Monday 27 July, 2020

Posted on July 27, 2020 by jjn1

Windows into the past

My wife is currently going through her family archive, and keeps coming up with astonishing photographs. This is a shot of a Mothers’ Union sewing (or perhaps embroidery) group in a Yorkshire village in the early years of the 20th century. (Her great-grandmother was a member.)

Everyone is wearing a hat — which suddenly reminds me that my grandmother never left the house without one. But then her husband never went out without his Homburg either.

En passant: this fabulous hoard of family photographs reminds one that most people living today will leave nothing like this because their digital photographs will be on computer disks or hosted on online servers. Which means that when they die, most of those accounts will be closed or inaccessible to relatives, and the images will therefore be lost to posterity. Which is why, when people ask me about digital preservation, I tell them to print anything they wish to preserve and store them in shoeboxes in their attics. That’s the only way their grandchildren and great-grandchildren will ever be able to see them.

Today’s musical alternative to Radio 4’s ‘Today’ programme

Alessandro Marcello’s Concerto in D minor, arranged for two guitars

Ten minutes of peaceful bliss.

Our remote work future is going to suck

Or: Why are we always assuming a distributed workforce is a good thing for the worker?

A very thoughtful essay by Sean Blanda in the be careful what you wish for genre.

It’s quite a long read, but worth it.

My TL;DR summary is:

Remote work “democratises talent” for everyone. Even you.

The work you’re doing from your home in a nice rural village can also be done much more cheaply by someone in the Phillippines.

Remote enables you to be forgotten

You do gain a bit of freedom from your boss (which doubles as a loss of a mentor, but we’ll get to that). You also gain “freedom” from your colleagues and collaborators. Which means you’re effectively on your own.

This is empowering to some, but the isolation can mean your contributions are easily overlooked or misunderstood. As a result, I’ve noticed a disturbing trend at (especially larger) remote companies: Some managers often have no clue what their direct reports are doing and how they are doing it.

Remote work breaks large companies

Remote work evangelists often portray it as liberation from the “interruption culture” at a traditional office. But, says Blanda,

First, clearly people that believe remote work creates an interruption-free zone have never used Slack or email. Second, those interruptions often exist for a reason: They often communicate information that ensures everyone is working on the right thing.

Remote work can stifle your career growth

When you work remotely, mentorship is stifled because there is no learning via osmosis. You can’t model your behavior on your successful teammates because you only see them on Zoom and in Slack. Whatever process they are using to achieve their results is opaque to you.

Evangelists for remote working have revealing blind spots

For example, they assume that:

Remote workers prefer to tightly wrap their identity in their work.
Everyone has a dedicated working space.
Parents have reliable child care outside of the home.

Real-world experience of remote working during the pandemic suggests that often none of these is the case.

The key takeaway (for me, anwway) from this great piece:

We derive more from our careers than simply a paycheck. We find meaning, community, and connection to others. We gain a needed context for seeing the world. We cannot completely decouple the working experience from being in the physical presence of others without causing a slow-simmering existential crisis in its participants.

That’s right IMO: and it means that anything other than a blended future (some remote plus some face-to-face working) is the only way of avoiding another neoliberal nightmare.

So who’s doing well in the pandemic?

This chart tells it all.

Last Responders: couriers of the dead

Memorable reporting by the Texas Tribune.

Juan Lopez is in the ambulance bay of a McAllen hospital, zipping a gauzy blue jumpsuit over a Polo button-down and work slacks. Two well-worn stretchers are in the back of his Cadillac Escalade, a pack of Marlboros near the gear shift.

It’s Saturday morning in South Texas, and the corpse of a 60-something-year-old needs to get to a funeral home — specifically, a refrigerated truck behind a funeral home that’s run out of storage space. The deceased coronavirus patient goes in the back of the Escalade, and Lopez heads to retrieve a body from another hospital’s morgue.

These are the first jobs of the day — and far from the last. Lopez will pick up 16 bodies Saturday, wake up at 2 a.m. Sunday and transport 22 more, including a husband and wife both infected with the virus.

Lopez, 45, is a courier of the dead, contracting with funeral homes and the county to pick up and deliver bodies. In normal times, he handled around 10 jobs a week. But this isn’t a normal time.

Wonderful reporting.

Frequent, Fast, and Cheap is Better than Sensitive

From Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution:

A number of firms have developed cheap, paper-strip tests for coronavirus that report results at-home in about 15 minutes but they have yet to be approved for use by the FDA because the FDA appears to be demanding that all tests reach accuracy levels similar to the PCR test. This is another deadly FDA mistake.

The PCR tests can discover virus at significantly lower concentration levels than the cheap tests but that extra sensitivity doesn’t matter much in practice. Why not? First, at the lowest levels that the PCR test can detect, the person tested probably isn’t infectious. The cheap test is better at telling whether you are infectious than whether you are infected but the former is what we need to know to open schools and workplaces. Second, the virus grows so quickly that the time period in which the PCR tests outperforms the cheap test is as little as a day or two. Third, the PCR tests are taking days or even a week or more to report which means the results are significantly outdated and less actionable by the time they are reported.

The fundamental issue is this: if a test is cheap and fast we shouldn’t compare it head to head against the PCR test. Instead, we should compare test regimes. A strip test could cost $5 which means you can do one per day for the same price as a PCR test (say $35). Thus, the right comparison is seven cheap tests with one PCR test.

Spot on. This is the same as with the ridiculous reluctance to use face-masks: the best (peer-reviewed) being the enemy of the good. Cheap, rapid strip-tests could be really useful at this stage of the pandemic. Not perfect. But useful. So why don’t we have them — now?

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Saturday 18 July, 2020

Posted on July 18, 2020 by jjn1

What if the Trinity test had failed?

Fascinating counter-factual essay by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear weapons.

After getting the successful results from Trinity, Truman took a very hard line with Stalin. He believed that the bomb gave him leverage for both the end of World War II and the peace that would follow. Though he did not try to argue that the Soviets should not declare war on Japan or stop their invasion plans, he was less convinced he would need the Soviet entry into the war, and did not encourage them. Without the confidence from Trinity, would he have pushed so hard? I’m not sure he would have; he might have felt the Soviet invasion too necessary for the end of the war to risk alienation. And if he had taken a more compromising approach, what would the impact of that had been on the later Cold War to follow? The Cold War was a complex thing, not the result of a single interaction, but there are scholars who have attributed some of its formation and angst to Truman’s post-Trinity bravado, so it’s not outside the realm of contemplation.

A Covid lexicon

From the New Yorker.

Maskhole: an individual who wears a mask in a way that makes it completely ineffective — e.g. below the nose, under the chin, on the back of the head.

Face naked: The state of facial exposure that occurs when an individual declines to wear a mask in public.

Someday, Noneday, Whoseday?, Whensday?, Blursday, Whyday?, Doesn’tmatter day: Days of the week.

Pan-demic: A potentially dangerous increase in the baking of bread in a quarantined home.

What comes after Zoom fatigue?

Long essay which basically comes to the conclusion that we’ll just get used to it — just like we got used to the telephone.

What comes after Zoom fatigue is what I’d call Zoom acquiescence. It’s an inevitability.

During the pandemic, we’ve all started relying on video chat technology for health care, religion, entertainment, and simply keeping up with friends. It will remain relevant in our lives going forward, especially for work. Much like those who were gobsmacked by telephones a century ago, we’re likely witnessing a transformation in communication — a leap forward with no return. The new thing is scary, imperfect, and often off-putting. We might as well make the best of it.

“We’ve been forced to use these tools for things that we otherwise never would have dreamed of, like buying and selling houses,” said Nicole Ellison, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information. “We’ll essentially come out of this with a better, more calibrated sense of what we really need to do face to face.”

We might not, for instance, need to go to the doctor’s office as often. While telemedicine has existed for years, the pandemic forced all kinds of doctor’s appointments to happen online. Some experts think there’s no reason to go back, arguing that over half of doctor’s visits don’t require an in-person meeting. Research has also shown that telemedicine is significantly more efficient than traditional in-person visits for mental health care, and these benefits could mean more people seek help.

In other words, the pandemic has fundamentally changed our relationship with these tools and with digital spaces generally.

Pressure from Trump led to 5G ban, Britain tells Huawei

Surprise, surprise.

Guardian story:

In the days leading up to the controversial announcement on Tuesday last week, intensive discussions were held and confidential communications exchanged between the government and Whitehall officials on one side and Huawei executives on the other.

As part of the high-level behind-the-scenes contacts, Huawei was told that geopolitics had played a part, and was given the impression that it was possible the decision could be revisited in future, perhaps if Trump failed to win a second term and the anti-China stance in Washington eased.

Senior Huawei executives have gone public since Tuesday’s decision saying that they hope the British government will rethink, apparently encouraged by the results of back-channel contacts.

Basically, the Brexiteers are trying to have it both ways. And they really don;t want to annoy the Chinese. Trouble is, they need to play nice with both the US and China, since they need trade deals with both. Sooner or later they are going to discover that having cake and eating it is a fantasy.

Thursday 16 July, 2020

Posted on July 16, 2020 by jjn1

“Now we are all sons of bitches”

75 years ago today, the nuclear age began. July 16 1945 was the day the first atomic bomb was detonated in the New Mexico desert in the Trinity test. To mark the anniversary the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has compiled a memorable assembly of personal reflections by the scientists who worked on the bomb and who were there when it went off. It’s an unmissable, moving read. Here are two of the reflections.

Val Fitch:

It took about 30 millionths of a second for the flash of light from the explosion to reach us outside the bunker at south 10,000. It took the blast wave about 30 seconds. There was the initial loud report, the sharp gust of wind, and then the long period of reverberation as the sound waves echoed off the nearby mountains and came back to us.

I got up from the ground and watched the now famous mushroom cloud rise in the morning sky. Apparently no one had told the military policeman, stationed at the door of the bunker to control access, what to expect. He was absolutely pale and a look of incredible alarm was on his face as he came away from the bunker door to stand beside me and view the sight. I simply said what was on my mind, “The war will soon be over.”

Kenneth Bainbridge:

After the blast wave had passed, I got up from the ground to congratulate Oppenheimer and others on the success of the implosion method. I finished by saying to Robert, “Now we are all sons of bitches.” Years later he recalled my words and wrote me, “We do not have to explain them to anyone.” I think that I will always respect his statement, although there have been some imaginative people who somehow can’t or won’t put the statement in context and get the whole interpretation. Oppenheimer told my younger daughter in 1966 that it was the best thing anyone said after the test.

Ancient history? Yes. But if China, fresh from subjugating Hong Kong, were to move on Taiwan…

The costs of the next Cold War: $3.5 trillion

And while we’re on the subject of China, this from yesterday’s FT:

A larger tech cold war is taking place that could cost $3.5tn over the next five years, according to a report today by Apjit Walia, Deutsche Bank’s Global Head of Tech Strategy. This permeates to the consumer level, with DB surveys recording 41 per cent of Americans and 35 per cent of Chinese saying they will not buy each other’s products.

The $3.5tn figure comes from a $400bn reduction a year in domestic end demand from China and $100bn a year as a “Tech Wall” creates extra costs for companies dealing with rival internet platforms, operating systems, and communications and payment networks. A further $1tn in costs would come from rebuilding and reconfiguring the supply chain, mainly falling on “final goods manufacturers” who currently use China as a manufacturing base.

If there is any upside, it might come from similar dynamics to the US-USSR cold war, where a ramp in spending on defence and the space race could translate as a leap in tech investment this century. US government spending alone on R&D more than doubled as a percentage of GDP between 1957 and 1964 — to 2.2 per cent. Tech investment might not match that in this post-Covid era, but it could still provide a much needed blast of warmth for the sector in icy times.

Boris Johnson needs a therapist. Who knew?

John Crace on Boris Johnson’s latest shambles in PMQs:

At this point, it dawned on Starmer that Boris almost certainly hadn’t read the report [from the Academy of Medical Sciences on the dangers of an Autumn surge in Covid cases] to which he had referred – a little slow on the uptake from the Labour leader as the prime minister never reads any reports of more than two paragraphs – so he asked him outright if he had. “Um … er …,” Boris hesitated. He was aware of the report. In the same way he is aware that he has children, but is unable to say exactly how many. And in the same way as I am aware of the space-time continuum but would be unable to explain exactly what the science meant to anyone. Though if it turned out that Boris only really existed in another parallel dimension then I’d happily settle for that.

Apple, Ireland and the saga of €13 billion

This is stuff you couldn’t make up.

Four years ago, the European Commission said that Ireland had failed to collect €13 billion in taxes from Apple. According to the Commission this meant that Apple had received illegal state aid and should have paid more taxes. Apple duly handed over the €13B to the Irish government, which put it in an escrow account (where it’s been sitting ever since earning interest). Apple appealed the ruling to the EU General Court. Even more intriguingly, so did the Irish government.

Today, the Court handed down its judgment — that the European Commission’s case had no legal basis. So unless the Commission appeals, then the Irish government — which will be strapped for cash because of Covid-19 and the forthcoming financial crash caused by the UK crashing out of the EU without a deal — will cheerfully refund Apple.

According to the FT the EU has two months and 10 days to appeal against the decision, and it believes that the commission is likely to file an appeal and the case will be heard by the European Court of Justice, the EU’s highest court, which will issue a final ruling.

All of this may make sense to lawyers. But Sinn Féin, the main opposition party in the Irish parliament is not amused. Nor, I suspect, are many of my fellow-countrymen and women.

Wednesday 15 July, 2020

Posted on July 15, 2020 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

“If we could get everybody to wear a mask right now, I really think in the next four, six, eight weeks, we could bring this epidemic under control”.

Robert Redfield, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Enlightenment, eh? How long have you got?

Here’s an interesting wormhole. Yesterday, intrigued by a comment on Tim Gray’s post about the dark sides of ‘efficiency’, I looked up David Wooton’s Power, Pleasure and Profit: Insatiable Appetites from Machiavelli to Madison. Not having access to the book at the moment, I watched his 2017 Besterman Lecture which was based on Chapter 8 and then read the blurb on Amazon, which reads:

A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents. We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning-cost-benefit analysis-to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought-from Machiavelli to Madison-to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success. Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip.

Since Wooton is a fine historian (see his 2015 The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution), I guessed that Power, Pleasure and Profit might not be the standard-issue conservative rant about the decline of religious values, world going to the dogs, etc., and was maybe worth reading sometime. So I looked for reviews, and found this long and thoughtful one one by John Gray. It’s a respectful, but not uncritical review, the gist of which is that Wooton’s concept of the Enlightenment is rather too narrow to bear the weight be seeks to load upon it.

Wootton presents the conceptual shift that gave birth to our life today in a book that is ambitious and impressive in its sweep. Nearly a third of Power, Pleasure and Profit’s 400 pages consist of scholarly notes and appendices. Yet Wootton’s vividly written narrative never loses momentum. Few academic books tell such a gripping story of how ideas can change the world. Yet it is a story that leaves out an enormous amount, and the view of “the Enlightenment paradigm” that Wootton presents is both parochial and anachronistic. He does not suggest that Enlightenment thinkers promoted a homogeneous set of ideas. “‘The Enlightenment’ is a problematic term,” he writes, “because it is easy and fruitful to multiply enlightenments.” Enlightenment thinking was riddled with “bitter disputes”, with radicals and conservatives adopting diverging views of the limits of human sociability. For all these caveats, Wootton’s Enlightenment paradigm is extraordinarily narrow.

At which point I realised that I’m heading down a wormhole and I have a newspaper column to write. Life is too short sometimes to follow one’s nose. Sigh.

American teenagers are masking up as grannies to buy liquor

This report is from the New York Post, which doesn’t exactly guarantee its accuracy. But if it’s true, then it restores my faith in human nature.

And of course it also reminds me of Monty Python’s wonderful Hell’s Grannies sketch.

Link

Why venture capital doesn’t build the things we really need

Unnecessarily long Tech Review essay which takes ages to come up with the obvious answer. Venture Capital goes to stuff that stands a chance of rapid returns. It doesn’t do the long-term stuff that lays the groundwork for major industrial change. No VC firm would fund something like the Internet, or — for that matter — the Web. Only the state can do that. In the United States, for example, 75% of venture capital goes to software. Some 5 to 10% goes to biotech: only a tiny handful of venture capitalists have mastered the longer art of building a biotech company. The other sliver goes to everything else transportation, sanitation, health care.

What we need, as Mariana Mazzucato has been saying for years, is an Entrepreneurial State.

Sunday 12 July, 2020

Posted on July 12, 2020 by jjn1

A house full of music

This astonishing programme was broadcast on BBC1 this evening. It’s on the iPlayer for a month and is unmissable IMHO. Take an hour off and watch it.

Could juries be a solution to the free-speech moderation problem on social media?

This morning’s Observer column on Jonathan Zittrain’s big idea.

One of the most instructive experiences of my life was serving as a juror in a criminal trial. When the summons to report for jury service arrived, though, I was anything but enthusiastic. I was bringing up two young children on my own at the time and the last thing I needed was to be locked down for an unknown number of days. So I headed into the crown court feeling pretty glum.

The trial was a serious one: the charge was of causing grievous bodily harm with intent. It went on for two weeks. A number of witnesses gave evidence, much of which seemed (to me) unconvincing, sometimes contradictory, occasionally horrifying. We learned more about what goes on at night in an economically depressed East Anglian town than is good for anyone. And then, when the lawyers and the judge had summed up, we retired to reach a verdict.

What happened next was remarkable…

Read on

History of (tech) ideas?

One of the biggest treats of the lockdown has been David Runciman’s ‘History of Ideas’ podcast — a set of absorbing, enlightening and thought-provoking lectures on some of the intellects who have shaped the way we think about politics. In this first set of talks he covered:

Thomas Hobbes on power
Mary Wollstonecraft On Sexual Politics
Benjamin Constant on Liberty
Alexis de Tocqueville on Democracy
Marx and Engels on Revolution
Mahatma Gandhi on Self-Rule
Max Weber on Leadership
Friedrich Hayek on the market
Hannah Arendt on Action
Frantz Fanon on Empire
Catharine MacKinnon on Patriarchy
Francis Fukuyama on History

(The only one I would have added is John Maynard Keynes.)

If there had been a season of talks like this on the radio when I was a teenager I might have decided to study politics rather than engineering. I can imagine these podcasts having a similar impact on serious teenagers wondering what A-Levels to study now. What made the talks so good was the way they provided the context needed if one is embarking on reading, say, Hobbes or Weber for the first time.

Having really enjoyed the series, I then fell to wondering who would be the thinkers for an analogous series on computing and computation.

Here’s a first stab at such a list:

George Boole on logic
Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace on automated calculation
Alan Turing on computability
John von Neumann on computer architecture
Norbert Weiner on automation
Claude Shannon on information theory
Donald Knuth on algorithms
Vannevar Bush on associative linking
JCR Licklider on computers as communication devices
Douglas Engelbart on augmentation
Paul Baran and Donald Davies on packet-switching
Ted Nelson and Tim Bernard-Lee on hypertext
Hal Varian on the economics of information goods
Stuart Russell on AI
Shoshana Zuboff on surveillance capitalism

Who am I missing? Nick Bostrom on superintelligence?

With India’s TikTok Ban, the World’s Digital Walls Grow Higher

As this NYT story illustrates, censorship and politics are fracturing the global internet, isolating users and industries accustomed to ignoring national borders.

TikTok, the first Chinese internet service to have a truly global fan base, is rapidly falling victim to China’s worsening diplomatic relations around the globe. It is yet another sign that the digital world, once thought of as a unifying space that transcended old divisions, is being carved up along the same national lines that split the physical one.

Tensions between India and China have run hot ever since a border clash in the Himalayas two weeks ago left 20 Indian soldiers dead. The government in New Delhi announced a ban on 59 Chinese apps late Monday, saying they were secretly transmitting users’ data to servers outside India.

India’s decision strikes at a number of China’s leading technology companies, including Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu. But perhaps none will be more affected than TikTok and its Beijing-based parent, ByteDance, which has built a huge audience in India as part of an aggressive and well-funded expansion around the world. TikTok has been installed more than 610 million times in India, according to estimates by the data firm Sensor Tower. In the United States, the app has been installed 165 million times.

‘Balkanisation’ of the Internet picks up speed.

Imagining New York without cars

Farhad Manjoo’s imaginative essay is worth some of your time. It’s a nice example of how to tell a complex story using Web technology imaginatively.

That whirring sound you will hear is that of Robert Moses rotating at 5,000rpm in his grave.

Monday 15 June, 2020

Posted on June 15, 2020 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

I keep wondering about this too.

Termite capitalism: the menace of private equity

Terrific essay in open Democracy on one of the most pernicious manifestations of capitalism.

The problem is that the private equity model of takeover and ownership is akin to inviting termites into your house. The basic model is as follows: private equity acquires a company using loans, usually from banks but also increasingly from pension funds, insurance companies, sovereign wealth funds etc. The old management is replaced, the workforce cut, and assets such as land and buildings are sold, often to an entity registered in an offshore tax haven. The new company must pay interest on the debt, repay the debt over time, pay rent for the premises, management fees to the private equity owners.

Costs will also include payment to linked third-party suppliers, at prices which are not arm’s length. The taxable capacity of the new company is thereby reduced, and tax liabilities are shifted towards capital gains tax away from corporation tax. The company can only be financially viable in a booming market or where revenue streams continue to rise.

In general, private equity does not actually create anything – it engages instead in extracting resources from previously existing assets. Eventually, by excessive extraction of revenue flows, the companies are bound to fail. The termites eat away at the foundations until the house falls down.

If ever one wanted a demonstration of the extent to which neoliberal ideology is suffused through our ruling elites, then tolerance of private equity provides it. The argument that it’s really a way of ensuring the survival of the fittest in corporate life is specious — at least in its present manifestations.

The Long Shadow Of The Future

Yesterday was the 100th anniversary of the death of Max Weber, the patron saint of the administrative state. Wolfgang Drechsler has a nice essay to mark the occasion.

“Weberian public administration in the wider sense”, he writes,

has been, and is, much maligned; bureaucracy is an easy target, and whining about it is a steady feature of complex human societies which always need and automatically generate it. And Weberian public administration has its systemic faults — slowness, process-orientation, a slippery slope to authoritarian, mindless hierarchization and shirking. However, this bureaucracy is in its optimal form ethics-based, high-capacity, and motivation-driven. It is meant to be both responsible — to a state that is above and beyond particular interests — as well as responsive — to groups and citizens, but not at the cost of the commonweal.

However we decide to manage the transition to a CO2-neutral world — via Green Growth or Post-Growth — that process will have to be implemented by competent, motivated, and yes, Weberian civil servants.

Yep. And the problem was that neoliberal ideology never believed that this kind of civil service was valuable. (One of its more fanatical American devotees used to say that his ambition was “to shrink the state until it was small enough to be drowned in a bathtub”.) So its devotees (including Margaret Thatcher) imported economic principles and management theories into the administrative state without recognizing the crucial, fundamental differences between public and private, not least as regards value creation.

As a result, writes Drechsler, “We still stand in front of the smoldering ruins of a capable, responsible state … and we are still paying a high price for it.”

And how! The pandemic has vividly demonstrated this — especially in the cases of the US and the UK. We have discovered that these states lacked the capacity to deal with the crisis because, over preceding decades, that capacity had been eroded or (in the case of the US) actively destroyed, especially during the Trump presidency — as Michael Lewis described in his sobering book, The Fifth Risk.

Which brings us to a remarkable long essay by Nils Gilman and Steven Weber on how different kinds of states have responded to the challenge of the virus. They focus particularly on Taiwan (which did well) but draw some really interesting general conclusions from their survey.

Poor policy reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic aren’t the result of a failure of imagination; the pandemic was not a black swan event, and it was not unpredictable. It was entirely foreseeable — and foreseen — by a wide variety of government, business, medical and other foresight professionals. For years, the World Economic Forum hosted pandemic preparedness planning events. Even if we didn’t know when and precisely how, we knew something like COVID-19 was coming.

The real challenge is not foresight itself but how to turn foresight into action — specifically, into operational readiness supported by competent operators. The inability to contain the COVID-19 outbreak signals a failure to take seriously the outputs of our own foresight models by acting to create contingency arrangements, manage risks and secure back-up plans in advance, in a sustained manner and without a precise target date or endpoint.

This failure has taken place in Italy, Iran, Spain, England, Sweden, the U.S. and elsewhere; authoritarian, conservative and social democratic governments alike have been overwhelmed. And because we live in a time of rapid and intensive global flows of people and products, multiple national failures compound inexorably into a global failure. In the words of President Eisenhower: “Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.”

And why have a small number of countries, like Taiwan, been able to manage the crisis better than others?

Nils and Weber identify a “distinctive mix of governance attributes” —

at once vigorously participatory, highly trustworthy, competent and with careful plans. In 2004, the year after the SARS epidemic, which was widely seen to have been mishandled, the Taiwanese government established the National Health Command Center as “a disaster management center that focuses on large-outbreak response and acts as the operational command point for direct communications among central, regional and local authorities.” Five years later, Taiwanese health officials staged simulated drills as a capability exercise. Simulations revealed the tensions and miscommunications between different levels of government and agencies during a crisis, allowing officials to develop heuristics for overcoming such problems in advance.

One of the most intriguing ideas in this marvellous essay is the way it highlights the difference between ideas and delivery. “One of the less-positive effects of digital social media over the last decade”, they write,

has been to contribute to a set of mythologies about the special value of ideas. Ideas are of course powerful and ultimately the source of innovation and social change, but the pandemic is revealing a sharp difference between power and value. In a landscape where there are plenty of ideas — good and bad and mixed in terms of quality, and often hard to distinguish — value tends to migrate toward what is relatively scarce. And what’s been shown to be relatively scarce right now is competent operational expertise.

Put simply, ideas are cheap and easy to create and distribute — never more so than on social media platforms. But really knowing how to get things done effectively requires a set of capabilities that are difficult to create, expensive to maintain and improve, and not something you describe in 280 characters. Pandemics and other mass emergencies and mobilizations like wars demonstrate the difference in sharp relief. The ability to execute becomes visibly more important than the ability to ideate. What’s more, the best ideas are rarely discovered in isolation from practical implementation. Improvement depends on concrete feedback from what happens when ideas are put into practice in the world. What works and what doesn’t reveals itself to operators before (and often more clearly than) it reveals itself to idea generators.

Wow! This summary has just scratched the surface of an extraordinary essay. Which is why it’s worth reading in full.

29-hour reading of Ulysses to air on RTÉ radio tomorrow!

If you’re an admirer of James Joyce (like me), tomorrow — June 16 (Bloomsday) — is the most important day of the year.

For over 20 years I’ve hosted a lunch to celebrate the writer and his wonderful novel. We gather, drink burgundy and eat gorgonzola sandwiches — just as Leopold Bloom did in Davy Byrne’s pub — at lunchtime in the novel. And read from the book.

Sadly, this year the virus has put paid to that event. I had pondered trying to do a virtual Bloomsday lunch over Zoom, but decided it was too ridiculous and depressing to contemplate.

But — here’s some good news. RTE, the Irish national broadcasting station, is going to broadcast a marathon reading of the novel, starting at 8am tomorrow, the moment when the novel opens in the Martello Tower in Sandycove, south of Dublin.

Here’s the link. Use it wisely. Hope you enjoy the day.

Quarantine diary — Day 86

Link

Saturday 6 June, 2020

Posted on June 6, 2020 by jjn1

The Complex Debate Over Silicon Valley’s Embrace of Content Moderation

Interesting NYT piece by Nellie Bowles.

One of the few things that Democrats and Republicans in Washington agree on is that changes to Section 230 are on the table. Mr. Trump issued an executive order calling for changes to it after Twitter added labels to some of his tweets. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has also called for changes to Section 230.

“You repeal this and then we’re in a different world,” said Josh Blackman, a constitutional law professor at the South Texas College of Law Houston. “Once you repeal Section 230, you’re now left with 51 imperfect solutions.”

Under pressure, UK government releases NHS COVID data deals with big tech

Hours before openDemocracy was due to sue, the government released massive data-sharing contracts with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Faculty and Palantir.

Great journalism. Link

Reminds one that in addition to contact-tracing apps we also need contract-tracing ones.

The Story Behind Bill Barr’s Unmarked Federal Agents

Good piece of investigative and explanatory journalism by Politico. Turns out that the US Federal government has a largish hidden army of police-like officers and agents. Who knew?

History Will Judge the Complicit

Wonderful essay in The Atlantic by Anne Applebaum on the phenomenon of collaboration and, in particular, why (and how) prominent Republicans have become collaborators of a president who stands for everything they supposedly abhor. One of her case studies is Senator Lindsay Graham, a former military patriot who has become one of Trump’s most nauseating legislative groupies. (Graham is a living proof that power is the greatest aphrodisiac.) Also explores the various self-deluding strategies that collaborators use to justify their surrender of agency. What’s especially lovely about the essay is the way it explores the nature of collaboration by going back in modern European history to the Soviet and Nazi eras. It’s a long read, but worth it.

Contact tracing isn’t rocket science. As a small Welsh local authority has shown

This is an extraordinary story.

As Wales takes the first steps out of lockdown and starts trying to find a way to live with Covid-19, people living in one part of the nation could be forgiven for thinking they have almost entirely escaped the disease which reached crisis points in other parts of Wales.

With just 42 confirmed cases to date, and seven deaths, it seems that in the coastal council area of Ceredigion the virus never really took hold.

The initial flurry of cases in this rural part of Wales was comparable to the starts of the outbreak in the local authorities of Wales that ended up being worst hit by the virus. Yet here it just sort of petered out.

I don’t think “petered out” is quite right. The control of the virus in this small rural district was due to:

Early, pre-emptive and decisive action. The local University was one of the first to close, so the student population in Aberystwyth was effectively evacuated ahead of time. And because the district is a popular tourist area, long before the national lockdown was announced, the council had instructed all holiday and caravan parks to close too.
Effective deployment of contact-tracing from Day One. A simple system has enabled them to carry out contact tracing on every confirmed case in the county. The Council picked up all positive cases did been contact tracing on them all. A couple of environmental health officers were assigned to pick up on positive tests. And precautions were extended to Council staff.

One inescapable lesson from this is that if Whitehall had delegated responsibility and resources for contact-tracing to local authorities from Day One, the UK wouldn’t have the current omnishambles of a ‘world beating’ contract-tracing system that might just be operation by September.

We always used to think that the most pathologically-centralised state in Europe is France. My hunch is that the UK was actually more dominated by London than France was by Paris.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for alerting me to this.

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Yale has made Frank Snowden’s celebrated course “Epidemics in Western Society Since 1600” freely available.

You can download the course materials from here. As far as I can see, you can only read the HTML version of the lectures. Audio and video require Flash, of which I don’t approve and don’t trust. But the text of the lectures was all I wanted. As you’d expect, the course also has an interesting Reading List.

Quarantine diary — Day 77

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Monday 25 May, 2020

Posted on May 25, 2020 by jjn1

Fledging Day!

The Blue Tits in the nesting box outside the kitchen window fledged today.

Some of the kids were decidedly dubious about heading out into such a dangerous world, with paparazzi lurking everywhere. Quite right, too.

One was decidedly not amused to find me awaiting his maiden flight.

Pushing the Zoom envelope: the Amsterdam Cello Octet does it again

This is lovely — and inventive. Especially the way the home life of the musicians is subtly woven into the piece.

Link

Thanks to Gerard de Vries for spotting it.

Infuriated by the impunity with which Dominic Cummings was able to flout the lockdown rules?

If you are a UK voter and have a Tory MP, why not write to him or her letting know how you feel about Cummings’s impunity and Boris Johnson’s support for it?

It’s simple to do: just go to the MySociety Write to Them and the site will check your MP’s identity by your postcode and set up a form for composing and dispatching a suitable message to him or her.

I’ve just done it. It’s called giving feedback.

The benefits of taciturnity

Portrait of Forster by Dora Carrington, oil on canvas, 1920.

Lovely LRB piece by Julian Barnes from 1987.

In Madrid the other week a literary journalist told me the following joke. A man goes into a pet shop and sees three parrots side by side, priced at $1000, $2000 and $3000. ‘Why does that parrot cost $1000?’ he asks the owner. ‘Because it can recite the whole of the Bible in Spanish,’ comes the reply. ‘And why does that one cost $2000?’ ‘Because it can recite the whole of the Bible in English and in Spanish.’ ‘And the one that costs $3000, what does he recite?’ ‘Oh, he doesn’t say a word,’ explains the pet shop owner: ‘but the other two call him Maestro.’

This made me think, naturally enough, of E.M. Forster; and then of the fact that we were about to undergo the annual garrulity of the Booker Prize for Fiction.

Reminds me of that old adage of Abraham Lincoln’s: it’s better to keep one’s mouth shut and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all room for doubt.

btw: When I was a student I went to E.M. Forster’s 90th birthday party in King’s College, Cambridge in January 1969. When I tell people that, they check for the nearest exit, and when I tell them that the party was hosted by Francis Crick of DNA fame, they really run for cover. But it’s true: I was a member of the Cambridge Humanists and they held the party for him. Crick was at the time the Chairman of the Humanist society.

Remind me to tell you about the Boer War, sometime …

New life and an awareness of mortality

Kara Swisher has a baby daughter — at the age of 57. Don’t know how that happened, but she’s written about the differences it has made to her life under lockdown:

I am at the highest risk of our little quarantine group, as my 15-year-old has pointed out to me more than once. I assume it is his way of whistling past the grave in hopes that the grave does not whistle back.

But whistle it does, sometimes softly, like when I had a life-threatening stroke on a long-haul trip to China five years back, or more loudly, like when my father died unexpectedly more than 50 years ago from an aneurysm at 34 years old, at the start of what should have been a brilliant long life with his three children.

That is why I am thinking more often of math. Each of us has an exact number — whether it is of years, days, minutes or seconds. We don’t know our number, but it helps to keep in mind that this number exists.

I’m now more aware that our time here is finite. So I take an extra minute I might not have before watching my sons play with their new sister at the dinner table. It is a love that I did not expect to jell so quickly and so perfectly. My sons, with their phones down, are clapping their hands, making faces and doing anything they can to delight my daughter into yet another magnificent smile. Luckily for us, she is an endless font of those.

Covid is messing with machine-learning systems

You know those ‘recommender’ systems that tell you what you might be interested in based on your browsing or purchase history? Well, it turns out that the poor dears are mightily confused by our ‘weird’ behaviour during the pandemic. For example, once upon a time the top 100 searches on Amazon, say, would be mostly for gadgets — iPhone cases, battery packs, SSDs, etc. etc. And machine-learning systems trained on these searches have traditionally been good at extracting the trends from those patterns.

And then all of a sudden everybody is interested in quite different things. “In the week of April 12-18”, says an interesting Tech Review article by Will Douglas Heaven,

the top 10 search terms on Amazon.com were: toilet paper, face mask, hand sanitizer, paper towels, Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, mask, Lysol, masks for germ protection, and N95 mask. People weren’t just searching, they were buying too—and in bulk. The majority of people looking for masks ended up buying the new Amazon #1 Best Seller, “Face Mask, Pack of 50”.

What’s happening is that machine-learning systems trained on normal (i.e.pre-pandemic) human behavior are now finding that ‘normal’ has changed, and some are no longer working as they should.

But machine-learning isn’t just used for recommendations. Mr Heaven found a company in London, Phrasee ( Motto: “Empower your Brand with AI-Powered Copywriting”), which uses natural-language processing and machine learning to generate email marketing copy or Facebook ads on behalf of its clients.

Making sure that it gets the tone right is part of its job. Its AI works by generating lots of possible phrases and then running them through a neural network that picks the best ones. But because natural-language generation can go very wrong, Phrasee always has humans check what goes into and comes out of its AI.

When covid-19 hit, Phrasee realized that more sensitivity than usual might be required and started filtering out additional language. The company has banned specific phrases, such as “going viral,” and doesn’t allow language that refers to discouraged activities, such as “party wear.” It has even culled emojis that may be read as too happy or too alarming. And it has also dropped terms that may stoke anxiety, such as “OMG,” “be prepared,” “stock up,” and “brace yourself.” “People don’t want marketing to make them feel anxious and fearful—you know, like, this deal is about to run out, pressure pressure pressure,” says Parry Malm, the firm’s CEO.

If, like me, you are sceptical about the claims made for machine-learning technology, this kind of thing will be music to your ears. Though I doubt if the Spotify system that thinks it knows my musical tastes has made the necessary adjustment yet.

Quarantine diary — Day 65

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Wednesday 20 May, 2020

Posted on May 20, 2020 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

So, the way we’re dealing with the new coronavirus is the way computer newbies deal with computer viruses. I know because I have supported a virus neophyte, my mom. The current US govt is behaving pretty much the way she would. She didn’t want to learn the rules, and she wanted to pretend it was okay, get back to business as usual (checking her email, writing a blog post). All the while she’s got something watching and recording her every move and looking for a chance to infect some other computer.

Dave Winer

How Trump plays the US media

Jack Shafer sees through it:

While the admission makes Trump look as scientifically minded as an unsegmented worm—hydroxychloroquine has not been shown to be safe or effective in the treatment or prevention of Covid-19—the attention generated was worth it, like swapping a pawn for a bishop. The hydroxychloroquine confession didn’t displace the IG story from the news, but it wasn’t expected to. Both the New York Times and Washington Post made Trump’s dreams come true by putting the story on Page One of their Tuesday editions (Times: “President Says He Takes Drug Deemed a Risk”; Post: “Trump Says He’s Taking Unproven Medication”) and after being featured on Monday cable news the talking heads were still gabbing about it on Tuesday afternoon as he hyped the drug anew during a press spray. Monday evening, the White House added some frosting to the hydroxychloroquine cake by releasing a note from the president’s physician that went on and on about the drug but didn’t actually claim that he had prescribed it to Trump or that Trump was even taking it. There would be fewer questions about Trump and hydroxychloroquine if the White House had released no note at all.

Trump’s disclosure on Monday about taking hydroxychloroquine was a decoy move, designed to deflect public—and press—attention from his firing of the State Department inspector general, which broke over the weekend. And it worked.

In manipulating US media, Trump is a genius — an evil one, sure, but very good at what he does.

Botch on the Rhine

Wonderful NYRB review by Max Hastings of Anthony Beevor’s history of the Arnhem fiasco in 1944. Some parts of Beevor’s account bring Colonel Johnson (Lt Brigade, rtd.) to mind.

The operation to capture the Rhine bridge was a fiasco. So, asks Hastings, how did it come about?

It was chiefly a consequence of hubris—a belief that, after the Allies’ dramatic August breakout from Normandy, Hitler’s armies were on the ropes. Britain’s commander-in-chief, the newly promoted field marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, stood by a dusty French roadside urging an armored column roaring past: “On to the kill!” This was not merely theater for the benefit of such listening war correspondents as my father: Monty really believed it. Thus he made one of the most grievous strategic errors of the northwest Europe campaign, declining to hasten troops to clear the approaches to the Scheldt River, without which the newly captured port of Antwerp was useless, as Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay warned him. Instead, he launched the most reckless thrust of his career, seeking to seize the bridge over the lower Rhine at Arnhem.

The principal objective of that thrust, known as Operation Market Garden, was to force the hand not of Hitler, but of Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower. If the British secured a corridor beyond the Rhine, Ike would be obliged to support a drive from the north led by Montgomery into Germany: the cocky little bishop’s son saw before him the prospect of passing into history as the composer and conductor of Western Allied victory.

Outside the paywall and worth a read. And Anthony Beevor is clearly a great historian.

The Trouble with comparisons

Fabulous essay by Samuel Moyn on the way historical analogies and comparisons may blind us to actuality. Case study: our analyses of Trump.

For those doubtful about the fascism analogy for Trumpism—and I count myself as one of them—the point is to appreciate both continuity and novelty better than the comparison allows. Abnormalizing Trump disguises that he is quintessentially American, the expression of enduring and indigenous syndromes. A response to what he represents hardly requires a restoration of “normalcy” but a questioning of the status quo ante Trump that produced him. Comparison to Nazism and fascism imminently threatening to topple democracy distracts us from how we made Trump over decades, and implies that the coexistence of our democracy with long histories of killing, subjugation, and terror—including its most recent, if somewhat sanitized, forms of mass incarceration and rising inequality at home, and its tenuous empire and regular war-making abroad—was somehow less worth the alarm and opprobrium. Selective outrage after 2016 says more about the outraged than the outrageous.

It is no contradiction to add to this qualm that comparing our current situation in America to fascism also spares ourselves the trouble of analyzing what is really new about it. For all its other virtues, comparison in general does not do well with the novelty that Trump certainly represents, for all of his preconditions and sources. It is true that in the face of novelty, analogy with possible historical avatars is indispensable, to abate confusion and to seek orientation. But there is no doubt that it often compounds the confusion as the ghosts of the past are allowed to walk again in a landscape that has changed profoundly. Comparison is always a risky tool; it leads to blindness, not just insight.

Terrific essay.

The Coronavirus diaries of Samuel Pepys

Nice spoof, if the few fragmentary entries are anything to go by. Here’s the entry for March 9th:

Up betimes and by tube to Westminster, and there busy with several business all morning, for our firm intends a splendid show at the conference in the middle of this month. Then comes the intern to my office like a doting fool, and proves himself an ass talking excitedly of this plague come late out of China, which, he says, is now in Italy. Of which, my wife and I having had no Wi-Fi this last month, I know nothing, only to see how vexed this blockhead intern was did almost make me fearful myself. Yet I remembered talking with my Lord and Lady touching this matter, and him very skeptical, and my lady said to me, ‘What, Mr Pepys – shall’t die of a hiccough at the last?’ And at this jest we were all very merry. Thence home to sing with my wife in the garden, but with much trouble, for it was bitterly cold. And so to bed, our iPhones left downstairs as is now our custom.

Scientists (epidemiologists) and spooks are not all that different: they all just want to know everything

Interesting post from 2006 by the sociologist Kieran Healey, which sheds light on the current debates about contact-tracing apps, health data and privacy.

Scientists and spies are not so different. The intelligence community’s drive to find the truth, to uncover the real structure of things, is similar to what motivates natural or social scientists. For that reason, I can easily understand why the people at the NSA would have been drawn to build a database like the one they have assembled. The little megalomaniac that lives inside any data-collecting scientist (“More detail! More variables! More coverage!”) thrills at the thought of what you could do with a database like that. Think of the possibilities! What’s frightening is that the NSA is much less constrained than the rest of us by money, or resources, or—it seems—the law. To them, Borges’ map must seem less like a daydream and more like a design challenge. In Kossinets and Watts’ study, the population of just one university generated more than 14 million emails. That gives you a sense of how enormous the NSA’s database of call records must be. In the social sciences, Institutional Review Boards set rules about what you can do to people when you’re researching them. Social scientists often grumble about IRBs and their stupid regulations, but they exist for a good reason. To be blunt, scientists are happy to do just about anything in the pursuit of better knowledge, unless there are rules that say otherwise. The same is true of the government, and the people it employs to spy on our behalf. They only want to find things out, too. But just as in science, that’s not the only value that matters.

Quarantine diary — Day 60

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ERRATA Thanks to the many readers who wrote tactfully to point out that my attribution of the lyrics “Don’t it always seem to go and you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone.” to Kate Bush was wrong. The credit should go to Joni MItchell.

The one thing that always amazes me is the depth of my ignorance. Which is why I love the response Dr Johnson made to the lady who asked him to explain how he had come wrongly to define “pastern” as “the knee of a horse” in his Dictionary. “Ignorance, Madam”, he replied. “Pure ignorance”.

Wednesday 29 April, 2020

Posted on April 29, 2020 by jjn1

Quote of the Day

”The best test of a person’s intelligence is their capacity for making a summary”

Lytton Strachey

Understanding the virus

It’s a very complicated and (still) poorly-understood organism. The Atlantic has published this really helpful explainer. Sample:

Since the pandemic began, scientists have published more than 7,500 papers on COVID-19. But despite this deluge, “we haven’t seen a lot of huge plot twists,” says Carl Bergstrom, an epidemiologist and a sociologist of science at the University of Washington. The most important, he says, was the realization that people can spread the virus before showing symptoms. But even that insight was slow to dawn. A flawed German study hinted at it in early February, but scientific opinion shifted only after many lines of evidence emerged, including case reports, models showing that most infections are undocumented, and studies indicating that viral levels peak as symptoms appear.

This is how science actually works. It’s less the parade of decisive blockbuster discoveries that the press often portrays, and more a slow, erratic stumble toward ever less uncertainty. “Our understanding oscillates at first, but converges on an answer,” says Natalie Dean, a statistician at the University of Florida. “That’s the normal scientific process, but it looks jarring to people who aren’t used to it.”

For example, Stanford University researchers recently made headlines after testing 3,330 volunteers from Santa Clara County for antibodies against the new coronavirus. The team concluded that 2.5 to 4.2 percent of people have already been infected—a proportion much higher than the official count suggests. This, the authors claimed, means that the virus is less deadly than suspected, and that severe lockdowns may be overreactions—views they had previously espoused in opinion pieces. But other scientists, including statisticians, virologists, and disease ecologists, have criticized the study’s methods and the team’s conclusions.

One could write a long piece assessing the Santa Clara study alone, but that would defeat the point: that individual pieces of research are extremely unlikely to single-handedly upend what we know about COVID-19. About 30 similar “serosurveys” have now been released. These and others to come could collectively reveal how many Americans have been infected. Even then, they would have to be weighed against other evidence, including accounts from doctors and nurses in New York or Lombardy, Italy, which clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 can crush health-care systems. The precise magnitude of the virus’s fatality rate is a matter of academic debate. The reality of what it can do to hospitals is not.

It’s a long read, but worth it.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for spotting it.

En passant. There’s been a torrent of research papers on the virus since the crisis broke. Some of this is making it way through the peer-review vetting process of traditional scientific journals. But an awful lot of it is winding up on so-called ‘preprint’ servers, where (more or less) anyone can publish anything that bears a superficial resemblance to ‘scientific’ or scholarly work. These preprint archives have their uses, and peer-reviewing isn’t perfect. But when mainstream media sees an unreviewed preprint and then draws sensational conclusions from it, then that only makes things worse.

Julie Pfeiffer of UT Southwestern, who is an editor at the Journal of Virology, says that she and her colleagues have been flooded with submitted papers, most of which are so obviously poor that they haven’t even been sent out for review. “They shouldn’t be published anywhere,” she says, “and then they end up [on a preprint site].” Some come from nonscientists who have cobbled together a poor mathematical model; others come from actual virologists who have suddenly pivoted to studying coronaviruses and “are submitting work they never normally would in a rush to be first,” Pfeiffer says. “Some people are genuinely trying to help, but there’s also a huge amount of opportunism.”

From Private Lives to Public Memory

Absorbing conversation on Lapham’s Quarterly about the 1918 flu pandemic with the historian Nancy Bristow, author of American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds Of The 1918 Influenza Epidemic.

It’s fascinating for all kinds of reasons, of which the first is that 1918 was the last time that the US and Europe went through something akin to our current crisis. Lots of differences, of course, but also similarities. For example:

In general, the common pattern was a lot of community commitment, and folks nationwide stepped up to do the right thing. You hear stories of schoolteachers whose school districts were closed down and were asked to serve as volunteer nurses instead. In an email from a colleague this week, I learned the story of schoolteacher who spent the pandemic holding the hands of the dying in an emergency ward. And that kind of story is not unusual. People formed soup kitchens, they helped in the emergency hospitals, they delivered food, they ran temporary orphanages to take care of children whose parents were ill. So again and again you see people doing really heroic things to help one another. And this is an era in which, because they can’t identify the virus, and they don’t really have the same kind of understanding of personal protective equipment we do now, those who offered that kind of help were often putting their own lives at risk. Across the country you see examples of communities really stepping up and of individuals stepping up to be their best selves, of being what Rebecca Solnit describes as part of “a paradise built in hell”: this idea that we can be our best selves in the midst of a catastrophe and that that’s actually a common reaction for human beings. You see that a great deal in 1918.

The private and public lives of Albert Einstein

Lovely review article in the TLS by P.D. Smith of five books about Einstein’s life, relationships and experiences. Includes lots I hadn’t known. Including this:

On September 9, 1933, something spooked Einstein, who was by then living in exile in Belgium. Apparently fearing for his life, he travelled alone to England at short notice. Einstein turned to Oliver Locker-Lampson, whom he had met on an earlier visit, for protection. A Conservative Member of Parliament and decorated former soldier, Locker-Lampson was “an impulsive romantic” and, according to Robinson, Einstein clearly liked the “commander’s can-do, gung-ho personality”.

Locker-Lampson took Einstein to his thatched holiday hut in Norfolk. In what sounds like an episode of Dad’s Army, he armed locals with shotguns to protect Einstein from Nazi assassins. Einstein used the “admirable solitude” of the countryside to continue working on his unified field theory, a project which would occupy him for the rest of his life. The sculptor Jacob Epstein came to model him and recalled his “wild hair floating in the wind”, like “the ageing Rembrandt”. His wonderful bronze bust of the scientist is in the Tate Gallery.

Dominic Cummings: the plot thickens

From this morning’s Politico London newsletter:

Lockdown story of the morning: Irresistible scoop from Bloomberg News’ Alex Morales, who reports that Dominic Cummings did indeed heavily influence the government’s SAGE committee of scientific advisers at a crucial meeting last month. Morales speaks to two sources who say Cummings “played far more than a bystander’s role at a crucial SAGE meeting on March 18,” five days before Britain went into lockdown. Yikes. Guardian readers will be frothing at the mouth to learn that Cummings checks notes “asked why a lockdown was not being imposed sooner, swayed the discussion toward faster action, and made clear he thought pubs and restaurants should be closed within two days.” Oh.

OK, OK: It will of course concern an awful lot of people if an unelected history graduate with zero science expertise is swaying our most eminent scientists on their crucial advice to the government. Downing Street has repeatedly denied Cummings in any way influenced the committee, and this was backed up on the record at the weekend by one of its members, Professor Neil Ferguson. We may never know for sure, but certainly Cummings’ position as described should not come as a surprise — the Sunday Times’ Tim Shipman reported last month that Cummings swung heavily and forcefully behind a strict lockdown once scientists modeled the vast loss of life associated with the initial ‘herd immunity’ plan.

Quarantine diary — Day 39

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