To the Lighthouse

With apologies to Virginia Woolf.

Quote of the Day

”In answer to: Inside every fat woman is a thin woman trying to get out. I always think it’s: Outside every thin woman there’s a fat man trying to get in.”

• Katharine Whitehorn (of blessed memory)

… and whose Memorial Service I am looking forward to attending soon. She was a colleague of mine on the Observer.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Bach | Cello Suite No.1 in G | Mischa Maisky

Link

I love these Suites. I have the Casals performance on vinyl somewhere. Now where in the attic is my turntable?

Long Read of the Day

 The Unlikely Persistence of Antonio Gramsci

I never read Gramsci until I started to read Francis Fukuyama and then started to think about the ‘hegemonic anxiety’ one can now see in the US as China becomes ever more powerful. This essay by Thomas Meaney in The New Republic is interesting because it helpfully puts Gramsci into a contemporary context.

If Gramsci has aged better than many of his peers, it is in part because he became a thinker for a defeated, rather than a triumphalist, left. With his own cause in ruins, Gramsci became ever more interested in the ways of the enemy. One of his abiding inquiries was how capitalist elites and their publicists laundered their perversions of the social order into “common sense,” how they spun morality tales around their economic interests, and how they were able to preserve their leadership of society after each crisis delivered by the capitalist system. The ground of this inquiry may have shifted in the decades since his death, but the main battle lines remain the same, and this still makes Gram­sci a thinker worth turning to in our moment.

Looks matter, ask Dorian

Jonty Bloom is not impressed by Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (aka Finance Minister).

They say that politics is show business for ugly people, but the Chancellor is a well turned out, good looking, young chap and it has done him no harm.

But actions matter as well, they have to look and smell good and here the Chancellor is beginning to suffer.

Nothing says we are all in this together like swanning off to your holiday home in California, having totally failed to deal with a cost of living crisis.

And nothing says we are all in this together like discovering that the man responsible for gathering every single penny of taxation in this country is married to a woman who has non-dom tax status.

A wife who is therefore pretty much immune to all the tax rises that her husband is imposing on the rest of the country.

At any other time this would have cost the Chancellor his job and career.

But this is a Dorian Gray government. What matters is whether the public sees the real picture.

My commonplace booklet

Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) was musing on the story of the return of Darwin’s two missing notebooks, and wrote:

It occurred to me to mention, amidst all the rejoicing over the return of Darwin’s notebooks, that in our glorious collective digital future, there will be no notebooks, manuscripts, annotated copies, autographs, sketches or any other evidence of the individual human behind the text on the (flat, textureless, colourless, odourless, undifferentiated) screen. #Senseless.

She’s right. When future historians try to exhume the records of our era, they will find a huge black hole. That’s why I say to people that if they want their great-grandchildren to know what they looked like, they should print off all their digital images on 6 x 4 photographic paper and put them in shoeboxes in the attic. Because, one day, nobody will be able to access those digital images.

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Urban Cormorants

Seen on the Liffey in Dublin one September day in 2019

Quote of the Day

”When I’m good, I’m very good. When I’m bad, I’m better.”

• Mae West

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Steve Cooney | O’Farrell’s Slip Jig

Link

From Wikipedia:

The slip jig is one of the four most common Irish stepdances, the others being the reel, the jig and the hornpipe. It is danced in soft shoes. At one time only men danced it, then for several decades only women, and today slip jigs can be danced by any dancer, though at a competitive level they are almost exclusively danced by women. This dance is graceful and controlled, with heels very high, often called “the ballet of Irish dance”.

Long Read of the Day

Erasmus in the 21st century

Erasmus lived for five years in Cambridge (in Queens’ College) and is often described a “the man who brought the Renaissance to the fens”. As I pass Queens’ I’ve often wondered what he was like.

So this nice essay by Jeroen Bouterse turned out to be a welcome delight. And made me want to find a biography of a remarkable man.

I decided to read Erasmus on war because he was, though I know him only superficially, not completely new to me; I went to a school named after him that consciously sought to channel his individualism and cosmopolitanism, and over the years I have read some of his works, admiring his open-minded, kind and forgiving attitude to people for whom existing social institutions didn’t work so well. Based on this, however, I did not expect to be challenged; I did not expect surprising insights in war from a Christian theologian and classicist who lived before the nation-state, before NATO, before modern artillery and nuclear weapons. I was not looking for analyses, or for arguments pro or contra no-fly zones, but for a simple, friendly voice that cried out for peace.

It’s also appropriate that the great EU student programme is named after him.

Meme stocks and Bitcoin will not redistribute wealth

Useful reality check from Noah Smith…

Financio-populism may not excite quite the passion it did last year, but it’s still definitely an undercurrent in modern society. Most recently, it seems to be manifesting in the form of NFT mania.

And I deeply understand the financio-populist impulse. Wealth inequality is at record levels. That wouldn’t be so bad if fortunes rose and fell, and everyone got to spend a little time at the top. But you hardly hear about anyone going from richest to rags these days. There’s always the nagging sensation that the system is rigged — that to get rich you have to have gone to the right East Coast prep school or met the right angel investors at the right parties. In that kind of world, anything that mixes up the set of who’s rich and who’s not can feel like justice.

There’s just one problem — financio-populism is not really going to do this. Yes, we all know that one guy who worked at Starbucks before he got rich on Bitcoin or GameStop, and now drives a Lamborghini. Financial markets are random enough where there will always be that guy. But overall, trading meme stocks and crypto is likely to leave the average person poorer than before. Their dreams will end up lining the pockets of the rich, knowledgeable, and well-connected…

Sadly, he’s right.

My commonplace booklet

More on the provenance of ‘meatspace’…

From Kevin Nolan:

You mentioned this morning that you considered the term ‘meat-space’ to have been coined by John Perry Barlow, or perhaps in the slightly more obscure realms of ‘cyberpunk sci-fi’. I think that this second speculation is correct, and that in fact the term is a demi-invention leading back at least as far as the 1960s, where William Burroughs and other, cynical realists who straddled the zone between High Literature and Anarcho-punk science fiction frequently used the expression ‘meat’ to refer to human flesh (and biology) in a somewhat offhand and dispassionate manner. John Lennon used it a trope also, in his later, vegetarian phases: ‘(Meat is Murder’ etc.)

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Many Happy Returns, Charles

Here’s a bit of good news. Two notebooks of Charles Darwin, missing for two decades, one of which contains his famous ‘Tree of Life’ sketch, have been returned to Cambridge University Library, their rightful home.

Image Credit: Cambridge University Library

They were returned anonymously to the Library on March 9 in a bright pink gift bag (!) containing the notebooks’ archive box and inside a plain brown envelope addressed to the University Librarian with the printed message: “Happy Easter, X”. And they’re in good condition, with no obvious signs of significant handling or damage sustained in the years since their disappearance.

Quote of the Day

”Soon after I enter Decentraland, I fall through a fountain and land in a bar, where an octopus is serving drinks. In the corner, two bots are having a scripted conversation about why the NFTs on display in the metaverse are superior to physical artworks. (It’s because they aren’t hidden away in a collector’s archive.) At least at the Tate my ability to view the art isn’t limited by my computer’s processing power, I think, as I try — unsuccessfully — to order a virtual pint from the octopus.”

• The Financial Times’s Peter Bradshaw, describing his visit to a ‘metaverse’.

Funny to think that this is what Mark Zuckerberg thinks is the human future.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler & Chet Atkins | Instrumental Medley

Link

Recorded at the Secret Policeman’s Ball, 1987. Their version of John Lennon’s Imagine is particularly sweet.

Long Read of the Day

 The geopolitics of fossil fuels and renewables reshape the world

When we come to look back on 2022, my hunch is that Helen Thompson’s book will be seen as one of the most perceptive books published in recent years. When, nearly a decade ago, I was searching for the historical origins of the mess we’re in today, she changed the way I thought about these things. Just as investigative reporters always follow the money, Helen suggested that “following the oil” would be a productive line of inquiry.

Her book is a masterful exposition of how to do that. But it’s a long read and I guess many people won’t be up for the journey, so it’s great to see her capture some of the thinking behind it in this succinct article in Nature. For nearly 200 years, Helen argues, fossil-fuel energy has been central to geopolitics. And with 84% of our energy still coming from oil, coal and gas, the transition to renewable energy sources will take longer and be more painful than most people are willing to admit. Given that the transition will be a long one, therefore, fossil fuels will continue to shape geopolitics. In that sense, the war in Ukraine provides a sobering reality check on our global plight.

My commonplace booklet

My belief that the term ‘meatspace’ was coined by John Perry Barlow in 1995 has sparked some speculation that it may have originated earlier in cyberpunk sci-fi. And someone found it used in a News Group post dated 21 February 1993. It’s possible that Barlow picked it up from there, since he was already a pre-Web internet veteran then. (He was on The Well from 1986 onwards, for example.)

I once shared a speaking gig with him, which was entertaining and, for me, instructive. Our session was allocated 60 minutes, and he spoke first — for 50 of them!

Thanks to David Elliott for launching me down this entertaining rabbit hole.

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Sunset over the Bay

Quote of the Day

”Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.”

• Bertrand Russell

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Villa-Lobos | Prelude No. 1 | Nicholas Petrou

Link

Long Read of the Day

‘Meatspace’? Technology Does Funny Things to Language

Nice NYT piece by Peter Coy.

Consider this coinage: meatspace. It refers simply to the physical world, where we have tangible bodies made of … meat. “Meatspace” is a word that didn’t need to exist until the invention of cyberspace. Technological progress gives us a new perspective on things we once took for granted, in this case reality itself.

“I.C.E. vehicle” (pronounced “ice”) is similar. I.C.E. is short for internal combustion engine, a modifier that was superfluous until electric cars came on the scene. Like meatspace, it’s what the journalist Frank Mankiewicz called a “retronym” — a new term that’s invented for something old because the original term has become ambiguous, usually because of some development such as a technological advance.

I love essays like this — writing that suddenly causes one to realise the significance of something that one has been doing automatically for years without ever pondering its significance.

Made me think that the term “career planning” is an oxymoron. Doesn’t the verb ‘career’ mean ‘to move fast and in an uncontrolled way’? (Checks). Yes it does!

I’ve always attributed the term ‘meatspace’ to John Perry Barlow.

Godfather of Memes” passes away 

Steve Wilhite, the the computer scientist who invented the gif image file format in 1987 has died aged 74. Kate Miltner and Tim Highfield wrote an interesting academic article on the cultural significance of his creation. Here’s the Abstract:

The animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) is a digital file format with a long history within internet cultures and digital content. Emblematic of the early Web, the GIF fell from favor in the late 1990s before experiencing a resurgence that has seen the format become ubiquitous within digital communication. While the GIF has certain technical affordances that make it highly versatile, this is not the sole reason for its ubiquity. Instead, GIFs have become a key communication tool in contemporary digital cultures thanks to a combination of their features, constraints, and affordances. GIFs are polysemic, largely because they are isolated snippets of larger texts. This, combined with their endless, looping repetition, allows them to relay multiple levels of meaning in a single GIF. This symbolic complexity makes them an ideal tool for enhancing two core aspects of digital communication: the performance of affect and the demonstration of cultural knowledge. The combined impact of these capabilities imbues the GIF with resistant potential, but it has also made it ripe for commodification. In this article, we outline and articulate the GIF?s features and affordances, investigate their implications, and discuss their broader significance for digital culture and communication.

My Commonplace Booklet

To date, Apple has sold roughly 2.8 billion iPhones. That translates to about 243,056 miles of black glass, which is longer than the distance to the moon.

Source

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Holy Smoke!

The geology of Donegal in North-West Ireland is extraordinary, but its contemporary rocks have given up smoking, despite this pic!

Quote of the Day

Could it really be only a year and a half ago that the British government was declaring, shamelessly, its intention to break international law? And adding that this was ok because, In the words of the Northern Ireland Secretary, Brandon Lewis, it would do so only in a “limited and specific” way?…And now Boris Johnson is preaching to the world “It is no longer enough to express warm platitudes about the rules-based international order. We are going to have to actively defend it against a sustained attempt to rewrite the rules.”

• Fintan O’Toole in the Irish Times, 29.03.2922

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mark Knopfler | The Long Road

Link

Long Read of the Day

The First Authoritarian: Popper’s Plato

Interesting essay by Tae-Yeoun Keum on the interpretation of Plato and his ‘Republic’ in Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies.

Today, The Open Society and Its Enemies is perhaps best remembered for two things: Karl Popper’s coinage of the terms “open society” and “closed society,” and his scorched-earth attack on Plato as the original architect of the latter. For Popper, Plato was the first and the most influential authoritarian thinker.

The assault on Plato took up the first of the book’s two volumes.

Focusing on Plato’s Republic and its blueprint of a city ruled by a handful of elite philosophers, Popper argued that Plato had produced a vision of one such closed society. He pointed to the stratification of the social order in Plato’s ideal city, the strict division of labor between the intellectual and productive classes, the absence of social mobility, state censorship of most culture, and, above all, the promulgation of an openly fraudulent myth, the so-called Noble Lie, to legitimize the status quo. All of this, Popper observed, amounted to nothing less than a dictatorship of philosopher-kings who peddled myths to their subjects in order to suppress free thinking and to lock them into a rigid caste system. The whole business of Plato’s politics boiled down to maintaining this scheme: an effort to “arrest all change.”

The implication was that Plato’s ideas had found their incarnation in fascism. Popper wrote that the Noble Lie, the foundation myth of Plato’s Republic, was “an exact counterpart” to the Nazi’s “modern myth of Blood and Soil.”

When I first read The Open Society… as a student, I rather ignored the attack on Plato and was much more interested in Popper’s critique of Marx, so it was interesting to come on an essay that explains the renewed interest in Plato that followed the election of Trump and the view that some kind of “epistemic democracy” was needed if society were to avoid that kind of degeneration.

Which explains why I enjoyed the piece and thought that you might too.

Applebaum on ‘Putinism’

Transcript of an interesting conversation between Yascha Mounk and Anne Applebaum.

I found this exchange particularly interesting…

Mounk:There was a very clear and specific goal in the actions of the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period: they wanted to erect a communist regime. Part of the point was that it would be subservient to the will of Moscow or the Kremlin, but another part of the point was a set of ideological goals for what those societies would look like internally.

What is the nature of the Putin regime today? It started off as just a kind of kleptocratic dictatorship. There’s an argument being made that Russia is quickly turning into a kind of totalitarian society, but one without a very strong ideology. It does not have the strength of ideology that the Third Reich or the Soviet Union had. What do you think Russian society is going to be like after the war if Putin stays in power? What would following the same Soviet playbook without its ideological foundation look like?

Applebaum: I have actually been arguing for about 15 years that there is a kind of ideology of Putinism: there is a theory of history, an economic theory, and a kind of politics. The theory of history is that Russia was robbed at the end of the Soviet Union when it broke up, the 1990s were a disaster (when the West sought to destroy Russia), and then Putin began to rebuild Russia. There’s a kind of resentment and nostalgia that work together. To explain everything that’s happened in the last 30 years, there’s a kind of fake democracy and fake capitalism. There are some of the forms of capitalism, but in fact, the economy is controlled from above by a group of oligarchs. There appear to be democratic elections, but in fact, the outcomes are predetermined. You have a managed economy and a managed democracy. And there is an elite behind it who controls things, like puppet masters.

Worth a read.

My commonplace booklet

The Leica 0-Series No.105 was also one of the personal cameras of Oskar Barnack – the inventor of 35mm photography. Barnack used the 105 to capture motifs from his family life, gaining technical insights that he then applied to the further development of the camera and its succeeding models.

Up for auction its estimated price of €2-3 million (roughly $3.3 million / £2.5 million), with the starting bid standing at $1.1 million.

(And I won’t blame you if you file this under ‘camera porn’. For that is what it is.)

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Peace on Earth (well, in a small corner of it anyway)

What did this scene remind me of? See today’s Musical Alternative for the answer.

Quote of the Day

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

• John Kenneth Galbraith

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J. S. Bach | Cantata Nº 208, ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’, BWV 208

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Strange Rebirth Of Imperial Russia

Unmissable essay by Andrew Sullivan on what most of us have missed about the newly visible monster of post-Communist Russia. “It would be hard to conjure up a period of post-modern bewilderment more vividly than Russia in the post-Soviet 1990s”, he writes.

A vast empire collapsed overnight; an entire totalitarian system, long since discredited but still acting as some kind of social glue and cultural meaning, unraveled in chaos and confusion.

Take away a totalitarian ideology in an instant, and a huge vacuum of meaning will open up, to be filled by something else. We once understood this. When Nazi Germany collapsed in total military defeat, the West immediately arrived to reconstruct the society from the bottom up. We de-Nazified West Germany; we created a new constitution; we invested massively with the Marshall Plan, doing more for our previous foe than we did for a devastated ally like Britain. We filled the gap. Ditto post-1945 Japan.

But we left post-1991 Russia flailing, offering it shock therapy for freer markets, insisting that a democratic nation-state could be built — tada! — on the ruins of the Evil Empire. We expected it to be reconstructed even as many of its Soviet functionaries remained in place, and without the searing experience of consciousness-changing national defeat. What followed in Russia was a grasping for coherence, in the midst of national humiliation. It was more like Germany after 1918 than 1945. It is no surprise that this was a near-perfect moment for reactionism to stake its claim.

It’s a really interesting piece which illuminates something I’ve wondered about from the beginning, which is that Putin isn’t trying to reclaim the territory lost by the USSR in 1989-91, but to redraw the boundaries of Russia to those that obtained when the Tsar ruled!

If the war ends in manifest Russian failure, Sullivan says, then “Putin is surely finished”. But if it becomes a long-drawn-out grinding mess, then he might survive and emerge stronger. Russia, after all, has in the past been good at winning wars of attrition — ask Napoleon’s or Hitler’s ghosts.

Putin had a 21st-century digital battle plan, so why is he fighting like it’s 1939?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

One thing at least we know about Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine: it isn’t going according to plan. Ah, yes, you reply, but which plan? Was it plan A, which simply said that you assemble enough conscripts and heavy artillery, roll into Ukraine, shell a few apartment blocks, amble across to Kyiv and have a victory parade? What we call the George W Bush model (except that he had his Iraq victory parade on the flight deck of an American aircraft carrier).

If this was plan A, then we know what plan B is. It’s to do to Ukraine what was done to the statelet of Chechnya in 1999, namely bomb it to rubble regardless of civilian casualties. Apart from its intrinsic inhumanity, trying to implement this plan in Ukraine faces some practical difficulties: Ukraine is vast whereas Chechnya is small, and Ukraine has a serious army, a feisty capability for resistance and a plentiful supply of serious weaponry from its friends in the west. So if Putin wants a primer before embarking on the next stage of his imperial adventure, he should perhaps download Charlie Wilson’s War, an instructive film about what happened to the USSR in Afghanistan all those years ago.

For those who follow these things professionally, the biggest puzzle is why Putin embarked on a campaign that looks like the second world war in Technicolor, when his military actually had an ultra-sophisticated plan for warfare in a digital age. It’s called the Gerasimov doctrine and it was the creation in 2013 of Valery Gerasimov, a smart lad who is chief of the general staff and first deputy defence minister of the Russian Federation…

Read on

Why have Ukraine’s ‘clay pigeons’ been so successful against Russian targets?

As Putin tries to pretend that the Russian swerve back to Donbas was what he always intended, one of the intriguing aspects of the war so far has been the effectiveness of humdrum aerial warfare — in the shape of the relatively low-tech Turkish Bayraktar drones against the invaders’ supposedly invincible armoured columns. This piece entertainingly explores that mystery.

Before the war began, military experts predicted that Russian forces would have little trouble dealing with Ukraine’s complement of as many as 20 Turkish drones. With a price tag in the single-digit millions, the Bayraktars are far cheaper than drones like the U.S. Reaper but also much slower and smaller, with a wingspan of 39 feet.

As so often has been the case in this war, however, the experts misjudged the competence of the Russian military.

“It’s quite startling to see all these videos of Bayraktars apparently knocking out Russian surface-to-air missile batteries, which are exactly the kind of system that’s equipped to shoot them down,” said David Hambling, a London-based drone expert.

That is confounding, Hambling said, because the drones should be easy for the Russians to blow out of the sky — or disable with electronic jamming.

“It is literally a World War I aircraft, in terms of performance,” he said. “It’s got a 110-horsepower engine. It is not stealthy. It is not supersonic. It’s a clay pigeon — a real easy target.”

Eh? A million dollars each is ‘cheap’? Explains why arms manufacture is such a profitable racket.

Why does Tucker Carlson sound like a Berkeley leftist?

Antonio García Martínez on how the war in Ukraine has exposed an ideological vacuum  at the heart of American right. Unlike many of the commentary at, he actually went to see for himself.

I spent last week reporting from Poland and Ukraine myself. It was more than a bit eye-opening: The refugee crisis on the border is enormous, Europeans have mobilized tremendously to handle it, and Ukraine itself is on a total war footing where all thought and action go toward victory over the Russian invaders. 

On the way back, I was standing in line along with Ukrainian refugees to re-enter the EU zone at a desolate rural crossing point. After all the hours it took to get through, there was a collective euphoria (much stronger among the refugees surely than me) upon entering the European Union and NATO. The line between the worlds of war and destruction and desperation and that of order and safety and prosperity was very stark indeed.

Those who rail constantly against the global liberal order should step outside it every now and then. They might appreciate it more. After all, there’s no law of the physical universe that we must always live in democracies with rule of law. That’s the historical exception not the rule.

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Progress?

Slowly, agonisingly slowly, I’m getting the hang of this wildlife photography business.

Quote of the Day

”Comments Are the Radioactive Waste of the Web.”

• Mic Wright, quoted by Jon Gruber

(Via Charles Arthur)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Pinetop Perkins | How Long Blues

Link

Magical!

Long Read of the Day

The Art of Monetary War

A long and sobering essay by economist Dominik Leusder pointing out the longer-term implications of the West’s ability effectively to shut down the Russian economy. The financial war, he argues, is a genuine war — and its stakes are immense. Over the course of a week, targeted financial sanctions escalated into measures that, if not lifted in the near future, “are almost certain to condemn Russia’s quasi-autarkic economy to sharp and lasting stagnation. No matter their intent or longevity, these sanctions will change the country forever”.

Globalisation turns out to be a many-faceted sword.

As globalization underwrote Putin’s militarism and his increasingly hostile posture toward Russia’s neighbors, it simultaneously rendered the country’s economy fatally reliant: on the net demand from other countries such as Germany and China; on imports of crucial goods such as machinery, transportation equipment, pharmaceutical and electronics, mostly from Europe; on access to the global dollar system to finance and conduct trade. This is one way to construe the deceptively simple insight of Henry Farrell and Abraham L. Newman’s theory of weaponized interdependence: the logic of financial globalization that generated Russia’s trade surplus and gave Putin room to maneuver also provided the economic and financial weaponry that was turned against him.

This vulnerability is reflected in Putin’s strategic economic logic. In the period since 2014, the Russian central bank has successfully sought to de-dollarize a substantial portion of its reserves, and outstanding dollar liabilities throughout the economy have been reduced. These moves were informed by Western dominance of the global payment infrastructure via SWIFT and the dollar interbank system. In a very meaningful way Russia had prepared for the current conflict. But it was also guided by a belief in the sanctity of foreign reserves held at the world’s central banks. If such a sanctity ever existed, it has been obliterated overnight.

What’s happened provides a vivid illustration of the untrammelled power of the global financial system that has turned our ‘democratic’ world upside down. At one level, it’s obviously satisfactory to see the effectiveness of the sanctions against a pitiless adversary. But at the same time we need to ask: who controls this colossus? And if it can do this to an apparently powerful country like Russia, what could it do to others who trigger its rage?

Maybe we will find after this war ends that we should have been more careful about what we wished for.

Calculator Construction Set

If you’re interested in computer lore, then this little tale by the sainted Andy Hertzfeld is a gem. It tells of how Chris Espinosa invented a way of getting Steve Job’s approval on designs.

The history of the personal computer is littered with great stories like this. Many years ago, when I taught at the Open University, Martin Weller and I had the idea of teaching the technology of the PC and the Internet through narratives about the way the technology evolved. The course we created — entitled You, Your Computer and the Net — had 12,000 students on its first presentation and was one of the most popular courses the Open University ever created.

My commonplace booklet

Tyler Cowen on John McGahern

Tyler is one of the most voracious and insightful readers I know of. He’s just read McGahern’s novel, Amongst Women (which is marvellous IMO). Here’s his succinct verdict:

That is the title of a 1990 Irish novel by John McGahern, well-known in Ireland but as of late not so frequently read outside of Ireland. In addition to its excellent general quality, I found this book notable for two reasons. First, it focuses on the feminization of Ireland, being set in the mid-century decades after independence. An IRA veteran slowly realizes that the Ireland he fought for — a place for manly men — was a figment of his civil war imagination, and not an actual option for an independent, modernizing Ireland. The latter will be run according to the standards and desires of women, and actually be far more pleasant, whether or not Moran likes it. Second, the book is an excellent illustration of the importance of context for reading fiction. The story reads quite differently, depending how quickly you realize the protagonist is an IRA veteran with his wartime service as a fundamental experience. Few readers will know this from the very beginning, but I suspect many Irish readers — especially older ones — will figure this out well before they are told. In general, the very best fiction is context-rich, and this is one reason why many people may not appreciate all of the literary classics.

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Cygnets

Two slightly-dissatisfied teenagers, spotted the other day.

Quote of the Day

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform (or pause and reflect).”

• Mark Twain

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Telemann | Horn Concerto in D Major

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto

Kevin Roose is a very good journalist, so when he writes about anything I pay attention. This primer is worth it if you’re puzzled by the hysteria over ‘crypto’, NFTs and Web3.

I agree with the skeptics that much of the crypto market consists of overvalued, overhyped and possibly fraudulent assets, and I am unmoved by the most utopian sentiments shared by pro-crypto zealots (such as the claim by Jack Dorsey, the former Twitter chief, that Bitcoin will usher in world peace).

But as I’ve experimented more with crypto — including accidentally selling an NFT for more than $500,000 in a charity auction last year — I’ve come to accept that it isn’t all a cynical money-grab, and that there are things of actual substance being built. I’ve also learned, in my career as a tech journalist, that when so much money, energy and talent flows toward a new thing, it’s generally a good idea to pay attention, regardless of your views on the thing itself.

My strongest-held belief about crypto, though, is that it is terribly explained…

It was. Until now.

How Putin’s weaponising of “traditional values” at home resonates with some in the US

From the Washington Post yesterday morning…

That rightist strain of support is built on one of the Russian leader’s lesser-known war tactics: His casting of a Christian catchall — “traditional values” — as a weapon. To defend Russian aggression in Ukraine, he has lobbed disproved claims of U.S.-funded bioweapons labs and a neo-Nazi takeover of the government in Kyiv (both of which have found homes on gab.com as well). But even as Russian bombs kill scores of civilians, Putin has also sought to portray his war as righteous — describing Ukraine as a microcosm of the greater global tug of war between liberal and conservative thought.

His parlance speaks to the rise of Putin as a global touchstone of the far right. Building for years, his crafted image as a right-wing Christian leader is finding its most potent outlet in the horrific war in Ukraine. For the Christian right in the United States and Europe, Putin’s messaging is not so much a dog whistle as a blaring siren. The U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson has said that the Russian leader was “compelled by God” to invade Ukraine. U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) spoke this month at a White nationalist event where the crowd was earlier heard chanting “Putin! Putin! Putin!”

Well, well.

The Royal Mint to build ‘world first’ plant to turn UK’s electronic waste into gold

According to the blurb,

Pioneering new technology enables The Royal Mint to recover precious metals from discarded electronic devices such as mobile phones and laptops

The first of its kind plant will provide a source of high-quality precious metals while offering a solution to significant and growing environmental challenges

Forms part of The Royal Mint’s reinvention and helps secure a future as a leader in sustainably sourced precious metals

I liked Charles Arthur’s observation that Isaac Newton, who was once Master of the Mint, was passionately interested in alchemy. So he’d be pleased by this development.

My commonplace booklet

A post in Jonty Bloom’s blog about the Brexiteers as a Cargo Cult sent me to Wikipedia, which had this helpful observation that Cargo cults

“are marked by a number of common characteristics, including a “myth-dream” that is a synthesis of indigenous and foreign elements, the expectation of help from the ancestors, charismatic leaders, and lastly, belief in the appearance of an abundance of goods.”

Which fits the Brexiteer crowd in government pretty well.

Russia’s only justification for aspiring to be a superpower rests only its possession of nuclear weapons (and the veiled threat that it might use them). In economic terms it’s a second-rank power which combines a huge land-mass with an economy the size of Italy’s. And its current advantage of possessing large reserves of fossil fuel is, ultimately, finite, especially as the rest of the world transitions towards renewable energy. In that sense it reminds me of the UK with its North Sea reserves in the Thatcher years.

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Londistan, 2022

Quote of the Day

”I’ve worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”

• Groucho Marx

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | Jesus on the Mainline | New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival

Link

Yeah, I know I’ve played this before. But I needed waking up yesterday and this was just the ticket.

Long Read of the Day

Putin in His Labyrinth: Alexander Gabuev on the View from Moscow

Marvellous interview by Jonathan Tepperman of Alexander Gabuev, a former diplomatic correspondent and editor at Kommersant, a Russian newspaper. He’s now a Senior Fellow and chair of the ‘Russia in the Asia-Pacific’ Program at the Carnegie Moscow Center (although, like many of his colleagues and a huge number of other Russians, he recently left the country).

Imagine a Russian czar at the top of a powerful country, unchallenged for 20-plus years, who’s also been lucky and successful by Russian standards. Russia has never been as free and prosperous at the same time as it has been during Putin’s reign, particularly his first two terms. That’s all been undone over the last two weeks, obviously. But before that, he was very successful. To the self-confidence born from that success, add the impact of his age and his isolation, and you get a state of mind that led him to believe that his legacy would be the return of Ukraine to Russia’s control. The whole idea is irrational, but in his worldview, it’s a prize worth fighting for.

Another reason for all the mistakes is that he never went to Russia’s national-security establishment and said, “Hey guys, in a year or so I want to invade Ukraine, so let’s start thinking through the scenarios and debate the economic costs.” A full invasion of Ukraine was such an unimaginable idea that Putin tried to keep his plan as well hidden as possible. Instead of serious war planning, it became a clandestine operation, with only a handful of military planners involved.

It’s really informative (at least for me), and particularly interesting towards the end when the conversation turns to the way China will exploit post-war Russia.

How a nondescript box has been saving lives during the pandemic – and revealing the power of grassroots innovation

(And also restoring one’s faith in humanity at a time when it’s in real trouble.)

Fascinating account of how a small amount of imagination and ingenuity can go a long way.

One afternoon, a dozen Arizona State University students gathered to spend the morning cutting cardboard, taping fans and assembling filters in an effort to build 125 portable air purifiers for local schools. That same morning, staff members at a homeless shelter in Los Angeles were setting up 20 homemade purifiers of their own, while in Brookline, Massachusetts, another DIY air purifier was whirring quietly in the back of a day care classroom as children played.

The technology in all three cases – an unassuming duct tape-and-cardboard construction known as a Corsi-Rosenthal box – is playing an important part in the fight against COVID-19. The story of how it came to be also reveals a lot about communities as sources of innovation and resilience in the face of disasters.

My commonplace booklet

• The Digital Scrapbooker Link

• Gus Simmons’s memoir Ross Anderson has a nice blog post about it.

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The Elf’s-eye View

Seen on a woodland walk yesterday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”If I were Ukrainian, I would feel insulted. If I were British, I would feel ashamed. As a French diplomat, I will not comment on Twitter.”

• Philippe Errera, political director at the French foreign ministry, commenting on Boris Johnson’s likening of Ukraine’s battle against Russian aggression to the Brexit campaign.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Shaun Davey | The Winter´s End | Uilleann Pipes (Walter Lelle) and Organ (Stefan Max Bergmann)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Gus Simmons’s memoir

The cryptographer Gustavus (Gus) Simmons was the chief mathematician at Sandia National Laboratories for many years who worked primarily on authentication theory, developing cryptographic techniques for solving problems of mutual distrust and devising protocols whose function could be trusted, even though some of the inputs or participants cannot be. In that context he invented a lot of critical things to do with nuclear command and control, as well as related mathematics such as secret sharing and subliminal channels.

Gus came from a grindingly poor background in rural West Virginia and enlisted in the US army air force at the age of 18 to be a radar techician — and ended up a thought leader in cryptography with medals and honorary degrees. Among other things he was the Rothschild professor at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1966 when university cryptographers and security experts ran a Newton Institute program on computer security, cryptography and coding theory. All of which is by way of saying that, in a ferociously arcane field, Gus is a big deal.

Over three decades, though, he was quietly compiling a distinctive kind of memoir of his childhood in West Virginia. It takes the form of 30 stories, all of the kind that — as the grandson of a peasant farmer in early 20th-century rural Ireland — I recognise. They are the kind of compelling, quirky, amusing and occasionally shocking fireside tales that story-tellers in isolated rural villages used to tell before the age of radio and television. During the lockdown, Gus assembled them into a book which he self-published, sending a few copies to the distinguished cryptographers who are his peers and friends.

One of them — my friend and colleague Ross Anderson — persuaded Gus to release it as a pdf so that this remarkable piece of social history history could be more widely read and appreciated. It can be downloaded from Ross’s website here. I’ve been reading and really enjoying it. Here’s a sample that gives a good flavour of it:

It is not news that votes are bought and sold in West Virginia. It would be news if they weren’t. Anyone who has read The Dark Side of Camelot knows that in the 1960 democratic primary in West Virginia Bobby and Teddy Kennedy were handing out cash in large amounts well in advance of the election, which their brother Jack won easily.

How much of that cash trickled down to individual voters is anyone’s guess? The Kennedys bought elections wholesale. But anyone who grew up in West Virginia during the depression knew about buying elections retail.

A common sentiment in those days, at least on Frog’s Creek where I grew up, was; Whut’s the point in voting if you don’t get paid fur it. And lots of people got paid. Since times have changed so much, even in West Virginia, in the last seventy years, it is worth digressing to give the reader some insight into how voting was regarded and done in those days. The biggest surprise would be that not many women voted in West Virginia back then. Women’s suffrage had come into effect with the nineteenth amendment to the Constitution a decade and a half before, but almost all of the men and many of the women viewed voting as “men’s business”.

My mother voted, but then she had been a nurse before she met Pop, so she had seen more of the world than most of her contemporaries on Frog’s Creek where we lived. But even so, whoever got Pop’s vote got hers as well, since as they often said, there was no point in them voting if they just cancelled each other out. They would talk over who they were going to vote for in each position on the ticket—but it was always “two-for-one” so far as their voting was concerned.

But the main thing the reader needs to know to appreciate this story was that most families had fixed political allegiances that spanned generations. If someone’s daddy had been a Democrat, it was a matter of family pride and honor to vote the same way—and virtually everyone voted a straight ticket. Of course, that was necessary since roughly half of the adults in the community were totally illiterate so all they could do was to have someone show them where to put their X and vote a straight ticket.

The going rate for a straight ticket vote was two dollars cash and a pull of bottled in bond whiskey—a pull being what you could gulp in one large mouthful from a bottle. That may not seem like much to a modern reader, but you need to remember that the going rate for a day’s manual labor—hard labor—was one dollar and found; found being the midday meal; dinner as we called it then, the evening meal being supper. So, two dollars was the equivalent of getting paid for two days labor that you didn’t have to do and couldn’t get anyway. Almost all of the men drank; some a little, some a lot. Since the depression was hard on and cash money almost nonexistent, for the main part they drank moonshine…

If this sounds like your kind of thing, download the book, pour a glass of whisky, put another log on the fire and be transported to West Virginia long before any of us were born.

It’s not Cancel Culture, it’s Cancel Technology 

Social ostracism is as old as the hills. Social media is not.

Really perceptive essay by Noah Smith.

As anyone who either was alive before 2010 or has read a book about the period will remember, people got socially ostracized all the time before Twitter and Facebook and Google existed. The things they got ostracized for have changed over the years — maybe before it was cheating on your husband, or saying you didn’t believe in God, or being disabled, or being a communist, or whatever. Ostracism is a consistent feature of human societies, and relabeling it “Cancel Culture” is fine with me I suppose.

The really interesting question is whether ostracism has changed in important and substantial ways in the age of social media and the internet. Even if human nature doesn’t change over time (and I think the jury is still out on that one), the tools we have access to do change, and that allows society to reshape itself in new ways. (That’s what I mean when I semi-ironically call myself a “technological determinist”, by the way.)

What does the internet do? Lots of stuff, but the two things I want to focus on here are distribution and memory. The internet:

• allows a very very large number of strangers to see what you say and do, and

• keeps a record of most of the things you say and do online.

Terrific essay.

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