Set in stone

A small rock, picked up on the beach on the North Norfolk coast the other day. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know its history.

Quote of the Day

”The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.”

• Alfred Hitchcock

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Tommy Emmanuel and Igor Presnyakov | Eric Clapton’s Tears In Heaven

Link

Long Read of the Day

Why Hungary?

Or, more accurately, why has the American Right become so keen on Hungary as a model for what they’d like to do to the US?

This terrific post on Heather Cox Richardson’s blog explains.

On paper, Hungary is a democracy in that it still holds elections, but it is, in fact, a one-party state overseen by one man.

Orbán has been open about his determination to overthrow the concept of western democracy, replacing it with what he has, on different occasions, called “illiberal democracy,” or “Christian democracy.” He wants to replace the multiculturalism at the heart of democracy with Christian culture, stop the immigration that he believes undermines Hungarian culture, and reject “adaptable family models” with “the Christian family model.”

Hungary is in the news in the United States because Americans on the right have long admired Orbán’s nationalism and centering of Christianity, while the fact that Hungary continues to hold elections enables them to pretend that the country remains a democracy.

In 2019, Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson endorsed Hungary’s anti-abortion and anti-immigration policies; in that year, according to investigative researcher Anna Massoglia of Open Secrets, Hungary paid a D.C. lobbying firm $265,000, in part to arrange an interview on Carlson’s show. Recently, former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, where he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court. Further indicating the drift of today’s right wing, the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest.

The US is turning into a basket-case. The mid-term elections will tell us if the (flawed) American experiment with democracy is over.

We can’t plant our way out of the climate crisis

Trees are great, and they are very good at absorbing carbon dioxide. So it’s disastrous that de-forestation is still proceeding at an alarming rate.

Tree-planting schemes always sound like a good idea. (Though there’s a time-lag before they reach the necessary maturity to do their stuff for the planet.) Of course, sometimes there’s a whiff of ‘buying carbon offsets about these schemes. But even if there isn’t and motives are pure, it seems that many planting schemes fail.

In his marvellous Just Two Things blog, Andrew Curry points to a story on Vox about how large tree-planting initiatives often fail — and some have even fuelled deforestation.

In one recent study in the journal Nature, for example, researchers examined long-term restoration efforts in northern India, a country that has invested huge amounts of money into planting over the last 50 years. The authors found “no evidence” that planting offered substantial climate benefits or supported the livelihoods of local communities.

The study is among the most comprehensive analyses of restoration projects to date, but it’s just one example in a litany of failed campaigns that call into question the value of big tree-planting initiatives. Often, the allure of bold targets obscures the challenges involved in seeing them through, and the underlying forces that destroy ecosystems in the first place.

Instead of focusing on planting huge numbers of trees, experts told Vox, we should focus on growing trees for the long haul, protecting and restoring ecosystems beyond just forests, and empowering the local communities that are best positioned to care for them.

Trees are harder to grow that one might think. Some years ago, Cambridge University planted a large wood with 800 trees in Madingley to mark the university’s 800th anniversary some years ago. Many of those trees are thriving. But a surprising proportion are not. And this is par for the tree-planting course, I’m told.

Recently a survey of the mature trees around where we live was commissioned. The consultant who carried it out observed that the British climate seems to be changing into two rather than four seasons — much wetter winters and much drier summers. Which is exactly what many current species of native trees trees don’t need.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

Further to yesterday’s musings about the iPod’s 20th anniversary, here’s mine. It was a gift from a very generous (and wealthy) friend many years ago. Its battery is long dead, but it’s the only iPod I really liked. So I’ve begun to wonder if I should take the bull by the horns, open it up and get a replacement battery from those wonderful folks at iFixit. Hmmm…

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Halloween cometh

Seen on a walk yesterday afternoon.

Quote of the Day

”Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering, and it’s all over much too soon”.

• Woody Allen

Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) whose email signature line is a thing of wonder.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Wagner – Siegfried Idyll (Proms 2012)

Link

Long Read of the Day

Accounting for uncertainty during a pandemic

Long and sometimes demanding attempt to address an important question: How can we adequately account for uncertainty in a pandemic? Worth it for the takeaway: sometimes it’s better to think like an engineer than like a ‘scientist’ (and the two are different: I can say that because I’m an engineer).

Or, to put it more judiciously:

The question is probably better reframed as: How can we be better prepared to address the uncertainty inherent in the response to the next pandemic or another catastrophic, unforeseen—but foreseeable—event. An answer to this question may lie in a reimagining of the tools of epidemiological modeling from something that looks a bit more like the engineering perspective and a bit less like the “pure science” perspective. This entails a move away from analyses as one-off exercises that uncover some permanent—or at least durable—truth, toward a more software-like, continuous improvement conception of the products of statistical analysis.

Facebook: parallel universes

Universe 1

In which it is now abundantly clear that Facebook is a toxic company which prioritises ‘engagement’ over the public good, and revenues above all else. Here, just as an illustration, are some of the headline stories:

• Washington Post:  Five points for anger, one for a ‘like’: How Facebook’s formula fostered rage and misinformation 

• The Atlantic: How Facebook fails 90 per cent of its users

• Rest of World: The Facebook Papers reveal staggering failures in the Global South

• AP: Facebook froze as anti-vaccine comments swarmed users

• Stephen Levy in Wired: Facebook Failed the People Who Tried to Improve It

• Chris Stokel-Walker in The Guardian:Facebook cannot moderate itself – its problems have only just begun

• Matt Stoller in The Guardian: Facebook was born, lives and thrives in scandal. It’s been lawless for years

And so on, seemingly ad infinitum.

Universe 2

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe, Facebook is a raging success and a great company…

Here, for example, are excerpts from an email I got yesterday from a prominent stock-market analyst…

“As always with Facebook it’s important to look at the numbers not the headlines. Revenue is up 35% in the quarter and profit is up 30%. Facebook itself has 1.9 billion daily users and the group of platforms has 2.9bn billion users. A 12% increase. Yet from the narrative you’d assume everyone hates Facebook at the moment.

But…

“Facebook is positioning itself as a strong metaverse contender. It has the Oculus technology, which is the primary hardware, but with metaverse they will have a big presence in virtual gaming, live events and e-commerce. Facebook are investing $10bn in the metaverse over the next year.

“The guidance for the next quarter is a little below expectations but due to iOS 14 and the fact that Facebook’s advertising customers are supply constraints. But next year, Facebook will increase capex by 60% to $29-$34bn and will be investing in artificial intelligence and machine learning.

And the advice for investors?

“Overall Facebook looks cheap from a valuation perspective, and once again it’s all about fundamentals not about the headlines.”

And as for the stock price, CNBC reported that

The social media giant fell 5.5% after Facebook missed estimates for revenue and monthly active user growth for the third quarter. Several Wall Street analysts cut their price target on the stock after the report, though they kept their buy ratings. (Emphasis mine.)

All of which explains two things:

1. The current hoo-hah will have zero impact on Facebook’s management. And,
2. Facebook will continue to be a darling of the Wall Street crowd. Just as tobacco, oil companies and arms manufacturers used to be.

RentaTesla

“Just months after bankruptcy, Hertz says it will buy 100,000 Teslas for new electric fleet.”

Eh? Where does the necessary $4 billion come from? If this is bankruptcy, show me the way to the court. According to NBC News,

Hertz plans to field 100,000 Tesla electric cars through its North American and European rental car fleets.

The move will position the rental company as the largest source of electric vehicle rentals in the U.S., and one of the biggest in Europe, at a time when electric vehicles are beginning to gain real traction. In turn, it could help not just Tesla, but the auto industry overall, by increasing awareness of what today’s latest electric vehicles can do.

The one-time rental car leader declared bankruptcy in May 2020, re-emerging 13 months later. Earlier this month, it announced that former Ford CEO Mark Fields would come on board as its interim chief executive.

“The new Hertz is going to lead the way as a mobility company, starting with the largest EV rental fleet in North America and a commitment to grow our EV fleet and provide the best rental and recharging experience for leisure and business customers around the world.”

Personally I’m a bit pissed off by this news. After buying a Tesla in December I was looking forward to being regarded as a plucky, adventurous pioneer. Now it turns out I’m just an average schmuck.

Sigh.

My commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

The Apple iPod is 20 years old this month. If you’ve ever wondered that the original prototype looked like, Jason Kottke has found the answer:

“As you can see”, says Cabel Sasser,

it’s… quite large! We’ve always assumed that this mighty shell was designed to fit the large breadboards or circuit boards that were used during the earliest days of iPod development, until everything was eventually sized down to actual iPod-size. (It also has the Jobsian side-benefit of keeping the engineers in the dark about what the final device will look like.) I can’t get enough of those chunky, clunky, clicky black buttons wired up for navigation.

Pic shows how big it actually was when compared to the size of the actual iPod.

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On the waterfront

Wells-next-the-Sea late on Friday afternoon. Beautifully still. Tide still out.

Quote of the Day

“Etiquette” used to be the second-most stolen book from the library after the Bible (which presumably is taken by people unfamiliar with the Ten Commandments).

• Louis Menand, in his New Yorker review of Jess McHugh’s Americanon.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Gentle Morpheus | Alceste | Emma Kirkby

Link

An aria I didn’t know — until last week. Better late than never.

Long Read of the Day

 Climate optimism of the will

Noah Smith’s surprisingly passionate argument that climate fatalism is both misguided and disabling. His point is

that we don’t have to depend on any one magical deus ex machina technology to come and save us. There is no single such technology. Instead, everywhere you look, scientists and engineers are inventing new technologies to maintain our industrial society while eliminating greenhouse emissions. And everywhere you look, companies are eager to both develop and purchase these technologies, promising to bring them down in cost the way solar and batteries have fallen in cost.

And a new report from the Institute for New Economic thinking suggests that this flurry of technological innovation has already changed the game in a fundamental way. In “Empirically grounded technology forecasts and the energy transition”, INET’s team notes that we’ve consistently underestimated progress in renewable technology. They argue that realistic forecasts mean that green energy will be so cheap that even businesses that don’t care about climate at all will now find it worth their while to ditch fossil fuels.

As a pessimist about climate change who also realises that pessimism is disabling, I found this piece refreshing. Hope you do too.

Whistleblowing requires courage, but don’t expect Facebook to change its ways

Yesterday’s Observer column:

The bigger question is whether whistleblowing does any good even when it is accomplished as skilfully as she has managed it to date. Does it lead to meaningful change?

Take Edward Snowden’s case. His revelations were genuinely sensational, revealing the astonishing scale and comprehensiveness of the NSA’s (and its allies’) electronic surveillance. It was clear that the democratic oversight of this surveillance in a range of western countries had been woefully inadequate in the post-9/11 years. Facebook chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg

The revelations triggered inquiries in many of those countries, but what actually happened? In the US, very little. In the UK, after three separate inquiries, there was a new act of parliament – the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which replaced inadequate oversight with slightly less inadequate oversight and gave the security services a set of useful new powers.

Will it be any different with the Haugen revelations? My hunch is no, because the political will to tackle Facebook’s astonishingly profitable abuse is still missing…

Do read the whole thing. _

Great news for Facebook: it’s no longer the most toxic social network!

Trump has a new social media operation. Marina Hyde celebrates its arrival in her inimitable style:

For now, Facebook is only convincingly troubled by “disinformation” if it’s about itself. We don’t know what will emerge next week, but we can be almost sure how the firm will react to it. The usual MO of Facebook’s chiefs has been to deny they even did the thing they’re being accused of, until the position becomes untenable. At that point, they concede they did whatever it was on a very limited scale, until that position becomes untenable. Next up is accepting the scale was more widespread than initially indicated, but with the caveat that the practice has now come to an end, until that position is the latest to become untenable.

Clear evidence that the practice never came to an end and, in fact, only became more widespread will come with aggressive reminders that it is not and never has been technically illegal. If and when whatever-it-is has been proved to be technically illegal after all, Facebook will accept the drop-in-their-ocean fine, with blanket immunity for all senior officers, and move back to step one in the cycle. We get rinsed; they repeat.

Such a wonderful columnist.

Amazon’s ambitions to build an air freight empire got a lift from the pandemic

From: Quartz:

Amazon went on a plane buying spree in the pandemic summer of 2020, fueling the fastest expansion yet of its air fleet. “They had plans for this, but the pandemic obviously pulled forward everyone’s demand for e-commerce and strained Amazon’s shipping capacity,” said John Blackledge, an analyst at the investment bank Cowen.

In 2020 alone, Cowen analysts estimate that Amazon invested $80 billion in logistics infrastructure—everything from warehouses to trucks to cargo planes—and they expect the company will wind up spending another $80 billion in 2021. That compares to the $56 billion Amazon spent on logistics infrastructure in the five years between Amazon Air’s launch in 2015 and the onset of the pandemic in late 2019, Cowen analysts estimate.

Amazon’s air freight investments aren’t just an urgent effort to move goods faster as the holiday shopping season approaches: Analysts who watch Amazon believe it will be one of the first steps toward competing directly with incumbent couriers like FedEx and UPS as a global delivery service.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

“Simulations reveal that ducklings swimming in a single-file formation behind the parent can achieve a wave-riding benefit whereby the wave drag turns positive. — from The Journal of Fluid Mechanics, no less.

Gives a new meaning to ‘getting your ducks in a row’!

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Quote of the Day

”Worth seeing, but not worth going to see.”

• Samuel Johnson on the Giant’s Causeway in Co. Antrim.

(I respectfully disagree with the great Doctor in this case.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Jimmy Yancey | How Long Blues

Link

Beautiful, just beautiful. And so simple.

Long Read of the Day

False Positivism versus Real Life

Thoughtful essay by Peter Polack on the implications of retreating into data-driven arguments as a way of navigating round ideologically-fuelled disagreements. An appeal to the objectivity of models can seem like an escape from subjective politics.

This idea has its roots in a longstanding desire to streamline political thought through an appeal to technical principles. It can be traced back at least to Auguste Comte’s 19th century positivism and his idea of developing a “social physics” that could account for social behavior with a set of fixed, universal laws. Later in the 19th century the term was taken up by statisticians, covering their racist criminological and sociological theories with a veneer of data. Now the premise of social physics lives on in everything from MIT professor Alex Pentland’s work on modeling human crowd behavior to the dreams of technocrats like Mark Zuckerberg, whose quest for “a fundamental mathematical law underlying human social relationships” is in conspicuous alignment with Facebook’s pursuit and implementation of a “social graph.”

But a “social physics” approach that broadens the horizon of computational modeling can seem appealing to more than just tech-company zealots. In more disinterested hands, a compelling political case can be made that it is the only viable way forward in a world out of control, marked by demagoguery and mistrust. As the hopes for modeling gain momentum, it will become increasingly important to articulate clearly its shortcomings, inconsistencies, and dangers.

Which is what this perceptive piece tries to do.

Why doesn’t whistleblowing lead to more real change?

Re-reading this piece by Os Keys in Wired made me wonder whether the astute campaign currently being run by Francis Haugen is likely to be any more effective at inducing real change than earlier whistleblowers.

“In this environment, whistleblowing can’t save us, because the issue isn’t an absence of information but an absence of will. And what builds will, and shifts norms, doesn’t look like a single, isolated figure speaking truth, but mass movements of people setting new standards and making clear there are costs to regulators and companies for not attending to them.”

Yep. Take the case of Edward Snowden. His revelations were genuinely sensational, revealing the astonishing scale and comprehensiveness of the NSA’s (and its allies’) electronic surveillance. It was clear that the democratic oversight of this surveillance in a range of Western countries had woefully inadequate in the post-9/11 years.

The revelations triggered inquiries in many of those countries. But what actually happened? In the US, very little. In the UK, after three separate inquiries, there was a new Act of Parliament — the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, which replaced inadequate oversight with slightly less inadequate oversight and gave the security services a raft of useful new powers.

Will it be any different with the Haugen revelations? Regretfully, my hunch is no because the political will to tackle Facebook’s astonishingly profitable abusiveness is still missing. Ms Haugen’s ‘testimony tour’ (she comes to Parliament here soon) will make for great copy and legislative grandstanding. But her revelations will “have zero impact on regulation. No new laws, no new regulations, no new challenges worth a damn” says Os Keys. The idea that when the truth gets out, good things happen — that regulators and corporate executives and legislators are ultimately just dependent on the right information to ensure justice is done — is a myth. Which is why the only regimes capable of taming companies like Facebook are autocracies. And we’re not there — yet.

Surprise: the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of the universe anymore

Damn! Is nothing sacred? We (well, cosmologists) used to think the Big Bang meant the universe began from a singularity. Nearly 100 years later, we’re not so sure. This long piece by Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist, says that the Big Bang theory teaches us that our expanding, cooling universe used to be younger, denser, and hotter in the past. But apparently extrapolating all the way back to that cosmic ‘singularity’ leads to predictions that disagree with what we observe. Instead, “cosmic inflation preceded and set up the Big Bang, changing our cosmic origin story forever”.

This should probably be put in the “important if true but not directly relevant to the climate crisis” drawer. Fun to see how cosmologists think, though.

Chart of the Day

The moral: the stock market is a parallel universe to the one we inhabit.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

From Axios:

Companies that have returned more than 10,000% over 30 years — “superstocks,” as christened by fund manager William Bernstein of Efficient Frontier Advisors — all tend to crash at least once along the way.

Buying Apple stock 30 years ago would have been a fantastic investment, for instance: A $100 investment in October 1991 would be worth some $40,000 today.

But it was a bumpy ride: The same $100 would have been worth just $26.75 at the end of 1997.

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This was my favourite image in the first phase of the pandemic lockdown — in March 2020

Quote of the Day

”I much prefer Sartre’s plays to his philosophy. Existentialism works much better in the theatre than in theory.”

• A.J. Ayer

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Galway Girl | Sharon Shannon, Mundy and the citizens of Galway

Link

The biggest ever street performance of Steve Earle’s song “Galway Girl” took place on June 11th, 2016.

Long Read of the Day

The prospects for democracy surviving in the US

Transcript of an interview with Steven Levitsky, co-author (with Daniel Zitblatt) of How Democracies Die:

It opens thus:

Q:In 2018, when your book “How Democracies Die” came out, on a scale from zero to 10 — with 10 being the most dire concerns about our democracy and zero being, no, everything’s fine — where were we then in terms of your concern about our democracy?

A: I would say if 10 is most concerned, we were at five or six. We wrote the book because we were concerned. We wrote the book because we saw warning signs. But where I’m going is that I think we were too optimistic because we blamed the Republican Party for dropping the ball and allowing Donald Trump, a demagogue, an authoritarian demagogue, to be nominated. We thought they should have broken with Trump in defense of democracy. They obviously didn’t. But we believed at the time — not long ago, three years ago — that the bulk of the Republican Party was minimally committed to small-D democracy.

We believed there was a faction in the Republican Party, particularly in the Senate, that would be able and willing to draw a line that they wouldn’t let Trump cross. And we were wrong about that. The speed and the extent to which the Republican Party has been Trumpified is way beyond anything that we expected…

It’s a good interview.

Chart of the Day

When WhatsApp went down, Brazilian workers’ jobs went with it

The Facebook ‘outage’ shut down an entire economy of informal work

The day before a job, Luiza Ferreira always messages her client on WhatsApp to confirm they need her services. Ferreira is a cleaner in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and she cleans different households every day. If the job is confirmed, she knows she won’t be wasting money on her commute and guarantees income for that day. If the job is not confirmed, she tries to fit another client in her schedule so she doesn’t lose money for the day.

But on October 4th, that system fell apart. A configuration change in Facebook’s internal network wiped the company’s services off the internet for six hours — including WhatsApp. Cut off from Brazil’s primary mode of communication, Ferreira’s business ground to a halt.

“By the time I started using SMS instead of WhatsApp, it was too late and I couldn’t book another client for the next day instead,” Ferreira told The Verge in an interview through WhatsApp audio notes. “My client didn’t see the text message I sent her. When WhatsApp was down, it really disrupted my life.”

The outage lasted for six hours, but it cost Ferriera two whole days’ worth of earnings, since she also couldn’t schedule work for the following day. “That’s income I can’t really get back,” she says.

This is an interesting illustration of the power of network effects and why social media companies are difficult to regulate — people have come to depend on the services they provide.

My Commonplace booklet

Eh? (See here)

 Bus lane camera mistakes woman’s sweater for number plate

From a BBC report

A couple were sent a fine for driving in a bus lane when a camera mistook a word on a woman’s clothing for their number plate.

Dave and Paula Knight, from Surrey, received the fine for driving in a bus lane in Bath despite not being in the city at the time.

A camera had registered the word ‘knitter’ on a pedestrian’s clothing as Mr Knight’s number plate KN19 TER.

”We thought one of our friends was stitching us up,” said Mrs Knight.

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Quote of the Day

“I used to believe that anything was better than nothing. Now I know that sometimes nothing is better”

• Glenda Jackson

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

JS Bach | And At The Hour Of Death (Arr. Badzura) | Víkingur Ólafsson

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’

Great review by Rob Miller of Sidney Dekker’s The Field Guide to Understanding ‘Human Error’.

Last week Facebook, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger went down, for everyone in the world, for six hours. The services were unavailable not just to their ordinary users, but to those inside Facebook; there were stories of technicians sent to repair the damage being unable to access Facebook’s data centres, because the service that checked their badges and unlocked the doors was one of those that was offline.

After the collective global meltdown, the accounts of what happened began to emerge and coverage switched to how the problems had occurred.1 Predictably, virtually all of them contained the phrase “human error”. “It was simply human error,” said The Times. “The outage was caused by human error that occurred while an engineer was doing routine maintenance work,” offered USA Today’s fact-checking department.

If there’s anyone whose gears are ground by this invocation of “human error” to explain incidents, it’s Sidney Dekker…

Really illuminating and worth a read. Also led me to get Dekker’s book.

Tom Morey, inventor of the Boogie Board, dies at 86

Nice NPR obit:

Using his degree, Morey went to work for Douglas Aircraft as an engineer but left to start his own surf shop in 1964, according to the Post. By this time Morey had already begun experimenting with surfboard designs.

But it wasn’t until Morey left Southern California that he created the first Boogie board. In 1971, Morey was living in Hawaii when he cut a large piece of polyethylene foam in half. He then worked to shape the foam with an iron after putting pages of the Honolulu Advertiser on top. By the time he was done Morey had a short board with a mostly rectangular body and a rounded nose. It weighed around three pounds — a fraction of what traditional surfboards weighed at the time.

With his new creation in hand, Morey went to the beach to test it out.

”I could actually feel the wave through the board. On a surfboard, you’re not feeling the nuance of the wave, but with my creation, I could feel everything,” Morey said as he recounted his first ride to SurferToday.com.

I never used a Boogie board, but my kids did and got a lot out of it.

’Performative’: How the meaning of a word became corrupted

Lovely little disquisition by Wilfred M. McClay in The Hedgehog Review on misuse of the term ‘performative’ (a crime to which this blogger pleads guilty).

In defense of performative, it is a technical academic word that was invented to serve a particular purpose. The British philosopher J.L. Austin (1911–60) was an influential exponent of the view that our use of language must in some instances be understood as a form of action, and not merely as a system of signifiers that record and order the structure of reality. His most famous work, How to Do Things with Words (1955), is the locus classicus for the understanding of what he called a “performative utterance,” and he would go on to label such utterances “speech acts,” uses of language that are not describing something—indeed, are not even susceptible of being judged true or false, real or artificial—but doing something.

Chart of the Day

I know this is US only, but just look at the cost of university tuition.

Chart comes from a typically thoughtful post by Noah Smith.

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The Quince tree

Quinces are fascinating fruits, always looking battered like sailors after a night on the town.

Quote of the Day

”That’s not exercise, it’s flagellation.”

• Noël Coward on Squash

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

EELS | That Look You Give That Guy

Link

Long Read of the Day

The climate disaster is here – this is what the future looks like

Stunning series of interactive visualisations by the Guardian. Not so much a long read as a long and sobering browse. Don’t know what it looks like in print, but it really works online.

Paddy Moloney and Frank Zappa

Stories about Paddy keep coming. Here’s a nice snatch of dialogue from the BBC Radio show Midweek presented by Libby Purves (Whom God Preserve) on which Frank and Paddy appeared.

Libby: I think we should break it to you that Frank has been known to sing ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’.

Paddy: Really? I’m very sorry for your troubles, Frank.

Libby: We were going to invite him to do it with the Chieftains backing.

Paddy: Well, we’ll have a go. It’s early in the morning.

Frank: What we did with that particular song was that on St Patrick’s Day in 1988, we were working in a town in the US and we had an Irish population and an Italian population, so during the soundcheck in the afternoon, we put together an arrangement that combined ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ and the theme from ‘The Godfather’. (laughter)

Libby: The perfect combination…

Many thanks to Nibor for the tip.

Game-theory and diplomacy

Really interesting piece on how diplomats are beginning to appreciate how applied mathematics might be useful in international negotiations. It’s based on a conversation with Michael Ambühl, a professor of negotiation and conflict management at ETH Zurich and was the chief Swiss negotiator when Switzerland was negotiating the deal that it now has with the EU.

The Lab for Science in Diplomacy, a collaboration between ETH Zürich where Ambühl is based and the University of Geneva, will also focus on “negotiation engineering”, where existing mathematical techniques such as game theory are used either to help frame a discussion, or to play out different scenarios before engaging in talks.

I particularly enjoyed this bit:

Ambühl said that, as Switzerland’s chief EU negotiator, he ran a game theory simulation ahead of talks that led to Switzerland joining the Shengen area and a raft of agreements with the EU on tax, trade and security. The analysis indicated that it was in Switzerland’s interest for the negotiations to take place as a package rather than sequentially, and so the Swiss government insisted on this as a basis for talks.

Did the EU do their own analysis? “I don’t think so,” said Ambühl. “We didn’t tell them that we did game theory.”

Which of course makes one wonder if Michel Barnier had some backroom boffins working for him when he was ‘negotiating’ with the Brexiteering clowns.

On second thoughts, he didn’t need game theory, just re-runs of Laurel and Hardy.

My Commonplace booklet (Eh? See here)

We’ve had a cheeky little mouse in our utility room for about a week, and our elegant cat (who sleeps in the adjacent kitchen) was supremely indifferent to the presence of the little blighter, regarding him (or her) with the disdain of a Dowager Duchess contemplating a boot-boy.

But then the other night the mouse Went Too Far — climbing onto a worktop and nibbling away at the tiny, deliciously sweet, tomatoes that are still emerging from our green house. This was deemed by me to Too Much. Something Had To Be Done. (In capital letters.)

My wife (a compassionate and generous soul) fearing that I would do something drastic (like setting a violent mousetrap) then took preemptive action. She retrieved a non-lethal trap that we had once used successfully in the attic and on Sunday night set it up in the Utility Room, baited with a piece of cheese. Yesterday morning she came down early to find the little creature wandering round the (spacious) trap clearly wondering if there was more cheese where that from. Her captor then gently walked with the trap to the nearby wood and released him (or her) into the wild before returning to a cat — and a husband — demanding to know where was the bloody mouse.

All of which is a long-winded way of explaining that her humane approach to the matter reminded me of Robbie Burns’s lovely poem To a Mouse , addressed to a wee beastie whose nest had been disturbed by a plough in November 1785.

This is how it begins:

Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickerin brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

Read it from the link in its entirely and relish the immortal phrase that Burns gave to the English language (via his native Scots dialect)

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

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