There was a crooked house…

Taken the other day in Lavenham, an exquisite old town in Suffolk.

Quote of the Day

”We cannot live without fossil fuels or chemicals, period, end of story.”

• Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who (according to the New York Times) wants to expand exports of liquefied natural gas, which is produced in Louisiana and emits half the carbon dioxide of coal but is a source of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Christine McVie | Fleetwood Mac | Songbird

Link

This was one of the favourite songs of my beloved Sue, who died nineteen years ago this month. I never hear it without thinking of her.

Long Read of the Day

 Playing Nice With the Fossil Fuel Industry Is Climate Denial

By Kate Aronoff, writing in The New Republic on the way the American political system is unable to deal with the challenge (as expressed above in Quote of the Day).

This is climate denial. These politicians don’t dispute that the climate is changing, but they are absolutely in denial about what curbing it would entail. The report has made clear that the climate in which this country became a superpower no longer exists. So why are politicians stuck on twentieth-century answers to the twenty-first century’s problems?

Link

Going from climate-denial to climate-delay

The latest IPCC report should make climate-denial the last refugee of nutters and conspiracy theorists (though, God knows, there are still plenty of those around), so reactionary activism is shifting its grounds — from denial to delay and new kinds of discourses which accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. These discourses focus on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast. Advocates of climate delay are now arguing for minimal action or for action to be taken by others. (China, in particular.) They highlight the negative social effects of climate policies and — most importantly — raise doubt that mitigation is possible. This remarkable paper outlines the common features of these ‘climate delay’ discourses and provide a guide to identifying them, organised around this brilliant diagram.

Many thanks to Richard Sambrook and Andrew Curry for alerting me to it.

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CAPTCHA developments

Further to my post the other day about why CAPTCHA images are so depressing, Euan Williamson sent me a link to this witty spoof on the whole idea.

Link

Quote of the Day

”Show me a congenital eavesdropper with the instincts of a Peeping Tom and I will show you the makings of a dramatist.”

• Ken Tynan, theatre critic of the Observer in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

J.S. Bach | Air on the G String (Suite No. 3, BWV 1068) | Voices of Music using original instruments

Link

I was feeling peaceful when I chose this. Hope you are too.

Long Read of the Day

The Future of EV Charging

Transcript of a terrific discussion by a group of experts about the infrastructure needed to support the UK government’s aspirations for adoption of electric vehicles.

Link

Apple’s image-scan plan

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, updates of computer operating systems were of interest only to geeks. No longer – at least in relation to Apple’s operating systems, iOS and Mac OS. You may recall how Version 14.5 of iOS, which required users to opt in to tracking, had the online advertising racketeers in a tizzy while their stout ally, Facebook, stood up for them. Now, the forthcoming version of iOS has libertarians, privacy campaigners and “thin-end-of-the-wedge” worriers in a spin.

It also has busy mainstream journalists struggling to find headline-friendly summaries of what Apple has in store for us. “Apple is prying into iPhones to find sexual predators, but privacy activists worry governments could weaponise the feature” was how the venerable Washington Post initially reported it. This was, to put it politely, a trifle misleading and the first three paragraphs below the headline were, as John Gruber brusquely pointed out, plain wrong.

To be fair to the Post though, we should acknowledge that there is no single-sentence formulation that accurately captures the scope of what Apple has in mind. The truth is that it’s complicated; worse still, it involves cryptography, a topic guaranteed to lead anyone to check for the nearest exit. And it concerns child sexual abuse images, which are (rightly) one of the most controversial topics in the online world…

Read on

Making Twitter useable again

When Twitter first appeared I thought it was wonderful. It enabled me to plug into the streams-of-consciousness of people I admired or valued. But over the years my feed has become cluttered and polluted by ads, nonsense and hysteria — to the point where I almost never use it.

I realise that the ads are inevitable — after all, Twitter is a surveillance capitalist operation (though I would happily pay to have it ad-free). But most of the other crap comes from people innocently, maliciously or lazily retweeting stuff. So, as Alexis Madrigal pointed out ages ago, retweeting is a large part of the problem.

I mentioned this to Charles Arthur (Whom God Preserve) at lunch yesterday and he sent me a link to “How to turn off retweets for everyone” by Luca Hammer. Turns out there are various ways to do it. The complicated ones (at least for non-geeks) are via the API or a Javascript snippet. The easy way is via something I’d never spotted: mute retweets through your Twitter settings! You just add the phrase “RT @“ to your ‘Muted Words’.

Luca points out that this simple method doesn’t provide a comprehensive solution: there will be some ‘false positives’ that the tech solutions will catch. But as a first step I’m trying it. Stay tuned.

Social media attention spans

Source

Heidegger and technology

On Friday, in a discussion about Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for the ‘Metaverse’, I attributed the adage that “Technology is the art of arranging the world so that you don’t have to experience it” to Martin Heidegger.

Kevin Cryan (Whom God Preserve) emailed to say that the adage “comes, I believe from somewhere in Homo faber. Ein Bericht, a 1957 novel by the Swiss novelist Max Frisch. Not possessing a copy, I looked up “Max Frisch Quotes”, and there it is at #7. But Frisch might have got it from Heidegger, I cavilled, so I looked up his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology” (which is where I thought I’d seen it) and the quotation isn’t there, though the sentiments of the essay correspond to the general idea. So, unless some more learned evidence comes to light, the credit should go to Frisch.

Which only goes to show that blogging is great for autodidacts with flaky memories!

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Covid: We’re in for a long haul Link
• Hot air: Climate change targets are rising at a dangerous rate By Christopher Snowdon in The Critic Magazine. Link

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Seen on the Interwebby thing.

Quote of the Day

”In my experience, if you have to keep the lavatory door shut by extending your left leg, it’s modern architecture.”

• Nancy Banks-Smith, The Guardian, 1969.

Nancy was the Guardian’s TV critic for many years. I occupied the same post on the The Observer between 1987 and 1995, so was in an excellent position to know how good she was. As a critic she was wonderfully funny, sharp — and occasionally lethal for pretentious performers.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Samuel Barber | Adagio for Strings, Op.11 | Vienna Philharmonic | Conducted by Gustavo Dudamel with pianist Yuja Wang as soloist | Summer Night Concert 2019

Link

Long Read of the Day

 How to curate (just about) anything

Lovely essay by Glenn Anderson about a subject that bothers most of us and obsesses some. Tidying up is a start. But it won’t get you to the kind of lived-in, personalised space that defines an ideal of home.

Double-think about the climate crisis

If you’re optimistic about the political world’s determination to address the crisis, then this piece by Adam Tooze might make you choke on your muesli. Sample:

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic. While Opec+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that Opec+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough. President Biden has made clear that he wants Americans to have access to affordable and reliable energy, including at the pump. Although we are not a party to Opec, the United States will always speak to international partners regarding issues of significance that affect our national economic and security affairs, in public and private.”

Yes, you read that correctly. One of the most senior figures in the Biden administration, the administration that promised climate was “everywhere” in its policy, is declaring that an increase in petrol prices to $3.17 per gallon is a matter of national security and that the US reserves the right to cajole Opec and Russia into flooding the world with more oil.

Not to be outdone, the current UK government is allowing oil drillers to keep exploring the North Sea for new reserves, despite its pledge to tackle carbon emissions, as long as they pass a “climate compatibility” test.

Why are CAPTCHA images so depressing?

I hadn’t thought about this. I just find them annoying. But an interesting essay by Clive Thompson finds six reasons why they’re so off-putting:

1. They’re generally devoid of humans.
2. The angles are all wrong — usually shot from extremely awkward positions and angles that humans would never choose.
3. They’re voyeuristic: nobody gave consent for them to be taken.
4. They look like crime-scene footage — frequently grainy and badly focused.
5. The grids on the photos are an alien’s-eye view of the world.
6. There’s very little sign of nature in them. Self-driving vehicles need to recogne things in the built environment — red lights, taxis, cyclists, fire hydrants, pedestrian crossings. They don’t care about trees, or flowers or birds or any of the other sights to which the human eye naturally gravitates.

In other words,

They weren’t taken by humans, and they weren’t taken for humans. They are by AI, for AI. They thus lack any sense of human composition or human audience. They are creations of utterly bloodless industrial logic. Google’s CAPTCHA images demand you to look at the world the way an AI does.

It’s no wonder we wind up feeling so numbed and depressed as we click through them, day in and day out.

Nice, observant piece.

Why is the tech industry so enthused about a dystopian future?

The current faux-excitement in the industry about the ‘Metaverse’ idea floated by Mark Zuckerberg and other techbros is weird. It makes one wonder if any of these enthusiasts have actually read Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash — which supposedly is the origin of the idea.

Here is an excerpt from Brian Merchant’s splendid blast on the subject:

The hero of Snow Crash is named Hiro, and he is a gig worker delivery driver who moonlights as a hacker, and lives in abject poverty in a 20×30 storage unit he shares with an alcoholic roommate. “Hiro spends a lot of time in the metaverse. It beats the shit out of the U-Stor-It.”

The U.S. as we know it has ceased to exist, and corporate entities and organized crime control whole city-states. Workers like Hiro can be killed for taking too long to deliver a pizza, and they are driven into the metaverse underworld to find extralegal work and enough money to make ends meet. The only reasonably safe places in the physical world are heavily fortressed “burbclaves” where the wealthy reside behind batteries of guns and gated communities.

Or maybe this is the future that the Silicon Valley overlords are really looking forward to. After all, they will be the ones in the burbclaves.

What I’m reminded of most is Heidegger’s observation that “technology is the art of arranging the world so that you don’t have to experience it”.

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Quote of the Day

”I cannot bring myself to vote for a woman who has been house-trained to speak to me as though my dog has just died.”

• Daily Mirror columnist Keith Waterhouse on Margaret Thatcher

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mozart | Oboe Quartet in F Major, K. 370 | First movement: Allegro | Itzhak Perlman, Ray Still, Pinchas Zukerman, Lynn Harrell

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Real Story of Pixar 

How a bad hardware company turned itself into a great movie studio.

(And how Steve Jobs made a great investment after Apple threw him out.)

Link

How did this school do it?

From Politico’s London newsletter yesterday:

One epic success story: Fair play to Brampton Manor Academy in east London, where 55 pupils got into Oxford and Cambridge — compared with 48 students from Eton. The Standard reports: The majority of pupils at Brampton Manor Academy are from ethnic minority backgrounds, in receipt of free school meals, or will be the first in their family to attend university.” Remarkably, of the 350 Brampton students who took their A-levels this year, 330 got into Russell Group universities. There must be lessons here for all secondary schools. Wonder what they are.

Meanwhile, here’s the Metro report on the school.

What we know (and don’t know) about the Delta variant at the moment

From Technology Review’s daily newsletter:

What we know: The delta variant is nearly twice as contagious as previous versions of the virus, according to the CDC. It also seems to lead to higher viral loads. The evidence suggests that vaccinated people may be able to transmit the virus, perhaps even just as readily as unvaccinated people. The overwhelming majority of infections are still in unvaccinated people. So far, it looks as if vaccines still largely work, especially in preventing severe illness.

What we don’t know: The appearance of a new variant has people worried we’ll see other, even worse variants. There is some genuine cause for concern: viruses mutate all the time, so as long as there are places in the world where there’s unchecked spread, we’ll likely continue to see more variants that will behave differently. The solution is to increase vaccination rates, and fast.

Revisiting ‘The Limits to Growth’

The Limits to Growth (LtG) project, funded by a shadowy outfit called The Club of Rome in the early 1970s, was the first (and, as far as I know, still the only) serious attempt to build a dynamic model of the world viewed as a single system. It used System Dynamics, a simulation language developed by Jay Forrester at MIT which had earlier been used to create simulation models of (a) industrial corporations and (b) urban areas. (Urban Dynamics was a report on the findings from a simulation model of an unnamed city — in actual fact Detroit — and later on was the inspiration for the Sim City computer game.)

The Club of Rome project involved creating a ‘world dynamics’ model, which was published in 1972 and attracted a great deal of interest and controversy (in which I played an insignificant part — though, later, one of my PhD students did a dissertation on the ideological background to the Urban Dynamics model).

Most people have forgotten the LtG model, but its basic idea — conceptualising the world as a global dynamic system — has suddenly re-acquired salience in the light of the looming climate catastrophe. So it was a delightful surprise to open Andrew Curry’s Substack blog this morning and find a fascinating and insightful post on more recent scholarship which examines how four of the various scenarios explored by the LtG team relate to our recent experience.

The four are:

• Business as Usual (BAU);

• Business as Usual2 (BAU2) — a revised, later version of BAU;

• CT (continual technological innovation — the Bill Gates scenario, I guess); and

• SW (Stabilised World — a scenario assuming that, in addition to sustained technological innovation, global societal priorities change to favour, among other things, low desired family size, perfect birth control availability and a deliberate choice to limit industrial output and prioritise health and education services).

You can guess which one is worth backing; unfortunately, it’s also the one we’re least likely to choose.

Andrew has a great discussion of all this, which is why I think it’s worth reading in full.

Chart of the Day

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Quote of the Day

“War is the unfolding of miscalculations.”

• Barbara Tuchman

Exactly the thought I have as I watch the unfolding of Chinese/American rivalry.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brian McGrath | Blackthorn Hornpipe, The Blackthorn Reel and The Killarney Boys of Pleasure

Link

Long Read of the Day

The politics of lies: Boris Johnson and the erosion of the rule of law

Terrific dispatch by Annette Dittert, London bureau chief for Germany’s public broadcaster, explaining to her fellow-citizens what has happened to Britain.

And, yes, I realise that we (residents of this sceptered isle) know it all. But it’s interesting to see what a perceptive external observer makes of it.

Thanks to James Miller for spotting it.

How media coverage trivialises harbingers of climate catastrophe

Interesting critique by the Columbia Journalism Review:

The heat wave that swept the Pacific Northwest and Western Canada in late June was an extraordinary disaster. A mass of high-pressure air over the region trapped heat there, creating a “heat dome”—a term that recurred in news coverage. In Oregon, power cables melted; in Washington, roads buckled. Record-breaking temperatures in Lytton, British Columbia, and nearby First Nations communities, were followed by a devastating wildfire.

The sustained temperatures in Washington have since been called “the state’s deadliest weather-related disaster.” According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 800 heat-related deaths occurred across the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia between June 25 and 30. An additional 2,800 people across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska ended up in an emergency room due to heat-related illness.

The devastating heat—more harbinger than anomaly—exposed weaknesses in the media’s representation of deadly temperatures as well as their connection to climate change. The images that led news stories widely minimized the event. Many photos made it look like a run-of-the-mill heat wave; some were so banal as to conjure stock photography. Photo slideshows confused the issue with a juxtaposition of the ordinary and extraordinary.

For example, this Reuters photograph in the sainted New York Times, which at first sight might suggest a picnic.

The Oxford Reuters Institute published a useful report a while back about international media coverage of the climate crisis.

En passant: Here are the front pages of the main UK newspapers yesterday morning — the day after publication of the IPCC report.

Putting yourself in the shoes of a harassed news editor and you can see why wacky or quirky pictures of people apparently coping with intense heat might be popular. But in aggregate they contribute to public complacency about the looming catastrophe because their subliminal message is: “we can hack it”.

Chart(s) of the Day

So basically the Tory dream of turning Britain into a homeowning democracy looks like a fantasy.

And the consequence of this? An entire generation at the mercy of a rentier class.

(Images from a new website associated with a forthcoming book by Bobby Duffy.)

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Clowns’ Day Out

Cover of this week’s Private Eye.

Quote of the Day

“I go to the pantomime only at Christmas.”

• W.S. Gilbert, on being asked if he had seen Sir Henry Irving in Faust.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ennio Morricone | Cinema Paradiso | in concert | Venice | 2007)

Link

Music from one of my favourite films, conducted by the composer in St Mark’s square. Magical.

Long Read of the Day

Vaclav Smil: We Must Leave Growth Behind

Transcript of an interview by David Wallace-Wells recorded two years ago after the publication of Smil’s magisterial book, Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities. The interview one the best expositions I’ve seen for my putative Theory of Incompetent Systems — ones that can’t fix themselves. Unfortunately, we humans belong to one of those.

DW-L: Let me start by asking you about the very end of the book. I know so much of this was written in a spirit of caution and care and wanting to avoid drawing long-term, large-scale conclusions from the material. But from my read, at least, it ends on a quite definitive note. “The long-term survival of our civilization cannot be assured without setting limits on the planetary scale.”

Smil: That has been always the case. There’s nothing new in this, except many people have been refusing to recognize it.

DW-L: Can you tell me a bit about how you came to that conclusion?

Smil: Speaking as an old-fashioned scientist, I think the message is kind of a primitive and, again, old-fashioned message. This is a finite planet. There is a finite amount of energy. There is finite efficiency of converting it by animals and crops. And there are certain sensitivities in terms of biogeochemical cycles, which will tolerate only that much. I mean, that should be obvious to anybody who’s ever taken some kind of kindergarten biology.

Unfortunately, this is a society where nobody’s taking kindergarten biology because everybody’s studying what’s communications, writing in code, economics, business administration, liaising the state office, and things like that. This is a new civilization we have. People are totally detached from reality. If you are attached, at least a bit, to reality, all of this is common sense.

Not a comfortable read, but a salutary one.

The IPCC Report

It’s out and it contains no surprises — at least for anyone who’s been paying attention. The TL;DR version is simple: climate science has advanced rapidly; climate action has not. Or, as Dave Pell put it in his newsletter:

The fight that pits humanity vs climate change isn’t over. But so far, humanity has been beaten up, knocked around the ring, and dropped to the canvas a few times. And even in this heat, climate change has barely broken a sweat, choosing to just sit back and watch as humanity punches itself in the gut. In short, the bad news is that the scientists we ignored when they accurately warned us about the risks of temperature hikes, sea rises, and deadly weather patterns are back to inform us that what they said would happen has happened and things are, inevitably, going to get worse in the coming years. BBC: Climate change: IPCC report is ‘code red for humanity.’ The good news is that all is not lost. We know what’s causing the changes and we know how to slow things down before the Earth turns into a rolling fireball. All we have to do is come together as humans, follow the science, and do what it takes to change course before it’s too late. You know, sort of how we handled Covid.

Yep.

Paul Krugman on Albert Hirschman

Apropos yesterday’s Long Read about Albert Hirschman, Bill Janeway (Whom God Preserve) emailed asking if I’d read Jeremy Adelman’s great biography of Hirschman (I hadn’t) and also reminding me of an old essay by Paul Krugman that he (Bill) had quoted in the early pages of his book, Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy (which I have read). The particular excerpt that Bill had used was the passage about the emerging relationship between maps of Africa and the reality of that continent.

Needless to say, I dug out the Krugman essay and spent an enjoyable hour reading it. It’s an interesting and very perceptive piece on the role of models and metaphors in economics. In fact, if you’re busy, that section of the piece is worth it just for that.

Of course, for me it turned out to be a rabbit-hole — albeit an enjoyable and instructive one. But now the Adelman biography has been added to my reading list. Sigh.

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