Unknown Poster Campaign (1970s) [ 09-Jun-20 11:15am ]
No one is entirely sure what the purpose of this public information poster was. All we know is that when a council worker accidentally posted it on billboards around Scarfolk, the poster below was quickly pasted over it.
Records show that the errant, anonymous worker was soon sold to another council where his job was either to feed the council pets or be fed to the council pets. Documents don't clarify which.
This killer remix of Georgias 24 Hours made by Sofia Kourtesis has been making my weekend. Its one of the greatest remixes i have heard in a long, long time. Check it out, and listen some more to Sofia Kourtesis.
Georgia · 24 Hours (Sofia Kourtesis Remix)
The whole world is protesting against racism in the wake of the death of George Floyd. You may think from my last post, that I am skirting around the subject and you are probably right. I empathise completely and I deplore violence and racism. But as my son points out, I have almost definitely said things that could be construed as racist in my life. For that I am sorry.
But this blog is always about action and moving forward. Its about finding solutions and taking small steps and promoting big ones. I know that I don't have any of the answers. I see the protests and I don't know where the solutions lie and how the change can come about. I am hoping to get a guest post from someone I trust to deal with this subject better than I can.
In the meanwhile I saw part of an interview with Russell Brand and Professor Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University. They were saying that part of the underlying problem is that there is a surplus of workers.
The idea was always that manual work would be automated and robots would become the cheap labour of the future, in order to make life easier for people. For example if machines can do the hard part of mining, then less people need to risk life and limb underground. It sounds like a good idea.
The intention was that people would then need to work less, would have more leisure time and could do more creative roles, but this is where it has all fallen down. Automation has been used to reduce the need for manual labour and the resulting surplus of workers has decreased wages for low skilled jobs. This has just led to widespread poverty. As the interview above has pointed out, this disproportionately affects Black and Minority communities the most.
We need a 4 day week. I am not the first to think or say this by a long shot. Apparently British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted back in the 1930s that a century later the average work week would be just 15 hours (Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes, 1930).
There is a lot to be said for a 4 day week, not least that it should create 25% more jobs. The video below highlights more of the benefits, such as less illness and more family time.
The benefits of a 4 day week don't really materialise until the change is made by the majority. It also has to come hand in hand with a rise in the minimum wage. It seems to me like the highest earners in society are holding the purse strings too tightly to allow that to happen without a fair bit of persuasion.
Reading further through Keynes predictions, he sees a time when the pursuit of wealth over everything else will end. (I have included another extract from the same source below) I hope in this aspect he is right and that within the next 10 years (100 years since his prediction) it becomes a reality. Then at least we may have a more level playing field to deal with the issues of racial equality.
There are changes in other spheres too which we must expect to come. When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession - as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life - will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease. All kinds of social customs and economic practices, affecting the distribution of wealth and of economic rewards and penalties, which we now maintain at all costs, however distasteful and unjust they may be in themselves, because they are tremendously useful in promoting the accumulation of capital, we shall then be free, at last, to discard. Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth - unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them. For we shall inquire more curiously than is safe to-day into the true character of this "purposiveness" with which in varying degrees Nature has endowed almost all of us. For purposiveness means that we are more concerned with the remote future results of our actions than with their own quality or their immediate effects on our own environment.
Contents
• 2019: An Introduction - Donna Scott
• The Anxiety Gene - Rhiannon Grist
• The Land of Grunts and Squeaks - Chris Beckett
• For Your Own Good - Ian Whates
• Neom - Lavie Tidhar
• Once You Start - Mike Morgan
• For the Wicked, Only Weeds Will Grow - G. V. Anderson
• Fat Man in the Bardo - Ken MacLeod
• Cyberstar - Val Nolan
• The Little People - Una McCormack
• The Loimaa Protocol - Robert Bagnall
• The Adaptation Point - Kate Macdonald
• The Final Ascent - Ian Creasey
• A Lady of Ganymede, a Sparrow of Io - Dafydd McKimm
• Snapshots - Leo X. Robertson
• Witch of the Weave - Henry Szabranski
• Parasite Art - David Tallerman
• Galena - Liam Hogan
• Ab Initio - Susan Boulton
• Ghosts - Emma Levin
• Concerning the Deprivation of Sleep - Tim Major
• Every Little Star - Fiona Moore
• The Minus-Four Sequence - Andrew Wallace
My short story 'Fat Man in the Bardo', originally published in Shoreline of Infinity 14, and I'm well chuffed to see it here.
(TOC layout copy and pasted from the redoubtable Lavie Tidhar, who as you can see also has a story in it.)
The company I work for is being shut down, and I am waiting to hear whether there is a position available for me within the parent company, or if I will be made redundant. There will be plenty of you out there who have experienced or are experiencing the same situation right now.
I am grateful, because it was a lovely company to work for and they were very good to me. I felt able to express my views and enjoyed working with the rest of the team. It had a good balance of trust and respect, even though we were frequently under pressure to deliver projects. However the journey of life continues onward to new opportunities and experiences.
I am announcing my news to everyone quickly because the standard response is "Oh I'm sorry you are redundant", "How dreadful", "That's tough because it will be impossible to find a job right now". All these negative responses I have put in a box and sealed shut, so they can't poison my thoughts or decisions. Will I ever meet anyone who says "Wow that's exciting!", "You are free to discover a new adventure", "There are so many options, what will you choose to do next?"
Hmmm….what will I choose to do next?
I have spent the last 2 months on Furlough, which means being paid 80% of my wages to stay at home and not work. If it wasn't for the current circumstances this would have been bliss. I have enjoyed getting the garden and house back in order after a year of it being virtually untouched. Having time to meditate, cycle and enjoy the sunshine and my family. I have even had time to watch some interesting series like Chernobyl, The Durrells and Afterlife. Life has been rather full on, so time to breathe and reflect has been very welcome.
My garden is coming along nicelyEven so, I know that this is not an option that I am happy doing long term. I get bored easily and am always happier with a challenge or mental stimulation. I need to find that balance where I can do some mentally intense work but still have time for gardening and family in between. Working from home cuts out hours of commute a week and really facilitates getting a good work life balance, so will be something I wish to continue. Having managed so well on 80% of my income, I am also wondering whether a 4 day week may be a viable option. It is slightly tempting to sell up and live somewhere by the coast or travel in a campervan, but my youngest daughter still has one more year at school, so those dreams will have to wait for now. Which means I am looking for a new job locally.
I am an engineer and a woman. The UK has one of the worst rates in Europe for employing women engineers. Women make up 51% of the population, yet less than 10% of engineering professionals are women according to the Statistics on Women In Engineering (WES, Jan 2018) as shown in their graph below. This is the lowest in Europe, whereas Latvia, Bulgaria and Cyprus lead with nearly 30%.
In my current workplace 4 out of 9 technical staff are women and it made for a good mix. In other engineering roles I was always the only one. The chances of finding new work for a company with any other female engineers is fairly slim. That red band at the bottom of the graph above is spread rather thinly. What is the problem with that?
What this large blue expanse translates to in the workplace is that you don't fit in. You have to fight to get your views heard, and you are last on the list to be asked what you think about any issue. You will be overlooked for key projects where there is an opportunity to shine, even when you are the only volunteer stepping forward. And if you can't shine it's a hard slog to progress up the ladder. You will never be the "blue-eyed boy" on a fast track for promotion. It is far more likely that you will earn less than your colleagues for doing the same work and be regularly overlooked despite your competence.
20 years ago as the only female engineering manager in a team of 70 engineers that was me. The most memorable incident was in a meeting with the Operations Manager, Principal Engineer, and all the other engineering managers. Earlier in the day, I had inducted some contractors that were working for Pat the Site Services Manager, because he was busy. Now they had finished their work and needed their permits signing off before they could leave. I saw them through the glass walled meeting room as they walked past a few times trying to find Pat. Pat was often in the bowels of the factory where no phone signal would ever find him. I ducked down in my seat to try and avoid being seen, but they spotted me. They tapped on the door and then stuck a head round. The Operations Manager stopped mid-flow. "We just need Pat's secretary to sign off our permits please". The rest of the room cracked up with hysterical laughter, as I jumped up and tried to escape whilst glowering my worst scowl at these bloody contractors. Only the Operations Manager wasn't laughing. "She is not a secretary, she is one of our engineering managers!", he managed to get out before I had reached the door, grabbed the contractors and marched off down the corridor. As if a secretary would be able to sign off safety permits! Duh! But to them it was a natural assumption that any woman was there to do admin, as they had never met a female engineer before.
And it is from these little assumptions, casual remarks and minor actions that inequality grows into a problem. It is parents that tell their friends that their daughter is a scientist because it sounds better than an engineer. It is the apprentices who are taught and influenced by male engineers, so any prejudices are perpetuated. It is the free calendars of half-naked women, sent as a 'perk' from the supplier, that hang in the engineering stores and engineers workshop - because only engineers aka men ever enter these areas. There is nothing that makes your position more uncomfortable than standing in front of the storeman to discuss delivery dates for essential parts, with the engineers behind discussing their favourite features from the latest pinup. (Well apart from a boss who stares at your breasts while he talks to you.) Why would this be fit for any workplace when your mind should be on work? It does not build respect for the female workforce. And for that matter it doesn't build respect for male engineers either.
20 years later and you would hope the situation has changed, but really it hasn't. Progress is as flat as the red band in the above graph. There is an equal opportunities policy now, but it just states the obvious - that you shouldn't treat people differently because of gender, race, disability, age, sexual orientation etc. In my view it does little to stop discrimination, especially as most discrimination is subtle, underlying or hidden.
For instance how do
At the end of April, the retail consultant Mary Portas appeared on the BBC’s World at One programme to discuss how physical shopping could continue to function during the coronavirus crisis.
Portas has a bit of form for, shall we say, car-centric ‘solutions’ to high street problems, proposing the quack remedy of free parking as a response to town centre decline, and generally arguing for unfettered access by motor traffic to shopping streets, while simultaneously paying scant attention to benign modes of transport like walking and cycling. So it was perhaps no great surprise to hear her complaining about having to pay car parking charges in London boroughs during the coronavirus pandemic, while singing the praises of department stores that have converted themselves into drive-throughs, a kind of transformation that these hidebound councils are apparently not enlightened enough to adopt.
Here's 'High Streets expert' Mary Portas advocating "luxury drive throughs" (yes, really) for retail, while moaning about current on-street parking charges. There really is going to be a battle for how our streets feel and look in the coming weeks and months pic.twitter.com/IEaugNqqrf
— Mark Treasure (@AsEasyAsRiding) April 28, 2020
I was reminded of this episode by this excellent cartoon from Dave Walker, which manages to capture the Dystopian reality of the Portas worldview in the left panel.
As he so often does, @davewalker has managed to get a very important message, clearly, into a cartoon. Decision Time. pic.twitter.com/jcXda8gjvX
— John Dales
Julianna Barwick makes gorgeous ambient electronic music. If you like mood music for a clear skied starfilled night or just a sunrise on a clear blue morning sky Julianna's music is just perfect.
Julianna Barwick · Inspirit
So Ninja Tune roster doesn't sleep for sure, Romare has a new brilliant single out from the upcoming album "Home" that is to be released during later on this summer. Listen and enjoy.
Romare · Sunshine (Edit)
Fire in the hall, Jayda G is on the on pure fire with this upcoming single "both of Us". Such a massive groove to this tune. Looking forward to this Ep.
Jayda G · Both Of Us
Government Employee Eye-Test Slide (1970s) [ 26-May-20 10:38am ]
The remarkable beauty of an old slate quarryAfter my 4th child was born, I made the commitment that I didn't want to work long hours in a stressful career anymore, for a company that just churned out products as cheaply as possible. I wanted to have an interesting, fulfilling and meaningful career, which was completely flexible around my family and allowed me to spend more quality time with them, when I chose to. Securing a future for all our children, by acting to prevent catastrophic climate change, felt like a worthwhile goal, so I signed onto a masters course, to arm me with the knowledge to go out into the world and battle greenhouse gas emissions.
The University of East London (UEL) had teamed up with the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) to provide the perfect hands on course for me. For each module you spent a week living at CAT, having lectures and practicals all day, often until late in the evening, then the rest of the month was spent at home preparing essays and presentations before the next module.
Old stone building with a green sedum roof and sunken garden at CAT.At this point I need to describe CAT. It started out life with a small community transforming an old slate quarry on a very wet hillside into a beautiful, organic, sustainable, off-grid home. 30 years on the focus had shifted to being an educational facility promoting a low impact lifestyle, powered by micro-hydro turbines, wind turbines, solar panels and biomass. The award winning cafe on site served vegetarian food, a lot of which was grown intensively on site, and included an abundance of seasonal vegetables, herbs and flowers. The traditional thick stone-walled buildings, that had served the quarry many years before, were renovated to make them more efficient, but also opened up to bring in lots of natural daylight, improving the feel of the indoor spaces. Additional buildings demonstrated different techniques of timber and straw bale construction, but my favourite was the shop. The beautiful rammed earth walls, with their striated texture felt so warm and grounded, and designed with natural light flooding through the rooflights, it was a peaceful and calming space. Even more so because it was packed with hundreds of amazing and inspiring books that you wouldn't see anywhere else! (CAT publish their own books) The weeks were always so full that there barely seemed enough time for really enjoying this space.
Rammed earth walls and large roof lights for natural light in CAT's shopWith no mobile signal and very poor internet, we spent the week cut off from the outside world. I remember the shock of many arriving to find themselves with quite basic shared accommodation, completely cut off without news, TV, processed food or meat, in the constant downpour of cold, deepest, darkest Wales. A few jumped back in their cars and drove straight back home. But there was delicious hot food waiting for us and as we all sat on long benches full of strangers, from the most varied backgrounds you could imagine, aged from 18 to 70. Yet it was noisier than a playground full of primary school children. Everyone was immediately drawn into deep conversations with their neighbours, because suddenly you were surrounded by people who share your passion and dreams for a better world and are eager to learn more, yet have a lot they can teach you. These conversations only stopped whilst we listened attentively to the absorbing lectures, or when overcome by sleep in the early hours of the morning.
The strawbale lecture theatre, surrounded by welcoming open spaces.After just one week I was filled with the confidence that we can do so much.... I can do so much. The negativity of climate change was blown away, by the knowledge that so much has already been demonstrated and achieved. I felt it wasn't good enough to just try and save energy as a job, but I needed to try and incorporate sustainability into every aspect of my life. Its funny that it all seemed such a big challenge then, like how could I ever grow my own food with a small garden and 4 young kids, yet I started growing just a few tomatoes in pots, then some peas and beans, and now I have an allotment full of vegetables.
The eco-cabins at CATI was really inspired to leave our cramped, 1980's "noddy house", devoid of character and not designed to support a sustainable lifestyle. I wanted to design and build a home for ourselves. Not just a home, but a lifelong home, designed to be flexible to our needs at every stage of ours and our children's lives, whatever changes befell us. Internal walls would not be structural and would be constructed in panels to allow the spaces to be re-arranged as easily as changing the decor. The doors would be wide and spaces would be clean and flowing to enable wheelchairs or baby walkers to access all areas. Walls would be super-insulated and glazing would maximise solar gain in winter, so it could keep us warm and sheltered even in the event of severe poverty. There would be a garden to give freedom for children to play, and that was sufficient to produce food when times were hard. Materials would be local and sustainable, so that maintenance involved digging up some clay to patch up the walls or replacing timbers. And when the world moved on and our home no longer met the needs of future generations, then the roof could be removed and the house would be washed away by rain or slowly decompose, so that a few years later little more than a weedy mound would show where our home had once stood.
The eco-cabins at CAT
It would be nice to place all the blame for not achieving this dream on the planning system, one that allows low impact buildings when they are intended to be used as holiday homes, but makes it extremely difficult to build something similar as a home to be lived in. Or place blame on the predominance of large house builders, who buy up the land and smother it with ugly developments of roads, drives and brick buildings, that concrete over nature and just leave handkerchief-sized lawns, with no space for trees or wildlife or craftsmanship and beauty. But if I am honest, and I do try to be, it is scary to step out of the comfort, security and conformity of that noddy house, and into unfamiliar territory filled with self-doubt, with a family in tow. So here I remain stuck until my courage and resolve return.
And so, in a very long-winded way, I come to addressing the comment from Rory on my last post regarding the lack of affordable housing in the UK, and the first step of my solution would be Land Stewards.
The Native American people have a belief system that we don't and can't own the land. In the millions of years that the earth has heaved and turned, we are but a passing whim. How can we own the land when our time here is so short and who owned it before us to say that we are now the owners? The earth had no borders before we evolved and will not after us, these are figments of our own invention, rules and constrictions that we have made for ourselves that form our own chains.
Ownership has allowed the rentier class to develop. Most people earn a living working each day, providing goods or services, such as nurses, plumbers and factory workers. The money they earn is constricted by the hours they have available to work. The rentier class earn money by owning things, whether land or property or money, their income comes from loaning them out and charging a fee for it. So we pay them to live in their property or for the use of their money, not for the work that they do. Their earnings are not relative to the work they put in, but are more dependent on how desperately people need a place to live.
I would like councils to be able to apportion 1 acre plots of land to people who wish to be Land Stewards. As a Land Steward you are responsible for looking after that land in a sustainable manner and are entitled to use of the land for as long as you continue to do so, but you do not own the land. When you die your partner or children can apply to be the Land Steward in your place, or the land can be returned to the council to be re-allocated to another person. You would be entitled to build one dwelling and outhouses on the land as long as they are low impact, so that they can either be wheeled away or left to melt back into the landscape when you leave, with no long term damage to the land. No concrete would be allowed, not even for foundations, so drives would need to be gravel or wood chip or just tracks. Do you see where I am going with this?
If you offered a homeless person, or anyone, the right to their own piece of land, there is the potential that with support and hard work that they could make a life for themselves. Land gives people the opportunity to grow or raise some food for themselves and to build a shelter, but also the opportunity to learn new skills in the process. It encourages creativity and craftsmanship and re-skilling. It won't be everyone's cup of tea, but that's fine. If all people get a basic income as discussed here and there are more flats and properties becoming available in the cities due to the surge in working from home, then there will already be a boost to city accommodation and reduction in demand should help affordability too. Then a shift for some people back to the countryside, and becoming self-builders or using local tradesmen, would enable a boost to rural communities.
In addition the housing that Land Stewards build could not be tied to a mortgage, a loan of money from the rentier class, because there is no land ownership as a security to back it. This would mean that most stewards would have to build truly 'affordable' homes, using local materials or recycling. It would give people a chance to have shelter without the need to be on the property ladder. If people can build something special for themselves, then the demand for noddy houses would diminish.
Individual beach houseIf you are wondering what this kind of affordable house building would look like, then walk along many of the beach roads in the UK. There are wooden beach houses, temporary holiday dwellings, often unique and individual and beautiful, even if sometimes in a shabby rundown sort of way. Or walk along the river bank and there are similar properties.
Another beach house in NorfolkThe landscapes that were painted by Constable showed small cottages dotting the landscape made of local materials with their thatched roofs. It is the surviving quirky, individual dwellings that we love, that makes a scene picturesque, something that our housing estates will never be. Let us give people back the opportunity to build beautiful homes and celebrate the diversity that will come from it. Lets do something that reduces peoples burden to the rentier class. Lets promote living sustainably from the land without damaging it for future generations
Simple riverside cottages
A short brief message and straight up conversation Aquilotto put the amazing ep SKY++ on bandcamp. As a sunny warm day it is this Friday, go check out bandcamp for some nice cloud pop.
aquilotto · Romeo
Khruangbin are awesome.
박혜진 Park Hye Jin got really hyped for the release If U Want It and then have also been involved with works of Baltra. Cool girl, definitely worth a check, she is pure fire. Upcoming release on Ninja Tune is set for later on this year.
By all the Dj names that starts with Dj, Dj Boring was one of the first that has was mentioned during the start of the golden era of the lo-fi house genre and all the Dj names. But Dj Boring has always been a favourite. This is for Fridays living room dancing.
Getting familiar with Divine Interfaces music first lead me on a more beat and chill inspired kind of electronic music. While this new Divine Interface touches more of a hazy lo-fi slow-mo House. I like where Drew Biggs is headed. Album is coming. Be alert.
I have always had a soft spot for Canadian music and dreamy pop. Tide Riders debut "Minus Touch" is such a catchy pop tune i have been listening to it a lot. I sure hope there is more to come.
As governments are starting to lift lockdown, or are at least asking about it here in the UK, lots of people are wondering what this new reality will look like.
I don't think anyone is expecting everyone to go back to the normal commute and book a mini-break in Venice as soon as lockdown is lifted. Yes, there may be some businesses that don't open again. Almost all companies will have taken this opportunity to re-evaluate staffing levels and possibly made some employees redundant to "streamline" going forward. Some may have made a business decision to close the office and work from home permanently, or move to online sales, to reduce overheads and give them a competitive advantage. I think most of us would expect to see a quieter city centre and more closed shops when we emerge from our isolation.
Looking beyond the local impact what could happen on a global scale? If you have been reading past the coronavirus headlines, you will see that oil prices dropped into negative figures for the first time ever. I was left scratching my head - people were willing to pay $37 to take a barrel of oil off their hands?
It is down to storage capacity - it is full. So even at rock bottom prices no one can squeeze any more in their storage until consumption starts to pick up. There were apparently more fully laden oil tankers at sea than there has ever been before and with few customers they had nowhere to dock. Most countries have agreed to production cuts, but at those prices facilities will be closing due to bankruptcies if they haven't been mothballed. Production won't ramp back up until the price increases to a level that is profitable.
If that doesn't ring the financial meltdown alarm bells, then Germany announcing a recession that will take 8 years to come out of should. Firstly because all countries are cautious about announcing the full extent of their financial problems and secondly Germany was not one of the most Covid-19 infected countries in Europe, with only 87 deaths per million people compared to over 400 for Italy and UK ( taken from https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/on 7/5/20).
Then you have to look at what the US are doing - I know it's a mixture of horrifying and farcical watching the words fall out of President Trump's mouth, but as the dominant global player it's important.
War Games. The last few weeks there has been more antagonism with Iran in the Gulf, they have encroached into China's territory in the South China Sea, and they are carrying out naval drills with the UK on Russia's doorstep. Plus they have continued meddling in Venezuela which has the biggest oil reserves in the World. These provocations aren't really new, but interesting to see there has been no pause during the pandemic.
Historically wars have been seen to follow recession. Given that just the announcement of "tensions" from the US normally results in a boost to oil prices, a new war would have the added bonus of boosting GDP and providing plentiful contracts for re-building to US contractors, after the unfortunate country has been plundered.
There's never much public support for war without a trigger. There needs to be a catalyst for governments to "react" to. Remember how slowly and ineffectually the UK government responded to the threat of Covid-19? Or how it took 3 days to comment after the Grenfell Tower disaster? This is normal, government is a ponderous beast to manoeuvre. When the response is fast and they immediately know conclusively who is to blame before the dust has settled and an investigation has even begun, then strap yourself in to be taken for a ride. This is where observing reports from different media outlets helps. When the media have been fed a story from government, they all describe it with the same wording and there is little variation from the national channels.
I'm just saying that overseas development and military hardware are likely growth industries, and that it's not a good time for your potentially unemployed kids to sign up for military service.
High unemployment doesn't necessarily mean there are no jobs around. Even in lockdown there is an increase in demand for delivery drivers and businesses supplying bikes and table tennis tables have been booming. Amazon is thriving, and as much as I avoid them and try to buy local, I can't see this declining anytime soon. Unless we take action like France - to fine them for every non-emergency supply delivery that they make until they have ensured their workers are being protected from Covid-19. What we really need is a fairer tax system that taxes all turnover made in the UK, rather than a complicated tax on "profits" with lots of official loopholes, so that Amazon pay the same percentage of tax as all the small businesses they are wiping out ( I touched on this in my last very old post).
In the UK we may also see the trend of declining manufacturing industries reverse as we start to manufacture more essential goods at home. This is because countries will always protect supplies for their own citizens first. Plus transport of cargo has become more complicated, with borders more protected.
Flexible working and 4 day weeks may be more in demand, as people reassess their priorities after lockdown. If you can survive on 80% of your wages when you have time for cooking from scratch and no commute costs, then why not carry on with a more relaxed way of living? Part time working also provides more flexibility for businesses to have 20% of their labour hours in reserve if work starts slowly, so they are prepared if it ramps up again. This way they are retaining more of their trained staff with a broader expertise base, rather than opting for layoffs and then a recruitment drive once things pick up.
If the trend for homeworking continues then we could see the demand for properties in London decrease with more people choosing to live further afield. Whilst new office developments may slow, there could be bargains around for companies who can re-purpose them for higher value domestic units. Renting out hot-desking and meeting facilities could be a new growth area, to cater for companies with no main office space. I can imagine this gap being filled by Universities who may find online courses have become more popular for overseas students.
Once news outlets run out of Covid-19 drama, they will return to the normal fear-mongering about increases in crime due to the unemployed masses, so security products will be as popular as ever. I would like to hope that the new community spirit lasts and there are increases in the voluntary sector. The vacancies in the NHS may even get filled, as NHS workers are now getting the respect they deserve and there will be plenty of pressure from the public for more investment and fair pay rises. We can probably expect lots more from Extinction Rebellion too, as this pandemic has proved that the way to get change is to force a reaction.
I would love to hear about your experiences. What are your thoughts for the changes we are likely to see over the coming year?
Kllo did floor me with their latest brilliant single "Still here", i recommend a listen to this Aussie duo. A little more laid back but lush and gorgeous this one. Im so thrilled to hear the album coming later on this year.
So I remember back in 2012 I've first heard the lovely duo Southern Shores.
I remember falling in love with the sounds reminding me very much of the Swedish west coast sound. So happy to see they are back. It is really the sound I need this year.
CASCINE · Southern Shores - Estrisa
Scarfolk Death Statistics (1975) [ 06-May-20 1:46pm ]
The idea of a society of entirely voluntary arrangements has its charms, but we don't live in one and are not likely to for quite some time. Until that happy day, public services should be funded out of taxation, rather than having to scrounge off the generosity of the public. In emergencies, however, we should pitch in. That's how I square my conscience with making donations, anyway. And if the inadequate supply of PPE to healthcare workers isn't an emergency, I don't know what is. So I was happy to contribute a story to an anthology of SF, fantasy and horror conceived and edited by Ian Whates at NewCon Press, and compiled and published with breathtaking speed. At a quarter of a million words from some of the leading names in the field, a paperback version would be an epoch-making brick that cost a significant chunk of cash. Electronic and weightless, Stories of Hope and Wonder is a steal at £5.99 / $7.99. Every penny of the proceeds goes straight to providing PPE and other support to UK healthcare workers. A significant amount, I understand, has already been raised and donated. More is needed.
They can't wait. Buy it now.
The core of this book describes working conditions in Bakkavor's food processing factories in West London, then moves on to describe how a Tesco distribution centre operates. The opening 100 plus pages are used to set the scene, then there is the central 180 pages, finally after a curious detour into 3D printer manufacture - and leaving aside an appendix - the last 50 pages deal with the question of revolutionary organisation. Cut into the descriptions of contemporary labour and class exploitation is much useful analysis and historical material:
The food and drink industry is the UK's largest manufacturing sector, accounting for 17% of the total UK manufacturing turnover, contributing £28.2bn to the economy annually and employing 400,000 people. And while a lot of fruit and veg is imported, the shelf life of freshly prepared products (FPP) means that outsourcing this work overseas is not possible. All the FPP found in the chilled section of our supermarkets comes from UK factories. Page 136.
People in Britain buy around 3.5 million ready-meals a day, which easily makes it the leading ready-meals market in Europe. Working hours are some of the longest in Europe, which perhaps explains the demand. Page 139.
Bakkavor is one of the biggest UK food companies you've never heard of. You've probably got a Bakkavor food item in your fridge, but you wouldn't know it because their name won't be on the packaging. They employ around 17,000 people across various sites in the UK and source 5,000 products from around the world to supply the largest supermarkets with their own-brand products - from salads, to desserts, to ready-meals and pizzas. Pages 147/148.
Bakkavor has an ageing workforce, the majority in the 55-64 age bracket. The next biggest age group was workers aged between 45-54, fewer again in the 35-44 age range. I think this was a huge factor in the docility of the workforce in general, even when the union was ramping up its activity. There was an aversion to risk, a palpable fear of going on strike, and a resignation that only comes with living a hard life with few victories. That isn't to say there weren't some older workers who were up for the fight. Page 155.
A toxic culture of disrespect pervaded the factories… All the stress and bad vibes understandably had a negative impact on peoples' mental and physical health. One guy dropped down dead in the smoking area. Another guy, a night shift hygiene worker, died in his late forties. A mild-mannered Polish guy from the maintenance department had a psychotic episode and climbed onto the roof, sobbing in front of his workmates. A young office worker who everybody ignored even killed himself. Others had strokes and panic attacks and were taken away by the ambulance, which came with depressing regularity. It wasn't just that they were old or smoked, although of course those were factors. I think it was also the type of work and toxic culture that drove people to their limits. Page 178.
The poor working conditions at Bakkavor, bad pay and struggles to improve it - alongside the unhygienic methods of food production - are described in detail. The switches from more objective analysis to an utterly subjective position and speculative assertion are sudden and frequent. Some might see this as a weakness but it is actually the book's strength. It's a rhetorical device designed to give those who haven't done these jobs a feeling of insight into them and a sense of empathy with those depicted in the book. Likewise if you have been employed in the industries described you might be drawn to a conscious embrace of the book's wider analytical perspective in part due to a sense of identification with the text's more subjective turns. Even even those who have not worked in these industries - or on some other factory floor - will recognise the social relations depicted from shops, offices and other places of employment.
In short Class Power On Zero Hours is worth reading for its central sections about food production and distribution. The opening and closing parts of the book may resonate with some but were less than thrilling to me. I found the initial section about west London especially tedious and almost gave up when I read the following sentence on the first full page:
Nobody on the London left had even heard of Greenford, not surprising due to its status as a cultural desert, in zone four on the Central line. Page 7.
I don't know - and don't care - if I'd count as part of what Angry Workers configure as the London left but I'd not only heard of Greenford, until lockdown I was going through it once once a month on my way to an extended training session the martial arts club I belong to has in South Ruislip. Likewise, I have two friends - one born in the same south-west London hospital as me - who work for Ealing council (pest control and a desk job); for those who don't know, Greenford is part of the borough of Ealing. While I passed through rather than went to Greenford and Park Royal growing up, I spent plenty of time back then in Hounslow which isn't so far away.
Ultimately the claim that 'nobody' was familiar with Greenford reveals Angry Workers' contact with the working class across much of London when its members first arrived here to have been rather limited. Other things they say point to the same conclusion. On the basis of what the collective writes it would seem that many of those they hung out with in London before moving to the city's west were students who'd come here to take university courses and who saw themselves as on the left but were clueless about about the place they'd relocated to. The text makes it clear Angry Workers went to great efforts to connect with the working class in west London, but leaves the impression they are still disconnected from it in other parts of the city.
The assertion that Greenford has cultural desert status appears obnoxious, racist and anti-working class: clearly not positions Angry Workers would want to be associated with even if what's quoted above might be (mis)read as linking them to views of this type. Bourgeois distaste for proletarian culture - sometimes expressed with the absurd assertion that the working class don't have a culture and exists in a 'cultural desert' - can be found among parts of what Angry Workers seem to be describing as the London 'left'. What 'the left' is and whether 'liberal' elements who want to transform everyone into a bourgeois subject are part of it might be seen by some as open to debate, although not by me. In odd places Class Power On Zero Hours lacks clarity in its verbal formulations but on the basis of the entire text, a generous guess would be it is the views of reactionaries who wish to demean working class immigrant communities that are being invoked in the statement about Greenford's cultural desert status rather than the Angry Workers collective itself believing this to be the case. That said, anyone who was born in the west or south-west of London or who has spent much time there can safely skip the early parts of this book. It is uneven but there is more than enough in its main section to make it worthwhile reading if you're consciously engaged in class struggle: or even if you're not, yet!
Finally, I really liked the solid pink inside covers of the book, so much so that I'm almost tempted to overlook the fact that this publication really cries out for an index. I'm unlikely to read the whole book twice but it would have been helpful to be able to find the parts I'm going to want to access again easily with an index.
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Everyone, I hope you and yours are safe and well during this unprecedented pandemic.
As I write this, various governments are rushing to implement — or have already implemented — a wide range of different smartphone apps purporting to be for public health COVID-19 “contact tracing” purposes.
The landscape of these is changing literally hour by hour, but I want to emphasize MOST STRONGLY that all of these apps are not created equal, and that I urge you not to install various of these unless you are required to by law — which can indeed be the case in countries such as China and Poland, just to name two examples.
Without getting into deep technical details here, there are basically two kinds of these contact tracing apps. The first is apps that send your location or other contact-related data to centralized servers (whether the data being sent is claimed to be “anonymous” or not). Regardless of promised data security and professed limitations on government access to and use of such data, I do not recommend voluntarily choosing to install and/or use these apps under any circumstances.
The other category of contact tracing apps uses local phone storage and never sends your data to centralized servers. This is by far the safer category in which resides the recently announced Apple-Google Bluetooth contact tracing API, being adopted in some countries (including now in Germany, which just announced that due to privacy concerns it has changed course from its original plan of using centralized servers).
In general, installing and using local storage contact tracing apps presents a vastly less problematic and risky situation compared with centralized server apps.
Even if you personally have 100% faith that your own government will “do no wrong” with centralized server contact tracing apps — either now or in the future under different leadership — keep in mind that many other persons in your country may not be as naive as you are, and will likely refuse to install and/or use centralized server contact tracing apps unless forced to do so by authorities.
Very large-scale acceptance and use of any contact tracing apps are necessary for them to be effective for genuine pandemic-related public health purposes. If enough people won’t use them, they are essentially worthless for their purported purposes.
As I have previously noted, various governments around the world are salivating at the prospect of making mass surveillance via smartphones part of the so-called “new normal” — with genuine public health considerations as secondary goals at best.
We must all work together to bring the COVID-19 disaster to an end. But we must not permit this tragic situation to hand carte blanche permissions to governments to create and sustain ongoing privacy nightmares in the process.
Stay well, all.
–Lauren–
The Lord Mayor is not to be confused with the much better known but politically insignificant Mayor of London. Freemasons were cunning like that, they installed themselves in an office few knew anything about but which had loads of power and money as well as a rigged election, while leaving millions of Londoner's to democratically put their cross against a dupe with a similar title and lots of visibility but little power. This meant that their World King AKA head of the Court of Aldermen would be left alone to plot in secret. When Boris told me this he also said he hoped people would not recall that he had once been Mayor of London but never Lord Mayor.
Even Johnson's close friend and fellow believer in the bleach cure Donald Trump had been ridiculed for confusing the Mayor of London and the Lord Mayor of London. Those colonials in New York and Washington might only have one mayor but mighty London had two! Boris confided to me he assumed most people were ignorant of the fact that he had been born in New York and wasn't really Lord Mayor material. He hoped no one would suspect he was anything but a true blue Britisher when he called heartily for his favoured brew of Watneys Red Barrel, a beer that had been initially tested on the public at the East Sheen Lawn Tennis Club in south west London. This was close to where John Dee had his home in the sixteenth century, explorer Richard Burton had his tomb and the 1970s punk rock band Subway Sect hailed from.
To tell the truth it wasn't just a desire to get stupid fresh with Catherine MacGuiness - and the multi-billion City's Cash sovereign wealth fund she jointly controlled with the Lord Mayor - that led Boris to turn down ordination into the Guildhall Lodge. He was also concerned that once he was buck naked and dressed in nothing but a blindfold during his initiation, he might be subjected to some indignity he wouldn't have stood still for if he'd been able to see what was going on. Not that there hadn't been lots of perversion when Boris had been a member of the Bullingdon Club at Oxford.
At the Bullingdon they'd hired prostitutes to perform sex acts for them, and then there'd been the time Boris had got so drunk that… Well he'd been so drunk he wasn't sure whether or not he'd taken a fresh corpse borrowed form the local morgue on a date to an expensive restaurant as a dare….. Returning to things that put Boris off becoming a fully paid up freemason, there was also the issue of what had happened to both his Ottoman great-grandfather and Roberto Calvi. Although he was not related to the latter, Calvi's death had been much closer to home. The body of God's banker, a top Italian freemason, had been found ritually strung up under Blackfriars Bridge. This was roughly half-way between Britain's Parliament where Boris was Prime Minister and the City of London's Guildhall HQ - where Lodge 3116 met without so much as having to pay to hire a room. Boris had a public image of being a powerful man but he wanted the keys to power that were actually held in the Guildhall. The City of London council got to send a Remembrancer to sit in the House of Commons and tell the government what the City thought of what it was doing, The arrangement wasn't reciprocal.
Returning to Ali Kema, he\d been assassinated during the Turkish War of Independence. Historians claimed Kema was bumped off for being a traitor to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's cause but Johnson knew that he'd been killed so that the Turkish state could lay its hands on his great-grandfather's stock of red mercury. Boris had been told this by the freemasons who had engineered his rise through the ranks of British politics in order to repay a debt their grandparents owed to Kema. Once Johnson's friend Donald Trump had blown their plan to use a bleach cure to rid the world of Covid 19 - by revealing it prematurely and thus having it ridiculed by the press - it seemed like his best bet for dealing with the virus was to lay his hands on his great-grandfather's stock of red mercury. As every alchemist knows, red mercury is a super rare substance that will cure cancer or boils or almost any other ailment, so why not coronavirus too? The problem was getting hold of the red mercury. When Boris phoned the Turkish Embassy in London to ask for it they told him he was an Islamophobic asshole who'd betrayed his Ottoman heritage. Ingrates!
In the meantime Boris had been passed 7,500 ring donuts that a food bank in his South Ruislip constituency had been unable to distribute to the needy and which would pass their use by date in a matter of hours. Some food processing plant in Greenford was donating what they couldn't sell, and there'd been a huge decline in demand for donuts since a rumour had gone around that eating them while talking on your smartphone caused Cover 19. More than 40 branches of Derek's Donuts had been set ablaze in the past two weeks and hundreds of supermarket workers whose stores sold the snack had been abused and threatened. Of course Boris had got all of his cabinet members to denounce as idiots those who claimed eating donuts caused Covid 19, and he'd brought in some top scientists too whose secret research proved the same thing. None of which stopped the anti-donut activists from promoting the conspiracy theory and denouncing his favourite delicacy as junk food for cops. When push came to shove the country needed donuts for its police force. They - Boris was never explicit when using this generic term whether he was invoking donuts or the police or both - were vital to the UK's infrastructure and without them the virus couldn't be beaten! Likewise, if the boys in blue weren't able to eat donuts in peace then Boris would never Get Brexit Done!
As he was chauffeured to number 10 Downing Street with his 7,500 ring donuts, Boris found himself getting all hot and sweaty. Something had come over him and he'd had one of those flashes of inspiration that were common to men of genius. He'd use the ring donuts to worship the goddess in her triple form - not the conventional maiden, mother and crone, but rather mouth, backside and naughty bits! Boris wasn't too good at maths - he couldn't even work out how many children he had - but he figured the 7,500 donuts would just about cover three out of seven external orifices for every woman he'd ever slept with. If he'd had more ring donuts he might have indulged himself with nasal sex too. Boris was going to work backwards and imagine doing gross and naughty things with all those he'd known Biblically until every last donut had been abused. Johnson had got as far as Jennifer Arcuri when Dominic Cummings burst in and caught Boris bollock naked rubbing a disintegrating ring donut up and down his manhood.
"That's a waste of good donuts that is!" Cummings spat as he took in the remains of several dozen ruined sweet fry cakes on the floor.
"A man with your surname ought to understand what it's like when I've got the horn," Boris whinged defensively, "and besides even a glutton like me couldn't eat 7,500 donuts with a use by date we'll have gone past at midnight!"
"The witching hour!" Cummings boomed. "That reminds me, those scientists you've got advising you on the pandemic have no respect. They may know about the laws of nature but I know about the laws of spirit, and that means I outrank them all!"
"That's well and good, but we must do something about the bad publicity my government is getting over a lack of personal protection equipment for health workers!'
"That's why I told you not to waste the donuts!"
"What have donuts got to do with PPE?" The Prime Minister wanted to know.
"We can turn them into PPE," Dom explained. "Let's string lots of donuts together to make protective gowns. Two rings fastened to each other will make fantastic googles."
"What about face masks, can we make donut face masks?" Boris asked excitedly.
"Don't be stupid," Dom chided, "anyone using donuts as a face mask would start licking off the sugar coating and then chewing on the cake. Donut face masks wouldn't last five minutes!"
The sugary smell of 7,500 ring donuts had attracted the attention of Larry the Downing Street cat who was mewling like a loon on the other side of the door. Boris let the feline into the room which was a mistake, since Larry was all over the stale fry cakes within seconds. Fortunately it was the ones Boris had used to frontage himself with that most interested the cat. These had traces of dead skin and even blood on them, since the sugar coating had caused a lot of friction when rubbed up and down the Prime Minister's love muscle.
Boris wasn't too hot in the fine motor skills department, in fact he probably needed testing for dyspraxia. Cummings certainly didn't want to risk being exposed as suffering form developmental co-ordination disorder and so his entrepreneurial bent led him to combine three economic sources that were of major significance to the UK - the charity sector's food banks for unwanted donuts, the government and immigrant labour. The Queensmead Sports Centre in South Ruislip's Victoria Road was closed due to the pandemic, and so Cummings decided to deploy it's unused gym as a base from which to make prototype versions of the ring donut PPE that would turn around the public's false perception of a poor governmental performance with regard to the current pandemic.
Dom hired a Gujarati woman from Park Royal who'd initially come to the UK to work at the mammoth hummus production part of Bakkavor's Cumberland site in Greenford. She was extremely nifty with a needle and regularly worked as a seamstress because it was difficult to live on the poor wages paid at local food processing plants. Before 24 hours had passed Johnson and Cummings had what they'd dreamed up the previous night, a medical gown and googles made of ring donuts! Well, the googles were made of ring donuts. At the suggestion of the seamstress, the gown had been fabricated from jam donuts since having holes the length and breath of the garment would have been a health risk to NHS heroes.
Although the donut PPE had been Dom's idea, Boris pulled rank and insisted that he be the first to try it out. Given it was made from literally hundreds of jam donuts, the gown proved to be pretty heavy but at least it was voluminous enough for a fatso like Johnson to wear. To keep Dom happy, Boris told him he was going to recommend his adviser for a Queens Award for Enterprise on the basis of his donut recycling activities in South Ruislip. The prototype PPE turned out to be perfect in every way, except for a slight tendency for the donuts at the bottom of the gown to fall off with a soft plop as Boris spun around in his triumph at having saved the National Health Service. That said, as libertarians he and Dom both knew that ultimately private health was much more efficient than haemorrhaging corporate profits to pay for public services. So once Boris had saved the NHS and after everything got back to normal in about 3 weeks time, he planned to abolish the NHS.
In his moment of glory for having saved the NHS, Boris decided to burst out of the gym and take a lap of honour on a Queensmead Sports Centre football pitch. After all he'd proved once again that England had won its wars - and the battle against Covid 19 was a war - on the playing fields of Eton! The fact that a fuckwit like Boris could get to be Prime Minister demonstrated that his parents had got real value for money when they'd paid for him to attend Britain's top public school. The fees were reassuringly expensive!
Two unfortunate things happened as Boris jigged across the football pitch. Firstly his smartphone rang, it was a call from a hefty female former professional kick boxer turned gym instructor with whom the PM was enjoying an intimate relationship.
"I found snot all over my dirty underwear when I was loading it into my washing machine just now. Have you been sniffing it again?"
This baseless accusation caused Johnson to sway and he'd never been a good runner at the best of times. He tripped over this own feet and fell to the ground. Seeing red oozing all around him, Boris thought he was a goner. While the British Prime Minister was able to pull the wool over his own eyes about his life ebbing away before him, he couldn't fool a passing swarm of wasps who knew that what Boris thought was his own blood was in fact strawberry jam. Recovering a slight semblance of sense at the sight of the descending wasps and wanting to save the prototype PPE, even if it was now squashed and in fragments, Johnson tried to shoo the insects away but this only made them angry. Boris quickly discovered that the painful pricks of failure were more or less equivalent to a dozen wasp stings.
In the interests of safety the plans for recycling donuts as PPE were shelved. It was back to the drawing board for Boris and Dom…. they still needed a way to demonstrate their political genius by defeating Covid 19.
"All is Well!" (1970) [ 16-Apr-20 3:27pm ]
Submarines also feature in a novella that's coming out sometime in the next month or two: Selkie Summer, from NewCon Press. Some years ago, between book contracts, I started writing a paranormal romance as an exercise, leaving it half-finished when the awaited boat came in. An online publisher showed interest in it as a novella, and was happy to wait until I'd finished The Corporation Wars. When I completed the novella two years ago, it was still front-loaded with an opening more suitable for a longer work, and for that and other reasons it didn't quite make the cut. I tinkered with it some more, and passed it to Ian Whates, who liked it and helpfully suggested further improvements. And after many vicissitudes, including a last-minute page-proof realisation that a Skye summer sunset was about an hour and a half later than I'd originally written, it's good to go! I'm very happy with the book's editing and production, and downright thrilled and delighted with Ben Baldwin's cover. I'm not sure if Selkie Summer meets the criteria for paranormal romance, but it's still about a young woman who falls for a paranormal entity. It's set in a contemporary Scotland much like ours, except that certain paranormal entities definitely exist and this is taken for granted as a fact of natural history. Partly as a consequence, there is no Skye Bridge.
It was due to be launched by me and Ian at Cymera 2020, which has now been cancelled (though it has some online content, and will have more, so keep checking it out). Meanwhile, you can hear me reading from the opening chapter in the online version of Edinburgh's monthly science fiction and fantasy cabaret, Event Horizon.
Another event that has had to move online is the Edinburgh Science Festival. I was honoured to be asked to give a short talk on a non-religious topic at the Festival's traditional St Giles service. I happened to have just read a book that got me thinking about contingency, Corliss Lamont's Freedom of Choice Affirmed, so I freely chose to talk about that. And as the contingencies we all know worked out, it's now online here.
Finally, a plug for a project I'm proud to have contributed to: the just-published Edwin Morgan Twenties, a set of five selections of twenty poems by the late great Makar, with introductions by Jackie Kay, Liz Lochhead, Ali Smith, Michael Rosen and me. You can buy the set for the bargain price of £16 (UK post free) or pick and mix. 'Space and spaces', the one I wrote the introduction to, brings together many of Morgan's science fiction and space poems -- and one or two that make a more metaphorical use of 'space' to brilliant effect. Like the other selections it's a mere £4 (UK post free) and is available here.
The fact that so many are completely incapable of keeping a safe distance from strangers - and this extends well beyond the cops and amateur cops - illustrates how alienated people are. Half the population seem to have no awareness of their own bodies or whose in the street or supermarket with them. Meanwhile, the homeless and mad are becoming ever more desperate and have either given up on begging and can be seen huddled together in encampments on Tottenham Court Road and elsewhere, or else have become much more aggressive in their quest for money to buy food and alcohol. The homeless are supposed to be in shelters but most still seem to be roaming around, presumably preferring the relatively greater freedom of the streets to being locked up under lockdown. There's a shortage of many street drugs but the government recognise booze as an essential and so London's off-licences (liquor stores) are open. Anyone hoping to sleep on the streets probably needs a drink or two in order to nod off, while the rest of the population are also living out the insane nightmare that is late-capitalism and dependence on alcohol is one way of dealing with it.
Covid 19 has brought out the best in many people and the worst in others. There are wonderful community mutual aid groups doing shopping for the vulnerable and delivering presents to children. Meanwhile hysterical media coverage links burning telecommunications masts and infrastructure to ridiculous conspiracy theories about 5G causing Covid 19. At least one of the fires the press was wringing its hands over recently and blaming on anti-5G activists turned out to have been due to faulty equipment and not suspicious. The papers call those who oppose 5G idiots because the equipment that was maliciously targeted is largely 3G and 4G. Since no one has yet been charged with - let alone convicted - of these acts of arson against phone masts, the fact that it isn't 5G equipment that was torched might well imply those involved in the vandalism aren't opposed to 5G and had other motives. The links made in the press between this arson and anti-5G activism are at best speculative.
There are many reasons for setting telecommunications infrastructure alight but even when it's just teens doing it for kicks it doesn't follow that we shouldn't be thrilled by film and photos of the resultant fires. Baudrillard said more than 50 years ago: "Something in all (wo)men profoundly rejoices at seeing a car burn.." This rings true because cars are a symbol of possessive individualism and have wrought untold destruction on our planet. Given the negative social impact of smartphones - including but not limited to surveillance and an intensification of work - today nothing is more beautiful than a burning phone mast. Technology isn't neutral, it shapes societies and human relations, and so the health and wellness concerns of anti-5G activists aren't the reason I get a buzz when I see burning telecommunications infrastructure. Nonetheless media hysteria about torched masts and Covid 19 conspiracy theories mean it's now nearly impossible to have a nuanced conversation about the joys and broader political dimensions of such vandalism, why everyone should get rid of their smartphone or what's actually bad about 3G, 4G and 5G.
Under lockdown I like to run around the streets for an hour a day, since it's quite a kick to see most of the shops and all the restaurants in central London closed, and knowing that even if they were open I wouldn't be using most of them. I don't even miss the record and book stores I did sometimes visit before Covid 19. I totally dig jogging through Soho and Covent Garden to visit the places I went as a teen 40 and more years ago and to revel in the fact that the London I knew then has entirely disappeared, just as the hyper-capitalist London of the current millennium is about to disappear. A different and better world is not only possible, it is also very necessary….
I’m doing fine, asymptomatic at the moment and hoping to stay that way until a working vaccine shows up. Hope you’re the same, or better yet, that you had a mild case and are now immune.
Anyway, good wishes aside, I wanted to say something I haven’t dared say for weeks: as bad as this crisis is, I suspect it’s a training wheels exercise for what we’ll have to do to deal with climate change. What I think right now is that if we seriously try to flatten the curve on greenhouse gas emissions, that effort is going to be like what we’re going through now, but longer and more thoroughly disruptive. It pretty much has to be if we’re going to avoid a mass extinction.
However, if you’re an artist looking for inspiration out of the darkness, that isn’t a bad thing.First, the bad news. No, not the Covid-19 economic induced coma. I’m talking about the Nature paper that came out yesterday (link to an article about it). Basically, it says we’ve got about 10 years until we see tropical ocean ecosystems (coral reefs) start to collapse wholesale. If you know anything about mass extinctions, you know that the disappearance of biogenic reefs in the fossil record is the classic sign of a major/mass extinction event. So that’s maybe 10 years off, although the reefs are mostly in bad shape now. By 2050, the ecosystem disintegration will reach the temperate zone, and the mass extinction will swing into high gear. When I talk about bending the curve, trying to avoid a mass extinction in 10 years, with which will start with the loss of a huge amount of fish that’s feeding hundreds of millions of people, that’s what I’m talking about avoiding. It’s about stopping the death of the coral reefs, and stopping the spread of the disaster.
Now if you use the paradigm I’ve used for the last ten years, you can assume this disaster will definitely happen, and that leads to Hot Earth Dreams land and the high altithermal starting in a decade.
But let’s look at the other side, where people survive however many waves of Covid-19 we go through until we get to a vaccine, and that breaks the inevitability, makes us think that maybe we can actually make a difference in the world. Scientists get respected enough again, and air quality improves so radically that people decide, not as a unified movement but en masse, to get serious about not dying due to climate change. The air quality improvement is quite real, and there’s enough footage of nature bouncing back (pandas mating, coyotes howling in San Francisco’s North Beach) that it’s just possible that people will get the idea that we can actually make a difference.
And so we start to bend the curve on climate pollution, let our fasts from consumerism get longer and longer, listen to the experts more than the reality stars, alternately slack and scramble to survive. Fantasy? You’re living it now.
I’m not going to portray this as easy. People are going hungry right now, whole careers and industries are in limbo. People are dying around the world, and we don’t even know what’s happening in the slums. While we have serious economic disruptors, people taking science seriously, and people showing their best in times of adversity, we also have predatory capitalism at it’s worst, with the current U.S. administration possibly behaving more like mafiosi than leaders.
And that’s the point, especially if you’re looking for disaster to inspire art, trying to figure out what will get made out of the broken shards of 2019 consumer culture, starting in 2021. Take all the disruption right now, the kleptocracy and vulture capitalism, the suffering of the essential workers keeping us alive, the kindness, heroism, and acts of creativity, the disruption of whole economic sectors surplused and gone, the world gone strangely silent and healing itself. Now ramp that up by orders of magnitude. That’s what flattening the curve on greenhouse gases will look like in the 2020s.
Now it’s not easy, but it’s not dystopian either. It’s a bit different: science is in charge, people are struggling to make a better, solve the problems that are killing us now. That’s a classic science fiction theme. But I’m pretty sure that struggle will involve as much suffering as failing and letting the world die.
As the sign in the psychotherapist’s office says, either way it hurts. Death from climate change will be slow, horrible, and painful, with you living to watch everything you care about get destroyed around you. Fighting climate change will be slow, horrible, and painful, as you watch everything you grew up with either fall apart or change into new forms that will survive. If they’re equal, why not choose change. Why not struggle against huge forces to keep the world from being totally destroyed, give the coral reefs a chance to come back, the forests a chance to regrow without migrating to the poles. Why not struggle for a civilization that doesn’t kill itself?
Why not let this inspire you?
A differential analyzer is a mechanical, analog computer that can solve differential equations. Differential analyzers aren't used anymore because even a cheap laptop can solve the same equations much faster—and can do it in the background while you stream the new season of Westworld on HBO. Before the invention of digital computers though, differential analyzers allowed mathematicians to make calculations that would not have been practical otherwise.
It is hard to see today how a computer made out of anything other than digital circuitry printed in silicon could work. A mechanical computer sounds like something out of a steampunk novel. But differential analyzers did work and even proved to be an essential tool in many lines of research. Most famously, differential analyzers were used by the US Army to calculate range tables for their artillery pieces. Even the largest gun is not going to be effective unless you have a range table to help you aim it, so differential analyzers arguably played an important role in helping the Allies win the Second World War.
To understand how differential analyzers could do all this, you will need to know what differential equations are. Forgotten what those are? That's okay, because I had too.
Differential EquationsDifferential equations are something you might first encounter in the final few weeks of a college-level Calculus I course. By that point in the semester, your underpaid adjunct professor will have taught you about limits, derivatives, and integrals; if you take those concepts and add an equals sign, you get a differential equation.
Differential equations describe rates of change in terms of some other variable (or perhaps multiple other variables). Whereas a familiar algebraic expression like specifies the relationship between some variable quantity and some other variable quantity , a differential equation, which might look like , or even , specifies the relationship between a rate of change and some other variable quantity. Basically, a differential equation is just a description of a rate of change in exact mathematical terms. The first of those last two differential equations is saying, "The variable changes with respect to at a rate defined exactly by ," and the second is saying, "No matter what is, the variable changes with respect to at a rate of exactly 2."
Differential equations are useful because in the real world it is often easier to describe how complex systems change from one instant to the next than it is to come up with an equation describing the system at all possible instants. Differential equations are widely used in physics and engineering for that reason. One famous differential equation is the heat equation, which describes how heat diffuses through an object over time. It would be hard to come up with a function that fully describes the distribution of heat throughout an object given only a time , but reasoning about how heat diffuses from one time to the next is less likely to turn your brain into soup—the hot bits near lots of cold bits will probably get colder, the cold bits near lots of hot bits will probably get hotter, etc. So the heat equation, though it is much more complicated than the examples in the last paragraph, is likewise just a description of rates of change. It describes how the temperature of any one point on the object will change over time given how its temperature differs from the points around it.
Let's consider another example that I think will make all of this more concrete. If I am standing in a vacuum and throw a tennis ball straight up, will it come back down before I asphyxiate? This kind of question, posed less dramatically, is the kind of thing I was asked in high school physics class, and all I needed to solve it back then were some basic Newtonian equations of motion. But let's pretend for a minute that I have forgotten those equations and all I can remember is that objects accelerate toward earth at a constant rate of , or about . How can differential equations help me solve this problem?
Well, we can express the one thing I remember about high school physics as a differential equation. The tennis ball, once it leaves my hand, will accelerate toward the earth at a rate of . This is the same as saying that the velocity of the ball will change (in the negative direction) over time at a rate of . We could even go one step further and say that the rate of change in the height of my ball above the ground (this is just its velocity) will change over time at a rate of negative . We can write this down as the following, where represents height and represents time:
This looks slightly different from the differential equations we have seen so far because this is what is known as a second-order differential equation. We are talking about the rate of change of a rate of change, which, as you might remember from your own calculus education, involves second derivatives. That's why parts of the expression on the left look like they are being squared. But this equation is still just expressing the fact that the ball accelerates downward at a constant acceleration of .
From here, one option I have is to use the tools of calculus to solve the differential equation. With differential equations, this does not mean finding a single value or set of values that satisfy the relationship but instead finding a function or set of functions that do. Another way to think about this is that the differential equation is telling us that there is some function out there whose second derivative is the constant ; we want to find that function because it will give us the height of the ball at any given time. This differential equation happens to be an easy one to solve. By doing so, we can re-derive the basic equations of motion that I had forgotten and easily calculate how long it will take the ball to come back down.
But most of the time differential equations are hard to solve. Sometimes they are even impossible to solve. So another option I have, given that I paid more attention in my computer science classes that my calculus classes in college, is to take my differential equation and use it as the basis for a simulation. If I know the starting velocity and the acceleration of my tennis ball, then I can easily write a little for-loop, perhaps in Python, that iterates through my problem second by second and tells me what the velocity will be at any given second after the initial time. Once I've done that, I could tweak my for-loop so that it also uses the calculated velocity to update the height of the ball on each iteration. Now I can run my Python simulation and figure out when the ball will come back down. My simulation won't be perfectly accurate, but I can decrease the size of the time step if I need more accuracy. All I am trying to accomplish anyway is to figure out if the ball will come back down while I am still alive.
This is the numerical approach to solving a differential equation. It is how differential equations are solved in practice in most fields where they arise. Computers are indispensable here, because the accuracy of the simulation depends on us being able to take millions of small little steps through our problem. Doing this by hand would obviously be error-prone and take a long time.
So what if I were not just standing in a vacuum with a tennis ball but were standing in a vacuum with a tennis ball in, say, 1936? I still want to automate my computation, but Claude Shannon won't even complete his master's thesis for another year yet (the one in which he casually implements Boolean algebra using electronic circuits). Without digital computers, I'm afraid, we have to go analog.
The Differential AnalyzerThe first differential analyzer was built between 1928 and 1931 at MIT by Vannevar Bush and Harold Hazen. Both men were engineers. The machine was created to tackle practical problems in applied mathematics and physics. It was supposed to address what Bush described, in a 1931 paper about the machine, as the contemporary problem of mathematicians who are "continually being hampered by the complexity rather than the profundity of the equations they employ."
A differential analyzer is a complicated arrangement of rods, gears, and spinning discs that can solve differential equations of up to the sixth order. It is like a digital computer in this way, which is also a complicated arrangement of simple parts that somehow adds up to a machine that can do amazing things. But whereas the circuitry of a digital computer implements Boolean logic that is then used to simulate arbitrary problems, the rods, gears, and spinning discs directly simulate the differential equation problem. This is what makes a differential analyzer an analog computer—it is a direct mechanical analogy for the real problem.
How on earth do gears and spinning discs do calculus? This is actually the easiest part of the machine to explain. The most important components in a differential analyzer are the six mechanical integrators, one for each order in a sixth-order differential equation. A mechanical integrator is a relatively simple device that can integrate a single input function; mechanical integrators go back to the 19th century. We will want to understand how they work, but, as an aside here, Bush's big accomplishment was not inventing the mechanical integrator but rather figuring out a practical way to chain integrators together to solve higher-order differential equations.
A mechanical integrator consists of one large spinning disc and one much smaller spinning wheel. The disc is laid flat parallel to the ground like the turntable of a record player. It is driven by a motor and rotates at a constant speed. The small wheel is suspended above the disc so that it rests on the surface of the disc ever so slightly—with enough pressure that the disc drives the wheel but not enough that the wheel cannot freely slide sideways over the surface of the disc. So as the disc turns, the wheel turns too.
The speed at which the wheel turns will depend on how far from the center of the disc the wheel is positioned. The inner parts of the disc, of course, are rotating more slowly than the outer parts. The wheel stays fixed where it is, but the disc is mounted on a carriage that can be moved back and forth in one direction, which repositions the wheel relative to the center of the disc. Now this is the key to how the integrator works: The position of the disc carriage is driven by the input function to the integrator. The output from the integrator is determined by the rotation of the small wheel. So your input function drives the rate of change of your output function and you have just transformed the derivative of some function into the function itself—which is what we call integration!
If that explanation does nothing for you, seeing a mechanical integrator in action really helps. The principle is surprisingly simple and there is no way to watch the device operate without grasping how it works. So I have created a visualization of a running mechanical integrator that I encourage you to take a look at. The visualization shows the integration of some function into its antiderivative while various things spin and move. It's pretty exciting.
A nice screenshot of my visualization, but you should check out the real
thing!
So we have a component that can do integration for us, but that alone is not enough to solve a differential equation. To explain the full process to you, I'm going to use an example that Bush offers himself in his 1931 paper, which also happens to be essentially the same example we contemplated in our earlier discussion of differential equations. (This was a happy accident!) Bush introduces the following differential equation to represent the motion of a falling body:
This is the same equation we used to model the motion of our tennis ball, only Bush has used in place of and has added another term that accounts for how air resistance will decelerate the ball. This new term describes the effect of air resistance on the ball in the simplest possible way: The air will slow the ball's velocity at a rate that is proportional to its velocity (the here is some proportionality constant whose value we don't really care about). So as the ball moves faster, the force of air resistance will be stronger, further decelerating the ball.
To configure a differential analyzer to solve this differential equation, we have to start with what Bush calls the "input table." The input table is just a piece of graphing paper mounted on a carriage. If we were trying to solve a more complicated equation, the operator of the machine would first plot our input function on the graphing paper and then, once the machine starts running, trace out the function using a pointer connected to the rest of the machine. In this case, though, our input is just the constant , so we only have to move the pointer to the right value and then leave it there.
What about the other variables and ? The variable is our output as it represents the height of the ball. It will be plotted on graphing paper placed on the output table, which is similar to the input table only the pointer is a pen and is driven by the machine. The variable should do nothing more than advance at a steady rate. (In our Python simulation of the tennis ball problem as posed earlier, we just incremented in a loop.) So the variable comes from the differential analyzer's motor, which kicks off the whole process by rotating the rod connected to it at a constant speed.
Bush has a helpful diagram documenting all of this that I will show you in a second, but first we need to make one more tweak to our differential equation that will make the diagram easier to understand. We can integrate both sides of our equation once, yielding the following:
The terms in this equation map better to values represented by the rotation of various parts of the machine while it runs. Okay, here's that diagram:
The differential analyzer configured to solve the problem of a falling body in
one dimension.
The input table is at the top of the diagram. The output table is at the bottom-right. The output table here is set up to graph both and , i.e. height and velocity. The integrators appear at the bottom-left; since this is a second-order differential equation, we need two. The motor drives the very top rod labeled . (Interestingly, Bush referred to these horizontal rods as "buses.")
That leaves two components unexplained. The box with the little in it is a multiplier respresnting our proportionality constant . It takes the rotation of the rod labeled and scales it up or down using a gear ratio. The box with the symbol is an adder. It uses a clever arrangement of gears to add the rotations of two rods together to drive a third rod. We need it since our equation involves the sum of two terms. These extra components available in the differential analyzer ensure that the machine can flexibly simulate equations with all kinds of terms and coefficients.
I find it helpful to reason in ultra-slow motion about the cascade of cause and effect that plays out as soon as the motor starts running. The motor immediately begins to rotate the rod labeled at a constant speed. Thus, we have our notion of time. This rod does three things, illustrated by the three vertical rods connected to it: it drives the rotation of the discs in both integrators and also advances the carriage of the output table so that the output pen begins to draw.
Now if the integrators were set up so that their wheels are centered, then the rotation of rod would cause no other rods to rotate. The integrator discs would spin but the wheels, centered as they are, would not be driven. The output chart would just show a flat line. This happens because we have not accounted for the initial conditions of the problem. In our earlier Python simulation, we needed to know the initial velocity of the ball, which we would have represented there as a constant variable or as a parameter of our Python function. Here, we account for the initial velocity and acceleration by displacing the integrator discs by the appropriate amount before the machine begins to run.
Once we've done that, the rotation of rod propagates through the whole system. Physically, a lot of things start rotating at the same time, but we can think of the rotation going first to integrator II, which combines it with the acceleration expression calculated based on and then integrates it to get the result . This represents the velocity of the ball. The velocity is in turn used as input to integrator I, whose disc is displaced so that the output wheel rotates at the rate . The output from integrator I is our final output , which gets routed directly to the output table.
One confusing thing I've glossed over is that there is a cycle in the machine: Integrator II takes as an input the rotation of the rod labeled , but that rod's rotation is determined in part by the output from integrator II itself. This might make you feel queasy, but there is no physical issue here—everything is rotating at once. If anything, we should not be surprised to see cycles like this, since differential equations often describe rates of change in a function as a function of the function itself. (In this example, the acceleration, which is the rate of change of velocity, depends on the velocity.)
With everything correctly configured, the output we get is a nice graph, charting both the position and velocity of our ball over time. This graph is on paper. To our modern digital sensibilities, that might seem absurd. What can you do with a paper graph? While it's true that the differential analyzer is not so magical that it can write out a neat mathematical expression for the solution to our problem, it's worth remembering that neat solutions to many differential equations are not possible anyway. The paper graph that the machine does write out contains exactly the same information that could be output by our earlier Python simulation of a falling ball: where the ball is at any given time. It can be used to answer any practical question you might have about the problem.
The differential analyzer is a preposterously cool machine. It is complicated, but it fundamentally involves nothing more than rotating rods and gears. You don't have to be an electrical engineer or know how to fabricate a microchip to understand all the physical processes involved. And yet the machine does calculus! It solves differential equations that you never could on your own. The differential analyzer demonstrates that the key material required for the construction of a useful computing machine is not silicon but human ingenuity.
Murdering PeopleHuman ingenuity can serve purposes both good and bad. As I have mentioned, the highest-profile use of differential analyzers historically was to calculate artillery range tables for the US Army. To the extent that the Second World War was the "Good Fight," this was probably for the best. But there is also no getting past the fact that differential analyzers helped to make very large guns better at killing lots of people. And kill lots of people they did—if Wikipedia is to be believed, more soldiers were killed by artillery than small arms fire during the Second World War.
I will get back to the moralizing in a minute, but just a quick detour here to explain why calculating range tables was hard and how differential analyzers helped, because it's nice to see how differential analyzers were applied to a real problem. A range table tells the artilleryman operating a gun how high to elevate the barrel to reach a certain range. One way to produce a range table might be just to fire that particular kind of gun at different angles of elevation many times and record the results. This was done at proving grounds like the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. But producing range tables solely through empirical observation like this is expensive and time-consuming. There is also no way to account for other factors like the weather or for different weights of shell without combinatorially increasing the necessary number of firings to something unmanageable. So using a mathematical theory that can fill in a complete range table based on a smaller number of observed firings is a better approach.
I don't want to get too deep into how these mathematical theories work, because the math is complicated and I don't really understand it. But as you might imagine, the physics that governs the motion of an artillery shell in flight is not that different from the physics that governs the motion of a tennis ball thrown upward. The need for accuracy means that the differential equations employed have to depart from the idealized forms we've been using and quickly get gnarly. Even the earliest attempts to formulate a rigorous ballistic theory involve equations that account for, among other factors, the weight, diameter, and shape of the projectile, the prevailing wind, the altitude, the atmospheric density, and the rotation of the earth1.
So the equations are complicated, but they are still differential equations that a differential analyzer can solve numerically in the way that we have already seen. Differential analyzers were put to work solving ballistics equations at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1935, where they dramatically sped up the process of calculating range tables.2 Nevertheless, during the Second World War, the demand for range tables grew so quickly that the US Army could not calculate them fast enough to accompany all the weaponry being shipped to Europe. This eventually led the Army to fund the ENIAC project at the University of Pennsylvania, which, depending on your definitions, produced the world's first digital computer. ENIAC could, through rewiring, run any program, but it was constructed primarily to perform range table calculations many times faster than could be done with a differential analyzer.
Given that the range table problem drove much of the early history of computing even apart from the differential analyzer, perhaps it's unfair to single out the differential analyzer for moral hand-wringing. The differential analyzer isn't uniquely compromised by its military applications—the entire field of computing, during the Second World War and well afterward, advanced because of the endless funding being thrown at it by the United States military.
Anyway, I think the more interesting legacy of the differential analyzer is what it teaches us about the nature of computing. I am surprised that the differential analyzer can accomplish as much as it can; my guess is that you are too. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking of computing as the realm of what can be realized with very fast digital circuits. In truth, computing is a more abstract process than that, and electronic, digital circuits are just what we typically use to get it done. In his paper about the differential analyzer, Vannevar Bush suggests that his invention is just a small contribution to "the far-reaching project of utilizing complex mechanical interrelationships as substitutes for intricate processes of reasoning." That puts it nicely.
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Previously on TwoBitHistory…
Do you worry that your children are "BBS-ing"? Do you have a neighbor who talks too much about his "door games"?
— TwoBitHistory (@TwoBitHistory) February 2, 2020
In this VICE News special report, we take you into the seedy underworld of bulletin board systems:https://t.co/hBrKGU2rfB
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Alan Gluchoff. "Artillerymen and Mathematicians: Forest Ray Moulton and Changes in American Exterior Ballistics, 1885-1934." Historia Mathematica, vol. 38, no. 4, 2011, pp. 506-547., https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0315086011000279. ↩
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Karl Kempf. "Electronic Computers within the Ordnance Corps," 1961, accessed April 6, 2020, https://ftp.arl.army.mil/~mike/comphist/61ordnance/index.html. ↩
Social-Distancing Laws (1970) [ 31-Mar-20 4:17pm ]
There’s not too much I can say about Covid-19, but there are some things that need to be said.
First, stay safe. This is going to go on for months, and it’s unlikely we’re going to go back to things they were the way before even after there are effective vaccines, treatment, and herd immunity.
Second, right now, the scale of the response to Covid-19 appears to be greater than what we’d need to adapt civilization to climate change if we started right now. So if anyone posits that we’re all doomed because we can’t mount such an effort, point to what’s happening now and ask them about the basis for their belief.
Now granted, the Covid-19 response is not sustainable, for reasons I go into in Hot Earth Dreams. In that book I compare cities to coral reefs. Both are metastable, composite, living structures that depend on the constant input of energy and circulation of nutrients and organisms (often the same thing for the carnivores consumers). Cut off the circulation and especially inflows and outflows to the outside, and both systems will fall apart in short order, simplifying down until they’re sustainable within their new boundaries. For reefs, that means that, if you boxed up a reef in a tank without circulation and food inputs, almost everything dies and what’s left is largely microbial life. For a city under a dome, almost everyone dies, and if anyone does survive, they’re in a village farming the ruins. This is the extreme, but the problem facing pandemic control is to keep the virus from spreading by minimizing human movement and contact, without so strangling necessary movement of food, water, and supplies that people starve. Striking this balance successfully for months to a year or more is going to be really interesting. Doable, but really interesting.
No matter whether polities pull it off while minimizing loss of life or not, the result will shape politics. In some places, strong men will use the emergency to boost their own power, whether they’re effective or not. This is apparently happening in Israel right now, where Netanyahu is clinging to power on a platform of something like “don’t depose and prosecute me while I’m dealing with this heaven-sent new emergency.” Other countries may look at how Singapore, South Korea, and China dealt with it, and more emulate their system of a surveillance state with local democracy overseen and limited by a higher level bureaucracy. Indeed, if Biden wins the election and the US Congress doesn’t manage to find it’s ass with at least one hand, I expect something like this to be installed in the US, again because we’re going to be dealing with the problem of rapid-moving pandemics as long as there are billions of people in the world and cheap air travel, and we’re getting an epic-level demonstration of why a lack of good governance is a very bad thing indeed.
Third: one big, unsolvable problem is that Chinese horseshoe bats (multiple species) reportedly have thousands of endemic coronaviruses circulating and recombining within their populations. It’s something like their version of colds. Almost all of these viruses are not capable of infecting humans, but some are, sort of. This is where SARS came from originally (SARS and Covid-19 are as close to each other as strains of flu). However, the viruses closest to SARS-CoV-2 in horseshoe bats don’t produce Covid-19 exactly. They’re also transient in the bats. The virus appears to have jumped to an intermediate host (perhaps a pangolin, although the pangolin coronavirus found so far isn’t SARS-CoV-2 either) and jumped from there to a human. Or it’s entirely possible that the final SARS-Cov-2 recombined into being inside an early human host. Getting confused? Well, the same process happened with SARS too, with an ephemeral bat virus infecting a civet that got sick with SARS (the intermediate host that made lots of copies of a single virus) and passed it to a human. And Chinese people who live near horseshoe bat roosts apparently show antibodies to various bat coronaviruses. In other words, bat coronaviruses infecting humans appears to be a natural process that’s been happening for…centuries? Millennia? Up until now, it was a rural problem for a few villages, but with global civilization, it can now spill over and rapidly blow up into a pandemic. Getting rid of the bats almost certainly won’t solve a problem, either, because that problem is ultimately too many people moving around the world too fast and in too close contact. Worse, there are other viral sources in the world, and we do desperately need the insect-eating ecosystem services that bats provide, because insects transmit a whole host of illnesses on their own. We’re entirely embedded in the biosphere, and randomly killing off bits of it for greed or fear backfires, often lethally.
Finally, as many know, I’m fond of the metaphor of the Four Horsemen: Epidemic Disease, Famine, Social Unrest, and Death, that ride together. This is NOT to say that Covid-19 is the start of the apocalypse, but it does show how the metaphor works. When there’s an epidemic, or food shortage, or a war, the other two problems show up, and if they’re not dealt with rapidly, a lot of people die. So for example, if a pandemic showed up and went uncontrolled, a few people would hoard resources for the purpose of price gouging and profiteering (the normal causes of famines), as people got sick and died there would be a breakdown of social order, potentially extreme enough to lead to a civil war, and a lot of people would die, some from the disease, but perhaps more from the resulting famine and war. Or you could start with the war. Or you could start with the crop failure. For any of the three causes, the way people actually died as a result (for instance, being shot while looting because they’re desperate for food) might have little apparently to do with the ultimate cause (the pandemic that shut down food shipments and the resulting hoarding). With Covid-19 so far, we’ve seen a very mild version of this play out, with people hoarding toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and food. Don’t take this lightly, because in a more serious situation, the Four Horseman can bring down civilizations (as apparently with the classic Maya–this has been used as an explanation for how the lowland Maya collapsed, starting with an epic drought and going from there). Rather, look at it as a worked example of another endemic human problem.
The effective responses to these problems as they arise, oddly enough, are very Christian: band together in community (even if you have to maintain physical distance), take care of each other, share what you have, punish and exclude people who would cause problems, or welcome them in if they stop causing problems and make restitution for what they’ve done. That’s what we need to do, going forward.
And stay safe out there, okay?
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As vast numbers of people are suddenly working from home in reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, doctors switch to heavy use of video office visits, and in general more critical information than ever is suddenly being thrust onto the Internet, the risks of major security and privacy disasters that will long outlast the pandemic are rising rapidly.
For example, the U.S. federal government is suspending key aspects of medical privacy laws to permit use of “telemedicine” via commercial services that have never been certified to be in compliance with the strict security and privacy rules associated with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). The rush to provide more remote access to medical professionals is understandable, but we must also understand the risks of data breaches that once having occurred can never be reversed.
Sloppy computer security practices that have long been warned against are now coming home to roost, and the crooks as usual are way ahead of the game.
The range of attack vectors is both broad and deep. Many firms have never prepared for large-scale work at home situations, and employees using their own PCs, laptops, phones, or other devices to access corporate networks can represent a major risk to company and customer data.
Fake web sites purporting to provide coronavirus information and/or related products are popping up in large numbers around the Net, all with nefarious intents to spread malware, steal your accounts, or rob you in other ways.
Even when VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) are in use, malware on employee personal computers may happily transit VPNs into corporate networks. Commercial VPN services introduce their own risk factors, both due to potential flaws in their implementations and the basic technical limitations inherent in using a third-party service for such purposes. Whenever possible, third-party VPN services are to be avoided by corporate users, and these firms and other organizations using VPNs should deploy “in-house” VPN systems if they truly have the technical expertise to do so safely.
But far better than VPNs are “zero trust” security models such as Google’s “BeyondCorp” (https://cloud.google.com/beyondcorp), that can provide drastically better security without the disadvantages and risks of VPNs.
There are even more basic issues in focus. Most users still refuse to enable 2-factor (aka “2-step”) verification systems (https://www.google.com/landing/2step/) on services that support it, putting them at continuous risk of successful phishing attacks that can result in account hijacking and worse.
I’ve been writing about all of this for many years here in this blog and in other venues. I’m not going to make a list here of my many relevant posts over time — they’re easy enough to find.
The bottom line is that the kind of complacency that has been the hallmark of most firms and most users when it comes to computer security is even less acceptable now than ever before. It’s time to grow up, bite the bullet, and expend the effort — which in some cases isn’t a great deal of work at all! — to secure your systems, your data, and yes, your life and the lives of those that you care about.
Stay well.
–Lauren–
TLDR – the fact that there are people cycling fast on cycling infrastructure in London does not mean that the infrastructure is ‘creating’ or ‘causing’ fast cycling. The people cycling fast are the people who were already cycling in London, brave enough to deal with the (almost entirely hostile) road network. Instead of ‘causing’ fast cycling, cycling infrastructure actually enables a diverse range of users to cycle at whatever speed they wish to pedal at. It lowers cycling speeds, rather than raising them.
Last autumn, my partner and I cycled together in London. It was her very first time cycling in the capital. I think it’s more than fair to describe her as a nervous cyclist – while she cycled in her youth, the bike was pretty much discarded once she became a teenager, and she only started again, intermittently, several decades later, on holiday trips we took to the Netherlands.
On one of our Dutch cycling trips
Given her nervousness, the very first bit of road we ended up cycling on in London would have been an absolutely crazy choice five years ago. Upper Thames Street, a four lane canyon of motor traffic running straight through the City of London, is (or at least was) notorious for danger. The cycle courier Sebastian Lukomski was killed here in 2004, crushed under an HGV, a death that Bill Chidley identifies with the start of the politicisation of cycling safety in London. In 2008, Nick Wright was killed a matter of yards from where Lukomski died – again, crushed under the wheels of an HGV. And these horrible collisions kept happening. Again in 2013. And again in 2014. All on the same stretch of road.
But last autumn we cycled along this very same road, in almost complete safety. At rush hour.
Just now my very nervous, very wobbly partner cycled for the very first time in London. On Upper Thames Street pic.twitter.com/uUoap7BgHM
— Mark Treasure (@AsEasyAsRiding) September 6, 2018
To state the obvious, I can guarantee you that there was no way this would have happened, without the subjective and objective safety offered by the protected cycleway, which meant we did not have to cycle down this canyon, mixed in with HGVs, coaches, vans and cars. We had our own space, where we could trundle on our fully-laden Dutch bikes at a sedate 10mph, roughly the same speed as the slow moving motor traffic on the other side of the kerb.
Without that kerb, I don’t think there is any chance that this young child would be cycling along Upper Thames Street either.
Or these children.
Or these children.
The crucial difference the cycleway has made is that people are now free to cycle at their own pace. Just like my partner, they can trundle along fairly slowly, without worrying about HGVs and coaches steaming up behind them. The cycleway has enabled, and will enable, people to cycle at slower speeds – the very people who would never even have considered cycling here, and on similar roads, without it.
It’s more than a little troubling, therefore, to see an emerging narrative that these kinds of cycleways are ‘creating’ a mentality of fast cycling – that their design (and even their name), are somehow fomenting or encouraging a type of cycling that wouldn’t exist if the cycling infrastructure hadn’t been built.
It's entirely possible this thread will set me off on a cycle super-highway rant again.
I mean you can just feel the testosterone in the name. Never mind the appalling design and behaviour they encourage in cyclists who use them. (I am a cyclist).
— Sarah Hayward (@Sarah_Hayward) March 2, 2019
The latest example is a piece from Jill Rutter for Reaction. The piece makes very some sensible arguments, but has had a silly headline added (at a guess, by an editor who has previously demonstrated some antagonism towards cycling infrastructure in London), and unfortunately creates the overall impression that safe, attractive and convenient cycling infrastructure, rather than enabling nervous people to cycle, is instead fostering a problem of fast and aggressive cycling. This impression was slightly reinforced by some comments the author later made on social media.
Hi Will – not sure if you read my piece in @reactionlife https://t.co/zST6mIcnPC — was discussing with other (female cycling) friends – who said they wd oppose @TfL new infra because of the racer mentality it created..
— Jill Rutter (@jillongovt) May 9, 2019
Unlike those journalists and politicians who are opponents of cycleways and would like to see it removed, and who are therefore making these kinds of arguments about ‘racing culture’ in bad faith, it’s pretty clear to me that Rutter is sincere. She supports cycling infrastructure, wants to see more of it, but is troubled personally by the types of cycling she is seeing at the moment, and worries that it may be putting people off cycling in London.
The problem is that new cycling infrastructure is obviously not ‘creating’ a racing mentality. That mentality is created not by the few miles of safe cycling conditions that have been built in central London, but by the abject reality of the rest of the road network, which does involve mixing with fast motor traffic, and large vehicles, on dreadfully-designed junctions and roads that make no concession whatsoever to the safety of people cycling. The ‘superhighways’ aren’t the reality of cycling in London – they’re only a small respite from it.
We haven’t suddenly transplanted the Netherlands onto London. We’ve built a few miles of good stuff, in pockets here and there, often without even joining it up, and… that’s it. The aggressive, fast people we encounter on ‘superhighways’ are the people who were cycling already, the people who will almost certainly be cycling without the subjective safety offered by motor traffic-free conditions.
Plainly, we shouldn’t be musing about why we haven’t got a demographic of relaxed, Dutch-type cycling in London when we’ve barely started changing our roads. We haven’t even scratched the surface. Let’s not start pretending that the infrastructure which allows my friends, family and partner to cycle slowly, and in safety, is somehow encouraging or fostering a type of cycling that is in reality a natural consequence of the rest of the road network.
The gyratory system around Victoria station in Westminster has been a genuinely horrible place to cycle for as long as I can remember. Getting to and from the station, or cycling past it, involves dealing with multiple lanes of one-way motor traffic, zooming off towards Park Lane, or thundering south towards Vauxhall Bridge.
The gyratory makes absolutely no concessions to cycling. If, for instance, you want to get from the station to the safety of Cycle Superhighway 3 – central London’s flagship cycle route, you have to make your way around two sides of a terrifying triangle, holding a position in the right hand lane of traffic heading north onto Grosvenor Place, before taking primary position on the left hand side as you skirt the edge of Buckingham Palace.
Cycling from Victoria to CS3
Cycle Superhighway 5 should have arrived in this area from Vauxhall Bridge, and should – quite sensibly – have connected up with Superhighway 3 in the vicinity of Buckingham Palace. However, it seems to have stalled right on the boundary of (guess who!) Westminster City Council, leaving anyone attempting to get between the two to negotiate a mile or so of unpleasant roads without any mitigation for cycling whatsoever.
Right in the middle of the Victoria gryatory stands the new Nova development. An incidental detail is that one of the buildings here won 2017’s Carbuncle Cup for the UK’s ugliest building, but I doubt that anyone cycling past has any time to assess its aesthetic qualities, given that they are busily trying to stay alive. Like Superhighway 5, this development should have represented an opportunity to make the roads around Victoria a bit less lethal for anyone attempting to cycle here. There’s even a detailed 60-page Transport for London strategy document dating from 2014, the Victoria Vision Cycling Strategy (link opens a download automatically), which explicitly sets out the key challenges and requirements in the Victoria area, in the context of the then-Mayor’s Vision for Cycling.
However, while there have been some improvements in the area around the Nova development – in particular, widened footways, better public realm, and a surface-level crossing that has replaced a subway – it is unfortunate that, despite this golden opportunity to make some serious changes, cycling has been almost completely ignored as the roads have been rebuilt.
One of the biggest issues is that the gyratory around the Nova development has been retained. The new buildings still sit in the middle of what is effectively a giant multi-lane roundabout. The problem of trying to negotiate these roads without being diverted around hostile one-way systems remains, to say nothing of the total lack of protected space for cycling.
Buckingham Palace Road, 2017. New buildings, new footway, new trees, new road surface -the same three lanes of one-way motor traffic.
Cycling towards the camera here remains impossible. And when the bus lane is occupied, cycling away from the camera is – while possible – an unpleasant and potentially dangerous experience.
Buckingham Palace Road, summer 2018.
4 metre wide bus lanes aren’t so great for cycling when they’re full of buses.
Much the same is true on Victoria Street, lying between Victoria station and the Nova development. Again, we have 2-3 lanes of one-way motor traffic thundering through here, exactly as before.
Victoria Street, looking east. The Nova development is on the left.
And again, this arrangement make no concession for anyone trying to cycle east (away from the camera).
Worst of all, it introduces a significant collision risk at the junction itself, where I am standing to take the photograph. On the approach to the junction, a wide bus stand narrows down significantly, leaving perhaps a metre of width between the kerb and stationary vehicles as a ‘channel’ through which people can cycle to reach an inviting advanced stop line (ASL). The area in question is indicated with the arrow, below.
Approaching the junction on Victoria Street.
That ASL looks very inviting, but getting there could be very risky indeed. There’s absolutely no guarantee that any large vehicle progressing through the junction will remain a safe distance from the kerb. Three separate examples below, taken within the space of a few minutes.
Anyone cycling up to the lights – forced into a tight merge by the narrowing of the road, and tempted to advance by a cycle lane leading to an ASL, could very easily find themselves squeezed between a lorry, or a bus, and the kerb. If any of these vehicles are turning left, like the National Express coach in the photograph below, the consequences could be lethal.
Someone has already had a very narrow escape here, taken to hospital in a critical condition after going under a left turning lorry at precisely this location.
From Get West London. The lorry is in nearly exactly the same position as the National Express coach in the previous photograph.
This is dreadful design, and it’s shocking that new road layouts this are appearing right in the centre of our capital city, with a blank slate to do so much better.
It may not be apparent from these photographs, but the footway on this corner is now very large indeed – nearly twenty metres wide, at the apex.
This is obviously a very good thing, in its own right. A left-turn slip lane for motor traffic has been removed and replaced with this footway, making the junction far more attractive for anyone walking here. But it seems extraordinary that, simultaneously, so little thought has been given to the safety of people attempting to cycle through here. They are almost literally being thrown under the bus. At a location where the building-to-building width is 30 metres, it is simply unacceptable to squeeze people cycling into a tiny space where they are already ending up under the wheels of HGVs.
Blink and you’ll miss it. The tiny, narrow and dangerous concession to cycling in this enormous space.
How can things be going so wrong with brand-new road layouts? How can we we rebuilding roads with 2-3 lanes of one-way motor traffic, without any apparent thought for cycling?
The distinct, unavoidable impression created from the new roads around Victoria is that it seems sufficient to treat cycling as a mere afterthought once the road layouts and widened pavements have been planned. Once the kerb lines have been defined, all that’s left to do is to add a painted bicycle symbol in a box just behind the stop line, and perhaps a tokenistic line at the side of the road, where there isn’t any parking, or a bus lane. Even if that might make a dangerous junction even more dangerous.
That’s just not good enough. These roads could and should have been rebuilt with protected cycleways, allowing people to travel to and from the Vauxhall area and central London in safety, or from west London towards central London. Instead they are still being put in danger, and cycling here will continue to remain the sole preserve of the fit and brave.
UPDATE
Alex Ingram points out that – in addition to the Transport Initiatives/PJA 2014 report for Transport for London on cycling in Victoria, the Victoria BID also produced a report on public realm in the area in 2015. It has this to say –
Cycling in Victoria can feel dangerous and intimidating. High volumes of traffic on the Inner Ring Road and the associated Victoria gyratory have a significant negative impact on cycling through the area. One-way streets in general are a hindrance to the desire lines of cyclists and create longer and more difficult journeys.
… Cycle routes and safety are key considerations when upgrading streets and spaces … In April 2013 a cyclist was fatally injured during the morning rush hour at the junction between Victoria Street and Palace Street. A number of minor injuries have also occurred at junctions along Victoria Street and more serious cycling injuries around the Buckingham Palace Road-Lower Grosvenor Place junction. Here the fast-flowing multiple lanes of one-way traffic include many coaches and large service vehicles which create significant hazards. Major arteries such as Vauxhall Bridge Road and Grosvenor Place are also accident hotspots.
Doubtless many of you will have seen this video of a ‘near miss’ on the A38 in Bromsgrove, in which a child narrowly escapes serious injury, thanks to the quick reactions of a driver – a fireman, Robert Allen.
I wasn't sure whether to post this but if it stops a child from being killed on the road it's worth it! Today a child rode out in front of me, across the dual track, without looking! Thankful I was driving under the speed limit & reacted quickly! #neverchanceit @BromStandard pic.twitter.com/NuDgFqcdDj
— Robert Allen (@HWfireRAllen) August 5, 2018
I wasn’t the only one to notice that the way this incident was framed – both on social media, and in the media more generally – focussed entirely on human actions. On the one hand, the quick thinking, forward planning and skill of the driver, and on the other, the mistakes and foolishness of the children.
Framed in this context, the only way to prevent near misses (or even serious injuries and fatalities from occurring in future) is to ensure that all drivers are as quick-thinking and careful as this one, and also to ensure that children don’t behave impulsively, and don’t make mistakes and misjudgements.
But unfortunately both of those things are actually very difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Children, especially younger children, have serious problems judging the speeds of approaching vehicles, due to their difficulty in perceiving visual looming (HT AndyR_UK). On top of that they will inevitably be impulsive, fail to concentrate, or become distracted. Equally, drivers won’t be paying attention 100% of the time. They will also get distracted. They are fallible. They will not all be as cautious and as quick to react as Robert Allen. Because they are human beings, not robots.
So the only realistic way of preventing these kinds of incidents from happening in the future is to design the danger out of the crossing. We can’t rely on human beings not do stupid things, or to not make mistakes, because it’s not who we are. The only rational response is to minimise the chances of collisions occurring in the first place, and to minimise the severity of those collisions if they do happen. The alternative – attempting to get children to behave properly in the context of this type of crossing – is nothing more than applying the flimsiest of sticking plasters to a gaping wound.
If we look at the location, it’s a little bit ambiguous whether the posted speed limit is 60mph or 70mph, because the crossing is at exactly the point where two lanes (60mph limit) become a four lane dual carriageway (70mph limit).
But whether it’s 60mph or 70mph doesn’t really matter – as Ranty Highwayman observes, either way, these are still very high speeds for children to be processing, especially where drivers will be distracted by the process of merging back down to one lane in the in the oncoming direction, or focused on accelerating up to 70mph as they move into two lanes from one in the facing direction.
On top of that, we have the pedestrian barriers – presumably installed with the intention of stopping people from cycling straight out into the road – acting to steer anyone cycling up to the crossing into a position parallel to the road, where any oncoming motor traffic will be directly behind them. 
Rather than naturally facing that oncoming traffic, children (or anyone else cycling here) will have to look right back over the shoulder to process it. Frankly the entire layout is a recipe for casualties, which the ‘Sign Make It Better’ warning does nothing to fix (not least because it’s only about 50 feet from the actual crossing – not a great deal of help when it comes to alerting drivers of the potential danger).
I’m not sure when this road was built, and the period in which it was thought this was an appropriate type of crossing for a road of this context – but it’s far from unique.
Here's another A38 ped crossing just outside Lichfield The gap in the barrier is where people are supposed to cross pic.twitter.com/3l9jtAt2sK
— Andy (@Bluecrossbar) August 7, 2018
There are several similarly lethal crossings of 70mph dual carriageways in West Sussex, usually the result of existing routes or lanes being severed by the construction of new roads and bypasses, with absolutely no consideration given to the safe passage of people walking and cycling across them. I can think of at least three on Horsham’s northern bypass, which was built in the late 1980s. Below is just one of them.
There’s housing behind the trees on the left hand side of this location, and a railway station a couple of minutes’ walk down the lane to right. It’s not only the danger that is infuriating – it’s the fact that people could be walking and cycling, easily, to and from these locations, but have these horrendous barriers put in their way. The road simply shouldn’t have been built like this – it should have had underpasses integrated into it during construction, to allow people to cross it freely, and in safety.
The Bromsgrove example is perhaps even more pressing, however, as the road is a clearer example of severance – with housing on both sides of the road. If the A38 were a Highways England road, then under the IAN 195/16 standard (which I’ve covered here) a grade-separated crossing would be a mandatory requirement for a 60mph limit. If that’s not possible, then the speed limit should be lowered, the motor traffic lanes should be narrowed significantly, and the crossings should involve clear sightlines, with only one lane crossed at a time. Something like this kind of thing, which I saw on a distributor road in the city of Zwolle.
There are no signals; this is just a simple priority crossing, with cycles having to give way to motor traffic. However, only one lane has to be crossed a time, motor traffic speeds are much lower, and the visibility is excellent, for all parties. This really isn’t rocket science.
If the council wish to retain a 60mph limit, or four lanes of motor traffic, then that obviously means that human beings should be separated entirely from the road, to insulate them from the increased danger that attempts to cross such a road at-grade would involve. An underpass is the obvious answer in that traffic context.
That would plainly be an expensive undertaking, but really there’s no other safe way of addressing the severance posed by a multiple lane road with such a high speed limit.
Obviously I don’t know the local situation, but I suspect it may be much more appropriate to ‘downgrade’ the road to an urban distributor, with single lanes in each direction, separated by a median, and with a much lower speed limit. That would allow the ‘Zwolle’ type of crossing to be employed, and safely. But there are many other places where that is impossible, or at least undesirable. The Horsham example is one location where the traffic volumes and road context – an explicit bypass – should really necessitate grade separation.
To a large extent, we’re reaping the harvest of decades of road-building and planning with little or no thought for the safety and convenience of anyone who wasn’t in a motor vehicle – people cycling and walking along these roads, or attempting to cross them. It’s going to be difficult and costly to undo that damage. Perhaps it’s not surprising, therefore, that we all reach for the superficially easy option of attempting to change human behaviour, rather than changing the system, when we’re confronted with incidents like the one in Bromsgrove.
There’s recently been some silly-season noise about making the use of bells compulsory in our newspaper of record, The Times.
Frothing gibberish on Page 3 of The Times today. Remember when this paper took cycling safety seriously? pic.twitter.com/iemsfa2seJ
— Mark Treasure (@AsEasyAsRiding) July 14, 2018
This story seems to have been based entirely on five written questions from the MP Julian Lewis.
Re @thetimes article about bicycle bells, it is based on 5 parliamentary questions posed by Julian Lewis (MP for New Forest, Conservative) to @transportgovuk .
All 5 receive 1 answer from Transport Minister @Jesse_Norman https://t.co/ijCdWJMTIL pic.twitter.com/Qap6brq38F— always last (@lastnotlost) July 14, 2018
The non-committal response from the Minister has been spun into a story; the Minister in turn dismissed it.
But let’s (charitably) take this seriously, just for a moment. What does ‘mandatory use of bells’ actually mean? Am I supposed to ding every time a pedestrian hoves into view? In a town or a city, my bell would be ringing relentlessly. Let’s also bear in mind that plenty of people will object, often quite aggressively, to the ringing of a bell, interpreting it as akin to the honking of a car horn. A basic starting principle – before any of this nonsense ever gets anywhere near legislation – would have to involve getting some basic agreement and consensus about what people actually want and expect, when it comes to a form of audible cycling warning (or even whether they want people making a noise at all). It you can’t get the general public to agree, which I would imagine is more than likely, then there’s no point even embarking on legislation in the first place.
In any case, the general issue of bells, warnings and ‘silent rogue cyclists’ is symptomatic of basic design failure. I’ve probably cycled at least 500 miles in the Netherlands over the last five or six years. Not a huge amount, but enough to get a good flavour of the country. In all that distance – in cities, in towns, through villages, across the countryside – I can’t honestly remember ever having to ring my bell to warn someone walking that I was approaching. Not once.
A large part of that is probably down to the fact that people walking in the Netherlands are – understandably – fully aware that they will encounter someone cycling quite frequently. In general, it’s unwise to assume that, just because you can’t hear anything approaching, nothing is approaching – and this is especially true in the Netherlands. Being aware of cycling is just an ordinary part of day-to-day life, because everyone cycles themselves, and because they will also encounter cycling extremely frequently.
However, I suspect my lack of bell use is also due to the fact I rarely ever come into conflict with pedestrians, because of the way cycling is designed for. Unlike in Britain, where walking and cycling are all too frequently bodged together on the same inadequate paths, cycling is treated as a serious mode of transport, with its own space, distinct from walking.
No need for bells here, to warn people you are approaching
I don’t need to ring my bell to tell someone walking I am coming up behind them because we’re not having to share the same (inadequate) space. There are of course many situations in the Netherlands where walking and cycling are not given separate space – a typical example below.
However, these will almost always be situations where the numbers of people cycling, and of people walking in particular, will be relatively low. In practice, these paths function as miniature roads, marked with centre lines, and used by low amounts of low-impact traffic. Pedestrians treat them as such, walking at the sides, and the dynamics of path use are obvious and well-understood. If demand for these paths increases, such that people walking and cycling begin to get in each other’s way, separation of the two modes becomes a necessity. It is all blissfully rational.
Contrast that with Britain, where ‘cycle routes’ will often be nothing more than putting up blue signs to allow cycling on existing – often quite busy – footways.
It isn’t hard to see why people walking will not be expecting cycling in these kinds of environments. It looks like a footway; feels like a footway. It is a footway. So users who are cycling then have to decide how best they approach someone from behind.
- Do they ring their bell?
- Do they try to make a noise with their bike?
- Do they call out? And if so, what do they say?
- Do they try to glide past without any noise at all?
Bear in mind that there is absolutely no consensus on which of these techniques is preferable to people walking. Some people hate bells, because they think it implies they are being told to get out of the way. Some people don’t like noises, or calls, and apparently prefer the clarity of a bell, and what it signifies. Some other people might be deaf.
As you cycle up behind someone, there is obviously no way of knowing how that particular person will react, and what they will prefer. It is entirely guesswork.
My own technique is usually to approach, slow down a bit, and hope that the person gradually becomes aware of my presence. If they don’t, then I usually say ‘excuse me’. My bell is reserved for occasions when someone is stepping into the road without looking, or similar situations where I can foresee a potential collision occurring.
A short snippet below, on a path I use on a daily basis.
I can see that the two girls are aware that I am approaching, but I slow down in any case, until I am sure. The woman is not aware, so again I slow down, and have to use a verbal ‘excuse me’ to let her know I am there.
This probably isn’t perfect. Maybe there is a better way. But really, I don’t think there even is a ‘perfect’ way of dealing with these kinds of minor conflicts. They are all flawed. You are going to startle someone; you are going to do the wrong thing without even realising it; you are going to annoy someone. It’s unavoidable.
But the solution to this problem is not MOAR BELLS or MANDATORY USE OF MOAR BELL. The basic issue here is crap cycling and walking environments. Every single location where people are being expected to use bells (or some other form of audible warning) will be one where cycling is not expected; where someone cycling is having to share the same space as someone walking; where there is not enough width for the two modes to peacefully co-exist. Bells are not the solution to this problem. Better design is.
The path in my video above is only a couple of metres wide, and has to accommodate cycling and walking in the same space. That’s just a straightforward recipe for conflict. If you think the answer to that conflict is bell legislation then you don’t care about cycling, and frankly you don’t really care about walking either. I don’t want to be cycling at little more than walking pace, having to ring my bell every few metres. I doubt people walking want to be having to deal with that either. I certainly don’t when I am on foot.
Let’s stop dribbling on about bells and instead ensure that our walking and cycling environments work for both modes, with clarity about where people should be and about expected behaviour, and with comfortable space for everyone.
Every three or four years Anthony Watts (who owns a conspiracy blog called Watts Up with That, or WUWT) claims steam pipes in vast empty spaces in remote and largely unpopulated areas of Russia are what's causing global warming. This year he's at it again.I don't need to write much about this, you can see it in pictures. In fact, Anthony himself put up a photo of steam pipes in a small town called Omyakon (population ~500), one of the coldest permanently inhabited places on earth.
The map below shows where the tiny settlement of Omyakon is located on the GISTEMP January temperature map . It's not in the middle of where the highest temperature anomalies were recorded.
Figure 1 | Temperature anomalies for January 2020 from the 1951-1980 mean, showing the location of Omyakon and its steampipes that conspiracy nutters blame for global warming. Data source: NASA GISTEMP
In fact, most of the huge hot area over Russia and parts of Europe has very low population density as you can see when you move the arrow to the right over the images below. (I've lined up the maps but it's a bit rough.)
Figure 2 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 from the 1951-1980 mean; and population density. Data sources: GISS NASA and SEDAC, NASA
Anthony Watts decided there's a Russian conspiracy at NOAA, and wrote:
In a report generating substantial media attention this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) claimed January 2020 was the hottest January on record. In reality, the claim relies on substantial speculation, dubious reporting methods, and a large, very suspicious, extremely warm reported heat patch covering most of Russia.
How (and why) does Russia keep moving its steampipes?
Anthony doesn't explain how or why Russia moves its steampipes around the world each January - from sparsely populated regions of Russia to North America and further, then back again. I'll let you try to figure out for yourself how and why they do this.
In January 2019 Russia turned its steampipes down a bit and shifted their Russian steampipes they'd installed in the USA and Canada a bit west. (Move the arrow to the right to compare January 2020 with January 2019).
Figure 3 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 and January 2019 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA
In 2018, Russia turned of quite a few of its steampipes, leaving any residents to suffer the freeziing cold. There were quite a few more Russian steampipes in North America in 2018.
Figure 4 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 and January 2018 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA
In 2017 Russia had cut down its steampipe operations, but it didn't turn them off altogether. That was probably so it could vastly expand its steampipes in North America.
Figure 5 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 and January 2017 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA
In 2016, when there was a big El Nino and the temperature anomaly was just a smidgen below that of this January (with no El Nino), Russia got rid of most of its steampipes, moving them from Russia to North America.
Figure 6 | Maps showing mean surface temperature anomalies for January 2020 and January 2016 from the 1951-1980 mean. Data source: GISS NASA
The WUWT waste heat conspiracy
Anthony finished his article with this, and no, he didn't tag it as satire:
It appears that the "warmest ever" January might simply have been influenced by Russian temperature data warmed up by waste heat. Maybe the U.S. House of Representatives will start an inquiry into Russian collusion to interfere with global temperature data and climate change legislation - but don't hold your breath.That reminds me of his "waste heat from the little warm pockets of humanity" he found in a tent in a remote and isolated part of the remote continent of Antarctica.
From the HotWhopper archives
- Denier weirdness: Russian steam pipes are causing global warming, sez Anthony Watts @wattsupwiththat - December 2013
- Those Russian steampipes are back at WUWT - February 2016
- Tectonic Anthony Watts moves continents using waste heat from little pockets of humanity! - September 2014
On a sunny September day last year, I headed out from the city centre of Utrecht to take a look at the town of Bilthoven, about five miles away. Despite being a fairly small settlement (Bilthoven itself only has a population of around 20,000 people, although it closely adjoins the larger town of De Bilt) the area around the station has been extensively redeveloped, with the road diverted, and a new underpass built that only allows walking and cycling.
This is the railway station for a town of just over 20,000 people. pic.twitter.com/g1P0lG9vEi
— Mark Treasure (@AsEasyAsRiding) September 19, 2019
I had arranged to meet my partner back in Utrecht city centre at midday (she wasn’t quite as interested in me in pedalling around ten miles to go and look at some cycle paths and new development!), and I was running a bit late, stopping off to take videos of roundabouts and cycle paths on the way.
Cycle path running parallel to main road, on the approach to Bilthoven.
The path is actually built in the woods, some distance from the road. It has its own street lighting. It then crosses a bridge, before skirting a roundabout (with priority). Just brilliant. pic.twitter.com/tlOPg244DU— Mark Treasure (@AsEasyAsRiding) September 20, 2019
Fortunately, on my route back, I stopped at a red light in de Bilt behind a lady on an e-bike, with distinctive bright green panniers.
I say ‘fortunately’ because over my years cycling in the Netherlands, I’ve found people on e-bikes are a real bonus when you are cycling along on a human-powered bike. You can tuck into their slipstream and roll along at a fairly steady 15mph, a speed which would take some effort to sustain on a heavy utility bike if you are cycling on your own. The couple in the photograph below, pedalling along effortlessly on their e-bikes, were an absolute godsend on a baking hot day when I was struggling towards Delft along a dead straight and seemingly unending road.
There’s no need to feel guilty about drafting either, because the person on the e-bike is expending very little effort acting while they act as your personal windbreak.
On my way back to Utrecht, it turned out that I managed to get a very pleasant tow all the way back to the city centre. Here we are, just leaving De Bilt, on the quiet road that runs through the town centre (the main through-road is behind the hedge to the left).
Then along the service road that runs parallel to the main road. (Note the induction loops built into the asphalt, that almost always ensure you have a green signal as you approach these minor junctions).
And then under the famous ‘Bear pit’ junction on the outskirts of the city centre. 
Now on Biltstraat, heading into the centre of Utrecht, on a protected cycleway. The road here is only one-way for private motor traffic, with a two-way bus lane off to the left.
Soon after this, the lady gets away from me a bit because… she jumped a red light – a pretty minor violation given the traffic context, but I didn’t want to risk it myself. 
She didn’t gain much advantage from her light jump, however, because soon enough I caught her up again, right into the city centre, along the busiest cycle path in the Netherlands (if not in the world) –
Then through the large underpass that takes you straight under the sixteen platforms of Utrecht railway station –
Before our journeys separate, and she peels off to join the cycle parking at the station itself – presumably to catch a train.
We travelled 6km together, nearly four miles, and according to my GPS track we did it in a little over 14 minutes, right from the eastern side of de Bilt, to the railway station in the city centre of Utrecht.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this works out at an average speed of a fraction over fifteen miles an hour, or 25kph, the legal limit for e-bikes. We only had to stop twice – at the red light I stopped for, and she didn’t, and then to cross Vredenburg.
Given the point at which we met, she had almost certainly come from even further away, either from Bilthoven, where I started, or from Zeist. These are both around five miles away, but at e-bike speeds, only twenty minutes or so from the centre of Utrecht. Indeed, 5 miles can be covered in exactly 20 minutes on an e-bike, which means that a huge area is within a negligible cycling time of both the city centre and the train station – pretty much the whole Utrecht agglomeration (well over half a million people), as well as other outlying towns and villages.
A five mile radius circle, centred on Utrecht train station. At e-bike speeds, it would take just twenty minutes to cover this distance.
That’s pretty remarkable when you think about it – that all these people are (potentially) less than twenty minutes away from the centre of the city, and able to get there in comfort and safety, with minimal inconvenience, just by pedalling, and without any need for a car. When you consider that these trips can then be made in combination with the Netherlands’ excellent rail network, vast swathes of the country are quickly within reach to people even in apparently ‘remote’ areas. Hypothetically, the lady I was following could have come from a remote village miles away from Utrecht, caught a train to Rotterdam, and have gone from door-to-door in less than an hour.
Naturally, these benefits accrue to people on ‘ordinary’ bikes too – people like me – although 5 miles is more likely to take 30 minutes or more to cover, under our own steam. That’s an entirely manageable distance, but e-bikes will obviously reduce the effort required. It has the potential to seriously start eating into those longer car trips that are not quite so appealing by bike.
In the UK we can only dream of having the kind of comprehensive, high-quality cycling networks that surround places like Utrecht, and that enable the types of journeys described here. Where I live, we have absolutely no meaningful cycle network to speak of, and a negligible rail network. Even our former railway lines – which could serve as excellent, flat connections between towns and villages, either by bike or e-bike – have been allowed to disintegrate into bumpy, muddy bogs that are unattractive and unpleasant to use.
A section of the former Horsham-Shoreham railway line, north of Partridge Green
Meanwhile our roads are increasingly clogged with dangerous, polluting and environmentally damaging motor vehicles, travelling in the vast majority of cases short trips that could be converted to other modes.
There is no reason why we can’t match the Netherlands. E-bikes erode the argument that it is too hilly, or too difficult, to cycle, and in combination with high quality cycle networks we could have people effortlessly travelling the kinds of distances described in this post.
As with many British towns in the wake of the 1963 Traffic in Towns report, Horsham responded to the coming age of the motor car with a mixture of enlightenment and destructiveness. In doing so, it largely reflected the nature of the Report itself, which presciently diagnosed the enormous problems mass motoring would present, but offered damaging remedies that essentially accommodated ever-expanding demand for driving right in the heart of our towns, alongside a more benign banishment of it from limited areas within them.
In Horsham, that destructiveness involved the construction, in several stages, of a four-lane inner ring road that now encircles most of the town centre, and the construction of several large multi-storey car parks to accommodate increasing numbers of private cars.
The red line indicates the approximate route of the four lane inner ring road, over the previous street pattern. Original map here.
Although that ring road was (and remains) a blight on the town, the area within it has fared rather better, with a fairly deliberate policy of either complete removal of motor traffic, or minimising its levels. Through-traffic is discouraged by means of a 20mph zone (one of the first in the country) combined with a winding, circuitous route through the town centre, while many other streets have been either fully pedestrianised, or part-pedestrianised.
While these changes within the ring road are largely to be applauded, the enlightened planners and councillors who implemented them sadly neglected to consider cycling in any way, shape or form. One of the biggest issues is that the one-way flow through the centre, while successful at keeping motor traffic on the inner ring road in an east-to-west and north-to-south direction, also completely excludes cycling. I’ve previously written about this specific issue here.
Another longstanding problem for cycling lies to the western edge of the town centre. Here the former main north-south road across the town (shown in green and blue in the overhead view below) has been bypassed to the west by the four lane inner ring road (in red), leaving short sections of road with a pedestrianised area in the middle (highlighted in green), that still allows cycling in a north-south direction, but in a very half-hearted and ambiguous way. In other words, it’s not at all clear that it’s legal to cycle there.
This is actually a fairly important area for cycle journeys, because as well as potentially allowing you to cycle in a north-south direction avoiding the unpleasant, fast and busy four lane inner ring road (which naturally makes no concessions to cycling at all), it should also allow journeys in an east-west direction – particularly, people coming from the north and the west to enter the town centre. All these potential routes are shown on the overhead view below.
The red lines indicate entry and exit points for cycling. To the left is the large inner ring road.
The real difficulty lies at the southern end, where a new bus station was built around twenty years ago. It lies in the middle of the red ring, above. The building itself is attractive, but once again there was absolutely no consideration of cycling when it was planned (are you sensing a pattern here?).
The area where buses arrive and depart is buses-only – so the area ringed in green, below, is a no-go area for cycling.
That means all the movements through this area have to pass through the gap between this green area and the building on the corner, which is at present a pedestrian crossing, connecting the pedestrianised area with the bus station. This is a very awkward fit for cycling.
The video below shows me cycling along the line of the red arrow. This is at a particularly quiet time of day, early in the morning, so it is free of the potential conflict with people walking to and from the bus station.
It’s not even clear to me how legal this is. I take the option of crossing into the bus station and then moving across the solid stop line (the lights will only change for buses, so jumping the lights is unavoidable). The alternative is to cycle onto the pedestrian crossing, but that doesn’t seem particularly appealing either.
Short of rebuilding the bus station and starting all over again from scratch, to my mind there are no obvious fixes here to formalise cycling through this area. Perhaps a short term bodge is simply to convert the pedestrian crossing into a toucan that is at least legal to cycle onto, but then you are left with the inelegant solution of cycling off of it to join the road where the heads of the red arrows are located. Furthermore this toucan crossing would not help with cycling in the opposite direction, where people have to cycle (the wrong way!) into the bus station entrance from a signalised road junction, and then somehow ‘merge’ onto a toucan crossing which may well have people walking on it.
To demonstrate, here is another video of me on this desire line, cycling from the east, then heading north, along the line of the upper red arrow. Currently I take the approach of cycling onto the footway before the red light, to avoid conflicts with the pedestrian crossing. Although cycling in the pedestrianized area is legal, it probably isn’t on this bit of footway. But I’m not sure what else to do.
For pure north-south cycling journeys, the most obvious option is some kind of route running down the western edge of the bus station. There is a new-ish hedge that could potentially be sacrificed, and some parking bays that are occasionally used by service vehicles from the bus companies.
Here is a family walking south down the footway along the western edge of the bus station, with the hedge and the parking bay to their left.
This would solve these purely north-south journeys. However, it wouldn’t do anything to address the most of the journeys across the area, which will involve some east- or west-component, and therefore will involve the difficulties shown in my videos.
Indeed, the junctions around the bus station are an almost perfect case-study in how people cycling are turned into lawbreakers (or at least flexible rule-benders) because nobody has given any thought into how people would actually cycle through the area.
From the east, the ‘least worst’ option is to cycle on a short bit of footway (which may or may not be legal), and from the north the ‘least worst’ option is either to cycle onto a pedestrian crossing, or to cycle through a red light designed only for buses.
It’s a mess. And without a total redevelopment of the area, I’m not sure how it can be substantially improved. But any thoughts on how it might be done would be welcome! This area is important, as it is right in the town centre, and dealing with how to cycle across it in at least a legal manner needs to be solved.
An interesting if ominous paper was recently published in Nature Climate Change. It came out just before Christmas, at the height of the holiday season here in Australia while fires were raging. For some weeks I've been meaning to write about it. That moment has finally arrived.The authors of the Nature Climate Change paper, Andrew D. King, Todd P. Lane, Benjamin J. Henley and Josephine R. Brown (from The University of Melbourne) tell us that it's up to us to a large degree (excuse the word play). We know that already, and we also know that recent history and current weather-related events in Australia, the UK, Africa and elsewhere demonstrate we've not yet been willing to take enough action.
However the authors weren't writing about our reluctance to do enough to save ourselves. They were in effect exploring what will happen if we can slow down global warming compared to if we let it continue to warm as quickly as it is. It probably won't surprise HotWhopper readers that the rate of warming makes quite a difference.
You may have seen the excellent series of articles in the Washington Post late last year: 2°C: Beyond the Limit: Dangerous new hot zones are spreading around the world. These articles were describing the impact of global warming in different parts of the world, where warming has already exceeded 2°C. On average, the world has warmed maybe a bit more than 1.1 °C above pre-industrial temperatures; however, some places are warming faster than others. This includes some ocean areas as well as land areas. Most of us live on land, so what happens on land is of particular interest.
As you may know, when the world is heating up, the land heats up faster than the ocean. This is because very large bodies of water have to absorb a huge amount of energy (heat) for the temperature to rise much whereas it doesn't take much energy to warm up the land surface. Specific heat capacity is a measure of a substances capacity to absorb energy compared to how hot it gets. It is defined as the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of a substance 1 degree Celsius (°C). Water needs a lot of heat to raise its temperature. Land doesn't need nearly as much.
The faster it warms the hotter we get
The authors of King19 decided to look at the different effects around the world when the climate is warming compared to when it's more or less stable. It's clear that the rate of warming makes a big difference. Their results indicate that as it warms it gets hotter on land compared to how hot it would be on land at the same global average temperature when the climate is in equilibrium. In other words, the land gets hotter the faster it warms. (I'm putting words into the authors' mouths here. It's fair IMO.)
A difference between 1.5 °C warmer at equilibrium and 2 °C warmer at equilibrium would certainly be noticed. However, it's the difference between how hot it gets during the transition to equilibrium that we'd notice a whole lot more.
As described in the abstract:
...more than 90% of the world's population experiencing a warmer local climate under transient global warming than equilibrium global warming. Relative to differences between the 1.5 °C and 2 °C global warming limits, the differences between transient and quasi-equilibrium states are substantial. For many land regions, the probability of very warm seasons is at least two times greater in a transient climate than in a quasi-equilibrium equivalent. In developing regions, there are sizable differences between transient and quasi-equilibrium climates that underline the importance of explicitly framing projections.
Transient vs quasi-equilibrium
The transient state refers to the state while change is happening, while the world is getting hotter. The quasi-equilibrium state is, as you can probably work out, a state where the climate is unchanging, is more or less steady.
Say the world is on average 2 °C hotter than in pre-industrial times. Now if it's come from 1 °C hotter (like now) and just hit 2 °C hotter on its way to 3 °C hotter, it's in a transient state. If it's been sitting at around 2 °C above and not varying much over time (no major forcings, just some internal variability) it's in a state of equilibrium. [The term "quasi-equilibrium" is used because that state is based on CMIP5 models for 2300 (mid-range greenhouse gas emissions - ECP4.5). The climate of the 2300s is not in full equilibrium, but getting close, hence "quasi-equilibrium".]
The land gets hotter faster until we reach equilibrium, then it cools a bit
What does this all mean? It means much of where we live will get a lot hotter until we stop warming the planet, then the land will cool down a bit as it reaches equilibrium with the ocean. That is, even while global surface temperature is steady, after warming stops, the hotter areas of land will cool a bit and the cooler parts of the oceans will keep warming a bit until equilibrium is reached.
The lead author, Andrew King, put it simply in an email, saying:
"For a given level of global warming, in a transient climate most land areas are warmer and experience more heatwaves than in an equivalent equilibrium climate with the same global temperature. So, if we were to hold the global temperature constant then most land areas would cool over time."
Land vs oceans
Consider what happens at 1.5 °C and 2 °C while the world is heating up, compared to the situation if the global surface temperature is more or less steady. While the world is heating up, land warms quickly and is out of sync with the oceans. In the transient 1.5 °C world, the continental land regions are warmer than they would be in a quasi-equilibrium 2 °C world. It's different for the slow warming oceans. With slow-warming ocean areas, the transient 2 °C world is cooler than the quasi-equilibrium 1.5 °C world.
The impact is illustrated below. The maps show the difference in temperature between transient warming and how warm it would be in a stable climate. Some of the oceans are cooler while most of the land is warmer in the transient climate compared to a climate at equilibrium.
Move the arrow to the right to see what happens in June to August and in the December to February period.
Figure 1 | Transient minus quasi-equilibrium difference. In a transient climate, where the world is rapidly warming, land areas are warmer and ocean areas cooler than in a stabilised climate. These two figures shows the pattern of temperature difference between a transient scenario relative to an equilibrium climate for both the June-August period (l) and December-February period (r). Data source: Article by Dr Andrew King in Pursuit (The University of Melbourne)
More heat waves and hot seasons as the world warms
The research also indicates that there'll be a lot more severe heat events while the world is heating up than there will be after some sort of steady state temperature is reached. Where a hot season may be a one-in-ten year event in a quasi-equilibrium climate, in a transient climate this could be a one-in-five year event.
From the paper (my para break):
This is particularly true in boreal summer where, for almost all land regions of the world, the likelihood of a hot season is significantly higher in a transient climate compared with the equivalent quasi-equilibrium state. Regions with at least a doubling in the probability of hot summers in a transient climate compared with a quasi-equilibrium world of equivalent global warming encompass major cities including New York City, Istanbul, Baghdad, Seoul and Tokyo.
Although this is a global-scale analysis, one could infer that for these densely populated locations, the heat-related impacts of human-induced climate change would be lessened in a stabilized climate compared with a rapidly warming climate at the same level of global warming.
It's the coming generations who'll be hardest hit
Think what that means while global heating continues. If it keeps warming as it has, then the land will warm up faster, there will be more and worse heat waves, more severe fires, worse droughts etc. After the new climate approaches equilibrium, things should settle down a bit. The biggest upheaval will be during the transition. If society can survive that, generations far into the future will have a fighting chance.
This is an important piece of work because policy and planning people need to think about what's going to happen in their region over coming decades. If they merely focus on the likely scenario should the global temperature stabilise at 1.5 °C, 2 °C, 3 °C and hotter, they'll not be prepared for what happens along the way. Like the Australian Government this year, countries could be woefully unprepared for the changes to come during the transition to a new climate equilibrium.
The only comment I'll add is that the researchers discussed 1.5 °C and 2 °C. The world has not yet taken sufficient action to limit warming to 2 °C. We are still heading for 3 °C and hotter over the coming decades. It's time to take action and slow things down to limit the number and frequency of worse disasters than the ones we're now experiencing.
References and further reading
King, Andrew D., Todd P. Lane, Benjamin J. Henley, and Josephine R. Brown. "Global and regional impacts differ between transient and equilibrium warmer worlds." Nature Climate Change 10, no. 1 (2020): 42-47. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-019-0658-7
- How fast the planet warms will be crucial for liveability - article by the lead author, Andrew King, about the paper in Pursuit (The University of Melbourne)
Neal Ascherson
Democratic Left Scotland, n.d. (2018)
This is an odd pamphlet which is well worth getting. Some day it'll be a collector's item. It's well-produced on glossy paper, with a striking cover and, inside, a fine reproduction of the portrait whose gift and sitter the pamphlet celebrates. In these pages three big names meet: the author Neal Ascherson, the subject Tom Nairn, and the painter, Sandy Moffat. It has already been reviewed, briefly and enthusiastically by Davie Laing, and lengthily and discursively by Rory Scothorne. There's no need for me to review it here, inevitable quibbles though I may have - I can only recommend it, as a small piece of history, and a useful summary of an argument that is still influencing that history.
The title, apt as the pun on 'painting' no doubt was for the occasion, does less than justice to the content: a concise intellectual biography of Nairn by the journalist who did a great deal to make his ideas part of common sense. Ascherson saw Scotland in an international context provided by his own wide-ranging life; Nairn's intellectual formation was likewise cosmopolitan; and for both Scotland was key to dismantling the 'archaic' structures of the British state.
The pamphlet can be obtained by sending a cheque for £4 (10% discount for orders of 10 or more) to:
Democratic Left Scotland,
9 MacAulay Street, Dundee DD3 6JT
If the archaic structures of 'cheque' and 'post' are too constraining, you can always enquire of the publisher by telephony and the interwebs:
Telephone 07826 488492
Email stuartfairweather [at] ymail [dot] com
I don't have time to go into her "arguments" in detail. Suffice to say she seems to be hanging on to the failed "stadium wave" theory and has maybe tossed in a few other ideas as well such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation flavoured with a smidgen of "it's the sun".
Judith has put up three options for the temperature change over the next 30 years: warmest +0.7C, moderate +0.11C and coldest -0.5C.
What I will do is what she hasn't (for reasons that seem obvious to me). I'll put up some charts showing her guesses. I can't tell from her post what she's used as a baseline, so I've taken it as the average global surface temperature for 2019. I've also made the assumption her predicted change relates to the last year of the prediction. That is, her prediction of 0.5 cooling is that in 2050 the average global surface temperature will be 0.5C colder than it was last year.
I've simplified the predictions by assuming a steady change from 2019 to the final temperature predicted, based on the above.
The charts are below. Not up to my usual standard with captions and labels, as I've not got time for that. Each chart shows the actual mean global surface temperature to 2019 based on NASA GISTEMP and is in Celsius.
First, the annual temperatures, with Judith's predictions. This chart also shows the linear trend line from mid-1970s to 2019 i.e. from the most recent change in trend to the present (0.19 C per decade).
Next her "warmest" prediction, as a decadal chart:
The "moderate" prediction as a decadal chart:
And the "coldest" prediction as a decadal chart:
If you're wondering why the next decade in all of them is warmer than the previous actual, it's because of averaging over the decades and the fact I've assumed a steady change with Judith's predictions.
Feel free to add your two bobs worth in the comments.
Scott Hames
Edinburgh University Press, 2020
How well I remember Scotland in the 1980s! Scunnered by the failure of even a majority vote to establish a Scottish Assembly, snookered by the Cunningham Amendment, gubbed in the first round of the World Cup, gutted and filleted by Thatcherism, disillusioned by repeatedly voting Labour and getting Tory ... only the writers and artists remained standing, to produce a body of self-confident work that firmly established the nation on the global cultural map. Together with dedicated political and civic activists they in due course lifted its spirits to the heights of gaining its own Parliament. They accomplished a devolution - or independence -- of the mind and heart, well in advance of its political achievement.
I remember it like this, of course, because I wasn't there. I was in London, reading all about it in the columns of Neal Ascherson and the volumes of Tom Nairn. Now and again I'd browse a journal or pamphlet from the Scottish literary or political edge. Scotland from afar seemed to have a more democratic, more socialist and more egalitarian spirit than England - particularly the South- East of England - and this consciousness showed through in the culture it had inherited as much as in the culture it now produced. And since I moved back in the early 1990s, the same story has become received wisdom, not least among writers and artists.
According to Scott Hames's new book, the real story is a bit more complicated than that. So much more complicated, indeed, that it's hard to summarise. If he's missed a magazine, a literary feud, a Commission or a Report, it's not for want of looking. The discussion is sometimes dry, the narrative always engaging. The savagery of the spats he disinters from the archival peat-bog is eye-opening. Hames contrasts 'The Dream' of literary nationalism with 'The Grind' of political procedure (characterised in this case more by friction than motion). Two features stand out, all the more because in retrospect they're often overlooked. The first is how radical an aim devolution seemed, and how bright it shone in the literary imagination. The second is how conservative - how conserving -- a manoeuvre its implementation was, driven far more by the need of the British state and the Labour Party to 'manage national feeling' than by the SNP, whose votes were read as fever-chart symptom rather than political challenge.
In focusing on the cultural and the political, Hames avowedly and explicitly omits the economic and the social. This is fair enough in its own terms, but it's liable to leave the reader's inner vulgar Marxist - if they, like me, they have one -- sputtering. The oversight, if we can call it that, is overcompensated in the novel whose analysis gets a chapter to itself: James Robertson's And the Land Lay Still. It's the most ambitious Scottish realist novel for decades, grand in scale and scope and an immersive read. Ranging from the late 1940s to the early 21st Century, the novel interweaves family sagas and stories of personal individuation with political and parapolitical history to tell one overarching epic: the growth of national consciousness.
And therein lies one problem with it. It's as if at the back of every honest, decent Scot's mind is a relentless yammer of 'You Yes Yet?' Older generations are permitted to die in the old dispensation, shriven by their invincible ignorance, but those who live in the light of the new have no excuse. If they step off the path to nationhood they sink in the slough of self-loathing - as the two major pro-Union characters, an alcoholic police spy and a Tory MP undone by a secret fetish, in the end do.
Robertson conducts a large and varied cast through a long time and a complex plot with great skill to a most satisfactory click of closure. But, Hames argues, the difficulty of integrating the characters' lives with a political history that mostly consisted of tiny conventicles and ceilidhs in literally smoke-filled rooms and debates in widely unread periodicals, and that now and then took public form as 'set-piece' events in parliaments and streets, can defeat even the best novelist - even though Robertson was himself on those marches and in those rooms. It's a problem familiar in science fiction: one reviewer cited refers to Robertson's 'info-dumping', a term from the lexicon of SF criticism.
Hames's final chapters deal with Scots, the language, in relation to Scots, the people - and 'people' too is ambiguous, referring as it can to the nation as a whole or to 'the people' as opposed to the elite. Here Scots is an abrasion almost as raw as Gaelic, and more widely felt. At the risk of rubbing it, here's how it went. Centuries ago, Scots was an official language, known as Inglis. It was used at Court and in courts, in poetry and prose. For readers outwith Scotland, you wrote in Latin like any other literate European. After the Union of the Crowns and the Treaty of Union, the United Kingdom conquered a third of the world, and English replaced Latin as the de facto lingua franca. Scots was pushed out of administrative, then everyday upper-and-middle-class speech. Its several dialects became the language of the working poor of town and country. (Except in the Highlands, where the people were schooled and regimented straight from Gaelic into Standard English, which of course they spoke in their own distinct way.)
In the first Scottish literary renaissance, MacDiarmid and others sought to revive Scots as a national language, which they called Lallans or (because of the fusion of Scots dialects) 'Synthetic Scots'. This produced some great poems, but in polemic and reportage it can come across as as affectation. Fights between the Lallans-scrievin old guard and the younger, more outward-facing literary intelligentsia flared in the 1960s and 1970s. But some new writers found another aspect of the language question, and one that far from being esoteric was central to everyday life, at least in the Central Belt. Modern vernacular Scots is different enough even from Scottish Standard English to separate the home and the school, the working class and the middle class. That difference could literally hurt, could smart and bruise, from the classroom tawse and the playground clout. At the same time, and very much as part of what Nairn excoriated as the conservative 'tartanry' of the proud Scot, the Scots language appeared in print as a quaint rustic dialect, in English spelling spattered with apostrophes, from Burns Night to the Broons patronised to within an inch of its life.
Now here I do remember personally, from the 1970s. Seeing for the first time urban West of Scotland demotic speech rendered phonetically in print, in Lament for a Lost Dinner Ticket by Margaret Hamilton, and 'Six Glasgow Poems' in Tom Leonard's Poems (1973), was a mental liberation. Almost as much, for me, as seeing for the first time Highland English dialogue accurately conveyed, in the children's novels of Allan Campbell McLean. The release came from not being patronised or mocked. Only that!
Not a lot to ask, you might think, but this modest request was seldom met with comprehension, let alone satisfaction. As an issue with which to elide class hurt with national grievance, it packed a wallop. But only, or mainly, on the individual level. In a country and at a time where upward social mobility is closely connected with further education and a change in language, the typical agonies of the intellectual of working-class origin growing away from their roots and the socialist of middle-class origin separated by accent and vocabulary from the class they most wish to speak to (or, problematically, for) are widespread enough to make these private pains a social force.
Scotland's peculiar development, however, has meant that Scots has very little chance of becoming the national language. Stranger things have happened, but... Naw. More likely, and well under way, is its official celebration as one of several languages spoken in Scotland. This provides gainful employment to some, and bewilderment to schoolchildren who speak what they think is English, but which they are now taught (in English) is another language, Scots.
As Hames suggests, this linguistic and social devolution within the devolved polity serves to defuse any class and national charge that spoken Scots still has, and offers its speakers symbolic representation in the place of - or at least, quite independently of - any actual power. The identity politics of a section of the working class is assimilated to the identity politics of the nation, to which its characteristic manner of speech is supposed to lend authentic voice. What this contributes to the material condition, let alone the social and political self-confidence, of the working class within Scotland is another matter entirely. All those years after Trainspotting, it's still shite being Scottish.
Like the devolution settlement as a whole, this uneasy arrangement leaves a lot of unfinished business. Looking back on the Scottish 1980s that I saw only from a safe distance, I have a wry suspicion that somebody was running a Gramscian strategy through those smoke-filled rooms. That self-effacing Modern Prince has yet to have their share of glory. Be that as it may, the smoke-free Scotland of 2020 cries out for an analysis of likewise Gramscian canniness. Scott Hames's book is avowedly not it, but points towards that, and beyond to an unknown 'utopian' future wherein we speak for ourselves.
Views: 73
For years — actually for decades — those of us in the Computer Science community who study election systems have with almost total unanimity warned against the rise of electronic voting, Internet voting, and more recently smartphone/app-based voting systems. I and my colleagues have written and spoken on this topic many times. Has anyone really been listening? Apparently very few!
We have pointed out repeatedly the fundamental problems that render high-tech election systems untrustworthy — much as “backdoors” to strong encryption systems are flawed at foundational levels.
Without a rigorous “paper trail” to backup electronic votes, knowing for sure when an election has been hacked is technically impossible. Even with a paper trail, getting authorities to use it can be enormously challenging. Hacking contests against proposed e-voting systems are generally of little value, since the most dangerous attackers won’t participate in those — they’ll wait for the real elections to do their undetectable damage!
Of course it doesn’t help when the underlying voting models are just this side of insane. Iowa’s caucuses have become a confused mess on every level. Caucuses throughout the U.S. should have been abandoned years ago. They disenfranchise large segments of the voting population who don’t have the ability to spend so much time engaged in a process that can take hours rather than a few minutes to cast their votes. Not only should the Democratic party have eliminated caucuses, it should no longer permit tiny states whose demographics are wholly unrepresentative of the party — and of the country as a whole — to be so early in the primary process.
In the case of Iowa (and it would have been Nevada too, but they’ve reportedly abandoned plans to use the same flawed app) individual voters weren’t using their smartphones to vote, but caucus locations — almost 1700 of them in Iowa — were supposed to use the app (that melted down) to report their results. And of course the voice phone call system that was designated to be the reporting backup — the way these reports had traditionally been made — collapsed under the strain when the app-based system failed.
Some areas in the U.S. are already experimenting with letting larger and larger numbers of individual voters use their smartphones and apps to vote. It seems so obvious. So simple. They just can’t resist. And they’re driving their elections at 100 miles an hour right toward a massive brick wall.
Imagine — just imagine! — what the reactions would be during a national election if problems like Iowa’s occurred then on a much larger scale, especially given today’s toxic conspiracy theories environment.
It would be a nuclear dumpster fire of unimaginable proportions. The election results would be tied up in courts for days, weeks, months — who knows?
We can’t take that kind of risk. Or if we do, we’re idiots and deserve the disaster that is likely to result.
Make your choice.
–Lauren–
Not that I’m a fan of Trump, but the move to establish a US Space Force caught my attention. There are two points of interest. The lesser one is what apparently happened. Of greater interest to me is how someone could use it in military science fiction, and what it might say about the future of space warfare. And space cadets. What apparently happened, and why the democrats agreed to founding the USSF. Here’s ye olde Wikipedia page on the USSF, and if you dig into the details it’s a bit less revolutionary or boondoggle-y than one might first guess. There were two things going on for the last I-don’t-know-how-many-decades (six decades?). The bigger fight was the perennial one in the US Department of Defense, over which branch of the military got to control which resource. The related fight, within the US Air Force, was how many resources went into their space division, versus resources to pilots and planes.
I got a peanut gallery seat, because in San Diego, right next to the I-5 freeway on the way into downtown, is this huge Navy building prominently labeled “SPAWAR.” I’d always assumed that, in addition to running the Navy’s program on using dolphins and sea lions as patrol animals (among other things), it held some important chunk of the Navy’s space warfare command. And it did, until June 2019, when it pivoted into Informational Warfare. Long story short, the fight over whether each service had its own space arm, or whether one service got to bogart the satellites (so to speak) was finally settled (for now!) in favor of the US Air Force becoming the US Air and Space Force in all but name.
Trouble is, the satellite intelligence Force of the USAF was apparently not getting sufficiently funded, presumably because jet pilots are cool while others drool, and more importantly, because fraternal funding battles are where the echelons above reality get their combat experience and promotions. Anyway, long story short, the funding and independence battle between air pilots and space cadets had been going on for decades, and in 2019 the solution (first proposed in the early 2000s) was to split of the space wing of the USAF into a semi-separate US Space Force which would run the military’s space efforts. However, the USSF is under the Secretary of the Air Force, just as the US Marine Corps is under the Secretary of the Navy. So the USSF is a separate force, but not very separate just yet. I suspect the cadets in Colorado Springs who go in for the new BS in Space Operations are going to get heartily sick of the “space cadet” label.
So that’s the US Space Force. It’s not boots in the sky just yet (or weapons deployed in space). Right now it’s about flying satellites and doing things with them. This IS a critical part of the US military, regardless of whether there are weapons up there or not, so I’m actually okay with them being their own force.
The fun part is going forward, what this means for science fiction, specifically the military culture of space. To begin with, although I only watched a few episodes of Stargate, I’m perfectly aware that the USAF already has been represented in milSF quite successfully (for those who don’t know, the Stargate of the series was run by the US Air Force, who apparently cheerfully cooperated with the filming of the series). While I’m not a military SF expert, my major exposure has been to a certain Honor Harrington, whose military is based rather more on the British Royal Navy of centuries past. Basing a military SF story on the memes swiped modern USSF will be *extremely* different than something aping the Honorverse, possibly in useful ways.
Let’s start with the parameters of space warfare. Assuming interstellar spaceships are possible, and especially assuming FTL is possible, how do you shoot at a spaceship? It’s moving far too rapidly for a human to perceive, and probably far too small to see due to extreme distances. Star Wars and kin notwithstanding. bodies in space normally move 1-2 orders of magnitude faster than a bullet, so in real life, you don’t hit them by firing guns at them. At best we’re looking at machines firing lasers or missiles at each other and maybe occasionally hitting, sort of like WW 1 torpedoes. The idea of Cpl Luke or MSgt Han swinging a gun, acquiring a target, and hitting with the shot is orders of magnitude too slow.
Anyway, that’s space warfare interpreted as conventional warfare, 20th Century style. And it works in stories. David Weber, to his great credit, made a lot of fun and profit in the Honorverse, through making space naval broadsides cool again.
However, we’re in the 21st Century, and hybrid warfare is the thing these days, rather than battleships or even aircraft carriers. Can you destroy a starship with physical sabotage, cyber warfare, or social hacking? Why yes, yes you can. The speed of the spaceship is not only irrelevant to such attacks, it actually makes sabotage more dangerous and harder to detect in the resulting debris field. And not so oddly, the USSF strongly appears to be a hybrid warfare force. It’s lack of guns in space may be completely irrelevant to its legitimacy or even its deadliness.
If someone wants to do military SF about interstellar warfare now, it is, yes, possible, to unlimber the gimbal-mounted laser cannon and go pew pew pew, as has been done for over 40 years. Or you can create a universe where starships in full flight are moving too fast to hit with anything except maybe an exceptionally lucky shot with a laser, or perhaps a really well guided, really expensive rocket (and even then, the chance of a hit is fairly abysmal, considering how much the munition costs to launch). Therefore, if you want to wage successful warfare against an enemy starship in flight, you attack when they’re in orbit around planets (moving slower in predictable paths) or on the ground. Or you attempt to hack them, boobytrap the information going into, and hack the social networks running the ship, using every weakness you can find about the crew. Countering such attacks, as we know now, is hard. It also can make for interesting storytelling. Is someone aboard ship a mole, a kamikaze saboteur, or just cracking slightly faster than everyone else under an unending bombardment of psychological warfare? Therein lies part of a story.
There are parallels in older science fiction. Here, I’m thinking particularly of James Schmitz and his psionics. I suspect one can draw memes from Schmitz’s psionics stories and repurpose them to our emergent AI era, where you can use big data and machine learning to get inside someone’s skull almost as effectively as a budding telepath could. Perhaps not so oddly, Schmitz served during WW2 in the US Army Air Corps, the predecessor to the USAF.
Then there’s the whole military culture thing. I’m not a veteran, but I do like to read, and one of the books I’ve reread several times is Carl Builder’s 1989 The Masks of War: American Military Style in Strategy and Analysis. It’s obviously a bit obsolete, but it’s still relevant, because it talks about the different ways the Navy, Army, and Air Force go about dealing with reality. For universe building it’s a worthwhile read, combined of course with other, more modern sources (I’d suggest Chris Hadfield’s An Astronaut’s Guide to Life On Earth for one)
For example, SF traditionally has space admirals, because space ships are independent commands like ships, and…But that’s not how the Generals of the Space Force would work, if you believe Masks of War. They’re less about crusty tradition, and far more about technological superiority, creating doctrine to implement long-term strategies, and using technical analyses to inform their opinions (I don’t think they’ll ever just trust their feelings, whether the Force is strong in them or not). If this sounds like corporate America, Builder noted the similarity.
As an example of the cultural difference, US naval aviators identify as Navy officers first, pilots second, while an Air Force aviators identify themselves by the kinds of planes they fly. It’s a different mindset, and it leads to a different culture of warfare. Again, you can see this a bit in Schmitz’s writing, where battles are often less about naval engagements in space, and more about quick shoot-outs using highest tech guns, with a large side order of skullduggery.
Incidentally, that skullduggery has historical roots. If I remember correctly, CIA officers who were required to be military officers often got themselves commissioned in the Air Force rather than the other services, and there’s currently a big overlap between the US Space Force and the “civilian” (hah!) National Reconnaissance Office, which does US satellite espionage. The USAF and the black world of clandestine military activity have been closely associated for a very long time.
I could certainly go on, but if you’re interested in writing military SF, or even writing SF stories about interstellar flight, it’s worth taking a long, even sidelong look, at this new US Space Force and seeing whether the difference sparks your creativity. Yes, you can still go from windjammers to sunjammers if you must (with space marines doing drops instead of landing on beaches! And crusty admiralty politics among the Lords of Space!). But if you want to be new and different, maybe get into mind-hacking in space and starship sabotage, and see where that leads you. If you’re writing your ToE chart, instead of having the captain of the starship reporting to a commodore or the space admiralty, you might, alternatively have the captain of a flight (in USAF terminology, about 100 people, or 3-4 craft, perhaps a starship and attached drone crews) reporting to a lieutenant colonel running the squadron, who in turn reports to the colonel running the wing (in increasing size), who in turn reports to a general running the numbered space force . And that’s just a trivial example.
Yes, yes, I know the USSF is really just a boondoggle. Nothing here to see at all. Whatever. I figure it’s grist for the mill, and if it doesn’t fight, maybe it will still inspire something fun to read.
What did I miss?
By now, you have almost certainly heard of the dark web. On sites unlisted by any search engine, in forums that cannot be accessed without special passwords or protocols, criminals and terrorists meet to discuss conspiracy theories and trade child pornography.
We have reported before on the dark web's "hurtcore" communities, its human trafficking markets, its rent-a-hitman websites. We have explored the challenges the dark web presents to regulators, the rise of dark web revenge porn, and the frightening size of the dark web gun trade. We have kept you informed about that one dark web forum where you can make like Walter White and learn how to manufacture your own drugs, and also about—thanks to our foreign correspondent—the Chinese dark web. We have even attempted to catalog every single location on the dark web. Our coverage of the dark web has been nothing if not comprehensive.
But I wanted to go deeper.
We know that below the surface web is the deep web, and below the deep web is the dark web. It stands to reason that below the dark web there should be a deeper, darker web.
A month ago, I set out to find it. Unsure where to start, I made a post on Reddit, a website frequented primarily by cosplayers and computer enthusiasts. I asked for a guide, a Styx ferryman to bear me across to the mythical underworld I sought to visit.
Only minutes after I made my post, I received a private message. "If you want to see it, I'll take you there," wrote Reddit user FingerMyKumquat. "But I'll warn you just once—it's not pretty to see."
Getting AccessThis would not be like visiting Amazon to shop for toilet paper. I could not just enter an address into the address bar of my browser and hit go. In fact, as my Charon informed me, where we were going, there are no addresses. At least, no web addresses.
But where exactly were we going? The answer: Back in time. The deepest layer of the internet is also the oldest. Down at this deepest layer exists a secret society of "bulletin board systems," a network of underground meetinghouses that in some cases have been in continuous operation since the 1980s—since before Facebook, before Google, before even stupidvideos.com.
To begin, I needed to download software that could handle the ancient protocols used to connect to the meetinghouses. I was told that bulletin board systems today use an obsolete military protocol called Telnet. Once upon a time, though, they operated over the phone lines. To connect to a system back then you had to dial its phone number.
The software I needed was called SyncTerm. It was not available on the App Store. In order to install it, I had to compile it. This is a major barrier to entry, I am told, even to veteran computer programmers.
When I had finally installed SyncTerm, my guide said he needed to populate my directory. I asked what that was a euphemism for, but was told it was not a euphemism. Down this far, there are no search engines, so you can only visit the bulletin board systems you know how to contact. My directory was the list of bulletin board systems I would be able to contact. My guide set me up with just seven, which he said would be more than enough.
More than enough for what, I wondered. Was I really prepared to go deeper than the dark web? Was I ready to look through this window into the black abyss of the human soul?
The vivid blue interface of SyncTerm. My directory of BBSes on the left.
I decided first to visit the bulletin board system called "Heatwave," which I imagined must be a hangout for global warming survivalists. I "dialed" in. The next thing I knew, I was being asked if I wanted to create a user account. I had to be careful to pick an alias that would be inconspicuous in this sub-basement of the internet. I considered "DonPablo," and "z3r0day," but finally chose "ripper"—a name I could remember because it is also the name of my great-aunt Meredith's Shih Tzu. I was then asked where I was dialing from; I decided "xxx" was the right amount of enigmatic.
And then—I was in. Curtains of fire rolled down my screen and dispersed, revealing the main menu of the Heatwave bulletin board system.
The main menu of the Heatwave BBS.
I had been told that even in the glory days of bulletin board systems, before the rise of the world wide web, a large system would only have several hundred users or so. Many systems were more exclusive, and most served only users in a single telephone area code. But how many users dialed the "Heatwave" today? There was a main menu option that read "(L)ast Few Callers," so I hit "L" on my keyboard.
My screen slowly filled with a large table, listing all of the system's "callers" over the last few days. Who were these shadowy outcasts, these expert hackers, these denizens of the digital demimonde? My eyes scanned down the list, and what I saw at first confused me: There was a "Dan," calling from St. Louis, MO. There was also a "Greg Miller," calling from Portland, OR. Another caller claimed he was "George" calling from Campellsburg, KY. Most of the entries were like that.
It was a joke, of course. A meme, a troll. It was normcore fashion in noms de guerre. These were thrill-seeking Palo Alto adolescents on Adderall making fun of the surface web. They weren't fooling me.
I wanted to know what they talked about with each other. What cryptic colloquies took place here, so far from public scrutiny? My index finger, with ever so slight a tremble, hit "M" for "(M)essage Areas."
Here, I was presented with a choice. I could enter the area reserved for discussions about "T-99 and Geneve," which I did not dare do, not knowing what that could possibly mean. I could also enter the area for discussions about "Other," which seemed like a safe place to start.
The system showed me message after message. There was advice about how to correctly operate a leaf-blower, as well as a protracted debate about the depth of the Strait of Hormuz relative to the draft of an aircraft carrier. I assumed the real messages were further on, and indeed I soon spotted what I was looking for. The user "Kevin" was complaining to other users about the side effects of a drug called Remicade. This was not a drug I had heard of before. Was it some powerful new synthetic stimulant? A cocktail of other recreational drugs? Was it something I could bring with me to impress people at the next VICE holiday party?
I googled it. Remicade is used to treat rheumatoid arthritis and Crohn's disease.
In reply to the original message, there was some further discussion about high resting heart rates and mechanical heart valves. I decided that I had gotten lost and needed to contact FingerMyKumquat. "Finger," I messaged him, "What is this shit I'm looking at here? I want the real stuff. I want blackmail and beheadings. Show me the scum of the earth!"
"Perhaps you're ready for the SpookNet," he wrote back.
SpookNetEach bulletin board system is an island in the television-static ocean of the digital world. Each system's callers are lonely sailors come into port after many a month plying the seas.
But the bulletin board systems are not entirely disconnected. Faint phosphorescent filaments stretch between the islands, links in the special-purpose networks that were constructed—before the widespread availability of the internet—to propagate messages from one system to another.
One such network is the SpookNet. Not every bulletin board system is connected to the SpookNet. To get on, I first had to dial "Reality Check."
The Reality Check BBS.
Once I was in, I navigated my way past the main menu and through the SpookNet gateway. What I saw then was like a catalog index for everything stored in that secret Pentagon warehouse from the end of the X-Files pilot. There were message boards dedicated to UFOs, to cryptography, to paranormal studies, and to "End Times and the Last Days." There was a board for discussing "Truth, Polygraphs, and Serums," and another for discussing "Silencers of Information." Here, surely, I would find something worth writing about in an article for VICE.
I browsed and I browsed. I learned about which UFO documentaries are worth watching on Netflix. I learned that "paper mill" is a derogatory term used in the intelligence community (IC) to describe individuals known for constantly trying to sell "explosive" or "sensitive" documents—as in the sentence, offered as an example by one SpookNet user, "Damn, here comes that paper mill Juan again." I learned that there was an effort afoot to get two-factor authentication working for bulletin board systems.
"These are just a bunch of normal losers," I finally messaged my guide. "Mostly they complain about anti-vaxxers and verses from the Quran. This is just Reddit!"
"Huh," he replied. "When you said 'scum of the earth,' did you mean something else?"
I had one last idea. In their heyday, bulletin board systems were infamous for being where everyone went to download illegal, cracked computer software. An entire subculture evolved, with gangs of software pirates competing to be the first to crack a new release. The first gang to crack the new software would post their "warez" for download along with a custom piece of artwork made using lo-fi ANSI graphics, which served to identify the crack as their own.
I wondered if there were any old warez to be found on the Reality Check BBS. I backed out of the SpookNet gateway and keyed my way to the downloads area. There were many files on offer there, but one in particular caught my attention: a 5.3 megabyte file just called "GREY."
I downloaded it. It was a complete PDF copy of E. L. James' 50 Shades of Grey.
If you enjoyed this post, more like it come out every four weeks! Follow @TwoBitHistory on Twitter or subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you know when a new post is out.
Previously on TwoBitHistory…
I first heard about the FOAF (Friend of a Friend) standard back when I wrote my post about the Semantic Web. I thought it was a really interesting take on social networking and I've wanted to write about it since. Finally got around to it!https://t.co/VNwT8wgH8j
— TwoBitHistory (@TwoBitHistory) January 5, 2020
Welcome to Scarfolk... [ 31-Jan-20 8:34am ]
NHS Face Removals (1977- ) [ 30-Jan-20 2:55pm ]
While some children were born without faces simply because they didn't deserve them (see the Scarfolk Annual 197X), the government became increasingly concerned about citizens who did have them. They found that people with faces are more likely to have personal desires, hopes and dreams, in short: a will and ideas of their own.
Such idiosyncrasies were not only thought of as needlessly self-indulgent, they were also deemed inconsistent with the smooth running of a successful society. Scarfolk's was the first council benevolent enough to offer face removals on the NHS.
In 1976, the council trialled face removals on stray foreigners, prisoners, children nobody wanted, unsuspecting people who were picked up leisurely walking in a park after sundown and volunteers (see leaflet above).
When the full scheme was rolled out in 1977, the council soon lost track of which faceless citizen was which. By 1978 a new law was passed which dictated that all faceless people were required to have a tattoo of their old face over their lost one to make identification easier.
