Welcome, Ol’ Timer

The ad Apple ran in 1981 when IBM introduced its PC.

(Thanks to Dave Winer)

Quote of the Day

”Though you think the world is at your feet, it can rise up and tread on you”

• Ian McEwan

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Cherish the Ladies | Lord Inchiquin Medley

Link

Cherish the Ladies is an interesting and talented group.

Long Read of the Day

Between Golem and God: The Future of AI

An illuminating essay by Ali Minay, who is Professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science and a member of the Neuroscience Graduate Faculty at the University of Cincinnati. His research focuses on complex adaptive systems, computational neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.

Maybe it’s because I’m an engineer, but what I really liked about this piece is the elegant way he structured his analysis round a simple diagram:

Anyway, it’s well worth your time.

The physical reality of ‘AI’

Kate Crawford’s Atlas of AI:Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence is a landmark book which challenges the glib way in which ‘AI’ (a polite and misleading term for machine-learning) is regarded as an abstruse abstraction.

Last Sunday, the Observer carried an excellent interview of her by Zoë Corbyn. Here’s a sample:

What’s the aim of the book?

We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.

.What should people know about how AI products are made?

We aren’t used to thinking about these systems in terms of the environmental costs. But saying, “Hey, Alexa, order me some toilet rolls,” invokes into being this chain of extraction, which goes all around the planet… We’ve got a long way to go before this is green technology. Also, systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.

Worth reading in full.

Italy’s fading digital democracy dream

Interesting Wired piece by Michele Barbero.

The Five Star Movement (5SM), launched one of the most interesting experiments in using tech to revitalise democracy by reconciling thousands of disenfranchised citizens with democratic processes by giving them a say on strategic decisions and in the selection of candidates by means of frequent online votes. But, writes, Barbero,

over the past two months its internal processes have been disrupted by a painful divorce with the association that owns Rousseau, the web platform (named after the Genevan political philosopher and theorist of direct democracy) where the 5SM used to hold its ballots and debates. The end of a long stalemate between the party and the platform, this week, provided some respite – but questions remain on whether the party’s online democracy utopia can ever be revived.

In many ways, the row resembled an Italian opera buffa rather than a political showdown over the future of participatory democracy. The Rousseau association, founded by Gianroberto Casaleggio and his son Davide – now the president following Gianroberto’s death in 2016 – had long been complaining that many Five Star elected officials had stopped paying, with the blessing of their leaders, the €300 (£260) monthly quotas that accounted for much of its revenue. The organisation claimed that the total back fees amounted to about €450,000 (£388,000), a figure that the 5SM rejected, arguing that it had been calculated including representatives that had long left the party, and billing for services it had never asked for.

The billing fiasco will doubtless be used by opponents of digital experiments as proof that this kind of ‘direct democracy’ can’t work. But the interesting thing about the 5SM experiment is that it was the biggest experiment of its kind to date. It shows that governing is a difficult business, that deliberative democracy is hard and that the problems highlighted by Edmund Burke in his famous letter to the electors of Bristol are still relevant. The fact that there’s no magic tech solution doesn’t mean that we can’t use the technology creatively to reduce the distance between the governors and the governed.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Puffin island: a voyage to one of Scotland’s remotest habitats A wonderful photo-essay by Murdo MacLeod. They are the most beautiful birds. Link

• US recovers millions in cryptocurrency paid to Colonial Pipeline ransomware hackers So much for the idea that crypto kept the Feds at bay. Link

ERRATUM The link to yesterday’s Long Read was missing. It’s https://fivebooks.com/best-books/industrial-revolution-sheilagh-ogilvie/. Apologies for the omission.

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!

After the party

We had a nice family gathering in the garden one night last week. After everyone had departed I sat at the table, admiring the little Hay light that I got as a present. It’s a really lovely piece of kit.

Quote of the Day

”It’s fairly common to say that Google is the new Microsoft, but from a regulatory perspective Apple is the new Microsoft and Google is the new AT&T. (Amazon is the new Walmart and Facebook perhaps the new Murdoch.)”

• Benedict Evans

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Ry Cooder and David Lindley | Promised Land

Link

Recorded in the Vienna Opera House (not what one usually associates with that staid institution).

Beautiful Reggae number. If it doesn’t improve your breakfast, then nothing will.

Long Read of the Day

The best books on the Industrial Revolution

Recommended by historian Sheilagh Ogilvie. Plus an interview in which she talks about the topic and the books.

Link

Annoying, though, that Humphrey Jennings’s wonderful  Pandaemonium, 1660-1886: Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers wasn’t mentioned. Maybe it’s because it’s just an anthology.

What We Leave Behind

Wonderful blast from Scott Galloway from a year ago, as the extent of the pandemic was beginning to become clear (at least to those who were disposed to think about it.)

Essential workers. The term essential means we’re going to treat you like chumps but run commercials calling you heroes. Just stop it. We lean out our windows and applaud health-care workers, as we should. We don’t, however, lean out our windows to salute other front-line workers — the guy or gal delivering your groceries or dropping Indian food through the window in your back seat.

Why? Because, deep down, we’ve been taught to believe that we live in a meritocracy and that billionaires and minimum wage workers all deserve what they get. We’ve conflated luck and talent, and it’s had a disastrous outcome — a lack of empathy.

There is so much that’s jarring about American exceptionalism. An enduring American image of the pandemic is a makeshift morgue in a refrigerated tractor-trailer in Queens. Worse? We idolize the founder of Tesla, who’s added the GDP of Hungary to his wealth (all tax-free/deferred) during this crisis, even as we discover 25% of New Yorkers are at risk for becoming food insecure. This isn’t a United States, it’s The Hunger Games.

This country was built by titans of industry even wealthier than today’s billionaires — Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and J.P. Morgan. But 1 in 11 steel workers didn’t need to die for bridges and skyscrapers to happen. We are a country that rewards genius. Yet no one person needs to hold enough cash to end homelessness ($20 billion), eradicate malaria worldwide ($90 billion), and have enough left over to pay 700,000 teachers’ salaries. Bezos makes the average Amazon employee’s salary in 10 seconds. This paints us as a feudal state and not a democracy.

Our lack of empathy for fellow Americans is vulgar and un-American. We can and should replace the hollow tributes with a federally mandated $20/hour minimum wage. This “outrageous” lift in the hourly wage would vault us from the 1960s to the present. As of 2018 the federal minimum was worth 29% less than in 1968.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• China’s WeChat bans nose-picking, spanking in bid to clean up livestreams Reuters report. Link
•  Government Report Finds No Evidence U.F.O.s Were Alien Spacecraft Damn. Link

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!

From the Preface to my copy of Keynes’s General Theory.

What caught my eye was the point that his readers will have difficulty not with the new ideas they will encounter in the text, but in sloughing off the old ideas with which they have been conditioned and reared. I see this all the time at the moment, as our governing elites can’t escape from their neoliberal conditioning.

Quote of the Day

”A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.”

• Richard Bach

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Garth | Concerto for Violoncello Nº 2 in B flat Major

Link

Lessons from Trump’s short career as a blogger

‘From the Desk of Donald J. Trump’ lasted just 29 days. It’s tempting to gloat over this humiliating failure of a monster hitherto regarded as an omnipotent master of the online universe.

Tempting but unwise, because Trump’s failure should alert us to a couple of unpalatable realities.

The first is that the eerie silence that descended after the former President was deplatformed by Twitter and Facebook provided conclusive evidence of the power of these two private companies to control the networked public sphere. Those of us who loathed him celebrate his silencing because we saw him — rightly — as a threat to democracy. But nearly half of the American electorate voted for him. And the same unaccountable power that deprived him of his online megaphones could easily be deployed to silence others of whom we approve.

The other unpalatable reality is that Trump’s failure to build an online base off his own bat should alert us to the way the utopian potential of the early Internet — that it would be the death of the couch potato, the archetypal passive consume — has not been realised. Trump, remember, had 80m followers on Twitter and God knows how many on Facebook. Yet when he starts his own blog they didn’t flock to it. In fact they were nowhere to be seen. Indeed his blog, as reported Forbes, had “less traffic than pet adoption site Petfinder and food site Eat This Not That.” And he shuttered it because “low readership made him look small and irrelevant”. Which it did.

What does this tell us? The answer, says Philip Napoli in an insightful essay in Wired,

lies in the inescapable dynamics of how today’s online media ecosystem operates and how audiences have come to engage with content online. Many of us who study media have long distinguished between “push” media and “pull” media. Traditional broadcast television is a classic “push” medium, in which multiple content streams are delivered to a user’s device with very little effort required on the user’s part, beyond flipping the channels. In contrast, the web was initially the quintessential “pull” medium, where a user frequently needed to actively search to locate content interesting to them. Search engines and knowing how to navigate them effectively were central to locating the most relevant content online. Whereas TV was a “lean-back” medium for “passive” users, the web, we were told, was a “lean-forward” medium, where users were “active.” Though these generalizations no longer hold up, the distinction is instructive for thinking about why Trump’s blog failed so spectacularly.

In the highly fragmented web landscape, with millions of sites to choose from, generating traffic is challenging. This is why early web startups spent millions of dollars on splashy Super Bowl ads on tired, old broadcast TV, essentially leveraging the push medium to inform and encourage people to pull their online content.

Then social media helped to transform the web from a pull medium to a push medium…

He’s right. See today’s Long Read for Cory Doctorow’s expansion of this idea.

Long Read of the Day

 Recommendation engines and “lean-back” media

Typically perceptive essay by Cory Doctorow.

The optimism of the era is best summarized in a taxonomy that grouped media into two categories: “lean back” (turn it on and passively consume it) and “lean forward” (steer your media consumption with a series of conscious decisions that explores a vast landscape).

Lean-forward media was intensely sociable: not just because of the distributed conversation that consisted of blog-reblog-reply, but also thanks to user reviews and fannish message-board analysis and recommendations.

Worth reading in full. Our media ecosystem has profoundly changed. And that means our culture is changing too.

Why a silicon chip shortage has left carmakers in the slow lane

Yesterday’s Observer column:

Once upon a time, cars were made the Henry Ford way, revolutionary in its time, but involving holding huge stocks of components to feed a relentless mechanised production line. As Japan started to rebuild after the war, its leading carmaker, Toyota, came up with a more efficient way of making them. It came to be called the “lean machine” and a key feature of it was to hold very small inventories of components and instead have the necessary parts delivered just when they were needed for a particular assembly task. It was the beginning of just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing and it eventually became the way all cars were made because lower inventories meant lower manufacturing costs, better quality and higher profit margins.

But JIT critically relies on an efficient, reliable and robust supply chain. If the chain falters, then everything grinds to a halt. This applies whether the part is a gearbox or a silicon chip and over the last two decades chips, particularly in engine management units (EMUs), have become vital to the functioning of even the humblest petrol or diesel vehicle. We’re heading towards a future when cars will essentially be computers with wheels. But even now, if the relevant chips don’t arrive, then it’s crisis time.

The current distress of the car industry stems from the fact that the chips aren’t arriving – for several reasons…

Read on

Another, hopefully interesting, link

• Ice-skating Robot Also Swims No, I don’t need one. But interesting nonetheless. Link

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 polite request in the grounds of Dartington Hall in Devon.

Quote of the Day

”When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a drawing room full of dukes.”

• W.H. Auden

Nice, but it smacks a bit of what is now called “humblebragging” on social media.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Brian McGrath, Cathal Hayden & Steve Cooney | Banjo Duet | Gradam Ceoil TG4 | 2000

Link

Note that it’s a ‘duet’, not a duel.

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.)

Remembering Paul Feyerabend

Chancing on this video was an example of the blissful serendipity offered by the Web. It’s an extended interview of the philosopher Paul Feyerabend on Italian TV. And it’s in English.

What was striking about it was the way it suddenly reminded me of a thinker who had streaked like a comet across the sky when I was a young academic. I have always been interested in the philosophy of science, and spent much of the 1970s oscillating between the views of Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn and the attempts of Imré Lakatos to find some way of bridging the chasm between the two.

And then in 1975 came Feyerabend’s remarkable book, Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge, an intellectual grenade lobbed into those austere controversies.

It was one of those books which forever changes the way one thinks. Certainly it had that impact on me. And there have been interesting echoes of the issues it raised in current controversies about “following the science’ in the Covid crisis. When the book appeared in the 1970s it met with predictable responses from the philosophical establishment, which interpreted it as a frontal attack on ‘science’. What I hadn’t appreciated at the time was the personal toll that this hostile reaction took on Feyerabend. I knew very little about him as a person, and I assumed from his wonderfully insouciant style that he wouldn’t give a damn what these people thought.

But he did, and was deeply depressed for a time. Later on, he wrote movingly in his autobiography about it:

The depression stayed with me for over a year; it was like an animal, a well-defined, spatially localizable thing. I would wake up, open my eyes, listen—Is it here or isn’t? No sign of it. Perhaps it’s asleep. Perhaps it will leave me alone today. Carefully, very carefully, I get out of bed. All is quiet. I go to the kitchen, start breakfast. Not a sound. TV—Good Morning America—, David What’s-his-name, a guy I can’t stand. I eat and watch the guests. Slowly the food fills my stomach and gives me strength. Now a quick excursion to the bathroom, and out for my morning walk—and here she is, my faithful depression: “Did you think you could leave without me?”

He was, by all accounts, an unforgettable lecturer. The entry for him in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes a memoir of one of his students which brilliantly conveys that.

Sussex University: the start of the Autumn Term, 1974. There was not a seat to be had in the biggest Arts lecture theatre on campus. Taut with anticipation, we waited expectantly and impatiently for the advertized event to begin. He was not on time—as usual. In fact rumour had it that he would not be appearing at all that illness (or was it just ennui? or perhaps a mistress?) had confined him to bed. But just as we began sadly to reconcile ourselves to the idea that there would be no performance that day at all, Paul Feyerabend burst through the door at the front of the packed hall. Rather pale, and supporting himself on a short metal crutch, he walked with a limp across to the blackboard. Removing his sweater he picked up the chalk and wrote down three questions one beneath the other: What’s so great about knowledge? What’s so great about science? What’s so great about truth? We were not going to be disappointed after all!

During the following weeks of that term, and for the rest of his year as a visiting lecturer, Feyerabend demolished virtually every traditional academic boundary. He held no idea and no person sacred. With unprecedented energy and enthusiasm he discussed anything from Aristotle to the Azande. How does science differ from witchcraft? Does it provide the only rational way of cognitively organizing our experience? What should we do if the pursuit of truth cripples our intellects and stunts our individuality? Suddenly epistemology became an exhilarating area of investigation.

Feyerabend created spaces in which people could breathe again. He demanded of philosophers that they be receptive to ideas from the most disparate and apparently far-flung domains, and insisted that only in this way could they understand the processes whereby knowledge grows. His listeners were enthralled, and he held his huge audiences until, too ill and too exhausted to continue, he simply began repeating himself. But not before he had brought the house down by writing “Aristotle” in three-foot high letters on the blackboard and then writing “Popper” in tiny, virtually illegible letters beneath it!

Feyerabend later in life. Photograph by Grazia Borrini-Feyerabend 

Another thing I hadn’t known was that his health was very poor. He was in the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front in the Second World War and while directing military traffic during the German retreat he was shot three times, with one bullet hitting his spine, leaving him with chronic pain and difficulty in walking. And, in a way, his iconoclastic attitude towards establishment worship of ‘science’ may have been at least partly influenced by personal experience. The Stanford enclopedia entry hints at that:

Because his health was poor, Feyerabend started seeing a healer who had been recommended to him. The treatment was successful, and thenceforth Feyerabend used to refer to his own case as an example of both the failures of orthodox medicine and the largely unexplored possibilities of “alternative” or traditional remedies.

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!

Our local Canada Geese family, photographed late yesterday. All eight fluffballs have grown into gawky teenagers.

Quote of the Day

”There was clearly no need for a war to lay waste to the biosphere; all that was needed was business as usual.”

• Francis, a character in Edward St Aubyn’s new novel, Double Blind.

(I’m reminded of it by this morning’s news about Republican opposition to Joe Biden’s ‘pause’ on the Alaskan exploration licences awarded by Trump to oil companies.)

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

John Garth | Cello Concerto No 6 in D Major

Link

Long Read of the Day

Sport loves athletes with mental health issues – if they just shut up and play

Well, perhaps not long, but definitely today’s best read. Marina Hyde on the ludicrous hypocrisy of the bodies that run professional tennis.

You do have to admire tennis’s position on health. The women’s No 2 has been pushed into withdrawing from a grand slam for having the temerity to take a small step to protect her own mental equilibrium, while the men’s No 1 has spent the past 14 months continually honking out anti-Covid vaccine messages . Novak Djokovic has not been officially censured for that, nor for the ridiculous super-spreader tournament he hosted across the Balkans last summer against all advice, which saw several players (including him) catch Covid.

Lots more where that came from. Enjoy (as faux-friendly waiters say in faux-posh restaurants), apparently unaware that ‘enjoy’ is a transitive verb.

The UK’s recipe for disaster: keep taking the tabloids

Britain has a few good newspapers, and some of the world’s worst — its ‘tabloids’ or ‘red tops’. Take, for example, yesterday’s ‘news’ headlines as reported by Politico, after the country had its first day without a Covid-related death :

A major milestone: Most papers lead on yesterday’s brilliant news that there were zero COVID deaths reported in the U.K. for the first time since March 11, 2020 — 447 days ago. The Mail says the stat shows there is “nothing to fear from freedom” and blasts what it calls an “insidious campaign to keep curbs.” The Telegraph says Johnson is now “under pressure not to stall” his reopening, and the Times reckons there is “fresh hope for June 21 as deaths fall to zero.”

Then…

A weary Whitehall official put it slightly more strongly after the front pages came out: “I would politely point out that we have been in this pandemic for 15 months and everyone should know by now that there is a lag between cases, hospitalizations and deaths. Today is obviously very good news but as the health secretary said, cases are rising and it always takes some weeks to know the effect of that on hospitalizations and deaths.”

There are numerous reasons why the UK is such a badly-governed state (a dysfunctional first-past-the-post electoral system, a patchwork ‘constitution’, class divisions, inequality, over-centralisation, imperial afterglow, etc.) But the country’s tabloid media have to shoulder a good deal of the blame.

And, of course, while things may appear to be getting better in the UK and the US, in the rest of the world (terra incognito to British tabloids) things are actually getting much worse. And so long as the virus exists anywhere in the world, nowhere is really safe.

”We know what you did during lockdown”

An FT Film written by James Graham.

And a graphic introduction to the dystopia into which we’re heading.

18 minutes long. Unmissable and disturbing.

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!

Make the Earth move…

… But on no account push.

Seen on a journey the other day.

Quote of the Day

”Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draft from here.”

• Groucho Marx on Chico

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | Suite No. 5 | Sviatoslav Richter

Link

Long Read of the Day  Monopolists are winning the repair wars

Marvellous long blog post by Cory Doctorow on the way an increasing percentage of vital machinery is being controlled by monopolistic manufacturers. This is not just about Apple trying to make sure that nobody except Apple repairs your iPhone. Ditto medical equipment. Ditto modern tractors. And so on. It explains why the ‘right to repair’ is an important issue, and why the power of corporate lobbying to prevent it is so damaging and environmentally disastrous.

Uber finally recognises a trade union — the GMB

Well, well. This from the Guardian:

Uber is to recognise the GMB trade union in the UK for its private hire drivers, marking the first deal between a union and a gig economy ride-hailing service.

Under the recognition deal, the GMB will have access to drivers’ meeting hubs to help and support them. It will also be able to represent drivers if they lose access to the Uber app, and it will meet quarterly with management to discuss driver issues and concerns.

Drivers will not become members automatically but will be able to sign up to take part in collective bargaining.

Uber has signed the deal two months after agreeing to guarantee its 70,000 UK drivers a minimum hourly wage, holiday pay and pensions in March after a landmark supreme court ruling.

But (there’s always a but)…

The union recognition agreement, like the pay deal, does not apply to delivery riders for the Uber Eats food service, which works with about 30,000 couriers.

Still, as the Chinese say, the longest journey begins with a single step.

Who knows, maybe one day I might use Uber?

Britain’s electric car charging network gets a boost

Today’s Guardian reports that:

Britain’s energy regulator has approved a £300m investment spree to help triple the number of ultra-rapid electric car charge points across the country, as part of efforts to accelerate the UK’s shift to clean energy.

Ofgem has given the green light for energy network companies to invest in more than 200 low-carbon projects across the country over the next two years, including the installation of 1,800 new ultra-rapid car charge points for motorway service stations and a further 1,750 charge points in towns and cities.

The regulator hopes the extra investment to make car charging points more convenient will help to address motorist “range anxiety”, which is frequently mentioned as a key reason why drivers are wary about choosing an electric vehicle over a fossil fuel model.

The UK plans to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 and phase out hybrid vehicles from 2035 as part of its plan to reduce road transport emissions. However, only 11% of new car registrations last year were for ultra-low emission cars.

This is interesting because I suspect there’s a race on between EV adoption and the rate at which the charging infrastructure expands.

Other, hopefully interesting, links

• Sites of the graves of famous economists Of arcane interest, I grant you, but I was intrigued to find that Keynes’s ashes were not — as his will stipulated — deposited in the crypt of his College (King’s, Cambridge) but scattered on the Downs at Tilton, his country estate. Link
•  The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen – Interviewed by a Retard. You thought Elon Musk was nuts? Well, try Marc Andreessen — as portrayed in this interview by Niccolo Soldo doing a fair impression of Hunter S Thompson on speed. Link
• Stairway to Heaven as you’ve never heard it sung before Link

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! 

We spent the long weekend at Dartington Hall in Devon, which has what are, IMHO, the most entrancing grounds in England. This is just one of dozens of photographs from a long walk round the estate.

Quote of the Day

”It is advantageous to an author that his book should be attacked as well as praised. Fame is a shuttlecock. If it be struck at only one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground. To keep it up it must be struck at both ends.”

• Samuel Johnson

Try telling that to some academics, though.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Gerry O’Connor (Banjo) and Arty McGlynn (Guitar) | Francie Brearton’s (Jig 0:00) & Sally Kelly’s (Reel 1:35) | Recording made for the Geantraí music series on TG4 in 2007.

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Social Life of Forests

Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another? Fascinating essay by Ferris Jabr in The New York Times. Here’s a sample:

Simard noticed that up to 10 percent of newly planted Douglas fir were likely to get sick and die whenever nearby aspen, paper birch and cottonwood were removed. The reasons were unclear. The planted saplings had plenty of space, and they received more light and water than trees in old, dense forests. So why were they so frail?

Simard suspected that the answer was buried in the soil. Underground, trees and fungi form partnerships known as mycorrhizas: Threadlike fungi envelop and fuse with tree roots, helping them extract water and nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for some of the carbon-rich sugars the trees make through photosynthesis. Research had demonstrated that mycorrhizas also connected plants to one another and that these associations might be ecologically important, but most scientists had studied them in greenhouses and laboratories, not in the wild.

This is a great read.

Data is not the ‘new oil’. It’s people’s lives

Last Sunday’s Observer column:

The phrase “data is the new oil” is the cliche du jour of the tech industry. It was coined by Clive Humby, the genius behind Tesco’s loyalty card, who argued that data was “just like crude. It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analysed for it to have value.”

It turned out to be a viral idea: marketers, tech companies, governments, regulators and the mainstream media went for it like ostriches going after brass doorknobs (as PG Wodehouse might have put it) and it rapidly attained the status of holy writ. But it’s a cliche nevertheless and cliches are, as my colleague David Runciman once observed, “where the truth goes to die”.

Humby’s cliche, however, is also a metaphor – a way of describing something by saying it is something else and that should concern us. Why? Because metaphors shape the way we think and, as the philosopher George Lakoff pointed out aeons ago, the best way to win arguments is to use metaphor to frame the discourse and dictate the language in which it is conducted. Thus American anti-abortion campaigners framed abortion as murder and the music industry framed filesharing as theft.

And who’s in favour of murder or theft?

Do read the whole thing.

Inside the enigma that is Joe Biden

Short but revealing interview with Edward-Isaac Dovere of The Atlantic

Joe Biden had been president for less than two weeks when he told me something he’d heard from a friend after the election. Biden was like the dog that caught the car, the friend told him—after a lifetime of dreaming of becoming president, he’d finally done it. “I said, ‘No, I think I got the bus,’” Biden told me, reflecting on the combined crises of the pandemic, the economic collapse, and the shaky future of American democracy. “I’m the dog that caught the bus.”

This isn’t the presidency Biden had expected when he entered the race two years ago…

It sure isn’t. And he’s not the President that most of the commentariat expected, either.

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!

Predator and friend

Quote of the Day

”If the Third World War is fought with nuclear weapons, the Fourth will be fought with bows and arrows.”

• Lord Mountbatten

Funnily enough, I’m reading  2034: A Novel of the Next World War by Elliott Ackerman and Admiral James Stavridis and thinking along the same lines.

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

Handel | ”The Harmonious Blacksmith” | Wilhelm Kempff

Link

I’ve loved this piece ever since I first heard it. There are also some delicious adaptations of it — for example this for Oboe, Bassoon and Harpischord.

Long Read of the Day

 Data isn’t oil, so what is it?

We need a better metaphor, because metaphors shape the way we think. And at the moment we’re wilfully misunderstanding ‘data’.

Really insightful essay by Matt Locke.

Thanks to Andrew Curry for spotting it.

Got an electric car but no home charger?

If you have an EV (as I do) then charging it at home is the obvious thing to do. But in order to do that you need to have a driveway so that the vehicle off the road while being charged. This is an obvious limitation on the adoption of EVs by people who live in apartments or in urban houses with no off-street parking.

Which is why this story by Miles Brignall in the Guardian caught my eye.

Electric car owners with a charger installed at their home can sign up to a community app that allows them to share it with neighbours, while making them a little extra cash at the same time.

Designed to get local communities sharing the 300,000 privately owned electric chargers across the country, the Co Charger app puts electric vehicle owners who don’t have a charger of their own in touch with neighbours who do.

Joel Teague, the man behind it, came up with the idea after his new electric Renault Zoe arrived without its charger. A kind neighbour allowed him to use his, with Teague popping £5 in his letterbox each time.

The app matches people with home chargers, the hosts, to “chargees” – those who would like to share them. It is free to download and it handles the whole booking process, works out how much the chargee owes the host, and makes the payment directly into their bank account…

Singapore Approves Covid Breath Test With One-Minute Result

From Bloomberg.

A breath test designed to detect Covid-19 and give accurate results within one minute has been approved for use in Singapore, the National University of Singapore said in a statement.

The test, developed by NUS spin-off startup Breathonix, works much like a standard breathalyzer test that police might use to see if an erratic driver is drunk. A person blows into a one-way valve mouthpiece, and compounds in the person’s breath — think of it as a breath signature — are compared by machine-learning software to the sort of breath signature expected from someone who’s Covid-positive.

Accurate tests at that speed could be key to unlocking a travel sector that’s crucial for Singapore’s economy but has slowed to a crawl during the pandemic. Even as the U.S. and parts of Europe begin to reopen with higher viral caseloads, Singapore and other “Covid-Zero” countries in Asia have been hesitant to open borders and have cracked down harshly on any sign of flare-ups.

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!

I haven’t worn a suit (or tie) for 14 months, so getting ready yesterday evening for the first College dinner since last March meant re-learning old skills. Like how to knot a tie! It turned out to be a really nice evening, with colleagues who haven’t met in person for at least a year gathered round a table, exchanging gossip and ideas.

It was also a reminder that Zoom is a mighty bloodless substitute for life, as Charles Lamb might have said.

Quote of the Day

”To eat well in England you should have a breakfast three times a day.”

• Somerset Maugham

Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news

The Traveling Wilburys | End Of The Line

Link

Long Read of the Day

The Fall of the House of Gates?

Fully reckoning with Bill Gates means not just focusing on how he treats women—vital as that is—but also confronting our own deep-seated worship of wealth and hardwired belief in hero narratives. By Tim Schwab Link

Galaxy Upcycling: How Samsung Ruined Their Best Idea in Years

By Kevin Purdy of iFixit.

This is a great story — of how Samsung had a great idea for making use of older smartphones and reducing waste, and how it fizzled out. The imperative to planned obsolescence and corporate conservatism triumphed.

“There is another way to create even more value” than recycling, Samsung said in a video at the time. “It’s called upcycling.” With code and creativity, upcycling could turn a Galaxy S5 into a smart fish tank monitor, a controller for all your smart home devices, a weather station, a nanny cam, or lots more. Upcycling not only kept your old phone from being shredded or stuck in junk-drawer purgatory, it could keep you from buying more single-purpose devices. It was a smart way to reduce our collective upgrade guilt.

We were so excited, in fact, that when Samsung asked us to help launch the product in the fall of 2017, we jumped at the chance. You’ll see iFixit’s name and logo all over Samsung’s original Galaxy Upcycling materials. Samsung, a company without much of a public environmental message, was tossing around big ideas born at a grassroots level. This was something new. We were jazzed, and after validating the concept with working code in our labs, lent our name and credibility to the effort.

But sometimes well-intentioned projects get muzzled inside giant companies. The version of Galaxy Upcycling that finally launched, four years later, is nearly unrecognizable. It makes Samsung seem like a company that hit its head and lost all memory of an idea that would really make a difference for their customers and the planet.

The original Upcycling announcement had huge potential. The purpose was twofold: unlock phones’ bootloaders—which would have incidentally assisted other reuse projects like LineageOS—and foster an open source marketplace of applications for makers. You could run any operating system you wanted. It could have made a real dent in the huge and ever-growing e-waste problem by giving older Samsung devices some value (no small feat, that). It was a heck of a lot more interesting than the usual high-level pledges from device makers about carbon offsets and energy numbers.

Sigh. Pity.

AI emotion-detection software is being tested on Uyghurs

BBC report

A camera system that uses AI and facial recognition intended to reveal states of emotion has been tested on Uyghurs in Xinjiang, the BBC has been told.

A software engineer claimed to have installed such systems in police stations in the province.

A human rights advocate who was shown the evidence described it as shocking.

Xinjiang is home to 12 million ethnic minority Uyghurs, most of whom are Muslim.

Citizens in the province are under daily surveillance. The area is also home to highly controversial “re-education centres”, called high security detention camps by human rights groups, where it is estimated that more than a million people have been held.

This isn’t just a Chinese story: there are tech companies in the West which are experimenting with this technology. When I mentioned this to a sceptical acquaintance he assumed I was pulling his leg. So, in a sense, one good thing about China at the moment is that it provides a demonstration that the fears some of us have about machine-learning are not the nightmares of technophobes, but concerns about real technology that is already in use for sinister purposes.

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!