Learning the craft

Trainee gondolieri in Venice.

Quote of the Day

”Social media can be vainer and more vacuous than any newsletter, and it is distracting into the bargain. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, data scientist and author of Everybody Lies, points out the sharp distinction between Google searches and Facebook posts. A sentence in a Facebook post beginning “My husband is . .. ” will tend to continue with “the greatest” or “my best friend”. A Google search beginning “Is my husband . . . ” usually continues “gay” or “a jerk”. What we say proudly on Facebook is very different from what we whisper to Google.”

• Tim Harford

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Morten Lauridsen | O Magnum Mysterium | King’s College Choir | 2009

Link

One of the lovely thing about living in Cambridge is that one can go to Evensong in King’s on a winter’s afternoon and hear this kind of singing.

Long Read of the Day

He conceived of the Metaverse in the ’90s. He’s unimpressed with Mark Zuckerberg’s version.

Kara Swisher’s conversation with Neal Stephenson.

Transcript of a really fascinating exchange. It starts with the notion of a Metaverse (an idea that Stephenson launched many years ago in his dystopian novel Snow Crash) but rapidly gets on to discuss his new book, Termination Shock, which is about what happens when a super-rich billionaire decides to do something about global warming by effectively creating an artificial volcanic eruption (a giant sulphur gun).

Sample:

Swisher: First of all, what does “Termination Shock” mean to you? Explain it to people who have not read the book yet.

Stephenson: Sure. So there are a number of ideas kind of under the heading of so-called geoengineering, meaning technological interventions in climate to blunt the effects of having too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, basically. One of the kind of hypothetical drawbacks that’s been talked about is that if somebody were to begin intervening in the climate to hold down the temperature, and then they stopped, that it would create a so-called termination shock. Meaning that the climate would very suddenly snap back to kind of what it ought to be with unpredictable and kind of violent — presumably violent results. So “termination shock” is just a phrase that one hears sometimes when people are talking about geoengineering and climate change that I thought sounded cool.

Worth reading in full. Stephenson is an amazingly perceptive and imaginative writer. I’ve been following him ever since I first read his famous essay, “In the Beginning was the Command Line”, which is what convinced me that it was possible to write interestingly and elegantly about computers. If you’re tempted by it, book some time out: it’s 78 pages long and, IMHO, still wonderful.

Real-world data show that filters clean COVID-causing virus from air

An interesting Nature report of an experiment conducted in our local hospital:

Earlier experiments that tested air filters’ performance assessed their ability to remove inactive particles while operating in carefully controlled environments. As a result, “what was not known was how effective they would be in a real-world ward setting for clearing SARS-CoV-2”, says study co-author Vilas Navapurkar, an intensive-care unit (ICU) physician at Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, UK. Hospitals have turned to portable air filters as an attractive solution when their isolation facilities are full, Navapurkar says, but it’s important to know whether such filters are effective or whether they simply provide a false sense of security.

To determine how the filters stand up to real-world conditions, Navapurkar and his co-authors installed them in two fully occupied COVID-19 wards — a general ward and an ICU. The team chose high-efficiency particulate air (HEPA) filters, which blow air through a fine mesh that catches extremely small particles. The researchers collected air samples from the wards during a week when the air filters were switched on and two weeks when they were turned off.

In the general ward, the team found SARS-CoV-2 particles in the air when the filter was off but not when it was on. Surprisingly, the team didn’t find many viral particles in the air of the ICU ward, even when the filter there was off. The authors suggest several possible reasons for this, including slower viral replication at later stages of the disease3. As a result, the team says that measures to remove the virus from the air might be more important in general wards than in ICUs.

Looks like a really useful experiment which suggests that HEPA air cleaners provide a cheap and easy way to reduce risk from airborne pathogens.

Isn’t it funny, though, to think back to March 2020 when few were taking seriously the idea that Covid-19 was mostly transmitted by airborne aerosols rather than by droplet-infected surfaces? And even now, surface-disinfecting hygiene-theatre still goes on.

My commonplace booklet

Every Schubert Song, Ranked by Jeffrey Arlo Brown, after listening to 40 hours of lieder.

Heroic is the only word for it.

Link

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Sydney opera house as you’ve (probably) never seen it before

Quote of the Day

”The outlaw glamour that comes from being on the wrong side of the Zeitgeist is one of the quiet pleasures of ageing.”

• Janan Ganesh (writing about W.G. Seabald) in the FT, 11/12 December, 2021.

Yep.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

George Lewis | Burgundy Street Blues

Link

Long Read of the Day

David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Address

I’ve read this a few times before (and you can too — here).

But I’d never heard a recording of it, until now. Here’s the Link.

It’s 22 minutes long, but when you’ve heard it you might see why many of those graduating students in 2005 have never forgotten it.

Richard J. Evans on Tory ‘cancel culture’

Absolutely splendid dissection in the LRB by a distinguished historian of the current obsession of the Tory party to airbrush slavery out of the the Great British historical narrative.

Discovering and presenting to the public new knowledge about the English country house is an admirable way for the National Trust to deepen and broaden appreciation of the complex histories of the buildings in its care. But the project has attracted fierce criticism from Conservative politicians and journalists who clearly think it a subject best left in decent obscurity. In February, Marco Longhi, Tory MP for Dudley North, called for government funding to be withheld from such initiatives, run by people who ‘hate our history and seek to rewrite it’. The National Trust’s plans (as well as the National Maritime Museum’s scrutiny of Nelson’s involvement with slavery) were, Longhi alleged, ‘a form of Marxism applied to our cultural and heritage sector’ by people ‘who want to apply today’s standards to events and people of decades and hundreds of years ago’. It was entirely wrong, he said, to use taxpayers’ money ‘to effectively besmirch our heroes to suit their left-wing woke narrative’. In the Telegraph, Charles Moore complained that the National Trust had been ‘rolled over by extremists’, and Andrew Brigden, another Tory MP, that it had been ‘overtaken by divisive Black Lives Matter supporters’. The Telegraph, the Express and the Daily Mail all reported that displays at Jane Austen’s house in Chawton would carry out ‘historical interrogation’ of ‘Austen’s tea drinking’ and its links to slavery. This, the papers solemnly declared, was ‘woke madness’. In fact, Austen’s father was a trustee of an Antigua sugar plantation, worked by enslaved people. The museum responded: ‘We are increasingly asked questions about this by our visitors and it is therefore appropriate that we share the information and research that exists on Austen’s connections to slavery and its mention in her novels.’

One of those involved in Colonial Countryside is Corinne Fowler, a professor of postcolonial literature at Leicester University and co-author of a list of 93 National Trust properties built on money earned from plantations run by enslaved workers, or from slave ownership, or furnished with the lavish compensation paid to former slave owners after abolition. She feels that academics pursuing work like hers are being misrepresented, maligned and intimidated. ‘I think we should all be worried when academics are targeted in this way, when the evidence can’t be disputed.’

Evans points out that the National Trust’s director-general, Hilary McGrady, reported that complaints had only been received from 0.05 per cent of its 5.6 million members, and that a great many members had voiced their support of the Colonial Countryside project.

There was no ‘revolt’ of the membership, as had been claimed in parts of the right-wing media. A 2020 survey found that more than three-quarters of the trust’s members thought it should do more to educate visitors on its properties’ colonial connections. The resignation in October of the trust’s chairman, Tim Parker, widely hyped in the same places as a victory against ‘wokeness’, was coincidental (his two-term tenure had come to an end, having been extended for a year because of the pandemic).

It’s a great piece, worth reading in full.

Did Apple Really Embrace Right-to-Repair?

As the ‘Right-to-Repair’ movement gathers momentum, Apple — a long-term believer in not allowing owners of Apple kit to tinker with it — has started engaging in what one might call repair-washing. Last month, for example, it announced that it would make Apple parts, tools, and manuals — starting with iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 — available to individual consumers so that they can do their own repairs. This, it says,

will allow customers who are comfortable with completing their own repairs access to Apple genuine parts and tools. Available first for the iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 lineups, and soon to be followed by Mac computers featuring M1 chips, Self Service Repair will be available early next year in the US and expand to additional countries throughout 2022. Customers join more than 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers (AASPs) and 2,800 Independent Repair Providers who have access to these parts, tools, and manuals.

IEEE Spectrum, a publication of the leading engineering institution, had the good idea of interviewing Kyle Wiens, co-founder of iFixit (Which God Preserve, because I use it regularly) and a champion of the right to repair.

Why now? Is it because of the kind of lobbying you’ve been doing?

It’s clear that this is in response to pressure from lawmakers and the Federal Trade Commission, which has been investigating this. So there was pressure coming from all sides. They are trying to kind of get ahead of it.

Is it your sense that they’re genuinely trying to get repair parts into people’s hands at fair prices—that this represents a change in their philosophy. Or do you think they intend just to make repair parts available in theory so that they satisfy any future regulations?

I think it’s going be a little bit of both. But we’ll have to wait and see. After two decades of seeing them stymie repair options at every turn, I’ve got some skepticism. But they’re going to make the service manual available publicly. That’s a huge step. That’s exactly the right thing to do.

There is, however, a catch with the software that they’re saying they’re going to provide: They’re saying that you’re going to have to buy the part from Apple in order to use the software to “pair” the part.

Tell me about this pairing of parts that gets done in the Apple devices.

This is the totally new concept that Apple’s kind of inventing. It’s another way for them to keep control of things and it’s kind of novel. Imagine you had two coffee makers and you wanted to take the jar from one coffee maker and use it the other one, but you couldn’t, unless you have the manufacturer’s permission. Apple has been doing it with the major parts that you need to repair a phone. So that’s the battery, the screen, and the camera.

So I couldn’t take a battery out of a phone that I sat on and put it into a working phone of the identical model that has a weak battery?

That’s the idea. I can’t say that 100% the case. You still can do that right now, but you get warnings—basically the equivalent of a check-engine light. You have to have Apple’s blessing and permission to turn that off.

So this is a little bit like printer ink cartridges, where companies put a chip in the cartridge so that you couldn’t buy an aftermarket replacement cartridge.

It’s worse: It’s like saying if I have two identical printers, I can’t swap the cartridges between them, even if they’re both genuine cartridges. You can’t salvage parts in this regime. And this is what all of the recyclers do. They may use 10 broken phones to make three of them work.

Two steps forward, one step back. But these control-freak corporations (John Deere, we’re looking at you) are going to find this Right-to-Repair movement a bigger challenge than they anticipated.

My commonplace booklet

Elon Musk named Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ Link.

That’s interesting. Wonder if they read my Observer column about him.

Even more interesting: Time magazine is still going? Who knew?

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

In a topiarist’s garden

Quote of the Day

“If I don’t like the way the times are moving, I shall refuse to accompany them”

• John Mortimer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Vivaldi | Nulla in mundo pax sincera | Marie Lys

Link

13 blissful minutes before breakfast.

Long Read of the Day

Visualising the end of the American republic

In his book, How Democracy Ends, my colleague David Runciman makes the point that democracies don’t fail backwards (which is why, for example, analogies with the Weimar Republic or the Colonels’ coup in Greece are misleading.) If our democracies fail, they will fail forwards — which is why concerned citizens need imaginative vision to see where the danger comes from.

This sobering essay by George Packer argues that to fend off the threat by the Republican Party — which increasingly looks like now a subsidiary of the Trump organisation — US citizens will need to practice “envisioning the worst”. For example:

If the end comes, it will come through democracy itself. Here’s one way I imagine it could happen: In 2024, disputed election results in several states lead to tangled proceedings in courtrooms and legislatures. The Republican Party’s long campaign of undermining faith in elections leaves voters on both sides deeply skeptical of any outcome they don’t like. When the next president is finally chosen by the Supreme Court or Congress, half the country explodes in rage. Protests soon turn violent, and the crowds are met with lethal force by the state, while instigators firebomb government buildings. Neighborhoods organize self-defense groups, and law-enforcement officers take sides or go home. Predominantly red or blue counties turn on political minorities. A family with a Biden-Harris sign has to abandon home on a rural road and flee to the nearest town. A blue militia sacks Trump National Golf Club Bedminster; a red militia storms Oberlin College. The new president takes power in a state of siege.

Few people would choose this path. It’s the kind of calamity into which fragile societies stumble when their leaders are reckless, selfish, and shortsighted. But some Americans actually long for an armed showdown…

Do read it.

Elon Musk: Henry Ford 2.0?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Enormous wealth, like power, acts as an aphrodisiac that warps people’s perceptions of those who possess it: it’s as if they’re surrounded by a reality distortion field. Similar force fields have enveloped Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in their time and now it’s Musk’s turn. Because he’s uncommonly voluble on social media, especially on Twitter, where he has 65.7 million followers, his every utterance is assiduously parsed by besotted fans (all of whom call him “Elon”, as if he were a buddy of theirs). This gives him an influence way beyond that of any other corporate executive, influence that, on some occasions, even affects global financial markets through what the normally sober Financial Times calls the “Tesla-financial complex”. A closer examination of his Twitter feed, though, yields an impression of a really complex individual: a baffling combination of formidable intelligence and ungovernability – part visionary, part genius, part fruitcake and part exploiter of tax loopholes and public subsidies. And it raises the question: what (or where) is the real Elon Musk?

The answer, I suspect, lies in his mastery of the business of manufacturing complex products…

Read on

Finding time to write

A nice impressionistic piece about the day jobs that some writers have.

Here’s the construction worker on when he writes:

On breaks I write first drafts on my cellphone with my thumbs—sitting in the work truck or in the machine shop. At the end of the day when everybody else is fighting to get out of the parking lot, I write for twenty more minutes. It adds up. When I get home, I edit that day’s work on a laptop or retype it on my typewriter. Later I retype that back into the laptop again and then send it somewhere.

Makes me feel guilty if I have writer’s block, sitting in a comfortable, book-lined study.

What is Trump really worth?

Nice column by Jack Shafer:

What is Donald Trump really worth to a business?

He’s known for making lavish claims about what his “brand” is worth. Others have punctured his estimates as wildly inflated, especially since the reputational hits he took at the end of his presidency. But now we have a new kind of answer, thanks to investors. The Trump aura alone — at least to a media startup — appears to be worth a neat $1 billion.

That’s how much secret financiers are investing in Trump’s newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group, which is going public by merging with a shell company called Digital World Acquisition. TMTG, as Bloomberg Opinion’s Timothy L. O’Brien and Matt Levine explain, has no products, no revenue, no cash flow, no known intellectual property, no big names attached and no “clear business plan,” only a wispy promise to build a new social media network (Truth Social) to take on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon and other tech companies.

And yet the company has excited traders enough to boost its current market value to more than $2 billion. You might think that this means the Trump brand is actually worth $2 billion, but you’d be wrong: The speculative run-up of the stock is a reaction to the $1 billion the Trump brand attracted, not to the Trump brand alone.

The company’s CEO is a guy called Nunes — a soon-to-retire Republican member of Congress who has degrees in agriculture science and lots of experience running his family’s dairy farm, but no tech background. How’s that for the CEO of a ‘media’ company! Somehow, I don’t think that the Fox News crowd are all that worried.

The key question — as Shafer says — is who’s put up the money. Who are these ‘investors’? The Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund? Some Russian oligarchs? The Koch brothers? Since Trump will run for president in 2024 it’ll be important to know who will have him on the hook. And for what?

It could be, of course, that said ‘investors’ have simply been had: that their investments will really just fund Trump’s debts and campaign costs for 2024.

My commonplace booklet

• Byline TV looks interesting.

• Pondering the current obsession with the ’metaverse’ idea I was suddenly reminded of a quote by Douglas Adams (of blessed memory): “There’s a set of rules that anything that was in the world when you were born is normal and natural. Anything invented between when you were 15 and 35 is new and revolutionary and exciting, and you’ll probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.” (Thanks to Quentin for reminding me.)

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!

Ike and LBJ

I love this picture.

Quote of the Day

”More knowledge of a man’s real character can be gained by a short conversation with one of his servants than from a formal and studied narrative, begun with his pedigree and ended with his funeral.”

• Samuel Johnson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Diana Krall | Christmas Time Is Here

Link

On balance, I thought it might be a good idea to play this before Christmas is cancelled again!

Long Read of the Day

What Google’s trending searches say about America in 2021

One of the most sobering books I’ve read is Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s Everybody Lies: What the Internet can tell us about who we really are. He’s a data scientist who worked for a time at Google, where he learned that people’s Internet searches reveal things about them that they would never, ever entrust to another human being.

Which explains why at this time of the year there’s a good deal of interest in trying to extract meaning from records of what people have searched for most in the preceding twelve months. This piece on Vox by Rani Molla is the first compendium I’ve seen so far.

Each year, Google puts out lists of top trending searches in the United States, giving readers a tantalizing view into America’s collective id.

Rather than simply show what people searched for the most, these lists highlight the words and phrases people are searching for this year that they weren’t the year before. In effect, these searches speak to our latest fears, desires, and questions — the things we were too embarrassed to ask anyone but Google.

As Google data editor Simon Rogers put it to me last year, “You’re never as honest as you are with your search engine. You get a sense of what people genuinely care about and genuinely want to know — and not just how they’re presenting themselves to the rest of the world.”

The lists are, as you’d expect, all over the place, but Molla notes a few common themes that rose to the top, “offering a glimpse of what it was really like to be an American in 2021”.

Do read the whole thing.

Wikipedia (contd.)

My mini-rant about Wikipedia yesterday has sparked several interesting emails, for which many thanks. They prompted me to reflect on why I value it so much, and why I think it’s such an amazing phenomenon.

Two thinkers set me off on this track, many years ago. One was James Boyle, a great legal scholar who gave a lecture at my invitation in Cambridge on the significance of the public domain in a networked world. (James was one of the founders of Creative Commons, and his 2009 book —  The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind — is a masterful survey of the enclosure of the digital commons.) In his Cambridge lecture, he highlighted the improbability of a project like Wikipedia getting off the ground and prospering. Crudely paraphrased, his thought-experiment went roughly like this: “What, you mean anyone can write and edit entries? Anyone????? C’mon, give me a break”. This was the origin of the old joke about the project: that Wikipedia works really well in practice, just not in theory.

The second wake-up call (for me) came from Jonathan Zittrain’s book (also published in 2009), The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It. One of the most striking things about the book was the amount of attention he paid to the governance structures of Wikipedia — in particular the elaborate process of discussion that goes into editing entries, resolving arguments, the fact that the revision history of every entry is publicly available etc. Why did these people — all unpaid volunteers — create such an elaborate structure?

The answer of course is that they somehow intuited that we would be moving into the polarised world we now inhabit — where lies, propaganda, misinformation, etc. would become rife, and where people felt entitled not only to their own opinions but also their own facts. And in fact, if anyone’s interested in knowing how best to work within this social-media-fuelled maelstrom, then the Wikipedia methodology provides a useful way through it.

The big thing about Wikipedia, though, is that it’s the only surviving illustration of how the early promise of the Internet — that it could harness the collective IQ of humankind — might be realised. As I write, it’s the seventh most-visited site on the Web and the only non-commercial site in the top 100. In other words, it’s one of the wonders of our networked world.

Apple’s sweetheart deal with the Chinese state

An interesting story that broke in The Information this week says that Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, signed a secret $275 billion deal with China in 2016 to neutralise threats that would have hobbled its devices and services in the country.

According to the Guardian’s report,

The five-year agreement was made when Cook paid visits to China in 2016 to quash a host of regulatory action against the company, the report said, citing interviews and internal Apple documents.

Cook lobbied Chinese officials, who believed the company was not contributing enough to the local economy, and signed the agreement with a Chinese government agency, making concessions to Beijing and winning important legal exemptions, the report added.

Some of Apple’s investment in China would go toward building new retail stores, research and development centers and renewable energy projects, the report said, citing the agreement.

The most interesting revelation, though, was this:

“Outside of the deal, Apple made other concessions with the Chinese government to keep business running. By early 2015, China’s State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping had directed Apple Maps to make the Diaoyu Islands, or Senkaku Islands, which China and Japan both claim to own, look big even when zoomed out; regulators said they’d refuse to approve the Apple Watch if Apple didn’t comply, according to internal documents viewed by The Information.”

When you sup with the Devil, best to use a long spoon. And don’t navigate using Apple Maps when travelling in that part of the globe?

I wonder what effect, if any, these revelations will have on the sainted Cook’s reputation.

My commonplace booklet

How to read canonical literature

Tyler Cowen is one of the most omnivorous readers I’ve come across. Someone asked him how he does it. Here’s the gist of his answer:

1. Assume from the beginning that you will need to read the work more than once, or at least read significant portions of the work more than once. Furthermore, these multiple readings should be done back-to-back (and also over many years, btw, after all this is the canonical). So your first reading should not in every way be super-careful, as you don’t yet know what to look for. Treat the first reading as a warm-up for the second reading to follow.

2. The first fifty pages very often should be read twice, in a single sitting if possible, even on your “first reading.”

3. Assemble three to five guides to the main book you are reading, or significant fairly general contributions to the secondary literature. Consult those works throughout, and imbibe an especially large dose of them between your first and second readings of the classic itself. But you shouldn’t necessarily read those books straight through, or finish them. They are to be pillaged for both conceptual structure and particular insights, not to be reified as books in their own right.

4. Always be asking yourself how the classic work you are reading is engaging with other classic works you might know or know of. Starting with the Bible, but not ending there.

5. Find people to talk to about the book.

He missed out the sixth and most important rule: arrange for the day to be redefined as 36 hours. Oh – and give up on sleep: it’s a waste of valuable reading time.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

Quote of the Day

“Mark Twain and I are in very much the same position. We have to put things in such a way as to make people, who would otherwise hang us, believe that we are joking.”

• George Bernard Shaw

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Sharon Shannon | Blackbird

Link

A phenomenal musician who lights up every venue she plays.

Long Read of the Day

Lina Khan’s Battle to Rein in Big Tech

Classic New Yorker profile by Sheelah Kolhatkar of one of the most interesting young women in America, who is now Chair of the FTC. If you don’t know about Khan, then this is a good place to start.

After years spent publishing research about how a more just world could be achieved through a sweeping reimagining of anti-monopoly laws, Khan now has a much more difficult task: testing her theories—in an arena of lobbyists, partisan division, and the federal court system—as one of the most powerful regulators of American business. “There’s no doubt that the latitude one has as a scholar, critiquing certain approaches, is very different from being in the position of actually executing,” Khan told me. But she added that she intends to steer the agency to choose consequential cases, with less emphasis on the outcomes, and to generally be more proactive. “Even in cases where you’re not going to have a slam-dunk theory or a slam-dunk case, or there’s risk involved, what do you do?” she said. “Do you turn away? Or do you think that these are moments when we need to stand strong and move forward? I think for those types of questions we’re certainly at a moment where we take the latter path.

“There’s a growing recognition that the way our economy has been structured has not always been to serve people,” Khan went on. “Frankly, I think this is a generational issue as well.” She noted that coming of age during the financial crisis had helped people understand that the way the economy functions is not just the result of metaphysical forces. “It’s very concrete policy and legal choices that are made, that determine these outcomes,” she said. “This is a really historic moment, and we’re trying to do everything we can to meet it.”

The inner lives of cats: what our feline friends really think about hugs, happiness and humans

Nice piece by Sirin Kale on a question that perplexes most cat-owners: what does their pet think of them? (My own answer: not much.)

Despite the fact that cats are the most common pet in UK households after dogs, we know relatively little about them. This, says Dr Carlo Siracusa of the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, “is partly due to practical problems.”

Dogs are easy to study: you can take them to a lab and they will be content. But cats are intensely territorial creatures. “The behaviour of a cat is so modified by its environment that if you move it to a laboratory,” says Siracusa, “what you’ll see is not really reflective of what the normal behaviour of the cat is.”

But there is another reason that cats are under-researched. “There’s a stigma,” says Siracusa. Cats have been unfairly maligned through much of human history. In the middle ages, cats were thought of as the companions of witches, and sometimes tortured and burned. “They have been stigmatised as evil because they are thought to be amoral,” says the philosopher and writer John Gray, author of Feline Philosophy: Cats and the Meaning of Life. “Which in a sense, cats are – they just want to follow their own nature.”

Thanks to Rob for spotting it.

Footnote: John Gray’s book on the subject of cats is lovely, btw. It opens with a story about a philosopher friend who believed that he had trained his cat to be a vegan. (He omitted to notice that his cat went out every night.)

This philosopher, Gray writes,

only showed how silly philosophers can be. Rather than trying to teach his cat, he would have been wiser if he had tried learning from it. Humans cannot become cats. Yet if they set aside any notion of being superior beings, they may come to understand how cats can thrive without anxiously inquiring how to live.”

Amen.

Chart of the Day

Useful way of thinking about a topic that is usually smothered in vagueness (not to say vacuity). It comes from a new report by the Reuters Institute looking at the trade-offs news organisations navigate when trying to increase trust in news. It’s the fourth instalment from the Institute’s ‘Trust in News’ Project and is based on our conversations with 54 journalists and newsroom managers in Brazil, India, the UK and the US.

It’s an interesting and worrying report — worth reading in full if you work in media. The nub of the problem, unsurprisingly, is that in an industry which is fighting for its life (in the sense of economic viability) ‘trust’ or trustworthiness may come down the list of priorities.

Here are some of the authors’ reflections on what they found.

What we find here is nuanced. On the one hand, these conversations reveal a great deal of pessimism and concern about the impact of external forces on news organisations’ abilities to forge trusting relationships with their audiences. Most focused on what they see as the highly corrosive impact of negative criticism on digital platforms, which they increasingly depend on to broaden their reach, but which also serve to amplify bad-faith criticism about independent reporting and the institution of journalism more generally. Many also expressed grave concern about the level of vitriol and toxicity in these spaces, some of it egged on by political leaders with their own reasons for antagonising the press.

Some of these concerns are well-supported by academic research, especially the important role played by elite cues, polarisation, and the distance audiences may feel from the professional practices of journalism. Others centre on very real risks that have yet to be the subject of much academic investigation. However, it is important to recognise that while many journalists may feel relatively powerless to move the needle on trust (and much academic research suggests external factors are more important for trust in news than the things individual journalists or news organisations have control over), much of the public sees journalism and news media as powerful institutions (see, for example, Palmer 2017) and are unlikely to accept that the root of the problem lies elsewhere, or that they have few options at their disposal. Thus, giving up on building trust may look like a lack of real interest in the issue.

Supporting Wikipedia

I use Wikipedia a lot, and always have. And I donate to it regularly. If, like me, you write newspaper columns, a link to the relevant Wikipedia entry often frees one from having to break the narrative by pausing to explain something in detail. Regular financial donations are a way of expressing my appreciation for using it as a resource.

In the early days, though, some people — especially academics — were very sniffy about it. I remember an occasion when the Vice-Chancellor of an ancient university made a dismissive comment about Wikipedia and then was astonished to find a very distinguished Fellow of the Royal Society interrupting her to say that the Wikipedia pages on his arcane speciality were the most accurate and up to date reference on the subject. Why? Because he had written them. Result: one very embarrassed Vice-Chancellor.

As time went on, I noticed that people tended to have two kinds of views about it — (a) dismissive because they had found a glaring error in a page; or (b) gushing with praise. I developed a strategy for dealing with both types.

For (a), the dialogue would go something like this.

Me: “So you’ve found a glaring error on a subject you know about?”

Critic: “Yes. Elementary mistake”.

Me: “So why haven’t you corrected it?”

Critic: Flustered (sometimes), irritated (often), defensive (much too busy)

For (b), things were generally simpler.

Me: “I’m glad you think highly of Wikipedia”.

Gusher: “Yes, it’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

Me: “So when did you last make a donation to ensure that it keeps going?”

Gusher: Er…

Correction

The link to Colin Dickey’s essay on Mrs Galloway the other day was faulty. The correct link is: https://lithub.com/the-work-of-living-goes-on-rereading-mrs-dalloway-during-an-endless-pandemic/

Apologies for the error.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

Vanishing point

An EV year

We picked up our Tesla 12 months ago today. Before that we’d had a series of Toyota Prius hybrids, which were terrific, ultra-reliable cars, so this was our first fully electric vehicle. It’s been an interesting experience.

Some reflections on the year.

• The biggest disadvantage of owning a Tesla is that people immediately hold one responsible for Elon Musk, the founder of the company, who is three-parts genius and one part fruitcake.

• It was ironic having a new car without being able to go anywhere serious in it! So in the first year we were able to go on only three longish trips. And because we cycle to work, we haven’t used it to commute. That’s lockdown for you.

• It’s lovely to drive — and I say that as someone who has been a serious petrolhead in my time. In the 1970s I had a 3.8-litre Mk 2 Jaguar, for example, when that was a pretty serious indulgence. (The Yom Kippur war in 1973 and the consequent quadrupling of the oil price ended that particular love-affair.) The Tesla Model 3 is as agile, responsive and sure-footed as any of the fancy ICE cars I’ve driven in my time. And it’s fast — as quick as even conventional Porsche 911s: zero to 60 in 3.1 seconds. Not that you’d ever want to do that in real life.

• It has all-wheel drive and good traction control, which turned out to be very useful driving through snowstorms in Yorkshire just over a week ago.

• Two ways of looking at it.

1: it’s basically software with wheels. Regular software updates (at near-weekly intervals) just like an iPhone. Mostly they bring bug fixes or minor changes. But sometimes big changes are software driven — for example the acceleration boost that our model has came via software, not through mechanics with spanners.

2: It’s really just a big skateboard with wheels at the four corners. The board is the battery.

• If you’re lucky enough to have a driveway and are therefore able to install a home-charger then ‘range anxiety’ mostly fades away. That’s no consolation to urbanites, though.

• From talking to other EV owners, I get the feeling that once you’ve owned an electric vehicle you’ll never want to go back to ICE. (And of course eventually you won’t have that option anyway, so perhaps it makes sense to jump before you’re pushed.)

Quote of the Day

””When one burns one’s bridges, what a very nice fire it makes”

• Dylan Thomas

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder & David Lindley | The Promised Land | April1994 | Fillmore Auditorium

Link

Wonderful!

Long Read of the Day

Why Humans Aren’t the Worst (Despite, Well, Everything Happening in the World) The journalist and historian Rutger Bregman makes a case for the “collective brilliance” of humanity.

Transcript of a podcast interview with Kara Swisher.

I can never figure Bregman out. Occasionally he reminds me of the Monty Python guys singing “Always look on the bright side of life”. At other times he seems good at seeing through conventional wisdom that’s actually baloney. This interview with Kara Swisher is good largely because she keeps probing him. Here’s a sample segment:

Swisher: So one of the things we’ve been talking about is self-interest. And I want you to address the downright brutality in human history. We have to talk, obviously, about the Holocaust. It’s hard to look at that and think humans are decent. Why doesn’t this disprove your argument?

Bregman: What I wanted to do at first was to show that veneer theory, this notion that we are evil or we do evil things because we are evil, is way too simplistic or just basically wrong. But then you’re still left with the question, why do we engage in warfare and ethnic cleansing and all these kinds of horrible things? So the honest answer is that you have to start building up a very layered explanation with a lot of different ingredients. I look at the role of German soldiers during the Second World War. In 1944 and 1945, many Allied psychologists couldn’t understand why these soldiers were still fighting at the end of the war, when it was clear they were going to lose. And they assumed at first that these soldiers must be brainwashed or something like that, must be highly fanatical Nazis. But it turns out that actually what was driving them most of the time was Kameradschaft, comradeship, loyalty for their friends. And the German Army Command, they knew this. So they deliberately tried to keep friends together as much as possible during the course of the war, because they knew then they would be much more effective fighters. Now, I’m not saying this to — how do you say that — condone anything. I’m just trying to use it as an explanation.

Anyway, it makes for a good read.

How TikTok keeps people hooked

With a billion users, TikTok is now the most successful smartphone app in the world.

The NYT’s Ben Smith has seen a document describing the algorithmic approach that keeps TikTokers hooked.

The document explains frankly that in the pursuit of the company’s “ultimate goal” of adding daily active users, it has chosen to optimize for two closely related metrics in the stream of videos it serves: “retention” — that is, whether a user comes back — and “time spent.” The app wants to keep you there as long as possible. The experience is sometimes described as an addiction, though it also recalls a frequent criticism of pop culture. The playwright David Mamet, writing scornfully in 1998 about “pseudoart,” observed that “people are drawn to summer movies because they are not satisfying, and so they offer opportunities to repeat the compulsion.”

“This system means that watch time is key. The algorithm tries to get people addicted rather than giving them what they really want,” said Guillaume Chaslot, the founder of Algo Transparency, a group based in Paris that has studied YouTube’s recommendation system and takes a dark view of the effect of the product on children, in particular. Mr. Chaslot reviewed the TikTok document at my request.

According to Smith the formula the apple recommendation engine runs on is:

Plike x Vlike + Pcomment x Vcomment + Eplaytime x Vplaytime + Pplay x Vplay

Which implies that a prediction driven by machine learning and actual user behaviour are summed up for each of three bits of data: likes, comments and playtime, as well as an indication that the video has been played.

Interesting but not necessarily a scoop. I bet the formula that drives YouTube’s recommendation algorithm is rather similar.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

Christmas in Toryland

The annual Cold War Steve charity Xmas cards have arrived !!! Pack of 5 cards (A5 size) for £10 – 100% of profit is going to @RefugeeAction

Link

Quote of the Day

”We all get our closing parentheses. I’ve gone longer without closing mine than Kim did before closing his. That also makes me sad, not that I’m in a hurry. Being old means knowing you’re in the exit line, but okay with others cutting in. I just wish this time it wasn’t Kim. Britt Blaser says life is like a loaf of bread. It’s one loaf no matter how many slices are in it. Some people get a few slices, others many. For the sake of us all, I wish Kim had more.”

• Doc Searls, in a nice tribute to his friend Kim Cameron

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ghiribizzi | MS 43: No. 40 in A Major: Andante

Link

Think of it as like a delicious starter for the day.

Long Read of the Day

How to Fix Social media

I know, I know — the Web is full of putative answers to this question. But this essay is a bit different because it’s by Nicholas Carr, who for years has been one of the most thoughtful and provocative writers on tech. What I particularly like about the piece is that — unlike other commentaries — it isn’t overwhelmed by the supposed exceptionalism of our present moment.

It’s a mistake … to assume that technological changes, even profound ones, render history irrelevant. The arrival of broadcast media at the start of the last century set off an information revolution just as tumultuous as the one we are going through today, and the way legislators, judges, and the public responded to the earlier upheaval can illuminate our current situation. Particularly pertinent are the distinctions between different forms of communication that informed the Supreme Court’s decision in the Carlin case — and that had guided legal and regulatory policy-making throughout the formative years of the mass media era. Digitization has blurred those distinctions at a technical level — all forms of communication can now be transmitted through a single computer network — but it has not erased them.

By once again making such distinctions, particularly between personal speech and public speech, we have an opportunity to break out of our current ideological bind and create a democratic framework for governing social media that is consistent with the country’s values and traditions.

It’s long, but historically informed and comes up with an interesting idea towards the end. Worth your time.

Anatomy of a cancellation, and its withdrawal.

Or: “Jordan Peterson and the Lobster”

Nice Economist piece about how to manage an appearance by a controversial speaker on a university campus.

To culture wars, it is worth considering what happened between Jordan Peterson and a large red lobster in Cambridge University on a recent evening. Namely, nothing. Which doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. On the contrary: how it came to pass that nothing was allowed to happen between Mr Peterson and a student dressed as a lobster matters a lot.

It’s a great story. Peterson appeared, gave a talk, went away. The sky didn’t fall in. And a vote to thanks to the lobster was passed.

My commonplace booklet

 The Work of Living Goes On: Rereading Mrs Dalloway During an Endless Pandemic

A lovely essay by Colin Dickey on the dystopian undercurrents in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the echoes he sees in our attempts to ‘move on’ from the pandemic.

And yet, the work of living goes on—doggedly, at times obscenely. We have not yet even begun to face the task of what we owe the dead, and we are nonetheless still faced with the question of what we owe the still living. There are birthday parties to plan, quarterly reports due, new books to read, new friends to make. Our faces are still turned toward the past, fixedly contemplating the single catastrophe of the past two years, wreckage upon wreckage, still wanting to wake the dead and make whole what’s been smashed, even as the storm called Progress propels us into the future.

Few books capture this moment like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, a novel obsessed with the question of how moving on can be possible. How can anyone have a party in the wake of the flood? It is a question the novel takes both rhetorically—how dare anyone have a party in such a time—and literally: how might it be possible to do such a thing? It is a novel about a broken, hobbled England, unable to face the wreckage of war and influenza and the death throes of its own empire, where nonetheless the work of the living persists, where, as the character Peter Walsh observes, “life had a way of adding day to day.”

It made my day, anyway.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

A morning view

Imagine opening the curtains in your hotel room one morning and seeing this scene.

Well, we did, just over a week ago. And it made me vow to return to Yorkshire in the Spring.

Quote of the Day

”A distributor of short messages.”

• The Economist’s succinct description of Twitter.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Aaron Copland | Simple Gifts

Link

Yeah, well it is nearly Christmas, after all.

Long Read of the Day

What Can the Metaverse Learn From Second Life?

An IEEE Spectrum interview with Philip Rosedale, a virtual-reality pioneer who was the chief architect of Second Life until he left in 2009.

Sample:

It’s interesting to note that Second Life is, in my opinion, still the largest and the closest thing to a metaverse that we have as it relates to grown-ups. The environments that are used by kids, such as Roblox, are very interesting as well but very different in terms of what they offer. If you talk about people wanting to go to a live concert, or wanting to go shopping or something like that, I think Second Life is still US $650 million a year in transactions and a million people using it. But Second Life didn’t grow beyond about a million people. It’s been growing more with COVID, but as you say, it didn’t break out, it didn’t become a billion people. And the hope that Facebook has is that there’ll be a billion people using a metaverse.

Sensible throughout. Especially this sentence: “Any single-company, advertising-based, attention-based strategy for building virtual spaces would potentially be extremely damaging to people”. Which, of course, is exactly what Facebook has in mind.

Does the Twitter CEO’s departure signal a platform identity crisis?

Yesterday’s Observer column:

So Jack Dorsey has stepped down as the CEO of Twitter. This means that the company has had four CEOs in its 15 years of existence, with Dorsey occupying the role twice, but in all that time it’s had only one business model, which may largely explain his departure.

There are interesting parallels between Dorsey’s relationship with the company he co-founded and Steve Jobs’s with Apple, for both were ousted at one stage by their board colleagues and were then brought back to rescue said colleagues from their incompetence.

And the parallels don’t stop there. During their sojourns in the wilderness, both men founded successful new companies, in Dorsey’s case the payments firm Square, in Jobs’s case the computer firm NeXT Inc, after which he went on to transform the Lucasfilm graphics company into Pixar. For both men, these were profitable periods of exile: Square is now valued at $100bn; Jobs sold Pixar to Disney for $7.4bn and got a seat on the Disney board. Which only goes to show that sometimes being fired is the best thing that can happen to a visionary.

Do read the whole thing.

So who polices Interpol?

From this week’s Economist…

Matthew hedges, a British doctoral student, says he spent nearly seven months mostly in solitary confinement in a prison in the United Arab Emirates (uae). He tells of being drugged, interrogated, blindfolded and forced to stand all day in manacles. He falsely confessed to being a spy just to end the agony, he says. He was eventually pardoned and freed. To his horror, the man he accuses of complicity in his torture, Ahmed Naser al-Raisi, the inspector-general of the uae interior ministry at the time, who was in charge of prisons, was neither sacked nor demoted. The uae denies the claims and on November 25th Mr al-Raisi was elected Interpol’s new president.

Interpol was set up to help countries’ police forces work together to catch crooks. It has an unfortunate habit of employing them instead. Jackie Selebi, its president from 2004 to 2008, was later sentenced to 15 years in jail for corruption in his native South Africa. Meng Hongwei, the boss from 2016 to 2018, was summoned back to China, disappeared, reappeared in the dock and got 13-and-a-half years for bribery. (His wife says he was framed.) A cynic might ask: whose side is Interpol on?

It’s not just cynics who ask that question.

What if the All England Club had been in charge?

John Lanchester has a characteristically brilliant review essay in The London Review of Books on five books about the Covid crisis, which I hope is not behind the magazine’s paywall. Among other things, it’s an excoriating account of the ignorance, incompetence, indolence and corruption of Boris Johnson’s government, but it starts with an interesting thought-experiment. Here’s how it goes…

The weird world – Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic – has responded poorly to Covid, and part of the reason is that the weird world had been existing at a distance from this central reality of human history. As Adam Tooze points out in his brilliant book Shutdown, 91 per cent of deaths in the contemporary West are from noncommunicable diseases like cancers and strokes and heart attacks, many of them illnesses associated with modern lifestyles. The equivalent figure in sub-Saharan Africa is 34 per cent. We have a generation of leaders in the West who have no visceral understanding of the risks posed by infectious illness. In addition, as David Runciman has pointed out, politicians and government don’t get credit for the disasters and failures they prevent. The combination of these two factors – generational obliviousness and the bias away from the good governance of prevention – goes a long way to explaining why the UK government, despite having had the possibility of pandemic at the top of its risk register since that register was instituted in 2008, was so woefully unprepared for an event it was its job to predict and either prevent or mitigate.

The story of the UK is not the whole story of the global pandemic, but it is worth taking a moment to look at the local specifics. We could take as a benchmark the All England Club, which manages Wimbledon. In 2003, having learned from the experience of Sars, Wimbledon began paying around £1.5 million a year to insure against the cost of a pandemic. As a result, when Covid hit, the club trousered cheques totalling £174 million to cover the cost of the cancelled 2020 tournament. That is what competent governance looks like. What would the UK response have looked like if the All England Club had been in charge? What would the Wimbledon number – the death toll assuming competent government – have been?

My commonplace booklet

Two things:

• Bell Pepper Time Lapse: From Seed to Fruit in 115 Days. Fascinating video

• 52 things Tom Whitwell learned in 2021 Link

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already! 

The first Webmaster

I was sorting through a batch of old photographs the other day and came on this picture of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, at a Royal Society symposium we both attended a few years ago.

Quote of the Day

“The cat which isn’t let out of the bag often becomes a skeleton in the cupboard.”

• Geoffrey Madan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Nun danket alle Gott | BWV 192*

Link

A cantata written for Trinity Sunday in 1730. The words (translation: “Now thank we all our God”) are taken from a hymn written by Martin Rinkart a century earlier.

Long Read of the Day

How clothing and climate change kickstarted agriculture

An intriguing Aeon Essay by Ian Gilligan, a prehistorian at the University of Sydney and the author of Climate, Clothing, and Agriculture in Prehistory: Linking Evidence, Causes, and Effects.

(With thanks to Andrew Curry, who spotted it first and wrote a nice commentary on it.)

We talk a lot about “Artificial Intelligence”. Shouldn’t we also talk about AS — Artificial Stupidity?

Here’s a transcript of an interaction between a real human being and the Boston Globe‘s ‘Globot’. The human is trying to cancel her subscription.

\ 9:51 am today (Trying to end the chat…)

No that’s it, thanks Sorry, I don’t understand that. I’m still learning, with your help! Try me again with different words?

Nothing more, thank you Sorry, I don’t understand that. I’m still learning, with your help! Try me again with different words?

All done Sorry, I don’t understand that. I’m still learning, with your help! Try me again with different words?

Nothing else for now I’ll put you in touch with our live chat support team (please note our chat hours of operation are 8:00 am – 5:00 pm from Monday to Friday, and 8:00 am to 12:00 pm from Saturday to Sunday). What can the team help you with today?

Bollocks I’m sorry our chat agents are not available right now. I can pass along your message to our Support team and they will get back to you by email. Please describe your problem in one message.

Please just cancel my subscription and remove my contact details from your records. Thanks Your information has been sent to our team. They will get back to you within 24 hours. Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

I think that’s it, for now. Thanks Sorry, I don’t understand that. I’m still learning, with your help! Try me again with different words?

I don’t need any more help If you’d like the Boston Globe to no longer contact you with marketing offers, please contact support by clicking the button below. Please include the phone number or address to be excluded when you contact us. It may take up to two weeks for your information to be fully removed from our records. You’ll still hear from us about transactional, account-related issues though! Was this helpful?

Bye Bye! With advanced notice, we can temporarily suspend home delivery while you’re away. You can do this online by clicking the link below and logging in using your BostonGlobe.com credentials: Vacation Stop  In most cases, this will take effect within two days or less from the request date (depending on your delivery area).

Good bye. Have a lovely day. No more help needed. Thanks With advanced notice, we can temporarily suspend home delivery while you’re away. You can do this online by clicking the link below and logging in using your BostonGlobe.com credentials: Vacation Stop In most cases, this will take effect within two days or less from the request date (depending on your delivery area).

Is there any way to make you stop pestering me, please? Sorry I wasn’t helpful Try me again with different words?

No thanks Sorry, I don’t understand that. I’m still learning, with your help! Try me again with different words?

\

“Finally”, my source writes, “though it goes against every rule of good manners I was ever taught, I hit ‘end chat’. Then I see the globot is ‘powered by Ada’. She’d be cursing from the grave…”.

She would.

Nicole Perlroth wins FT /McKinsey prize

From the Financial Times:

Nicole Perlroth’s sobering investigation into the cyber weapons arms race, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, has been named Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year for 2021.

The judges lauded Perlroth’s unprecedented in-depth analysis, which they said had opened their eyes to the potential for a cyber catastrophe.

Roula Khalaf, FT editor and chair of judges, said: “Cyber security isn’t featuring highly enough on CEOs’ agenda. I hope this award will prompt them to read this book and pay attention.”

If it took this book to ‘open’ the judges’ eyes to the risks of cyber catastrophe, one can only wonder which planet they have been vacationing on this past year.

My commonplace booklet

• If you think that the ‘selfie’ is a modern invention, then check out this lovely set of goofy 18th-Century self-portraits by the painter Joseph Ducreux. Nothing new under the sun and all that. (via Jason Kottke)
• Richard Moore, the new Head of MI6 gave his first broadcast interview to the BBC the other day. Gordon Carera, the BBC’s Security Correspondent had an interesting snippet about the interview: “Mr Moore also revealed the significance of the green ink used by those in his role – which came from a tradition started by Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the first head of MI6, or ‘C’. He said the green ink means those working in the service know any directive has been signed by him. ‘The same is true of my typescript on my computer,’ he added.” That’s interesting because anyone who’s worked in pre-Internet journalism knows that letters to the Editor that were written in green ink invariably came from nutters.

This Blog is also available as a daily email. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!