Not a post office scandal

Merely a New Year knitted top for a postbox in Ely!

Quote of the Day

”Life must be understood backwards. But with this, one forgets the second proposition, that it must be lived forwards.”

• Søren Kierkegaard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Four Last Songs, TrV 296 – 4. Im Abendrot | Jessye Norman

Link

I love this. The songs were composed in 1948, when Strauss was 84, and premiered at the Albert Hall in London on 22 May 1950 by soprano Kirsten Flagstad and the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Furtwängler.

Long Read of the Day

AI rights and human harms

Terrifically sharp essay by Helen Beetham (Whom God Preserve), a writer who takes no prisoners.

A possible captive in this context is Jeff Jarvis, a distinguished journalist and academic (and author of an interesting book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, which I’ve read and enjoyed). When generative AI arrived on the scene, Jeff was excited about its possibilities for journalism and penned an essay cautioning us against imposing unreasonable restrictions on the training of LLMs (Large Language Models) like CPT-4 et al.

His piece included the following stirring paragraph:

To this day, journalists — whether on radio or at The New York Times — read, learn from, and repurpose facts and knowledge gained from the work of fellow journalists. Without that assured freedom, newspapers and news on television and radio and online could not function. The real question at hand is whether artificial intelligence should have the same right that journalists and we all have: the right to read, the right to learn, the right to use information once known. If it is deprived of such rights, what might we lose?

That last, rhetorical, question is what irked Helen. “Whose rights are really at risk?” she asks

Who or what is being ‘deprived’ of development? If we read closely, it is not the models at all, but ‘we’ who will ‘lose out’ if AI is not allowed to ‘learn’. This is not a coherent moral position. If models have rights, it can only be on their own behalf: their rights must relate to their own needs and purposes and vulnerability to ‘loss’, not to anyone else’s.

So what passes for moral philosophy in Silicon Valley really amounts to this: let big tech get on with doing big tech, without annoyances like legal frameworks and workers rights. The very last thing these corporations want is a new class of entities with rights they might have to worry about. They don’t want to give up valuable server space to failed or defunct models just because they ‘learned’ or once passed some spurious test of ‘sentience’: they want to decommission the heck out of them and make way for something more profitable. That is hardly a rights-respecting relationship. No, the models that big tech really cares about are business models and the thing they want to be accorded more rights, power and agency is the business itself.

Warming to her task, she exhumes an essay in a special issue of Robotics and AI about whether robots should have moral standing. “The essay,” she writes,

uses the examples of ‘servants’, ‘slaves’ and ‘animals’ to argue that what matters is how ‘virtuously’ the ‘owner’ behaves towards those in his power. The lived experience of slavery does briefly appear – so props to the author for realising that there might be an issue here – but in the end only to lament that the robot-slave metaphor is ‘limited’ by the unhappy particulars. Not that the ‘virtuous slave owner’ is a problematic moral guide. Not that human slavery should conscientiously be avoided as a metaphor for something else, such as the rights of non-human machines.

You are free to use the metaphors you choose, guys, but your choices betray your perspective. And in all these cases, the perspective is from someone with power. The power to choose, the power to behave nicely, or not so nicely, towards other people, women, servants, slaves, animals, chatbots, substrates. What these choices give away is a complete lack of understanding of the agency, the consciousness, the realities and perspectives and struggles of other people. The puzzle you can see lurking behind these examples is: where did all these rights of non-white non-guys come from? And the answer: it can only have been from the enlightened virtue of the white guys in charge. They decided that women deserved the vote, that slaves should be free. And in exactly the same way, they can decide to endow rights, privileges, consciousness even, to things they have created from their own incredible brains.

There’s lots more in that vein, which makes for a striking, exhilarating read.

My commonplace booklet

 Our Rodent Selfies, Ourselves

From the New York Times…

A photographer trained two rats to take photographs of themselves. Guess what: They didn’t want to stop.

(Instagram and TikTok users, look away now.)

Augustine Lignier, a professional photographer, began to wonder why so many humans feel compelled to photograph their lives and share those images online.

So he built his own version of a Skinner box — a tall, transparent tower with an attached camera — and released two pet-store rats inside. Whenever the rats pressed the button inside the box, they got a small dose of sugar and the camera snapped their photo. The resulting images were immediately displayed on a screen, where the rats could see them. (“But honestly I don’t think they understood it,” Mr. Lignier said.)

Do read it. And reflect. We are the rats in the Skinner boxes devised by Meta, ByteDance, Google & Co. But at least Mr Lignier’s rodents, unlike us, didn’t have better things to do with their lives. We, on the other hand, do. Go figure.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• Machine-learning (‘AI’) is coming for your signature. Link

Just as well we’ve stopped writing cheques.

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Days like this

Just an ordinary picture, taken on an ordinary winter Saturday afternoon. I was sitting after lunch brooding on the Financial Times’s coverage of the Post Office scandal (about which I had written the next day’s Observer column), and listening to Van Morrison singing ‘Days Like This’, when suddenly the light changed and I saw the table — cluttered with (among other things) newspapers, a copy of Seamus Heaney’s letters that I’d been reading, a vase of tulips, a significant number of pots of newly-made marmalade — in a different light. And because one of the great things about smartphones is that one always has a camera to hand, I snapped it. And then thought that we rarely take such pictures. Generally we take photographs because something (or someone) is going on. But at this particular moment, nothing was happening. And yet it was a special moment.

Quote of the Day

”Somebody’s boring me. I think it’s me”

• Dylan Thomas

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Inside Story of Josef Koudelka’s Career

Josef Koudelka is IMO the greatest living photographer, so it’s great to learn that Aperture has published a ‘visual biography’ of him, written by Melissa Harris with his full cooperation.

This is the transcript of a terrific interview of Harris that Lesley A. Martin has done.

Here’s how it starts:

Martin: How do you prepare to take a project like this, in which you have to understand the entirety of a life—or at least try to? What is the process of research?

Harris: We just started talking. I wasn’t really sure where to start with him, and so I thought I would start personally. He really did not know what he’d gotten himself into. It was brutal, our first meeting: Nobody was unpleasant or anything, but it was just really hard for him to talk about his parents or to talk about certain things about his childhood. Not because he had bad relationships or had been unhappy, but because he is very private, and in his own way, quite shy. At the start, it was mostly about figuring out the pacing and just going slowly, letting him formulate responses to questions he hadn’t been asked before or that he had stealthily evaded…

It’s fascinating from beginning to end. And it has a few of his most famous images strewn through it.

I’ve been thinking about his work for a while recently, because I’ve gone back to black-and-white photography, and discovered that, after years of shooting in colour, one has to re-learn how to do it. Photographers like Koudelka are inspiring because they demonstrate how powerful monochrome can be. It’s a completely different medium.

And I’ve ordered the book.

If the Horizon Post Office story is treated as a scandal, nothing will change

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The key question raised by the Horizon story is whether it’s a scandal or a crisis. Why is that important? Simply this: although scandals generate controversy, shock, anguish and anger, they don’t result in significant change. After a while, the public becomes bored, the media caravan moves on – to the next story, the next scandal; politicians piously declare that “lessons have been learned” (though heads rarely roll), and so on. Crises, on the other hand, do lead to systemic change, at least in working democracies. Laws change, institutions are closed or radically reformed, culprits go to jail… life does not go on as before.

There’s no question that the Post Office’s inhumane treatment of sub-postmasters constituted an egregious scandal. And initially there were indications that it might actually have become a crisis. Just a week after Mr Bates vs the Post Office aired on ITV, for example, the prime minister announced that the government would be introducing a new law to quickly exonerate and compensate the victims of “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.

A whole new law, eh? Maybe this scandal is a crisis after all. Not so fast. Although we don’t know the detail yet, it will just be a piece of legislation to right a specific wrong – a bit like the Dangerous Dogs Act of 1991, say. But it will do nothing about the systemic problems that led to the mistakes and injustices in the first place…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

An interesting question

Willard McCarty is one of the most thoughtful and scholarly people I know. He’s also annoying (for me) because he seems to have read everything . He’s the Editor of the Humanist daily newsletter (to which I’m a devoted subscriber), and he has a nice habit of lobbing hard questions into the community which often trigger interesting epistolary debates.

On Friday last, this is what he asked:

For the purposes of argument, let’s put aside whether Sigmund Freud’s theories of mind are correct or the latest word on the psyche. Let’s ask instead whether the great influence they have had and continue to have tells us something important about how we construe mind. For some of the world’s inhabitants (e.g. at least some indigenous Amazonians) the idea of ‘the unconscious’ (a black-box mind) makes no sense whatever. To paraphrase a forthcoming paper, everyone in a specific tribe knows what’s going on in another person’s mind; what they have no access to is what this person’s unknowable relations with other humans and with non-human others will lead him or her to do.

The question I want to ask is this: what do we do on discovering people who think in radically different ways than we do? Would not the best response be to question our possibly quite provincial assumptions about mind?

Why is this significant for those interested in computing? For one thing, taking radical diversity in the exercise of intelligence just might sensitise us to the anomalies of the artificial kind, and suggest that its failures to perform as expected just might open a window on emergent radical diversity in smart machines.

Needless to say, this has led me (and no doubt others) into exploring numerous rabbit-holes. Two I’ve been down already are Samuel Hammond’s essay “Where is all this heading? and Sam Altman’s “The Merge”. What I’ve learned so far is that I’m out of my depth.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

UK parcel firm disables AI after poetic bot goes rogue

From Reuters…

A dissatisfied customer of DPD tricked its ‘customer service’ chatbot into writing a poem about how bad it was. This is how it went…

There once was a chatbot named DPD,
Who was useless at providing help.
It could not track parcels,
Or give information on delivery dates, And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

DPD was a waste of time,
And a customer’s worst nightmare.
It was so bad,
That people would rather call the depot directly,
Than deal with the useless chatbot…

You get the idea. Not a promising poet. But DPD pulled its plug nevertheless.

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Cobwebbed

Well, it is cold around here just now.

Quote of the Day

”The true hypocrite is the one who ceases to perceive his deception, the one who lies with sincerity.”

• André Gide

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sony Terry & Brownie McGee | Bring it on home to me

Link

Decades ago, I heard them play in the Cambridge Guildhall. The kind of evening one never forgets.

Long Read of the Day

 Davos duplicity

This is the week of the nauseating annual gabfest in Switzerland, in which powerful elites gather to smooch and do virtue-signalling. It’s mostly pass-the-sickbag stuff, but this year’s edition is really OTT: the ‘theme’ is “Rebuilding Trust”, which is beyond satire, given that most of the big US corporations are there.

Robert Reich’s blog post nails it. These titans have been confessing, apparently, how worried they are that Trump will be re-elected.

“Yet”, observes Reich,

”many of them are fueling Trump and political upheaval in America by continuing to bankroll the 147 members of Congress who refused to certify Joe Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021.

Recall that after the certification vote and storming of the Capitol, a cavalcade of big corporations announced with great fanfare that they had stopped making political contributions to these 147.

Since then, most have resumed campaign donations to them — thereby helping the deniers get reelected and threatening the stability of American democracy.

All told, at least 228 of America’s biggest (Fortune 500) corporations — representing more than two-thirds of some 300 companies with political action committees — have given $26.3 million to election deniers during the 2021-2024 election cycles…

Do read it. But check your blood-pressure first.

My commonplace booklet

Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

What, you didn’t know the CIA had a creative writing group? Me neither. Not the propaganda department, either; ‘Real’ creative writing. But first you have to negotiate the parking problems at Langley.

Fabulous essay by Johannes Lichtman in The Paris Review.

On the agreed-upon morning a few weeks later, I left my apartment in D.C. and drove into the haze of Canadian wildfire smoke that was floating over the city. By the time I turned off the George Washington Parkway at the George Bush Center for Intelligence exit, and on to a restricted usage road, I was already nervous. I’m the kind of person who weighs and measures my suitcases before flying, lest I be scolded at the airport, and I do not like driving down roads with signs like EMPLOYEES ONLY and WILL BE ARRESTED.

At the gate intercom, I gave my name and social security number—Vivian had gathered this information and more ahead of time, over a series of phone calls, each from a different phone number—and a police officer gave me a visitor’s badge that was to be displayed on my person at all times. He warned me that I was to be escorted at all times.

I met Vivian in a lot between the first gate and the second gate, where her car was the only one parked. She gave me another badge that appeared identical to the first. I left my phone in my car as instructed, and we got into Vivian’s car and drove to the second gate. That was when things started not going as planned.

Four agitated police officers blocked our way.

“He can’t leave his car here!” they yelled when Vivian rolled down her window.

“But I cleared this ahead of time,” Vivian said.

“He can’t leave his car here. It’s a security risk.”

“But how am I supposed to escort him if we can’t drive together?”

“Ma’am,” one of them said, “I just do parking.” Read on.

It gets better. Nice to know that the fate of Western civilisation is in the hands of these guys.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

•  How is AI education going to work?. In two different ways, according to Tyler Cowen.

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This is how you do it

Trinity Street, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

”I love criticism so long as it is unqualified praise.”

• Noel Coward

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tuba Skinny | Jubilee Stomp – Royal Street I

Link

Long Read of the Day

 The Case for Trump … by Someone Who Wants Him to Lose

A really interesting column by Bret Stephens, a columnist on the New York Times. It’s significant because it comes after a day that confirms that Trump will be the Republican candidate for President. The piece makes for uncomfortable reading — mostly because it makes one contemplate the mote in one’s own (liberal) eye.

You can’t defeat an opponent if you refuse to understand what makes him formidable. Too many people, especially progressives, fail to think deeply about the enduring sources of his appeal — and to do so without calling him names, or disparaging his supporters, or attributing his resurgence to nefarious foreign actors or the unfairness of the Electoral College. Since I will spend the coming year strenuously opposing his candidacy, let me here make the best case for Trump that I can…

If I had to sum up the argument, I’d say it was this. Trump is unquestionably a monster (a point upon which even many of his supporters may conceivably agree). So we need to look at why some many Americans seem willing to overlook his loathsomeness. In a nutshell, my hunch is that it’s because the kind of democracy that our neoliberalist ruling elites have carefully curated and venerated hasn’t been much good for many of them. And so they may be less troubled than we privileged elites are by the thought that Trump might be the wrecking ball that will blow up the whole wicked system. To adapt the the old joke — “What has posterity ever done for me?” — Trump voters may be asking “What has this neoliberal democracy ever done for me?” Of course they should be careful what they wish for for. But still…

The hard truth about AI? It might produce some better software** 

Sunday’s Observer column:

In its Christmas issue, the Economist carried an instructive article entitled “A short history of tractors in English” (itself an understated tribute to Marina Lewycka’s hilarious 2005 novel, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian). The article set out to explain “what the tractor and the horse tell you about generative AI”. The lesson was that while tractors go back a long way, it took aeons before they transformed agriculture. Three reasons for that: early versions were less useful than their backers believed; adoption of them required changes in labour markets; and farms needed to reform themselves to use them.

History suggests, therefore, that whatever transformations the AI hype merchants are predicting, they’ll be slower coming than they expect.

There is, however, one possible exception to this rule: computer programming, or the business of writing software…

Read on

Books, etc.

Just downloaded this, after strong recommendation by a friend with good judgement. Entrancing title, ne c’est pas?

My commonplace booklet

If you want to understand how difficult cybersecurity is, read this.

New iPhone Exploit Uses Four Zero-Days.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

Mute inglorious Miltons

Lovely meditation by John Quiggin on those who worry about ‘peak population’.

I’m going to start with a claim that came up in discussion here and is raised pretty often. The claim is that the more children are born, the greater the chance that some of them will be Mozarts, Einsteins, or Mandelas who will contribute greatly to human advancement. My response was pre-figured hundreds of years ago by Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Gray reflects that those buried in the churchyard may include some “mute inglorious Milton” whose poetic genius was never given the chance to flower because of poverty and unremitting labour

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll;
Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage,
And froze the genial current of the soul.

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In flight

Two of my kids, on a memorable day on the Mayo coast, way back in 2004.

Quote of the Day

”There’s no underestimating the intelligence of the American public.”

• H.L. Mencken

As we may be destined to discover in November.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Muireann Bradley | Candyman (Jools’ Annual Hootenanny)

Link

A gifted Donegal teenager who was one of the discoveries of 2023. A kid who really understands the blues.

Long Read of the Day

Inside My Dark Room

A really lovely essay by Julie Park in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

This is how it begins…

I felt cornered. A colleague had given me his comments on the manuscript for my academic book in progress about the camera obscura as a model for interiority and interior space in 18th-century England, and he didn’t like my argument. As a senior white male, this colleague had a significant measure of power over me, a woman of color who was junior to him professionally. He was considered one of the gatekeepers in our field; at the time, I was relying on him to write me letters of recommendation for jobs and fellowships.

My colleague said that the focus on the camera obscura in my argument worked to conceal my book’s “true” topic. According to him, this was the discourses on empiricist philosophy surrounding 18th-century literature. I suspect its fault lay also in departing from his preferred critical orientation and failing to cite him, among other colleagues, in the process. This was my second book, yet his feedback made me seem like a disobedient child. Clearly, I could no longer rely on him to support me in my professional endeavors unless I changed my book to more closely reflect what seemed to be his own way of thinking and writing, jettisoning my focus on the camera obscura. I didn’t want to.

In Latin, camera obscura means “dark room.” As the name suggests, the basic features of a camera obscura are easy enough to grasp: the visual device projects images of the external world onto a wall in a dark room via a ray of light coming through a hole on the opposite wall. Yet its fundamental mechanism can be explained in even simpler terms: in the fourth century BCE, Aristotle described how, during an eclipse, he caught sight of the way images of the sun appeared on the ground between the leaves of a tree…

Horrified by Horizon? Then get ready to be totally appalled by AI

My Observer OpEd on the Post Office scandal.

It doesn’t take much imagination to describe what happens when a large corporation, over 16 long years, is allowed vindictively to prosecute 900 subpostmasters for theft, false accounting and fraud, when shortfalls at their branches were in fact due to bugs in the accounting software imposed on them by that corporation, as “one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in our nation’s history”.

But then Rishi Sunak is not the most imaginative of men. The US Marines, on the other hand, have an economical term that fits the Horizon fiasco like a glove: it was a “clusterfuck” – primly defined by the Cambridge Dictionary as “a very rude word for a complete failure or very serious problem in which many mistakes or problems happen at the same time”.

Horizon was the product of a flawed and sometimes clueless IT procurement system to which the British state has for decades been addicted. The system eventually procured – from an offshoot of ICL owned by the Japanese giant Fujitsu – was a sprawling, computer bug-filled monster…

Read on

My colleague Tim Adams has a terrific article on the scandal in the same issue. And Andrew Rawnsley, in his column, explores the way the British political establishment ignored the injustices and allowed the toxic corporation at the heart of it to prosper.

My commonplace booklet

Clearly I’m not the only person who is increasingly pissed off by the New York Times.

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It’s a long, long road…

… that has no turning.

(Though it might have been built by the Romans.)

Quote of the Day

”The four stages of life are infancy, childhood, adolescence and obsolescence”

• Art Linklater

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Leo Kottke and Mike Gordon | Tiny Desk (Home) Concert

Link

A jewel from the pandemic time. I’ve enjoyed Kottke’s playing ever since I heard him play Jesu, God of Man’s Desiring at the Cambridge Folk Festival sometime in the 1970s.

Long Read of the Day

ChatGPT is an engine of cultural transmission

By Henry Farrell.

Background: A while back, the cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik, one of the wisest people around, gave a terrific lecture and co-authored an academic paper in which she offered the first original perspective I’d seen on Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude, et al. She thinks we should regard them not as oracles (or even “stochastic parrots”) but as “cultural technologies” — more specifically an information retrieval technology. That is, says one insightful summary of her view,

we should not think of an LLM as being something like a mind, but much more like a library catalog. Prompting it with text is something like searching over a library’s contents for passages that are close to the prompt, and sampling from what follows. “Something like” because of course it’s generating new text from its model, not reproducing its data. (LLMs do sometimes exactly memorize particular sequences … but they simply lack the capacity to memorize their full training corpora.) As many people have said, an LLM isn’t doing anything differently when it “hallucinates” as opposed to when it gets things right.

And that’s because it doesn’t actually know anything. It just knows about statistical correlations between different ‘tokens’ standing for words or parts thereof. Artificial intelligence programs that learn to write and speak can sound almost human—but they can’t think creatively like a small child can.

Her lecture is, sadly, behind a kind of academic paywall, though the academic paper she co-authored is not, as far as I can see.

All of which is by way of a long-winded introduction to a remarkable essay by Henry Farrell that has just appeared, in which he picks up Gopnik’s insight and runs with it.

What’s lovely about reading people like Farrell and Gopnik is that they think about this stuff the way Lewis Mumford and other sages once thought about technology and its role in society. Which is why I think this latest essay is worth your time.

My commonplace booklet

Richard Susskind, who has just stepped down as Technology Adviser to the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, had an interesting piece in The Times (behind a paywall). Here’s the bit that caught my eye:

Long term, the significance of AI in law will not lie in replacing tasks currently taken on by human lawyers. To suppose this is to imagine, by analogy, that the future of surgery is entirely about robots replacing the work of human surgeons. Instead, the key to future health care is in non-invasive therapies and preventative medicine.

So too in law. The future of law is not robotic lawyering. It will be using AI to deliver the legal outcomes that citizens and organisations need, but in entirely new ways — for instance, through online dispute resolution rather than physical courts.

More fundamentally, the huge promise of legal AI systems lies in enabling a shift from dispute resolution to dispute avoidance.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

The Seven Social Sins

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Religion without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.

Link

Ironic that we have built societies that reward every one!

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Analog/digital

This is the kind of daft things that photographers do (well, this photographer anyway) when they should be working.

It’s a photograph taken with an iPhone of what a venerable analog camera (a Hasselblad 501CM) saw yesterday morning. (And, yeah, I know that the Hass wasn’t level. Growl.)

And here’s what the iPhone saw, all on its own.

Of the two, I think I prefer the analog one. Not sure why.

Quote of the Day

”Nothing is inevitable until it happens”.

• A.J.P. Taylor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64, TH. 29 – II. Andante cantabile, con alcuna…

Link

Ravishingly beautiful.

Long Read of the Day

The desperate race to save Generative AI

Lovely blast by Gary Marcus, who with Reid Southen published a pretty damning analysis of generative AI plagiarism in the IEEE Spectrum journal. The tech companies, led by OpanAI are lobbying furiously for protection from having to pay for their IP theft.

TL;DR summary:

We won’t get fabulously rich if you don’t let us steals please don’t make stealing a crime.

Oh, and don’t make us pay licensing fees, either.

Sure, Netflix might pay billions in licensing fees, but we shouldn’t have to.

But don’t rely on that summary. Do read the whole thing. Basically, the tech industry is having its “Napster Moment”. One’s heart bleeds for it. Not.

Pandemics and diaries

For the first 100 days of the pandemic I kept an audio diary. Every night, before going to bed, I would record my thoughts on the day, and readers of this blog would listen to it at breakfast. It was, said the wife of one dedicated reader, “Like Thought for the Day but without the God stuff”. Later, I published the scripts as a Kindle book, 100 Not Out: A Lockdown Diary.

I was going through the text the other day looking for something that I needed to check, when I came on the entry for Day 61, Thursday 21 May, 2020. This is how it went, in part:

Among the many things I’ve always thought I would not like to do for a living, running a restaurant ranks pretty high. It seems to me to be backbreaking, tense work, done in very pressurised environments, and requiring you always to be polite to customers, many of whom are obnoxious.

My Observer colleague, our restaurant critic Jay Rayner, told a nice story a couple of weeks ago that illustrates this nicely. It comes from the opening chapter of Wine Girl, the entertaining memoir of a well-known American female sommelier, in which she describes an encounter with a diner from hell.

It is a Monday lunch at a posh New York eatery and the creep in question has chosen a fancy Burgundy (a 2009 Chevalier-Montrachet from Domaine Ramonet). Having checked at her serving station that the wine is ok, James returns to the table and pours a small measure for the customer to taste. He declares it corked. “I think she has too much perfume in her nose, this girl…” he says, as if competing for a gold in the misogyny Olympics.

There are only two bottles of the wine in the restaurant’s cellar. James does not want to waste a big-bucks bottle when she knows it is perfectly fine. Instead, she presents the unopened second bottle, takes it away, then returns and gets him to taste the original bottle again. And between racist epithets, he declares it perfect, with a fat top note of triumph in his voice.

This, says Rayner, “is small penis energy at work.”

You can see why I love having colleagues like this.

While we’re on the subject of Covid reflections, my friend, the historian David Vincent, has also published his thoughtful and scholarly diary of the first year of the plague.

My commonplace booklet

From Kevin Munger

First, the facts: in 2024, either Trump or Biden would be the oldest person to win a presidential election. We have the second-oldest House in history (after 2020-2022), and the oldest Senate. A full 2/3 of the Senate are Baby Boomers!

Not only is the age distribution of US politicians an outlier compared to our past—we also have the oldest politicians of any developed democracy. And not just the politicians, but the voters, too: more Americans will turn 65 years old in 2024 than ever before—and given macro-trends in demography, maybe than ever again.

We baby boomers have a lot to answer for.

Errata

1. In my reference to the new film about Nicholas Winton, I mistakenly referred to his rescue effort as the Kindertransport. Judy Armit has written to point out that this term only related to children saved from Germany and Poland. Those rescued by Winton are known as “Nicky’s Children”. She also pointed me to an impressive resource which fosters “historical understanding and an understanding of the Holocaust’s contemporary relevance. I regret the mistake and am grateful to Judy for having it so tactfully pointed out. One of the great compensations of being a blogger is having readers who know more than I do.
2. Thanks also to Andrew Clark, who pointed out that I didn’t spell Hillary Clinton’s name correctly in Monday’s edition. I would of course like to blame Apple’s bossy autocorrect for the error, but in this case but instead have to fall back on Samuel Johnson’s answer to the annoyed lady who asked him how he could have made the mistake of defining “pastern” as “the knee of a horse”. “Ignorance, Madam, pure ignorance”.

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Swans’ Lake

Photographed at Sutton Gault in the Cambridgeshire fens, yesterday.

Background: A significant portion of East Anglia (about 1,500 square miles) is flat and lies below sea-level. Until the 17th century this was mostly ‘fen’ or marsh (and therefore no good for farming). But then a group of aristocratic opportunists like the Duke of Bedford, aided and abetted by wealthy merchants from the City of London, decided that if these fens were drained, a large amount of arable land could be created. And so they set to it. (The merchants btw were called ‘Adventurers’ because they were supposedly risking their capital in the venture — so they were the first ‘venture capitalists, and thus the spiritual ancestors of the Silicon Valley crowd in Sand Hill Road. Except, of course, that the current lot risk other peoples money, not their own.)

The story of how the massive engineering and hydraulic engineering project to drain the Fens was carried out is interesting but need not detain us here. A key part of it involved the construction of two huge, parallel, elevated, canal-like ‘drains’ — called the New Bedford and Old Bedford rivers — into which water from the low-lying marshes was pumped and then ferried to the North Sea. These two parallel canals had an interesting design feature: their inside walls were slightly lower than the outside ones — which means that at times of heavy rainfall the overflow in the drains cascaded over into the corridor of land that lay between them, creating a massive inland lake.

There was a lot of heavy rain in the last couple of weeks and so yesterday we set out to Sutton Gault to see how the late Duke’s waterworks were faring. Sure enough, they were working fine. And had made a fine lake for a family of swans.

Quote of the Day

Nate Silver, when asked, “Gun to your head, who is going to win: Trump or Biden?”

His answer:

”Shoot me.”

(Silver is the American statistician who persuaded me in 2016 that Hilary Clinton would win the Presidential election. His reputation is not what it was.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Freddie White | Tenderness On the Block

Link

Long Read of the Day

Between the Algorithm and a Hard Place: The Worker’s Dilemma 

Really thoughtful piece by Diana Enríquez on the problems you encounter when your ‘manager’ is an algorithm rather than a human.

Today you’re supposed to drop off a package in a location outside the route provided by the AmazonFlex app’s map. The passenger needs to go somewhere and the app wants you to drive on a street that you know has very hazardous road conditions. You also know that the app is always tracking your location and how closely you stick to the “optimized route.” You’ve heard from other drivers that you might get a warning and a strike against you if you go too far off route. Too many strikes means you’ll lose your flexible job, and the supplemental income that is helping you pay your bills.

You have two options:

Break the rules but complete the goal – you decide to leave the route and reach your destination, though it is outside the tracked route. Or, you avoid the hazardous road because you are responsible for maintaining your car and you get to the end destination without any damage. You wait a few days to see what happens… and you get an automated email warning you that your driver score was marked down by your passenger for taking a “longer route” or a warning saying they needed to check whether or not you delivered the final package because they saw you left the optimized route.

Follow the rules but at a heavy cost – you’ve heard too many stories about people being deactivated for not obeying the app’s guidance, so you stick to the route and try to figure out how to reach your final goal anyway. You take the short route but damage your car.

And there’s no human to whom you can explain your decision.

More and more workers face this kind of problem every day. Whenever I see an Amazon driver in our locality I give him a friendly wave. He probably thinks I’m potty. But what I’m really thinking is how glad I am not to have work like he does.

Substack’s Nazi problem

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Substack was founded in 2017 by two geeks, Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi, and a journalist, Hamish McKenzie. It grew rapidly, partly because it looked like a lifeboat to many journalists and writers who could see the writing on the wall for conventional media organisations. It enabled prominent hacks working for prestigious publications to monetise their celebrity, or at least get paid for writing online. (Substack had teamed up with the online payments processor Stripe to make it easy to charge some of the writers’ subscribers a monthly fee; if they did charge, then Substack took a cut of their earnings.) … But, in a way, the money is a side issue: most Substacks are free. What’s important is that, as social media degenerates into fragmented chaos, Substack has evolved into a significant part of our culture’s public sphere. Some of the most thoughtful long-form writing around nowadays can be found on the platform.

From the outset, the founders were emphatic about their commitment to free speech…

Read on

A life worth living

Johnny Flynn as the young Winton and Helena Bonham-Carter as his iron-willed mother.

At the weekend we went to see One Life, the story of Nicholas Winton, the young London stockbroker who organised the Kindertransport trains which saved 639 children from the Nazis. It has some wonderful performances — particularly by Anthony Hopkins as the elderly Winton and Johnny Flynn as him as a young man; and by Helena Bonham-Carter as Winton’s mother. And it’s a truly inspiring story. Life-enhancing, you might say. Do see it.

The trailer is here.

My commonplace booklet

Tim Brighouse, the great, charismatic educationist and campaigner for state schools, died recently.

His son Harry told this nice story of an exchange he had on his way back to the US after the funeral:

”The chap serving me at Pret in Heathrow the other day asked if I was going somewhere special for Christmas, and for the second time since Tim died I faltered, and said “I’m going home to Wisconsin, I’ve just been visiting because my dad died on Friday”, and berated myself inside for making him uncomfortable. But he smiled, and said, you know the usual things, and then said “Did he have a good life?” and I found myself grinning widely and said “Yes. He had a great life”, to which his response was “That’s really the best you can ask, isn’t it?”. It was lovely, like something out of the kind of movie that neither my dad nor I would ever willingly watch.”

Remembering Niklaus Wirth

Lovely obituary in The Register by Liam Proven.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

• 52 interesting things Jason Kottke (Whom God Preserve) learned in 2023. Link

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Van Gogh inverted

This lovely photograph by Natalya Saprunova in yesterday’s Washington Post stopped me in my tracks. It shows bubbles of carbon dioxide and methane — released by permafrost melting — floating to the surface of a stream in Siberia. What it instantly reminded me of was paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, and if you turn it upside down you can perhaps see why.

Quote of the Day

One of my grandfathers was a bombardier in the European theater of World War 2. He came back uninjured, but the stress of so many near-death experiences, and so many dead friends, drove him to lifelong alcoholism. Once, in the 1990s, I heard a conservative pundit claim that young Americans had become soft and weak because they had never had to face adversity like the World War 2 generation did. I asked my grandfather what he thought of that. After uttering something unprintable, he said: “I did that [stuff] so you wouldn’t have to.”

• Noah Smith, writing on his terrific blog

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ye Vagabonds | Whistling Wind

Link

Thanks to Celine Naughton for suggesting it.

Long Read of the Day

Does Capitalism Beat Charity?

Scott Alexander is IMHO one of the most interesting writers on the Web. This essay indicates why. Even when I disagree with him, I admire the way he approaches complicated questions. As in this case.

This question comes up whenever I discuss philanthropy.

It would seem that capitalism is better than charity. The countries that became permanently rich, like America and Japan, did it with capitalism. This seems better than temporarily alleviating poverty by donating food or clothing. So (say proponents), good people who want to help others should stop giving to charity and start giving to capitalism. These proponents differ on exactly what “giving to capitalism” means – you can’t write a check to capitalism directly. But it’s usually one of three things:

1. Spend the money on whatever you personally want, since that’s the normal engine of capitalism, and encourages companies to provide desirable things.

2. Invest the money in whatever company produces the highest rate of return, since that’s another capitalist imperative, and creates more companies.

3. Do something like donating to charity, but the donation should go to charities that promote capitalism somehow, or be an investment in companies doing charitable things (impact investing)

I agree that overall capitalism has produced more good things than charity. But when I try to think at the margin, in Near Mode, I can’t make this argument hang together. Here’s my basic objection…

Read on and enjoy the ride. With Alexander, the journey, not the destination, sometimes matters most.

Books, etc.

I’ve come late to Cade Metz’s book, and regret that fact. It’s interesting, readable and very illuminating about the origins of the current AI frenzy.

Niklaus Wirth RIP

He was a great computer scientist, inventor of several programming languages, two of which — Algol and Pascal — I used during my student days. I particularly liked Turbo Pascal, the development system Borland created for programming in Pascal, which included a fast compiler and a useful front-end for writing code, and which ran on the first IBM PC I owned. I used it to write software what kind-of worked, and which therefore qualified for Roger Needham’s astringent evaluation of being “good enough for government work”.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

James Fallows: Updates on the Haneda Airport Collision

Fallows is a great journalist and also a practising pilot who writes insightfully about aviation. This is his update on the horrendous accident at Tokyo airport the other day.

What the pilots and controllers knew.

On current evidence, the Japan Air Lines plane had been properly cleared to land on Runway 34R. It is possible the pilots in that Airbus cockpit did not see the small Coast Guard plane sitting on the runway until the very last instant, or perhaps at all.

How could this be? The runway lights were bright, at night, and could make it hard to see wingtip lights in unexpected locations; the Coast Guard plane was relatively small, in a runway environment packed with other blinking lights; the Airbus windshield would have been showing a “heads up display” of the landing path, which could obscure weak lights on the runway; the controller appears not to have cautioned the crew about previously departing traffic or other complications; etc.

Latest evidence suggests that controllers had intended the Coast Guard plane to taxi to the entry point for Runway 34R, but not onto the runway. This is a fundamental life-and-death distinction in aviation, with lots of language and procedures designed to underscore the difference. “Hold short” when you’re not supposed to enter the runway; “line up and wait” when you are cleared to enter the runway but not to take off; “cleared for takeoff” when it’s time to go.

At all airports I’ve ever seen, there are bright red signs to alert you that you’re about to turn onto a runway…

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Boxed set

Cycling past the University Library in Cambridge over Christmas, I noticed that some genius — in a neat touch — had placed a classic red telephone box on the forecourt. Why ‘neat’? Simply that the phone box as well as the Library had both been designed by the same architect — Giles Gilbert Scott.

But to see the joke you need to take a wider view.

Note the shape of the Library tower.

Quote of the Day

”I loathe writing. On the other hand I’m a great believer in money.”

• S.J. Perelman

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Kate Rusby | Who Will Sing Me Lullabies

Link

Long Read of the Day

James Fallows on the year ahead for the US

From the veteran journalist’s blog..

Three hundred and nine days from now, America’s prospects will look very different than they do as we begin this year—different one way or another. The results will depend on an electorate whose downcast mood contrasts with the strongest economic growth in decades. In the starkest way since Bush v. Gore in 2000, the outcome may be in the hands of a Supreme Court that is less trusted and more politicized than in that era, and far more visibly corrupt. Public information will depend on a mainstream press still struggling to cope with a movement like Trump’s, and social media companies that barely try…

Fallows is a sharp and perceptive observer of mainstream media in the US In his piece he includes a dramatic graphic of what Gallup heard from American voters in the run-up to Trump’s election.

It’s a vivid demonstration of how US mainstream media allowed themselves to be distracted from the important issues in the 2016 campaign. I can see the same deficient narrative building again this time, partly because of the ‘balance as bias’ dysfunctionality that still plagues political journalism everywhere. Nowhere, for example, will voters be introduced to the idea that Joe Biden might turn out to be a more effective President than Barack Obama — at least in terms of getting things done. Or that Trump is showing signs of serious cognitive impairment which make Biden look like Spinoza.

Books, etc.

From GoodInternet.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.

100 Greatest Beatles Songs

Good list in Rolling Stone magazine.

This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!