For the sake of speed, the ONS re-deployed an established Opinions and Lifestyle Study, based on a statistically representative sample of 2,200 people. UCL went for scale, recruiting over 70,000 respondents through advertising and contacting ‘organisations representing vulnerable groups.’

The data in the two surveys are broadly similar, and oddly counter-intuitive. Whereas the drivers of physical change represent a fairground roller coaster during an event which is far from reaching its conclusion, the dominant shape of the graphs of emotion over the period is a gentle countryside, a landscape of gradual inclines and declivities. Why this should be so is difficult to understand.

It is.

There are, David says, “discernible changes tracking the surges in the pandemic, but not on the same scale. We appear to be a more phlegmatic society than we might suppose, as was also the conclusion of the wartime studies of ‘morale’. ”

Another, possibly interesting, link

•  Apple Watch’s Sensory Overload. Om Malik on Apple’s latest version of its watch. Interesting because OM suffers from heart problems, so having a monitoring device as good as the iWatch on his wrist matters. Link.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe(https://johnnaughton.substack.com)? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Jesus on the mainline

Quote of the Day

”The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.”

• Oscar Wilde

Musical replacement for the morning’s radio news

Randy Newman: Sail Away Link

Long read of the day: The undemocratic US Constitution

Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation is a sham, but it’s one the Constitution allows. There’s only one way out of this crisis: it must be amended, writes Julie C. Suk in the Boston Review.

But if Justice Barrett’s confirmation is an undemocratic sham, it is one that the Constitution allows. As COVID-19-infected, unmasked Senate Judiciary Committee member Mike Lee tweeted, “We are not a democracy.” With his pocket Constitution in tow, he noted that the word “democracy” never appears in the Constitution.

And he’s right. By design, the Constitution empowers the Senate, the president, and the judiciary to ignore the will of most of the American people. The Senate, unlike the House, is blatantly undemocratic, overrepresenting citizens who live in small states by allocating them the same number of Senators as those who live in larger states. The presidency can be unrepresentative of the majority because the Electoral College allows for presidents who lost the popular vote (such as Trump) to assume office and exercise tremendous power. One such power is appointing the judiciary. And the judiciary, too, threatens democracy in two ways: the Constitution entitles judges to lifetime tenure, giving them power to shape the law that governs generations of people. And, since Marbury v. Madison in 1803, federal judges have assumed the power to strike down laws enacted by democratically-elected legislatures. These aspects of the Constitution are not democratic and were not meant to be…

Worth reading in full. We’re back to my theory of incompetent systems — ones that can’t fix themselves.

How McConnell played Trump

Perceptive piece by John Gruber:

It’s almost comical how badly Trump misplayed this opening at Mitch McConnell’s behest. It serves McConnell’s interest to fill the seat while they can, before Trump seems likely to lose the election. It doesn’t serve Trump’s interest at all. There are voters who love Trump all the more for filling this seat now before the election, but they’re the sort of voters who were going to vote for Trump no matter what. But there are almost certainly an electorally significant number of conservative-leaning voters who care about the makeup of the Supreme Court who might have held their noses and voted (again) for Trump even though they dislike him – maybe really dislike him – just on this issue alone, who will now feel free to vote for Joe Biden because conservatives on the Court now hold a 6-3 majority. If a conservative Supreme Court majority is your top issue as a voter, you’ve already got it. You’re free to move on to your next issues, like, say, having someone you respect in the White House. Or someone who believes in science.

Dave Winer wrote the following a month ago, and I haven’t seen anything that puts McConnell’s place in this better:

McConnell is 78, an old man, and he’s got maybe one more term in him, maybe not even that. He’s playing a game for the sake of the game, the same way a compulsive crossword puzzler has to finish the Sunday NYT puzzle.

He set out to do one thing in his life, turn the court Republican.

Look at it this way. The Republicans had two ways to play this vacancy: ram a nominee through before the election just because they can, or use the vacancy as an issue to help win the election.

McConnell was guaranteed of his life’s goal if they rammed it through pre-election. If they’d waited, that turned into a maybe. It served McConnell’s interest to take the sure thing now, even if it hurt Trump personally and Republicans in general in the upcoming election.

I used to think that Trump was the most evil man in American politics. I was wrong: Mitch McConnell beats him hands down.

Other, possibly interesting, links

• North Pole ice cap too thin for testing Russia’s giant icebreaker. The Arktika icebreaker will have to undergo a second test-voyage to prove its capabilities to crush thick and hard sea-ice. Link
• White House science office says Trump ended COVID-19 pandemic as US hits record cases. I know. You think I made that up. Well, see here.
• New Parents Freaked Out Upon Learning That Babies Can Live Up To 100 Years. “Oh God, we got this baby thinking it would just be a few year commitment, tops,” said Conway, who grew increasingly distressed with her partner as she discovered that some infants can be expected to grow up to six feet long.” News from The Onion

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

“Here’s what being called sir feels like to me. You see someone who you think you could be friends with because inside you’re 19, and they call you sir, and you remember what it was like when you were them and you saw someone who looked like you look now.”

• Dave Winer

I know just how he feels. And I’m older than he is! Although, when I think of it, I can’t recall ever calling anyone sir. Maybe I was born middle-aged.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Merle Haggard & Keith Richards – Trouble In Mind

Link

Misconceptions about the virus

The longer this pandemic goes on, the more we’re learning about our initial misconceptions about the virus. Remember when it was just a new kind of flu? And then all the stuff about coughs, high temperature etc. being sure-fire symptoms? And how it was mainly a respiratory disease that attacked the lungs? And how you were most of risk of catching it if you touched an infected surface? And so on.

Making tea this morning I happened to catch an interview with Professor Tim Spector of King’s College London, who’s one of the researchers behind the Covid Symptom-Tracking app which apparently has been downloaded 4m times. This is an app which asks users to spend a minute every day reporting (to the app) their health status (even if they’re not feeling ill). The app asks you to share some general information (age and some health details, such as whether you have certain diseases) and then asks you every day to report know how you feel, so you can share your symptoms. It also asks if you have visited a hospital, and if so what treatment you received there, and whether you have been tested for COVID-19.

Some interesting findings seem to be emerging from this research, including ones which seem to suggest that our original ideas of signature symptoms might have been a bit off beam.

Here’s the relevant audio clip from the programme:

Link

It’s funny how we always seem to be fighting the last war. I was thinking of this while reading about schools and hotels going to extraordinary lengths to make sure that work-surfaces, door-knobs etc are sanitised, or even made redundant.

And all the while maybe the prime means of transmission is via aerosols rather than droplets.

I promise to pay the car park attendant on demand…

My friend Quentin and his wife are on holiday in Cornwall at the moment, where they have run into a problem they hadn’t anticipated — the need to use cash (as in coins and notes). Quentin has written a lovely blog post about it. Here’s a sample:

We’ve been taken by surprise, as visitors here, by the number of car parks which require payment, and where that payment can only be made with cash. Usually in coins, with no change given, so you really want the exact amount. Now, as someone who hasn’t really used cash for years, this was a minor inconvenience the first two or three times. But I’ve now realised that it’s basically the same everywhere: the Queen’s currency is still vital here; it’s a complex kind of car-parking token. Every single car park has required cash; I think we’ve been to four or five here, and one in Devon on the way down. Today, as a gesture to the 21st century, the car park had two machines. One took cards! Hurrah! It was out of order.

Now this isn’t because we’re in some remote backwater where they’ve never heard of digital transactions. Pretty much everything else, since we’ve left home, has been paid for sans contact using my Apple Watch (which is how I’ve paid for most things in the last five years). And, in fact, in Covid-world, most shops are not taking cash at all, so it’s even harder to go and buy a Kit-Kat to get some change. That’s assuming you can find an ATM from which to get some notes in the first place; they’re not exactly plentiful here.

Since there are a lot of visitors to this part of the world, car park attendants have to spend a lot of their time explaining to people that, no, I know it’s astonishing, but you do actually need cash if you want to park here. No, sorry, there isn’t an ATM here, but there’s one in the next town… Yes, that one you drove past 20 minutes ago on the narrow winding road with occasional passing places…

Why Holocaust denial thrives

One of the things that always puzzles me is why conspiracy theories involving Holocaust denial continue to circulate and thrive.

And then I read this report in today’s Guardian:

Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.

According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online.

Ye Gods!

Bill Gates Sr. RIP

Bill Gates’s Dad has passed away. The Seattle Times has a nice obit. He was an Honorary Fellow of my College, Wolfson, and a thoroughly good egg. Bill Jr. said yesterday that his father “was the real Bill Gates. He was all the things I strive to be.” The funny thing is that while Bill Jr. was a very obnoxious kid, he eventually morphed into a thoroughly good human being. Rather like his old man, in fact.

At last: a full at-home rapid coronavirus test – Axios

If we’re ever to get this virus under some kind of control, the first step is not a distant vaccine but a cheap, quick and easy test. It looks as though one may have arrived. At any rate the American pharma firm Gauss and Cellux has announced what it describes as the first full at-home rapid coronavirus test.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows”.

• J. Robert Oppenheimer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field – Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major

Link

According to Nate Silver Biden is on course to win on November 3

I’ve just been looking at his latest projection.

I can’t help remembering that at this time in 2016 he was convinced that Hilary Clinton would win!

How to (Actually) Save Time When You’re Working Remotely

From the Harvard Business Review:

While the widespread shift to remote work hasn’t been without its challenges, it does offer a major silver lining: For many of us, commuting has become a thing of the past. In the United States alone, eliminating the daily commute has saved workers around 89 million hours each week — equivalent to time savings of more than 44.5 million full workdays since the pandemic began! These numbers suggest that working remotely could be a deus ex machina for reclaiming one of our most precious and limited resources: time.

But despite the potential for staggering time savings, many have struggled to achieve everything they hoped the pandemic would finally make time for: baking sourdough, meditating, or writing the next great literary masterpiece. On the contrary, data we collected from 12,000 people across the U.S. and Europe during the pandemic show that the additional time is often burned on unproductive work and unsatisfying leisure activities. Having more time does not necessarily mean that we use it wisely. So, what are we doing wrong?

Answers on a stamped, addressed, handmade postcard.

HT to Charles Arthur, who spotted it.

Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year

Well, actually, I wasn’t expecting that. But it’s the headline on a NYT OpEd today:

Anthony Fauci warned us last week that Covid-19 is likely to be hanging over our lives well into 2021. He’s right, of course. We need to accept this reality and take steps to meet it rather than deny his message.

Many Americans are resistant to this possibility. They’re hoping to restart postponed sports seasons, attend schools more easily, enjoy rescheduled vacations and participate in delayed parties and gatherings.

It is completely understandable that many are tiring of restrictions due to Covid-19. Unfortunately, their resolve is weakening right when we need it to harden. This could cost us dearly.

The unrealistic optimism stems in part from the fact that people have started pinning their hopes on a medical breakthrough. There have been promising developments. Remdesivir holds potential for those who are hospitalized. Convalescent plasma might do the same. Antibody treatments might improve outcomes for some or prevent infections in those at highest risk…

It’s an interesting and not very cheery assessment.

The bottom line is that we’re in a marathon when too many people think it’s a sprint.

Nicci Gerrard’s crowdfunding campaign is half-way to meeting its target!

Please consider donating. It’s a great cause.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.

• George Orwell, 1945.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Glenn Gould plays Haydn Piano Sonata no.60 in C major (13 minutes)

Link

It will take more than attacks on Huawei to win the tech cold war

My Observer column this morning. Banning the Chinese giant from using US components won’t stop a company that’s too big for China to allow it to fail.

Nobody knows how this attempt to strangle Huawei will pan out. The company is too big and too dominant in China to fail – and it’s unlikely the Chinese state would let it go down anyway. After all, Huawei still has a huge domestic market and non-aligned countries will still buy its mobile networking gear. But if one of the motives behind the American assault was to reduce the chances that China would replace the US as the global tech hegemon then it’s unlikely to work.

All that’s happened is that the campaign has highlighted the extent to which semiconductor design and manufacturing capacity have become key strategic assets. The Chinese understand this and there’s no reason that they can’t build that strategic capacity: all it needs is money and brains and they have plenty of both. And when they finally achieve tech parity, the US – and hopefully the rest of the world – will have learned a new slogan: the technological is not just political, it’s geopolitical.

Trevor Paglen has a fascinating, sobering new exhibition on the history of photography and its relationship to state surveillance.

His work brilliantly illustrates how artists can sometimes critique tech much more effectively — and efficiently — than we academics. He was the guy behind ImageNetRoulette, for example, a digital art project and viral selfie app that exposed how biases are intrinsic in facial-recognition technology. Here’s how the NYT reported in 2019.

When Tabong Kima checked his Twitter feed early Wednesday morning, the hashtag of the moment was #ImageNetRoulette.

Everyone, it seemed, was uploading selfies to a website where some sort of artificial intelligence analyzed each face and described what it saw. The site, ImageNet Roulette, pegged one man as an “orphan.” Another was a “nonsmoker.” A third, wearing glasses, was a “swot, grind, nerd, wonk, dweeb.”

Across Mr. Kima’s Twitter feed, these labels — some accurate, some strange, some wildly off base — were played for laughs. So he joined in. But Mr. Kima, a 24-year-old African-American, did not like what he saw. When he uploaded his own smiling photo, the site tagged him as a “wrongdoer” and an “offender.”

“I might have a bad sense of humor,” he tweeted, “but I don’t think this is particularly funny.”

As it turned out, his response was just what the site was aiming for.

An immodest proposal

Nice essay by Samuel Weber, meditating on the ageism intrinsic in mask refusal.

He starts by reminding us of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” for alleviating the shortage of food facing the growing Irish population. The essay, published in 1729, suggested that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to rich people. This satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general.

Samuel Weber has used this satirical lens as a way of thinking about contemporary attitudes towards the pandemic. The virus, he writes,

has one distinctive quality that might have appealed to Swift’s satiric talent: in attacking above all the poor and the elderly, it can be seen to be a kind of Malthusian force striving to rid “society” of its unproductive elements. This is especially relevant to the elderly persons “parked” in “nursing” or “old-age homes.” In French there is a good word that describes the reality of many of these institutions, even if it does so brutally: mouroir. It is a place people are sent to die, when there is no one willing or able to care for them in a less institutional manner. The spread of dementia, in its various forms, collected often under the name “Alzheimer,” has only increased this tendency of contemporary societies to dispose of the elderly by removing them to invisible institutional settings, more or less well-equipped depending on the financial resources of those subjected to them.

If he’d been around today, Weber writes, Swift would have had to modify his satirical proposal.

No one is proposing to eat the poor and the elderly. It is enough to dispose of them, just as society has tried to exclude them from public view by parking them in “homes” or in segregated housing “projects” where they are free to assassinate each other in a scramble for the profits of a socially imposed “drug trade.”

Not cannibalism today — that would be too crude. Today’s “immodest proposal” is being made practically if implicitly by all those who have decided that the extra effort involved in wearing masks, distancing, etc., is simply not worth it, since it only affects “others” and not oneself. This attitude and behavior should not surprise anyone, since it simply builds on the invisibility that is already a characteristic of most of the societies affected by this pandemic. Such invisibility — which sustains thoughtlessness and unconcern about structural injustice — has long been a “preexisting condition” of these societies. COVID-19 has only cast a fresh and harsh light on this — but it is a light that conceals more than it reveals.

I love these sharp perspectives on current events. Swift’s modest proposal also made a lot of people think — though perhaps not the right people.

Haven’t we come far

No comment needed.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

“Don’t wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

• Mark Twain

It’s the mistake liberals make when dealing with creeps like Trump and Farage.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Nicolas Altstaedt plays the Bach Cello suites in the Philharmonie in Berlin

Link

This is long (an hour and three-quarters in total) but beautiful. It reminds me of Casals’s wonderful version recorded (I think) in a small deserted church in Spain many years ago.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link.

The Simulmatics project

One of the great benefits of working in a university is that one has access to lots of stuff that’s normally behind journal paywalls. So when I saw that the historian Jill Lepore has a forthcoming book about an astonishing data-science operation that was up and running for the 1960 Presidential election, I went looking for academic papers by the people who ran the project. And lo and behold, here’s one by two of the key figures.

LATER Charles Arthur (whom God preserve) told me about a New Yorker (non-paywalled) piece by Jill Lepore in which she sketches out the story on which her book is based. It begins thus:

The Simulmatics Corporation opened for business on February 18, 1959, in an office rented by Edward L. Greenfield, the company’s thirty-one-year-old president, on an upper floor of a building at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street, five blocks south of I.B.M.’s glittering World Headquarters. Greenfield, an adman, political consultant, and all-around huckster, pulled people in like a “Looney Tunes” magnet. “Ed Greenfield,” he’d say, flashing a Dean Martin grin, slapping a back, offering a vodka-and-tonic, palming a business card. His new company’s offices were threadbare; his ambition could hardly have been grander. “Simulmatics,” a mashup of “simulation” and “automatic,” had much the same mystique as another nineteen-fifties neologism: “artificial intelligence.” Decades before Facebook and Google and Cambridge Analytica and every app on your phone, Simulmatics’ founders thought of it all: they had the idea that, if they could collect enough data about enough people and write enough good code, everything, one day, might be predicted—every human mind simulated and then directed by targeted messages as unerring as missiles. For its first mission, Simulmatics aimed to win the White House back for the Democratic Party.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard M. Nixon in a campaign that carries an air of destiny, mainly because of an iconic account by the reporter Theodore H. White. In “The Making of the President 1960,” White created the myth of Kennedy as an inevitable President—King Arthur, pulling Excalibur from the stone. But Kennedy’s bid for the nomination was a long shot, his victory in the general election was one of the closest in American history, and his campaign deployed an election simulator. However commonplace now, this was new then, and fiercely controversial. White, while never naming Simulmatics, took the trouble to disavow its influence on the very first page of his book. “It is the nature of politics that men must always act on the basis of uncertain fact,” he wrote. “Were it otherwise, then . . . politics would be an exact science in which our purposes and destiny could be left to great impersonal computers.” White was close to the Kennedy campaign, and the Kennedy campaign had decided to deny, publicly, that it had used Simulmatics…

Interesting piece of history that. The only book I read about Kennedy’s victory was Theodore White’s. So I’ve been labouring under a misapprehension for six decades!

WashPo’s ‘Date Lab’

It’s strange what newspapers get up to sometimes. The Washington Post, for example, has something called a Date Lab.

Here’s how it works: We search our database of thousands of Washington, D.C.-area singles until we find a pair with romance potential. Then we send them out on a blind date on our dime and report the results in the pages of the Washington Post Magazine and online.

Our requirements: To participate you must be over the age of 21, single and living in the greater D.C. area. You must agree to have your name, age and picture published and to participate in a telephone interview.

Apply now!

Here’s an excerpt from one of the ‘experiments’:

Meeting through a computer screen did not curb their physical chemistry. Sam immediately noticed Elli’s olive complexion. He added: “She’s beautiful.” Elli, who Sam described as “extroverted,” was not shy about stating her height preferences. “I was like, don’t worry, I’m 5-foot-11,” he said. “And no one would lie about being 5-foot-11, so you can believe me.”

Sam says his ideal partner would share 80 percent of his political views (100 percent “would be boring,” he says), and over the nearly three-hour conversation, they discovered where their 20 percent gap in politics lay: former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg. When Elli asked him who his preferred candidate was during the 2020 Democratic primaries, she said, “Please don’t say Pete.” (He said Pete.) Sam, on the other hand, says that Elli thought Buttigieg “was a Republican.” Ultimately, it was a difference that both of them could stomach.

There were no awkward lulls in conversation, and Sam did not consult his tab of questions even once…

Dark matter, second waves and epidemiological modelling

Since we can’t know the future, we have to make educated guesses about it. Statistical modelling is one way of doing that. This interesting (but not yet peer-reviewed) research paper uses a modelling approach to try to assess whether fears of a catastrophic Autumnal second wave of Covid-19 are too pessimistic.

Its conclusion is: they are. Or, as the researchers put it:

A dynamic causal model that incorporates heterogeneity of exposure, susceptibility and transmission suggests that the next wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will be much smaller than conventional models predict, with less economic and health disruption. This heterogeneity means that seroprevalence underestimates effective herd immunity and, crucially, the potential of public health programmes.

I hope they’re right.

Om Malik on emerging from lockdown

Interesting postfrom a thoughtful tech commentator and photographer.

As I become more open to the world, I notice that the words others use to describe it have become more calculated. Every word online, it seems, is uttered for the benefit of the platforms. Through the feed, which is how we experience the “now,” words are designed to provoke outrage. Images are almost perfect, each one laser-printed to perfect saturation, built to get likes and followers. Like a polluted stream, it flows past us.

Faster and faster it goes, when slower is what I want everything to be — especially my photography. I have lost all interest in perfection. The representation of reality is meaningless. From politics to stock markets to fashion, we find ourselves trapped in a reality that is nothing more than synthetically generated memes in obeisance to the hyper-capitalism.

For me, the camera has become a way to try and escape this world defined by unreal reality. When I find something that I see in synchronicity with my inner self, I want to use it to paint that moment. I want to get lost in what I can only imagine. My journey is taking me deeper and deeper into these imagined landscapes.

This is a constant quest. As I looked out in the Pacific Ocean beyond Bolinas, the feeding frenzy unfolding in front of my eyes, I imagined it as a pastoral activity in the distance.

The ocean had a green-blue color, not the ominous dark blue that one encounters during the winter. The sky was gray, but somewhere beyond, you could feel the sun slowly slithering into the ocean.

His photographs are always distinctive, though never vivid.

It’s not just Americans who are paying the price of Trump’s thuggery

Great essay by Andrew Sullivan — now back on his own blog. This is how it begins…

The Uighur women in exile in Istanbul are the fortunate ones. They managed to escape the control of the Chinese Communist regime, thanks to relatives who found ways to get them out of the country. But one woman refugee also has a confession: “She speaks of participating in at least 500 to 600 operations on Uighur women including forced contraception, forced abortion, forced sterilisation and forced removal of wombs. She told me that on at least one occasion a baby was still moving when it was discarded into the rubbish.” She believed, she says, that this was just part of the Chinese government’s overall birth control policy. Now she knows that was a lie. While birthrates have fallen by 4 percent over the whole country, in Uighur areas, they have declined by 60 percent. The only word for this is genocide — something we have now known for some time.

Meanwhile, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has denied that he had anything to do with the sudden sickness of Alexander Navalny, the most prominent Russian opposition leader. A Russian hospital where Navalny was initially treated claimed there was no evidence of poisoning. But as soon as he was transferred to Berlin for medical attention, incontrovertible evidence emerged that Navalny had been poisoned by the now-familiar nerve agent, Novichok, a substance manufactured by the Russian government. It is the same poison used against a former Russian spy in exile in Salisbury, England, a little over two years ago.

China’s dictator, president-for-life Xi Jinping, has made some efforts to hide his new complex of concentration camps, but he does not appear to be worried. Vladimir Putin, despite the pro forma denials, is also not particularly concerned that he be discovered as a state assassin. In fact, the blatant use of a nerve agent long tied to the Kremlin is a sign that he wants these attempted murders to be attributed to him.

And both dictators know very well that in president Trump, they have an American leader who is actually impressed — rather than repelled — by this kind of state thuggery…

Worth reading in full.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!