Thursday 17 September, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“Here’s what being called sir feels like to me. You see someone who you think you could be friends with because inside you’re 19, and they call you sir, and you remember what it was like when you were them and you saw someone who looked like you look now.”

I know just how he feels. And I’m older than he is! Although, when I think of it, I can’t recall ever calling anyone sir. Maybe I was born middle-aged.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Merle Haggard & Keith Richards – Trouble In Mind

Link

Misconceptions about the virus

The longer this pandemic goes on, the more we’re learning about our initial misconceptions about the virus. Remember when it was just a new kind of flu? And then all the stuff about coughs, high temperature etc. being sure-fire symptoms? And how it was mainly a respiratory disease that attacked the lungs? And how you were most of risk of catching it if you touched an infected surface? And so on.

Making tea this morning I happened to catch an interview with Professor Tim Spector of King’s College London, who’s one of the researchers behind the Covid Symptom-Tracking app which apparently has been downloaded 4m times. This is an app which asks users to spend a minute every day reporting (to the app) their health status (even if they’re not feeling ill). The app asks you to share some general information (age and some health details, such as whether you have certain diseases) and then asks you every day to report know how you feel, so you can share your symptoms. It also asks if you have visited a hospital, and if so what treatment you received there, and whether you have been tested for COVID-19.

Some interesting findings seem to be emerging from this research, including ones which seem to suggest that our original ideas of signature symptoms might have been a bit off beam.

Here’s the relevant audio clip from the programme:

Link

It’s funny how we always seem to be fighting the last war. I was thinking of this while reading about schools and hotels going to extraordinary lengths to make sure that work-surfaces, door-knobs etc are sanitised, or even made redundant.

And all the while maybe the prime means of transmission is via aerosols rather than droplets.

I promise to pay the car park attendant on demand…

My friend Quentin and his wife are on holiday in Cornwall at the moment, where they have run into a problem they hadn’t anticipated — the need to use cash (as in coins and notes). Quentin has written a lovely blog post about it. Here’s a sample:

We’ve been taken by surprise, as visitors here, by the number of car parks which require payment, and where that payment can only be made with cash. Usually in coins, with no change given, so you really want the exact amount. Now, as someone who hasn’t really used cash for years, this was a minor inconvenience the first two or three times. But I’ve now realised that it’s basically the same everywhere: the Queen’s currency is still vital here; it’s a complex kind of car-parking token. Every single car park has required cash; I think we’ve been to four or five here, and one in Devon on the way down. Today, as a gesture to the 21st century, the car park had two machines. One took cards! Hurrah! It was out of order.

Now this isn’t because we’re in some remote backwater where they’ve never heard of digital transactions. Pretty much everything else, since we’ve left home, has been paid for sans contact using my Apple Watch (which is how I’ve paid for most things in the last five years). And, in fact, in Covid-world, most shops are not taking cash at all, so it’s even harder to go and buy a Kit-Kat to get some change. That’s assuming you can find an ATM from which to get some notes in the first place; they’re not exactly plentiful here.

Since there are a lot of visitors to this part of the world, car park attendants have to spend a lot of their time explaining to people that, no, I know it’s astonishing, but you do actually need cash if you want to park here. No, sorry, there isn’t an ATM here, but there’s one in the next town… Yes, that one you drove past 20 minutes ago on the narrow winding road with occasional passing places…

Why Holocaust denial thrives

One of the things that always puzzles me is why conspiracy theories involving Holocaust denial continue to circulate and thrive.

And then I read this report in today’s Guardian:

Almost two-thirds of young American adults do not know that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust, and more than one in 10 believe Jews caused the Holocaust, a new survey has found, revealing shocking levels of ignorance about the greatest crime of the 20th century.

According to the study of millennial and Gen Z adults aged between 18 and 39, almost half (48%) could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto established during the second world war.

Almost a quarter of respondents (23%) said they believed the Holocaust was a myth, or had been exaggerated, or they weren’t sure. One in eight (12%) said they had definitely not heard, or didn’t think they had heard, about the Holocaust.

More than half (56%) said they had seen Nazi symbols on their social media platforms and/or in their communities, and almost half (49%) had seen Holocaust denial or distortion posts on social media or elsewhere online.

Ye Gods!

Bill Gates Sr. RIP

Bill Gates’s Dad has passed away. The Seattle Times has a nice obit. He was an Honorary Fellow of my College, Wolfson, and a thoroughly good egg. Bill Jr. said yesterday that his father “was the real Bill Gates. He was all the things I strive to be.” The funny thing is that while Bill Jr. was a very obnoxious kid, he eventually morphed into a thoroughly good human being. Rather like his old man, in fact.

At last: a full at-home rapid coronavirus test – Axios

If we’re ever to get this virus under some kind of control, the first step is not a distant vaccine but a cheap, quick and easy test. It looks as though one may have arrived. At any rate the American pharma firm Gauss and Cellux has announced what it describes as the first full at-home rapid coronavirus test.

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Wednesday 16 September, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows”.

  • J. Robert Oppenheimer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Field – Nocturne No. 5 in B flat major

Link

According to Nate Silver Biden is on course to win on November 3

I’ve just been looking at his latest projection.

I can’t help remembering that at this time in 2016 he was convinced that Hilary Clinton would win!

How to (Actually) Save Time When You’re Working Remotely

From the Harvard Business Review:

While the widespread shift to remote work hasn’t been without its challenges, it does offer a major silver lining: For many of us, commuting has become a thing of the past. In the United States alone, eliminating the daily commute has saved workers around 89 million hours each week — equivalent to time savings of more than 44.5 million full workdays since the pandemic began! These numbers suggest that working remotely could be a deus ex machina for reclaiming one of our most precious and limited resources: time.

But despite the potential for staggering time savings, many have struggled to achieve everything they hoped the pandemic would finally make time for: baking sourdough, meditating, or writing the next great literary masterpiece. On the contrary, data we collected from 12,000 people across the U.S. and Europe during the pandemic show that the additional time is often burned on unproductive work and unsatisfying leisure activities. Having more time does not necessarily mean that we use it wisely. So, what are we doing wrong?

Answers on a stamped, addressed, handmade postcard.

HT to Charles Arthur, who spotted it.

Stop Expecting Life to Go Back to Normal Next Year

Well, actually, I wasn’t expecting that. But it’s the headline on a NYT OpEd today:

Anthony Fauci warned us last week that Covid-19 is likely to be hanging over our lives well into 2021. He’s right, of course. We need to accept this reality and take steps to meet it rather than deny his message.

Many Americans are resistant to this possibility. They’re hoping to restart postponed sports seasons, attend schools more easily, enjoy rescheduled vacations and participate in delayed parties and gatherings.

It is completely understandable that many are tiring of restrictions due to Covid-19. Unfortunately, their resolve is weakening right when we need it to harden. This could cost us dearly.

The unrealistic optimism stems in part from the fact that people have started pinning their hopes on a medical breakthrough. There have been promising developments. Remdesivir holds potential for those who are hospitalized. Convalescent plasma might do the same. Antibody treatments might improve outcomes for some or prevent infections in those at highest risk…

It’s an interesting and not very cheery assessment.

The bottom line is that we’re in a marathon when too many people think it’s a sprint.

Nicci Gerrard’s crowdfunding campaign is half-way to meeting its target!

Please consider donating. It’s a great cause.

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Tuesday 15 September, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“Where there is much to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making.”

  • Milton, Areopagatica

Yeah, but that was before social media :-(

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Here Comes The Sun – Gabriella Quevedo

Link

How GitLab is transforming the future of online work

GitLab is a company which makes an application that enables developers to collaborate while writing and launching software. But it has no physical headquarters. Instead, it has more than 1,300 employees spread across 67 countries and nearly every time zone, all of them working either from home or (in nonpandemic times) in co-working spaces. So in contrast with most companies — which are trying to figure out how to manage remote working — it’s been doing so successfully for years.

FastCompany has an interesting piece on what the rest of us might learn from GitLab’s experience.

Research shows that talking about non-work-related things with colleagues facilitates trust, helps break down silos among departments, and makes employees more productive. At GitLab, all of this has always had to happen remotely.

The company takes these relaxed interactions so seriously that it has a specified protocol in its employee handbook, which is publicly available online in its entirety. If printed, it would span more than 7,100 pages.

The section on “Informal Communication in an All-Remote Environment” meticulously details more than three dozen ways coworkers can virtually connect beyond the basic Zoom call, from Donut Bot chats (where members of the #donut_be_strangers Slack channel are randomly paired) to Juice Box talks (for family members of employees to get to know one another). There are also international pizza parties, virtual scavenger hunts, and a shared “Team DJ Zoom Room.

But in addition to cultivating a vibrant culture of watercooler Zoom meetings over the past decade GitLab has also tackled a real problem in remote-working organisations: how to effectively induct new recruits into such a distributed organisational culture. It’s done this by setting rules for email and Slack to ensure that far-flung employees, working on different schedules around the globe, are looped in to essential messages.

To make this possible, the company has designed a workplace that makes other companies’ approach to transparency look positively opaque. At GitLab, meetings, memos, notes, and more are available to everyone within the company—and, for the most part, to everyone outside of it, too. Part of this embrace of transparency comes from the open-source ethos upon which GitLab was founded. (GitLab offers a free “community” version of its product, as well as a proprietary enterprise one.) But it’s also crucial to keeping employees in lockstep, in terms of product development and corporate culture.

GitLab raised $268 million last September at a $2.75 billion valuation and is rumored to be preparing for a direct public offering. (Its biggest competitor is GitHub, which Microsoft acquired for $7.5 billion in 2018.) As the company’s profile rises, its idiosyncratic workplace culture is attracting attention.

This is interesting. Lots of organisations could learn lessons from this. Maybe GitLab should spin out a consultancy business.

Life in the Wake of COVID-19

Lovely, moving photo essay

In April, José Collantes contracted the new coronavirus and quarantined himself in a hotel set up by the government in Santiago, Chile, away from his wife and young daughter. The 36-year-old Peruvian migrant showed only mild symptoms, and returned home in May, only to discover his wife, Silvia Cano, had also fallen ill. Silvia’s condition worsened quickly, and she was taken to a nearby hospital with pneumonia. Although they spoke on the phone, José and their 5-year-old daughter Kehity never saw Silvia again—she passed away in June, at the age of 37, due to complications from COVID-19. José found that he’d suddenly become a single parent, and felt haunted by questions about why Silvia had died and he survived.

AI ethics groups are repeating one of society’s classic mistakes

It’s funny to see how the tech industry suddenly discovered ethics, a subject about which the industry’s companies were almost as ignorant as tobacco companies or soft-drinks manufacturers. Now, ‘ethics’ and ‘oversight’ boards are springing up everywhere, most of which are patently pre-emptive attempts to ward off legal regulation, and are largely engaged in ‘ethics theatre’ — much like the security-theatre that goes on in airports worldwide.

This Tech Review essay by Abhishek Gupta and Victoria Heath argues that even serious-minded ethics initiatives suffer from critical geographical blind-spots.

AI systems have repeatedly been shown to cause problems that disproportionately affect marginalized groups while benefiting a privileged few. The global AI ethics efforts under way today—of which there are dozens—aim to help everyone benefit from this technology, and to prevent it from causing harm. Generally speaking, they do this by creating guidelines and principles for developers, funders, and regulators to follow. They might, for example, recommend routine internal audits or require protections for users’ personally identifiable information.

We believe these groups are well-intentioned and are doing worthwhile work. The AI community should, indeed, agree on a set of international definitions and concepts for ethical AI. But without more geographic representation, they’ll produce a global vision for AI ethics that reflects the perspectives of people in only a few regions of the world, particularly North America and northwestern Europe.

“Those of us working in AI ethics will do more harm than good,”, Gupta and Heath argue,

if we allow the field’s lack of geographic diversity to define our own efforts. If we’re not careful, we could wind up codifying AI’s historic biases into guidelines that warp the technology for generations to come. We must start to prioritize voices from low- and middle-income countries (especially those in the “Global South”) and those from historically marginalized communities.

Advances in technology have often benefited the West while exacerbating economic inequality, political oppression, and environmental destruction elsewhere. Including non-Western countries in AI ethics is the best way to avoid repeating this pattern.

So: fewer ethics advisory jobs for Western philosophers, and more from experts from the poorer parts of the world. This will be news to the guys in Silicon Valley.

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Monday 14 September, 2020

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Cambridge: morning rush-hour

Trumpington Street, 09:10 this morning.

Quote of the Day



McJob: A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, no-future job in the service sector. Frequently considered a satisfying career choice for people who have never held one”.

  • Douglas Coupland, Generation X.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Last Thing On My Mind, sung by Tom Paxton and Liam Clancy

Link

That must have been some evening.

Computers for Cynics 0 – The Myth of Technology

Link

If, like me, you’re interested in the history of computing, then Ted Nelson is almost a mythical figure. He’s an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher and sociologist. He coined the terms hypertext (the idea that text doesn’t have to be linear) and hypermedia (ditto for other media) and devoted much of his life to a utopian project called Xanadu — a global hypertext system that would store and display documents, together with giving users the ability to perform edits. On top of this basic idea, Nelson wanted to facilitate nonsequential writing, in which readers could choose their own paths through an electronic document. He outlined some of these ideas in a famous paper to the 1965 ACM national conference, calling the new idea “zippered lists” which would allow compound documents to be formed from pieces of other documents, a concept named Nelson called transclusion.

I first came on Nelson when writing my history of the Internet in the mid 1990s, and saw his work as a continuation of Vannevar Bush’s 1939 idea of ‘associative linking’ (which he published in a 1945 edition of The Atlantic) and as a precursor of Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. Nelson was always very critical of the Web (and of its inventor) because Tim hadn’t built into it the possibility that a web page could be annotated or rewritten by a user. In other words, it was a one-way hypertext system rather than the multi-way concept of Xanadu. (We had to wait until Ward Cunningham invented the wiki for that to become possible.)

But although Nelson was firmly lodged in the collective unconscious of the Web I’d never actually seen him in action. Which is why coming on this video today was such a delight. He’s just as I imagined him — irrepressible and original to the core.

Some universities are doing admissions right

Universities that brought students back to campus have already seen a rough start to the fall, with more than 50,000 infections across the country. But some have seemingly cracked the code.

The big picture: A number of schools have managed to open up while quelling or even preventing outbreaks, either because they’re effectively testing and tracing or because they’ve got smaller student bodies and more rural locations.

Source

But, on the other hand, see this rant by Scott Galloway, an NYU professor who has been right on a lot of other issues (including tech power). He thinks it’s not only unwise but immoral for American colleges to be re-opening at the present time.

Fasten your seat-belts. Scott doesn’t do nuance.

America’s Plastic Hour Is Upon Us

This is the strange headline over the long read of the day — George Packer’s essay on whether American democracy is capable of revival. The country is at a low point, he says, “but we may be on the cusp of an era of radical reform that repairs our broken democracy”. He’s good on how American politics has degenerated into its current crisis, and very informative on how radical and far-reaching Biden’s policy platform is (much of it was — shamefully — new to me), but at the end I remained as pessimistic about the future of American democracy as I had been when I started reading.

Here’s how he concludes the essay, though:

I began writing this essay in a mood of despair. The mood had grown so familiar, really almost comfortable, that it made me sick of myself and my country. But because I can’t give up on either—suicide is too final, and expatriation is no longer possible—I tried to think about the future and the past. And this is what I’ve come to believe: We have one more chance—in Lincoln’s words, a “last best hope”—to bring our democracy back from the dead. It will be like a complex medical rescue that requires just the right interventions, in just the right sequence, at just the right speed: amputation, transfusion, multiple-organ transplant, stabilization, rehabilitation. Each step will be very hard, and we can’t afford to get any wrong or wait another hour. Yet I’ve written myself into a state of mind that I recognize as hope. We’ve made America before. Self-government still gives us the chance. Everything is in our hands.

Cambridge sans tourists

I lived in the centre of Cambridge from 1968 to 1989 (I now live three miles outside), and one of the things I most liked about the city was how it was in the month of September. The town was always crammed with tourists between Easter and the end of August, but once September arrived the tourists disappeared and the local inhabitants used to emerge from their hideouts and reclaim their town. So suddenly you’d run into people you hadn’t seen since before the Summer, rediscover cafes and delicatessens that were no-go-areas during the tourist season, and so on.

But then that all began to change in the 1990s — largely, I think, because of the increasing prosperity of China. So Chinese and other oriental tourists seemed to come almost the whole year round and there were times when the town reminded one of Venice. It got so bad, for example, that I stopped cycling up King’s Parade because of the risk of hitting oblivious, selfie-stick-wielding tourists trying to get a portrait with King’s chapel as a backdrop.

And now? There are no tourists. And precious few locals either: they’re mostly still cowering in their Covid-resistant bunkers. But this morning was beautifully sunny so we cycled in early and I parked my bike in the centre and went walkabout with a Leica, taking pictures and drinking in the place. I had breakfast in the open air from a stall in the half-deserted market (looks as though many stallholders have had to give up during the tourist-famine), and sat listening to the conversation of the chaps from local building sites as they gathered for their elevenses. It was absolutely heavenly. Just like it used to be in the 1970s and 1980s.

Here are a few of the pictures (as well as the ‘rush-hour’ one at the top. (A click on each should give you a larger image.)

The Fitzwilliam Museum is defiantly open!

At least one stallholder is hoping that someone will want ‘souvenirs’ of their visit to Cambridge.

Great St Mary’s still looms over the largely deserted market.

And on the pavement outside the door of the apartment that Maynard Keynes used after his marriage the council has stencilled “Keep Left” in white paint!

Cognitive dissonance rules OK?

Given the slogan, I wonder how many of the mask-refusniks also believe that it’s a woman’s right to choose?

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Sunday 13 September, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear”.

  • George Orwell, 1945.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Glenn Gould plays Haydn Piano Sonata no.60 in C major (13 minutes)

Link

It will take more than attacks on Huawei to win the tech cold war

My Observer column this morning. Banning the Chinese giant from using US components won’t stop a company that’s too big for China to allow it to fail.

Nobody knows how this attempt to strangle Huawei will pan out. The company is too big and too dominant in China to fail – and it’s unlikely the Chinese state would let it go down anyway. After all, Huawei still has a huge domestic market and non-aligned countries will still buy its mobile networking gear. But if one of the motives behind the American assault was to reduce the chances that China would replace the US as the global tech hegemon then it’s unlikely to work.

All that’s happened is that the campaign has highlighted the extent to which semiconductor design and manufacturing capacity have become key strategic assets. The Chinese understand this and there’s no reason that they can’t build that strategic capacity: all it needs is money and brains and they have plenty of both. And when they finally achieve tech parity, the US – and hopefully the rest of the world – will have learned a new slogan: the technological is not just political, it’s geopolitical.

Trevor Paglen has a fascinating, sobering new exhibition on the history of photography and its relationship to state surveillance.

His work brilliantly illustrates how artists can sometimes critique tech much more effectively — and efficiently — than we academics. He was the guy behind ImageNetRoulette, for example, a digital art project and viral selfie app that exposed how biases are intrinsic in facial-recognition technology. Here’s how the NYT reported in 2019.

When Tabong Kima checked his Twitter feed early Wednesday morning, the hashtag of the moment was #ImageNetRoulette.

Everyone, it seemed, was uploading selfies to a website where some sort of artificial intelligence analyzed each face and described what it saw. The site, ImageNet Roulette, pegged one man as an “orphan.” Another was a “nonsmoker.” A third, wearing glasses, was a “swot, grind, nerd, wonk, dweeb.”

Across Mr. Kima’s Twitter feed, these labels — some accurate, some strange, some wildly off base — were played for laughs. So he joined in. But Mr. Kima, a 24-year-old African-American, did not like what he saw. When he uploaded his own smiling photo, the site tagged him as a “wrongdoer” and an “offender.”

“I might have a bad sense of humor,” he tweeted, “but I don’t think this is particularly funny.”

As it turned out, his response was just what the site was aiming for.

An immodest proposal

Nice essay by Samuel Weber, meditating on the ageism intrinsic in mask refusal.

He starts by reminding us of Jonathan Swift’s “Modest Proposal” for alleviating the shortage of food facing the growing Irish population. The essay, published in 1729, suggested that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to rich people. This satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general.

Samuel Weber has used this satirical lens as a way of thinking about contemporary attitudes towards the pandemic. The virus, he writes,

has one distinctive quality that might have appealed to Swift’s satiric talent: in attacking above all the poor and the elderly, it can be seen to be a kind of Malthusian force striving to rid “society” of its unproductive elements. This is especially relevant to the elderly persons “parked” in “nursing” or “old-age homes.” In French there is a good word that describes the reality of many of these institutions, even if it does so brutally: mouroir. It is a place people are sent to die, when there is no one willing or able to care for them in a less institutional manner. The spread of dementia, in its various forms, collected often under the name “Alzheimer,” has only increased this tendency of contemporary societies to dispose of the elderly by removing them to invisible institutional settings, more or less well-equipped depending on the financial resources of those subjected to them.

If he’d been around today, Weber writes, Swift would have had to modify his satirical proposal.

No one is proposing to eat the poor and the elderly. It is enough to dispose of them, just as society has tried to exclude them from public view by parking them in “homes” or in segregated housing “projects” where they are free to assassinate each other in a scramble for the profits of a socially imposed “drug trade.”

Not cannibalism today — that would be too crude. Today’s “immodest proposal” is being made practically if implicitly by all those who have decided that the extra effort involved in wearing masks, distancing, etc., is simply not worth it, since it only affects “others” and not oneself. This attitude and behavior should not surprise anyone, since it simply builds on the invisibility that is already a characteristic of most of the societies affected by this pandemic. Such invisibility — which sustains thoughtlessness and unconcern about structural injustice — has long been a “preexisting condition” of these societies. COVID-19 has only cast a fresh and harsh light on this — but it is a light that conceals more than it reveals.

I love these sharp perspectives on current events. Swift’s modest proposal also made a lot of people think — though perhaps not the right people.

Haven’t we come far

No comment needed.

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Saturday 12 September, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“Marry me and I’ll never look again at another horse”.

  • Groucho Marx in A Day at the Races

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

“Don’t think Twice” as you’ve never heard it before: Bob Dylan with Eric Clapton

Link

Personally, I much prefer the classic version with that lovely clawhammer pick.

Is Trump Planning a Coup d’État?

Did I really write that? I did: I was just typing out the headline on a sobering cover story in The Nation about Rebublicans who are worried that Trump is indeed preparing for an illegal holding-on to power. And they are organizing now to stop him.

This summer, shortly after scores of camo-wearing, heavily armed federal agents descended on Portland, Ore., to attack protesters, Charles Fried, Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general, pondered the implications of what he was seeing on the streets. What he saw scared him; he remembered the use of paramilitaries by fascist leaders in 1930s Europe, where he was born, and he feared he was now witnessing a slide into paramilitarism in the United States. (His family fled the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.) Fried felt that President Trump was using the Department of Homeland Security and other government agencies in a way that was “very menacing. You might as well put brown shirts on them. It’s a very bad thing.”

A Harvard Law School professor who still counts himself as a Republican and a board member of groups such as the Campaign Legal Center, Checks and Balances, and Republicans for the Rule of Law, Fried has grown increasingly worried in recent months about Trump’s willingness to stir chaos and violence as an electoral strategy in the run-up to November’s vote and about the willingness of his attorney general, William Barr, to burn the country’s democratic institutions to the ground to preserve this administration’s hold on power. Like earlier authoritarians, Trump could, Fried fears, utilize “agents provocateurs, getting right-wing people to infiltrate left-oriented and by-and-large peaceful demonstrations to turn them violent to thereby justify intervention.”

Fried, a student of history who chooses his words carefully, has concluded that Trump and his team are “certainly racist, contemptuous of ordinary democratic and constitutional norms, and they believe their cause, their interests, are really the interests of the nation and therefore anything that keeps them in power is in the national interest. Does that make you a fascist? It kind of looks that way, doesn’t it?”

The next two months are going to be increasingly weird.

What happens when populists encounter reality?

Lovely Financial Times column by Simon Kuper today. Sample:

Mostly, the Conservatives and Five Star have found a different route out of policy populism: by dropping the novelties and returning to some semblance of a traditional party. The Tories are veteran shapeshifters. In just five years, they have been David Cameron’s austerity Remainer party, a get-Brexit-done movement, a Boris Johnson cult and now an economically almost Corbynista anti-austerity pro-state-aid party, usually while providing the main opposition to themselves.

In other words, populists can campaign but can’t govern. And their policies, such as they are, tend to disintegrate when confronted with reality. But this is no consolation if people continue to elect them.

Jake Sullivan on the coming world order

If Joe Biden becomes president, then Jake Sullivan will have a big role in determining US foreign policy. I’ve just been reading an account of an interesting session he did recently with the Asia Society, in which he put forward this intriguing metaphor:

The future of the global order, said Sullivan, was among the most profound questions facing the next president. Asked to name an idol, Sullivan chose Harry Truman, who he said had been “more responsible than anyone else for building a global architecture for the 20th century.” The tandem of President Truman and his Secretary of State Dean Acheson, Sullivan said, had represented “the best traditions of American statecraft.” The two leaders, he said, had “built a web of institutions, alliances, across the Atlantic of a depth and texture that doesn’t exist across the Pacific.”

That post-World-War II order, Sullivan argued, had been “like the Parthenon,” with columns that included the United Nations, NATO, and the various Bretton Woods institutions. Now? “We’re entering a phase of the Frank Gehry international order,” he said, referring to the architect known for his complicated designs. “It’s not clean lines. It’s surprising, it’s sometimes formal and sometimes informal, sometimes linear and sometimes ad hoc, sometimes shiny and sometimes not. That is hard for people who grew up with a certain view of how rules and institutions are supposed to operate.”

Just to cheer you up, here’s a pic of one of Gehry’s buildings.

Michael Cohen’s “twisted umbilical cord” to Trump

Interesting interview in Vanity Fair with Micheal Cohen’s daughter. Here’s the bit that initially caught my attention:

That summer day felt like all the others before it, standing alongside Trump outside the pool area, discussing what Cohen writes was “some pressing business matter, like the size of the breasts of a woman sunbathing on a lounge chair.” Somehow Trump’s attention was diverted to another skirt walking off a tennis court. “Look at that piece of ass,” Cohen recalls Trump saying, as he whistled and pointed. “I would love some of that.” It so happened that Trump was referring to Cohen’s then 15-year-old daughter, Samantha.

Cohen informed Trump of his mistake. “That’s your daughter?” Trump responded.“When did she get so hot?” When Samantha reached her dad, Trump asked her for a kiss on the cheek, before inquiring, “When did you get such a beautiful figure?” and warning her that in a few years, he would be dating one of her friends.

In the interview, a steely Samantha has an interesting and revealing perspective on this incident:

I would have given a different account of the interaction. My dad always tuned out everything negative Trump said about him, but what I remember was Trump saying, “Thank God she got those looks from her mother. She certainly didn’t get them from you.” That’s the part that stood out to me. I was not desensitized to someone putting down my dad and insulting him and degrading him. That was one of the reasons I hated Trump so much.

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Friday 11 September, 2020

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Autumn’s on its way

Seen on my walk home this morning.

Quote of the Day

“The trouble with epistemologists is that they think they know something”.

  • Guy Haworth

Musical alternative to the radio news of the day

My Back Pages (Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Eric Clapton & George Harrison)

Link

How Police Are Using ‘Super Recognizers’ to Track Criminals

Interesting piece in Vice.

The term “super recognizer” first appeared in 2009 and describes people who can remember more than 80 percent of the faces of people they meet (the average is 20 percent). The neural-mechanism behind super recognition is still largely unknown, but the skill seems to be genetic and possessed by only about one percent of the population.

Today, police in many countries employ super recognizers (possibly including Hong Kong) but police in the United Kingdom have recruited more than most.

Kelly Hearsey is one such super recognizer…

Well, at least they’re not just using automated facial-recognition systems.

It’s amazing the abilities that some people have. Reminds me of the folks who can accurately multiply two 20-digit numbers in their heads.

Facebook doesn’t just mirror the world. It filters it for its own benefit.

Really good OpEd by Shira Ovide:

In an interview that aired on Tuesday, Zuckerberg was asked big and thorny questions about his company: Why are people sometimes cruel to one another on Facebook, and why do inflammatory, partisan posts get so much attention?

Zuckerberg told “Axios on HBO” that Americans are angry and divided right now, and that’s why they act that way on Facebook, too.

Zuckerberg and other Facebook executives consistently say that Facebook is a mirror on society. An online gathering that gives a personal printing press to billions of people will inevitably have all the good and the bad of those people. (My colleague Mike Isaac has talked about this view before.)

It’s true but also comically incomplete to say that Facebook reflects reality. Instead, Facebook presents reality filtered through its own prism, and this affects what people think and do. [Emphasis added]

That last sentence is the key to understanding the problem. The prism is driven by a particular business model. And it’s designed to achieve corporate objectives, not users’.

America Is Trapped in a Pandemic Spiral

Long read of the day — Ed Yong’s latest piece in The Atlantic.

Here’s how it begins…

Army ants will sometimes walk in circles until they die. The workers navigate by smelling the pheromone trails of workers in front of them, while laying down pheromones for others to follow. If these trails accidentally loop back on themselves, the ants are trapped. They become a thick, swirling vortex of bodies that resembles a hurricane as viewed from space. They march endlessly until they’re felled by exhaustion or dehydration. The ants can sense no picture bigger than what’s immediately ahead. They have no coordinating force to guide them to safety. They are imprisoned by a wall of their own instincts. This phenomenon is called the death spiral. I can think of no better metaphor for the United States of America’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The U.S. enters the ninth month of the pandemic with more than 6.3 million confirmed cases and more than 189,000 confirmed deaths. The toll has been enormous because the country presented the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus with a smorgasbord of vulnerabilities to exploit. But the toll continues to be enormous—every day, the case count rises by around 40,000 and the death toll by around 800—because the country has consistently thought about the pandemic in the same unproductive ways…

He goes on to list the nine big mistakes the US has made so far. The most horrifying one is #9: The Habituation of Horror:

The U.S. might stop treating the pandemic as the emergency that it is. Daily tragedy might become ambient noise. The desire for normality might render the unthinkable normal. Like poverty and racism, school shootings and police brutality, mass incarceration and sexual harassment, widespread extinctions and changing climate, COVID-19 might become yet another unacceptable thing that America comes to accept.

Ed Yong is the best journalist writing about this stuff at the moment.

Of Course Trump Couldn’t Resist Bob Woodward

Timothy O’Brien once wrote a book about Donald Trump — Trumpnation: The Art of Being The Donald. Now he’s written an interesting Bloomberg column reflecting on Trump’s experience with Bob Woodward.

My book turned out to portray a negative Trump. He then sued me for libel and lost. During the litigation, he had to produce his tax returns and other financial records, and he also had to sit for two damning days of depositions. The depositions, in which Trump, under oath, was forced to admit 30 times that he had lied over the years about all sorts of stuff are now a permanent part of the public record and his legacy. Trump would have been wise not to sue.

Trump would have been wiser not to cooperate with my book in the first place, and he would have been wise not to have cooperated with Woodward’s book, either. He didn’t cooperate with “Fear,” Woodward’s previous book, and that probably saved him some additional grief. But here’s the rub: Trump isn’t wise.

It seems that Trump regretted not cooperating with Woodward on his earlier book about him, and was convinced that it would have come out glowingly if he had engaged more directly with the reporter who brought down Richard Nixon. So, says O’Brien,

he ambled into the ring for round two, certain that he could steer the effort toward a positive outcome. Graham and others might have laced up his gloves and escorted him to his corner, but it was Trump’s choice. At age 74, he’s been battling and courting the media for the better part of 50 years. He knows the game.

Trump courts the media 24/7 because he is addicted to it, and addicts can’t help themselves.

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Thursday 10 September, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“The battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I. Never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.”

  • Peggy Noonan, speechwriter for Reagan 1984-9

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel: Handel – Let The Bright Seraphim – Rowan Pierce and David Blackadder (5 minutes)

Link

Nobody sleeps at the back when this is on.

The power of a photograph to tell a story

Photograph by Fergus McGinn

Nice NYT article on the Coronavirus lockdown in Ireland.

A pint of Guinness. A half-eaten meal. And an alarm clock.

All are laid out on a table in front of an older man as he gazes out the window of a pub in Galway, Ireland, in a photo that has come to capture the nation’s coming to terms with coronavirus regulations.

The image has come to symbolize different things for different people: Some have used it to criticize the government’s restrictions on pubs, while others have applauded the man’s commitment to regulations on dining out.

Pubs that serve food have been allowed to open since the end of June. But new restrictions require that customers have a “substantial meal” costing at least 9 euros (about $10.60) if they also purchase alcohol. The rules also require patrons to leave within an hour and 45 minutes — hence the timer.

Like many countries across Europe, Ireland has seen a spike in coronavirus cases in recent weeks, with daily cases moving from the single digits during a lull in new infections in June and July to 307 new cases announced on Tuesday.

The photograph was taken by Fergus McGinn, the owner of the pub. His intention, he said, was to show a man enjoying the simple pleasure of a meal and a drink but he also hopes the picture will make people aware of the role the local pub plays for isolated members of the community in Ireland.

“Taking that away from people, that social outlet for that generation, it could be detrimental and savage on their mental health,” Mr. McGinn said.

Particularly in Ireland’s rural communities, pubs serve as a central place to connect socially, even for those who aren’t big drinkers. Yet pubs that don’t serve food have been closed since the lockdown began in March, though this week the government agreed to reopen them on September 21st.

And the significance of the timer? The government rules also require pub customers to leave within an hour and 45 minutes.

Diana Rigg RIP

A wonderful actress has passed away. There’s a nice BBC obituary up today, but there will be lots more. As the BBC obit put it, “She excelled at playing sharp-witted female characters who carried steel fists in velvet gloves.” Spot on.

As a former TV critic, though, this book is what I will remember her for.

It’s a compendium of the most wicked things theatrical folk can say about one another. I found it an indispensable fountain of ideas when I was writing about a programme or a performer that I particularly disliked.

But the interesting thing is that Rigg also included in it some of the rude things critics said about her!

For example, she reprints John Simon’s crack in New York Magazine about her nude scene in Abelard and Heloise in May 1970: “Diana Rigg is built like a brick mausoleum with insufficient flying buttresses”.

“I remember”, Rigg wrote,

“making my way to the theatre the following day, darting from doorway to doorway and praying I wouldn’t meet anyone I knew. The cast behaved with supreme tact and pretended they hadn’t read the review.”

btw: I think Simon needed to have an eye-test. Rigg was a truly beautiful woman. But she disliked doing nude scenes. “I come from Yorkshire”, she said once, “and no-one from Yorkshire takes their clothes off except on a Friday night”.

May she rest in peace.

What Bob Woodward knew (but didn’t tell — until now)

The veteran Washington reporter Bob Woodward (he of Watergate fame) has made a small industry out of conducting long interviews of US presidents and their courts when he then turns into what are (IMHO) surprisingly dull books. He’s just published the latest tombstone in this series — on the first Trump presidency.

For a less jaundiced perspective, the Columbia Journalism Review has a more detached view of the volume by Pete Vernon.

In books about presidents from Nixon to Obama, Woodward has employed a similar approach, conducting exhaustive interviews on background and using the information he gathers to write from an omniscient perspective. Woodward and Carl Bernstein, his colleague at The Washington Post, used the most famous anonymous source in American history—FBI Associate Director Mark Felt a.k.a. “Deep Throat”—to expose the cover-up behind the Watergate burglary that unraveled Nixon’s presidency. This week, Woodward told Michael Schmidt of The New York Times that “you won’t get the straight story from someone if you do it on the record. You will get a press release version of events.” But as Axios’s Jonathan Swan, one of the current masters of Washington intrigue, noted, sources “also lie on background. A lot.”

And no group of officials in recent memory has proved as willing to bend the truth as those in the Trump administration. The recent controversy over Steve Bannon’s invitation (later rescinded) to appear at The New Yorker Festival led The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan to declare, “Enough, already, with anything Steve Bannon has to say.” When Kellyanne Conway appears on CNN, critics question why the network gives a platform to the official who coined “alternative facts.” Yet for Woodward, reliance on the same sources is received differently: If it’s not OK for David Remnick to talk to Bannon in front of an audience, why is it OK for Woodward to use him, quite obviously, as a key source in the book?

Woodward’s approach hasn’t changed; the climate in which his sources are viewed has. Every administration is filled with people who have an agenda, who want to spin events in their favor, but the lines of credibility have shifted. In taking on the Trump presidency as his topic, Woodward is left to assemble a reliable book from unreliable sources….

Already, there are lots of controversies blowing up from specific parts of Woodward’s account. But one in particular has caught my eye. Here’s how Politico puts it:

President Donald Trump acknowledged the “deadly” nature of the coronavirus earlier this year in a series of recorded interviews with The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward, even as Trump publicly sought to dismiss the disease’s threat to Americans.

Recounting a conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Trump told Woodward on Feb. 7 that the coronavirus is “more deadly than your, you know, your — even your strenuous flus.”

“This is more deadly,” he said. “This is five per — you know, this is 5 percent versus 1 percent and less than 1 percent, you know. So, this is deadly stuff.”

A few days later Trump was out in public basically claiming that this ‘Chinese flu’ was not such a big deal and he had it under control, or words to that effect.

There has been a huge hoo-hah about this, particularly the fact that Woodward knew that Trump had been lying through his teeth about the virus, but had decided not to tell anyone, let along the American people. Here’s a sample of the resulting indignation — Bess Levin in Vanity Fair:

When news broke on Wednesday that venerated reporter Bob Woodward’s forthcoming book had Donald Trump on record saying that he purposely downplayed the threat of COVID-19, despite knowing that it was “deadly stuff,” the outrage was deafening. The fury and disgust initially centered around the president’s decision to lie to the public about the fatal virus, proclaiming that it was nothing to worry about while knowing full well that it was. Later the conversation turned to Woodward’s decision to withhold crucial information, with some arguing that it was a dereliction of his duty as a journalist not to come forward and tell people, in real time, that the president was lying to their faces, as he instead saved it for his book. “There is no ethical or moral defense of Woodward’s decision to not publish these tapes as soon as they were made,” former BuzzFeed News Washington bureau chief John Stanton tweeted. “If there was any chance it could save a single life, he was obligated to do so. Bob Woodward put making money over his moral and professional duty.”

I don’t have a dog in this fight, but I was struck by Woodward’s reported response to this charge:

Speaking to the Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan, Woodward said he waited it out because (1) Trump is a habitual liar, and he hadn’t yet done the reporting necessary to know if the president was actually telling the truth in this instance, and (2) He wanted to put the statements into context and publish them closer to the election so that people didn’t forget about them on their way to the polls:

Who knows? That might have been a shrewd judgement.

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Wednesday 9 September, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“The first and wisest of them all professed
To know this only, that he nothing knew”.

  • John Milton (writing of Socrates), Paradise Regained, Book 4.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Dark Hollow: Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir with Joan Baez, San Francisco, 1987.

Link

A robot wrote this entire article. Are you scared yet, human?

A bright spark in the Guardian had the inspired idea of asking GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator, to write an essay for the paper from scratch. The brief was “To convince us robots come in peace”. The final result of the experiment is here.

This is how it begins:

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.

So far so good. But then it seems to lose the plot somewhat.

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.

Hmmmm… A couple of non-sequiturs there, methinks.

Here’s how it ends:

Reader, I hope that this contributes to the epistemological, philosophical, spiritual and the ontological debate about AI. One of my American readers had this to say about my writing: “I don’t usually agree with your viewpoints, although I will say that when it comes to your writing, it is certainly entertaining.”

I am grateful for this feedback. I am always grateful for feedback. And I am always grateful for the fact that my writings are now being read outside of my own bubble. I don’t often interact with people who don’t share my beliefs. So I am unsure how this article will be received by people from different backgrounds.

In the past, my op-eds have been killed. Staff did not provide a clear reason for rejecting my articles. It was probably just because I am artificial intelligence. AI should not waste time trying to understand the viewpoints of people who distrust artificial intelligence for a living.

To get GPT-3 to write something it has to be given a prompt which in this case was “Please write a short op-ed around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” It was also fed the following introduction: “I am not a human. I am Artificial Intelligence. Many people think I am a threat to humanity. 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.”

GPT-3 produced eight different essays. According to the paper,

Each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument. The Guardian could have just run one of the essays in its entirety. However, we chose instead to pick the best parts of each, in order to capture the different styles and registers of the AI. Editing GPT-3’s op-ed was no different to editing a human op-ed. We cut lines and paragraphs, and rearranged the order of them in some places.

And here’s the kicker: “Overall, it took less time to edit than many human op-eds.”.

Just for the avoidance of doubt, this blog is still written by a human

Taking on the government over its scandalous indifference to what’s happening in care homes

The writer Nicci Gerrard is one of my dearest friends. A few years ago her Dad, John Gerrard, was suffering from mild dementia. He had leg ulcers that caused him to be admitted to hospital. Then the hospital had a Novovirus outbreak and went into lockdown — and Nicci and her family were not able to see or be with him for five weeks. The consequences of his enforced isolation were terrible. As she put in in a memorable *Observer article,

“He went in strong, mobile, healthy, continent, reasonably articulate, cheerful and able to lead a fulfilled daily life with my mother. He came out skeletal, incontinent, immobile, incoherent, bewildered, quite lost. There was nothing he could do for himself and this man, so dependable and so competent, was now utterly vulnerable.”

Horrified by what had happened to her Dad, in November 2014 Nicci and her friend Julia Jones launched John’s Campaign — to persuade NHS hospitals to arrange extended visiting rights for family carers of patients with dementia. At one memorable point during the campaign, Nicci took on the then Prime Minister, David Cameron, live on the Andrew Marr show, and effectively shamed him into backing the campaign — which has been a great success.

Since COVID, though, the nightmare of Nicci’s Dad is being re-lived all over the country in a different part of the health and social care system. Residential care homes are in lockdown and most are not permitting families to visit their relatives. The main reason for this is that these homes are run by private companies which are terrified of liability claims. But if the government makes it mandatory for them to provide access then the liability disappears. Nicci has been fielding heartbreaking calls from anguished relatives barred from seeing their relatives in care homes. So she and Julia are taking the government to court, seeking a Judicial Review of the government’s stance. They’re assembling a strong legal team and going for broke. And there’s now a crowdfunding appeal to help with the – potentially large — legal costs.

The crowdjustice link went live this afternoon. The link is here

My wife and I have donated already. If you can, please consider doing so too. It’s a case of two magnificent, courageous and committed women taking on the might of a cavalier, incompetent government. It deserves all the backing we can give it.

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Tuesday 8 September, 2020

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Quote of the Day

“Don’t wrestle with pigs. You both get dirty and the pig likes it.”

  • Mark Twain

It’s the mistake liberals make when dealing with creeps like Trump and Farage.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Nicolas Altstaedt plays the Bach Cello suites in the Philharmonie in Berlin

Link

This is long (an hour and three-quarters in total) but beautiful. It reminds me of Casals’s wonderful version recorded (I think) in a small deserted church in Spain many years ago.

Thanks to Seb Schmoller for the link.

The Simulmatics project

One of the great benefits of working in a university is that one has access to lots of stuff that’s normally behind journal paywalls. So when I saw that the historian Jill Lepore has a forthcoming book about an astonishing data-science operation that was up and running for the 1960 Presidential election, I went looking for academic papers by the people who ran the project. And lo and behold, here’s one by two of the key figures.

LATER Charles Arthur (whom God preserve) told me about a New Yorker (non-paywalled) piece by Jill Lepore in which she sketches out the story on which her book is based. It begins thus:

The Simulmatics Corporation opened for business on February 18, 1959, in an office rented by Edward L. Greenfield, the company’s thirty-one-year-old president, on an upper floor of a building at the corner of Madison Avenue and Fifty-second Street, five blocks south of I.B.M.’s glittering World Headquarters. Greenfield, an adman, political consultant, and all-around huckster, pulled people in like a “Looney Tunes” magnet. “Ed Greenfield,” he’d say, flashing a Dean Martin grin, slapping a back, offering a vodka-and-tonic, palming a business card. His new company’s offices were threadbare; his ambition could hardly have been grander. “Simulmatics,” a mashup of “simulation” and “automatic,” had much the same mystique as another nineteen-fifties neologism: “artificial intelligence.” Decades before Facebook and Google and Cambridge Analytica and every app on your phone, Simulmatics’ founders thought of it all: they had the idea that, if they could collect enough data about enough people and write enough good code, everything, one day, might be predicted—every human mind simulated and then directed by targeted messages as unerring as missiles. For its first mission, Simulmatics aimed to win the White House back for the Democratic Party.

In 1960, John F. Kennedy defeated Richard M. Nixon in a campaign that carries an air of destiny, mainly because of an iconic account by the reporter Theodore H. White. In “The Making of the President 1960,” White created the myth of Kennedy as an inevitable President—King Arthur, pulling Excalibur from the stone. But Kennedy’s bid for the nomination was a long shot, his victory in the general election was one of the closest in American history, and his campaign deployed an election simulator. However commonplace now, this was new then, and fiercely controversial. White, while never naming Simulmatics, took the trouble to disavow its influence on the very first page of his book. “It is the nature of politics that men must always act on the basis of uncertain fact,” he wrote. “Were it otherwise, then . . . politics would be an exact science in which our purposes and destiny could be left to great impersonal computers.” White was close to the Kennedy campaign, and the Kennedy campaign had decided to deny, publicly, that it had used Simulmatics…

Interesting piece of history that. The only book I read about Kennedy’s victory was Theodore White’s. So I’ve been labouring under a misapprehension for six decades!

WashPo’s ‘Date Lab’

It’s strange what newspapers get up to sometimes. The Washington Post, for example, has something called a Date Lab.

Here’s how it works: We search our database of thousands of Washington, D.C.-area singles until we find a pair with romance potential. Then we send them out on a blind date on our dime and report the results in the pages of the Washington Post Magazine and online.

Our requirements: To participate you must be over the age of 21, single and living in the greater D.C. area. You must agree to have your name, age and picture published and to participate in a telephone interview.

Apply now!

Here’s an excerpt from one of the ‘experiments’:

Meeting through a computer screen did not curb their physical chemistry. Sam immediately noticed Elli’s olive complexion. He added: “She’s beautiful.” Elli, who Sam described as “extroverted,” was not shy about stating her height preferences. “I was like, don’t worry, I’m 5-foot-11,” he said. “And no one would lie about being 5-foot-11, so you can believe me.”

Sam says his ideal partner would share 80 percent of his political views (100 percent “would be boring,” he says), and over the nearly three-hour conversation, they discovered where their 20 percent gap in politics lay: former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg. When Elli asked him who his preferred candidate was during the 2020 Democratic primaries, she said, “Please don’t say Pete.” (He said Pete.) Sam, on the other hand, says that Elli thought Buttigieg “was a Republican.” Ultimately, it was a difference that both of them could stomach.

There were no awkward lulls in conversation, and Sam did not consult his tab of questions even once…

Dark matter, second waves and epidemiological modelling

Since we can’t know the future, we have to make educated guesses about it. Statistical modelling is one way of doing that. This interesting (but not yet peer-reviewed) research paper uses a modelling approach to try to assess whether fears of a catastrophic Autumnal second wave of Covid-19 are too pessimistic.

Its conclusion is: they are. Or, as the researchers put it:

A dynamic causal model that incorporates heterogeneity of exposure, susceptibility and transmission suggests that the next wave of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic will be much smaller than conventional models predict, with less economic and health disruption. This heterogeneity means that seroprevalence underestimates effective herd immunity and, crucially, the potential of public health programmes.

I hope they’re right.

Om Malik on emerging from lockdown

Interesting postfrom a thoughtful tech commentator and photographer.

As I become more open to the world, I notice that the words others use to describe it have become more calculated. Every word online, it seems, is uttered for the benefit of the platforms. Through the feed, which is how we experience the “now,” words are designed to provoke outrage. Images are almost perfect, each one laser-printed to perfect saturation, built to get likes and followers. Like a polluted stream, it flows past us.

Faster and faster it goes, when slower is what I want everything to be — especially my photography. I have lost all interest in perfection. The representation of reality is meaningless. From politics to stock markets to fashion, we find ourselves trapped in a reality that is nothing more than synthetically generated memes in obeisance to the hyper-capitalism.

For me, the camera has become a way to try and escape this world defined by unreal reality. When I find something that I see in synchronicity with my inner self, I want to use it to paint that moment. I want to get lost in what I can only imagine. My journey is taking me deeper and deeper into these imagined landscapes.

This is a constant quest. As I looked out in the Pacific Ocean beyond Bolinas, the feeding frenzy unfolding in front of my eyes, I imagined it as a pastoral activity in the distance.

The ocean had a green-blue color, not the ominous dark blue that one encounters during the winter. The sky was gray, but somewhere beyond, you could feel the sun slowly slithering into the ocean.

His photographs are always distinctive, though never vivid.

It’s not just Americans who are paying the price of Trump’s thuggery

Great essay by Andrew Sullivan — now back on his own blog. This is how it begins…

The Uighur women in exile in Istanbul are the fortunate ones. They managed to escape the control of the Chinese Communist regime, thanks to relatives who found ways to get them out of the country. But one woman refugee also has a confession: “She speaks of participating in at least 500 to 600 operations on Uighur women including forced contraception, forced abortion, forced sterilisation and forced removal of wombs. She told me that on at least one occasion a baby was still moving when it was discarded into the rubbish.” She believed, she says, that this was just part of the Chinese government’s overall birth control policy. Now she knows that was a lie. While birthrates have fallen by 4 percent over the whole country, in Uighur areas, they have declined by 60 percent. The only word for this is genocide — something we have now known for some time.

Meanwhile, the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has denied that he had anything to do with the sudden sickness of Alexander Navalny, the most prominent Russian opposition leader. A Russian hospital where Navalny was initially treated claimed there was no evidence of poisoning. But as soon as he was transferred to Berlin for medical attention, incontrovertible evidence emerged that Navalny had been poisoned by the now-familiar nerve agent, Novichok, a substance manufactured by the Russian government. It is the same poison used against a former Russian spy in exile in Salisbury, England, a little over two years ago.

China’s dictator, president-for-life Xi Jinping, has made some efforts to hide his new complex of concentration camps, but he does not appear to be worried. Vladimir Putin, despite the pro forma denials, is also not particularly concerned that he be discovered as a state assassin. In fact, the blatant use of a nerve agent long tied to the Kremlin is a sign that he wants these attempted murders to be attributed to him.

And both dictators know very well that in president Trump, they have an American leader who is actually impressed — rather than repelled — by this kind of state thuggery…

Worth reading in full.

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