Classical selfie

All that’s missing is a smartphone.

Seen in the gardens of Dartington Hall.

Quote of the Day

”The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it.”

• Dylan Thomas, speaking of his native Wales.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett – Over the Rainbow (Tokyo 1984)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Heresy

Thoughtful essay by Paul Graham.

April 2022

One of the most surprising things I’ve witnessed in my lifetime is the rebirth of the concept of heresy.

In his excellent biography of Newton, Richard Westfall writes about the moment when he was elected a fellow of Trinity College:

Supported comfortably, Newton was free to devote himself wholly to whatever he chose. To remain on, he had only to avoid the three unforgivable sins: crime, heresy, and marriage.

The first time I read that, in the 1990s, it sounded amusingly medieval. How strange, to have to avoid committing heresy. But when I reread it 20 years later it sounded like a description of contemporary employment.

There are an ever-increasing number of opinions you can be fired for. Those doing the firing don’t use the word “heresy” to describe them, but structurally they’re equivalent. Structurally there are two distinctive things about heresy: (1) that it takes priority over the question of truth or falsity, and (2) that it outweighs everything else the speaker has done…

One of the few interesting pieces I’ve read on a contemporary malaise.

Longtermism: how good intentions and the rich created a dangerous creed

Yesterday’s Observer column:

In the past few weeks a photograph of Tony Blair and his buddy Bill Clinton sharing a panel with a scruffy kid wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts and trainers has been doing the rounds. The April event was in the Bahamas and funded by an outfit called FTX – a supposedly “user-friendly crypto exchange” – owned by the scruffy kid, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF from now on). Blair and Clinton are looking very pleased to be there, providing confirmation of the aphrodisiac effect of great wealth, because the lad who was playing host was apparently as rich as Croesus, or at any rate worth $32bn.

And this was real wealth, it seemed. After all, the venture capitalists at Sequoia – who had backed Silicon Valley success stories such as Google and PayPal – had given him the green light (as well as some of their investors’ money). A few months after Blair and Clinton made their pilgrimage to the sun-soaked and regulation-lite Bahamas, one of Sequoia’s partners offered a breathless endorsement of SBF and his crypto exchange. “Of the exchanges that we had met and looked at”, she wrote, “some of them had regulatory issues, some of them were already public. And then there was Sam.” And FTX, which, Sequoia felt, was “Goldilocks-perfect”.

And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. In fact it was effectively bankrupt. And it had been managed, said the administrator brought in to sort out the mess, using fraternity-house accounting principles – which kind-of squared with SBF’s sartorial style…

Do read the whole thing.

Books, etc.

Apropos my Observer column (see previous item), this review of the MacAskill book by Scott Alexander makes for interesting reading.

Mastodon and Twitter

From Dave Winer (Whom God Preserve):

Mastodon is like email and twitter got married and had a baby. Last night I posted a message to both Mastodon and Twitter saying how great M’s support for RSS is. Apparently a lot of people on Masto didn’t know about it and the response has been resounding. And the numbers are very lopsided. The piece has been “boosted” (the Masto equiv of RT) 1.1K times, yet I only have 3.7K followers there. Meanwhile on Twitter, where I have 69K followers, it has been RTd just 17 times. My feeling was previously that Mastodon was more alive, it’s good to have a number to put behind that.

Interesting, ne c’est pas?

Correction

The link in Friday’s edition to Kieran Healey’s blog post on the January 6 ‘insurrection’ was faulty. It should have been this.

Apologies. And thanks to the readers who pointed it out.

My commonplace booklet

MARMALADE

Ingredients: Sugar Oranges Conservatives

Jar Label, Hong Kong

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The Hall, in technicolour

Like me, William Davies (Whom God Preserve) loves Dartington Hall. And when I opened my laptop yesterday evening, this is what I found in an email from him. With this note attached:

So we are here again and after entering the arch we’re greeted by the quad in Christmas multicolour! The South Devon railway, with audio enhancement, sounding like the Polar Express in the background, and Jupiter above.

Good way to start December, eh?

Quote of the Day

”He was a bold man that first ate an oyster.”

• Jonathan Swift, 1738

Agreed. Can’t stand the things.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Keith Jarrett Solo

Link

One of my great regrets is that I could have gone to his Köln concert in 1975 and didn’t. (I was in Germany at the time within driving distance.) Sigh.

Long Read of the Day

What happened?

By Kieran Healy. A sociologist’s view of what happened in the January 2021 ‘insurrection’ in the run-up to Biden’s Inauguration. Written two day’s afterwards.

I don’t know what happened. But here’s my current theory of what the White House thought was going to happen. I don’t have any more information than you do, and here I’m not concerned with the broader question of how the country came to this end. I am just trying to make sense of what happened on Wednesday.

From the moment he knew he’d lost the presidential election, Trump absolutely wanted to get the result overturned. Some large proportion of his own staff and Congressional Republicans thought there was no harm in humoring him. Many surely knew him well enough to realize he was quite serious about it. But most, falling into a way of thinking that Trump has repeatedly benefited from over his entire career, and especially during his Presidency, figured that he could not possibly overcome the weight of institutional and conventional pressure behind the transition of power. Still, by the first week of January he had not relented in his efforts to find some way to do it, whether through bullying local election officials, chasing wild geese through the courts, or directly intimidating state officials. That all failed, or looked like failing. The next thing on the horizon was Electoral College certification.

So, Team Trump organized a big day of protest to coincide with the certification…

Read on. It’s perceptive, given that it was written just after the events in question.

Books, etc.

As you may remember, I was very impressed by Brad DeLong’s book, Slouching Towards Utopia and have been tracking the reviews via his blog. When I enthuse about the book to people they often ask for a thumbnail description (something like an elevator pitch, I suppose) and I struggle to come up with something compact and succinct. So I was pleased to discover yesterday that Brad now has one, courtesy of Robert Reich (who, if memory serves me right, was Secretary for Labor in Bill Clinton’s administration.

Anyway, here it is:

My thumbnail description—which Bob Reich suggested to me—is that, while we have made extraordinary progress at figuring out how to bake a sufficiently large economic pie so that, potentially, everyone can have enough, the problems of slicing and tasting that economic pie have completely flummoxed us. Thus while we are rich and powerful beyond the wildest dreams of avarice of previous centuries, that is all. We can neither equitably distribute our wealth nor properly utilize it to live wisely and well, so that people feel safe and secure, and live lives in which they are healthy and happy. To say “have not been distributed particularly evenly” and “our desires have grown” catches only half of it. Distribution has not been inept, but has been positively poisonous. And utilization has fallen vastly short not just because of our rising expectations: people 200 years ago would also have hoped along with us for a world in which they were not stalked by flying killer robots, and in which sinister people in steel and glass towers did not attempt to hypnotize them via dopamine loops to glue their eyes to screens in terror so they could be sold fake diabetes cures and crypto grifts.

That’ll do nicely.

My commonplace booklet

UNESCO lists the French baguette as an Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity

From Euronews…

Imagine the cliché of a French person, and you’ll probably picture someone carrying a baguette.

And rightly so – it’s a national treasure and nothing beats it, or that warm nostril-tingling waft of freshly baked bread as you enter a boulangerie.

Make no mistake: it’s less a baked good and more a way of life, a symbol of the French art of living.

Well, now the baguette has (finally) been inducted into the UNESCO World Heritage List. To be precise, the “Artisanal know-how and culture of baguette bread” has officially inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

I’m delighted by this elevation of the baguette. But it’s in no way “intangible”. That’ indeed’, is the whole point of it.

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Predictive Signology

You’ve heard of predictive policing, but how about this from Bath? And it was done long before the Queen died!

Thanks to Christopher Smart for the pic.

Quote of the Day

”War is capitalism with the gloves off.”

• Tom Stoppard

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Ruhe Sanft (Sleep Safely) | Mojca Erdmann

Link

This was new to me. It’s from Zaide. an unfinished opera by Mozart.

Long Read of the Day

If you’re puzzled about ‘blockchain’ then read this piece by Tim Bray — and relax. (The Andy Jassy to whom he refers in the first para is Amazon’s current CEO.)

At some point in mid-2016 I got hauled into a conversation with Andy Jassy. I can’t remember if it was video or f2f, can’t remember how many of his staff were there. There were four of us present who were senior techs, not Jassy staff. ¶

Andy is an outstanding communicator and was eloquent on this occasion. You have to understand that one of the most important parts of his job was listening to the CIOs and CTOs of huge enterprises explain their problems and concerns.

He said something like this: “All these leaders are asking me what our blockchain strategy is. They tell me that everyone’s saying it’s the future, the platform that’s going to obsolete everything else. I need to have a good answer for them. I’ll be honest, when they explain why it’s wonderful I just don’t get it. You guys got to go figure it out for us.”

Well, OK then. I can’t remember whether it was right there in the room or by email after a short caucus, we got back to Andy along the lines of “We mostly think it’s mostly bullshit and probably not strategic for AWS, but we’ll look harder.”

Before I move along, Dear Reader: There was a dead give-away in Andy’s presentation of the problem. I’ll get back to it later but do you see it?

Do read it. It’s great.

H/T to Charles Arthur, who spotted it first.

Building a PDP-11/70 Kit

If you’re a geek of a certain age, this is truly lovely. The DEC PDP11 was an iconic minicomputer on which many of my contemporaries cut their programming teeth. The one in my department was the size of a refrigerator and had the most compelling control panel with switches and blinkenlights! And it was so popular with students that it was hard to get any time on it.

Kieran Healey is Professor of Sociology at Duke University. His research is on the social organisation of exchange in human blood and human organs, cultural goods, software, and ideas. But in the pandemic he found that he had an interest in reviving old computers. And then he discovered that Oscar Vermeulen makes a fabulous little kit called the PiDP-11. It is a 6:10 scale replica of the PDP-11/70’s front panel. You assemble the board connect it to a Raspberry Pi via the Pi’s GPIO port. It runs some software that emulates the PDP’s operating system. The switches and LEDs and so on all function just as they would on the real machine. So he got one of the kits and set to work.

The blog post is an account of how he did it. And it includes a nice video of the device in action, sitting on a bookcase in his office. And he signs off with a nice message: “If anyone needs me, I’ll be running the inventory and payroll of a medium-sized business in 1974.”

Which indeed is what you could do with a PDP11 in the mid-1970s!

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