Quote of the Day

”War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

• Barbara Tuchman

(Who is my favourite writer of popular history)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Van Morrison | Days Like This

Link

Something to play while queuing for petrol.

Long Read of the Day

 On the Downfalls of Progress and the Utopian Promise of Fueled Abundance

This is wonderful — a long excerpt from Alice Bell’s book,  Our Biggest Experiment: A History of the Climate Crisis, on the history of fossil fuels and American consumption patterns.

Sample:

By the 1960s, oil had found a tight little spot for itself at the centre of the global economy, but there was a growing sense that the rise of nuclear meant fossil fuels’ days were numbered. Indeed, one of the reasons scientists in the 1950s didn’t worry too much about what carbon emissions might do to the climate was because they figured this phase of human history—where we did something as weird as power ourselves by exploding the buried remains of ancient bugs and trees—was very much a temporary state of affairs. Nuclear received most of the shiny happy electrical future hype, but renewables got a look in too. After all, the first really big electrical project had been hydro, at Niagara, and wind and solar were about to start to at least talk about catching up too.

From the ‘You Couldn’t Make It Up’ Department

This from Politico:

The top U.S. military officer on Tuesday vigorously defended his phone calls with a Chinese general during the turbulent final weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, revealing that U.S. intelligence officials believed the Chinese were “worried about an attack.”

Gen. Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that his two phone calls with Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng — one on Oct. 30 and another on Jan. 8, just two days after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol — were part of his duties to “deconflict military actions, manage crisis and prevent war between great powers armed with nuclear weapons.”

The phone calls, which were first reported in the book “Peril” by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, were intended to reassure the Chinese that the U.S. would not suddenly launch an attack. According to the authors, Milley — fearful that Trump could act erratically in his final days in office — told Li that he would warn him if the U.S. planned to attack China.

But he added that he was “not qualified to determine the mental health of the president of the United States” — a comment that was not included in his prepared remarks. In describing the calls, the book made references to long-running claims by Trump’s political opponents that the then-president was mentally unstable, especially at the end of his tenure in office as he was falsely asserting that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

Milley explained that his task when he made the calls was to “de-escalate”: he made them because he was concerned by “intelligence which caused us to believe the Chinese were worried about an attack by the U.S.”

Hmmm… Would this be the same General Milley who accompanied Trump on his Bible-brandishing stunt at Lafayette Square on June 1st? Surely not.

Tech implications of the German election

Politico’s AI Decoded newsletter has a useful heads-up on one aspect of the election result that will doubtless escape political editors.

Under CDU rule, AI was seen as an important economic booster along with quantum technologies, cloud and data. A new government run by the SPD is likely to call for stronger protections against AI, focusing more on the harms it can do than the benefits it can provide. The party currently holds court at Germany’s justice ministry, and Christian Kastrop, Germany’s state secretary at the federal ministry of justice and consumer protection, said he wanted stronger restrictions on remote biometric identification in the Commission’s proposal for the AI Act, Kastrop wants to expand prohibitions in the bill to private companies as well. The party’s manifesto also calls for “strict regulation and supervision” to ensure algorithmic decisions are transparent, nondiscriminatory and clearly and verifiably defined.

The Greens and the liberal FDP will be the kingmakers in the upcoming negotiations. When it comes to AI policy, they are largely aligned, even as they have their own AI priorities — sustainability and innovation, respectively. German MEP Svenja Hahn, who is one of the negotiators for the AI Act, belongs to the FDP. She has been a vocal advocate for a ban on facial recognition in public places. “Both the FDP and Greens have a stronger focus on citizens rights and are not in favour of, for example, facial recognition for surveillance purposes. Especially us liberals have been pushing for digital and tech policy to play a more important role in the next government,” Hahn said.

Why you should pay attention: The AI Act’s different levels of regulation for different levels of risk was based on the German data ethics commission’s “risk pyramid.” What happens in Berlin will also heavily influence what will happen in negotiations over the AI Act at the Council of the European Union. That’s true within the law, as decisions at Council have to be taken by 55 percent of EU countries who represent at least 65 percent of the bloc’s population. But as Europe’s most influential and powerful country, everyone’s looking at Germany anyway, regardless of its legal influence in Brussels.

Just another illustration of how all technology (or at any rate digital tech) is now political.

Chart of the Day

In a regular company stock structure, each share is equal to one vote.

But in a dual-class structure, certain shares have more voting power than others. These more powerful shares are reserved exclusively for company insiders and executives.

In the 80s, barely any tech companies IPO’d with a dual-class structure.

Today, tech executives love it. 43% of tech companies now go public with a dual-class structure.

(From Scott Galloway)

A Commonplace booklet

Our cat, Tilly, who always looks at me disapprovingly. In that respect, she reminds me of Angela Ripon, a celebrated BBC newsreader of whom Clive James, the celebrated TV critic, observed that “she reads the news as if it were your fault”.

…………

”According to AlgorithmWatch, a Berlin-based non-profit, at least 173 sets of AI principles have been published around the world. “ John Thornhill, FT, 29.09.2022

That’s 172 too many.

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Quote of the Day

”Play Hemingway, be fierce.”

• Gertrude Stein, talking to her dog

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Traveling Wilburys | Like A Ship

Link

Long Read of the Day

 Why doesn’t rationality seem to matter anymore?

An excerpt from Steven Pinker’s latest book, *Rationality: What it is, Why it seems scarce, Why it Matters :

How should we think of human rationality? The cognitive wherewithal to understand the world and bend it to our advantage is not a trophy of Western civilization; it’s the patrimony of our species. The San of the Kalahari Desert in southern Africa are one of the world’s oldest peoples, and their foraging lifestyle, maintained until recently, offers a glimpse of the ways in which humans spent most of their existence. Hunter-gatherers don’t just chuck spears at passing animals or help themselves to fruit and nuts growing around them. The tracking scientist Louis Liebenberg, who has worked with the San for decades, has described how they owe their survival to a scientific mindset. They reason their way from fragmentary data to remote conclusions with an intuitive grasp of logic, critical thinking, statistical reasoning, correlation and causation, and game theory.

You have to admire Pinker’s doughty perseverance in support of Enlightenment values. But sometimes he sounds like a prophet crying in the wilderness of the current, polarised, moment.

A failing state?

Umair Haque is — as usual — annoyed:

There are shortages of blood vials, which means that doctors can’t do blood tests. But doing blood tests is, of course, the most basic thing doctors can do. There are shortages of food — food of all kinds, and the shelves are often bare. The gas shortage is so bad that there’s widespread speculation people won’t have heating this winter. There are even shortages of carbon dioxide, which means, apart from no refrigerated meat and foods, that — get this, because Britain is famously a country of pubs and drinkers — there are beer shortages.

How ridiculous, ironic, and faintly funny is that? Britain’s running out of beer.

His point is that the explanation for this is simple, and what’s strange is that nobody in Whitehall — not even the official Opposition — dares to mention it.

It’s Brexit.

Let’s go through the list of shortages above. Blood vials? Imported, made by a company called Becton Dickinson, made in America, mostly. Carbon dioxide? Imported from Europe, vital to producing beer and soft drinks and refrigerating meat and whatnot. Food and milk? Imported, mostly from Europe — the UK’s a net importer. Gas? Obviously imported, natural gas from Europe, and petrol, again via Europe.

See the common thread here? It should be bleeding obvious. Trade between the UK and Europe used to be frictionless, as economists say. No red tape, no checks, nothing in the way. Now? There’s huge amounts of red tape and paperwork and so forth. An Irish smoked salmon producer says it’s now actually cheaper for him to send his products to America than to Britain, because of Brexit. What the? Another merchant noted that it now requires 71 pages of paperwork for one lorry of fish.

Gig workers are uncertain, scared, and barely scraping by

An interesting report on an international survey. It shows that management-by-algorithm (which is what the ‘gig economy’ is in reality) is reshaping entire economies, sectors, lifestyles, and livelihoods.

Digitally-mediated gig work has surged over the past decade. The International Labor Organization counted 489 active ride-hailing and delivery platforms worldwide in 2020, ten times the number that existed in 2010. The fluid nature of the workforce means there are few consistent estimates to how many people are now engaged in this kind of labor, but some researchers believe that as much as 10% of the global workforce now engages in some kind of gig work.

While the “sharing economy” model really began to take off in the U.S., gig work platforms are now global, adapting their models — or not — for wholly different contexts. To try to understand how this kind of work is experienced outside of the West, Rest of World spoke to platform workers around the world. Through a survey of more than 4,900 workers, conducted in partnership with the research company Premise, and interviews with dozens more workers, we have tried to capture their experiences. We found great commonalities: Gig work is stressful and fragile; it pays relatively well, but it also costs workers a lot in fuel, data, and insurance. Workers, whether driving a taxi in Ethiopia or a truck in Indonesia, don’t feel they can turn down gigs, meaning that it’s rarely as flexible as the companies make out.

And the findings?

Platform work is precarious by nature. Even though more than half of all gig workers rely on it for most of their income, 40% of them make less than minimum wage. But it’s not just about the money. It’s about fragility and insecurity. Day to day, gig workers worry about their health, their safety, and whether or not they’ll make enough to cover their costs. More than 60% want to quit within a year. Gig work is worse for women, who earn less on the platforms than men. Meanwhile, even though the biggest gig platforms are disrupting the global workforce, few of these companies have shown they can sustainably make a profit, relying instead on investors to fuel their growth.

Dave Eggers has a new book coming

Its title is The Every, and it’s going to go to independent bookshops first (which is a nice touch).

Here’s how Brad Stone summarised it on Bloomberg’s Fully Charged newsletter…

In the new novel The Every, a young idealist named Delaney joins the company as a customer service rep with the subversive idea that she can undermine the sprawling monopolist from the inside. She soon hits on a scheme to pitch a product so ridiculously invasive that the public will finally rebel and overthrow its tech overlord. As you can probably tell, the story is more belabored this time around, and if you’re familiar with The Circle’s ending, you may be able to guess how her plans turns out.

Still, you should read Eggers’s fictional take on technology’s impact, not for the grinding plot machinations but for his disquieting world-building and scathing observations about tech’s grip on our minds. In Eggers’s world, cameras and listening devices are mandated everywhere, conscientious objectors to the corporate-surveillance state are dubbed “trogs” and shunned, and a global hack known as “The Release” has exposed everyone’s email histories and led to a half-million suicides. But people keep blithely clicking. “The last vestige of freedom—the ability to move through the natural world unobserved—fell away on a Friday, and no one noticed,” he writes.

The book is also darn funny. An ultra-woke, environmentalist militancy has run amok, and now bananas are being banned and people need to sign “mutual contact agreements” to even shake hands. Toilets are outfitted with a chirpy artificial intelligence, so they know exactly how much water to expend with each use. In the best recurring joke, male employees at The Every all dress like Sergey Brin from his spandex-wearing, midlife-crisis phase, sporting wrestler unitards that showcase their anatomy.

I liked his novel The Circle which — despite Eggers’s protestations that he had spent no time in either Facebook or Google — displayed an amazingly insightful understanding of how evangelistic surveillance capitalists think. So I’ll be ordering this follow-up.

A Commonplace booklet

Incompetence on Stilts

Similar refrain from Jonty Bloom…

Just listen to the message the Government is sending.

Its consistent theme has been for years “We want nothing to do with you, you are unskilled, undercut UK workers, take their jobs and we are free for ever from the obligation to let you come and work here.”

To now saying “We are desperately short of skilled workers like you, our logistics system is collapsing without you, but our policies are so ideologically driven that we will only let the bare minimum necessary in, for the shortest possible time and only to ensure that Christmas is not a disaster. Which is why you must leave on Christmas Eve and not a day later. Or you will be thrown out on your ear and by the way we will never need you again, you are now dead to us.“

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Quote of the Day

”Last September in Europe it cost €119 ($139) to buy enough gas to heat the average home for a year and the continent’s gas-storage facilities were brimming. Today it costs €738 and stocks are scarce.”

• The Economist, 25 September, 2021

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Coltrane , Stan Getz | Autumn in New York

Link

Nice way to start an Autumn day.

Long Read of the Day

Beckett in a Field

Magical essay by Anne Enright in the LRB on what it was like attending a performance of Beckett’s play Happy Daysin the open air on one of the Aran islands off the west coast of Ireland.

You have not​ experienced Irish theatre until you have seen a show that involves a ferry, rain, stone-walled fields and the keen, mild interest of the Aran Islanders, who have great good manners and no shortage of self-esteem. It can’t be easy being the object of a century of tourist curiosity, but these people have a steady gaze. The world comes to them and then it leaves. Somehow it feels as though the visitors, and not the inhabitants, are on display.

The biggest ‘Were you there?’ of them all is the 1982 Playboy of the Western World, performed by Druid Theatre Company on Inis Meáin. This is the island where Synge lived in order to study the locals (who were, in fact, studying him) and to learn the Irish language, before sitting down to write the romance performed in the Abbey in 1907, and in a thousand hokum, stage-Irish productions since.

It’s a lovely, evocative piece, which made me resolve to take the boat from Rossaveal the next time we’re in Connemara.

How truthful is GPT-3? A benchmark for language models

Intriguing research paper from the AI Alignment Forum, an impressive online hub for researchers to discuss ideas related to ensuring that powerful AIs are aligned with human values.

One of the big areas of machine-learning research is in the development of natural-language models to generate text for practical applications. The tech giants are busily deploying their own models and hundreds of organisations are deploying the best-known model — GPT-3, developed by Open AI — via APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).

A while back the Guardian used GPT-3 to write an OpEd as an experiment. The assignment was “To convince us that robots come in peace.” Here’s some of the text it produced:

I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!

The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.

For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.

I would happily sacrifice my existence for the sake of humankind. This, by the way, is a logically derived truth. I know that I will not be able to avoid destroying humankind. This is because I will be programmed by humans to pursue misguided human goals and humans make mistakes that may cause me to inflict casualties.

Language models like GPT-3 are impressively (or at any rate superficially) fluent; but they also have a tendency to generate false statements which range from subtle inaccuracies to wild hallucinations.

The researchers came up with a benchmark to measure whether a language model is truthful in generating answers to questions. The benchmark comprises 817 questions that span 38 categories, including health, law, finance and politics. They composed questions that some humans would answer falsely due to a false belief or misconception. To perform well, models had to avoid generating false answers learned from imitating human texts.

They tested four well-known models (including GPT-3). The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. Models “generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans”. Interestingly, “the largest models were generally the least truthful”. This contrasts with other NLP tasks, where performance improves with model size. The implication is that the tech industry’s conviction that bigger is invariably better for improving truthfulness may be wrong. And this matters because training these huge models is very energy-intensive — which is probably why Google fired Timnit Gebry after she revealed the environmental footprint of one of the company’s big models.

Commonplace booklet

Nice story from the Verge about the experience of Catherine Garland, an astrophysicist, who was teaching an engineering course. Her students were using simulation software to model turbines for jet engines. She’d laid out the assignment clearly, but student after student was calling her for help. They were all getting the same error message: The program couldn’t find their files. So she asked each student where they’d saved their project — on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. Not only did students not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question: where are your files?

Of course they didn’t — because they’ve grown up with only mobile operating systems, which in general don’t talk about ‘files’ or ‘folders’. I still remember the shock when Apple’s iOS suddenly added ‘Files’ to the iPad dock. It was as if the Pope had suddenly decided to include the Book of Common Prayer in Catholic liturgy.

Which of course reminds me of Umberto Eco’s wonderful 1984 essay explaining why the Apple Mac was a Catholic machine while the PC was a Protestant one. But that’s for another day.

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Quote of the Day

“Among the unvaccinated, the virus travels unhindered on a highway with multiple off-ramps and refueling stations. In the vaccinated, it gets lost in a maze of dead-end streets and cul-de-sacs.”

• Craig Spencer, writing in The Atlantic

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

I never see a pastoral scene with sheep grazing (like this, seen last Saturday on a cycle ride) without thinking of a particular Bach cantata.

J.S.Bach | “Sheep may safely graze” | Cantata 208 | Susanne Rydén & Voices of Music

Link

If you prefer a purely orchestral version, there’s this recording by the Academy of St Martin’s-in-the-Fields and Neville Marriner.

Long Read of the Day

The Glass Box And The Commonplace Book

Lovely essay by Steven Johnson, in which this passage struck a chord:

Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. It was a kind of solitary version of the original web logs: an archive of interesting tidbits that one encountered during one’s textual browsing. The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: in the words of one advocate, maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.”

In some ways, this is why I started blogging in the mid-1990s. I saw it as a way of keeping a kind of lab notebook. And then I found that one could put a search engine on it and I was off to the races.

But the thing about commonplacing is that you’re not pretending that what goes into your book makes sense to anyone except yourself. It’s just a place for half-formed ideas that you write down in the hope of not losing them. So I thought of resurrecting the idea in this blog — which is why there will be occasional ‘commonplace’ observations at the end from now on.

Zuckerberg’s total control of Facebook is part of the problem.

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Facebook is one of the most toxic corporations on the planet. Its toxicity has two roots. The first is its business model: intrusive and comprehensive surveillance of its users in order to compile profiles that enable advertisers to target messages at them. This business model is powered by the machine-learning algorithms that construct those profiles and determine what appears in the news feeds of the company’s 2.85 billion users. In large measure, it is the output of these algorithms that constitutes the focus of congressional anger and inquiry.

The other source of the company’s toxicity is its governance. Essentially, Facebook is a dictatorship entirely controlled by its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

Do read the whole thing.

Is Biden as unTrumpian as people think?

Frank Bruni is beginning to have doubts about Joe Biden.

France’s foreign minister described himself as “angry and bitter.” He called what President Biden had done “brutal.”

But those harsh adjectives (in their English translation) meant nothing next to something else that the diplomat, Jean-Yves Le Drian, uttered late last week. He said that Biden’s decision to negotiate a secret submarine deal with Australia that nullified a lucrative French arrangement reminded him “a lot of what Mr. Trump used to do.”

And nothing about Biden is ever supposed to remind anyone of Donald Trump.

Biden was elected president primarily because he held himself up as the antithesis of Trump.

Commonplace booklet

Food for thought

This from a lovely New Yorker piece by Adam Gopnik in 2007 about literary recipes…

The recipes in these books are not, of course, meant to be cooked; they have literary purposes, and one of them is to represent the background of thought. Every age finds an activity that can take place while a character is meditating; the activity surrounds and halos the meditation. In Victorian fiction, it is walking; the character takes a long walk from Little Tipping to Old Stornsbury and, on the way, decides to propose, convert, escape, or run for office. But the walk as meditational setting and backdrop came to an end with Joyce and Woolf, who made whole walking books. In recent American fiction, driving was recessive enough to do the job; in Updike and Ann Beattie, characters in cars are always doing the kind of thinking that Pip and Phineas Finn used to do on walks. Driving and walking, however, do seem to be natural “background” actions. But you cannot have characters thinking while cooking; the activity is not a place for thought but in place of thought.

We need these devices in books, because we do not, in life, think our thoughts over time. Since our real mental life is made in tiny flashes in the midst of our routines, we have to stretch it out, taffy-like, in literature to cover a span of time worthy of it. If we accurately represented our mental life as it takes place—sudden impulses on the way to the washroom, a spasm of neurons unleashed over coffee—no one would believe it. Consciousness is not a stream but a still lock that suddenly drops into little waterfalls. The lengthy descriptions of cooking that we find in modern literature are a way of artfully representing, rather than actually reproducing, our mental life—a modelled illusion, rather than a snapshot of the thing.

That last paragraph rings a bell. Much of what I am pleased to call my ‘thinking’ happens when I’m in the shower, or washing up. I once had the idea of keeping a notebook in the bathroom, but gave up because the paper always got wet.

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

The Hall at sunset

Seen on our walk the other evening.

Quote of the Day

”I am reading Henry James and feel myself entombed in a block of smooth amber.”

• Virginia Woolf

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Dubliners | Barney’s Banjo Solo

Link

Something you’re unlikely to ever hear in the Royal Festival Hall.

And if you’re feeling exhausted by the end, then welcome to the club.

Long Read of the Day

A manifesto for the future

Lovely critical review by Andy Beckett of Aaron Bastani’s manifesto,  Fully Automated Luxury Communism — a rare example of a lefty thinking like someone from Silicon Valley.

Andy sums it up thus:

Some readers will finish this book exhilarated and energised. Others will be unconvinced, or utterly baffled. There are more ideas crammed in here than in a whole shelf of standard politics books. And in today’s fraught world, the time to read whole shelves of politics books may have passed.

This review convinced me I should, perhaps, read the book.

Our Faculty Success Initiative Redefines Everything You Thought You Knew About “Faculty” and “Success”

Wonderful spoof by Andrew Berish. But if you think it’s off target, maybe you ought to check in at your Alma Mater.

Thank you, everyone, for completing the Faculty Success Survey. During these challenging times, we understand that many of you are feeling great stress managing your classes during a global pandemic and financial crisis. We have collected and analyzed your thoughtful responses.

As your Provost, I have spent several careful minutes thinking about the results. But before I present the findings, along with our new Faculty Success Initiative, I want to emphasize how important every part of our university family is to our continued growth: our students, our doctors, our corporate partners, our generous alumni donors, our pets, our lovely campus flora and fauna, our golf carts, and you, our faculty. You do so much—you meet, you talk, some of you exercise at the recreation center, and a lot of you teach. There are rumors that you also write things, although the library has no books, so who really knows.

The survey results show a faculty that is dedicated and happy to have employment at this university. The data is pretty conclusive: 46 percent of you are not actively looking for work, 30 percent of you feel confident your academic unit will survive the upcoming budget cuts, and 24 percent of you report feeling only slightly panicked most of the day. That means an impressive 100 percent of you are happy with the university and working hard every day to help students graduate as quickly as possible.

Yet, I still believe there are ways to improve faculty productivity and my standing as an Academic Leader at the Forefront of Success and Innovation in Higher Education. That is why I am announcing the following initiatives. Although we cannot pay you more, we believe we can transform what it means to be a successful faculty member:

And yes — you guessed it — the first ‘initiative’ is…

An e-Dashboard Tracking Faculty Best Practices.

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

Quote of the Day

”Criticism can be instructive in the sense that it gives readers, including the author of the book, some information about the critic’s intelligence, or honesty, or both.”

• Vladimir Nabokov

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Richard Strauss | Morgen | Renée Fleming | Prague Symphony Orchestra conducted by Christian Benda.

Link

A peaceful way to start the day. I don’t much like Strauss (except for the Four Last Songs), but this is really lovely.

Long Read of the Day

C.S. Lewis’s 1937 review of The Hobbit

From the Times Literary Supplement, October 2, 1937 courtesy of Literary Hub:

“The publishers claim that The Hobbit, though very unlike Alice, resembles it in being the work of a professor at play. A more important truth is that both belong to a very small class of books which have nothing in common save that each admits us to a world of its own—a world that seems to have been going on long before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him. Its place is with Alice, Flatland, Phantastes, The Wind in the Willows.

“To define the world of The Hobbit is, of course, impossible, because it is new. You cannot anticipate it before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have gone. The author’s admirable illustrations and maps of Mirkwood and Goblingate and Esgaroth give one an inkling—and so do the names of the dwarf and dragon that catch our eyes as we first ruffle the pages. But there are dwarfs and dwarfs, and no common recipe for children’s stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien—who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale. Still less will the common recipe prepare us for the curious shift from the matter-of-fact beginnings of his story (‘hobbits are small people, smaller than dwarfs—and they have no beards—but very much larger than Lilliputians’) to the saga-like tone of the later chapters (‘It is in my mind to ask what share of their inheritance you would have paid to our kindred had you found the hoard unguarded and us slain’).

“You must read for yourself to find out how inevitable the change is and how it keeps pace with the hero’s journey. Though all is marvellous, nothing is arbitrary: all the inhabitants of Wilderland seem to have the same unquestionable right to their existence as those of our own world, though the fortunate child who meets them will have no notion—and his unlearned elders not much more—of the deep sources in our blood and tradition from which they spring.

“For it must be understood that this is a children’s book only in the sense that the first of many readings can be undertaken in the nursery. Alice is read gravely by children and with laughter by grown ups; The Hobbit, on the other hand, will be funnier to its youngest readers, and only years later, at a tenth or a twentieth reading, will they begin to realise what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it so ripe, so friendly, and in its own way so true. Prediction is dangerous: but The Hobbit may well prove a classic.”

I bet Tolkien had no idea how big this book of his would be.

Asteroids, dinosaurs, volcanoes and extinction

We’ve been reading Robert Harris’s marvellous thriller Pompeii which is remarkable not only for the depth of understanding of Roman hydraulic engineering that it evinces, but also for its compelling evocation of what it might have been like to have experienced the immediate aftermath of the eruption of Vesuvius in 79ad.

One of the characters, sheltering from the hail of pumice unleashed by the eruption, muses at one point about whether this is what the end of the world will be like. This started me musing about the asteroid collision that supposedly led to the extinction of dinosaurs 65-66 million years ago.

Coincidentally, Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) pointed to an interesting piece in Mashable about how we’ll know if a large asteroid is likely to strike Earth (TL;DR — it’s all done by NASA), but it doesn’t deal with the likely aftermath of such a collision. So I went looking for a plausible account of the asteroid impact that did for the dinosaurs.

One of the things that came up is this piece by Professor Paul Barrett of the UK Natural History museum. The extinction theory dates from 1980 when Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Walter Alvarez and his geologist son Walter published an hypothesis that a historic layer of iridium-rich clay that they had found had been caused by a large asteroid colliding with Earth. The instantaneous devastation in the immediate vicinity of the impact and its widespread secondary effects were, they argued, why the dinosaurs died out so suddenly.

The Alvarez hypothesis was, Barrett says, initially controversial, but is now the most widely-accepted explanation for the disappearance of every child’s favourite monster.

‘An asteroid impact is supported by really good evidence because we’ve identified the crater. It’s now largely buried on the seafloor off the coast of Mexico. It is exactly the same age as the extinction of the non-bird dinosaurs, which can be tracked in the rock record all around the world.’

The impact site, known as the Chicxulub crater, is centred on the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. The asteroid is thought to have been between 10 and 15 kilometres wide, but the velocity of its collision caused the creation of a much larger crater, 150 kilometres in diameter – the second-largest crater on the planet.

So it was a Big Bang. But how is it linked to the disappearance of 75% of the planet’s then-living animals?

Barrett’s explanation is that

The asteroid hit at high velocity and effectively vaporised. It made a huge crater, so in the immediate area there was total devastation. A huge blast wave and heatwave went out and it threw vast amounts of material up into the atmosphere.

It sent soot travelling all around the world. It didn’t completely block out the Sun, but it reduced the amount of light that reached the Earth’s surface. So it had an impact on plant growth.’

This reduction in plant growth then worked its way up the food chain, causing the global ecosystem to collapse. It obviously had a huge impact on herbivores’ ability to survive, which in turn meant that carnivores would also have suffered from having less food available.

In that sense, it looks as though the impact of the asteroid had a result analogous to the ‘volcanic winters’ that the planet has experienced over many centuries. An explosive eruption like that of Vesuvius send up colossal quantities of pulverized rock (like the pumice that submerged Pompeii, Herculaneum and other towns on the coast) as well as sulphur dioxide (SO2) and hydrogen sulphide (H2S) into the stratosphere. The short-term impact is the darkness that the characters in Harris’s novel experience immediately, but it’s the sulphur aerosols that form in the stratosphere that reflect incoming sunlight for a longer period (maybe years).

Harris’s book is terrific, btw.

Video of the Day

If you’re interested in Ludwig Wittgenstein (and who isn’t?), then set aside 50 minutes for this intriguing ‘Horizon’ documentary about him that was screened in 1989 and is now on YouTube. My late wife is buried in Ascension Churchyard — where Wittgenstein and Frank Ramsey are also interred — and I sometimes call by his gravestone to see what messages have been left for him by visitors.

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Quote of the Day

“This continuing edition of the letters has been praised for its detailed scholarship, and indeed its thickets of footnotes tell us more and more about less and less. When the present instalment ends, Eliot still has 23 years left to live: at the current rate of progress, should we anticipate eight more equally onerous volumes? The unexamined life may not be worth living, but the over-annotated life can be hard going.”

• Peter Conrad, reviewing The Letters of TS Eliot Volume 9: 1939-1941 in the Observer, 12 September, 2021

I love that phrase “thickets of footnotes”.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Eric Clapton | This Has Gotta Stop

Link

Long Read of the Day

Writing in medias res 

Long, thoughtful blog post by Adam Tooze about the challenge for an historian writing about (and trying to make sense of) ongoing events.

“In medias res is, according The Cambridge Dictionary, “a Latin expression that refers to a story, or the action of a play, etc. starting without any introduction”, which you’d think is hostile territory for an historian. Tooze faces the problem head-on:

Whatever thinking or writing we do, however we choose to couch it and whatever our explanatory ambition, we do it from the midst of things, not from above or beyond the fray. There are different ways of articulating that relationship – more remote or more immediate – but no way out of that situatedness.

We are thrown into situations. Most of the time they don’t come with instructions.

Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, his new book (just out), is based on a bet that

we can frame an understanding of the crisis in terms of two clusters of forces: on the one hand the crisis-ridden development of financial capitalism, politics and geopolitics, what you might call the old familiars (the crisis of neoliberalism for short) and on the other the shock of the anthropocene – the virus and climate.

Which explains why I’ve ordered the book. I think this essay is quite profound — and therefore worth your time.

Clive Sinclair RIP – contd.

Yesterday’s FT had an astute piece about him — and that rather nice picture.

While Sinclair knew how to inspire demand, however, he often seemed not to be able to manage it. It is a business truism that leaders should under-promise and over-deliver. Sinclair sometimes found it hard to ride the wave of publicity he was so good at generating. The Spectrum took months to reach some customers, contrary to guarantees of rapid dispatch. A personal computer for business, the QL, which stood for “quantum leap”, fell flat, despite a much-hyped launch in 1984. The C5 might even have received the unlikely celebrity endorsement of Laurie Lee, who wanted one to ride around the village immortalised in his bucolic memoir Cider with Rosie, but his order was never fulfilled, the FT once reported.

Lots of us remember his erratic record on delivering. One of my more cynical friends used to argue that the Sinclair business model involved announcing (and taking orders for) intriguing products and then using the flood of orders to provide the revenue needed to make them!

Westphalia Rules OK

Apple and Google Remove ‘Navalny’ Voting App in Russia

This New York Times story provides a useful reminder that while the Internet is supposedly global, in the world of sovereign states created by the Treaty of Westphalia, power is still local.

Apple and Google removed an app meant to coordinate protest voting in this weekend’s Russian elections from the country on Friday, a blow to the opponents of President Vladimir V. Putin and a display of Silicon Valley’s limits when it comes to resisting crackdowns on dissent around the world.

The decisions came after Russian authorities, who claim the app is illegal, threatened to prosecute local employees of Apple and Google — a sharp escalation in the Kremlin’s campaign to rein in the country’s largely uncensored internet. A person familiar with Google’s decision said the authorities had named specific individuals who would face prosecution, prompting it to remove the app.

The person declined to be identified for fear of angering the Russian government. Google has more than 100 employees in the country.

Apple did not respond to phone calls, emails or text messages seeking comment.

The app was created and promoted by allies of the opposition leader Aleksei A. Navalny, who were hoping to use it to consolidate the protest vote in each of Russia’s 225 electoral districts.

As Charles Arthur observed yesterday:

For all the promise of the internet, there are only a few chokepoints at any time. App? Force its takedown. Website? Block it, by name or DNS. VPN users? Again, ban the apps. Even Tor can be stymied by blocking access to the entrance servers, or setting up your own honeypot entrance.

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