Stephen Hawking RIP

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I didn’t know Stephen Hawking personally, though I often saw him around and in my early years in Cambridge (late-1960s, long before he was famous) my lab was in the same complex of buildings in Mill Lane as the department where he worked. The buildings had no ramps for wheelchair access at that time, so sometimes I or my fellow-students would help his wife to lift his (non-motorised) wheelchair up the steps into the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP).

At the time, of course, we had no idea of how important he was destined to be. The only clue was when one went into the DAMTP tea-room at 10.30am or 3.30pm (scientific departments have a tradition of gathering for morning coffee and afternoon tea) his wheelchair was always surrounded by a group of devoted graduate students, some of whom acted as his interpreter and wrote the equations on a blackboard when he was giving a lecture. It was clear then that — at least in the rarefied world of cosmologists — he was already a real celebrity.

One of those students was Nathan Myhrvold, who went on to become the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft and a close colleague of Bill Gates. My hunch is that Nathan was the link that persuaded Gates to endow the Gates Scholars (which is Cambridge’s version of Oxford’s Rhodes Scholars scheme).

For me, the most striking moment in Hawking’s career was when he was elected to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics. This was the professorial chair that had once been occupied by Isaac Newton, and it seemed an appropriate recognition of the significance of Hawking’s work.

Indeed, watching Hawking in public and marvelling at his astonishing and (to me) inaccessible brilliance, it was Newton who came to mind, and the statue of him in the chapel of Trinity College, of which Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude:

And from my pillow, looking forth by light
Of moon or favouring stars, I could behold
The Antechapel where the Statue stood
Of Newton, with his prism and his silent face,
The marble index of a Mind for ever
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.

Quote of the Day

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”This is the president’s vision. My function, really, as an economist is to try to provide the underlying analytics that confirm his intuition. And his intuition is always right in these matters.”

Evidence-based policymaking, courtesy of Peter Navarro, Trump’s Trade Advisor as told to Bloomberg.

Book you ticket

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From today’s Financial Times. Clearly they were so excited by the coup of landing Steve Bannon as a speaker that they omitted to employ a proof-reader.

Interesting also that the FT regards Bannon as an “influencer”. Just as Marine le Pen does, apparently.

How to stay sane on Twitter: ignore retweets

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This morning’s Observer column:

When Twitter first broke cover in July 2006, the initial reaction in the non-geek community was derisive incredulity. First of all, there was the ludicrous idea of a “tweet” – not to mention the metaphor of “twittering”, which, after all, is what small birds do. Besides, what could one usefully say in 140 characters? To the average retired colonel (AKA Daily Telegraph reader), Twitter summed up the bird-brained frivolity of the internet era, providing further evidence that the world was going to the dogs.

And now? It turns out that the aforementioned colonel might have been right. For one of the things you can do with a tweet is declare nuclear war. Another thing you can do with Twitter is to bypass the mainstream media, ignore the opinion polls, spread lies and fake news without let or hindrance and get yourself elected president of the United States.

How did it come to this?

Read on

Quote of the Day

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“Some hidden percentage of what you are seeing online is not commentary from real people, but bought-and-paid-for, computer-generated propaganda”1

Maria Bustillos

  1. Except for everything published on this blog, of course :-) ↩

Interesting uses for blockchain technology #15610

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From a lovely rant by Paul Ford:

The blockchain can be a form of media. The writer Maria Bustillos is starting a magazine that will publish on the blockchain — which means it will be impossible to take down. (Disclosure: In theory, I’ll write for Maria, who’s a friend, and she’ll pay me in cryptocurrency, or what she calls “space jewels.”) One of her aims is to make it impossible for people—Peter Thiel, for example, who backed Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker—to threaten publications they dislike.

You could even make a distributed magazine called Information of Vital Public Interest About Peter Thiel that would be awfully hard to sue into oblivion. It’s the marketplace of ideas. Literally. Try another thought experiment. Remember that anonymously created list of men who worked in media and who were alleged sexual harassers? You could, by whispering the allegations from one wallet to the next, put that information on a blockchain. You could make a web browser plug-in so that whenever someone visited a sexual harasser’s LinkedIn page, that page could glow bright red. You could have a distributed, immutable record of sexual harassment allegations on the internet. (Is there an economy around such allegations? Well, people do pay for gossip. GossipCoin?)

The bad news about false news

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The most comprehensive study to date of misinformation on Twitter is out. The Abstract reads:

We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it. We investigated the differential diffusion of all of the verified true and false news stories distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. The data comprise 126,000 stories tweeted by 3 million people more than 4.5 million times. We classified news as true or false using information from six independent fact-checking organizations that exhibited 95 to 98% agreement on the classifications. Falsehood diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information, and the effects were more pronounced for false political news than for false news about terrorism, natural disasters, science, urban legends, or financial information. We found that false news was more novel than true news, which suggests that people were more likely to share novel information. Whereas false stories inspired fear, disgust, and surprise in replies, true stories inspired anticipation, sadness, joy, and trust. Contrary to conventional wisdom, robots accelerated the spread of true and false news at the same rate, implying that false news spreads more than the truth because humans, not robots, are more likely to spread it.

Roger Bannister, RIP

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Roger Bannister, the first man ever to run a mile in under four minutes, has died at the age of 88. I heard the news just after listening to radio reports of the latest in a long line of scandals about doping in sports. Then I read the splendid obit in the New York Times. This is how it begins:

On the morning of May 6, 1954, a Thursday, Roger Bannister, 25, a medical student in London, worked his usual shift at St. Mary’s Hospital and took an early afternoon train to Oxford. He had lunch with some old friends, then met a couple of his track teammates, Christopher Chataway and Chris Brasher. As members of an amateur all-star team, they were preparing to run against Oxford University.

About 1,200 people showed up at Oxford’s unprepossessing Iffley Road track to watch, and though the day was blustery and damp — inauspicious conditions for a record-setting effort — a record is what they saw. Paced by Chataway and Brasher and powered by an explosive kick, his signature, Bannister ran a mile in under four minutes — 3:59.4, to be exact — becoming the first man ever to do so, breaking through a mystical barrier and creating a seminal moment in sports history.

And then, having broken the barrier, what did he do? Why, he ‘retired’ from competitive athletics in order to do something serious. “Now that I am taking up a hospital appointment,” he said in an address to the English Sportswriters Association that December,

I shall have to give up international athletics. I shall not have sufficient time to put up a first-class performance. There would be little satisfaction for me in a second-rate performance, and it would be wrong to give one when representing my country.

He worked as a neurosurgeon for the rest of his life.

It’s impossible to read this and not reflect on how competitive sport has changed in the intervening decades.

Even today, the Pathe news footage of his run is thrilling. May he rest in peace.

Fixing the future?

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My Observer review of Andrew Keen’s How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age:

Many years ago the cultural critic Neil Postman predicted that the future of humanity lay somewhere in the area between the dystopian nightmares of two English writers – George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Orwell believed that we would be destroyed by the things we fear – surveillance and thought-control; Huxley thought that our undoing would be the things that delight us – that our rulers would twig that entertainment is more efficient than coercion as a means of social control.

Then we invented the internet, a technology that – it turned out – gave us both nightmares at once: comprehensive surveillance by states and corporations on the one hand; and, on the other, a strange kind of passive addiction to devices, apps and services which, like the drug soma in Huxley’s Brave New World, possess “all the advantages of Christianity and alcohol and none of their defects”.

The great irony, of course, is that not all of this was inevitable…

Read on

What happens in China stays in China. Ask Apple

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This morning’s Observer column:

Here’s your starter for 10. Question: Apple’s website contains the following bold declaration: “At Apple we believe privacy is a fundamental human right.” What ancient English adage does this bring to mind? Answer: “Fine words butter no parsnips.” In other words, what matters is not what you say, but what you do.

What brings this to mind is the announcement that from now on, iCloud data generated by Apple users with a mainland Chinese account will be stored and managed by a Chinese data management firm – Guizhou-Cloud Big Data (GCBD). “With effect from 28 February 2018,” the notice reads, “iCloud services associated with your Apple ID will be operated by GCBD. Use of these services and all the data you store with iCloud – including photos, videos, documents and backups – will be subject to the terms and conditions of iCloud operated by GCBD.”

Read on