May 2021 – Page 2 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

I miss proper light bulbs

One from the I Just Like It directory:

March 2019. A sure sign of a true Big Thing is that you recognise it even when it’s out of focus. Well, even if you don’t, I do. Plus, is that a photoer on the bridge there? Maybe it’s just two people.

Now the above photo just makes me angry about how lightbulbs have degenerated into these bullshit bulbs that look pretty, but don’t give off enough effing light. Why didn’t I buy a lifetime’s supply of the old ones, that worked properly, when I had the chance?

Facadism ten years ago

On May 20th 2011, in other words a decade and three days ago, I photoed these photos, of a fine example of facadism in the process of being contrived. That is, an old facade is preserved, but an entirely new modern interior is inserted behind that facade:

I don’t know exactly when I started noticing this phenomenon, but these photos prove that I been doing this for over a decade.

Sadly, the resolution of these photos, photoed with my ancient last camera but about five (about six if you count the new mobile), a Canon S5 IS, is such that although there are street names to be seen in some of these photos, they are too blurry for me to read them clearly. So, I don’t know exactly where this was. The only other photos photoed that day provide no clues.

On the day, I would appear to have been at least as much interested in the crane.

What I mostly now note from the above photos is that in May 2011, the weather was the sort of weather that May weather should be. Our current May may get some nicer weather just before it ends, but that is still only a hope.

Views from and of the Blue Fin Building

GodDaughter2 has been doing a job in the Blue Fin Building, which is just behind Tate Modern. About three quarters of the way up this building there is a roof area you can walk about in and sit at tables in, and also an indoor sort of bring-your-own-food canteen with views out on outside this roof area. And yesterday, she arranged for us both to go up there are sample the views. Sadly, the weather was pretty filthy, and entirely lacking in the sort of bright sunshine illuminating everything that I so much prefer for photoing. But of course I photoed anyway:

What the above photos all have in common is that they combine views of London beyond the Blue Fin building with close-up views of this or that aspect of the building itself. Sometimes the Blue Fin foreground dominates, but often you just see a bit of the outside of the building, like the big transparent “wall” that stops you accidentally walking off this roof to your death, but which, because it is transparent, actually makes me (and GodDaughter2) scared to go near the damn thing, because transparent walls at the top of cliffs are not things that humans have all evolved not to be freaked out by. If you get my drift.

The best you can say about the weather was that it wasn’t raining all the time, just spitting some of it.

How the artificial meat story will play out

Andrew Lilico tweets:

People seem to imagine there’ll be a “Yuck!” factor barrier to lab-grown meat. But a) in a sausage or burger are you even going to notice? And b) if you think “Yuck!” about lab-grown meat, wait til you find out how they produce non-lab-grown meat!

And “Discount Davy Jones” immediately responds thus:

Step 1: vat grown meat is a luxury, rich people eat it to look better than animal-killing proles.
Step 2: vat grown meat is cheap enough for everybody and becomes a staple of fast food.
Step 3: rich people start eating expensive animal meat because it’s more authentic.

Lilico:

That’s exactly how it’ll work.

Me: Yes, probably. But add in that at some point regular meat will be made illegal, at which point there will be a thriving black market in it.

When good things happen, “progressives” (the sneer quotes because these people typically get in the way of progress rather than make any significant contribution to it) always try to get on the front of the trend by making whatever it is illegal, compulsory, whatever, thus … well, getting in the way of progress, in this case by bullying the old and recalcitrant, and by introducing criminals into the mix.

Nevertheless, I do think it will be progress when we mostly become much nicer to animals, by not imprisoning them and then eating them on the huge scale we do now.

ISIBAISIA, although I couldn’t quickly find where (that link is to a posting about Modern Art): The planet earth is becoming one gigantic zoo.

Michael Jennings tells me more about mobile phone photography

Today Michael Jennings, the creator and still technical curator of this blog, who was in my area for the first time in quite a while, called round and we went out and had drinks. In a Pimlico pub. Indoors. Unmuzzled. With quite a few other people also present. This being the first time that either of us had done this with anyone for … quite a while:

I photoed him and his Lockdown hair, and he told me more about how photography on mobiles is developing. He has an iPhone, which you can just see bottom right of that picture. My mobile only has ~~one camera~~ two cameras (see comments 1 and 3), but Michael’s iPhone has three, thus making variable and quite impressive zoom possible.

Michael speculated that it may not be long before the whole of the back of his next iPhone but three with be covered in cameras, like: well over a dozen.

The limiting factor on this sort of multi-camera is not the cameras themselves. The problem is processing power. Making sense of the output of such a large camera array will take a lot of that, and also lots of ultra-clever software as yet still being contrived.

And there we have the ongoing story of digital photography, better explained than I have ever heard it before. All that processing power attached to an old-school camera would presumably triple its price. But mobiles already have all that processing power, or soon will, so it makes sense for your camera to be part of your personal pocket Kray computer, that you use for all your other mobile computerising.

Several years ago, the big Japanese enterprises who decide these things decided that they would spend no more money making regular dedicated cameras better, which is why these things haven’t changed in the last half decade. They decided to throw all their photography money at mobile phone cameras.

What I had not realised was how very, very good the mobile phone “camera” (quotes because it will really be cameras plural) is going to be, and how inexorably it will go on improving. 3D images? Oh yes, said Michael. The processing power applied to these camera arrays will make imagery possible of a sort that no single dedicated camera, no matter how complicated and costly, could possibly now contrive.

Which means: that old school cameras, even of the most sophisticated sort, will ever so slowly but ever so surely fade into the history books. And actually, do so really rather soon. In historical time, in the blink of … a camera.

Which further means that the best of all those photoer photos that I’ve been photoing for the last two decades will just keep getting better and better, like old wine. Plenty of other people have photoed such photos, but I know of nobody else apart from me who has made a point of doing this on such an industrial scale.

Here are thirty such photos I photoed in July 2006 and which I displayed here last January. There are plenty more where they came from.

This entertaining photoer habit, on the other hand, looks like it will be with us for a while.

McCloskey summarised by Scheidel

I have recently been reading Escape From Rome: The Failure of Empire and the Road to Prosperity by Walter Scheidel. Scheidel himself summarises the arguments in this book in this piece.

Better yet, Scheidel also provides (pp.489-490) a very short summary of Deidre McCloskey’s very long trilogy about how the bourgeoisie ignited the Industrial Revolution:

Deirdre McCloskey has advanced a bold thesis that places values at the center of modernization and the Great Escape. In her telling, “liberal ideas caused the innovation” necessary to sustain this process. By 1700, talk and thought about the middle class began to change. As “general opinion shifted in favor of the bourgeoisie, and especially in favor of its marketing and innovating commerce and investment in human capital expanded as a consequence of this shift, rather than precipitating it. This led to a sweeping “Bourgeois Revaluation” embodied in a new rhetoric that protected the pursuit of business: whereas aristocratic-inflected discourse had previously stigmatized it as a vulgar pursuit, it now garnered acceptance and even admiration. This new mode of thinking permitted the bourgeoisie to join the ruling class and to infuse and enrich it with innovative and competitive traits. In the final analysis, the idea of liberty and dignity for ordinary people was the principal driving force behind this change.

According to McCloskey, this process unfolded in a series of steps. The Reformation together with the growth of commerce, the fragmentation of Europe, and the freedom of their cities enabled the Dutch bourgeoisie to enjoy freedom and dignity. Over time, Dutch influence that encouraged emulation of their practices regarding trading, banking, and public debt converged with the spread of printing and English liberties in similarly liberating and dignifying the British bourgeoisie, whose efforts subsequently unleashed modern economic growth.

Thus, “the Four Rs” – reading, reformation, revolt (in the Netherlands), and revolution (in England in 1688) culminated in late seventeenth-century England in the fifth and ultimately decisive “R,”the revaluation of the bourgeoisie, an “R-caused, egalitarian reappraisal of ordinary people.” Democratic church governance introduced by the Reformation emboldened the populace, and northern Protestantism encouraged literacy. McCloskey regards political fragmentation as vital to these processes: these forms of improvement worked better on a small scale. But political ideas, and ideas more generally, took the lead: “rhetorical change was necessary, and maybe sufficient.” She consequently documents at great length the emergence of a pro-bourgeois rhetoric in Britain during the eighteenth century.

As one who has struggled to plough through all of McCloskey’s three books, I am very grateful to Seidel.

I have dipped extensively into the McCloskey trilogy, and my guess is that if I joined up all my dippings, so to speak, I would conclude that these books are long on illustrated assertion but short on actual arguments to the effect that what is asserted is right rather than just asserted. As it happens, I share McCloskey’s admiration for the bourgeois virtues and I think she is right to believe in their transformative importance in British and global economic history. But if I didn’t already agree, I don’t believe that these books would do enough to convince me of much besides how strongly McCloskey believes what she believes. And what I actually believe also, but for other reasons.

E-scooters big and small – safe and unsafe

I get emails whenever e-scooters are mentioned on the internet, but the problem with these emails is that they often refer to very different sorts of vehicles.

E-scooter can mean this …:

… which is a photo I found in a piece linked to in today’s google email.

Or, perhaps more commonly, e-scooter means this …:

.. that being a lady I photoed e-scooting along Vauxhall Bridge Road last week.

Another piece linked to in today’s e-scooter email was to this report which says that hired e-scooters are to be tested in various parts of London from early next month.

This piece claims that:

In the U.K., the electric kick scooter is classified as a PLEV, or Personal Light Electric Vehicle, and these are illegal on British roads or pavements.

That sentence includes two verbiages I’ve not encountered before, “electric kick scooter” and “personal light electric vehicle”, in an only moderately successful attempt to clarify that they are talking about e-scooters like the one in my Vauxhall Bridge Road photo, rather than about something heavier like the Honda photo above. The giveaway being that they still felt the need to include a photo of an e-scooting person standing on an e-scooter like the one I photoed, to make it entirely clear which they meant.

As for the notion that these contraptions are “illegal”, well, in London, they fall into that category of “illegal but actually allowed”, along with such things as possessing marijuana, or big left-wing demos during total Lockdown. As all Londoners know, e-scooting of the second sort above is regularly to be observed on London’s roads and bicycle lanes and footpaths. And as my photo also illustrates, this is not only being done by dodgy looking male teenagers in hoods but by respectable looking people like the lady in my photo. I could of course be quite wrong, but something about how she has arranged everything in her backpack, and her all-round appearance of sartorial organised-ness, to say nothing of her womanly as opposed to girlish figure, says, to me anyway: “steady job”. Which I believe she was engaged in getting home from when I photoed her.

I remain very curious to see how this story plays out, post-lockdown. My understanding is that the rulers of the world won’t be happy until they have entirely banished all private cars from all places like London, and that if any e-scooters get mown down by old school internal combustion type traffic, the traffic will be blamed rather than the maimed or killed e-scooting persons.

In my opinion, e-scooters like the above Honda are basically okay in the current traffic regime, but that to accommodate “personal light electric vehicle” type e-scooters will require a major rewrite of the traffic rules, and a massive amount of physical re-arranging. This is because, in my further opinion, e-scooters like the above big scooter are more or less safe, so long as you are careful, whereas e-scooters like the above smaller scooter are deaths and maimings just waiting to happen. I have talked with several random members of the “illegal” e-scooting fraternity (“Excuse me, I write on the internet about transport matters, I wonder if you could tell me about these machines …”), and they seem to feel that, appealing though these things are as an idea, they are not, as of now, nearly as safe as they’d like them to be. My guess, as I say, is that they will eventually be made to work safely, but only after what amounts to an urban transport revolution.

We shall see.

“It Charges 60 Times Faster Than Lithium-Ion …”

This sounds promising:

The graphene aluminum-ion battery cells from the Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group (GMG) are claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium-ion cells and hold three time the energy of the best aluminum-based cells.

They are also safer, with no upper Ampere limit to cause spontaneous overheating, more sustainable and easier to recycle, thanks to their stable base materials. Testing also shows the coin-cell validation batteries also last three times longer than lithium-ion versions.

GMG plans to bring graphene aluminum-ion coin cells to market late this year or early next year, with automotive pouch cells planned to roll out in early 2024.

Based on breakthrough technology from the University of Queensland’s (UQ) Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, the battery cells use nanotechnology to insert aluminum atoms inside tiny perforations in graphene planes.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? But good news, news about creative processes, only emerges gradually, as many – Matt Ridley to name just one – have pointed out. These batteries “are claimed” to speed up the charging process. And “automotive pouch cells” are merely “planned” to happen by a date that will hopefully be with us very soon. But things that are merely claimed or planned or just hoped-for do not necessarily happen, and certainly not always by the hoped-for date. So, if and when these batteries do end up happening, the fact that they have actually happened will be a distinct item of news. But, if and when it gets flagged up, this news item will not be that much of a revelation, because those who had already been following the story were seeing this end point of the process coming. Yeah yeah, better batteries. Cue the opinion pieces about how this is just technology as usual, with its inevitable carbon footprint, and which our children and grandchildren will mostly piss away by sending each other cat and dog videos or gibberish text messages on their dumbphones, blah blah blah.

Bad news, on the other hand, as often as not happens with one big explosion of horribleness. The badness of the news is not in doubt and everything happens all at once. A particular bit of the world goes, in one dramatic bang, from doing fine to Christ all bloody mighty what the hell was that? Hold the front page, and add opinion pieces saying that the entire world is going to hell.

Which is why, according to eyewitness accounts, the world has been going to hell ever since people got into the habit of recording such opinions. Nevertheless, opinions is all that these opinions have been. Luckily, it weren’t – and it ain’t – so.

Artificial brain-controlled limbs as brain therapy to reactivate real limbs

About a week ago now, I did a posting here about a monkey that had learned to play pong using only its brain, with no merely physical contrivance whatever. Well, the other day (which other day is of no consequence) I had a most pleasing conversation with someone called Paolo, who had been reading my blog, pleasing because it’s great to get feedback from such persons. And he referred in particular to this monkey plays pong posting.

He mentioned that, of course, one of the obvious applications of such wizardry is to help crippled people by equipping them with artificial limbs, which they control with pure brain power.

But Paolo then added a tweak to this story, by telling me that the mere process of enabling people to control a piece of machinery with their brains was actually getting them back in control of their own limbs, again. The reason being that if the brain gets no results from sending out body control messages, it in due course simply gives up and forgets how to do it. But if those same messages produce visible results with a piece of machinery, like a some kind of artificial arm which can, I don’t know, get food out of a cupboard or some such thing, then the brain’s enthusiasm for sending out these messages is rewarded and reinforced, in a positive feedback loop. And that can have the effect of the brain eventually getting control of its own body back again, because eventually the messages it sends out get through to the original limb, which has by now begun to recover. Usually, by the time such recovery has begun, the brain has lost interest. But by giving the relevant bit of the brain another reason to be doing it, in a way that’s very visible to the brain, the brain continues with the messages, and the messages eventually get through to their original destination.

So, installing a piece of useful brain-controlled machinery can have the effect not only of replacing immobilised limbs, but of actually bringing those same limbs back to life again.

Remarkable. Again, I’m very possibly telling you things you already know. But even if you did know this, I think you may agree that this is a remarkable development, worth celebrating.

Comments are rare at this blog. Paolo himself said he had thought about commenting along the lines stated above, but had not got around to it. But, if anyone can comment with a link to some detail concerning the above – Paolo himself maybe? – then that would be most welcome.