Monday 14 February, 2022

We went to a friend’s for dinner on Friday evening and discovered their cat sitting mesmerised by the flames in their woodburner, like a small child watching the flickering images on a TV. Wonderful moment.

Quote of the Day

”It was almost impossible to persuade Number 10, in particular, to treat the devolved governments as though they were grown-up governments with their own democratic legitimacy.”

• Philip Rycroft, Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the European Union. (From the UKICE Brexit Witness Archive.)

Surprise, surprise. I’ve always thought that the UK is the most pathologically centralised country in Europe, perhaps even more than France.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Paul Simon – Under African Skies (from The Concert in Hyde Park)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Data Is Not The New Oil

Nice essay by Dave Birch (Whom God Preserve) demolishing a popular but misleading metaphor and suggesting a better one: data is the new plutonium. He explores the implications of taking that view — which provides an interesting perspective and explains why this is worth your time.

Computers can write their own code. So are programmers now obsolete?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

I studied engineering at university and, like most of my contemporaries, found that I sometimes needed to write computer programs to do certain kinds of calculations. These pieces of utilitarian software were written in languages now regarded as the programming equivalent of Latin – Fortran, Algol and Pascal – and what I learned from the experience was that I was not a born hacker. The software I wrote was clumsy and inefficient and more talented programmers would look at it and roll their eyes, much as Rory McIlroy might do if required to play a round with an 18-handicap golfer. But it did the job and in that sense was, in the laconic phrase sometimes used by the great computer scientist Roger Needham, “good enough for government work”. And what I took away from the experience was a lifelong respect for programmers who can write elegant, efficient code. Anyone who thinks programming is easy has never done it.

All of which goes to explain why I sat up when, last year, someone realised that Codex, an offspring of GPT-3, a large neural network trained on vast troves of text gathered from the web that could generate plausible English text, could write apps, ie, short computer programs…

Read on

Johnson, Starmer and ‘swiftboating’

My favourite podcast, Talking Politics is winding down, which is a pity but understandable when one knows the toll that six years of producing original thinking every week about British and international politics has taken on David Runciman, Helen Thompson and the show’s producer Catherine Carr. In that time they provided a vivid illustration of how podcasting is a medium capable of providing a ‘second draft of history’ with a wider intellectual bandwidth than traditional broadcast media can provide.

On last week’s episode, which was about ‘The meaning of Boris Johnson’, Chris Brooke made an interesting observation about Johnson’s weird attempt to smear the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, with a vicious and false accusation that he had failed to prosecute Jimmy Savile, the notorious long-term paedophile. (It was true that the Crown Prosecution Service failed to prosecute Savile, but Starmer had not been the head of the service at the time when that non-decision was made.)

Most people interpreted Johnson’s smear as evidence of his desperation. But Chris saw an interesting parallel from ages ago in the so-called “swiftboating” of John Kerry, the Democratic candidate for the US presidency in 2004.

The object of the exercise was to undermine Kerry’s record as a much-decorated war hero for his service in the Vietnam war, and it clearly played a role in Kerry’s failure to win the election. The motivation behind the ‘Swiftboat’ campaign seems to have been Republican fears that George W. Bush’s dodgy military ‘experience’ (which consisted of a relaxed period in the Texas National Guard) didn’t exactly look impressive when compared with Kerry’s distinguished military record. So one can interpret it as a successful attempt to ‘cancel’ a perceived asset of his campaign for the presidency.

Turning back to Johnson’s smear… Starmer is not the most exciting of political leaders, but compared with Johnson he has an unquestionably distinguished record of public service. He is also manifestly a more serious and adult figure than the chaotic clown currently occupying 10 Downing Street. Associating him (wrongly) with the Savile scandal serves the purpose of mitigating these natural advantages over Johnson, in the sure knowledge that such smears ‘stick’ in a polaraised political environment.

They sure do. Evidence of that was provided on February 7 when, as the Guardian reported,

On Monday, Starmer and the shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, had to be bundled into a police car after anti-vax protesters surrounded him near parliament with shouts of “traitor” and “Jimmy Savile”. One witness said a protester carried a hangman’s noose prop, which another protester had joked was for Starmer.

And yesterday, the Guardian reported:

The Metropolitan Police is investigating death threats against Keir Starmer made in the wake of Boris Johnson’s accusation that he “failed to prosecute” Jimmy Savile.

A cache of evidence documenting the threats was sent to Scotland Yard on Friday afternoon, including a number of apparently identifiable users on the messaging app Telegram who called for the Labour party leader to be hanged or “executed”.

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which seeks to disrupt online hate, sent the material to the Met after unearthing threats to life against a named individual.

The uses and abuses of hype

The five Levels of Hype

This illustration is the centrepiece of an illuminating article by Johannes Klingebiel. One cannot study the contemporary tech industry without understanding the role that hype plays in it. I’ve often found the Gartner Hype Cycle useful in framing discussions about a particular technology, but its limitation is that it’s too granular sometimes. Klingebiel’s approach provides more of a helicopter view.

And hype, just like investment bubbles, has its uses, as Klingebiel observes:

Hype is an interesting thing. It‘s rightfully often spurred as misleading bullshit or ignorant boosterism but it also has its uses. In short: when it comes to creating a new technology you need to sell a vision to attract the resources you need (people, investment, etc.). Hype can also act as glue. At its best, it can create a shared vision pulling the actors in the same direction and thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

h/t to Andrew Curry (Whom God Preserve) for alerting me to it.

My commonplace booklet

Anand Menon’s Gresham College lecture on what we’ve learned so far from Brexit. As someone who thought he knew a lot about this, I found it really illuminating and an hour well spent. Link

Dreaming of Provence

We’re determined (well,hoping) to make it back there this summer.

Quote of the Day

”A cucumber should be well sliced, and dressed with pepper and vinegar, and then thrown out, as good for nothing.”

• Samuel Johnson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Chet Atkins | Black Mountain Rag

Link

Long Read of the Day

What Will It Take to Resuscitate American Democracy?

This essay by Stephen Marche is really a Long Read for a whole weekend!

Any American who can read knows that democracy is in crisis. The US government increasingly struggles to fulfil its most basic tasks, like guaranteeing the debt, passing budgets or confirming the diplomatic corps. Meanwhile armed groups of insurrectionists, like the one that stormed the US Capitol just over a year ago, spread incoherence. Think tanks on the right and universities on the left still debate policies like the tax rate or parental leave but they’re playacting by this point, whether they know it or not. They distract themselves with antiquities while the temple collapses around their shoulders. The questions have become much more basic than abstruse policy. Will democracy survive? How to keep America’s institutions alive?

Future historians will see a great irony in the intellectual history of our moment. Supposedly, we live in an era of wokeness. The misnomer could hardly be more total. The United States is sleepwalking to its end.

Marche is a novelist, essayist, commentator and the author of half a dozen books, including The Unmade Bed: The Messy Truth About Men and Women in the Twenty-First Century (2016) and The Hunger of the Wolf (2015). He’s currently working on a book about the possibility of a second civil war in the US which will be published by Simon and Schuster so — not surprisingly — the tone of the piece is a bit apocalyptic. Maybe that comes from being a novelist. At times the piece reminded me of the directness of Kim Stanley Robinson’s approach to the climate crisis. Here’s the outline of his argument:

1. For conservative intellectuals, “the slip into dreams came over a decade ago, in 2008. The reason behind their collapse was simple. They were wrong about everything”.
2. The failures of left-wing thinkers “are more severe than the failures on the right. The also started in 2008 and “much of the left doesn’t know it’s failed”.

Hope you find it as striking as I did.

What the Canadian Truckers Want

If you’re puzzled by the truckers’ protest, then this is illuminating. I haven’t been paying much attention to it, and have therefore been ingesting the mainstream media’s reporting of it. This is a piece by a reporter who took the trouble to talk to some of the protesters.

Virginia Woolf: cook?

My observation in Tuesday’s edition that

the obvious explanation for Woolf’s ignorance [about beouf en daube], of course, is that she never appears to have done any cooking herself. At any rate her diaries are full of exasperated entries about the difficulties she has with her cook(s)

attracted the attention of Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve), from whom Nothing is Hidden. She pointed me to Rachel Cooke’s 2014 Guardian review of The Bloomsbury Cookbook  by Jans Ondaatje Rolls, a compendium of recipes and food-related paintings, prose and gossip starring Woolf and all the rest of the Bloomsbury crowd.

This contains fragments of maddening information, such as that Woolf “once mistakenly baked her wedding ring into a suet pudding”, and that “Woolf was a keen baker; she was also devoted to bottling and pickling”.

But the bit that really caught my eye was this:

We are what we eat. When Clive Bell’s waistcoat button flew across the room during a society piano recital in 1923, it was a sign he’d been enjoying the work of his wife Vanessa’s cook, Grace Huggens, just a little too much. But his real appetite, you gather, was for life; the humiliation, as Virginia Woolf put it, “brushed him only slightly”, and his spirits remained “superb” even as his waistband groaned.

Intrigued by this, I dug out my copy of VW’s Diaries for the relevant year (in the Penguin edition edited by Julian Bell) but could find no reference to this intriguing event (though Clive figures extensively in the year’s entries), and the index contains no mention of Grace Huggens). Which of course makes me wonder where this story comes from. But it also, dammit, caused me to spend (waste?) a couple of hours re-reading the diary, which I’ve always found addictive. Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

• Geomagnetic Storm Destroys 40 New SpaceX Satellites in Orbit

Over the past three years, SpaceX has deployed thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit as part of its business to beam high-speed internet service from space. But the company’s latest deployment of 49 new satellites after a Feb. 3 launch did not go as planned.

As a consequence of a geomagnetic storm triggered by a recent outburst of the sun, up to 40 of 49 newly launched Starlink satellites have been knocked out of commission. They are in the process of re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, where they will be incinerated.

Hmmm… Divine intervention? SpaceX is Elon Musk’s company. Perhaps the Almighty is pissed off by his fatuous claims about the imminence of Full Self Driving.

Thanks to Alina Utrata for the Link.

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The Holy Wall?

Quote of the Day

“The battlefield of Cold War 2 extends far beyond the realm of missiles and ships. At its core, this is a struggle not over control of territory but over which set of institutions and ideas will guide the course of the world’s development. And on the economic, technological, cultural, and diplomatic fronts, the U.S. is somewhat asleep at the wheel.”

• Noah Smith (of Noahpinion fame)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

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

Link

I once heard them do this live. Unforgettable.

Long Read of the Day

The Big Short of Streaming

by Damon Krukowski

It’s  quite a short Long Read (for a change), but very efficient at getting its message across — which is that Spotify is a tech company trying to pass itself off as part of the music industry.

Nicely done.

Facebook is learning the painful lesson it taught print journalism

Good OpEd by Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. The lesson: never build your house on someone else’s land. Which is what mainstream media learned when they decided that they had to be on Facebook.

In 2015, some professors at Virginia’s Sweet Briar College faced an unusual problem. Through the college, they had purchased homes on campus. The land underneath them, however, was still owned by their employer. And now the college was closing, and presumably selling the campus to someone who might want to use that land for something else.

Happily, Sweet Briar was rescued at the last minute by its alumnae. But the financial cavalry don’t always ride to the rescue just in time, so the plight of the professors nonetheless stands as a vivid example of a wise business adage: “Never build your house on someone else’s land.”

For years, Facebook has been teaching that lesson to businesses that built their strategies around the platform. And now Facebook is itself getting schooled, which is why I bring this up.

Meta, Facebook’s parent company, just had a truly horrific earnings call…

Great piece.

When, in 2012, Zuckerberg decided to do a massive pivot and orient his company totally towards the smartphone, he was widely hailed — in Silicon Valley and by the commentariat — as a genius in the Bill Gates mould. (People saw echoes from the way Gates pivoted Microsoft in the mid-1990s to focus on the Internet once he perceived the extent of the threat that Netscape represented for Microsoft.) But Facebook didn’t own the smartphone — Apple and Google did with iOS and Android, respectively. So you could interpret Zuckerberg’s new pivot to the so-called Metaverse as determination to own the next iteration of the tech world so that anyone who wants to play in it has to do so on his terms — and at their own peril).

My commonplace booklet

In case you’re wondering how Julian Assange can pay his (whopping) legal bills, here’s how, courtesy of Azeem Azhar:

AssangeDAO, a decentralised autonomous organisation set up to raise money to cover the fees and publicity campaigns towards Julian Assange’s release, collected over $20 million in three days. As of writing this, the campaign has raised 16427.8 ETH or just over $50 million. This is a fascinating act of political subversion—worth following. Source: Wikileaks

Footnote. Puzzled by the DAO idea? Here’s Wikipedia on the subject:

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), sometimes called a decentralized autonomous corporation (DAC), is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a central government. A DAO’s financial transaction record and program rules are maintained on a blockchain. The precise legal status of this type of business organization is unclear.

You bet it is.

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High-tech minimalism

Without the vehicle on the left and the logo in the distance you’d never guess this was a service centre for cars.

Quote of the Day

”“What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left.”

• John Von Neumann on the digital computer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bill Evans | Waltz For Debby

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Cooking with Virginia Woolf

Marvellous essay by Valerie Strivers in the Paris Review arguing that the one flaw in Virginia Woolf’s great novel To the Lighthouse is that the author knows nothing about the dish that is a (perhaps the) central preoccupation of its central character, Mrs Ramsey.

The boeuf en daube in To the Lighthouse, a 1927 novel by Virginia Woolf about an English family on vacation in the Hebrides, is one of the best-known dishes in literature. Obsessed over for many chapters by the protagonist, Mrs. Ramsay, and requiring many days of preparation, it is unveiled in a scene of crucial significance. This “savory confusion of brown and yellow meats,” in its huge pot, gives off an “exquisite scent of olives and oil and juice.” It serves as a monument to the joys of family life and a celebration of fleeting moments. Thus, it is with fear and trembling that I suggest that Woolf’s boeuf en daube, from a cook’s perspective, is a travesty, and that its failures may prove instructive.

Ms Strivers even rounds off the piece with her own recipe for boeuf en daube. It looks convincing to me, and so I’m going to try making it — and, while I’m at it, also re-read the novel (which has always been one of my favourites).

En passant: The obvious explanation for Woolf’s ignorance in this matter, of course, is that she never appears to have done any cooking herself. At any rate her diaries are full of exasperated entries about the difficulties she has with her cook(s).

That’s typical of the Bloomsbury crowd, though, who (as the joke goes) “lived in squares and slept in triangles” — and, one could add, always had servants.

James Joyce’s modus operandi

(Alert: If Joyce isn’t your thing, avert gaze and skip this bit!)

There’s an interesting essay by Philip Keel Geheber in the LA Review of Books on the way Ulysses was written. It seems that Joyce was the worst nightmare of copy-editors and printers. Every time they sent him a proof, it came back much extended (as well as altered).

Joyce’s process was accretive, and he radically transformed Ulysses in 1921, while the manuscript was in proofs. During this late stage of production, he added one-third of the novel’s text in the margins of the typeset pages. But Joyce wasn’t adding text for the sake of length or difficulty, though these undeniably are effects of the additions; rather, fundamental characteristics of the novel’s episodes were bolstered at this stage. Joyce was no longer subject to deadlines and restrictions associated with serial publication. (This serialization abruptly ended following the first installment of “Oxen of the Sun” in the September–December 1920 issue of The Little Review, as the magazine suspended publication in preparation for the 1921 obscenity trial in the Southern District of New York.) With the author given time now to shape episodes in an open-ended fashion, the later sections of the book became much more complex and stylistically stranger.

Much of the book’s characteristic humor and allusiveness enters the novel in Joyce’s marginal scrawlings on the proof sheets. For instance, Bloom’s satirical commentary on the Latin Mass in “Lotus Eaters” is written at this stage…

Geheber is nothing if not thorough. He has a long analysis of the evolution of the famous 459-word rhapsodic passage in the “Ithaca” chapter on the qualities of water that Leopold Bloom admired.

“What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?” The drafted response is a short 58 words, with marginal inclusions of 36 words (indicated here between carets):

Yes, its universality ^and equality, ever seeking its own level, constant to its nature,^ its vastness in oceans ^on Mercalli’s projector^, its secrecy in springs ^such as the Hole in the Wall well by the Ashtown gate^, its healing virtues, its properties for washing, ^nourishing flowers & plants^ quenching thirst, and fire, it strength in hard hydrants, its docility in working millwheels, canals, electric power stations, ^its utility in bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills,^ the fauna and flora it gave life to, its evil in marches, faded flowers, pestilent fens, stagnant pools when the moon waned.

Joyce transferred these 94 words directly to the Rosenbach manuscript — his mostly legible manuscript draft, from which typescripts were produced — adding another 76 words in the margins and drafting a 117-word block on the facing page. To these now 283 words, Joyce added another 176 in the margins of the proofs, so that 38 percent of the water hymn’s total length was produced in the waning months of 1921.

Like I said: a copy-editor’s nightmare. But also a genius.

My commonplace booklet

How Presidents used to write to one another

From George Bush Senior to Gerald Ford…

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Quote of the Day

”Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”

• Henry David Thoreau

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dire Straits | Why Worry

Link

This lovely song was played at Dom Mulvey’s funeral last Friday and somehow it perfectly matched the occasion.

Dom was an unforgettable young man who had been dealt a terrible hand by fate — a number of congenital physical conditions that made his life almost unbearably difficult. He sometimes also wrestled with mental illness. And yet he was the most outgoing, enthusiastic, friendly person imaginable, a regular patron of many of the nicest cafes in Cambridge — which made him, in a way, possibly the best-known figure in the town. In the way he overcame his physical disabilities, he often reminded me of Stephen Hawking, who likewise outlived all the gloomy prognoses and left a mark on everyone who knew him.

Dom had a wonderful funeral — a packed service, followed by an amazing wake attended by, I’d guess, over a hundred people from all walks of life — with tea, music (compéred by Dom’s brother Nick, himself an accomplished musician), a potluck supper, memoirs and a vast rolling slide-show of photographs taken from the social media feeds of Dom and his innumerable friends. What was remarkable about Dom was the way he managed to be outgoing and positive; faced with the cruel hand he had been dealt, most of us would have curled up and hidden in a cave. And although his funeral was, in one way, an intensely sad event, the collective vibe at his wake was joyful — an evocation of how we humans can be better at love and generosity than hate and selfishness.

May the lovely lad who inspired those feelings rest in peace.

His sister Mary has set up a JustGiving page for donations to charities that Dom cared about. It’s already exceeded its target six-fold. I’m not surprised.

Long Read of the Day

America’s Favorite Pickup Truck Goes Electric

Long New Yorker essay by John Seabrook on Ford’s electrification of its best-selling F-150 pickup truck. Seabrook seems to be a big fan of the vehicle — he even owns a petrol-fuelled one, and has put down a deposit on the EV version (branded the ‘Lightning’ with typical Ford crassness), but his essay is a thoughtful disquisition on the EV phenomenon generally, and an enjoyable read. Sample:

Electric trucks are intended, in part, to appeal to drivers like me, who feel guilty about their gas-guzzler, as well as to citizens whose concern for the common good has kept them from buying a pickup at all. (Two hundred thousand people have reserved Lightnings with Ford dealers; most of those potential customers are neither pickup drivers nor Ford owners.) But will buying a Lightning absolve me of my sins against nature? If one calculates all the nonrenewable-energy costs incurred in manufacturing an E.V. pickup, including the mining and processing of battery metals—lithium, cobalt, nickel, and manganese, among others—and the worldwide shipping of those components, along with the percentage of fossil-fuel-based energy that goes into the grid that charges E.V.s (in 2020, less than twenty per cent of the electricity generated in the U.S. came from renewables), and then compares that with the environmental cost of driving my gas F-150, might keeping my old truck be the better option for now, at least until renewable-energy sources make the grid cleaner?

According to Rahul Malik, a battery scientist who is currently working in the natural-resources department of the Canadian government, even an E.V. plugged into a highly renewable grid must be driven for more than twenty-five thousand miles before it has lower “life cycle” emissions (which include the energy used in mining and manufacturing) than a combustion vehicle. And, as William Green, a professor of chemical engineering at M.I.T., pointed out to me, “if a person sells their used car and buys an E.V., that used car doesn’t disappear, it just has a new owner, so it keeps on emitting.” Ultimately, what matters is that first-time car buyers choose electric.

Then there’s the other big issue with pickups, whether they’re gas-powered or E.V.s: their size. Since 1990, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the weight of the average pickup has increased by twelve hundred and fifty-six pounds—thirty-two per cent. A recent post on Vice observed that the largest pickups and S.U.V.s today are as big as Second World War-era tanks. Now pickups are going to get heavier still. The Lightning, because of its lithium-ion battery, weighs approximately sixty-five hundred pounds; in some cases the pickup can be more than two thousand pounds heavier than its gas counterpart. You’ll be capable of assaulting a mountaintop redoubt, even if you’re just driving to the store for milk.

As the owner of an EV, I have a dog in this fight, but I’ve never subscribed to the delusion that electric vehicles are the solution to our environmental crisis. Although widespread adoption will obviously reduce CO2 emissions from transport (and that’s obviously a good thing), the overall impact of EVs has to be assessed in terms of the entire environmental footprint of manufacturing and charging them. And that’s not such a good story. For the grisly details (and in relation to the cobalt and lithium that are essential for contemporary batteries they are indeed grisly) see here.

John Dizard has an interesting article on battery production in the FT at the weekend. It’s behind the paywall, but some of the detail is compelling. For one thing, the market for lithium carbonate has gone mad. In January 2021 it cost about $9,600 a tonne. At the end of January 2022 it was more than $50,000 a tonne. And, as you may have noticed, Chile (from which most lithium seems to come at the moment) has a new left-wing government which has — sensibly — decided that using virtually irreplaceable underground water to produce more lithium salts in the Atacama Desert is, to use Dizard’s judicious, FT-ish phrase, “environmentally and socially unsound”. It is.

Spotify’s attempt to use the Facebook playbook over the Joe Rogan affair won’t wash

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Two decades ago, the late and much-lamented David Bowie said something that was eerily prophetic. “Music itself,” he observed, “is going to become like running water or electricity.” His point was that in 2002 we were still carrying our music in little bottles called iPods, just as Victorian travellers in India carried bottles of drinking water because you couldn’t rely on their being a safe and sanitary public supply.

Spool forward 20 years and Spotify, the Swedish audio streaming and media services provider founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, is, in Bowie’s terms, the global music authority, providing sanitised recorded music everywhere, on demand. At the moment, it has something like 406 million active monthly users, of whom more than 180 million pay for its “premium” (advertising-free) service…

Read on

My commonplace booklet

• Airstream’s new camper sips on solar and parks itself I’m not a caravan enthusiast myself, but I’ve always thought the Airstream ones are lovely, so was struck by this. Link

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Finally: the stamp of approval

In Ireland the technical term for this kind of nonsense is: codology.

Quote of the Day

Yes because a hundred years ago Sylvia Beach displayed in her Paris bookshop the first copy of a new novel she was publishing yes she was publishing “Ulysses” which is now recognised as one of the twentieth century’s greatest works of art and yes signed first edition copies can fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars in auction it was written by Irishman James Joyce with its peculiar use of punctuation and yes its stream of consciousness James marked that occasion on 2 February 1922 with a muted celebration and laid out what was then the only other copy with its white letters on a blue background a nod to the colours of the Greek flag and thus to the novel’s chief inspiration Homer’s Odyssey and yes for Beach it was a risk of course supporting this experimental novel which was looked at unkindly by some like playwright George Bernard Shaw who said it was revolting and that if you imagine that any Irishman would pay 150 francs for a book you little know my countrymen

• The Economist, marking the centenary of Ulysses’s publication in the style of Molly Bloom’s celebrated soliloquy at the end of the novel.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Julie Fowlis | My Love is on the High Seas’

Link

Long Read of the Day

Consuming Joyce: 100 Years of Ulysses in Ireland

Terrific review by Hugh Haughton in The Literary Review of John McCourt’s marvellous (and mortifying) account of how, over a century, my fellow-countrymen moved from regarding Joyce’s novel as an “Odyssey of the sewer” to being celebrated “the great Irish book of the twentieth century”. It’s not a pretty story, but the good news is that we got there in the end.

Beautifully written review. Worth a read.

North Korea Hacked Him. So He Took Down Its Internet

This is really lovely. Just over a year ago, an independent US hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. He managed to prevent them from swiping anything of value from him, but he felt unnerved by the idea of state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally — and by the lack of any visible response from his government.

So he took matters into his own hands and launched a series of very effective Denial of Service attacks on various parts of the North Korean cyber-infrastructure.

This Wired report tells the whole story, and it’s a fascinating read. But in a way, it corroborates something that I wrote years ago about the paradox of asymmetrical warfare. My argument was that the most intelligent strategy an underdog nation threatened by a superpower could adopt was not to buy conventional weapons but to invest in building an elite cadre of sophisticated computer hackers who could go after the critical infrastructure of its adversary.

Why? Two reasons: hackers are much cheaper than kinetic weapons; and secondly, the underdog can act with impunity because his lack of a critical Internet infrastructure means that he’s largely immune to devastating cyber-counter-attack. This is not the case for, say, the US vis-a-vis China or Russia, and it explains why Biden (and Obama before him) seems to have backed away from massive retaliation for Chinese and Russian cyber-espionage.

P4x’s counter-attack on North Korea was successful for various reasons — which are discussed in the article. He succeeded in temporarily shutting down critical servers and at one stage cutting North Korea off from the rest of the world. But even as he did so, his attacks probably had little effect on the daily life of the country — because it’s primarily an offline state, and therefore largely impervious to cyber offensives. The same cannot be said for those of us who live in advanced industrial societies.

My commonplace booklet

 Rotterdam bridge to be dismantled so Jeff Bezos’ yacht can pass through.

The Koningshavenbrug, known to Rotterdammers as De Hef, was renovated in 2017 and the council pledged at the time it would never be dismantled again. But that promise is now set to be broken, Rijnmond said, to let Bezos’ yacht through. The bridge, placed over the river in 1927, has had a central role in city’s history and was heavily damaged during the bombardment of Rotterdam in May 1940. The bridge is now officially protected.

Bezos’ three-masted yacht is being built by the Oceano shipyard in Alblasserdam but is too big to pass under the bridge when the central section is raised to its full height. Now Oceano and Bezos have approached the council about temporarily dismantling the bridge at their cost.

Money talks. It’s a universal language.

Link

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Two-camera selfie

One of those silly experiments that photographers do.

I was going to call it “bicameral selfie” but then realised that wouldn’t be quite right.

Quote of the Day

“Always tell the truth, and people will never believe you”

• Ronald Knox

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Grateful Dead | I Fought The Law | Live

Link

Vivid evidence of my misspent youth. One of my favourite numbers by my second-favourite band. Note how long it takes them to get going. They were the first band to really understand tech. A colleague of mine who was the entertainments officer for the Students’ Union at his university in the 1960s managed to get the Dead to do a concert in a local football stadium. He was astonished when the 40-page contract arrived beforehand. It specified that an acoustically optimal location in the arena should be roped off for Deadheads to make bootleg recordings.

Long Read of the Day

The Mafia hires good accountants

Bracing blog post by Cory Doctorow about a strange paradox. On the one hand, journalists pay increasing attention to the giant consultancy firms, fancy law firms, economists and other elite enablers who pimp for kleptocrats and oligarchs in London and elsewhere. But on the other hand the accounting profession itself is rarely named when scandals erupt. Which is a mystery, since the keeping and auditing of financial ledgers is so key to corrupt practices. Strange, isn’t it? In fact the only accountancy firm I can remember being destroyed by a scandal is Arthur Andersen, the firm that did the Enron accounts.

Great read. I’ve often been puzzled about how partners in the big four auditing firms have escaped gaol.

Chart of the Day

Source: Axios

Crypto and capital gains tax

Interesting snippet spotted in the nearest thing the Financial Times has to an agony aunt.

 Q:I jumped on the cryptocurrency bandwagon early on for a bit of fun and without particularly high hopes. I have benefited from a price rise post-lockdown and now have a fairly high-value portfolio. I’ve used my holdings to fund some one-off purchases and exchanged between currencies. I recently received a letter from HM Revenue & Customs claiming that I may owe tax. I’m worried I’ve done something wrong. If I have never cashed in my portfolio, am I still liable for capital gains tax on the potential sterling profit on my original investment?

A: in most cases where someone has invested in crypto assets, those “assets” will be subject to capital gains tax (CGT) when sold, if the gain realised is above the £12,300 threshold.

CGT is due as a result of disposal, so if you’ve made no disposals, no CGT would be due. However, if you have exchanged crypto direct for other goods, or even to acquire new cryptocurrency, then it is likely that you will have made some disposals and potentially triggered CGT.

HMRC’s approach is to apply the same rules as for shares and equities. The tax authority has been securing data in relation to coins and tokens held by individuals from a number of crypto exchanges, and it is this information that it is largely using to identify holders of crypto and sending them letters.

So if you have cryptocurrency (I don’t) be sure to keep good records. And if you do decide to cash in, remember to set aside enough to cover the whopping tax bill!

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Ulysses @ 100

Photo credit: Geoffrey Barker under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

This is a big day for those of us who are fans of the writings of James Joyce — the hundredth anniversary of the publication of Ulysses. (Footnote: If you’re not of that persuasion, this might be the time to take the day off, and no one will think the worse of you for that. Normal service will be restored tomorrow.)

As Kevin Birmingham observes in his fascinating study, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, so much has been written about what’s exceptional within the pages of Joyce’s epic that we have lost sight of what happened to Ulysses itself. It’s a great story and Birmingham tells it well.

The book was banned as obscene, officially or unofficially, throughout most of the English-speaking world for over a decade. And the fact that it was forbidden is part of what made the novel so transformative. Ulysses, says Birmingham, “changed not only the course of literature in the century that followed, but the very definition of literature in the eyes of the law”.

Joyce wrote all of it by hand in notebooks, on loose-leaf sheets and on scraps of paper in more than a dozen apartments in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. A portion was burned in Paris while it was still only a manuscript draft, and it was convicted of obscenity in New York before it was even a book (parts of it were published in instalments by a small magazine). Joyce’s difficulties inspired Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate running a small bookstore in Paris, to publish the book when everyone else (including Virginia Woolf’s Hogarth Press) refused.

Government officials on both sides of the Atlantic confiscated and burned more than a thousand copies. Most of the surviving copies of the first edition came from Shakespeare & Company, Sylvia Beach’s shop, where, as one writer remembered, “Ulysses lay stacked like dynamite in a revolutionary cellar.”

Joyce was, by all accounts, an utterly exasperating man, but his contemporaries saw his genius clearly. He was perpetually broke and living on the charity of friends and supporters (while also living it up whenever he had money to burn). He also suffered from terrible bouts of iritis (a swelling of the iris), which in turn brought on bouts of acute glaucoma and often left him close to blindness, and he underwent traumatising eye-surgery without anaesthetics.

His grevious health problems and feeble eyesight, writes Birmingham,

made him heroic and pitiable, inaccessible and deeply human. The images of Joyce wearing eye patches and post surgical bandages or reading with thick spectacles and magnifying glass gave him the aura of a blind seer, a twentieth-century Homer or Milton. Illness was taking away the visible world only to give him an experience whose intensity was too deep for others to fathom. Ernest Hemingway once wrote to Joyce after his son’s fingernail lightly scratched his eye. “It hurt like hell,” Hemingway said. “For ten days I had a very little taste of how things might be with you.”

Yet he persevered. The book, Birmingham thinks,

reads like s desperate, beloved labor, a work of uncanny insight behind thick spectacles… It is the book of a man who, even in a hospital bed — even with both eyes bandaged — would reach for a notebook and trace phrases blindly with his pencil so that he could insert them into his manuscript when he could see again. It’s no wonder that Joyce’s fiction explored the interior world. Beyond his family, it was all he had.

Spot on. And there are many among us who are very glad that he persevered.

Quote of the Day

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

• Ulysses, p. 31 (Bodley Head, 1937 edition)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Il mio tesoro from Don Giovanni | Sung by John McCormack

Link

Joyce had a fine singing voice and came close to winning first place in the singing competition at the 1904 Feis Ceoil, an annual celebration of Irish musical talent held in Dublin. It was a lively cultural moment—the kind of informal civic festivity that later eras would commercialize through corporate sponsorships or digital sweeps casinos running parallel promotional draws, but which in Edwardian Dublin was purely about local prestige. The previous year the top prize (a year-long scholarship to study in Italy) had been won by John McCormack, who was friendly with Joyce and had advised him to enter the 1904 competition. But Joyce won only the bronze medal, possibly because he didn’t stick to the rubric: he refused to sight-read a musical score. He was as cussed as hell even then.

McCormack went on to a brilliantly successful career as a Bel canto tenor, while Joyce became a great modernist writer. It’s tantalising to think that we might not have had Ulysses if he had adhered to the rubric. But he was fascinated by music all his life — as you can see if you consult Ruth Bauerle’s amazing James Joyce Songbook, an astonishing (and vast) compendium of all the music to be found in his writings.

Long Read of the Day

Heeding James Joyce

Nice essay by Chris Hedges in Counterpunch.

One hundred years ago this week, Sylvia Beach, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare and Company on 12 rue de l’Odéon in Paris and nurtured a community of expatriate writers that included Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, placed in the bookstore’s front window a 732-page novel she had published, “Ulysses” by James Joyce…

Read on.

Karl Jung’s letter to Joyce on finishing the novel

Dear Sir,

Your Ulysses has presented the world such an upsetting psychological problem, that repeatedly I have been called in as a supposed authority on psychological matters.

Ulysses proved to be an exceedingly hard nut and it has forced my mind not only to most unusual efforts, but also to rather extravagant peregrinations (speaking from the standpoint of a scientist). Your book as a whole has given me no end of trouble and I was brooding over it for about three years until I succeeded to put myself into it. But I must tell you that I’m profoundly grateful to yourself as well as to your gigantic opus, because I learned a great deal from it. I shall probably never be quite sure whether I did enjoy it, because it meant too much grinding of nerves and of grey matter. I also don’t know whether you will enjoy what I have written about Ulysses because I couldn’t help telling the world how much I was bored, how I grumbled, how I cursed and how I admired. The 40 pages of non stop run at the end is a string of veritable psychological peaches. I suppose the devil’s grandmother knows so much about the real psychology of a woman, I didn’t.

Well I just try to recommend my little essay to you, as an amusing attempt of a perfect stranger that went astray in the labyrinth of your Ulysses and happened to get out of it again by sheer good luck. At all events you may gather from my article what Ulysses has done to a supposedly balanced psychologist.

With the expression of my deepest appreciation, I remain, dear Sir,

Yours faithfully,

C.G. Jung

The 11 things missing from Sue Gray’s report on ‘Partygate’

Nice commentary in openDemocracy.

TL;DR version: basically, everything that’s important is missing.

The only question is whether (as I mentioned yesterday) the Met’s investigation is capable of leading to criminal charges.

I always suspected that the report would be a damp squib — partly because the Westminster bubble (and its associated media obsession) was making so much of it.

Only time will tell if that hunch was correct. In the meantime, Johnson is safe until the May elections.

In trying to wriggle out of its responsibilities, Spotify is making a category mistake

The company’s CEO Daniel Ek vowed to provide greater transparency around Spotify’s content rules and said he wanted to support “expression while balancing it with the safety of our users.” And just like Facebook, Spotify will be labelling content with warnings and directing users to a Covid-19 information hub with input from scientists and world health experts.

There are two things wrong with this:

1. As various people have pointed out, attaching warning messages to content (dodgy or otherwise) about controversial matters effectively gives all messages equal status, and often merely boosts the bad stuff.

2. More importantly, by borrowing ideas from the Facebook playbook, Ek is making a category error. Spotify, as a Sarah Frier points out on Bloomberg’s Fully Charged, is not Facebook. “The objectionable content at issue comes not from a video or politician that happened to go viral, but from The Joe Rogan Experience, a podcast Spotify paid for the privilege of distributing exclusively on its service, in a licensing deal worth about $100 million”.

Moreover, as Frier goes on to observe,

Spotify executives are not shocked at the nature of Rogan’s pandemic content; the podcast deal was inked in May 2020, when Rogan was already a highly controversial figure. And critically: Spotify isn’t a user-generated content company, it’s a curator and publisher of selected media. Rogan is the cornerstone of its podcasting business.

(Emphasis added.)

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

My commonplace booklet

• Celebrate the publication centennial of James Joyce’s Ulysses in a two-day conference at The Huntington.  Hmmm… Reading the blurb suggests that it’s above my pay grade. For example: “Joyce’s Ulysses uses Dublin as map as well as palimpsest upon which to inscribe his vision of worlds past and present. This conference will explore approaches to literary study that make clearer the verbal and nonverbal coordinates of Joyce’s literary terrain and their global expressions. Topics will range from forms of visualization (schemas, maps, charts, word indexes) to decolonization, intertexts and intermedia, mapping as metaphor and places as texts, in an effort to open up new ways of reading.”

• Teenager seeks $50k from Elon Musk to delete Twitter bot tracking private jet Link And now the lad is going after the private jets of other billionaires. One’s heart bleeds for the poor dears.

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The lane in sunlight

Little St Mary’s Lane — one of my favourite streets in Cambridge. In the early 1970s Stephen Hawking and his wife Jane lived at No. 6 and I would sometimes meet them in the morning, Jane wheeling Stephen in his wheelchair to the Department of Applied Mathematics and Physics (DAMPT), which was next door to my lab. Initially, I had no idea who he was, or what a significant figure he was — even then. But I found out quickly enough, because some of my friends were students in DAMTP and I would sometimes go there for the morning coffee break and notice that in one corner of the room was this chap in a wheelchair, invariably surrounded by a small group of animated graduate students and post-docs. One of the latter was Nathan Myhrvold, who later became Microsoft’s Chief Technology Officer. There’s a story that when Bill Gates decided to set up a global scholarship fund on the lines of the Rhodes Scholars at Oxford, Nathan steered him in the direction of Cambridge. I’ve no idea if that’s true, but Cambridge now has an annual cohort of Gates Scholars. I’ve worked with a few of them in recent years, and they have been, without exception, remarkable young people.

Quote of the Day

”I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour.”

• Evelyn Waugh, Prelude to Decline and Fall.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Radu Lupu & Murray Perahia | Brahms Haydn Variations, op. 56b

Link

Longer (18 minutes) than usual, but worth it. I just started it off when I was writing and let it roll. And when it got to the end, I played it again!

Long Read of the Day

Luxury at the top, privation at the bottom: Britain is becoming feudal in its disparities

(An advertisement in a recent copy of the Financial Times.)

Good John Harris column in the Guardian. My only quibble is with the word ‘becoming’. The fact that so-called ‘liberal’ democracies have become comfortable with inequality levels that are now at pre-1914 levels is what leads increasing numbers of their citizens to ask why that kind of ‘democracy’ is such a big deal. Which is one reason why its survival is in doubt.

Makes for uncomfortable reading.

There are good reasons why the Met may want a redacted version of the Gray report

Informative piece by Parm Sandhu in the Guardian:

If criminal proceedings go ahead, the matter must be proven beyond reasonable doubt for each named individual. Using the gathered evidence, the Crown Prosecution Service would consider using tests of sufficiency of evidence and public interest in determining whether to prosecute. The process on the whole is held to a much more robust standard than the publishing of a report, and could go some way to explaining the Met’s requests.

Conspiracy theories about the Met and the Sue Gray report are entertaining (and might even be true) but adhering to the rule of law in a criminal inquiry requires different standards to those which guide a civil service inquiry. This piece by a former cop provides a useful corrective to the current hoo-hah about Johnson and his various ‘partygates’.

Dominic Cummings says it is his ‘duty to get rid’ of Boris Johnson

While we’re on the subject of Johnson, another Guardian piece pointed me to an interview his nemesis and former adviser, Dominic Cummings, gave to New York Magazine. Trying to take the Prime Minister down, he says, is “an unpleasant but necessary job. It’s like sort of fixing the drains.” The interview is larded with other entertaining quotes.

He’s particularly — and savagely — dismissive of conventional British politicians, who are, he says,

obsessed with the media and little else. “People just don’t understand the extent to which they are dominated by what’s going to appear on TV tonight what’s going to appear in the papers tomorrow,” he says. Johnson is an example of a man who governs — or performs — for the media. In Cummings’s telling, he is an imbecile. “In January 2020,” Cummings says, “I was sitting in No. 10 with Boris and the complete fuckwit is just babbling on about: ‘Will Big Ben bong for Brexit on the 31st of January?’ He goes on and on about this day after day.

Eventually I say to him: ‘Who cares? What are you talking about? Why are you babbling on about Big Ben? It’s completely ludicrous. We won the election a few weeks ago. We have an eighty-seat majority. You are literally only in this study because for six months we actually had a plan that focused on the country, not on the stupid media. And that’s why we won, despite all the pundits saying we are idiots, we didn’t know what we are doing. Now we have proved them wrong, we have an eighty-seat majority, we don’t have to worry about their babbling.’” He looks aghast: “‘Why the fuck are we sitting around having these meetings about what will the Sun do tomorrow about Big Ben?’”

What I don’t understand is why people are astonished — and even shocked — to learn that Johnson is like this. It’s been obvious for at least three decades that’s he’s a lazy narcissist with an entitlement complex.

But, in a way, it was the same with Trump when he was elected. The quasi-liberal mainstream US media were continually shocked by the things he would do, by his contempt for constitutional and behavioural norms and by his obvious corruption. Which made one wonder which planet they had been inhabiting in the previous three decades.

My commonplace booklet

My piece yesterday about James Fallows’s lovely account of how an airline emergency was handled and the convention that an air-traffic controller used the agreed phrase “Say Souls Aboard” to inquire how many passengers were on the plane. The phrase struck a chord with a reader who emailed to say:

Always remember the phrase ‘souls on board’ from the Titanic film. It appeals to me in the way it seems to place a greater value on passengers.

She included a clip of the relevant moment in the film.

The thought that sparked in this blogger is about the way a new mode of transportation (air travel) adopts approved lingo from older modes — in this case seafaring.

Which in turn reminds me of an academic symposium I attended decades ago on the challenge of devising a legal system for regulating a global system like the internet. At one point, international maritime law was proposed as a model by some of the lawyers present. At which point a very senior Microsoft executive laconically observed: “That’s fine, so long as you remember that we own all of the water and most of the ports”. He may have been joking, but somehow I doubt it.

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Return of our wild geese

Our village’s family of Canada geese have returned to the lake. Here they are the other evening, in the dusk.

Quote of the Day

”Eternity’s a terrible thought. I mean, where’s it going to end?”

• Tom Stoppard, in a line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Neil Young | Harvest Moon

Link

Given that Neil Young has demanded that his music be removed from Spotify due to vaccine misinformation spread by podcaster Joe Rogan on the streaming service, it seems right to highlight him today out of solidarity. “They can have Rogan or Young. Not both,” he said. Predictably, Spotify chose Rogan. They are, after all, a tech company masquerading as a music company, and they paid Rogan $100m to bring his creepy but popular podcast to their platform.

Long Read of the Day

Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating: everything I learned about Dominic Cummings from his £10-a-month blog

An illuminating essay on Dominic Cummings by David Runciman, who has been reading Cummings’s blog so you don’t have to. This is a useful service to society because Cummings is both very interesting and very obnoxious, and the latter quality repels so many people that they don’t get to understand what an astute, imaginative, flawed and dangerous figure he is. David Runciman has his measure, and in this fascinating piece he lays it out.

Sample:

This is his political superpower: he takes the other side’s ideas seriously, but not the people who hold those ideas. It means he can think dispassionately about what his opponents are doing – even get inside their heads and explore how they will react to what he is doing – while retaining his unshakeable contempt for them. He likes to conduct thought experiments in which he imagines how the idiots might do their version of politics better if they weren’t such idiots. It’s what won him Brexit. When remainers wailed about his tactics, traduced his character and told him he was playing with fire, he just shrugged. He ignored the commentariat and relished the howls of outrage from the chatterati. But he also thought hard about how his campaign messages would affect theirs. By wrapping the case for Brexit in the mantle of the NHS, he not only made Brexit more appealing to many voters, he infuriated remainers who knew it was nonsense. Which meant they ended up talking about his message, Brexit = NHS, and not theirs. In politics, victory doesn’t always go to the people who work hardest. It also goes to the ones for whom outrage is a weapon, not simply an indulgence.

If you read nothing else this week, make time for this.

The metaverse is dystopian – but to Big Tech it’s just a new business opportunity

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, a very long time ago – until Thursday 28 October 2021, to be precise – the term “metaverse” was known only to lexicographers and science fiction enthusiasts. And then, suddenly, it was everywhere. How come? Simply this: Mark Zuckerberg, the supreme leader of Facebook, pissed off by seeing nothing but bad news about his company in the media, announced that he was changing its name to Meta and would henceforth be devoting all his efforts – plus $10bn (£7bn) and thousands of engineers – to building a parallel universe called the metaverse.

And then, because the tech industry and the media that chronicle its doings are basically herds of mimetic sheep, the metaverse was suddenly the newest new thing. This was news to Neal Stephenson, the writer who actually invented the term in his 1992 novel, Snow Crash…

Read on

‘Say Souls On Board’: How Professionals Sound Under Pressure

An absolutely compelling blog post by James Fallows, a great American journalist who’s also a long-time pilot and flying enthusiast. It tells the story of an emergency landing of a commercial airliner shortly after it departed Dulles airport in Washington DC. Early in the flight, the crew detected a possible fault in the plane’s landing gear and requested permission to return to the airport. Fallows includes an audio recording of the radio exchanges between the pilots and the airport’s control tower as events unfold, and adds a commentary for readers who (like) are unfamiliar with the lingo. “Say souls on board”, for example, is the standard inquiry about how many passengers the plane is carrying.

It all ends well, but it’s a brilliant example of what competence and expertise is like in real life. And it led to wishful thoughts about what it would have been like if we had similar levels of competence in governments when they were confronted by the Covid pandemic.

My commonplace booklet

”Members of Congress have a lot of Big Tech in their portfolios. According to financial filings, at least 18 senators and 77 House members report owning shares of one or more of the biggest tech companies. And Nancy Pelosi disclosed that her husband has as much as $25.5 million in Apple stock alone.

(Source: Bloomberg)

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