Coffee morning
In one of my favourite cafés.
Quote of the Day
”Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”
- Ernest Hemingway
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
J.S. Bach | Double Violin Concerto in D minor, second Movement, Largo Ma Non Tanto (BWV 1043)
Driving under time pressure the other day I got caught in an irritating tailback. And then this came on the radio and I relaxed. Just as the movement came an end the road blockage cleared and I was on the move again, feeling peaceful. Music really does reach the parts that even Carlsberg can’t.
Long Read of the Day
The announcement yesterday that Geoff Hinton had won the Nobel prize for physics (together with John Hopfield) made my day. I’ve been following his work for years and a few months ago mutual friends invited me to a long and memorable lunch with him before he returned to the US. What I admire about him in not just how smart and thoughtful he is (and the resolution he showed in sticking with neural networks when the rest of the world had written them off), but also how he handled the tragic death of his wife from cancer, leaving him with two young children (an experience that mirrored my own). He’s the exact opposite of a noxious, bumptious tech bro: an exceptional human being.
After he left Google in 2023 I wrote this piece about him in the Observer.
He is a truly remarkable figure. If there is such a thing as an intellectual pedigree, then Hinton is a thoroughbred.
His father, an entomologist, was a fellow of the Royal Society. His great-great-grandfather was George Boole, the 19th-century mathematician who invented the logic that underpins all digital computing.
His great-grandfather was Charles Howard Hinton, the mathematician and writer whose idea of a “fourth dimension” became a staple of science fiction and wound up in the Marvel superhero movies of the 2010s. And his cousin, the nuclear physicist Joan Hinton, was one of the few women to work on the wartime Manhattan Project in Los Alamos, which produced the first atomic bomb.
Hinton has been obsessed with artificial intelligence for all his adult life, and particularly in the problem of how to build machines that can learn…
Do read the whole piece.
Books, etc.
“Unleashed” is less an autobiography than a nearly 800-page staircase argument. It is a testy and frequently tedious defence in which Mr Johnson rambles on about the many and varied villains who have dared to doubt, slight or fight him — ranging from journalists to socialists, Remainers, Vladimir Putin and a rather laudable-sounding girl called Tracy who punched him in primary school. After a few hundred pages, the book starts to feel less “Unleashed” than unhinged and, worse, uninteresting.
The Economist, reviewing Boris Johnson’s recently-published memoir.
I won’t be buying it: we already have a sufficient supply of loo paper.
My commonplace booklet
Ethan Zuckerman Whom God Preserve) is on a road trip across the US, and he stopped in Columbus, Ohio, which I had always assumed to be a mundane place. How wrong can you be? He’s written a lovely meditation on a city that has more architecturally significant buildings in the span of a few blocks than most major US cities do within their entire footprint. How come? Cummins, the manufacturer of diesel engines and generators that power trucks, buses, boats and buildings around the world, is based there, and it seems to have had a sense of social responsibility that would make most stock-optioning MBAs choke on their muesli. Heartwarming.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- It’s hard not to like this story…
My friend Quentin (himself an experienced sailor) writing about the development of sail-powered commercial ships. Back to the future stuff.
This Blog is also available as an email three days a week. If you think that might suit you better, why not subscribe? One email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays delivered to your inbox at 6am UK time. It’s free, and you can always unsubscribe if you conclude your inbox is full enough already!