Armchair sailors

Quote of the Day

”What the mulberry leaf is to the silkworm, the author’s book, treatise, essay, poem is to the critical larvae that feed upon it. It furnishes them with food and clothing.”

• Oliver Wendell Holmes

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Arvo Pärt | Spiegel im Spiegel

Link

I’ve always thought this would make great background music for hypnotherapy. Watch ze watch, watch ze watch, watch ze….. Zzzzz.

Long Read of the Day

What if military AI is a washout?

Absolutely fascinating and thought-provoking essay by Jack McDonald.

A rough summary (by the author) goes like this:

The argument goes something like this: The socially transformative vision of AI sold by venture capital over the last decade and a bit looks like it is going to wash out as a few niche areas of tremendous improvement, but no self-driving taxi fleets in London. The integration of some AI technologies will enable automation/autonomy in parts of pre-existing military processes (e.g. kill chains), but no robot super-soldier, HAL 9000 strategists, and limited institutional change. This would still have a huge impact on warfare by rendering machine-recognisable objects vulnerable to automated destruction by any variety of autonomous systems. This visibility asymmetry will make it harder to project power and sustain military forces in the field and reduces the capability gap that state militaries seek to maintain relative to non-state actors. Rections to this asymmetry will drive warfare towards urban environments. In short: worry about marginal improvements to what has already been fielded, and ways to constrain proliferation of those platforms, because the future is now (to shamelessly quote Non Phixion).

But the detailed reasoning is riveting. Some of it also applies to ‘peaceful’ uses of so-called ‘AI’.

Thanks to Sheila Hayman (Whom God Preserve) for pointing me to it.

Chart of the Day

What goes into an EV battery

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Twilight in Norfolk

In a way, this is an extraordinary photograph. It’s a 2-second handheld exposure taken on Brancaster Staithe with an iPhone 11, after sunset. And although I have a pretty steady hand, it isn’t 2-second steady. So some heavy-duty computational processing went into making this image as sharp as it is.

Quote of the Day

”The difference between an author and a horse is that the horse doesn’t understand the horse-dealer’s language.”

• Max Frisch

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Crosby, Stills and Nash | Teach Your Children | Live

Link

I know I’ve posted this before but I love it and it just popped up on a playlist and I’m on holidays with some of my kids, so it seems appropriate. Not that there’s anything I can teach them :-)

Long Read of the Day

John Banville on Graham Greene

Pure delight of a review essay in The Nation.

Sample:

Greene chafed under the privilege into which he was born. His family may have been top dogs, but from his earliest days Graham was firmly on the side of the underdog. His parents’ people were moneyed, with business interests including brewing, which involved the slave trade: An ancestor, Benjamin Greene, ran a business on the island of St. Kitts in the West Indies that was worked by 225 slaves. Greene’s parents were first cousins, and both had tainted genes. Charles Greene’s father suffered from what Graham judged to be manic depression, like himself, and his maternal grandfather, an Anglican priest, was also mentally ill. The latter labored under a burden of guilt—presumably he had Doubts—and according to Graham, “when his bishop refused his request to be defrocked, he proceeded to put the matter into effect himself in a field,” doffing his frock and standing naked before his goggle-eyed parishioners. Perhaps understandably, the Reverend Greene became an unmentionable in the family, so that his grandson assumed he was dead (though in fact he lived until 1924) and must have posed “a living menace” to his daughter and her family. Out of such stuff are novelists made, and a “Catholic novelist” in particular.

 This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

”We like to think of ourselves as living in a post-industrial era, but tell that to someone breaking their body in an Amazon fulfilment centre.”

• Jack McDonald

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Beach Boys | Surfin’ U.S.A.

Link

A relic of my misspent youth.

Long Read of the Day

Suspended Hell

Lovely meditation by Katie Kadue on Twitter, Hell, Milton’s Paradise Lost and being an early-career academic researcher.

Link

Chart of the Day

The planet’s vital signs

One key concern: the lack of lasting impact the Covid-19 pandemic had on the “vital” indicators.

“Huge behavioural changes by humans in reducing energy consumption as a result of the pandemic had such a small effect,” one of the authors cited by the Financial Times explained. “We need to be thinking about big transformative change at this stage . . . yet, we are still in a fossil fuel society.”

Energy consumption from fossil fuel sources fell as the pandemic brought industry and services near to a standstill in 2020. Yet global energy use originating from coal power is expected to reach above pre-pandemic levels this year, the forecasts suggests, while energy consumption from oil and natural gas sources will rebound.

MeetingBuster and the Christmas Call Diary

Entrancing story on Quentin’s blog about how he got interested in Voice over IP (VoIP) — aka Internet telephony — and some of the ways he adapted it for his own purposes.

The thing you need to know about Quentin is that he is constitutionally incapable of not inventing things. He started many years ago with the Webcam and he’s been at it ever since.

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

A flower from the Fuchsia in our garden. It’s one of my favourite plants. If you go to West Kerry at this time of year you’ll find that hedgerows are full of it. And it’s a heartwarming sight.

Quote of the Day

”On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting. ’Twas only that when he was off he was acting.”

• Oliver Goldsmith on David Garrick

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Nick LaRocca and The Original Dixieland Jazz Band |Tiger Rag

Link

Just in case you were thinking of going back to bed!

Long Read of the Day

Surely We Can Do Better Than Elon Musk

Fabulous Long Read by Nathan J. Robinson in Current Affairs. Here’s how it begins…

There are two facts that I have sometimes found it difficult to reconcile. The first is that Tesla, Inc. makes innovative and genuinely impressive electric vehicles that can hold their own against the fastest performance cars in the world. The second is that the CEO of Tesla, Inc., celebrated entrepreneurial genius Elon Musk, is a liar, huckster, and moron, who regularly says things so ignorant that I cannot understand how they can come from a human adult, let alone one treated by his fans as a super-genius. Is one of these facts untrue? Are Tesla’s cars actually bad, their deficiencies carefully covered up and their quality over-hyped? Is Elon Musk actually not a liar, huckster, or moron? If you look more closely, are things that look like fraud and stupidity to me actually signs of brilliance? Or is there a way for both facts to be true?

It turns out it’s all true. The cars are impressive and their flaws get covered up. Musk is a lying ignorant grifter and he has inspired innovation in the electric car industry. Understanding that these seemingly contradictory things can be true simultaneously is important, because societies who cannot hold these two ideas at the same time may end up following scam artists and false prophets off the cliff and into the abyss…

Do read on. It’s worth it.

Apple and the Pegasus problem

Further to my column on Sunday, one interesting question I’ve been asked is why — if Pegasus spyware can infect both Apple and Android phones — there seems to be much more concern about iPhones.

It’s a good question. The answer, as a fine piece by Alex Hern in the Guardian explains, is that the demographics of iPhone users (richer and sometimes in senior managerial and governmental roles) are attractive to snoopers. And iPhones are more attractive for journalists because Apple’s security measures (and its iron control of the App Store) generally makes iPhones more secure than their Android counterparts.

And that perception is not an illusion. Ever since it launched the iPhone in 2007, Apple has tried to ensure that hacking iOS was hard, that downloading software was easy and safe, and that installing patches to protect against newly discovered vulnerabilities was the norm.

“And yet”, writes Alex,

Pegasus has worked, in one way or another, on iOS for at least five years. The latest version of the software is even capable of exploiting a brand-new iPhone 12 running iOS 14.6, the newest version of the operating system available to normal users. More than that: the version of Pegasus that infects those phones is a “zero-click” exploit. There is no dodgy link to click, or malicious attachment to open. Simply receiving the message is enough to become a victim of the malware.

It’s worth pausing to note what is, and isn’t, worth criticising Apple for here. No software on a modern computing platform can ever be bug-free, and as a result no software can ever be fully hacker-proof. Governments will pay big money for working iPhone exploits, and that motivates a lot of unscrupulous security researchers to spend a lot of time trying to work out how to break Apple’s security.

But this belief that iPhones are super-secure is a bug as well as a feature. If you believe (wrongly) that the lock you’ve purchased for your very expensive bike is unbreakable, you may be more confident about leaving it (locked, of course) on the street. Something of analogous misplaced confidence applies to your iPhone. Alex says that security experts he’s spoken to see the misconception at work here. For example:

“Apple’s self-assured hubris is just unparalleled,” Patrick Wardle, a former NSA employee and founder of the Mac security developer Objective-See, told me last week. “They basically believe that their way is the best way.”

A key feature of Pegasus is that once it’s successfully installed on the phone, it carefully obliterates all traces of its presence. This seems to work fine on Android devices, but it turns out that an undocumented feature of iOS enabled forensic investigators to confirm Pegasus’s presence. Alex explains it well:

There is a file, DataUsage.sqlite, that records what software has run on an iPhone. It’s not accessible to the user of the device, but if you back up the iPhone to a computer and search through the backup, you can find the file. The records of Pegasus had been removed from that file, of course – but only once. What the NSO Group didn’t know, or perhaps didn’t spot, is that every time some software is run, it is listed twice in that file. And so by comparing the two lists and looking for inconsistencies, Amnesty’s researchers were able to spot when the infection landed.

So there you go: the same opacity that makes Apple devices generally safe makes it harder to protect them when that safety is broken. But it also makes it hard for the attackers to clean up after themselves. Perhaps two wrongs do make a right?

The Pegasus project has now published on Github a geek-friendly forensics tool for doing this kind of forensic analysis. And the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto has done an independent review of Amnesty’s methodology. It concludes:

We independently validated that Amnesty International’s forensic methodology correctly identified infections with NSO’s Pegasus spyware within four iTunes backups. We also determined that their overall methodology is sound. In addition, the Citizen Lab’s own research has independently arrived at a number of the same key findings as Amnesty International’s analysis.

Big Tech Has Outgrown This Planet

Interesting blast from Shira Ovide in the New York Times. I particularly liked this bit:

The current stock market value of the Big Five ($9.3 trillion) is more than the value of the next 27 most valuable U.S. companies put together, including corporate giants like Tesla, Walmart and JPMorgan Chase, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Apple’s profit just from the past three months ($21.7 billion) was nearly double the combined annual profits of the five largest U.S. airlines in prepandemic 2019.

Amazon’s stock price increases have made Jeff Bezos so rich that he could buy a new model iPhone for 200 million people — and he would still be a billionaire.

Google’s $50 billion in revenue from selling advertisements from April to June was about what Americans — all of the Americans — spent on gasoline and gas station purchases last month.

The annual revenue of one of Microsoft’s side businesses, LinkedIn, is nearly four times that of Zoom Video Communications, a star of the pandemic, in the past year.

Facebook expects to dole out more cash outfitting its computer hubs and offices in 2021 than Exxon spends around the world to dig oil and gas out of the ground in a year.

Amazon fell short of investors’ expectations on Thursday. But in the past year, Amazon’s e-commerce revenue still climbed by $109 billion — an increase in a single year that Walmart needed the past nine years to reach.

And this:

Logic would suggest that if the companies are fighting off lots of rivals, they might have to cut prices and profit margins would shrink. So how does Facebook turn each dollar of revenue, nearly all from ads it sells, into 43 cents of profit — a level that most companies can only dream of, and higher than Facebook posted before the pandemic?

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

“Men only learn from history how to make new mistakes.”

• A.J.P. Taylor

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Stamitz | Clarinet Concerto No.7 in E Flat | 3rd movement – Rondeau | Andreas Ottensamer

Link

Filmed in a recording studio.

Long Read of the Day

Why there is no solution to our age of crisis without China

Absolutely fabulous New Statesman essay by Adam Tooze which aims to bring some historical perspective to our (Western) views of China.

In November, the UK will host the Cop26 climate negotiations, where all eyes will be on China. Responsible for 28 per cent of global CO2 emissions, it emits more than the entire OECD, the US, Europe, Japan and the rest combined. There is no solution to the climate crisis without huge and expensive commitment from Beijing. Only China has the clout necessary to move the energy exporters of the world, especially Russia, to begin preparing to move beyond oil. Beijing, quite literally, holds the future of the humanity in its hands.

This is an unmissable piece.

The Pegasus problem

My column in yesterday’s Observer:

What’s the most problematic tech company in the world? Facebook? Google? Palantir? Nope. It’s a small, privately held Israeli company called NSO that most people have never heard of. On its website, it describes itself as “a world leader in precision cyberintelligence solutions”. Its software, sold only to “licensed government intelligence and law-enforcement agencies”, naturally, helps them to “lawfully address the most dangerous issues in today’s world. NSO’s technology has helped prevent terrorism, break up criminal operations, find missing people and assist search and rescue teams.”

So what is this magical stuff? It’s called Pegasus and it is ultra-sophisticated spyware that covertly penetrates and compromises smartphones. It’s particularly good with Apple phones, which is significant because these devices are generally more secure than Android ones. This is positively infuriating to Apple, which views protecting its users’ privacy as one of its USPs.

How does Pegasus work? Pay attention, iPhone users, journalists and heads of government…

Read on

Doc Searls on ‘the final demographic’

Doc is one of the wisest people on the Net — an elder statesman, if you like. In 2012 he fell off what he described as “a demographic cliff” (remember he started in marketing). And here are some of his reflections on the milestone he’d reached.

For individuals, demographics are absurd. None of us are an age, much less a range of them. We’re animals who live and work and have fun and do stuff. Eventually we croak, but if we stay healthy we acquire wisdom and experience, and find ourselves more valuable over time.

Yet we become less employable as we climb the high end of the demographic ladder, but not because we can’t do the work. It’s mostly because we look old and our tolerance for bullshit is low. Even our own, which is another bonus.

Nearly 100% of the people I work with are younger than me, usually by a generation or two. I almost never feel old among them. Sometimes I joke about it, but I really don’t care. It helps to have been around. It helps to know how fast and well the mighty rise, and then fall. It helps to see what comes and stays, and to know why those things matter more than what comes and goes. It helps to know there are sand dunes older than any company born on the Internet.

For most of my life I’ve worked in the most amazing industry the world has ever hosted. Technology is a miracle business. Lots of good new things come and go, but three aren’t sand dunes. They’re staying for the duration. I knew they would when I saw each arrive and then fail to leave. They were things nobody owned, everybody could use and anybody could improve. For all three reasons they supported boundless economic growth and other benefits to society. They are:

The personal computer

The internet

The smartphone.

That was nine years ago. He’s still going strong.

Sweat (contd)

I got the Victorian euphemism wrong. “Horses sweat, men perspire, but ladies simply glow” is. how it goes

Thanks to CA for putting me right.

The Delta variant: as infectious as chickenpox.

According to the US CDC, as reported in the Guardian,

The Delta variant spreads much faster, is more likely to infect the vaccinated, and could potentially trigger more severe illness in the unvaccinated compared with all other known variants, according to an internal report compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The document, a slide presentation prepared by officials within the US’s health protection agency first obtained by the Washington Post, warned that the Delta variant is as infectious as chickenpox, and argues that government officials must “acknowledge the war has changed” given how dangerous the variant is.

Citing data from an outbreak in a county in Massachusetts, the CDC document suggested that infections in vaccinated people can produce viral loads similar to those who are unvaccinated and infected with the variant.

However, scientists acknowledge that the likelihood of vaccinated people spreading the virus, if infected, is much rarer compared with unvaccinated people.

Phew!

En Passant: Remember how, at the beginning of the pandemic in the UK, someone in 10 Downing Street was heard to say that maybe the country should be holding ‘chickenpox parties’ — presumably to get to herd immunity quicker?

This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday through Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if your decide that your inbox is full enough already!

Quote of the Day

”Edith wholly ignorant. She said that port was made with methylated spirit: she knew this for a fact because her charwoman told her.”

• Evelyn Waugh, writing of Edith Sitwell, in his diary.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Mendelssohn | Song without Words | Jacqueline du Pré

Link

A recording I’ve never heard before. Lovely.

Long Read of the Day

The thermocline of truth by Rob Miller.

In organisations, reality is not always what it seems. Why is it that often things look rosy right up until they fall apart?

Among other things, this is the best piece I’ve seen about one of the biggest miscarriage of British justice in at least 50 years — the way the UK Post Office prosecuted, bankrupted and destroyed the lives of hundreds of innocent postmasters by accusing them for theft while all the while the ‘missing’ money was an artefact of a bug in the Post Office’s accounting system.

It also provides an analytical way of explaining why those at the very top of large organisations often have no idea of what’s going on until it’s too late.

Unmissable.

Thanks to Charles Arthur, who alerted me to it.

Chart of the Day

FT comment:

The three brought in combined after-tax profits of almost $5bn a week. At $56.8bn for the quarter, the total was almost double the year before and 30 per cent more than Wall Street had predicted. They generated a combined $189.4bn in revenue — 39 per cent more than the same period the year before, and some $15bn more than Wall Street had been expecting.

Sweating (contd.)

Further to the item yesterday about the lethality of humidity and the role of sweating in protecting humans, this lovely email arrived from Jonathan Rees (Whom God Preserve):

You have between 1 and 4 million sweat glands. In a sense they are like a distributed mini kidneys for pushing fluid across a membrane and reabsorbing some ions. More sweat glands than nephrons (some say…)

Max output is said to be 4 litres per hour (more than your kidneys). You can’t maintain this without constant fluid. When I taught medical students — in days when you could ad lib more — I used to make a comparison with how much beer you could drink in the bar and how often you had to visit the loo.

Humans are sweating machines. As we moved from the forest to the savannah — dry heat — we lost body hair to facilitate sweating because we became very energetic primates. Humans are better at losing heat than any other mammal.

The evolutionary problem then became how to protect the skin from UV (past-middle age bald professors of dermatology know hair is a great sunblock). The solution was re-badge melanins, molecules that absorb in the visible spectrum, but also absorb in the 290-400nm region (skin cell DNA damage max in 290-310nm). Old wine, new bottles. This is why blogging is good for autodidacts (like me).

Funny also how ’sweating’ became viewed as a vulgar term in Victorian times. (As in “horses sweat but ladies merely perspire.”). This was doubtless because the upper classes did no work. Paraphrasing Bertrand Russell’s great definition:

”Work comes in two varieties: the first involves altering the position of matter relative to the earth’s surface; the second is telling other people to do so. The first is agreeable and well-paid; the second is not.”

Gillian Tett on Trump and professional wresting

Very interesting podcast in the Media Masters series. The interviewee was Gillian Tett who’s now Editor-at-Large (whatever that means) at the Financial Times. Something she said about reporting Trump caught my attention. Here it is:

Well, I think that Trump is a symptom of many things, a growing level of polarization. But not just politically, also in terms of epistemology, in terms of how you process information. And there’s a lot of soul searching that needs to happen in the media world around this, because as journalists we’re trained to assume that command of language and words equates to credibility and respect and because we are trained to think and linear sequences, then everybody else must basically respect that and aspire to do the same. And of course the reality is that’s not the case at all. Much of the time, many people communicate in different ways, not through literal text-based analysis like journalists do, and Trump’s genius in some ways. And I use that word in a descriptive way, not in an admiring way, to tap into the kinds of communication styles that journalists were often very ill-equipped to understand. I write in my book about how I went to a world wrestling ring once because a friend of mine had told me if I wanted you to understand Trump, I had to go to a wrestling ring because the reality was that most of the American population knew him through wrestling, not through The Apprentice on TV.

But because wrestling is mostly a mass market, not elite sport. Most of the elites who were writing about Trump didn’t even realize that. And when you went into wrestling, when you realize that the performative aspect in terms of the crowd chanting and the fake aggression and the name calling and the staged contests and all of that were exactly what Trump had borrowed lock, stock and barrel for his political rallies. And elite journalists were very poorly placed to understand that because not only for the most part, are they not been to wrestling matches, but they tended to take him literally, but not seriously to quote Selena Zito, the journalist, as opposed to the crowds who were taking him seriously, but not literally because they were seeing it through the kind of performance and style of wrestling.

And I think in the aftermath of the whole Trump era, journalists need to really think about the degree to which not only are their perceptions of the world shaped by their own tribalism and that defensiveness in the face of the attacks by Trump, but also the way that they communicate and think, they often extrapolate that to other people where they look at how they think the world should work, rather than actually trying to ask other people humbling quietly, how other people think the world works. And that’s the lesson that I need to learn about to anybody else. You know, I got the Brexit vote completely wrong because I’d slipped into a period of rather lazy arrogance of looking at the UK from a distance. And after that, that was one reason why I remembered, you know, why I thought I’ve got to relearn my anthropology and go back to listening rather than just imposing my own assumptions on people.

I am thinking of replacing my electric car with a petrol car and have some questions.

From Reddit…

1. I have heard that petrol cars can not refuel at home while you sleep? How often do you have to refill elsewhere? Is this several times a year? Will there be a solution for refueling at home?

2. Which parts will I need service on and how often? The car salesman mentioned a box with gears in it. What is this and will I receive a warning with an indicator when I need to change gear?

3. Can I accelerate and brake with one pedal as I do today with my electric car?

4. Do I get fuel back when I slow down or drive downhill? I assume so, but need to ask to be sure.

5. The car I test drove seemed to have a delay from the time I pressed the accelerator pedal until it began to accelerate. Is that normal in petrol cars?

6. We currently pay about 1.2p per mile to drive our electric car. I have heard that petrol can cost up to 10 times as much so I reckon we will lose some money in the beginning. We drive about 20,000 miles a year. Let’s hope more people will start using petrol so prices go down.

7. Is it true that petrol is flammable? Should I empty the tank and store the petrol somewhere else while the car is in the garage?

8. Is there an automatic system to prevent gasoline from catching fire or exploding in an accident. What does this cost?

9. I understand that the main ingredient in petrol is oil. Is it true that the extraction and refining of oil causes environmental problems as well as conflicts and major wars that over the last 100 years have cost millions of lives? Is there a solution to these problems?

10. I have heard that cars with internal combustion based engines are being banned to enter more and more cities around the world, as it is claimed that they tend to harm the environment and health of their citizens?? Is that true??

I may have more questions later, but these are the most important ones to me at the moment. Thank you in advance for your reply.

(Many thanks to Gerard for spotting it.)

 This blog is also available as a daily email. If you think this might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email a day, Monday to Friday, delivered to your inbox at 7am UK time. It’s free, and there’s a one-click unsubscribe if you decide that your inbox is full enough already!