We keep getting closer to simulating a human being by running a process in a computer. On the street, the dream is that we might get software immortality. And I predicted it forty years ago. [Photo credit: Bart Nagel] How does it work? You start with a large data base on what a given person […]

The post Rudy Predicted Software Immortality first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

As I've mentioned, my wife Sylvia died eleven months ago, and I have to find ways to fill the empty time at home. Somehow I still haven't gotten back to writing stories and novels. I paint in the daytime, and I watch a fair amount of TV in the evening, but I get sick of […]

The post Notes on Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Rudy. I met John Walker in 1987, shortly after I moved to Silicon Valley, at an outsider get-together called Hackers. John is known as one of the founders of the behemoth company Autodesk. I had a job teaching computer science at San Jose State, although at this point I was totally faking it. Even so, […]

The post "The Roaring Twenties" Rudy & John Walker on LLM, ChatGPT, & AI first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Journey to the East! I'm gonna spend a four nights with Mike Gambone in Nashville. Mike and I taught at Randolph Macon Woman's College, sharing careers as low-grade malcontent academics. After Mike, I'll visit Greg Gibson in Gloucester, my college roommate at Swarthmore, and a fellow writer and eternal Zen mind-assassin. Then on to Providence […]

The post Journey to the East first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

As you may know, my wife Sylvia died of cancer in January 6, 2023. I'm still grieving, and I miss her very much. Over the last eight months, I've returned many times to the question of what it might mean to say Sylvia's soul is still with me. In this post, I'll outline some of […]

The post Talking to Sylvia first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

You may have seen a lot of press over the last few days about Google moving location data by default to be on-device (e.g., your phone) rather than stored centrally (and encrypted if you choose to store it centrally), and how this will help prevent abuses of broad “geofence” warrants that law enforcement uses to get broad data about devices in a particular specified area.

These are all positive moves by Google, but keep in mind that Google has long provided users with control over their location history — how long it’s kept, the ability for users to delete it manually, whether it’s kept at all, etc.

But when is the last time your mobile carrier offered you any control over the detailed data they collect on your devices’ movements? If you’re like most people, the answer seems to be never. And while cellular tracking may not usually be as precise as GPS, these days it can be remarkably accurate.

One wonders why there’s all this talk about Google, when the mobile carriers are collecting so much location data that users seem to have no control over at all, data that is of similar interest to law enforcement for mass geofence warrants, one might assume.

Think about it.

–Lauren–

As you may know, Google has recently begun a protocol to delete inactive Google accounts, with email notices going out to the account and recovery addresses in advance as a warning.

Leaving aside for the moment the issue that so many people who have lost track of accounts probably have no recovery address specified (or an old one that no longer reaches them), there’s another serious problem.

A few days ago I received a legitimate Google email about an older Google account of mine that I haven’t used in some time. I was able to quickly reauthenticate it and bring it back to active status.

However, this may be the first situation (there may be earlier ones, but I can’t think of any offhand) where Google is actively “out of the blue” soliciting people to log into their accounts (and typically, older accounts that I suspect are more likely not to have 2-factor authentication enabled, for example).

This is creating an ideal template for phishing attacks.

We’ve long strongly urged users not to respond to emailed efforts to get them to provide their login credentials when they have not taken any specific actions that would trigger the need for logging in again — and of course this is a very common phishing technique (“You need to verify your account — click here.” “Your password is expiring — click here.”, etc.)

Unfortunately, this is essentially the form of the Google “reactivate your account” email notice. And for ordinary busy users who may get confused to see one of these pop into their inbox suddenly, they may either ignore them thinking that they are a phishing attack (and so ultimately lose their account and data), or may fall victim to similar appearing phishes leveraging the fact that Google is now sending these out.

I’ve already seen such a phish, claiming to be Google prompting with a link for a login to a supposedly inactive account. So this scenario is already occurring. The format looked good, and it was forged to appear to be from the same Google address as used for the legitimate Google inactive account notification emails.  Even the internal headers had been forged to make it appear to be from  Google. The top level “Received from” header line IP address was wrong of course, but how many people would notice this or even look at the headers to see this in the first place?

I can think of some ways to help mitigate these risks, but as this stands right now I am definitely very concerned. 

–Lauren–

Last February, in:

Giving Creators and Websites Control Over Generative AI
https://lauren.vortex.com/2023/02/14/giving-creators-and-websites-control-over-generative-ai

I suggested expansion of the existing Robots Exclusion Protocol (e.g. “robots.txt”) as a path toward helping provide websites and creators control over how their contents are used by AI systems.

Shortly thereafter, Google publicly announced their own support for the robots.txt methodology as a useful mechanism in these contexts.

While it’s true that adherence to robots.txt (or related webpage Meta tags — also part of the Robots Exclusion Protocol) is voluntary, my view is that most large firms do honor its directives, and if ultimately moves toward a regulatory approach to this were deemed genuinely necessary, a more formal approach would be a possible option.

This morning Google ran a livestream discussing their progress in this entire area, emphasizing that we’re only at the beginning of a long road, and asking for a wide range of stakeholder inputs.

I believe of particular importance is Google’s desire for these content control systems to be as technologically straightforward as possible (so, building on the existing Robots Exclusion Protocol is clearly desirable rather than creating something entirely new), and for the effort to be industry-wide, not restricted to or controlled by only a few firms.

Also of note is Google’s endorsement of the excellent “AI taxonomy” concept for consideration in these regards. Essentially, the idea is that AI Web crawling exclusions could be specified by the type of use involved, rather than by which entity was doing the crawling. So, a set of directives could be defined that would apply to all AI-related crawlers, irrespective of who was doing the crawling, but permitting (for example) crawlers that are looking for content related to public interest AI research to proceed, but direct that content not be taken or used for commercial Generative AI chatbot systems.

Again, these are of course only the first few steps toward scalable solutions in this area, but this is all incredibly important, and I definitely support Google’s continuing progress in these regards.

–Lauren–

As per requests, this is a transcript of my national network radio report earlier this week regarding Google passkeys and Google account recovery concerns.

 – – –

So there really isn’t enough time tonight to get into any real details on this but I think it’s important that folks at least know what’s going on if this pops up in front of them. Various firms now are moving to eliminate passwords on accounts by using a technology called “passkeys” which bind account authentication to specific devices rather than depending on passwords.

And theoretically passkeys aren’t a bad idea, most of us know the problems with passwords when they’re forgotten or stolen, used for account phishing — all sorts of problems. And I myself have called for moving away from passwords. But as we say so often, the devil is in the details, and I’m not happy with Google’s passkey implementation as it stands right now. Google is aggressively pushing their users currently, asking if they want to move to a passwordless experience. And I’m choosing not to accept that option right now, and while the choice is certainly up to each individual, I myself don’t recommend using it at this stage.

Without getting too technical, one of my concerns is that anyone who can authenticate a device that has Google passkeys enabled on it, will have full access to those Google accounts without having to have any additional information — not even an additional authentication step. And this means that if — as is incredibly common — someone with a weak PIN for example on their smartphone, loses that device or it’s stolen, again, happens all the time, and the PIN was eavesdropped or guessed, those passkeys could let a culprit have full access to the associated Google accounts and lock out the rightful owner from those accounts before they had a chance to take any actions to prevent it.

And I’ve been discussing my concerns about this with Google, and their view — to use my words — is that they consider this to be the greatest good for the greatest number of people — for whom it will be a security enhancement. The problem is that Google has a long history of mainly being concerned about the majority, and leaving behind vast numbers of users who may represent a small percentage but still number in the millions or more. And these often are the same people who through no fault of their own get locked out of their Google accounts, lose access to their email on Gmail, photos, other data, and frankly Google’s account recovery systems and lack of useful customer service in these regards have long been a serious problem.

So I really don’t want to see the same often nontechnical folks who may have had problems with Google accounts before, to be potentially subjected to a NEW way to lose access to their accounts. Again it’s absolutely an individual decision, but for now I’m going to skip using Google passkeys and that’s my current personal recommendation.

–Lauren–

Google continues to push ahead with its ill-advised scheme to force passkeys on users who do not understand their risks, and will try push all users into this flawed system starting imminently.

In my discussions with Google on this matter (I have chatted multiple times with the Googler in charge of this), they have admitted that their implementation, by depending completely on device authentication security which for many users is extremely weak, will put many users at risk of their Google accounts being compromised. However, they feel that overall this will be an improvement for users who have strong authentication on their devices.

And as for ordinary people who already are left behind by Google when something goes wrong? They’ll get the shaft again. Google has ALWAYS operated on this basis — if you don’t fit into their majority silos, they just don’t care. Another way for Google users to get locked out of their accounts and lose all their data, with no useful help from Google.

With Google’s deficient passkey system implementation — they refuse to consider an additional authentication layer for protection — anyone who has authenticated access to your device (that includes the creep that watched you access your phone in that bar before he stole it) will have full and unrestricted access to your Google passkeys and accounts on the same basis. And when you’re locked out, don’t complain to Google, because they’ll just say that you’re not the user that they’re interested in — if they respond to you at all, that is.

“Thank you for choosing Google.”

–Lauren–

In the 2005 film “V for Vendetta” a fictional UK government has turned into a tightly censored, tracked, and controlled hellscape, with technology used to control citizens in every way possible. The UK has now taken a massive step toward making that horror a reality, with the passage of likely the most misguided legislation in the country since the Norman invasion of 1066.

I won’t detail their Online Safety Bill here — you can find endless references by searching yourself — but the vast, blurry, nebulous, misguided rules for “protecting children from ‘harmful’ content” — a slippery slope bad enough on its own, quickly expanded into a Chinese Internet style virtual steel collar for every UK resident, chained to the government in every aspect of their online lives.

The mandated social media platform ID age verification requirements, which will ultimately require the showing of government IDs for access to sites, alone will create the opportunity for virtually every action of every user of the Internet in the UK to be tracked by the government and its minions in ever expanding ways over time.

Be careful what sites you visit or what you ask or say on them. In China, you can simply vanish under such circumstances. And in the UK? Similar disappearances coming soon, perhaps, as every site you visit, no matter the topic related to business, medical concerns, or other aspects of your family’s private and personal life, will ultimately be linked to you in government databases.

VERY similar *bipartisan* legislative efforts are taking place here in the U.S., though the U.S. court system is creating additional hurdles for their perpetrators here, at least for the moment. For now.

While some activists and legislators spend their time ranting about Internet advertising, governments around the world are working to turn the Internet into a pervasive tool for tracking your every online move and thought, permanently linked to your government IDs.

We’ve seen it in Communist China. Now we see it in so-called democracies.

Open your eyes — while you still can. 

–Lauren–

I am a creative. What I do is alchemy. It is a mystery. I do not so much do it, as let it be done through me.

I am a creative. Not all creative people like this label. Not all see themselves this way. Some creative people see science in what they do. That is their truth, and I respect it. Maybe I even envy them, a little. But my process is different—my being is different.

Apologizing and qualifying in advance is a distraction. That's what my brain does to sabotage me. I set it aside for now. I can come back later to apologize and qualify. After I've said what I came to say. Which is hard enough. 

Except when it is easy and flows like a river of wine.

Sometimes it does come that way. Sometimes what I need to create comes in an instant. I have learned not to say it at that moment, because if you admit that sometimes the idea just comes and it is the best idea and you know it is the best idea, they think you don't work hard enough.

Sometimes I work and work and work until the idea comes. Sometimes it comes instantly and I don't tell anyone for three days. Sometimes I'm so excited by the idea that came instantly that I blurt it out, can't help myself. Like a boy who found a prize in his Cracker Jacks. Sometimes I get away with this. Sometimes other people agree: yes, that is the best idea. Most times they don't and I regret having  given way to enthusiasm. 

Enthusiasm is best saved for the meeting where it will make a difference. Not the casual get-together that precedes that meeting by two other meetings. Nobody knows why we have all these meetings. We keep saying we're doing away with them, but then just finding other ways to have them. Sometimes they are even good. But other times they are a distraction from the actual work. The proportion between when meetings are useful, and when they are a pitiful distraction, varies, depending on what you do and where you do it. And who you are and how you do it. Again I digress. I am a creative. That is the theme.

Sometimes many hours of hard and patient work produce something that is barely serviceable. Sometimes I have to accept that and move on to the next project.

I am a creative. I don't control my dreams. And I don't control my best ideas.

I can hammer away, surround myself with facts or images, and sometimes that works. I can go for a walk, and sometimes that works. I can be making dinner and there's a Eureka having nothing to do with sizzling oil and bubbling pots. Often I know what to do the instant I wake up. And then, almost as often, as I become conscious and part of the world again, the idea that would have saved me turns to vanishing dust in a mindless wind of oblivion. For creativity, I believe, comes from that other world. The one we enter in dreams, and perhaps, before birth and after death. But that's for poets to wonder, and I am not a poet. I am a creative. And it's for theologians to mass armies about in their creative world that they insist is real. But that is another digression. And a depressing one. Maybe on a much more important topic than whether I am a creative or not. But still a digression from what I came here to say.

Sometimes the process is avoidance. And agony. You know the cliché about the tortured artist? It's true, even when the artist (and let's put that noun in quotes) is trying to write a soft drink jingle, a callback in a tired sitcom, a budget request.

Some people who hate being called creative may be closeted creatives, but that's between them and their gods. No offense meant. Your truth is true, too. But mine is for me. 

Creatives recognize creatives like queers recognize queers, like real rappers recognize real rappers, like cons know cons. Creatives feel massive respect for creatives. We love, honor, emulate, and practically deify the great ones. To deify any human is, of course, a tragic mistake. We have been warned. We know better. We know people are just people. They squabble, they are lonely, they regret their most important decisions, they are poor and hungry, they can be cruel, they can be just as stupid as we can, because, like us, they are clay. But. But. But they make this amazing thing. They birth something that did not exist before them, and could not exist without them. They are the mothers of ideas. And I suppose, since it's just lying there, I have to add that they are the mothers of invention. Ba dum bum! OK, that's done. Continue.

Creatives belittle our own small achievements, because we compare them to those of the great ones. Beautiful animation! Well, I'm no Miyazaki. Now THAT is greatness. That is greatness straight from the mind of God. This half-starved little thing that I made? It more or less fell off the back of the turnip truck. And the turnips weren't even fresh.

Creatives knows that, at best, they are Salieri. Even the creatives who are Mozart believe that. 

I am a creative. I haven't worked in advertising in 30 years, but in my nightmares, it's my former creative directors who judge me. And they are right to do so. I am too lazy, too facile, and when it really counts, my mind goes blank. There is no pill for creative dysfunction.

I am a creative. Every deadline I make is an adventure that makes Indiana Jones look like a pensioner snoring in a deck chair. The longer I remain a creative, the faster I am when I do my work and the longer I brood and walk in circles and stare blankly before I do that work. 

I am still 10 times faster than people who are not creative, or people who have only been creative a short while, or people who have only been professionally creative a short while. It's just that, before I work 10 times as fast as they do, I spend twice as long as they do putting the work off. I am that confident in my ability to do a great job when I put my mind to it. I am that addicted to the adrenaline rush of postponement. I am still that afraid of the jump.

I am a creative. Not an artist. Though I dreamed, as a lad, of someday being that. Some of us belittle our gifts and dislike ourselves because we are not Michelangelos and Warhols. That is narcissism—but at least we aren't in politics.

I am a creative. Though I believe in reason and science, I decide by intuition and impulse. And live with what follows—the catastrophes as well as the triumphs. 

I am a creative. Every word I've said here will annoy other creatives, who see things differently. Ask two creatives a question, get three opinions. Our disagreement, our passion about it, and our commitment to our own truth are, at least to me, the proofs that we are creatives, no matter how we may feel about it.

I am a creative. I lament my lack of taste in the areas about which I know very little, which is to say almost all areas of human knowledge. And I trust my taste above all other things in the areas closest to my heart, or perhaps, more accurately, to my obsessions. Without my obsessions, I would probably have to spend my time looking life in the eye, and almost none of us can do that for long. Not honestly. Not really. Because much in life, if you really look at it, is unbearable.

I am a creative. I believe, as a parent believes, that when I am gone, some small good part of me will carry on in the mind of at least one other person.

I am a creative. I live in dread of my small gift suddenly going away.

I am a creative. I am too busy making the next thing to spend too much time deeply considering that almost nothing I make will come anywhere near the greatness I comically aspire to.

I am a creative. I believe in the ultimate mystery of process. I believe in it so much, I am even fool enough to publish an essay I dictated into a tiny machine and didn't take time to review or revise. I won't do this often, I promise. But I did it just now, because, as afraid as I might be of your seeing through my pitiful gestures toward the beautiful, I was even more afraid of forgetting what I came to say. 

There. I think I've said it. 

At the Grammys last night, jazz bassist and singer Esperanza Spalding (double nominee)

showed her support for the Palestinians by donning a kufiya.

Also: poet Aja Monet, up for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album, carried a watermelon clutch.

and...boygenius wore arists4ceasefire pins.

And finally, Annie Lennox gave a shoutout for #ceasefire

via Email and Blog Post

• "Mr Moss says he spoke to one inspector who said it was because the bus drivers are under pressure to make up time on the route, so they skip stops."
• "The ticket inspector said the schedule is too tight," he says."
• "And the drivers have been told, 'if you're late , if you don't have time', and these were the inspector's words, 'then just go go go'."

"The problem that we have with speed limits as a bus driver is that we drive to a timetable, what is called a headway. Now that we are coming across roads that have the 20mph speed limit, our timetables have not been changed to take into consideration that we are going 10mph less, doing 20mph as opposed to 30mph. That is a problem that we are having."

October 7 and its aftermath have produced multiple kufiya spottings, and a fair bit of news coverage. I've been too overwhelmed by the events to get on the blog to write about it. I will try to make more of an effort in future, but all I can promise is dribs and drabs. This represents some housekeeping, in fact, a photo that has been on my hard drive for some time but never managed to post.

John Lennon spent some time in Bermuda in 1980. A friend sent me this photo, found on reddit. The description says only this: "new release photo, on deck, Bermuda June 1980." Do we presume then that John was on some yacht, and needed to cover himself from the sun, or protect himself from the wind. And why did he use a kufiya? Kufiyas were starting to become somewhat common street wear in US urban areas by the early eighties, as I've written about elsewhere, so I guess it was simply something he came across in New York City, where he lived. That's all I've got! Check out the photo: 

Blockchain smartphones are the avant-garde devices propelling us into a new era where seamless interaction with Web3 apps, next-generation privacy features, and strict security for digital assets has become the norm. These nifty gadgets offer unrivaled privacy and security for our digital assets while unlocking seamless interactions with decentralized applications (dApps). As smartphone industry titans […]

The post Blockchain Smartphones: From Crypto Vaults to Meta Gateways appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

A small space heater allows you to thoroughly heat a space, and the objects in it, with ease. You will, by reading this guide, learn how much electricity a small space heater uses, and how to reduce this electricity usage. What Is A Small Space Heater? A space heater is a heater that's used to […]

The post Space Heaters – An Essential for Offices and Gaming Rooms appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

At this point in time, Sony isn't offering a web browsing app on the PS5. Unlike other console releases that the company has had, the app doesn't come standard, and there is no option to download an app from the Playstation Network, or PSN. For many people, this seems to be a warning that the […]

The post How to Surf the Web on a PS5 appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

Handheld PC. A name that is typically used to refer to portable gaming consoles with complete desktop operating systems. Valve’s Steam Deck is just but one of them, a single entity among the many models already out there. Every one of them has a single mission: Provide a technologically superior option to the aging Nintendo […]

The post Steam Deck Competitors: Which One Will Remain Standing Post-Release? appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

Although the price still needs some adjustment, SSD’s have finally pushed out the traditional hard drives out of the market. Sure, you can still find them in cheap laptops and some prebuilt PC configurations, but most, if not all mid-range devices feature at least 256 GB of pure solid state drive technology. The trouble, though, […]

The post Review: Sandisk Extreme Portable SSD 4 TB appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat […]

The post DIY: Build Your Own External SSD With These Enclosures appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

The post Nintendo Switch Error Codes Solutions appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

The post Best WiFi Adapter for PC appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

The post Best PSU Power Supply for PC appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

The post Best Water Liquid Cooling System Kit appeared first on Gadget Headlines.

This week the UK government welcomed the first transatlantic flight by a commercial airliner using 100% Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF). Prime Minister Sunak said 'SAF is primarily made of waste oils and fats. … SAF will be key to decarbonizing aviation.   .. It could create a UK industry with an annual turnover of almost £2.5 billion, which could support over 5000 UK jobs'.[1]

Unfortunately, this isn't correct. Aviation fuel made from waste oil and fats is not zero carbon. Perhaps more importantly, the quantities available for use in the UK and elsewhere are not sufficient to 'decarbonize aviation'. And published official reports show that the government knows this. The actual share of aviation needs that can be met by these two sources is almost certainly less than 2%, even if these raw materials are entirely used for this purpose, rather than existing uses. Mr Sunak estimates the potential industry value at £2.5 billion but even if all the UK's waste oil was used for aviation, the size would be about a tenth of this number.

How much waste cooking oil is potentially available in the UK?

In 2013, consultants Ecofys produced a report, then published by the Department for Transport, that estimated that the total volume of used cooking oil (usually called UCO) produced in the UK was about 250 million litres.[2] This figure was taken from estimates produced by the UK Sustainable Biofuels Association and submitted to the House of Commons.[3]

Most of this UCO, then and now, is used to make biodiesel for road use. And not all is collected for reuse. But let's assume that all the 250 million litres would be available for aviation. Put through the most efficient process, this would turn into about 160,000 tonnes of aviation fuel.

The total current demand at UK airports runs at about 12.2 million tonnes. So UK-sourced UCO could produce about 1.3% of the country's needs. But, to stress the point, this is assuming that every litre produced was efficiently turned into aviation fuel with no losses. Every single takeaway in the country, every restaurant and catering establishment would have to devote all its UCO to one particular use. Biodiesel and other uses have no access to the UCO even though at the moment, for example, McDonalds uses its own waste oil for biodiesel for its distribution fleet.

What do other government reports say about the maximum availability of UCO?

In 2017, the government's business and energy department, then called BEIS, asked Ricardo to estimate the real availability of all forms of waste biomass in 2030.[4] (UCO is included as waste biomass because cooking oil is made from oil seeds such as rapeseed).

The consultants reported that the energy value of all UCO available for use was 7 Petajoules (PJ). This was described as 'the accessible resource in 2030, if no barriers to supply are overcome'. If all these barriers were surmounted, the number rises to 9 PJ.

In an efficient process, 90% of the energy value of UCO can be converted to aviation fuel. That means that the maximum energy available would be 8.1 PJ, equivalent to 2.25 terawatt hours (TWh). The energy value of all the aviation fuel used in the UK is about 145 TWh, implying that UCO could provide about 1.45% of the total requirement if all is devoted to aviation fuel. That's slightly more than the Ecofys figure of about 1.3%.

What might be the actual amount that the aviation industry could use?

In a consultation document published earlier this year, the Department for Transport made its own estimates of the volume of UCO that could be available for aviation purposes in 2030.[5] It used further work by Ricardo and a body entitled the Aviation Impact Accelerator, a team based at Cambridge University. Most of the external team members of this second body are part of the aviation industry, including Boeing, Rolls Royce and Heathrow Airport. It won't be a surprise to learn that the Accelerator produces some estimates for availability which are an order of magnitude greater than the figures from the specialised consultants.

The 2023 forecasts developed by Ricardo assume that the UK can devote 3% of all available domestically produced UCO for aviation fuels and also purchase 1% of all internationally produced used oil. These assumptions therefore result in much lower assumed availability. Rather than estimating a total energy value of 2.25 Terawatt hours, it suggests a figure of less than a tenth of this level.[6] This figure is then assumed to fall as the availability of internationally sourced UCO declines. Other countries will need that oil for their own fuels.

 These Ricardo figures, published by the government as the lower bound of its forecasts, would allow only about 0.1% of all aviation needs to be fulfilled by UCO (from the UK and elsewhere) in 2030.

The estimates from the Aviation Impact Accelerator are far more optimistic, largely because it assumes that the volumes of used cooking oil available in the UK will grow. (There is no justification presented for this opinion). This industry body uses the Ricardo UK figures from 2017 for total availability (2.25 TWh for the energy value of UCO produced in the UK) and then almost doubles this figure by 2040. But even under these unrealistic assumptions, the total percentage of all aviation fuel produced in 2030 is no more than around 2% of current needs.[7]

To summarise, if ALL the UK's UCO was used to make aviation fuel, meaning that other major uses, such as biodiesel were stripped of their share, government data suggests that no more than 1.45% of energy needs could be met. Even adding in substantial growth (which is highly implausible) and some imports only increases that figure to around 2% in the Aviation Impact Accelerator figures.

Would the use of other waste oils change this position?

The UK Prime Minister also mentioned waste oils in his statement. The principal source for aviation fuel today is animal fats derived from slaughterhouses. This is sometimes called 'tallow'. The volumes are far smaller than for UCO. As importantly, tallow loses more energy in the conversion process to aviation kerosene than does UCO.

The Ricardo 2017 analysis suggests that the total availability of all tallow in the UK is equivalent to about 4 PJ, or 1.1 TWh. After conversion to jet fuel, the energy value might be around 0.4 TWh, or around a quarter percent of the UK's needs. For reasons which are not explained, the industry-led Aviation Impact Accelerator sees the amount of tallow rising over 50% between 2025 and 2030, even though the amount of meat being eaten in the UK is stable or even falling. The more pessimistic assumptions by Ricardo in its 2023 projections suggest that considerably less than 0.1% of aviation demand can be met by tallow.

What are the implications of this analysis?

For aviation to be fully decarbonised the world will need a mixture of battery aircraft for short trips, some use of hydrogen in medium-sized aircraft and a very large scale replacement for aviation kerosene for long distance travel. Although using UCO is appealing because of the ease of conversion to fuel, the volumes are tiny in the context of the global need. We will need alternatives that offer orders of magnitude more output for full decarbonisation of aviation, even though they are far more complex and costly than UCO. SAF from waste oils is a dead-end.

What are the realistic options for the future? Government reports in the UK focus on forestry residues and municipal solid waste. In the case of wood products, the concern is the risk of deforestation, the lack of available supply and the technological complexity of turning lignocellulosic materials into kerosene. No-one is doing it at scale yet. Municipal waste suffers in addition from a small supply that is likely to decline as recycling plastics becomes more common.

So the answer has to be synthetic fuels, made from hydrogen and direct air captured CO2. This is an early stage industry but is the only conceivable way of meeting aviation's needs with a low carbon impact. Follow Infinium and Norsk e-Fuel as good examples.

Appendix

The International Energy Agency's views

It isn't just the UK which doesn't have enough waste oils. Here's what the IEA wrote in December of last year.

Used cooking oil and animal fats are unlikely to provide relief (to biofuel producers), as they are in even higher demand because they offer lower GHG emissions intensity and meet EU feedstock requirements. In fact, the use of used cooking oil and animal fats nearly exhausts 100% of estimated supplies over the forecast period. Even when a broader range of wastes (such as palm oil mill effluent, tall oil and other agribusiness waste oils) is considered, demand still swells to nearly 65% of global supply. 

(From 'Is the biofuel industry approaching a feedstock crunch', IEA December 2022.)

And we almost certainly need to fly a lot less. Not least because even the best SAF still releases water vapour when burnt, adding to the global heating caused by contrails.

[1] https://www.livemint.com/news/world/sustainability-landmark-virgin-airlines-takes-off-first-saf-based-flight-rishi-sunak-calls-it-very-exciting-11701242225845.html

[2] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a74ebade5274a3cb286840c/ecofys-trends-in-the-uco-market-v1.2.pdf

[3] https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201012/cmselect/cmenvaud/1025/1025vw08.htm

[4]https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7f9007e5274a2e87db69a8/Biomass_feedstock_availability_final_report_for_publication.pdf

[5] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1147351/uk-sustainable-aviation-fuel-mandate-consultation-stage-cost-benefit-analysis.pdf

[6] The exact figures are not given in the report and I have estimated this number from Figure 5.

[7] Once again, I should stress that the government report does not provide the precise figures and I am estimating the percentage from Figure 5.

Almost every week a new report quantifies the investment needs for part of British infrastructure. Without unfailingly consistency, the researchers specify requirements for large numbers of billions of pounds to modernise energy, transport, water supply or similar sectors. Strikingly, these figures are never put into context. We are not told whether the additional capital investment represents a large or a tiny fraction of GNP, nor how they compare to other countries. It's time to change this.

This article is an attempt to pull together some of the estimates contained in the recent analysis from the UK's National Infrastructure Commission and compares these figures with the total investment volumes in the British economy, with international averages and with comparable figures, particularly as regards energy, that have been produced by other sources. It concludes by suggesting that, if carried through, new capital going into energy will require allocation of at least 1.5% of GDP. But other sectors will also need major injections and the rebuilding of the British economy will absorb at least 5% of national income over the next decades. This is a major - and unremarked - shift in the structure of the economy but the growing evidence of inadequate capital spending across the UK makes the investment increasingly urgent.

The data

The UK currently puts about 18.4% of its national income into capital investment across the economy.[1] This includes such things as the purchase of machine tools or robots for a factory, the construction of new houses or transmission masts for mobile phones.

18.4% is low compared to most countries. The average in the EU is 21.6%, about 17% higher than the UK.

UK GDP was around £2,500 billion in 2022.[2] Investment therefore ran at about £460 billion in that year.

Most of that money was spent by the private sector. Government investment was approximately 2.8% of GDP in 2019. If this share has remained the same, it represents be around £70 billion in 2022. The OECD average for public investment as a percentage of GDP averages around 3.2%.[3]

·      The estimates of how much extra investment the UK needs for infrastructure: National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) study, October 2023[4]

This study suggests the following requirements for the UK energy system on its trajectory to full decarbonisation by 2050. (A summary table is below).

o   £20-£35 billion a year of private investment between 2025 and 2050 for decarbonisation and increased electricity supply. This seems to cover power generation, transmission and distribution as well as a carbon capture network and hydrogen production, storage and transmission.[5]

o   £5.1 billion of public funding between 2024 and 2030 (7 years) on the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund to improve insulation standards. This equivalent to about £0.7bn a year.

o   £8.8 billion of private investment, although mandated by government, to install insulation improvements in low income households between 2024 and 2035 (12 years). This amounts to about £0.7bn per year.

o   £28.9 billion of public investment in improving the energy efficiency of public buildings, spread over the 2024 - 2050 period, but with 75% (£21.6bn) spent prior to 2035 (12 years). Between 2024 and 2035, this is £1.8 billion a year.

o   £33.8 billion of public funding between 2024 and 2050 to deliver low carbon heat for social housing of which 35% is spent before 2035 (12 years). This amount would provide about £1.0 billion a year.

o   £41.7 billion of public investment to help subsidise lower income households decarbonise their heat supply, principally by installing heat pumps. 35% should be provided by 2035, implying expenditure of about £1.2 billion a year.

o   Public subsidy of £7,000 per new heat pump installed between 2024 and 2035. The National Infrastructure Commission targets 7 million installations before the end of the period, implying a total subsidy of about £4.1 billion a year.

o   The NIC also recommends a scheme offering the buyers of heat pumps a zero interest loan. The cost of this is not calculated in the report so I use the following assumptions: 5% cost of interest subsidy, an average debt of £3,500, 7 million installations by 2035. This costs the government about £1.2bn a year.

o   To get to 300,000 public EV chargers by 2030, the UK will need about 35,000 new chargers a year. Making the crude assumption that 20% will need to be rapid chargers (50 kW or more at £30,000 installed cost) and the rest slower (7 kW+, averaging £8,000), very approximately the cost will be £0.45 billion a year.

The table below summarises these cost estimates.

Source; analysis and estimation partly using NIC data

Combining both public and private investment, the NIC is suggesting a figure of around £38 billion a year between now and 2035 to transform the energy system. This is approximately 1.5% of national GDP. If achieved, the UK would still sit well below the average investment ratio of EU economies. Public investment, now running at around £70 billion, would rise about 13%, or approximately to the same level as the average for the OECD.

·      Other assessments of how much will be needed in investments in the energy system

 Are the NIC assessments reasonable and well-supported? The data in the report is extremely sparse, particularly on the estimates of £20-£35 billion a year for the transformation of energy supply and storage. For example, there's absolutely no analysis of the amount of battery storage required or its price. Important questions like the direction of the cost of offshore wind are ignored. So we have considerable reason to be doubtful of the quality of the numbers provided.

One potential check is to make estimates of the money required just for the construction of electricity generation and the improvement of electricity networks. The government targets 50 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 and 70 gigawatts of solar by 2035. (Each of these two types of generation have about 14 gigawatts of UK capacity today).

o   The cost of offshore wind. About 5 gigawatts a year are targeted between now and 2030. The cost of offshore wind is about £3m a megawatt at present, implying a total cost of around £15 billion a year. Any onshore wind would be additional.

o   Solar will need to rise by about 3 gigawatts a year. It costs about £700,000 a megawatt in late 2023 if installed on open land. That is about £2 billion a year.

o   National Grid estimates that the amount of capital investment required to connect the new wind farms to the high voltage network will be about $21.7 billion before 2030, or £3bn a year.

These three items add up to £20 billion a year. In addition, there will need to be extensive battery farms, hydrogen production, new distribution infrastructure on the lower voltage grid and many other improvements. These will almost certainly take investment needs up to £35 billion or beyond. So the NIC estimates are probably too low.

·      The other sectors covered by the NIC

Transport and environmental resiliency are the other main sectors covered by the NIC 2023. It estimates that transport improvements will demand £28 billion a year between now and 2050. Much of this cash will need to be spent on the obviously necessary improvements to public transport, particularly in cities.

Environmental resilience, particularly against flood and drought will require £8-12 billion a year from the private sector and another £1-1.5 billion from public funds.

In total, the NIC's report suggests a need for around £39 billion of private investment each year and approximately the same amount from government. In total, this is over 3% of national income and, if carried through, would take the UK up to around the EU average for investment as a share of GDP.  This looks possible. However inside this total the NIC is proposing an increase in public investment of more than 50% in the next few years, which seems a more challenging task.  

·      Capital needs not covered by the NIC

In addition, we know that several other sectors, such as water supply and treatment, that are not covered by the NIC will also need major additional tranches of new capital. For example, the water companies have bid for the right to invest £96bn over the five year period of 2025-2030, almost double what they are currently investing.[6] The request is therefore for an investment of £19 billion a year, or almost 0.8% of GDP.

Add in other sectors requiring more capital, such health care provision, and the percentage of UK GDP devoted to investment will probably need to rise by at least an additional 5%, adding nearly a quarter to total capital spending. This will be an unprecedented change in the economy, temporarily reducing the amount of money available for immediate personal consumption.  

[1] Source: World Bank, https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators/Series/NE.GDI.TOTL.ZS

[2] Source: House of Commons Library, https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn02783/#:~:text=In%20the%20latest%20calendar%20quarter,£2%2C506%20billion%20in%202022.

[3] Office for Budgetary Responsibility; https://obr.uk/box/international-comparisons-of-government-investment/

[4] https://nic.org.uk/app/uploads/Final-NIA-2-Full-Document.pdf

[5] Data is from page 16 of the report.

[6] https://www.water.org.uk/news-views-publications/news/water-companies-propose-largest-ever-investment

Wholesale electricity prices are lower when the wind is blowing hard. This is true across the year. If the UK installs more turbines, there will be more wind power at all times, tending to further pull down the cost of electricity for all.  

How much might electricity consumers benefit if the country added more wind capacity? I looked at the data for the last 12 months and found that just by adding the turbines that are already planned the UK might save over £3bn a year in electricity costs. This calculation is based on the assumption that the relationship over the last year between wind output and wholesale prices persists into the future. Increasing wind capacity still further could add to these savings.

Put another way, the UK government's net zero rollback, and its reluctance to liberate onshore wind, will cost people money.

The analysis

Across the year, the correlation between wind speeds and power prices is reasonably robust. Why is this the case? If wind power is abundant only the most efficient gas power plants need to operate and they bid into the hourly power auctions at a lower price than the older and less efficient stations. And windy conditions in the UK usually mean that it's windy elsewhere in Europe, which also helps reduce the prices of electricity coming into the country through undersea connectors.

To give one example, the average price on the Nordpool 'day ahead' exchange was £81.6 per megawatt hour on December 30 2022 when wind provided the largest percentage of UK electricity of any day in the last year.[1]  One day later and the price was £130.6 as a result of wind cutting its contribution to little more than half the level of the previous 24 hours.

Wind provided about 26.8% of all UK electricity in 2022.[2] The new turbines already planned would increase that by about 24%.[3] If the wind farms match the productivity of existing turbines, that means the amount of electricity generated will be about 24% higher than today. This will push prices down. My analysis suggests that if the last year's patterns were repeated the average price of the electricity sold on the wholesale market might fall by 10.5% when these wind farms are complete. Further increases in wind capacity would proportionately increase this saving.

Much of the UK's electricity consumption is bought and sold on the wholesale market. My analysis uses data from the Nordpool 'day ahead' exchange. But large amounts of power are bought and sold via other mechanisms, such as direct power purchase agreements or longer term contracts. Of course the wholesale price of power does not directly affect these agreements. But in the course of time lower 'day ahead' wholesale prices will change the price in all contractual agreements.

If all electricity prices fell by the 10.5% estimated in the previous paragraph as the consequence of the planned wind expansion, the eventual reduction could cut the total cost of electricity by about £3.3bn a year. Of course we cannot be sure that the correlation between wind availability and power prices will continue to hold but it is a plausible possibility.

My purpose in calculating these numbers was to quantify the possible beneficial impact from increasing the amount of wind power available on the UK grid. This is a social and a shared value resulting from the private investment in new wind turbines. In addition, there is a gain from the reduction in carbon emissions.

We should put these possible savings in context. The 6.7 gigawatt already-planned expansion in UK wind power will cost private capital about £10 billion, assuming a 50:50 mixture of £1m per megawatt for onshore and £2m for offshore wind. The £3.3 bn saving in wholesale prices as a result of this investment is a profoundly attractive social return (in addition to the private profit return arising from the £10bn spent on expanding wind availability.

Apppendix

These are outline details of the method I used.

 ·      For each day in the year to the end of September 2023, I noted down the average daily price of electricity on the Nordpool 'day ahead' wholesale market, expressed in £ per megawatt hour. (To avoid any accusations that I broke Nordpool's rules by using automatic copying of its data, I took down each number manually).

·      For each of these days, I also noted the percentage of the UK's electricity that was generated by wind. I used the numbers from the Gridwatch web site, copying each figure from the charts on its main page. (These numbers exclude the electricity generated by smaller wind farms not connected to the high voltage National Grid network).

·      I then divided the year into months because electricity consumption and production patterns vary through the year. And, particularly in the last year, rapidly varying gas costs have strongly affected the price at which CCGT suppliers are willing to supply power into the UK at different times.

·      For each month in the year, I constructed a chart that plots the percentage of power output provided by wind and the average price for each day on an x-y chart. The wind percentage sets the position on the x axis, the average price on the y axis.

·      I then asked Excel to calculate the line of the trend for each month.[4] The equation for the trend line predicts the value of y (the price) dependent on the percentage of electricity provided by wind and a base number that estimates the price if there had been no wind during that day. For example, the equation for January 2023 is y = -£1.6802x + £187.36. This indicates that if there had been no wind on a day during that month the price would have been expected to be £187.36 per megawatt hour. Each one percentage point increase in the percentage of power provided by wind typically reduced the wholesale price by £1.6802.

·      The January 2023 chart is shown again below.

• The value called R2 on this chart is a measure of the closeness of the correlation between the two variables. A perfect correlation, in which y values are 100% determined by changes in the x number produces an R2 figure of 1. A complete absence of correlation results in an R2 of 0. The actual figure of 0.69 for January suggests a moderately strong but not complete link. The average across all months was lower at 0.47, implying that factors other than wind also had substantial effects on the electricity price.

• I then took the average wind percentage for each month (it was 33% in January) and increased this figure by 24%. Why 24%? Because current total wind capacity is about 26.9 gigawatts and an additional 6.7 gigawatts are now planned to be installed, or 24% of today's total.

• I used the trend line for each month to estimate how much of a reduction in the wholesale price would be obtained by increasing the percentage of electricity that is delivered by wind by 24%. This pushes up January 2023 from 33% to just under 41% of total supply. Using this trend line, the average wholesale price would fall from about £131.9 to about £118.6, a saving of approximately 10%.

• The implication of this number is that the total cost of the electricity supplied in the specific month of January 2023 would have been 10% lower if all the planned extra 6.7 gigawatts had already been installed. The percentage across all the twelve months ranged from 1.1% in May 2023 to 22.2% in the extraordinary month of December 2022 when gas prices reached historic highs. The average across all 12 months was similar to January's figure at around 10.5%.

• I continued this exercise by calculating how much might have been saved in terms of £ across the year if the extra wind capacity had already been in place. National Grid provides each month a figure for the amount of electricity that flows across its network.[5] We can use this estimate as a way of calculating the savings from having more wind power in the UK by multiplying the amount of electricity used by the prospective savings in £ per megawatt hour. January's figures would have resulted in a total saving of over £100 million.

• The total cost reductions from having 24% more wind across the 12 month period might have amounted to over £3.3billion, or about £50 per head of UK population. However this figure would have been concentrated in the months of October 2022 to January 2023. The savings in May 2023 could have been as low as £18m, compared to the £billion plus in December 2022. This a reflection of the very low correlation of wind power and wholesale prices in May 2023 compared to the other months.

• The May 2023 (lowest R2) and December 2022 (highest R2) charts are shown below. May was a period of relatively low gas prices by recent standards while December's were astronomically high. It looks as though wind power has more effect on the wholesale price of electricity when gas prices are elevated. This may mean that if gas prices revert to historical averages the deflationary impact of wind will be reduced.

Next steps and issues with the analysis

• Solar power should be added to the analysis because it also tends to push down the wholesale price of power, particularly on sunny summer afternoons.

• It would be better to split each month into weekdays and weekends to ensure that the different demand patterns are properly reflected in the analysis.

• I should normalise the data to take out the effects of changing gas prices on the wholesale price of power.

• The core hypothesis in this analysis is that wind power, which has no measurable cost to produce, deflates the overall market price when it floods on to the networks. This is highly plausible, but we cannot be sure that further increases in wind power will continue to deflate wholesale prices.

• At some points during very windy weather the UK already has enough renewable electricity to need no fossil fuel power. Gas is still being consumed in order to have a dispatchable power source that can be quickly varied. If we add a lot of new wind power, some of this electricity will have to be curtailed implying it will have no effect on wholesale prices.

  • It could be that the deflationary impact of high winds arises largely because the continental European price of power is being driven at the same time, flooding the UK interconnectors with cheap electricity. If the UK increases its wind capacity this will leave European prices unaffected. In other words, the increase in UK turbines may have less effect on power prices than I am calculating.

  • On the other hand, the most obvious downward effect of high winds on the UK power market occurs when wind supplies more than 45% of electricity needs. Any increase in wind capacity will make those events more frequent and so tend to exaggerate the impact on wholesale prices.

[1] The day ahead contract is the price agreed between buyers and sellers for the delivery of electricity in one hour periods on the following day. This market operates for seven days a week.

[2] Source: National Grid, https://www.nationalgrideso.com/electricity-explained/electricity-and-me/great-britains-monthly-electricity-stats

[3] I'm not sure whether or not this figure includes the wind farms that are currently on hold because the developers are unsure whether to proceed after facing much higher costs. I'm assuming that the wind farms waiting to be built are equally productive as the existing stock of onshore and offshore turbines. This is probably a pessimistic assumption since turbines are becoming larger and generate more electricity.

[4] Using linear regression.

[5] This is not a perfect proxy for the actual amount of electricity produced. Some electricity, such as that delivered by solar farms and small wind farms, does not travel on the National Grid high voltage network but stays on the local lower voltage distribution systems.

 My book chapter, "The Kufiya," published in  Asef Bayat and Linda Herrera, Global Middle East: Into the Twenty-First Century, University of California Press, 2021, is now available here, as a pdf.

Note that there is even a kufiya on the cover of the book! (On the shoulders of Edward Said, from a mural.)

 Note too that if you search this blog there is lots of kufiya/kaffiyeh/keffiyeh content.

 My 1992 article, "Seeing Double: Palestinian-American Histories of the Kufiya," published in Michigan Quarterly Review 31(4): 557-577, can now be found here, as a pdf. It also appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review's 60th anniversary issue--60(1): 341-362 in 2021.

"We are concerned by the unusually high number of incidents involving buses over recent days, which is far above what we might normally see on any given week".  

"Since 2014, Transport for London (TfL) has published Bus Safety Incident Data on its website every quarter (https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/publications-and- reports/bus-safety-data). The data publishes shows injuries by Bus Route, Operator and Borough supported by a dataset containing all this information made available for public scrutiny. Accordingly, I would like to make a Freedom of Information Request for Transport for Greater Manchester to provide me with a spreadsheet displaying the Bus Safety Incident Data for the period 1 January -30 March 2019 showing: 

1.     Date of Incident 2.     Bus Route3.     Local Name of Operator

4.     Operator Group Name (if applicable)

5.     Bus Garage/Depot

6.     Injury Description (Fatality, Serious/Minor Injury - Taken to Hospital, MinorTreated at Scene)7.     Victim's Sex

8.     Victim's Age

9.     Incident Event Type (Collision, Fall, Assault, other)

10.  Victim Category (Passenger, Pedestrian, Cyclists, 3rd Party Vehicle, Bus Driver, other)" 

"We do not hold any recorded information in relation to your request.  Since bus deregulation in 1986, bus services in Greater Manchester are run by commercial services and they do not share this information with TfGM.  Bus services in London were never affected by deregulation. TfL runs a franchising system which allows them to collate and publish this data." 

 Hanging from my ceiling over my desk, for many years, was my first 2WS/2WD experimental electric recumbent bike. While staring at it, I wondered why a video wasn't produced as soon as it was done. Then it hit me: It was built and ridden about 3 years before YouTube was launched! It was designed and built almost a quarter century ago! It also hadn't been ridden in 8 years - time to take it down, dust it off, and give it a fresh set of tires and batteries! The paint exhibits some wear and tear, but, well, so do I:

At a meeting of the London Assembly Transport Committee on 27 September 2023, Keith Prince AM asked TfL to 'come clean' about what decisions it took about a Safety Audit that TfL was finalising at the time Sandilands occurred to be (a) cancelled (b) kept from the RAIB Investigation and (c) removed from the public record.  

Here is my annotated informal transcript of Keith Prince's statement (a formal record of which will no doubt be published on the London Assembly site in due course)—

"From evidence TfL has provided through numerous Mayor's Questions and FOIs, when the Sandilands Tragedy occurred on 9 November 2019, these facts are known—

• TfL was putting the final touches on Internal Audit 16767 ("Trams Management of Operational Risk") which had already concluded First Group "Adequately Controlled" Operational Risk on the Croydon Tram." 

• "Hours after the crash, one of the Auditors sent an email to the Head of Audit which stated 
• "As soon as I heard the news this morning my thoughts were, my audit is going to be more high profile"  
• "Incidentally, the Derailment RA [Risk Assessment] was last reviewed on November 2013, so is one overdue for review"

• "Despite being asked for this Audit twice by the RAIB Investigators (on 24 November 2016 and 24 January 2017), Internal Audit 16767 was never provided by TfL to the RAIB and IA 16767 is nowhere to be found in TfL's Audit and Assurance Committee Records." 

• "Despite being—on 9 November 2016 and in the words of TfL's auditor— "more high profile", TfL appears to have deleted IA 16767 from the public record" .

1) Publish the Contents of the Blacked-Out Letter that TfL released in its much-delayed response to Question 2019/17340?

2) Publish a link to the evidence TfL made available in its response to Question 2019/17340 on the GLA Mayor's Question Time Site? I know for a fact that this evidence has been published online by a concerned member of the public — why not publish the Question 2019/17340 evidence on the GLA site and stop giving the impression TfL's trying to hide something?"

"I am determined to lead the most transparent, engaged & accessible administration London has ever seen"

—Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, 7 May 2016

While you're standing around
Waiting for your grandkids to drown
Or maybe catch fire
After you're dead and retired
You may as well listen
Get high and get pissed
To my apocalypse songs
Yes listen to this shit

Boomer please
I'm down on my knees
Everything has gone wrong
Buy my apocalypse songs

I've got profiles in discourage
From The Airplane to the bees
Failed stories faded glories
All you need is flowers and beads
From Stealers Wheel to The Troggs
From glitter glam to 60s mods
And there was surely Pussy Galore
Stick around you won't get bored

Boomer please
I'm down on my knees
Everything has gone wrong
Buy my apocalypse songs

We didn't stop the fire (rept)

Everyone's a prepper now Everyone's a mutilated cow Everyone is making vows
Everybody take a final bow

Actual apocalypse It isn't fun like watching Mad Max it isn't clever like Oliver Sacks or
Insanely great like Steve Jobs' Macs

One mask is for the disease One mask is for the smoke One mask is for avoiding police
Last toke before we're broken

Actual apocalypse It isn't fun like watching Mad Max it isn't clever like Oliver Sacks or
Insanely great like Steve Jobs' macs

2020 that was the year 2020 the vision is clear Gonna need four more beers Drown the
fire in my tears

Actual apocalypse It isn't fun like watching Mad Max it isn't clever like Oliver Sacks or
Insanely great like Steve Jobs' macs

Ring around the platitudes A pocket full of smug
Call & Response (rept. Many times)
East Coast Chorus
"Water water everywhere"
West Coast Chorus "Ashes ashes"

You don't need a weatherman to know we're toast
Shit's getting Biblical from coast to coast
I'm moving' to Ohio where the chicks are groovy
Surfin' with Mike Love we're gonna make it a movie

(to the tune of Surfing USA as stolen from Chuck Berry's Sweet Little 16)
And they'll be surfing in Boston
And in the ruins of Pompei
Deep in the deserts of Kashmir
L.A. has gone cra-cra
They'll all be grabbing their children
And all their property too
Tell everybody they're surfing
And everything is cool

You don't need a weatherman to know we're toast
Everybody's freakin' from coast to coast
Going' back to California where the chicks are pissed
They'll kneel before my virtue when I raise my fist

And they'll be shooting deniers
And oil CEOs
And all Republican Senators
And every Fox News host
They'll all be grabbing their children
And all their property too
Tell everybody they're surfing
And everything is cool

He was the stepfather of his country
But he raised the kids as his own
He gave them ears of corn — oodles of porn
But when they bought bad cocaine they earned his scorn

& when they all got older
He turned them into soldiers
Strapping tote bags to their shoulders
filled with weapons of mirth
It was all rather cheery
He read them Dr. Leary
Until those silly numbskulls
Decided to give birth

That was just the final straw
This was just what killed their pa
"Birth & death stay from my door
What do you think the porn was for?
To make you each one onanistic
Now I'll get a bit fascistic"

One by one he ate his grandkids
Chowed them down like gutted pigs
Except one who was schizophrenic
& could produce some anaesthetic
Together they drifted into a coma
Singing gleeful songs of soma

& thus a world was born & died
All because of a stepdads pride
It takes a village to make things fair
Fuckin' stepdad didn't care

Dumb easy feckless proles
Matrons danced the Watusi
Hoodlum malcontents did the stroll
Early tech geeks couldn't find sushi
Assholes like me were relentlessly droll
Dads at home acted like il Duce
Middle class kids weren't on the dole
Everyone bowled and went to the movies

But now there's no rest
Now there's no rest
Now there's no rest
For the Precariat
But now there's no rest
Now there's no rest
Now there's no rest
For the Precariat

Punters fighting punters
Owners sailing yachts
We can jump into the fire
But we cant afford new Reeboks
Nothing much is left to say
It's cyberwar from day to day
Street distress from night to night
Play instruments of madcap blight

And now there's no rest
Now there's no rest
Now there's no rest
For the Precariat
But now there's no rest
Now there's no rest
Now there's no rest
For the Precariat

The girl at the ticket booth
Started wailing and weeping
With all the grieving
A body could hold seething
& the bouncer standing near to me
With cracked and violent idiot glee
Was swinging his fists randomly
Saying everybody gets in for free
But first you have to get passed me

Everyone from all around
saying stuff that sounds profound
& a smarter king of Deliria
That day was duly crowned
& if you listen a wee bit closer
To all the people in the ground
You'll hear them screaming loud

& this is the sound

[Follow with Ornette Coleman meets Jimi Hendrix 8 minute jam]

Pulp
Pulp
One slimy gulp
Cheese contrasts and compliments
A hint of leather methamphetamine crashing
Disconsolate poisoned rockabillies smashing
Or just a washed-up cabaret
Playing themes around a town without pity

Laughter as much as revulsion
Prayer beads of a tactless devotion
A goblin drinking from a guilty pump
Ectoplasm and it's slithering amok
Could be Falstaff but I know it's Puck
Get thee to puppetry to come unstuck

There's something special in the grime
Lipstick smeared before a wife of crime
The whipped clean sheen of a mall
It's only pulp but here have mine
Love ain't like anthrax at all
It's only pulp but give it time

It's only pulp but give it time (rept)

Torn limb from limb by the mean girls at the orphanage
Glued back together in a spirited attempt at hoodoo bricolage
Went on a rampage of irreligious sacrilege
It didn't matter to her a whit if it was Islam or written in Sanskrit

Lip syncs sink ships
Uncle Fester loves Trent Reznor
Polly the hijacker wants a cracker
Lip sync ships stinker

She sniffed the air tingling & tasting loves uneasy lunacy
Saw sorrowful vistas spotted with funereal urns
She rang a doorbell brought her neighbors an eerie shrieking doll
with that invasion they entered the dreamlands of the unwell

Lip syncs sink ships
Uncle Fester loves Trent Reznor
Polly the hijacker wants a cracker
Lip sync ships stinker

In this lightly sprinkled phase
Of quasi-historical banter
Do you like Phyllis Diller
More than Paul Kantner?

I challenge you to a high stakes game
Of triage and hospitalization
Nearly fatal illnesses terrible stillnesses
What have you got to lose then?
You have no friends and might just mend
The betting starts and some day it ends
That's when the payoff takes its toll
Chased across the data in an infinite troll

And now I need an infinite rest (and that's death)
Now I need an infinite rest (and that's death)

Live free or dye your hair pink
The choice is easier than you think
There ain't no choices just cacophony of voices
It's the entire kitchen sink
So while we try to make sense
Ideas are being steamrolled by events
While we try to make sense
Ideas are being steamrolled by events

An intoxicating mixture of dogshit and fennel
Chowed down right there in the very kennel
A handful of bros and their surly bitches
Laughing in the faces of beheaded snitches
And if'n that don't float your boat
See what the news is with your remote
Yes pandemonium comes to all seven seas
Pirates with nukes and the deadly bees

So take a moment to name your poison
To run with the wolves or hang with the boys 'n'
Take a quick pic for an NFT fortune
Or just wait around for the next bus to Boston

Yoginini Joes has a private shaman
She screams "don't interrupt me" at her maid called Carmen
Who’s polishing the Paltrow vagina candle
When Yogini Jones flies off the handle
Shouting “don’t touch that talisman
It awaits the sacred phalisman
Unenlightened wretch you make me tired
I live in perfect peace and you’re fucking fired

The next thing you know Yoginini’s giving lectures
On how to stay positive — her bodyguard is Hector
Hector is a killer microdosing PCP
And Yoginini Jones is selling branded tantric pee
In a definite misunderstanding Yogini contacts me
I tell her I can’t help you dear — maybe try Flea
Flea invites him up to his place for wine and brie
But hw just won’t get behind the branded tantric pee

(repeat 3 times)
Enlightenment entitlement
Tantric pee is heaven sent
Buy Gwyneth’s sacred scent
With a tasteful dash of decadent

@thehonorable

I got the word from the Bolshevik shaman
Who thinks he's also a Hindu Brahmin
Drank Iboga from a patented cup
I just shrugged and said "Cool what's for supper"
Around me people were puking up shit
Put it on youtube — it could be a hit
They cried and tugged and gouged at their eyes
Pluck them out was not that surprising

But back to the operatic scene at hand
The long and boring road from madness to bland
Like reeling in the years and bobbing for Snapple
Getting paid to keep it low down and subtle
When that "all hell" broke loose I was in the back

Brokering a truce and wearing a dunce cap
Trying hard for death with pills and soda
Hovering around for just one last Mimosa

The edgelord built a sneerbot
He knew it would replace him
When it came time to upload his mind
He slipped away on a vacation
He hid out in Tangiers
Imagining he was Brion Gysin
But Edgelord pals can't be trusted
And one day one slipped him some ricin

And we were laughing all the way to the bank
But we found the account was vacant
We tried everything from flash to bland
And to making the sex more blatant
We tried pitching to the British ravers
And to the sincere planet savers
And to the loony libertarians
Who didn't do us too many favors

And the sneerbot said…
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe there own asses

And the sneerbot said…
Look at this history of the human masses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
And look at this dude tryin' to boil his own eggs
Man those humans was on their last legs

Watched jocks and the hippies share a kegger
And give free oysters to the local beggar
I've seen this all with my very own eyes
Man these humans they take the fuckin' prize

and the sneerbot said
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses
Haw haw haw they used to wipe their own asses

The universe is made of Crayola
I lost the '70s thanks to payola
I was a member of the Blank Panther Party
Ripped on coke and Bacardi

I learned to multiplex before I could add
I was a murderess before I was sad
My micro-mini is way below my knees
I ain't no goddamn tease

I hit the racetrack I was loaded with cash
Was feeling guilty and a wee bit rash
Bet all my winnings on a system crash
And now I've gotta dash

The universe is made of Crayola
I lost the '70s thanks to payola
I was a member of the Blank Panther Party
Ripped on coke and Bacardi

Well I used to be disgusted
And then I tried to be amused
But now I'm just plain flabbergasted
At the depth of the abuse
And I'm not singing 'bout a bad date
And I'm not singing 'bout ya 2 minutes hate
I'm looking at the new level of crazy
With their hands wrapped around our fate

Does anybody remember the quantified life?
(R. Plant voice) Does anybody remember laughter?
Does anybody remember the balcony speeches?
Does anyone remember bloodletting and leeches?
Does anyone remember the days before then?
Lugubrious meetings with remake-able men
& Little Brother is watching one and other
So mark your turf — Then run for cover

When you get to the bottom of the world
Just find some expensive California girls
Build a luxury home with all the convenience
Invite three billionaires and one digital genius

You'll start a new race that's probably pale
This human race is about to fail
Don't worry 'bout them you'll soon set sail
From the launching pad in the desert sun
Who knew holocausts could be so much fun
In your helter luxury shelter
In your helter luxury shelter
Days of fire and desert swelter
In your helter luxury shelter

Do you remember when chaos was a state of play
Do you remember "punk rock is here to stay"
Do you remember when Sister Ray was très outré
When Bowie asked… "or even yesterday?"

I'm wearing deplatform shoes
I've got the fear monger blues
When you ain't got somewhere
You got no choice to choose
And now I'm yesterday's news
They canceled Lenny Bruce

I still have a glimmer of rascalinity
But now it's one inch short of divinity
My jest is a million miles from infinity
I may be creepy crawling towards morbidity

I'm wearing deplatform shoes
I've got the fear monger blues
When you ain't got somewhere
You got no choice to choose
And now I'm yesterday's news
They canceled Lenny Bruce

I used to chatter to the birds and bees
Grabbed the branches and climbed the trees\
I'm picking fleas, man… all this disease
All that's left now is to vomit and sneeze

I'm wearing deplatform shoes
I've got the fear monger blues
When you ain't got somewhere
You got no choice to choose
And now I'm yesterday's news
They canceled Lenny Bruce

(first movement: Simcerely)

One more shot at glamour
Everybody's dead in Alabama
Your status symbol's your latest trauma
Don't bring the noise bring the drama
Bring all the bad karma
& the Dalai Lama
& lay your burden down on me
Come on lay it down

Simcerely yours
You're the boss
Just a lost cause
No remorse

(second movement: Draw the Curtain)

Last blast of spectacle
Termite feeding on the bloated corpse
I want a piece of the action
Fuck y'all and your way rad factions

Reemergence as the prince of naught
Truly ready for the triumph of the nil
All the hip kids need a reason to go on
Like '73 when I saw Satyricon

The next 4 years were sexy and steamy
I thought I was Frederick Fellini
It was a blast it couldn't last
I even wound up with my dick in a cast

Chump change with President Carter He said peanuts I said barter
A punk group was a total nonstarter
Drunken blonde was my perfect partner

She had a poster of Ulrike Meinhoff
She knew how to kick and she knew how to scoff
When the boys tried to climb on board
Her cutting words were as a sword so…

Last blast of spectacle
Termite feeding on the bloated corpse
I want a piece of the action
Fuck y'all and your way rad factions

(Third Movement Say The Right Thing)

I live in a world of perpetual crisis
We want to get out but we know what the price is
Death come fast
After this repast

They're all certain
Bring down the curtain
They're all certain
Bring down the curtain
They're so young

They're no fun
They're so young
They're no fun

Trite makes right
Uptight
Trite makes right
Uptight
Walk upright
Polite
Walk upright
Polite

I live in a world of perpetual crisis
We want to get out but we know what the price is
Death come fast
After this repast

It's tasty in the bakery
Sticky in the mines
We're trying to get out
Just tell me when it's time

His libidinal wants swaddled in rectitude
Born in purity at 60 years old
The stick gains its entry
The stick gains its entry
The stick gains its entry
There it must stay

She's got the bling
But she says the right thing
It don't mean a thing
Of thee we sing

(rept with increased stridency)

Say the right thing

The post Buy My Apocalypse Songs (15 Lyrics In Search Of Music) appeared first on Mondo 2000.

"Transport for London leads the way on bus safety" exclaimed the headline of an Opinion piece penned by Tom Cunnington, TfL's Director of Bus Business Development that recently appeared in the news site and publication Route One ("Number One for Coach, Bus & Minibus"). While Tom Cunnington's PR placement highlighted all of TfL's good intentions surrounding its two decades-long 'roll-out' of Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) to its contracted Bus Fleet, when you think about, the TfL executive merely parrots the words TfL has been using for many years while conveniently forgetting that New York City did lots of the same stuff TfL claim as "a first" twenty-odd years ago. 

But let's not get bogged down in the details, there's plenty of time for that!

Though, before we start, let me introduce myself: I've had over thirty years experience in the bus industry, top-to-bottom, and while I will try not to befuddle you with tech and bus lingo, ask virtually any Bus Driver the same questions and—with only a few months in the industry—he or she will give you the same sort of feedback, if not with the same level of detail.

If there is anything that needs clarifying I will endeavour to help out, but I'll also try to keep this as simple as I possibly can. 

So without further ado, let's get going.

Let's look at Tom Cunnington's published remarks:

"We welcome the work on improving bus safety by Stagecoach East on the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, but its use of the retarder with Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) in the UK is not a "first"."

Sounds impressive doesn't it? But how do you think this system works?

"Bus Safety" is the buzzword here—you'd imagine that using this would mean that buses were "safer" because "every journey matters"—but how exactly have buses been made "safer"? 

Because I do hope Tom Cunnington will explain how...

"Transport for London's Bus Safety Development team has been working with London Bus Operators, manufacturers, and suppliers like Actia for several years, and led the way with trials of the technology on urban buses."

Again, lots of big words designed to make you think that Safety's a huge priority! An entire team dedicated to bus safety development, working with operators, manufacturers and suppliers...for several years even!

Let's conveniently disregard the recent London Assembly discussion about the long-standing problem of Lack of Air Conditioning (A/C) in Bus Drivers' cabs—and how TfL will need to commission a complete redesign of the bus to make A/C work. Bus Drivers working in unsafe hot conditions in Bus Cabs has been an an issue since at least 2006 when TfL mandated that all buses must have Bus Cab A/C fitted to its contractors' vehicles.  Today A/C is fitted, it just doesn't work in most cases because TfL didn't insert the word 'working' next to 'installed' in its requirement!  We'll leave the long sad story of Bus Cab A/C for another thread, but please keep this in mind: the difference between TfL announcing that some new 'safety' technology will be 'installed' but not insisting—contractually—that the technology is actually 'working' suggests that TfL's ability to monitor implementation of 'safer' technologies like ISA (and A/C!) is compromised from the start. I do wonder if that systemic fault is intentional? 

But I digress...let's get back to the to the blog!

How many Bus Operators was Tom Cunnington talking about? Where do TfL and they have these "discussions"? Behind closed doors would be a good guess and certainly appears to be true.   

But when you realise that the ISA trials were done by Volvo on their buses, it doesn't sound as impressive does it?

"ISA formed part of our 2019 Bus Safety Standard, and has been mandatory on all new buses in London since then. Through a combination of retrofit and new, Stagecoach in London has over 500 buses fitted with Actia systems that limit the bus' speed through the retarder, with a further 1800 at the other London operators."

OK.  Let's assume the Mayor is correct and that a total of 3280 buses in TfL's total fleet (about 36% of the total) do have ISA fitted by now.  Let me tell you this fact though: this may reflect the situation on paper, but the reality is far from that.

Let's first take this "2019 Bus Safety Standard" (that, in fact, TfL announced in October 2018): one of the things it includes is a pedal camera in the Driver's footwell, because there were too many instances of 'pedal confusion'—again, on paper—that led to many crashes, some of them fatal. Nothing to do with runaway buses where there was a fault, oh no, the "blame the Driver for everything" mantra is strong here. 

Let's also look at that repeated word "retarder". The retarder is the electromagnet that's in the "gearbox" to help slow the bus down when the brakes are applied, to give a smoother braking feel to the passengers rather than to rely solely on the foundation brakes where you have the brakes working on their own. When the retarder fails, you can't use the bus as it takes so much more stopping that you can literally put your foot through the floor and it still doesn't stop. So the use of the word retarder here is not just incorrect, it's for something altogether completely different.

The actual method of the ISA is explained in his next paragraph, which, again, sounds great, but we'll take a closer look at it.

"This system uses a digital speed map which can be regularly updated as speed limits are changed, and because it does not rely on mapping the individual routes, it also works when the buses change garages, run out of service, and even on rail replacement."

The system TfL describes sounds wonderful, but dig a little deeper and it soon starts to fall apart.

• The digital speed map is designed by the Bus Operator.
• It is updated by the Bus Operator.
• The limits are changed by the Bus Operator.

You guessed it! the Bus Operator.

You may be asking "But why would TfL fit such a system and then not use it as it is designed to be used?"

And here is the rub that neither Tom Cunnington nor TfL will be rushing to write to Route One about.

TfL pay to have the ISA system fitted and then let the Bus Operator run it. And as the recent Sandilands tram investigation showed us, this kind of "hands-off" contractual arrangement is—quite literally—'an accident waiting to happen'.

Imagine—if you will—the very basics of how TfL operates: TfL pay a Bus Operator a set sum of money to operate a bus service—based on contract targets such as service intervals, i.e., how often a bus is going to turn up.  These contracted time targets have historically meant that the same numbers of buses will run at the same frequency. 

But we already know that buses are running around faster than they should because the Drivers are late (or they need to use the facilities, or there are too many passengers, or someone has parked in a bus lane, or it's raining, or there's a Y in the day etc....).  So when 20mph speed limits are imposed across the board, the bus time tables don't change and the Drivers are expected to make those same bus journeys at the same frequency and—get this—at the same speed.  And if there is an accident—"e.g, the Driver was driving too fast to meet the contracted timetable, we have held a meeting and he's been sacked, that's the end of that" (assuming you ever find out this is what's happened because, as we all know, these meetings are held behind closed doors and not independently reviewed or scrutinised, so anything could happen and it all gets brushed under the carpet and the public knows nothing).

Now imagine TfL's limited the buses' speed, and—all of a sudden—those contracted buses can't get to where they need to go in time and the Bus Drivers can't make any of that time up by speeding because ISA means they can't:  TfL will have to add more buses to the system—which costs money. So it would appear that TfL are more than happy to turn a blind eye to the ISA systems not being switched on by the Bus Operators: it's a win-win...except for Safety, of course.

And because there is no one there from TfL to monitor if the technology is actually 'working', TfL does nothing when Bus Operators disable ISA—so their Bus Drivers can speed to meet TfL's contracted Timeliness and Availability targets.

Officially though, TfL have now incorporated speed checking into the ticket machine since TfL went "module-less" a few years ago, so much so that TfL has the capacity to identify every single Bus that's broken the speed limit—by Operator, by Depot, by Route, by Bus and even by the Driver. Moreover, TfL now sells access to this Speed Data to the Bus Operators, with the knowledge that the Bus Operators are required to show at least 3 months of continuous late running before TfL will consider altering any contract's route timings. And despite seeing all that evidence of unsafe speeding by Bus Drivers who are incentivised by TfL to meet the route timings embedded in these contracts, TfL may still decide it doesn't want to adjust those contracted route timings to reflect reality/improve safety. 

So you got this, right? 

• The Bus Driver speeds to make up time and keep to the Bus Operators' contracted Timeliness and Availability targets;  
• Despite the obvious disconnect between the contracted targets and the reality of driving conditions the route, TfL doesn't change the route timing;
• if the Driver has an accident, the Bus Operator disciplines the Driver for speeding;
• Bus accidents 'happen', people are killed and seriously-injured, Bus Drivers are disciplined (or fired).....and nothing changes.

"We have also introduced ISA that stops the bus from accelerating beyond the speed limit on 1150 Euro VI Volvo hybrid buses, using the less agile route-based mapping and geofencing for each route the buses will travel on - as described by Paul Halford."

Remember a little way back when TfL were citing the Bus Safety Standard it introduced in October 2018?

Well, even before that, there's a set limit to how fast buses can accelerate from a standing start, and it's been getting lower and lower over the years.

This is fine from a passenger safety point of view—no one wants granny to fall over and break her hip—but it's not at all helpful when you are crawling along in traffic, pulling out at a roundabout, pulling away from the lights—ie., all the things a Bus Driver needs to do during the course of a normal working day behind the wheel. 

And from a Bus Driver's perspective, it's a stress-inducing madness—

• you lose more time than you would (time that you can't afford to lose because you'll be dropping back later and later)
• the newer bus in front of you, which is even slower (but 'safer'), is also running late, and backing up the route—
• and then the iBus Controller is on every Bus Driver's case complaining to each how they're ruining the service.

Can you see how the "real life" experience of a London Bus Driver is so far removed from the computer-generated perfect world of sound bites and "look at how great we are!" propaganda proffered to the public from TfL's  'higher-uppers' like Tom Cunnington?

That's before you discover that Volvo set up the ISA system in, I think, 2016 and it took years for that tech to be incorporated into the other types of buses.

I could complicate things by explaining how wide a variety of vehicles are deployed by Contractors on the London Bus Fleet. I could confuse you even further by explaining how the mechanicals of the bus can be made by one manufacturer and the body by another—this is why there was no standard Covid Screen 'protection' that TfL claimed was fitted: some companies used sellotape, while others used shower screens!  Here again, the difference between 'installed' and 'working' probably made a huge difference to human lives and livelihoods.

As you can see, there's a 'reality gap' that separates Mr. Cunnington's few simple 'pats-on-the-back' paragraphs from what ISA really means for London's Bus Drivers and the public. 

I could have expanded this Guest Blog to tens times the length, so, please bear with me while I continue to expose how far out of touch TfL and its Bus Operators remain with those of us here working on the coal face every day.

Stay safe.  See you soon!

—Bus Driver V0

Home movie — The filming of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe.

I THINK THAT MY CHIEF SURPRISE is that it’s all happening, as they say. The preliminaries have been so protracted and the idea so threatened by various aspects of the malaise affecting the film industry generally, that Peter Hall and my-self, glancing at each other across the farmyard, often find it amazing that we are actually shooting Akenfield. Initially I had great reservations about filming the book at all. In the first place, the tendency of film companies or television to want to turn every successful book into a picture is questionable. Writers are often mangled in the process. Anthony Burgess continues to protest about what occurred to his novel A Clockwork Orange when the film-makers got hold of it. My book presented unique difficulties inasmuch as it involved many friends and neighbours as well as deeply personal experiences drawn from a whole lifetime in the Suffolk countryside. Also, there was the problem of continuity; how did one film three generations in terms of work, belief, education and climate. For this is what Akenfield is really concerned with.

I met Peter Hall in London a few weeks after the book had been published and he told me of his Suffolk home; how my work had touched a deeply personal element in his life, and how, like all creative people, he felt a great need to express important things concerning himself and his family in artistic terms. He thought that a film based on Akenfield might achieve this. There would be no actors and as little as necessary of the general elaborations which accompany the making of a big film. That autumn I wrote a script based on the ideas in the book, on what people said and did. Roughly speaking, the pattern of this script involves a day in the past and a day in the present, a day of life and a day of death, and a day of summer and a day of winter. Within this pattern a century of Suffolk life works itself to a present-day conclusion.

It is a feature film and not a documentary, although every-body in it would be ploughing, shoeing, praying, marrying, harvesting, teaching, rook-scaring, factory-farming, digging up the past or concealing the present with all the actuality which the camera could catch. Peter Hall and I talked of Robert Bresson and his remarkable films of French country life. I even mentioned Man of Aran. A Suffolk friend of mine, Hugh Barrett, had accompanied Flaherty when he was making this classic. The script written, the agreements settled as to how we would resolve things generally, it took the super-human tact and imagination of a young producer named Rex Pyke to get our film financially and practically into motion. Then suddenly, after two years of negotiation—we started.

For myself it has meant starting off in hundreds of directions, returning, on the whole triumphantly, with the necessary spoils. Permissions to use old schools, fields, churches and chapels. Advice or artefacts from everybody within a thirty-mile radius and, most important of all, people. We auditioned scores of East Anglians for the little group of main roles and then literally went out into the highways and byways to collect country children, men and women for the large scenes. Many of the results deriving from this spontaneous casting have been a revelation to us all. I ‘shall never forget seeing the first rushes of the 1900 village school scene and the forty or so local children miraculously slipping back in time (under the influence of hob-nailed boots, slate-rags, pinafores and thunderous iron desks) until they had become, by some mysterious chemistry better known to themselves than our costume department, the distant children in the sepia photographs which I had brought from our splendid Rural Industries Museum at Stowmarket.

The school building itself was fascinating. It lies just across the meadows from my house and was built in 1858, but has not been used for over thirty years. It was the little building which Edward Fitzgerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam, used to visit when he felt like instructing the children. Several of the old people in my book were educated there and after we had re-furnished it with all the things discovered in the East Suffolk Education Department’s store at Ipswich, swept the chimney—full of jackdaws’ nests—lit the fire in the massive Victorian grate and chalked 'Tuesday 3rd January 1900’ on the blackboard, I thought of those neighbours of mine who had actually sat in this tall room and heard about the Boer War.

It was foolhardy, we realised later, to have begun filming Akenfield with a particularly elaborate and subtle scene involving seventy people, if one included such kind assistants as the Vicar’s wife and the headmistress of the nearby primary school, but when we saw the results on a vast screen in a little cinema in Wardour Street, we were delighted that we took so bold a plunge. I think it was John Constable who said that 'a big canvas will tell you what you cannot do’ and this first weekend of shooting, appropriately enough in Debach school, was a real education for everybody working on Akenfield. It did indeed tell us what we could not do in the circumstances of this unusual film, and this was never to go beyond the reality of what existed before our very eyes. The reality was the fun, the sadness, the poetry and the truth. And thus all the drama that we required.

The fun certainly came over in a big way—and accompanied by big-band music—when we held a 1943 village dance. Mr Arbon, who had blacked-out the hall for Hitler’s war, blacked it out all over again for us. People of all ages, the Young Farmers’ Club, farm workers and their families, teachers, every kind of person, danced to Glen Miller and the Inkspots, while the bombers from the nearby aerodrome (now the site of a vast mushroom factory) boomed overhead. Searchlights, sandbags, uniforms of the Suffolk Regiment, free beer from the Ipswich brewers whose wartime ads were mixed up with posters which said, 'Be like Dad, Keep Mum’, and some drastic haircuts created the kind of nostalgia you could cut with a knife.

But the real test of filming Akenfield has been re-creating the old horse economy of Suffolk for the early scenes, finding those small fields of heavy clay, with their dense hedges, discovering workable forges which have not progressed from leather bellows to acetylene welding and, above all, searching out young farm workers who are able to do the old traditional crafts. We soon found out that the best way to do anything of this nature was not by appeals in the local press or on local television, although each of these mediums have given us the most generous help, but by good old bush telegraph. Not the least disturbance to my normally extremely quiet existence is the unknown voice on the telephone, full of Suffolk diffidence, saying, 'I hear you’re looking for a man who can use a reaper…’ Or giving me invaluable advice on costume, weather, hymns, pigs, stone-picking, battery chickens or just life itself as we aim to show it.

Perhaps our best scene, and certainly the one which most excites us, is the great harvest scene of about 1911, with the magnificent Suffolk waggons, the biggest in England, in the field and with heroic punches to draw them. We intend to cut two fields according to the old manner and have even arranged for them to be delightfully, if inefficiently, starred with poppies and scabious. We are praying for traditional harvest sun and moonshine so that we can capture something of those toiling idylls reflected in the Suffolk Photographic Survey, a wonderful collection of old pictures showing every facet of rural life in the county since the 1870s. The survey is the basis of our authority in such matters and I find it deeply moving to see these glimpses of Suffolk long ago brought into the present, as it were–principally by local faces. 'Hands last’, said the blacksmith in my book. So do faces, of course. The youngster climbing out of his car, a bit awkwardly, for the old clothes are massive compared with jersey and jeans, takes the plough-reins and plunges off to the horizon behind delicately stepping shires, and, certainly for all the intents and purposes of our film, is his grandfather.

We have to shoot across the seasons, of course, so the making of the film is abnormally protracted. It is an enormous film, maybe two hours long and full of time and music, as well as work. Also love and death. Peter Hall calls it his home movie, thinking of his special involvement and of the weekend shooting schedules. In between filming, we all rush back to our 'normal’ tasks, Peter to the National Theatre, the camera crew to various studios, the producer to cutting Pinter’s The Home-coming, the designer, the make-up girls, wardrobe mistresses, and so on to a variety of professional quarters and myself to writing a book called The Art of the English Diary which makes a change. And our cast hurries back to keep half a dozen surrounding villages running.

If we succeed, we shall have challenged a lot of myths connected with the orthodox film industry, particularly those dealing with money. Our company, which we have registered as 'Angle Films’, is really a co-operative from which nobody takes his usual professional fee until the film itself makes a profit. If its soul, or whatever, finally emerges into the un-common light of an East Anglian day, it will be due to the marvellous help of the country people themselves, who have been swift to recognise the special nature of the enterprise, and due a bit also to Peter Hall and myself coming from many generations of 'Suffolk’.

Home movie: The filming of Akenfield by Ronald Blythe. Reproduced here with the kind permission of both Ronald and The Countryman. First published in The Countryman, summer 1973.

Orford Ness

Orford Ness is a cuspate foreland shingle spit on the Suffolk coast in Great Britain, linked to the mainland at Aldeburgh and stretching along the coast to Orford and down to North Weir Point, opposite Shingle Street.

Between August 1913 and the summer of 1916 the southern half of the King's Marsh was drained and levelled to form airfields to the left and right of the road. The site was ready to receive its first aircraft in 1915. This was perhaps the most significant turning point in the history of the Ness, with the arrival of part of the Central Flying School's Experimental Flying Section from Upavon in Wiltshire. This was the start of 70 years of intense military experimentation, which as well as leaving a variety of physical traces, has given the place what has been described as 'the mystique of secrecy'. The longevity as a place of military experimentation is significant. The arrival of the military curtailed the traditional uses of the Ness by the local population, although the station soon became an important source of employment for them. Most of the experimental work related to aerial warfare. Parachutes, bombs, machine guns and aircraft. Significant advances were made in both military hardware and experimental techniques and equipment. Amongst the pioneering work of the First World War were early experiments on the parachute, on aerial photography and on bomb and machine gun sights as well as evaluation of aircraft and the development of camouflage. After the War Orford Ness was put on a 'care and maintenance' order until 1924 when it was reopened as a satellite of the Aeroplane and Armaments Experimental Establishment at nearby Martlesham.

When the site was reopened in 1924 a 'new' experimental bombing range replaced the First World War range. The range operated right up until the development of nuclear weapons, with some of the last work being the development of advanced high-speed, low-altitude bombing techniques for Britain's last independent air-dropped nuclear weapons, the WE177 series. The current Bomb Ballistics building was built in 1933 to house 'state of the art' equipment used to record the flight of bombs. This information was used to improve their aerodynamics and provide data for the production of the tables used to refine bomb aiming. The equipment was steadily improved over the years, most notably from the 1950s for the development of the atomic bomb. The technical capabilities of the range were proved by the fact it was still used during the Second World War, despite its proximity to the continent. The Bomb Ballistics building was restored in 1996, and the roof now provides a platform from which to view the site, in particular the vegetated shingle features that make the Ness such an important site. Inside there is a display on the uses of this building and the surrounding area.

This enigmatic building, looking much like a sail-less black windmill, was constructed by local builders WC Reade of Aldeburgh in 1928 for the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, to house an experimental 'rotating loop' navigation beacon. Part funded by Trinity House and reported to be a marine navigation beacon, the Air Ministry also funded work on the development of an aircraft location system based on this early innovation, and the Orford Ness equipment was probably an early homing beacon for aircraft that formed part of this work. Renovated in 1995, the beacon now provides an elevated viewing area and displays for the visiting public.

Perhaps the most significant experiments on Orford Ness took place between 1935 and 1937, after Robert Watson-Watt and his team arrived on 13 May 1935 to found the 'Ionospheric Research Station'.This was in fact a cover for the research and development of the aerial defence system, which was later to become known as radar. Still standing and recently restored, one of the few surviving First World War accommodation blocks on the site (later employed as the NAAFI) was used by those radar pioneers. The First World War 'Institute' building - close by and still standing - might also have been used in these experiments. The first demonstrations of the feasibility of radar as a practical air defence system were made here before the team moved a little further down the coast to a larger site at Bawdsey Manor in 1936. There, a full range of applications was developed leading to the creation of the first of the 'Chain Home' stations. It is not an exaggeration to say that but for the work done by this team at Orford Ness and Bawdsey Manor, the outcome of the Battle of Britain and the subsequent history of Europe would have been very different.

Between 1938 and 1959 a majority of the firing trials were concentrated in the northern airfield, part of which is now reedbed. The firing trials were mainly concerned with determining the vulnerability of aircraft and aircraft components to attack by various projectiles. Whole aircraft or individual parts such as fuel tanks, oxygen tanks or running engines were subjected to carefully controlled and recorded simulations of attack. A principal area of work involved improving the lethality of Allied ammunition and improving the protection of Allied aircraft against German ammunition. A wide range of aircraft including four-engine bombers would be lined up here undergoing trials. To determine vulnerability the aircraft were shot at with .303 rifles from all angles, a single shot at a time, with each bullet hole marked and recorded after every shot. After the war work continued on machine gun ammunition, rockets and other projectiles, on the vulnerability of aircraft to attack and the development of techniques to record projectiles in flight and duplicate various effects experimentally.

Connected with the 'lethality and vulnerability' firing trials a rather uninteresting looking building was home to a number of extraordinary experiments. During the 1940s the Plate Store was part of a plate range. The plates in question were sheets of experimental armour plate or paper targets. Initially built to house the plate armour, the end wall was later removed and various types of projectile were fired from smooth bore field guns into plates mounted inside the building to test their effectiveness. Tests on the fragmentation of projectiles employed old London telephone directories to determine how far the fragments would penetrate. The method of firing projectiles from smooth bore cannon was later employed in the Model Bombing Range (sited near the NAAFi building) to test models of bombs and rockets. The Plate Store was last used by the AWRE as a technical base for experiments on the interaction of radio waves with the ionosphere. The bases of the radio masts can still be seen around the brackish lagoons just over the Chinese Wall in the King's Marsh.

After the Second World War, work continued on the aerodynamics of bombs, machine gun ammunition, rockets and other projectiles. It also continued on the vulnerability of aircraft to attack and the development of techniques to record projectiles in flight and duplicate various effects experimentally. During the 1950s the King's Marsh was used as an experimental range for recording the flight paths of air-launched rockets. Fired from above the airfields the rockets were recorded by a series of cameras triggered by infrared sensitive cells, which could detect the rocket as it passed over. In the peaceful atmosphere of today it is difficult to imagine the noise generated by these trials as the Gloster Meteor jets passed over at full speed and at a height of only 50 feet (15 metres).

In 1968 work started on the top secret Anglo-American System 441A 'over-the-horizon' (OTH) backscatter radar project, finally code-named Cobra Mist. The Anglo-American project, whose main contractor was the Radio Corporation of America, was set up to carry out several 'missions', including detection and tracking of aircraft, detection of missile and satellite vehicle launchings, fulfilling intelligence requirements and providing a research and development test-bed. A multi-million pound project, it was plagued by a severe 'noise' problem of an undetermined origin which resulted in a major reduction in detection capability. An investigation into this problem by a joint US/UK Scientific Assessment Committee (SAC) led to a report and recommendations in early 1973 from which came a joint US/UK decision to terminate operations at Orford Ness, based on economic and 'other considerations'. An integral part of the project, beyond the building stood 18 'strings' of antennae in the shape of a large open fan, until they were removed in the mid 1970s. This fan was accompanied by a large aluminium 'ground net' covering some 80 acres of Lantern Marsh to the north of the site. Cobra Mist is also well known for its alleged associations with UFOs. The large grey steel building currently houses radio transmitters that until recently broadcast the BBC World Service.

It is a place of strange contrasts. For the National Trust, its 'elemental nature' contrasts with the 'inherent dangers' of this place, a 'hostile and potentially dangerous site'. Military structures - the Bomb Ballistics Building, the Black Beacon, the 'pagodas' used for explosive design - have been converted into viewing spots. This is not a celebratory site, however; there is ambivalence and doubt here, with regard to what is being physically and ideologically conserved.

— Rachel Woodward — National Trust

Images — A Film by Robert Altman

When a wealthy housewife and children's author begins to have disturbing visions, her husband takes her to the countryside for a vacation. There, her delusions worsen, with tragic consequences.

Wealthy children's author Cathryn (Susannah York) receives a series of disturbing phone calls in her home in London one dreary night; the female voice on the other end, sometimes cutting in on other phone conversations, suggests mockingly that her husband Hugh (René Auberjonois) is having an affair. Hugh comes home, finding Cathryn in distress. As Hugh attempts to comfort her, Cathryn witnesses a different man who is behaving as if he were her husband. She screams in horror and backs away, only to see her vision of the figure revert to her husband.

Hugh attributes her outburst to stress and her pregnancy. He decides to take her on a vacation to an isolated cottage in the Irish countryside, where Cathryn can work on her book and take photographs for its illustrations. Immediately upon her arrival, however, Cathryn hears voices saying her name and sees strange apparitions: While preparing lunch one day, she sees her husband Hugh pass through the kitchen, then transform into her dead lover, Rene (Marcel Bozzuffi). Rene continues to appear to her around the house, and even speaks with her.

Cathryn's paranoia and visions become increasingly pervasive, and are exacerbated when a local neighbor and ex-lover, Marcel (Hugh Millais), brings his adolescent daughter, Susannah (Cathryn Harrison), to visit. Cathryn becomes unable to distinguish Hugh from Rene or Marcel, as the men shift before her eyes. One day, Rene taunts Cathryn, asking her to kill him if she wants rid of him, and hands her a shotgun. She shoots him through the abdomen; Susannah, startled by the gunshot, runs into the house, and finds Cathryn standing in the den, having shot Hugh's camera to pieces. Cathryn claims the gun accidentally fired when she was moving it.

Seeking solace, Cathryn goes to a nearby waterfall, where she often sees her doppelgänger staring back at her. After one such occurrence, she returns to the house, where Hugh tells her he has to leave for business. She drives him to the train station and returns to the house, where she finds Marcel waiting inside. He begins to undress to have sex with her, but she stabs him through the chest with a kitchen knife. The next morning, she encounters a local elderly man walking his dog, and invites him to come inside for coffee, in spite of the fact that Marcel's corpse apparently lies in the living room (which suggests that she regards the "murder" as a hallucination, like her shooting of Rene); the old man declines the invitation. Later in the evening, Susannah stops by the house, and remarks that her father was not at home when she awoke that morning. Cathryn is alarmed by this, as it could mean that she really did kill Marcel. She is relieved to hear that Marcel did return drunk after midnight, and invites Susannah in for a cup of tea after reasoning that Marcel cannot be dead on her living room floor. Susannah asks Cathryn if she looked like her when she was young before ominously saying, "I'm going to be exactly like you."

After having tea, Cathryn drives Susannah back home. Marcel comes out of the house and attempts to talk to Cathryn, but she drives away. While on a stretch of road through a desolate field, Cathryn witnesses her doppelgänger again, attempting to wave her down. Back at the house, she finds both Rene and Marcel's corpses have reappeared in the living room. Cathryn leaves again, and encounters her doppelgänger at a bend in the road; this time she stops. The doppelgänger begs Cathryn to let her into the car, and the two begin to speak in unison. She then hits the doppelgänger with the car, throwing her off a cliff and into a waterfall below. Cathryn then drives back to her home in London. At her home, she goes to take a shower. While in the bathroom, the door opens, and the doppelgänger walks inside. Cathryn screams in terror, "I killed you," to which the doppelgänger responds, "Not me." The final shot shows Hugh's corpse lying at the bottom of the falls.

Susannah York - Cathryn, Rene Auberjonois - Hugh, Marcel Bozzuffi - Rene, Hugh Millais - Marcel, Cathryn Harrison - Susannah, John Morley - Old Man, Barbara Baxley - Voice on telephone (uncredited).

Produced by Tommy Thompson and Al Locatelli (uncredited), Cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond, Film Editing by Graeme Clifford, Production Design by Leon Ericksen.

Makeup Department: Toni Delaney … makeup artist, Barry Richardson … hair stylist, Production Management: Sheila Collins … production manager, Second Unit Director or Assistant Director: Seamus Byrne … assistant director, Sound Department: Rodney Holland … sound editor, Noel Quinn … boom operator, Liam Saurin … sound recordist, Doug E. Turner … dubbing mixer (as Doug Turner), Stomu Yamashta … sounds (as Stomu Yamash'ta), Special Effects by Jerry F. Johnson … special effects (as Jerry Johnson), Gerry Johnston … special effects (uncredited), Camera and Electrical Department: Earl L. Clark … assistant camera (as Earl Clark), Jack Conroy…gaffer, Paddy Keogh … grip, Nico Vermuelen … assistant camera, Costume and Wardrobe Department: Jack Gallagher … wardrobe, Editorial Department: Robin Buick … assistant editor, Michael Kelliher … assistant editor, David Spiers … assistant editor, Music Department: Stomu Yamashta … musician: sound sculptures, John Williams … orchestrator (uncredited), Transportation Department: Arthur Dunne … transportation captain, Other Crew: Joan Bennett … continuity, John Collingwood … production accountant, Jean D'Oncieu … assistant to producer.

The Lost Town of Dunwich

There's a queer story going about, when the door's shut and the curtain's drawn, that is, as to a place right out in the country over the other side of Midlingham; on the opposite side to Dunwich. They've built one of the new factories out there, a great red brick town of sheds they tell me it is, with a tremendous chimney. It's not been finished more than a month or six weeks. They plumped it down right in the middle of the fields, by the line, and they're building huts for the workers as fast as they can but up to the present the men are billeted all about, up and down the line … Some say they've seen the gas. I heard that a man living in Dunwich saw it one night like a black cloud with sparks of fire in it floating over the tops of the trees by Dunwich Common.

— The Terror by Arthur Machen

Dunwich is a village and civil parish in Suffolk, England. It is located in the Suffolk Coast and Heaths AONB around 92 miles north-east of London, 9 miles south of Southwold and 7 miles north of Leiston, on the North Sea coast.

In the Anglo-Saxon period, Dunwich was the capital of the Kingdom of the East Angles but the harbour and most of the town have since disappeared due to coastal erosion. At its height it was an international port similar in size to 14th century London. Its decline began in 1286 when a storm surge hit the East Anglian coast followed by a great storm in 1287 and another great storm also in 1287, and it was eventually reduced in size to the village it is today. Dunwich is possibly connected with the lost Anglo-Saxon placename Dommoc.

A gravestone dedicated to Jacob Forster is the last remaining memorial in the churchyard of All Saints Church in Dunwich. The church was decommissioned in 1758 due to encroaching coastal erosion. Most of the site went over the cliff; the last remaining buttress from the church was saved in 1920 and was moved to St James Church. The gravestone reads "In Memory of Jacob Forster who departed this life March 12th 1796 aged 38 years"

The Dark Heart of Dunwich is piece of Suffolk folklore, the origins of which appear to lie in the 12th century. The legend tells of how Eva, a Dunwich maiden due to be married to the son of a local landowner, fell instead for a good-looking local cad, who had his way with her and then deserted her, running off to sea. After waiting in vain for her lost love to return, she cut out her heart and hurled it into the sea. However, according to the legend, she was unable to die, and still haunts the area, particularly around the (constantly shifting) beach. The heart itself, believed to be similar in appearance to a wooden heart, is believed to wash up occasionally, and bring great misfortune onto anyone who picks it up and keeps it.

Grumpy Locals Are Sabotaging Cruise and Waymo Robotaxis With Traffic Cones

At your local animal shelter, roughly half of the cats up for adoption will be black or black and white. But black cats, in particular, face difficulty in finding adoption.
Although some cultures regard black cats well (in Scotland they are said to bring prosperity and in England and Japan some say they bring good luck) in much of the world they are associated with evil omens and witchcraft.
But now they face an added challenge: the cruel demands of the Instagram age, in which black cats are deemed less aesthetically pleasing than their more colourful comrades. Between 2007 and 2013 the Blue Cross saw a 65% rise in the number of black cats taken in each year, and the RSPCA, noting similar figures, blamed the fact that black cats are not "selfie-friendly".
"It's not uncommon for many monochrome moggies to wait many weeks or months to be adopted," says Gemma Croker from Cats Protection, which takes in 200,000 cats each year.

Adopt a black cat - here’s how to make them look great on Instagram (Guardian)

On a long enough timeline, instagram filters will shift the evolutionary opportunities of whole species.

Spotify appears to be creating and uploading x thousands of identical, procedurally generated songs under different names and cover art.

• Example playlist

Other sources report that these are tracks licensed at low cost in order to fill playlists without paying record companies and their artists:

According to DN, Firefly Entertainment is doing a roaring trade in what some would call "fake artists" on Spotify.

These are the now-well-known pseudonymous artists on the streaming platform - artists with no discernible online footprint - whose music fills up many of Spotify's own key mood and chillout playlists.

For a long time, music industry figures have wondered aloud whether Spotify has deals in place that see it pay less in royalties for streams of music from "fake artists" - whose cumulative streams now sit in the billions - than streams of artists signed to major record companies.

In its report (available here) DN obtained a list of 830 'fake artist' names linked to Firefly, and discovered that at least 495 of these artists have music on first-party Spotify playlists.

This figure probably under-estimates the scope of Firefly's artists on Spotify-run playlists, suggests DN, as the newspaper only examined 100 playlists out of the "several thousand [playlists] that Spotify is responsible for".

"The expectation was, you have to smile eight hours a day," a woman Baker calls Sofiya tells her. A 41-year-old Russian émigré who had been living in the United States for the past decade, Sofiya "was a proficient English speaker," Baker writes, but it was in her job as a bank teller that she "came face-to-face with her deficiency in speaking 'American.' This other English language, made up of not just words but also facial expressions and habits of conversation subtle enough to feel imagined. Smiling almost constantly was at the core of her duties as a teller. As she smiled at one customer after another, she would wince inwardly at how silly it felt. There was no reason to smile at her clients, she thought, since there was nothing particularly funny or heartwarming about their interactions. And her face hurt."

This confrontation with the culture clash of smiling for an Eastern European immigrant in America hits close to home. Which is why seeing the relentless parade of toothy, ahistorical, quintessentially American, "cheese" smiles plastered on the faces of every civilization in the world across time and space was immediately jarring. It was as if the AI had cast 21st century Americans to put on different costumes and play the various cultures of the world. Which, of course, it had.

AI and the American Smile

The very first citation in this stupid letter is to our StochasticParrots Paper, “AI systems with human-competitive intelligence can pose profound risks to society and humanity, as shown by extensive research[1]”

EXCEPT

that one of the main points we make in the paper is that one of the biggest harms of large language models, is caused by CLAIMING that LLMs have “human-competitive intelligence.”

Timnit Gebru on Twitter

[Twitter]

One of Europe's largest ammunition manufacturers has said efforts to meet surging demand from the war in Ukraine have been stymied by a new TikTok data centre that is monopolising electricity in the region close to its biggest factory.

The chief executive of Nammo, which is co-owned by the Norwegian government, said a planned expansion of its largest factory in central Norway hit a roadblock due to a lack of surplus energy, with the construction of TikTok's new data centre using up electricity in the local area.

"We are concerned because we see our future growth is challenged by the storage of cat videos," Morten Brandtzæg told the Financial Times.

Norwegian company says TikTok data centre is limiting energy for manufacturing Ukraine ammunition

"Faye's book is, without doubt, an important contribution to the theory of causality. It is meant not merely to reconstruct or to react to existing scientific knowledge but “to outline the conceptual foundations of new scientific knowledge". In that sense, it stands in the tradition of classical essays concerning natural philosophy and metaphysics. Faye's aim is nothing less than to give us a comprehensive characterisation of the conceptual and logical features of the direction of causation (including a coherent notion of backward causation) and, what is more, to give us an understanding of how causation is related to energy and time. The monograph is original to a very large extent; sometimes provocative (for more traditional accounts). It contains eight chapters, an introduction, conclusion, and a helpful index. In the following, we briefly mention the content of Faye's book and point out those of his claims which seem to demand further clarification. Chapter I deals with 'The puzzles about backward causation'. However, Faye's theory of backward causation is not a really shocking one - no fortune-tellers, no altering the past, nor shooting someone's own grandfather. Even if there were instances of causal relationship directed against the temporal order of events of the system under consideration, the kind of involved particles is limited to hypothetical quantum-mechanical objects ("advanced particles") only. Moreover, those objects would not be able to interact (at least not directly) with the "normal particles" of the world. This topic is considered in more detail in the last two Chapters VII (The advanced particles'), VIII (‘The theories of tachyons and their interpretations') and in the Conclusion. Naturally, telling stories about backward causation is not the ultimate goal of Faye's considerations. Chapter I revisits a representative sample of arguments against backward causation to see whether it is ruled out by any of the aprioristic reasons stated so far. Faye's conclusion is straightforward: backward causation is conceptually possible”

Jan Faye, The Reality of the Future - An Essay on Time, Causation and Backward Causation. Odense University Studies in Philosophy vol. 7. © 1989 by Jan Faye and Odense University Press. Photoset and printed by AiO Tryk as ISBN 87 7492 710 8. ISSN 0107 7384.

Who is afraid of the Causal-General Approach?

Philosophers have struggled with understanding the direction of time for centuries. No common notion is available even today. There are those who think of time's arrow in terms of objective becoming. They hold that since fundamental laws of nature are time-invariant, allowing processes to be symmetric in time, it must be some kind of objective becoming that tailors these processes in one direction. On this perspective the orientation of causal processes are parasitic on objective becoming. Becoming is ontic prior to causation. This view fares well with substantivalism but not with relationalism, since, ex hypothesis, becoming are not reducible to any relation between events. Nonetheless, some philosophers urge to bring in objective becoming in a relativistic framework partly because they don't see the possibility of physics to describe the necessary asymmetry as an intrinsic feature of the causal processes.

The major part of philosophers and physicists agree that causal processes do not exhibit an intrinsic arrow in virtue of certain nomological features, i.e. they believe that the asymmetry is not internal to the processes themselves. But they also reject the idea that the observed causal asymmetry is due to an objective becoming as vacuous or incoherent. Objective becoming is incompatible with relationalism if it cannot be reduced to features of the causal processes or features of the laws of physics, and relationalism is traditionally regarded as the ontological foundation of relativity theories - although today this is more controversial. These philosophers and physicists are still looking to physics to find a proper way of describing the causal asymmetry in spite of the fact that they deny that there exist intrinsically asymmetrical causal relations. The upshot is that they find various physical arrows of time but all of them, or nearly all of them, are due to an asymmetric distribution of boundary conditions. They argue that any asymmetrical causal relation consists in either a contingent asymmetry in the distribution of boundary conditions or in an anthropocentric projection. The basic laws of physics are symmetric in time and provide no help in marking out the direction of physical processes.

Apparently, we are left with two alternative approaches to a causal asymmetry: becoming or boundary conditions. One has little if no place in physics (as Dorato points out), whereas the other yields mostly an extrinsic asymmetry. Such an asymmetry may, however, not even in fact coincide with time's arrow. In my opinion, however, there is a third alternative: The basis of the arrow of causation rests on an intrinsic, non-relational physical property of a process that makes an instance of it a temporally asymmetric cause of an effect.