Stained glass

This striking window is in a modern Catholic Church in Cong, Co. Mayo. Can’t remember who the artist was, alas. (Memo to self: always make notes when photographing interesting things.)

Quote of the Day

“A danger sign that fellow-obsessionals will at once recognize is the tendency to regard the happiest moments of your life as those that occur when someone who has an appointment to see you is prevented from coming.”

• Peter Medawar, Memoirs of a Thinking Radish

I once sat next to him at lunch when I was a graduate student and shyly asked him what advice he gave to his students. “What I tell them”, he said, “is that research is a straightforward business: you have to pick a problem that is big enough to be worth solving…” and then he paused before continuing “… and small enough to be solved!”

I’ve been dispensing this advice ever since, and miming profundity.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Robert Schumann: Konzertstück für 4 Hörner op.86 | First movement

Link

I’m always amazed that anyone can play a brass instrument. Fortunately, they can.

Long Read of the Day

The red bourgeoisie

Absolutely fascinating memoir by Branko Milanovic about realities of life in the Soviet empire.

We were attracted to the “forbidden” things happening there. So I remember when several days later as the insurrectionist students communicated with the city only through large banners, I first saw the words “Down with the Red Bourgeoisie”. It was a new term. The students were protesting against corruption, income inequality, lack of employment opportunities. They renamed the university of Belgrade, “The Red University Karl Marx”. It was very difficult for an officially Marxist-inspired government to deal with them. The days of uncertainty ensued: the newspapers attacked them for destroying public property and “disorderly conduct”, but rebellious students continued skirmishes with the police, and proudly displayed the name of their new university. I remember vividly a bearded student with a big badge “The Red University Karl Marx” standing in the bus, and everyone around him feeling slightly uncomfortable, not sure whether to congratulate him or curse him.

But the slogan was true. It was a protest against the red bourgeoisie, the new ruling class in Eastern Europe. It was a heterogeneous class: some came, especially so in the underdeveloped countries like Serbia, from very rich families; others from the educated middle class, many from workers’ and peasants’ families. Their background was similar to the background of students who were protesting against them now.. Had the students won in 1968, they would have become the new red bourgeoisie.

The red bourgeoisie itself was the product of huge inequities of underdeveloped capitalist societies…

Great read. It reminded me of Leah Ypi’s  Free: Coming of Age at the End of History about growing up in communist Albania.

My commonplace booklet

Raspberry Pi5 is here!

It’s the first Raspberry Pi to come with an in-house graphics chip. Powered by a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 processor running at 2.4GHz, which means it’ll be two or three times faster than my Raspberry Pi4. And it’s still the size of a credit-card.

According to The Verge, it runs hot! I’m not surprised.

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

** We finally know for sure what a trilobite ate Tens of thousands of fossils later, we’ve found a trilobite with a full stomach.

Not a terribly interesting diet IMO, but still. Amazing research.

Link

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Vanishing point

Cycling in to College for breakfast the other day, I found myself brooding on ‘mists and mellow fruitfulness’ and then saw this scene. And fell to thinking about how much I like Autumn, and how September, not January, is when the new year begins for me. Which is probably a legacy of a life spent working in universities, I guess.

Quote of the Day

”There’s nothing more permanent than a temporary hack.”

• Dave Winer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Dirty Mac | Yer Blues

Link

Wow! John Lennon on vocals, Eric Clapton on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums, Keith Richards on bass and Yoko Ono on blanket.

Long Read of the Day

Just for Fun

Lovely essay by Rebecca Baumgartner on people’s reaction to the news that she’s learning German — for fun! Which is really a reflection on the way our neoliberal-driven society is disdainful of hobbies, of things we do just because we enjoy doing them.

I was struck by this passage.

Beneath the self-deprecating label of “hobby” lives a whole array of benefits that we (ironically) don’t have the words to talk about. We don’t have a way of talking about fulfillment and enrichment, or flow and connectedness, without sounding like a snob or a hippie.

So many of the unpaid things I do fall into this category. These things make it possible to stay hopeful. They keep me flexible. They give me something to talk about – a virtue not to be underestimated for those who hate small talk. They (hopefully) make me a more interesting person to know. They make me feel connected to something. They help me stay awake, literally and metaphorically. They keep me engaged when I feel myself languishing. They take me out of my competent adult role and provide me with an invigorating dose of failure.

Yep. You could say that applies to my photography habit — as an incessant (and usually futile) quest for that one perfect picture. (My only satisfaction is that Derek Parfit had it worse; but at least he was also a great philosopher.) Or my enjoyment of crosswords — the pathetic satisfaction of eventually realising, for example, that the solution to “previous tube made one lose patience” (3,4,5) is “the last straw”.

Books, etc.

 Elon Musk: pillock, genius, or both?

My Observer review of Walter Isaacson’s biography of the SpaceX and Tesla guy.

Sample:

Much of Musk’s industrial success comes from his persistent attention to engineering detail and willingness to overturn practices that had congealed into holy writ in these industries. He is a great believer in “vertical integration” – making things yourself rather than outsourcing to others – for example. So Tesla writes all its own software whereas other car manufacturers outsource theirs to Silicon Valley giants. Musk believes that there must be no barriers between design and manufacturing: designers’ desks should be physically close to the production line. He believes that in redesigning many industrial processes automation is the last thing you should do, not the first. So just as Henry Ford is remembered not so much for the Model T but for the production line that made it, Musk will probably be celebrated for his obsession with “the machine that builds the machine”.

There is, however, a dark side to this industrial creativity. The term that comes continually to mind from reading Isaacson’s account of how Musk runs his pioneering enterprises is “brutal”. A fanatical worker himself, he doesn’t give a toss about employees’ work-life balance. He believes that if people want to prioritise their comfort and leisure they should leave his employment. He emails employees reminding them that “a maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle”. Isaacson’s study of Musk’s management style is filled with sudden dismissals, capricious decision-making and apparently sociopathic indifference to the feelings of other people. As one of his oldest friends from university put it: you can work with him or be his friend, but not both…

Footnote: It’s hard to get it right when writing about Musk. There’s a forcefield around him that continually shapes people’s views about him into single dimensions. (Something similar applied to Steve Jobs.) Binary categorisation: Pillock or Genius. And so I expected criticism when I decided just to focus on what Isaacson’s (diligent) research tells us about the things that Musk has built, rather than delving into his wacky, borderline-crazy behaviours. I expect there has been lots of criticisms of that approach, and the usual accusations of having become a devil-worshipper, etc.

But then I remembered that trying to keep a focus on ‘the work’ has always been a challenge. Many distinguished people in history — artists as well as inventors and industrialists — have been flawed and, on occasion, monstrous human beings. Think of Evelyn Waugh, Phillip Larkin, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Céline, to name just five with whom I am familiar. Somehow in the Humanities, though, we succeed in drawing a line between the work and the author. Or used to, anyway. Maybe in an age obsessed with ‘cancellation’ it’ll be more difficult.

My commonplace booklet

XKCD

Jonathan Peelle’s response:

Circular cats, contd.

Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) writes…

I took advantage of this convenient sleeping in circles habit when one of my great nieces wanted a cat cake for her birthday….

Linkblog

 Not all USB-C cables are created equal.

Useful warning by Brian X. Chen in the NYT.

Key takeaway: don’t charge your device using cables you buy in, say, a filling station. These cables are no longer just dumb pipes, so you need the right one for a particular job.

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On reflection…

This is an enigmatic image. We were walking on the banks of the river Corrib in Cong and came on a large, placid pool, and I saw the overhanging branches of a tree reflected in the water. So I pressed the shutter. But ever since, when I happen upon the image I find myself doing a double-take, to try and orient myself. Which way is up?

Quote of the Day

“Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.”

• J. K. Galbraith, letter to JFK, 1962.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Butterworth | English Idyll 2

Link

I stumbled on this the other day and was enchanted by it. I knew nothing of Butterworth, so headed to his Wikipedia page. Like many of his generation, he died on the Somme in 1916.

Long Read of the Day

Searching for a Breakup

From CNN:

US prosecutors opened a landmark antitrust trial against Google on Tuesday with sweeping allegations that for years the company intentionally stifled competition challenging its massive search engine, accusing the tech giant of spending billions to operate an illegal monopoly that has harmed every computer and mobile device user in the United States.

In opening remarks before a federal judge in Washington, lawyers for the Justice Department alleged that Google’s negotiation of exclusive contracts with wireless carriers and phone makers helped cement its dominant position in violation of US antitrust law.

This looks like being a big deal. It’s the biggest case since the DoJ took on Microsoft in the 1990s. Scott Galloway has a terrific piece helpfully putting it in its proper context.

Google doesn’t dominate computing today to the extent Microsoft did in 1998. Nobody does, as “computing” is a much broader space. But its control of search — the most common entry point to the internet — is a nearly pitch-perfect echo of Microsoft circa 2001. Similarly, a quarter century after its founding, Google has a more than 90% market share, a sclerotic artifact of market power vs. a function of innovation. Its market dominance creates a virtuous cycle of increasing power. An estimated 9 billion Google searches occur every day, vs. 400 million for Bing. The massive delta of data and reach makes for a better product: Click-through rates for ads on Google are 30% greater than on Bing. More usage = more data = more advertising, and so on. Today, Google’s parent Alphabet is worth $1.75 trillion and employs 175,000 people.

Most people probably switch off when they hear the word ‘antitrust’. But this is an important case, not just for the tech industry but for liberal democracy generally. As the legal scholar Tim Wu puts it, the notion that power should be limited so that no person or institution can enjoy unaccountable influence is at the very root of a democracy.

The trouble is that liberal democracies have spent half a century building governance and regulatory systems which have allowed the emergence of uncontrolled monopolies not just in tech but in many other industries. If this is not reversed then we’re in deep trouble.

Which is why Scott’s piece is worth your time.

(For those who — like me — have to pay more attention to this, Matt Stoller has set up a free Substack newsletter which will report daily from the trial.)

The EU cable guys have tied down Apple, yet big tech is still bossing the Tories

Yesterday’s Observer column…

Sometimes, when Apple launches a new device (or even an upgrade of an existing one), it’s tempting to think that the accompanying blurb is a satirical spoof. On Tuesday, the day the iPhone 15 and iPhone 15 Plus were launched in California, for example, it burbled that both phones featured “industry-first colour-infused back glass with a stunning, textured matt finish and a new contoured edge on the aluminium enclosure. Both models feature the dynamic island which displays outputs and alerts and an advanced camera system designed to help users take fantastic photos of everyday moments in their lives. A powerful 48 megapixel main camera enables super-high-resolution photos and a new 2x telephoto option to give users a total of three optical zoom levels – like having a third camera. The iPhone 15 lineup also introduces the next generation of portraits, making it easier to capture portraits with great detail and low-light performance.”

Oh, and by the way, it also has a USB-C charging port…

Read on.

If you’re really interested in the iPhone launch, then Jon Gruber’s long analysis is just the thing.

Nonsense on stilts

The Financial Times is a fine newspaper, but it has one intensely annoying appendage — a glossy colour magazine that accompanies the paper’s weekend edition and is aimed directly at the 0.01% . It was originally called “How To Spend It”, but this was eventually deemed to be too crass and so it’s now sneakily packaged as “HTSI”.

This weekend’s edition was beyond parody. It was largely taken up by umpteen two-page spreads of a pair of emaciated lads poncing about the streets of Paris dressed like expensive tramps, but what really took the biscuit was this little ‘feature’ for those heading for university in a week or two.

Among the essential items listed were:

• A suede backpack: £2,440
• A Lange & Sohne ‘Jumping Second’ wristwatch: £90,000
• A Paul Smith woollen sweater: £795
• A Burberry wool hot-water bottle: £290
• A Herno nylon trench coat: £1,295
• A 1953 ‘Vintage Reversivel’ armchair by Carlo Hauner & Martin Eisler: 48,000 Euros.

Two questions: who dreamed up this page? And what were they smoking at the time?

My commonplace booklet

Circular cats (cont.)

My good friend Miranda McArthur (Whom God Preserve), a talented painter, sent me this lovely pastel she did of her sister-in-law’s cat, who favoured a clockwise orientation!

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

On long reads

“Senior hack Adam Macqueen, who has worked for the Eye since 1997, thinks that the ‘long read’ could do with a rebrand: “‘I’ll Read That Later’ might be a better title in a lot of cases – I’d put money on an awful lot of them sitting on open tabs for weeks or months like those apples people buy with their lunch with the best of intentions and then leave on their desks to go all wrinkly and finally get thrown away. Obviously, there are some fantastic examples of the genre, but mostly I think if stories can’t be told short they’re quite often probably not stories.”

From an interesting piece in Press Gazetteby Charles Baker.

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Cats circular

Zoombini and Tilly, dozing in anti-clockwise formation.

My post about the passing of Tilly, the second of our brace of beautiful cats, brought a wonderful, heart-warming flood of emails from readers, which we deeply appreciated. On Wednesday evening we held a wake for her (an old Irish tradition, normally reserved for mere humans rather than superior beings like cats) and buried her in the garden alongside her sister, Zoombini, who died on June 10 last year. After we’d done that, I read all of the emails aloud to the assembled company. It seemed a fitting tribute to two felines who never realised how famous they were.

The picture above was inspired by the number of messages which revealed that our cats’ penchant for sleeping in the best circles was much more common than I had realised.

For me, though, the consoling takeaway from losing these two remarkable animals is discovering how many other people also understand the way pets reach parts of the human psyche that nothing else touches.

Quote of the Day

“When novel ideas succeed, they decay into stale clichés.”

• Henry Farrell and Abe Newman

(I’m reminded of David Runciman’s observation that “clichés are where the truth goes to die”.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | Brothers In Arms | Berlin 2007

Link

Triggered by reading a piece from the front lines in Ukraine.

Long Read of the Day

The Transformative, alarming power of Gene Editing

In his recent book, The Coming Wave, Mustafa Suleyman provided a vivid picture of two major technological forces that are bearing down on humanity. One is the so-called ‘AI’ wave; the other is genetic engineering. Crudely put, we humans have devised a powerful technology for messing with (or perhaps augmenting) our brains, plus another one (derived from CRISPR) for messing with our biology. As Edmund Leach, the great anthropologist, might have put it, humans are in the process of becoming gods: and isn’t it time that we thought hard about the responsibilities that accompany that role?

As a tech insider (Suleyman was a co-founder of DeepMind), his account of the potential of AI was predictably good. (I reviewed it for the Observer.) But I had to take his account of the threat/promise of gene-editing on trust, because I know little about the subject.

All of which is a roundabout way of explaining why I found this long, long New Yorker essay by Dana Goodyear so useful. If you read nothing else this weekend, set aside the time to read it.

Books, etc.

Errol Morris’s Believing is Seeing is one of the most interesting books on photography that I’ve read. In it, the distinguished (Oscar-winning) documentary film-maker analyses a number of celebrated photographs that have been taken to represent the truth about something. The book consists of four extensive essays, each of which presents the reader with a puzzle and then examines the relationship between the photographs and the reality they supposedly record.

Morris starts with two photographs taken by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War, and goes on to examine the famous “Hooded man” photograph in Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war, pictures by WPA photographers during the Great Depression and a photograph from the American Civil War. In each case things are not what they seem, and Morris proceeds through an investigation in his characteristic laid-back style. The basic message — captured in the book’s title — is that (as the philosopher Karl Popper famously observed in a different context) “all observation is drenched in theory”. Or, more prosaically, we see in pictures what we’re looking for.

For a nice illustration of Morris’s inimitable style take five minutes to watch this short.

My commonplace booklet

Linkblog

Something I noticed, while trying to drink from the Internet firehose.

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Cats

Guardians of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Quote of the Day

“The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”

• Amos Tversky in The Undoing Project

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mary Black | Sonny

Link

Something lovely I found while investigating a suggestion by Andrew Brown (Whom God Preserve)

Long Read of the Day

How Big Tech Got So Damn Big

A characteristically vivid essay in Wired by Cory Doctorow based on his new book.

Somehow, these new giants—the companies that have, in the words of New Zealand software developer Tom Eastman, transformed the internet into “a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four”—interrupted that cycle of “disruption.” They didn’t just get big, they stayed big, and then they got bigger.

How did these tech companies succeed in maintaining the dominance that so many of their predecessors failed to attain? Was it their vision? Was it their leadership?

Nope.

Do read it.

Nvidia’s picks and shovels

Yesterday’s Observer column…

It’s not often that the jaws of Wall Street analysts drop to the floor but late last month it happened: Nvidia, a company that makes computer chips, issued sales figures that blew the street’s collective mind. It had pulled in $13.5bn in revenue in the last quarter, which was at least $2bn more than the aforementioned financial geniuses had predicted. Suddenly, the surge in the company’s share price in May that had turned it into a trillion-dollar company made sense.

Well, up to a point, anyway. But how had a company that since 1998 – when it released the revolutionary Riva TNT video and graphics accelerator chip – had been the lodestone of gamers become worth a trillion dollars, almost overnight? The answer, oddly enough, can be found in the folk wisdom that emerged in the California gold rush of the mid-19th century, when it became clear that while few prospectors made fortunes panning for gold, the suppliers who sold them picks and shovels prospered nicely.

We’re now in another gold rush – this time centred on artificial intelligence (AI) – and Nvidia’s A100 and H100 graphical processing units (GPUs) are the picks and shovels…

Read on

Books, etc.

I’m reading it, all 370 pages of it, so you don’t have to. My review will be in next Sunday’s Observer.

My commonplace booklet

The Rolling Stones’s new album

From Tortoise media…

Believe it or not kids, the Stones, all now in their ninth decade, were once very good. Brilliant in fact. They mattered. Exile on Main Street, released in 1972 completed a decade of dazzling work that actually gave The Beatles (not to mention The Kinks and The Who) a run for their money. And their legendary 1969-1972 tours justly earned them the title of The Greatest Rock’n’Roll Band in the World, a crown they still, unjustly, claim today.

Now the once genuinely edgy Stones are a mini-corporation with an admittedly brilliant singer/executive chairman anxious for new product: ticket sales and of course merch for their very own outlet in Carnaby Street….

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