SOCIAL UNEASE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 350/ 07 Sep 2023 10:58 Ten years ago this column might have listed a handful of online apps that assist my everyday work, commenting on their effectiveness, but I can no longer do that – the plethora of apps and social media platforms have so merged, interweaved and entwined that they’ve now become my workplace. I spend much of each day in front of a screen reading, writing, communicating, drawing, coding, listening, the various apps coalesced into a complete world more real, and far more useful, than virtual playpens like Zuck’s Metaverse. It goes without saying that I’m writing this in Google Docs, and when finished will send it to Tim with a couple of keystrokes. I still prefer to communicate by email even though most of my friends have defected to WhatsApp, mostly for the free video calls. I detest it (as I also do Instagram) because I’m still laptop- rather than phone-oriented so their UIs don’t really work well. I do get out of the house occasionally for a walk, and take a few phone pictures. When I get home they’ll be there on Google Photos and I’ll edit one in Snapseed (or Artflow or Sketchbook, using Share to flip between them). I mostly post the result on Facebook nowadays, more rarely on Flickr because posting there feels increasingly tedious. I have a paid-for Premium account on Spotify, mostly to research new music, but I consume more music on YouTube when good videos are available. Any fantasies I once entertained about making money online have evaporated. To get monetised on YouTube nowadays you need a home studio, proper lights, and to cultivate winning/irritating mannerisms, none of which I’m prepared to do. But in any case, getting rich online nowadays means TikTok, OnlyFans, Substack – not YT – and being 20-something and wearing false eyelashes, none of which I’m prepared to do either. I’ve given up writing blogs (too mean to pay to promote them) and rejected podcasting as it requires a greater frequency of new content than I can muster. I do however spend/waste hours reading podcasts by those more motivated, like Andrew Hickey’s monumental ‘A History of Rock and Roll in 500 Songs’. By and large I don’t pay for these, Patreon notwithstanding. I also do enormous amounts of reading online, almost always in PDF or Kindle format, from platforms like Medium and the Atlantic magazine as well as academic papers. Articles that might be useful I print-to-PDF and store in my own (local) database. At this point it would be traditional to enter into the debate about whether this vast and spreading digital ecosystem will eventually completely supplant the older media, like paper newspapers and books, cinema, live music concerts. I’ll spare you most of that, to merely say that there are many omens that suggest otherwise. The original premise of this ecosystem was that internet access would democratise media production, allowing anyone a shot at online fame (remember an age ago when this was called Web 2.0, tee hee?) It sort of did though the result has been an explosion of volume with an implosion of quality. The amount of clickbait content on YouTube makes it a real chore to use. Digital streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon and co. are all in financial trouble because of the expense of generating endless streams of ever-more witless content, and because the cost-of-living crisis precipitated by Covid forces people to stop subscribing to stuff. Meanwhile the sheer hubris of macromoguls Musk and Zuckerberg tempts them to self-destruct their own platforms (though that cage fight would be worth watching). Unsettling enough, but there’s worse to come, from several directions. The telcos are grumbling about having to invest in ever more bandwidth to feed the streaming moguls audience, without getting a fair share of the profits: 16 European telcos last year signed a joint statement calling for Google, Meta and Microsoft to pay more, since they have to spend €50bn (£44.5bn) annually building and maintaining full-fibre broadband and 5G networks. Then there’s the increasing pressure by governments to regulate online content, lead by the EU’s Digital Services and Digital Markets Acts which seek to curb online hate speech, child sexual abuse and disinformation by law, and end Silicon Valley’s status as its own gamekeeper. Even the UK’s Online Safety Bill might add a face-slap to the EU’s arse-kick. And then there’s the Hollywood writers’ strike, which threatens to go beyond matters of current payment and become an all-out offensive against the possible future deployment of AI content generation by the studios and streamers. And I still have paper subscriptions to the London and New York reviews of books, partly to support the future of long-form journalism, partly because they’re easier to read in bed over coffee and toast… [Dick Pountain likes to kid himself that he’s an analog influencer]

PORTRAIT OR LANDSCAPE?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 349/ 04 Aug 2023 10:25 I don’t know whether it’s just me becoming a grouchy old man, but TV adverts seem to have become more imbecilic over the last year or two, and one that particularly saddens me is when that girl sees someone using a Samsung Flip phone and is so overcome with consumer-lust that she runs away to join ‘the flip side’. Esteemed editor Tim recently asked as a ‘masthead question’ whether we editors were tempted by such bendy phones and what would make us buy one, and I replied “The Galaxy Fold tempts me for use as a camera, and what would make me buy one is a price reduction of exactly one order of magnitude”. The reason I fancied the Fold (price apart) is simply that it alters the screen’s aspect ratio from portrait to almost square. The shift from desktop PCs to laptops barely affected the aspect ratio via which we absorb our digital content, which remained mildly landscape at around 4:3 (also roughly the shape of cinema and TV screens in olden times). Cinema went widescreen from the 1960s but it took till the early 2000s for laptops and TVs to follow suit with 16:9 or 16:10, still landscape but more so. That all changed at a stroke when the smartphone took over the world, with its thin upright portrait format around twice as high as wide. (And before you say it, I do know you can turn a phone on its side, but people only do that to watch movies and the user interface is designed for portrait). Does this matter? Well, yes, to me it does, but I only barely understand why it is that I prefer landscape. Is the real world portrait or landscape? That depends on where you live: the highlands of Scotland are awesomely landscape but where I live in central London is very much portrait, streets lined with buildings that obscure any horizon, some so tall you have to lean back to view them. The very terms themselves of course evolved in the era of classic oil painting, when rich folk who could afford it had one done sprawled with dogs and dead pheasants at their rolling country estate, and one upright in a chair in the town house. Portrait puts you at the centre of attention, as millions of selfie-sticks will testify. As a keen photographer I’m sensitive to the effects of field–of-view on composition, of different focal lengths and of film formats (the real pros often prefer square). What about physiology? The human retina is circular (more exactly a section of sphere) but the eye itself is oval thanks to its lids, with a horizontal field-of-view around 178o and vertical of 135o (60o upward and 75o downward). When looking straight ahead your eyes have a 95o field of view from nose to periphery, so rather unsurprisingly our vision leans toward the landscape, where we had to chase things to eat for several hundred thousand years. But I no longer have to chase my dinner over the hills, so that can’t be it. More to the point is that my digital existence nowadays lies in the borderland between phone and laptop. I use a Chromebook that looks like a landscape laptop but also runs Android, so that many of the apps I try were designed for phones with a portrait UI. The better ones do let me expand the window to fit and don’t assume I have a touch screen: the crappier ones do neither and go straight to bin. Among the big guns Facebook drifts inexorably toward portrait, following its acquisition of Instagram and introduction of Reels, while Amazon, because of Kindle, has become skilled at adapting to different screen and font sizes. Nowadays I read so many books in Kindle format that I’ve started using my Galaxy tablet again, and the non-fiction and tech papers I read or review are mostly PDFs that adapt easily to any aspect ratio. For many early years I was Dennis Publishing’s print buyer and hence intimately familiar with paper sizes. The printers’ A sizes all have the same aspect ratio of √2:1 or 1.4142, so that folding them in half - when printing book or magazine sections - retains the same aspect ratio. I’ve often wished, in vain, that the computer industry had adopted these A sizes so that turning a phone or tablet on its side could neatly flip into two pages. That would have made phone screens a bit fatter, and PC/laptop screens a bit taller, and more like paper books. So my preference for landscape is probably, as one who’s been addicted to reading since childhood, for the comfort of double-spreads in an open book or magazine… [Dick Pountain has an aspect ratio of roughly 4.6:1 (when standing and viewed from the front)]

WAVES RULE?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 348/ 05 Jul 2023 04:19 There appears to be a widespread opinion that biology and maths don’t mix. Perhaps it’s behind the current panic over AI, and the depiction of robots as villains in superhero movies (bring back the more sociable Robbie?) It was already prevalent in the 1960s at school when I had to choose which A-levels to take: to do chemistry I was told firmly I must take maths and physics but not biology or art, both of which I loved. In those days, and at university, and long afterwards, the only real connection between maths and biology was via statistics which were and remain necessary for designing and interpreting experiments and stuff like population studies. My interest in biology didn’t go away (I ended up in biochemistry) but it combined with interests in philosophy and computation to lead me down ‘eccentric’ paths. I discovered D’Arcy Thompson’s magnificent ‘On Growth And Form’ which showed how geometry was expressed in the shapes of living things. I encountered the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction where a certain chemical mixture oscillates between different states rather than proceeding smoothly to a final product: the Belgian chemist Ilya Prigogine (no relation) received the 1977 Nobel prize for extending this insight to explain what he called ‘dissipative systems’ which can organise themselves to exhibit complex moving structures.Last week in the Imperial College alumni magazine I read an article about professors Robert Endres and Mark Isalan whose work with synthetic embryos is revisiting the patterns described by Alan Turing in his seminal 1951 paper ‘The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis’. Turing had suggested that biological shapes and structures might arise when two different chemical compounds diffuse into one another, and he proposed a mathematical description using partial differential equations, whereby waves of chemical composition flow through the growing organism catalysing reactions that create structures and control their placement in space. Though Turing pioneered modern computing, he didn’t yet possess one powerful enough to solve these equations, which he did by hand using approximations. Turing was also working before Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, and the revolution in molecular biology and genetics they triggered now lets us understand the mind-boggling chemical systems that support his proposal. The embryos of multicellular creatures like ourselves start out as sheets of undifferentiated cells, but genes within some of them start to exude proteins called transcription factors which travel across the sheet in synchronised waves, turning other genes in far cells on or off and causing them to divide, to die, or to migrate, and to release further waves. This fantastically choreographed cellular ballet must happen in time and space very precisely to sculpt the shape of each particular creature: similar small sets of so-called homeobox genes generate the wings of a fly, the leaves of a tree, the segments of a worm or your arms and legs, via waves of proteins intersecting and interfering at the right places and times. If waves intersecting and interfering to make stuff happen sounds familiar, that might be because particle physics, which of course underlies the whole of modern chemistry, is currently based on waves too. The Standard Model, which has so far survived all attempts to surpass it, proposes that the universe consists of nothing but a set of ‘quantum fields’, one for each kind of particle, currently 17. All matter and energy and things and people, everything that happens (except for gravity at the moment, to the great chagrin of physicists) happens via ‘perturbations’ of these fields which spread like waves through space and time. And now for the punchline. Last week NANOGrav (North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves) and various international collaborating observatories released results that suggest there’s a very low frequency background ‘hum’ of gravitational waves permeating the whole universe. This hum might be the result of supermassive black holes merging, or it might be left-over ripples in space-time from shortly after the big bang, and it’s only now become detectable by new more precise LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) arrays that exploit ultra-tiny changes in the frequency of pulsars. But already there’s speculation that at some time shortly after the big bang, before there was light, just a soup of newly forming particles, it could have been interference between waves in this all-permeating gravity wave background that caused them to clump together into the first stars and then the first galaxies. There’s an apocryphal story about Bertrand Russell giving an astronomy lecture where a woman in the audience challenged him by saying the earth is actually supported on the back of a giant turtle. When Russell asked what that turtle was standing on, she replied that it’s “turtles all the way down.” Perhaps she was almost right but it’s the waves rather than the turtles… [Dick Pountain would rather waive the rules than rule the waves]

SEARCH ME

Dick Pountain /Idealog 347/ 06 Jun 2023 11:22 “I'm writing this column sitting under a magnificent copper beech tree in the West Meadow at the Kenwood Estate in North London, with tall summer grass all around and even a foxglove in the corner of my vision. You might not find this any big deal - after all mobile computers have been around for a long time - but it has taken me personally twenty years to achieve this feat, and I've only achieved it now thanks to my Palm Pilot and a neat little add-on keyboard called the GoType, whose purchase was the best £70 I've spent in a long time.” In actual fact I’m writing this column sitting under a magnificent copper beech tree in The Regent’s Park 24 years later, on a Moto g8 PowerLite phone, and I’ve just pasted that quote from Idealog 59 (1999) in seconds merely by searching for ‘copper beech’. That was possible because I post my old columns, six months in arrears, onto Google’s Blogger, which has an excellent full-text search facility. Of course this search only works on plain text files, not binary or encrypted ones, so even though over the years I’ve written columns in TextPad, MS Word, Libre Writer and now Google Docs, I upload them by cut-and-paste as plain text. The searchability of archives bothers me a lot, because I gave up on huge document management systems and NASes long ago in favour of simplicity, and that’s not an easy row to hoe. Recently an old friend, who’s just retired as a professor of robotics, mailed me to ask for a Byte article I wrote about his company back in 1985 and I was keen to oblige. I found the right Byte issue on the Internet Archive using their own search engine, which gave us a PDF of the page, and I located the original copy file on my local machine too. But this experience set me to thinking that I really don’t have an effective full-text search on my Chromebook that can locate topics in the many decades of files I keep locally (I love The Cloud, but I don’t trust it). I was about to write that this wasn’t a problem when I was a Windows user, thanks to its indexing system, until I recalled the appalling problems I used to have with that system consuming vast amounts of CPU time, and occasionally going metastatic and filling my whole hard drive with its index file. Anyway, I checked out grep-like apps in the Android Playstore only to discover they were all indescribably useless – several didn’t work at all, all were full of dodgy ads, and almost all failed to access external USB drives. I got so fed up installing and uninstalling these monstrosities that I formed a crazy idea that I needed to write my own. I entertained that idea for several minutes, before remembering that I’m working with Android running on Linux within a ChromeOS cocoon, and that I’ve always hated I/O programming at the best of times. So I had an even crazier idea, that I would ask my new friend ChatGPT to write one for me. I’ll admit that I considered this more as an experiment (and possible column topic!) than a serious strategy. So off I went: Me: “write python 3 program to find address of external SD card on Asus C301S Chromebook” ChatGPT: “On Chromebooks, external storage devices like SD cards are mounted under the /media directory. You can use the os module in Python to list the contents of the /media directory and find the address of the external SD card. Here's a Python 3 program that accomplishes this: … “ That Python code didn’t work quite immediately because it turns out the SD card mount directory name isn’t ‘/media’ on my machine but actually ‘/storage’. With that one alteration it just worked. I asked for a second Python 3 program to search for a target string within multiple text files, spliced them together with a couple of extra lines to format the output the way I wanted and it was done, in a couple of hours. My new app worked perfectly except for a rather amusing bug: some of the Byte columns would crash it with a Unicode error, which I discovered was because back in those prehistoric days my text editor used to insert a character code for the ‘£’ sign that conflicts with 64-bit Unicode. Python’s ‘try…except’ error handling soon put a stop to that. I was deeply impressed (and a little scared) by how fast ChatGPT generated such excellent code, but I don’t think I’ll be pushing my luck by asking it for an app that can search within DOCX and PDF files too. [Searching Dick Pountain’s 341 columns at https://dickpountain-idealog.blogspot.com/ will reveal only one occurrence of ‘copper beech’]