MEME CULTURE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 339/ 07 Oct 2022 03:02

I just checked and it was nine years ago that I devoted this column to Richard Dawkins’ theory of ‘memes’ –  ideas that act somewhat like genes by propagating from mind to mind and perhaps mutating during that passage so that some survive while others perish. Examples could be religions and political ideologies. In that column I said meme theory  interests me as a metaphor, but that I only partly accept it as important ideas like ‘liberalism’ or ‘Islam’ are too big and baggy to be treated as single coherent things. I did however sympathise with him over the way giggling netizens were applying his serious concept to pictures of talking cats and cheezburgers.

Now in 2022 I can see how condescending that was, because the internet meme has developed a colossal momentum, becoming something between a genre of comedy and a subversive language. It’s not a form that I’ve practised much myself, being of a generation more wedded to older forms of pictorial subversion that descend from Dada, Surrealism and Situationism, like the cut-up photomontage or the single-panel cartoon strip with speech bubbles. What prompted my recantation was actually posting a proper meme of my own, based on that photo of Keir Starmer and Liz Truss at the Royal Funeral.

I did some online research to grasp the rules of modern memeography, and soon realised that the meme has evolved into a format almost as spare and rigorous as the Japanese Haiku. A single photograph with a caption – funny, mocking, witty, gross, dark, horrid etc – often split into an opening line at the top and a punchline at the bottom, superimposed in bold, white, sans-serif letters. I found sites like the ‘know your meme’ database that collect, analyse, praise and criticise memes, and apps that help you to author them, which I didn’t need as Snapseed does the job well enough.

I also realised that while some memes are political, most aren’t: they’re something different, though equally significant and interesting. Those Dadaist/Surrealist montages by John Heartfield and Hanna Höch that I grew up to admire were produced by a handful of artists radicalised by world war and revolution, whose mass media were the radio, newspapers and pamphlets. Today’s meme generations grew up not merely with TV and cinema, the internet and computer games but also the ubiquitous ability to generate their own content. They’re individualistic (perhaps no coïncidence that ‘meme’ can be parsed as ‘me me’), hyper-aware of appearance and attitude, competitive, easily bored, and permanently anxious about status and popularity. They employ memes as a hieroglyphic language in which to express and to laugh at fears and frustrations in almost therapeutic fashion. The best and the worst of memes combine gross humour and subtle cynicism in ways barely comprehensible to an old fart like me unless I make a real effort.      

What I did get nearly right nine years ago was the cat bit, because a frequent meme component is the subversive animal picture – some animal with an ambiguous facial expression that could represent a human emotion that can’t easily be named. The original lolcat asked for cheezburgers in a mock-cute pidgin language, but was soon deposed by grumpy cat who just frowned expressively, who got deposed in turn by that prairie dog that gave you a ‘side-eye’ glance which could mean either friendship or scorn. 

And then along came that damned dog with the inscrutable expression – quizzical? amused? wary? – called ‘Doge’ in meme world. He/she/it’s face gets deployed as a Lego-style component that can be attached to other things, for example, a grossly over-muscled gym-bod, to stand as a symbol of success, failure, complacency, anxiety or whatever. Doge so intrigued me that I paid he/she/it the ultimate compliment of looking them up on Wikipedia. Turns out to be a ‘she’ called Kabosu, of a Japanese Shiba Inu hunting breed. First rose to fame in 2013, since recognised as among all-time greatest memes, has a popular cryptocurrency, a computer game and a NASCAR winner named after her. But the ultimate tribute is that an NFT of the original Doge meme was acquired by PleasrDAO and fractionalized into $DOG token (whatever that means). Memes now not only are coherent things, but arty things that are hence ‘worth’ money.

While I apologise for my earlier condescension, I have to admit that I remain wedded to a rougher, more political style of memeing than is currently fashionable. My favourite memes  come from places with histories of dark, sarcastic humour like Glasgow and Moscow, about apocalypse, panic buying of bog-rolls and the GULAG. To paraphrase T. S. Eliot, perhaps the world will end not with a bang but a meme…

[Dick Pountain regrets that this column has no room to display his three favourite memes, but you can see them at XXX.XXX.XXX]

GO WITH THE FLOW

Dick Pountain /Idealog 338/ 05 Sep 2022 03:37

In last month’s column I explained how I came to terms with, and eventually even to love, taking photographs with my smartphone rather than a proper camera. I take even more pictures now because the phone is always ready in my pocket. What hasn’t changed is that I select a very few of the pictures I take to post online, on Facebook more than Flickr nowadays (since the latter was taken over by SmugMug) and recently more on Instagram too. Before posting them I examine these pix in a photo editor and often lightly tweak them, by cropping (I’m not squeamish about that) and maybe a touch of exposure correction and/or sharpening. Fewer still get selected for heavier mangling, with special effects making them into graphic art, to look like a painting or a poster.I started learning such post-processing tricks many years ago under Windows 3 in Paintshop Pro, then Adobe Photoshop Elements (which became so bloated and that I stopped at v5, hacking my install onto each successive new PC). When I jumped ship to a Chromebook I needed to find a photo editor with a layer-based approach the equal of Elements and SumoPaint did that for a  while until its publisher switched to a rental business model and removed the feature I used most. 

I tried AutoDesk Sketchbook which is a good-looking app with a clever user interface – so clever that it still baffles me and I use it only occasionally. Then a professional photographer friend introduced me to Snapseed, which he uses on an iPad but I’ve found is just as good on Android. It too has a clever, minimalist user interface that avoids lots of cascading menus, but its UI clicked with me instantly, and for those minor touch-up jobs it’s the best tool I’ve ever used. The exposure controls are superb, particularly an ‘Ambience’ slider which works subtle magic on the ‘feel’ of pictures, and a ‘Details’ slider for structural sharpening that’s as good as the Nik Filters I miss so much from Photoshop days. However it doesn’t support multiple layers – only a rather limited ‘double exposure’ – and its handling of text is limited and idiosyncratic. 

I happened across an online magazine article which tested what it claimed are the 10 best Android image editors and grimly set to trying them all. Most were powerful enough, but not in ways that help me: many are clearly aimed at youngsters into anime and manga, others way too complicated, but one of them called ArtFlow Studio grabbed my attention. 

At first it was more puzzling even than Sketchbook or Snapseed: upon launch you face a blank screen with a white dot in the upper left corner. Click on that dot and a very minimal UI does appear with a single row of small icons along the top of the screen, a pair of thin vertical sliders at the left edge, and a hideable Layers box at the right. No text is visible anywhere, though clicking and holding the icons does pop up a hint. 

It took me several weeks to uncover all the power I need within ArtFlow, because it’s organised in such an unusually economical and elegant manner that you need to adjust, to stop looking for items in menus. Everything descends from the six icons at top left which spawn visual palettes of brushes, erasers, smudgers, fillers and selectors while those two left-hand sliders control the size and intensity for each tool. Once I’d got my mind right, I began to appreciate the speed and uncluttered screen. 

ArtFlow’s handling of layers is extremely powerful, with more Blend Modes than either Elements or Sumopaint, and its effects filters are also excellent. I do miss a fractal filter that only Sumo offers (and from which I’d created a whole art-style) but it’s some consolation that ArtFlow has an unusually controllable Solarise filter that can create some very striking effects. Its one major lack is that ArtFlow doesn’t handle text at all, but this discovery lead me to make another that has completely transformed the way my imaging workflow works. 

Not only does Android’s Files App recognise Snapseed, Sketchbook and ArtFlow in its ‘Open With’ menu, but these three apps also recognise one another in their own Share commands, so if I need to add text to an image that I’m creating or editing in ArtFlow, I just share it straight into Sketchbook which has rather superior text handling, then return it back into ArtFlow. Sketchbook, Snapseed and ArtFlow Studio are all available free for Windows too (though both Snapseed and ArtFlow require Bluestacks or a similar quality Android emulator). If ever you’re feeling symptoms of menuphobia, one of them might provide instant relief.

[Dick Pountain wonders whether, if a picture is worth a thousand words, he might submit 4/5ths of a picture next month]

 

WHAT I DID ON MY HOLIDAYS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 337/ 07 Aug 2022 02:01

Just back from a holiday visit to in-laws in Scotland, our first proper break from London since the lockdowns disrupted everything. Before Covid we would visit Scotland most years, by car or by train, to Edinburgh, the Highlands or The Mearns of the North East. However, since PC Pro is not a travel magazine, I figure that the best way to tie this column into technology is just to describe what felt so different this time round.

Packing used to be a matter of some concern in the days of Windows laptop, tablet, digital camera and phone/PDA, along with their rat’s nest of cables and power supplies. This time I took just my Chromebook and phone, and though it would be nice to claim only one cable it was actually two. We flew by Loganair from London City to Dundee. I’d booked on their website and didn’t need to show any tickets (even on a phone), simply some photo ID. Once we arrived in Montrose reconnecting to the online world was almost entirely seamless, as my Chromebook remembered their wi-fi address and connected automatically, while the phone being new had to be told. Chromebook also effortlessly cast YouTube and Spotify streams to their Sony TV and sound system, even though they don’t have a hardware Chromecast dongle. And while once upon a time mobile signal coverage was distinctly iffy in Northern Scotland, but that’s no longer true.One of the day trips we made was through the rolling hills of the Howe o' the Mearns to visit villages mentioned in Lewis Grassic Gibbons’ trio of between-the-wars novels which I greatly admire. These hills were covered by a vast harvest of ripe golden wheat: the valley contains some of the most productive soils in the world, and around 85% of UK bread flour is from home-grown wheat. The hills also display quite a lot of wind turbines, which neither ruin the landscape nor incur the frothing NIMBY wrath they do in England. Out sea there are vast wind farms, some right on the horizon, slowly replacing the fading oil industry. 

For me the biggest change compared to previous visits was that while I took many photographs, it was with my phone rather than a camera (despite having often declared in this column that I’d never succumb). Last year my trusty old HTC phone died and I replaced it with a Moto G8 Power Lite which has served very well and takes far better pictures. That summer I decided to experiment using the Moto instead of carrying (or forgetting to) my Sony WX350 pocket camera, and I was pleasantly surprised by the sharpness and colour balance of its pictures, and the convenience of always having it to hand. What I didn’t like was its user interface, which often had me shooting videos when I wanted stills, and occasionally blurry pictures that took ages to process which I discovered was because I’d inadvertently pressed a tiny, indecipherable icon and turned on  'bokeh' mode. 

I grumbled on Facebook about such options persisting after the camera was turned off, and wished the phone would reset itself to defaults between sessions: a FB friend Tony Sleep pointed me toward Open Camera, a free, no ads app that’s way better than Motorola's own camera app and works well with most Android phone cameras. With that obstacle overcome I’m happy enough with the Moto’s image quality for viewing online on FaceBook or Flickr, though it wouldn't do for large prints. 

I still don’t like the narrow phone portrait format as used on Instagram and in FB 'stories', but I've become very fond of the wide landscape format. After six months of this testing, one day I took both my Sony 350 and the phone, snapped identical pictures and compared them. I concluded that both lens and sensor in the phone appear superior; that neither is quite wide-angle enough; that the Sony camera has optical rather than digital zoom, but I rarely use telephoto nowadays. My overall impression is that pix from the phone look good over a fair range of zoom scales but then quite suddenly collapse at the deepest zoom into ugly sharpening artefacts, while the camera’s pix degrade more gracefully with scale. Probably the phone’s tiny lens demands a more aggressive sharpening algorithm.This Scottish visit was the first time I’ve travelled anywhere with a phone as my only camera, and I have to say I’ve been delighted with the results, though it’s taken over a year to learn how to exploit its abilities to the full. So am I now tempted to spend £1000 to get a flagship Apple, Samsung or Google phone? Nae chance.

[You can see a selection of Dick Pountain’s Scottish photos at  https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=dick.pountain&set=a.10162151385019478]

COMMONPLACE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 336/ 05 Jul 2022 12:30

A ‘commonplace book’, according to my dictionary, is “a book into which notable extracts from other works are copied for personal use.” My late friend and long-term associate Felix Dennis used to keep one, a largish leather-bound album that went with him on all his travels, filled with clippings, photos and hand-written notes of whatever happened to capture his attention (often poems). I myself was never inclined to note-taking in the era of paper – I’ve never kept a diary and only started to collect common (and not so common) places after the arrival of the personal computer. When I did start, it was back in the clunky, pre-Windows days, thanks to a nifty utility from Borland called ‘Sidekick’  which popped-up a window over any other DOS application so one could dash off a quick note. 

Once in Windows-land I sought out ever more capable free-form text databases – Idealist, AskSam, Threadz Organiser, Bonsai and half a dozen more – to soak up my inspirations about work-in-progress and enable me to find them again later. Stuck with each for a couple of years, but as Windows’ hierarchical file system gradually became more capable, especially for indexed search, I found myself relying ever less on databases and their pesky file formats. Then the rise of The Web changed everything, and not merely because I could store stuff in The Cloud but because more and more of my inspirations came from The Cloud. 

At first it was search engines like Lycos and AltaVista, then the all-conquering Google, but retaining search results meant links and bookmarks, which had to be stored and organised themselves. Cue a fierce competition between Chrome, Firefox, Explorer and Opera for best hierarchical bookmark manager. There were apps that stored web pages locally, but only as hideous subdirectories holding scores of irritating HTML files. That all changed with Pocket, which stores links to wanted web pages in its own cloud in an almost transparent fashion by clicking a single icon. Pocket continues to be the core of my data hoard even after I abandoned Windows for a Chromebook. I still send articles containing matter I might need later there while I’m reading them, which ends up storing far more than I actually use (I do purge my Pocket list occasionally, and its own tagging and search facilities are good). But nowadays I also download really vital articles immediately into a local folder containing the project they’re aimed at (for example these columns). When I say ‘download’, what I actually mean is ‘print to PDF’ which captures an article with all its pictures and formatting intact. 

I don’t worry about the space textual ‘commonplaces’ occupy, now that 128 gig USB sticks are so cheap, but pictures are a more worrying matter. Photo organising for pictures that I take myself – whether local, or online like Flickr and Google Photos – isn’t the problem, it’s pictures I’ve just grabbed from the ‘net because they tickled me, and which I’m too idle to categorise, tag or even name properly so they can be easily found again. That said though, most of what I do nowadays (including this column) doesn’t involve any pictures. 

I review books for a political journal, the sort of books that sometimes require me to quote extensively from the text, and I discovered quite a while ago that asking for a Kindle or PDF edition of the review book is a great advantage, just for the searchability. In a huge tome like Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital And Ideology’, being able to search and bookmark is a life-saver. At first Amazon was less than helpful in the matter of extracting book content and annotations: for example I found that notes made on my hardware Kindle or Android tablet could only be cut-and-pasted from within the PC version of the Kindle reader which I no longer use. 

Thankfully that’s all changed, and in a most helpful way. When I review books in more recent Kindle readers, in addition to searching and bookmarking pages I can highlight passages in four different colours, attach notes to them, copy them to the clipboard and even report typos and other errors back to the publisher. And this annotating activity gets automatically saved as a ‘Notebook’ which I can export either as plain text or in one of three approved academic footnote formats, and share wirelessly between my devices (Chromebook, phone or Galaxy Tab). Viewing a Notebook filtered by highlight colour can in effect turn it into a full-text database of colour-coded categories, just like those databases I played with in the bad old days. It can even export notes and annotations as a deck of flashcards, which I could one day use to perform acts of mass stupefaction on an unsuspecting audience… 

[Dick Pountain can recite the ‘fair use’ rules in his sleep (and sometimes does)]

AI, PROTEIN AND PASTA

Dick Pountain /Idealog 335/ 01 Jun 2022 01:55

I’ve devoted a lot of space in previous columns to questioning the inflated claims made by the most enthusiastic proponents of AI, the latest of which is that we’re on the brink of achieving ‘artificial general intelligence’ on a par with our own organic variety. I’m not against the attempt itself because I’m just as fascinated by technology as any AI researcher. Rather I’m against a grossly oversimplified view of the complexity of the human brain, and the belief that it’s comparable in any useful sense to a digital computer. And there are encouraging signs in recent years that some leading-edge AI people are coming to similar conclusions.  

There’s no denying the remarkable results that deep neural networks based on layers of silicon ‘neurons’ are now achieving when trained on vast data sets: the most impressive to me is DeepMind’s cracking of the protein folding problem. However a group at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recently performed an experiment in which they trained such a deep net to emulate the activity of a single (simulated) biological neuron, and their astonishing conclusion is that such a single neuron had the same computational complexity as a whole 5-to-8 layer network. Forget the idea that neurons are like bits, bytes or words: each one performs the work of a whole network. The complexity of the whole brain suddenly explodes exponentially: another research group has estimated that the information capacity of a single human brain could roughly hold all the data generated in the world over a year. 

On the biological front, recent research hints as to how this massive disparity arises. It’s been assumed so far that the structure of the neuron has been largely conserved by evolution for millenia, but this now appears not entirely true. Human neurons are found to have an order of magnitude fewer ion channels (the cell components that permit sodium and potassium ions to trigger nerve action) than other animals, including our closest primate relatives. This, along with extra myelin sheathing, enables our brain architectures to be far more energy efficient, employing longer-range connectivity that both localises and shares processing in ways that avoid excessive global levels of activation. 

Another remarkable discovery finds that the ARC gene (which codes for a protein called Activity-Regulated Cytoskeleton-associated protein), known to be present in all nerve synapses, now plays a crucial role in learning and memory formation. So there’s another, previously unsuspected, chemically-mediated regulatory and communication network between neurons in addition to the well-known hormonal one. It’s thought that ARC is especially active during infancy when the plastic brain is wiring itself up.

In other experiments, scanning rat brains shows that activity occurs throughout most of the brain during the laying down of a single memory, so memory formation not confined to any one area like the hippocampus. Other work, on learned fear responses, demonstrates that repeated fearful experiences don’t merely lay down bad memories but permanently up-regulate the activity of the whole amygdala to make the creature temperamentally more fearful. In short, imagining the brain (or even the individual neuron) as a simple computer is hopelessly inadequate: rather it’s an internet-of-internets of sensors, signal processors, calculators and motors, capable not only of programming itself, but also of designing and modifying its own architecture on the fly. And just to rub it in, much of its activity is more like analog than digital computing. 

The fatal weakness of digital/silicon deep learning networks is the gargantuan amount of arithmetic, and hence energy, consumed during training, which as I’ve mentioned in a recent column leads some AI chip designers toward hybrid digital/analog architectures. The physical properties of a circuit, like current and resistance, perform the additions and multiplications on data in situ at great speed. However the real energy hog in deep learning networks is the ‘back-propagation’ algorithm used to teach new examples, which imposes enormous repetitions of the calculatory load.  

A more radical line of research is looking outside of electronics altogether, toward other physical media whose properties in effect bypass the need for back-propagation. The best known such medium is light: optically encode weights as different frequencies of light and use special crystals to apply these to the video input stream. This could eventually lead to the smarter, faster vision systems required for self-driving cars and robots. Another, far more unexpected medium is sound: researchers at Cornell are using vibrating titanium plates which automatically integrate learning examples supplied as sound waves by a process called ‘equilibrium propagation’: the complex vibration modes of the plate effectively compute the required transforms while avoiding the energy wastage of back-propagation. Of course the ultimate weird analog medium has to be spaghetti (which appeals to the Italian cook in me): see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort

[Dick Pountain can confirm that the Spaghetti Sort works well with linguine and bucatini, but not with penne or fusilli] 

ANSI FANCY

Dick Pountain /Idealog 334/ 06 May 2022 10:01

During the darkest days of lockdown I kept myself amused mostly by practising my jazz guitar chords and by writing Python programs. I write a lot of small, off-the-cuff programs, for everything from updating phone codes or solving maths puzzles, to playing with simulations to do with Games Theory. Python is just the last of a long list of languages I’ve used –  Basic, Forth, Pascal, Lisp, Ruby are just a few of them – but the one I remember with most affection is Turbo Pascal. My programs are so small and ad hoc that it’s never worth investing too much time writing graphical user interfaces, so Windows was a nuisance rather than a liberation. 

Although I played with Visual Basic and Delphi for several years, eventually both metastasized into such baggy monsters that I dumped them. I wrote myself a little toolkit in Turbo Pascal 5 that created simple windows, menus and pick-box widgets from ASCII characters, quite good enough. I shared my code in Byte, and am proud to say I saw it on screens in more than one science lab where they had similar minimalist requirements. Now I use QPython 3.6 on Android, which has no native ability for colour or cursor control, just scrolling teletype output. There are plenty of add-on graphics libraries like Kivy, all way more than I need, and there’s a simple interface to Android dialogs and media components called SL4A which I do occasionally use but it’s still not what I had with Turbo. 

The impulse to recreate my Turbo widgets was finally triggered by of all things, Wordle. I do enjoy playing Josh Wardle’s clever and elegant little puzzle (though I deplore the posting of screenshots on Facebook or bragging about stats…) It’s just difficult enough to maintain an interest, but still simple enough to pose real questions over strategy, which is exactly what I love in a game. I never actually cheat but I do use tools that some purists might consider cheating, namely a mobile version of the Oxford Dictionary with wildcard search, and an Anagram Solver, and once I have three or four letters these will finish the job in a couple of minutes. Getting those three of four letters soon enough is what my Python program does, searching for effective first guesses using the known frequency distribution of letters in English at each position in a five-letter word: it outputs delightful combinations like AUDIT SNORE CLAMP and  CAMEO UNITS GRIND WHELK. I discovered that my old buddy David Tebbutt, one of the founding editors of Personal Computer World, is also fond of Wordle and it was he who sent me the letter frequencies list in a fine example of nerd-aid. (He also has access to Wordle’s own internal word list, but in a fit of hubristic rectitude I decided that was a step too far for me - I’ll make do with the Oxford).  

My Python Wordle Helper program’s scrolling teletype interface became a real bore, and while looking up how to write a clear-screen command using OS calls I discovered how to issue ANSI codes from Python, and hence how to do a 256-colour character-based terminal better than Turbo’s. QPython can in theory access the Linux curses library, but that refuses to work for me (and for quite a few other folk according to the forums) and in any case curses is pretty horrible. I set to and have now written a widget set that does everything I want, enabling single lines of code to invoke a box, a window, pick list, input box, progress bar, table or barchart. 

I very much doubt that my new widgets will prove as popular with nerds in science labs as those Turbo originals were – they were pre-Macintosh days, when IBM-compatible PCs running DOS were still ubiquitous in technical and process control contexts. I know that there are still far too many public institutions like hospitals and libraries which retain such dinosaurs, but they will be at least running Windows XP. Of course anyone under 70 is using a smartphone instead of a computer anyway, and an ANSI terminal on a smartphone screen is about as welcome as a turd on a sushi. So I’ll be keeping my little ANSI world to myself, going back and rewiring some of my old programs using the new interface. My 5-Card Drawer and 5-Card Stud Poker games actually ook rather splendid, and it’s a pity I can’t show you them here. But if for whatever bizarre reason you’re looking for a lightweight interface kit for some primitive device with a 160x36 character display, you know where to look, on my website at http://www.dickpountain.co.uk/home/computing/python-projects/ansi-library

[ Dick Pountain is so thankful that he programs as a hobby, not a job ]

HYBRID HYDROGEN

Dick Pountain /Idealog 333/ 08 Apr 2022 10:08

I write about energy fairly often in this column, mainly in the context of CPU efficiency or the foibles of mobile batteries, but now seems like the time for a wider look. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has thrown the global fossil markets into chaos, while the UK government has just revealed its long-term (not entirely feeble) strategy for increasing nuclear and wind power over the next 8 years. So this time I’m talking about the long run. 

I’ve been a convinced supporter of both nuclear power – fission and ultimately fusion – and the ‘hydrogen economy’ for around 50 years when neither was at all fashionable. I won’t rehash all the problems both face, which are well-known and debated, but will instead present two indisputable facts. Firstly the primary mode of energy delivery in advanced Western economies is turning toward electricity (and demand for it will soon exceed supply); and secondly, hydrogen is an impractical fuel for road, and perhaps for air, transport. It’s terribly inflammable, hard to store and has a knack of diffusing out of containers and pipelines.

You only have to remind yourself of the horror of power-cuts, when your phone and laptop batteries have run out, your router and internet connection are down (and maybe your gas central-heating controller is going nuts). Then think about the fact that electric car sales are approaching take-off, thanks to the soaring price of petrol and diesel, concern over air pollution and climate change. You don’t need a degree in economics to figure out what happens to electricity demand if all car users go that route. One solution would be to distribute the generation of electricity more widely, using small-to-medium nuclear and on-shore wind power stations. But I suggest that the solution we need to be looking at instead is a hybrid one, in which we keep electricity generation centralised – perhaps coastal – using nuclear, solar and wind power to generate hydrogen by the electrolysis of water. Then, instead of trying to distribute that hydrogen as gas or liquid, both fraught with danger, use it to make metal hydrides that can be distributed in standardised battery-like modules. The national chain of petrol stations replaces its pumps with hydrogen-pack replacement and recycling, which also eventually displaces the too slowly growing national grid of EV charging points. Such a distribution network of hydride packs would efficiently store and distribute energy produced by intermittent sources like solar, wind and tide, and replace bottled gas in remote rural areas beyond the reach of town gas. Such a system would require bringing two existing research technologies to commercial fruition: metal hydrides and hydrogen fuel cells, and I think that both can be achieved with sufficient investment.

A fuel cell turns a fuel like hydrogen into electricity directly, combining it with oxygen from the air within an electrolyte and electrodes rather than by burning it for heat. Invented way back in 1838 research has been extensive – as so often in history the military have lead the way in search of mobile battlefield power sources, and NASA has used them in spacecraft since the 1960s. 

Metal hydride storage has been around less long and remains more experimental. Hydrogen gas gets combined with a metal to form a liquid or a solid powder that requires neither high pressure nor cryogenic low temperatures to store, and the gas can be recovered by heating. Promising candidate metals include lithium, sodium, magnesium and aluminium, while boron combines with ammonia that can be turned back into hydrogen via a catalyst (the French company McPhy Energy is working on the first commercial product using magnesium). The Metal Hydride Fuel Cell combines these twin technologies into the same container, which gets recharged with hydrogen gas and outputs electricity directly: these are more experimental still, and once again the chief developers are currently the military.

It’s not yet clear what would be the best overall architecture for such a hybrid hydrogen economy: build a fuel cell into the electric car with exchangeable hydride packs; electric car with exchangeable metal-hydride-fuel-cell packs; existing EV with a fuel cell to recharge its conventional battery via hydride packs; even cars with hydrogen internal combustion engines and hydride packs. All sorts of questions over energy densities, performance and safety remain to be answered. 

But the history of the automobile tells us that eventually one architecture would triumph, witness the world-wide network of petrol stations. It’s also likely that an intermediate network of hydrogen liquid or gas to regional hydride recycling centres would need to evolve. What’s certain is that governments ought to be considering advice from people fluent in these technologies, then stump up the research funds that might just save both our current way of life and eventually the planet itself.  

[Dick Pountain has a picture of the Hindenburg disaster on his spare bedroom wall]