POD PEOPLE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 366/ 05 Jan 2025 03:05

It’s January, when columnists feel obliged to reflect on the past year and who am I to refuse, though I’ll try to be different by not saying that 2024 was the year of AI. Instead I’m going to say that for me it was the year of the podcast. That’s partly because I got exposed to AI rather early via Stable Diffusion in 2022, and was bored stiff by the end of 2023. But it’s also because online services that had kept me amused for years, like FaceBook and YouTube, started sliding down a sloppily slippery slope into irrelevance during 2024. Feeds filled up with unwanted sponsored guff and AI-generated fluff, real friends abandoned platforms to be replaced by reels and clickbait that spread like digital cockroaches. In response I began to view more podcasts. 

Just as reels were shrinking down to 30 seconds of inane pointlessness, podcasts started expanding into 3-hour epics. Of course our own excellent PC Pro podcasts, crafted by Barry, Tim, Jon, Lee and Rois, adopt a manageable one hour format, probably the optimum length for normal attention spans, but several other podcasts I consume started at that length then got carried away. Back in 2023 an old friend recommended an article about The Velvet Underground, of special interest to me as the first piece I ever had published was about my experience of working at Max’s in New York in 1970 while they were the house band. This piece was on a podcast called “A History Of Rock Music In 500 Songs” by Andrew Hickey, and it was three hours long… 

Rather to my surprise I listened to all of it and was riveted: Hickey’s taste, depth of research, even his bluff Mancunian accent kept me enthralled. This episode on “White Light/White Heat” was only number 164 of the 500 he plans, in chronological order, but I was hooked and started listening from the beginning – number 1 was on Benny Goodman Sextet’s 1939 “Flying Home”, the first record with electric guitar, played by Charlie Christian. Andrew’s early episodes ran around 30 minutes, soon zoomed past the hour and now are regularly split into two or more parts – as for example The Beatles and Rolling Stones – reaching three hours plus. Thanks to his immense research efforts they remain quite engrossing. He’s now at episode 177 and intends to finish with a song from 1999 (which may take another 25 years at his current delivery rate). 

Another mega-podcast I’ve listened to all through is Paul Cooper’s superb “Fall Of Civilisations” about the rise and fall of empires throughout human history. He has an advantage over Andrew Hickey in that they’re fewer of them, mostly long in the past, and he’s covered most of them in 19 episodes. While not an academic historian, Cooper like Hickey has invested huge research effort and is an excellent presenter, making every episode informative and exciting without resorting to sensationalism. Some online niggling about historical accuracy is only to be expected, but his interpretations are largely convincing, not grossly ideological biassed, and the video version of the podcast (free on YouTube) illustrates his arguments with a well-curated montage of photographic, film and literary evidence on par with the work of Adam Curtis. Turns out that my favourite dead empires were the Nabataean and the Pagan.

Cooper’s series, available in both audio and video, raises the question of when is a podcast actually a vlog, but I don’t much care. Among my favourites is a series of 80+ YouTube interviews with living musicians by the veteran jazz guitarist and producer Rick Beato, which is probably neither or both but his interview with Rick Rubin is priceless.  

Have I ever podcasted myself? Only once because I don’t much like the sound of my own voice. It happened this way: in 1990 my brother-in-law Pip Hills and I took a road trip to Prague in his 1937 Lagonda saloon to witness Václav Havel’s inauguration as president of the Czech Republic. Following this trip another friend, Mark Williams, commissioned us to write about it for his magazine The Classic Motoring Review and subsequently the Scotch Malt Whisky Society, which Pip had founded in 1983, asked to reprint our article in their magazine and accompany it with a podcast. I charily agreed, and since I don’t possess a professional-grade microphone let alone a studio, performed my part over my Chromebook’s mic, using an audio editor called Lexis (my Android replacement for the wonderful Audacity with which I had 20 years of experience). I managed a usable take after two attempts, even including a snatch of music by Smetana at a pivotal point. Judge for yourself from the link below whether a career in voice-overs beckons…

[Dick Pountain’s Prague trip podcast is at https://unfiltered.smws.com/unfiltered-01-2024/smws-adventures-prague]

TRUMP OF DOOM?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 365/ 09 Dec 2024 10:48

I’ve been writing this column for over 30 years, during most of which I’ve deliberately tried to keep my political opinions out of it, apart from the occasional nod and wink about my lack of faith in free-market dogmas. However there are, very occasionally, world-historic events of such importance that to avoid mentioning them would be a sign of ignorance and cowardice. The last such event was the destruction of the World Trade Centre on the 11th of September 2001, and I did permit myself a column on that. Well, to me the re-election of Donald Trump on 6th November 2024 is another such event. 

I have of course been commenting on the rising power of Silicon Valley moguls – corporations like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, eBay, HP, Twitter and more – who built the industry whose products we document in this magazine. And during those whole 30 years I was writing under an unspoken assumption that these moguls, having emerged from the post-1960s counterculture, were fundamentally inclined toward ‘liberal’ (in the American sense) values. The two Steves Jobs and Wozniac were once ‘blue box’ phone phreaks, Google was started by two Stanford students in a friend’s garage under the motto ‘Don’t Be Evil’. And in the interest of full disclosure, PC Pro itself was created by a company founded by Felix Dennis, once editor of Oz magazine on which I too worked. 

In order to remain neutral, over the last couple of years I’ve refrained from expressing alarm as it became clearer that my assumption was being overturned. It started to look really shaky when Elon Musk, owner of Tesla, bought Twitter and proceeded to corrupt it from a vital news conduit for journalists of all persuasions into X, a conduit for previously-banned hate speech and pro-Trump propaganda. Then a week or so before the November election Musk came out for Trump and appeared prancing on platforms with him. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post as well as Amazon, forbade its editors to endorse any candidate, while Mark Zuckerberg announced he’d made a “20-year mistake” and “political miscalculation” (coded language for dumping the Dems). 

What has induced such a hand-brake turn in these billionaires’ opinions? A stock price rally following Trump’s victory increased their collective fortunes by $64 billion overnight but that’s merely chump change: Musk spent $250 million to finance Trump’s election campaign, a sum he earns every 15 minutes. Trump is promising to oppose internet regulation and prosecute journalists who investigate or criticise too much, but I think even those aren’t sufficient bait. These moguls already had everything except power to rule, which is now on offer.

The other promise Trump makes is to dump the Democrats’ (already feeble) policies toward climate change mitigation, turning the USA away from the Paris Agreement and Net Zero. This very well suits a second generation of moguls – the AI barons. My own attitude to AI has changed somewhat over the last few years. I’ve been sceptical of earlier claims that silicon tech will soon produce intelligence equivalent to or greater than humans, a goal now renamed a AGI, but I’m enormously impressed by the strides made in language and perceptual processing (I did after all let ChatGPT write a guest column for me). 

Three AI problems are rapidly becoming visible. The first is that those who really know (as opposed to simply hyping a stock-price bubble) are  as sceptical as I am about whether merely adding more GPU and training data will push GPTs across into AGI: there are already signs of plateauing or even degeneration through data pollution. A second problem is the absurd, even obscene, amount of electrical power consumed by the huge processing arrays that support the current generative AI models. Pronouncements from OpenAI about their future energy needs are beginning to sound frankly deranged – restart old nuclear power stations to marginally improve AI services which are, let’s face it, really only souped up search engines rather than solutions to any physical-world problems. Building a new clean energy infrastructure to mangle words and bitmaps rather than provide clean transport, heating and air-conditioning is actually psychotic. 

The third problem is that if Trump humours his new silicon buddies by employing their current, flawed, AI products to displace huge numbers of human jobs, he’ll likely trigger an economic crisis that leads to social unrest or even breakdown. This magazine is called PC Pro, the first P standing for Personal. We grew out of a 1980s technical revolution that put computing power into the hands of individuals and decentralised power away from the mainframes of state bureaucracies. The ambitions of the AI brigade concentrate processing back into gargantuan data centres that threaten data democracy itself.  

[Dick Pountain is busy gathering followers on BlueSky (@dick-pountain) as an act of Xtermination]

IN PRAISE OF PDF

Dick Pountain /Idealog 364/ 07 Nov 2024 12:58

Besides all that arty stuff I wrote about in last month’s column, I also review books. Not novels, self-help or pop science books but rather heavier subjects like political economy, evolutionary and social psychology. Some of these tomes get big (I mentioned a 1000-page job back in column 315) and note-taking for such a behemoth is hard work. That’s why I was delighted to discover the notation abilities in Kindle ebook editions, which I’ve also mentioned in previous columns. This ability to bookmark pages, search for keywords, add comments and cut-and-paste notes and quotes has become essential to my way of working. 

Regrettably or otherwise, Amazon’s dream that Kindle editions could take over the book business hasn’t materialised, with sales stagnating or declining and, more importantly for me, few of the academic publishers I deal with still producing Kindle editions. However they do all produce PDF versions, used internally for proofreading and so on. Hence when soliciting a review copy I now always ask for a PDF too.

The facilities provided in a PDF are sometimes sparser than those in Kindle Reader, depending on the settings used by the publishers and designers when outputting them, and so the capabilities of PDF readers have become a vital issue to me. I started out as everyone does with Adobe Reader, but found it less and less satisfactory over the years and not just because of Adobe’s grabby pricing structure – it’s become way too slow to navigate and search my biggest books. Also in column 315, I described discovering a far better PDF viewer, the Chrome extension PDF.js which is a free GitHub project built with HTML5. I’d been using this happily for several years until recently a Google change to ChromeOS stopped it working, and my Chromebook is too old to support the OS update now required. Before biting the bullet and buying a new computer I decided to try out all the PDF readers in the Playstore.

What a horror-show that turned out to be. There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of them nearly all crap. It appears every wannabe Android developer from Lapland to New Zealand writes one as his apprentice piece, then bungs it online to reap 2-star reviews. All assume you’re using a phone rather than a Chromebook, all offer their own wretched file management, and few can see external USB drives at all, so I soon became Olympically fast at the ’install-swear-uninstall’ cycle. Scouring the forums yielded recommendations for phone users only, few understanding requirements as demanding as mine. Then one glorious day in October I found Readera, which does almost everything that Kindle does (and a few things more) at remarkable speed and with a very comfortable UI. Not only does Readera read every ebook format you’ve heard of, on Windows, Apple or Android, but it does it for free without ads. And not only does it see external USB drives but its own PDF manager with cover thumbnails is actually superior to Android’s. I used the free version for several weeks but they lured me into spending £14.49 (one-off) on the Premium upgrade which offers colour-coding for notes, which I’d started using under Kindle but then lost with the Chrome extension.

An unexpected side-effect is that I’ve started using PDFs for all sorts of purposes besides book reviewing. I’ve always known you can print documents to PDF rather than a physical printer via the system print dialogs in Windows, ChromeOS, Android (and I imagine iOS too) but I’d never found much use for this until recently. I started having problems saving web pages to Pocket for various reasons and so the penny dropped – just Save To PDF instead and store the file locally rather than in Pocket’s cloud, USB storage being so big and cheap.Some websites offer a download option, but for those that don’t, save-to-PDF often works and retains all formatting and colour pictures. 

I must stress that I’m not a pirate who re-sells or wishes to profit from such copies – they’re just aides-memoire for my writing of both book reviews and this column. For many years I used browser bookmarks but weblinks can break or just vanish and the bookmark hierarchies in successive browsers became more and more unwieldy. My local Idealog folder has subfolders like AI, Bio_Neuro and Quantum full of PDFs from journals like Nature, which I can find quickly to swot up or quote from. 

What I’d like is a good grep-like utility that searches for text within multiple PDFs. Adobe Reader does this but its file management has irritating limitations, so occasionally I fantasise about writing one in Python (and bunging it in the Playstore to reap 2-star reviews) but the feeling soon passes…    

[Dick Pountain thinks PDFs are Pretty Damn Fine] 

ARTY FACTS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 363/ 05 Oct 2024 03:05

When I’m not writing this column, which let’s face it is most of the time, I perform a variety of activities to keep me amused. Apart from walking, cooking, reading, listening to music (live and recorded), playing and fettling guitars, I have a couple of computer-based ‘hobbies’, namely making computer-generated music and computer-generated pictures (non-moving). I recently restarted work on my Python-based computer composition system Algorhythmics – which I described here back in issue 306 – after a four-year rest. What prompted me was viewing a YouTube video about the Indian mathematician D. R. Kaprekar and some interesting numbers he discovered, so I set-up Algorythmics to compose a short piano sonata around two of his numbers, and it sounds like a fairly pleasing mashup of Ravel, Janáček and Satie.

I’ve been documenting my efforts at visual art in this column for over 20 years as I marched through successive generations of paint software from Paintshop Pro to Photoshop Elements to Sumo Paint to Artflow. I loved art at school and can use both paint and pencil reasonably well, but I’ve never been tempted to use either seriously since I discovered the computer (any more than I’m tempted to write articles with a quill pen since I discovered the word-processor). The crux is editability: once you discover the infinite flexibility of digital imagery it’s hard to give up this ability to experiment, redo and correct without wasting paper, canvas and paint. Images on a screen certainly lack the texture of proper paintings, but then I’m strictly an amateur with no realistic ambition to make a living selling my work.

I’ve also been into photography ever since the 1960s and my computer explorations began by processing snaps to make them look like paintings, which taught me how to use layers and blend-modes to take total control of both the colour and tonal content. Later I began using this knowledge to create purely abstract images.

It won’t have escaped anyone in the habit of watching Instagram, Facebook or YouTube reels that there’s a remarkable revival of abstract painting going on right now among the social-media savvy younger generations. Unlike me they’re not working in the digital domain but rather in the messy and expensive domain of wet paint. Under various labels like fluidart, spinart and poured art they’re making dynamic action paintings – Jackson Pollock style – by pouring multicoloured acrylic paints onto a canvas, manipulating it using palette knives and then spinning and tipping it to produce a finished image. Often they incorporate silicone-based additives that introduce cell-like patterns of bubbles, and the results have a very particular biological look. Some of them are very attractive indeed and nearly all are highly decorative. I doubt that many of these folk consider their products to be high art but they are highly saleable, and that’s on top of any revenues that derive from successful social media hits, which is just as well as the costs in canvas and acrylic paint must be considerable.       

I'm very keen myself on early 20th-century modernist abstract art, especially Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Sonia Delaunay. I don’t set out to imitate their works but merely play around using digital processing on a starting image, which could be a photograph, a clip from a website or a digital image that I draw by hand. Mostly I just use a mouse nowadays (I’ve had several Wacom tablets in the past) since my starters are so simple. Another way I sometimes start is by using Zen Brush 3 on my Samsung Galaxy Tab, a delightful finger-painting program with extraordinarily realistic watercolour bleeding effects, and then send the result to my Chromebook via Android’s Nearby Share. Then I spend some time layering, blending, smudging and slicing until I see something I like, which does indeed tend to mean something that reminds me of one of my modernist mentors. 

I’m not at all tempted to go in for fluidart myself to make money, even though those attractive canvases are more readily marketable than digital prints. That’s not only because I don’t have a garage in which I can splatter paint up the walls, but also because whenever I watch these artists at work on Facebook, more often than not I find the earliest part of a new work the most pleasing but then they keep adding too many colours and over-do it. So, while watching one particularly spectacular piece I hit ‘Watch Again’, then hit || to stop it at an early stage I liked better, took a screenshot and used that as a starter for my own piece! This potentially raises a novel legal issue about copyright and plagiarism: I froze a moment in time that didn’t make it into the final painting, so was I really stealing…. 

[You can see six of Dick Pountain’s abstracts at https://www.facebook.com/dick.pountain/posts/pfbid02UBtGRbAU7aTLSPYjeyTebxJUjMJ6EME6cKd5iqYBsYcdbaPCPrUNxZNqJhE48rSKl and hear his Kaprekar tune at https://soundcloud.com/dick-pountain/kaprekar-sonatina]

  

SMELL U LATER

Dick Pountain /Idealog 362/ 05 Sep 2024 11:5

I have no qualms in claiming that I have a better (or least better trained) sense of smell than the average citizen. That’s partly, maybe mostly, because I studied organic chemistry in the 1960s. During my first few weeks of working in the cavernous Victorian college lab I was instructed to learn the odours of a dozen commonly encountered chemicals, and advised to employ smell as the first step in recognising any new compound. I can often tell an aldehyde from a ketone by sniffing, and became briefly addicted to ionone, cinnamaldehyde and menthol in succession, carrying little specimen tubes in my pocket. I’m sure this method is no longer taught, on health-and-safety grounds, as there are many substances nowadays that can kill at one sniff. 

In later life this training came in handy when my brother-in-law Pip founded The Scotch Malt Whisky Society and was writing a book that needed to categorise the nose of various famous spirits. Of course odour is now a huge business, not merely for perfumes as it has been for centuries but for those hundreds of flavourings contained in most supermarket foods which are manufactured in a huge chemical works in New Jersey. But smell has barely impinged upon the computer business so far, apart from the smell of burning insulation which most of us quickly learn to recognise (and investigate…)

I wrote semi-humorously in an earlier column about the possibility of a ‘sminter’ loaded with an assortment of smelly ‘inks’ that could be triggered via internet messaging, and I even got a letter some years later about an (unsuccessful) attempt at one. Even Hollywood attempted a brief stab at a Smell-o-Vision movie (‘Scent of Mystery’  by Mike Todd Jr.,1960 in case you’re interested) but the obstacles in both cases were the same, that smell is a chemical, not electronic, signal that moves at the speed of breeze rather than light – and you can’t just switch it off quickly either…

But a far more serious obstacle is that while the components of human light perception are threefold – red, green and blue retinal cells – the components of smell perception are vastly more numerous. Our noses contain at least 400 different chemical receptors and individual smells are recognised by trillions of combinations their outputs, which release a plethora of proteins that are still not entirely understood.  

But when you hear the word trillions nowadays, you’re usually either talking about a GPT (or at least about NVidia’s market cap). Understanding smell perception, like protein folding and DNA sequencing, is a perfect candidate for AI to analyse, so it comes as no surprise to learn (via an article in Nature https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02833-4) that many teams are working toward this end, with ample financing from industries. 

The problem has several aspects, which include: predicting the smell of a molecule from its structure; decoding the output of human odour sensors for particular compounds; and automating comparison of smells of different mixtures by identifying their components. The current hot variant of AI – the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) – works using the mathematics of parameter spaces: identify the important parameters of the subject to be analysed, apply tensor calculus to create a multidimensional space with a dimension for each parameter, and then map training examples into this space. For graphical AIs like Stable Diffusion and MidJourney such spaces already have trillions of parameters for identifying shapes in visual worlds.  

One immediate problem for applying this to smell is getting training data: odour receptors, whether human or animal, are hard to study, often won’t work outside the creature, fragile and the amount of protein released is minuscule. Two receptors from insects and two more from mice have been deciphered in the last year, leaving just 400+ more to go. A team at Duke University in North Carolina is using AlphaFold and machine learning to screen millions of chemicals for binding to two synthetic receptors they’ve engineered. A very important motivation for such work is to use smell recognition in diagnostic medicine by identifying odour molecules produced by disease processes (dogs are doing this already). Precisely how and where odour nerve signals are processed in the brain is perhaps the leading-edge study right now. 

Real progress is being made and AI may soon speed it enormously, but smell remains the least understood of our senses, and least amenable to digital manipulation. It’s so subjective that human tasters and perfumiers will retain an advantage over automated solutions for far longer than most professions, and I don’t expect to have to consult my laptop when I’m mixing our own custom bath oil from my little box of tubes of neroli, rose, ylang-ylang and sandalwood oils (plus several other secret ingredients).  

[Dick Pountain believes that a rose by any other name would smell mostly of β-phenylethanol] 

ARTYFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 361/ 08 Aug 2024 01:04

Who’d have thought that AI could become so boring so quickly? I feel a rather urgent obligation to devote a column to what’s been happening, but it appears to be happening faster than I can type. Last month NVidia’s stock rose faster, and then fell faster than a SpaceX test shot. Then Amazon reports that its Kindle self-publishing platform has been flooded by such a torrent of AI-generated bodice-rippers that it’s having to impose a limit of only three books a day on its customers.

Because Amazon stops short of banning AI-generated content altogether, ChatGPT is rapidly becoming a cancer on the body of the publishing industry in more ways than just crap e-novels. When I’m reviewing a book I often look online at other people’s reviews, not to plagiarise them but to see other opinions. Recently though I’ve witnessed spammers using ChatGPT to spatter the net with worthless AI-generated paraphrases and summaries of best-selling real books, which make it almost impossible to find any proper critiques. And it’s not only words. The hand-crafted goods site Etsy recently told The Atlantic Magazine that it’s being swamped by AI-generated tee-shirts, mugs and other merchandise which employ ChatGPT to optimise their Google search rankings and crowd out real producers.    

In a previous column I was worried about abuse of AI deep-faked photographs to compromise political opponents, but that’s turned out to have been somewhat wide of the mark because it requires a certain political seriousness on the part of the perpetrators. What’s happened instead is that Midjourney and its ilk are now enablers of pure fantasy and pop-surrealism. They allow everyone and anyone to produce memes and professional looking posters that make merely spray-painting slogans on a wall feel like something from a previous century. 

When I first tried out Stable Diffusion a year or so ago I was amused by the way its limitations generated such hilariously surreal images, but I’m not laughing now. The recent UK wave of far-right activity against immigrants and asylum seekers has been organised online via Telegraph, The-Platform-Which-Used-To-Be-Called-Twitter, TikTok and other social media, and an important part of this rallying process is a new genre of surreal nationalistic propaganda memes. Popular content components of such productions are squadrons of Spitfires, St George Cross flags, knight-crusader figures in mediaeval armour and British Lions (often wearing tee-shirts but no trousers and playing cricket), all meant as symbols of that old Britain they believe has been stolen from us. GenAI tools enable them to churn out infinite combinations of these icons in glorious Marvel-comic colour and for minimal effort. It’s worse still in the USA where these same tools are being used to depict Donald Trump with a six-pack and Hulk-like musculature, occasionally with the golden wings of an archangel and a blazing sword. Visual satire has a long history from Cruikshank, Rowlandson and Gillray, to Georg Grosz, Otto Dix and Ralph Steadman, but it always required a graphical skill that has now been entirely eliminated, and the purpose is no longer satire but adulation.

It feels as though we’re currently in the ‘phony war’ phase of a marathon battle between states and AI companies over regulation of the internet. The AI side continues to bluster about transforming the world’s economy with soon-to-be invented AGI, while also admitting that it will need to use about half of the world’s electricity supply to do so (and investing in fusion research). The state was until very recently clueless about the threat posed by widely available generative AI tools – though the wave of violence in the UK seems to have awakened them smartly – and they’re also quite chary about imposing content regulation, over quite legitimate concerns about freedom of speech. The owners of online content – publishers, television and film companies – form a third force standing on the sidelines watching the impending battle. They’re furious that the AI companies have already scraped a sizable chunk of their properties without payment, but also acutely aware that there might be a profit opportunity here somewhere (who wouldn’t like robot authors and actors that you don’t need to pay?). 

As for us poor authors, artists, actors and other creators we can only just watch aghast, while some members of the general public perhaps see possibilities to gain quick entrance to the so-called creative world without the bother of arduously learning a skill (hence all those Amazon three-a-day novels). How this will all pan out is beyond anyone’s (even GPT 4.5’s) ability to predict. Too many variables, like who becomes US president in November, and too many hero/villains like Trump, Musk and Altman with hidden and volatile agendas. My guess is that the stock market might just call a halt to hostilities, and quite soon…              

[Dick Pountain only uses ChatGPT as a party-trick to horrify arty friends]

FULL CIRCLE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 360/ 07 Jul 2024 11:12

Astute readers <aside class=”smarm”> which of course to me means all of you </aside> will have noticed from various other features that this is the 30th Anniversary Issue of PC Pro, and since this is a monthly magazine, and since there are 12 months in a year, and since this is Idealog 360, the corollary is that I’ve been writing here since the beginning. I used the word ‘corollary’ there because it suggests a mathematical proof, and that is a ham-fisted way of introducing my theme for this month, which is mathematics. 

360 is a special number to me not simply because it represents 30 years, but because when expressed as an angle in degrees it represents a full circle, a return to the beginning. Another way to look at a full circle is in radians as an angle of 2π which I find more congenial because π is an irrational, even transcendental, number and I like to think of this column as being sometimes irrational and occasionally even transcendental (which you astute readers may have noticed). 

What I’m tiptoeing around here (in this nauseatingly arch manner) is a confession, namely  that I’m only posing as a computer nerd, that I’m actually a mathematician manqué, a math sheep in hacker/wolf’s clothing. At school, way back in the early 1960s, maths was my top subject in which I got a distinction at S level. I had to choose between reading chemistry or maths at uni but was seduced into the former by the lure of stinks and bangs over pencil and paper. My introduction to computing did come very early, in 1962, as part of a school team who built a prize-winning computer out of ex-RAF radar set parts, but that computer was analog, not digital, and all it could do was solve sixth-order differential equations and display the result as green squiggles on a cathode ray tube (which only real maths nerds could appreciate).

Math-nerdship never left me even once I discovered ‘real’ digital computers. At college I only ‘used’ London University’s Atlas to process the statistics for my biochemistry experiments. After Dennis Publishing (or H. Bunch Associates as we were called then) bought Personal Computer World in 1979, as the only maths nerd in the room I was delegated to take home a Commodore PET and learn how to program. I discovered that I loved it, but math-nerdship continued to steer my journey because after Basic I learned Pascal, Forth and Lisp, rather than C which would have been the obvious choice were I to want to make a living from coding (which I didn’t and don’t).   

Elsewhere in this issue you’ll find our nominations for the most important milestones in computing over the last 30 years, so rather than recap those here I’ll instead name a few of my favourite milestones in computer-related math-nerdship. Thanks to the internet everything is computer-related now, so I follow developments in maths through YouTube videos, Wikipedia articles, Royal Institution and TED talks, but most of all through the excellent, non-profit, Pulitzer-Prize-winning online magazine Quanta. 

Launched in 2012 to promote public understanding of mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science and the basic life sciences, Quanta is funded by, but editorially independent of, the Simons Foundation. James Simons is a mathematician, educated at MIT and Berkeley, who started out working on pattern recognition, string and quantum field theory, then went to Wall Street and used his maths as a  ‘quant’ investor to become the 51st richest person in the world.

My favourite recent Quanta pieces have been by Philip Ball on [The New Math of How Large-Scale Order Emerges | Quanta Magazine] and one on Dedekind [How the Square Root of 2 Became a Number | Quanta Magazine]. Number theory is the part of maths that still entrances me. Irrational and transcendental numbers like π have infinitely many, non-repeating digits after their decimal point which makes them a little awkward to handle. Dedekind found a stunningly elegant way to pin them down, by splitting the number line into everything below and everything above the one you want. 

I still write programs – in QPython on my Chromebook – though nowadays they’re almost always about maths, playing with palindromic numbers or fiddling hopelessly with the Collatz Conjecture, or just solving a puzzle from Quanta magazine. I watch tons of YouTube videos that use clever visualisation tricks to explain p-adic numbers and their relation to the Riemann Hypothesis. The great thing about maths is that it doesn’t require a lot of apparatus, just a brain plus some sand and a stick, chalk and a blackboard or pencil and paper (or Python and a Chromebook). And there’s always a chance of being that amateur who makes a significant discovery…   

[ Dick Pountain is quite satisfied with his slice of the π ]