• Who owns Silicon Valley? Apart from Stanford, that is?
• An interview with Stuart Russell on Artificial Intelligence Audio plus transcript. Russell’s book, Human Compatible is thoughtful and accessible. My review of it for the Literary Review is here.
• The Myth of the Nazi War Machine Amazing piece of factual research. Looks as though almost everything we thought we knew about German (and Japanese) military and industrial might is wrong. [See footnote]
• Former Twitter Employees Charged With Spying for Saudi Arabia Wonder how many Saudi moles there are in Facebook and YouTube.

Footnote A reader writes that my claim that “everything we thought we knew about German (and Japanese military and industrial might is wrong” applies only to those who haven’t read Adam Tooze’s * The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy*. I stand corrected.

• Inside Amazon’s plan for Alexa to run your entire life The re-engineering of humanity continues apace.
• List of the international brands that have apologised to China Hypocrisy or pragmatism? Is there any difference?
• Artificial Intelligence: How to get it right Terrific report, full of good sense.
• Down the Hunger Spiral: Pathways to the Disintegration of the Global Food System Nothing but alarming news: for a precarious global agricultural system with powerful feedback loops, business as usual means widespread hunger and embedded systemic risk. We kind-of realised that. But this is a very informed and systemic analysis.

• What’s behind a scary number? Nice analysis by Quentin Stafford-Fraser of alarming estimates about the electricity-generation implications of electric cars.
• The Market for Bulletproof Vehicles Is Skyrocketing Hmmm… I wonder why? Could it be anything to do with the fears of the super-rich about the consequences of rising inequality? These vehicles will essentially be mobile gated communities.
• The internet is getting less free Election interference and government surveillance on social media are hurting internet freedoms.
• Human Rights and the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Expert critique by Aoife Nolan.

• A Simple Combinatorial Model of World Economic History I bet that W. Brian Arthur will not be surprised.
• Queen’s dresser tells all Including what she said to Daniel Craig.
• The best books on Charles de Gaulle and the French Resistance Chosen by Jonathan Fenby, who was once my Editor on the Observer.
• Technology and rock-climbing Or, the importance of rubber. Fascinating, even to those of us who suffer from vertigo.

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s Inrupt startup receives £5m investment
• Rosemary Hill on Auberon Waugh Lovely LRB piece.
• Remembering Edward Shils Nice memoir by his friend Joseph Epstein.
• Ten of the most important papers published in Nature Includes monoclonal antibodies, the structure of DNA, the first exoplanet and the discovery of the Antarctic Ozone hole.

• How Trump Reshaped the Presidency in Over 11,000 Tweets Funny what you can do with 140 characters.
• Russia just brought in a law to try to disconnect its internet from the rest of the world ‘Balkanisation’ gathers pace.
• MIT president acknowledges women, minorities on campus feel belittled, excluded Boston Globe report. The surprising thing is that anyone who knows MIT would be surprised.
• Newton vs the machine: solving the chaotic three-body problem using deep neural networks Since Newton’s time the problem of solving the equations of motion for three bodies under their own gravitational force has remained practically unsolved, and even partial solutions require massive brute-force computing. But four researchers at the University of Edinburgh have trained a neural network which provides accurate solutions at a fixed computational cost and up to 100 million times faster than a state-of-the-art conventional solver. Interesting because it suggests a novel way of using machine learning.