Many Happy Returns, Charles

Here’s a bit of good news. Two notebooks of Charles Darwin, missing for two decades, one of which contains his famous ‘Tree of Life’ sketch, have been returned to Cambridge University Library, their rightful home.

Image Credit: Cambridge University Library

They were returned anonymously to the Library on March 9 in a bright pink gift bag (!) containing the notebooks’ archive box and inside a plain brown envelope addressed to the University Librarian with the printed message: “Happy Easter, X”. And they’re in good condition, with no obvious signs of significant handling or damage sustained in the years since their disappearance.

Quote of the Day

”Soon after I enter Decentraland, I fall through a fountain and land in a bar, where an octopus is serving drinks. In the corner, two bots are having a scripted conversation about why the NFTs on display in the metaverse are superior to physical artworks. (It’s because they aren’t hidden away in a collector’s archive.) At least at the Tate my ability to view the art isn’t limited by my computer’s processing power, I think, as I try — unsuccessfully — to order a virtual pint from the octopus.”

• The Financial Times’s Peter Bradshaw, describing his visit to a ‘metaverse’.

Funny to think that this is what Mark Zuckerberg thinks is the human future.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler & Chet Atkins | Instrumental Medley

Link

Recorded at the Secret Policeman’s Ball, 1987. Their version of John Lennon’s Imagine is particularly sweet.

Long Read of the Day

 The geopolitics of fossil fuels and renewables reshape the world

When we come to look back on 2022, my hunch is that Helen Thompson’s book will be seen as one of the most perceptive books published in recent years. When, nearly a decade ago, I was searching for the historical origins of the mess we’re in today, she changed the way I thought about these things. Just as investigative reporters always follow the money, Helen suggested that “following the oil” would be a productive line of inquiry.

Her book is a masterful exposition of how to do that. But it’s a long read and I guess many people won’t be up for the journey, so it’s great to see her capture some of the thinking behind it in this succinct article in Nature. For nearly 200 years, Helen argues, fossil-fuel energy has been central to geopolitics. And with 84% of our energy still coming from oil, coal and gas, the transition to renewable energy sources will take longer and be more painful than most people are willing to admit. Given that the transition will be a long one, therefore, fossil fuels will continue to shape geopolitics. In that sense, the war in Ukraine provides a sobering reality check on our global plight.

My commonplace booklet

My belief that the term ‘meatspace’ was coined by John Perry Barlow in 1995 has sparked some speculation that it may have originated earlier in cyberpunk sci-fi. And someone found it used in a News Group post dated 21 February 1993. It’s possible that Barlow picked it up from there, since he was already a pre-Web internet veteran then. (He was on The Well from 1986 onwards, for example.)

I once shared a speaking gig with him, which was entertaining and, for me, instructive. Our session was allocated 60 minutes, and he spoke first — for 50 of them!

Thanks to David Elliott for launching me down this entertaining rabbit hole.

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Sunset over the Bay

Quote of the Day

”Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Villa-Lobos | Prelude No. 1 | Nicholas Petrou

Link

Long Read of the Day

‘Meatspace’? Technology Does Funny Things to Language

Nice NYT piece by Peter Coy.

Consider this coinage: meatspace. It refers simply to the physical world, where we have tangible bodies made of … meat. “Meatspace” is a word that didn’t need to exist until the invention of cyberspace. Technological progress gives us a new perspective on things we once took for granted, in this case reality itself.

“I.C.E. vehicle” (pronounced “ice”) is similar. I.C.E. is short for internal combustion engine, a modifier that was superfluous until electric cars came on the scene. Like meatspace, it’s what the journalist Frank Mankiewicz called a “retronym” — a new term that’s invented for something old because the original term has become ambiguous, usually because of some development such as a technological advance.

I love essays like this — writing that suddenly causes one to realise the significance of something that one has been doing automatically for years without ever pondering its significance.

Made me think that the term “career planning” is an oxymoron. Doesn’t the verb ‘career’ mean ‘to move fast and in an uncontrolled way’? (Checks). Yes it does!

I’ve always attributed the term ‘meatspace’ to John Perry Barlow.

Godfather of Memes” passes away 

Steve Wilhite, the the computer scientist who invented the gif image file format in 1987 has died aged 74. Kate Miltner and Tim Highfield wrote an interesting academic article on the cultural significance of his creation. Here’s the Abstract:

The animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a digital file format with a long history within internet cultures and digital content. Emblematic of the early Web, the GIF fell from favor in the late 1990s before experiencing a resurgence that has seen the format become ubiquitous within digital communication. While the GIF has certain technical affordances that make it highly versatile, this is not the sole reason for its ubiquity. Instead, GIFs have become a key communication tool in contemporary digital cultures thanks to a combination of their features, constraints, and affordances. GIFs are polysemic, largely because they are isolated snippets of larger texts. This, combined with their endless, looping repetition, allows them to relay multiple levels of meaning in a single GIF. This symbolic complexity makes them an ideal tool for enhancing two core aspects of digital communication: the performance of affect and the demonstration of cultural knowledge. The combined impact of these capabilities imbues the GIF with resistant potential, but it has also made it ripe for commodification. In this article, we outline and articulate the GIF?s features and affordances, investigate their implications, and discuss their broader significance for digital culture and communication.

My Commonplace Booklet

To date, Apple has sold roughly 2.8 billion iPhones. That translates to about 243,056 miles of black glass, which is longer than the distance to the moon.

Source

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Holy Smoke!

The geology of Donegal in North-West Ireland is extraordinary, but its contemporary rocks have given up smoking, despite this pic!

Quote of the Day

Could it really be only a year and a half ago that the British government was declaring, shamelessly, its intention to break international law? And adding that this was ok because, In the words of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Brandon Lewis, it would do so only in a “limited and specific” way?…And now Boris Johnson is preaching to the world “It is no longer enough to express warm platitudes about the rules-based international order. We are going to have to actively defend it against a sustained attempt to rewrite the rules.”

• Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, 29.03.2922

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | The Long Road

Link

Long Read of the Day

The First Authoritarian: Popper’s Plato

Interesting essay by Tae-Yeoun Keum on the interpretation of Plato and his ‘Republic’ in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies.

Today, The Open Society and Its Enemies is perhaps best remembered for two things: Karl Popper’s coinage of the terms “open society” and “closed society,” and his scorched-earth attack on Plato as the original architect of the latter. For Popper, Plato was the first and the most influential authoritarian thinker.

The assault on Plato took up the first of the book’s two volumes.

Focusing on Plato’s Republic and its blueprint of a city ruled by a handful of elite philosophers, Popper argued that Plato had produced a vision of one such closed society. He pointed to the stratification of the social order in Plato’s ideal city, the strict division of labor between the intellectual and productive classes, the absence of social mobility, state censorship of most culture, and, above all, the promulgation of an openly fraudulent myth, the so-called Noble Lie, to legitimize the status quo. All of this, Popper observed, amounted to nothing less than a dictatorship of philosopher-kings who peddled myths to their subjects in order to suppress free thinking and to lock them into a rigid caste system. The whole business of Plato’s politics boiled down to maintaining this scheme: an effort to “arrest all change.”

The implication was that Plato’s ideas had found their incarnation in fascism. Popper wrote that the Noble Lie, the foundation myth of Plato’s Republic, was “an exact counterpart” to the Nazi’s “modern myth of Blood and Soil.”

When I first read The Open Society… as a student, I rather ignored the attack on Plato and was much more interested in Popper’s critique of Marx, so it was interesting to come on an essay that explains the renewed interest in Plato that followed the election of Trump and the view that some kind of “epistemic democracy” was needed if society were to avoid that kind of degeneration.

Which explains why I enjoyed the piece and thought that you might too.

Applebaum on ‘Putinism’

Transcript of an interesting conversation between Yascha Mounk and Anne Applebaum.

I found this exchange particularly interesting…

Mounk:There was a very clear and specific goal in the actions of the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period: they wanted to erect a communist regime. Part of the point was that it would be subservient to the will of Moscow or the Kremlin, but another part of the point was a set of ideological goals for what those societies would look like internally.

What is the nature of the Putin regime today? It started off as just a kind of kleptocratic dictatorship. There’s an argument being made that Russia is quickly turning into a kind of totalitarian society, but one without a very strong ideology. It does not have the strength of ideology that the Third Reich or the Soviet Union had. What do you think Russian society is going to be like after the war if Putin stays in power? What would following the same Soviet playbook without its ideological foundation look like?

Applebaum: I have actually been arguing for about 15 years that there is a kind of ideology of Putinism: there is a theory of history, an economic theory, and a kind of politics. The theory of history is that Russia was robbed at the end of the Soviet Union when it broke up, the 1990s were a disaster (when the West sought to destroy Russia), and then Putin began to rebuild Russia. There’s a kind of resentment and nostalgia that work together. To explain everything that’s happened in the last 30 years, there’s a kind of fake democracy and fake capitalism. There are some of the forms of capitalism, but in fact, the economy is controlled from above by a group of oligarchs. There appear to be democratic elections, but in fact, the outcomes are predetermined. You have a managed economy and a managed democracy. And there is an elite behind it who controls things, like puppet masters.

Worth a read.

My commonplace booklet

The Leica 0-Series No.105 was also one of the personal cameras of Oskar Barnack – the inventor of 35mm photography. Barnack used the 105 to capture motifs from his family life, gaining technical insights that he then applied to the further development of the camera and its succeeding models.

Up for auction its estimated price of €2-3 million (roughly $3.3 million / £2.5 million), with the starting bid standing at $1.1 million.

(And I won’t blame you if you file this under ‘camera porn’. For that is what it is.)

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