VINTAGE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 354/ 06 Jan 2024 10:04

For 30+ years now I’ve been dabbling in the digital arts in music, in graphics and indeed  programming itself. Digital offers enormous advantages in speed of production, editability and economy of experiment – no wasting paint and canvas, no twanging of strings or blowing on hard reeds. But for several years I’ve felt an increasing pull back toward the physical, and to judge by the content on YouTube I’m by not alone. 

If forced to change professions I’d probably want to become a luthier, repairing and fettling fine guitars (I wasn’t good enough at school woodwork to actually make them). My first job would be to reset the neck angle on my beautiful red 1963 Hofner Verithin, currently unplayable, which would make it worth around £1000. But the money is only part of the pull  I, and many others, feel towards restoring vintage objects: there’s profound satisfaction in the process and accomplishment too. Old cars, motorbikes, musical instruments, toys and more can become more valuable (sometimes staggeringly so) with age. Most computers on the other hand become fit only for the skip.

OK there’s a small community who cleverly deploy the marvellous little Raspberry Pi board to emulate and hence resurrect a handful of desirable vintage computers like the Sinclair Spectrum or Apple Mac 1, but these merely illustrate the problem. The speed of progress in the IT industry makes its past vanish. TTL chips that are no longer made, lost storage media (8” floppy sir, you’ll be lucky), operating systems, applications but most of all vanished esoteric knowledge. People who restore old cars or motorbikes can club together to have spares made by small metal-work shops. People who restore violins or guitars can do it themselves with planes and chisels. But fabricating lost chips or etching PCBs to restore an old computer isn’t feasible, and is also pointless if you can emulate them so effectively in software.   

Wearing my other, social science, hat I’m a fan of the French sociologist Luc Boltanski who has studied the way that objects acquire value. In a 2014 paper ‘The Economic Life of Things’ he and Arnaud Esquerre outlined three-stages in the ageing of manufactured goods, from milk bottles to motor scooters. In the first stage objects get used and their price is determined by the cost of materials, energy and labour needed to make them; in the second stage people start to collect certain used objects – beer-mats, stamps, bayonets, whatever – and value them by rarity. The third stage, the asset, sees the most rare and sought-after objects become too valuable to use – think Swiss watches, old master paintings, Ferraris:  they’re purchased by the rich as stores of value, thought to be safer than money or shares. Boltanski and Esquerre analyse these stages along axes like disposability, uniqueness and portability and though they did include laptops and smartphones, it was only in the first stage.

However 2014 is a decade ago now, a long time in IT, and that decade saw YouTube rise from merely distributing amateur videos to a source of substantial income for lots of people, by making videos about precisely what I’m talking about here. Videos about restoring everything from coffee grinders to aeroplanes, do-it-yourself videos from metal-work and carpentry to dangerous chemistry, and reviews of all kinds of objects. Many of the objects involved belong in the collectable class, while some, like Gilmour, Clapton or Cobain’s guitars, are £1m+ assets. Comparatively few videos involve restoring computers, maybe because soldering is far less photogenic than carving or sand-blasting or blowing things up. 

I’ve spent a frightening amount of time watching YouTube videos in recent years. My favourites include ChemicalForce, a man with an almost comic Russian accent who obtains dangerous chemicals, mixes them and choreographs the resulting explosions in slow motion and gorgeous colour with balletic skill; Hand Tool Rescue (stop that sniggering) who discovers and restores marvellous 19th and early 20th-century engineering tools; and any number of blacksmiths who bash wrought iron into beautiful utensils (my father worked in the Sheffield steel industry). 

I also sporadically watch The Trogly’s Guitar Show, a daily vlog-style channel by a nerdy Texan who makes big bucks dealing online in modern Gibson and Fender guitars, buys and sells from other online sites, thinks nothing of splurging $5000 on a promising one. My favourite of all though is a genial, bearded Canadian chap called Ted Woodford who maintains and restores vintage guitars. After watching him do several dozen neck resets I feel, or perhaps delude myself, that I could do one myself on my Hofner. Virtual worlds and exotic AI-generated scenes are beginning to feel thin compared to the real chisels, spanners and explosions on YouTube, even though both only happen on my screen. 

[ Dick Pountain fancies himself as a blacksmith as well as a luthier]

RENTAL HYGIENE

Dick Pountain /Idealog 353/ 06 Dec 2023 12:02

My ideas for this column often come from newspaper stories, and this one was about Meta (The Corporation That Used To Be Called Facebook, or MTCTUTBCF for short) which has just launched ad-free, subscription-only versions of Facebook and Instagram to comply with a new EU privacy law. That law, first deployed in Norway, prohibits tech companies from forcing users to agree to targeted advertising to use their products: the user must be free “to individually refuse consent to certain data processing operations … without being forced to completely waive the use of the service.” 

Charging money for the product instead of monetising users’ data through advertising is one way to comply, hence Meta responded by offering paid subscription versions of Instagram and Facebook as “a valid form of consent for an ads-funded service”. This means all the major online platforms now offer a choice between a ‘free’ ad-funded and a subscription or rental version: Amazon has Prime, Google has YouTube Premium, while content-providers like Netflix and Disney+ offer no other model. 

Economists of both left and right persuasion tend to frown upon ‘rent-seeking’ – that is, making money from what you merely own rather than what you make or what you do – as it’s reputed to stifle innovation and competition and is often a symptom of monopoly. That’s as may be, but there are obvious cases (for example water, electricity and communications utilities) where renting their service is the only sensible route – Margaret Thatcher’s attempt to get us to own a slice of them fizzled within months as people sold their windfall shares to buy wide-screen tellies.

Personally I have very few software services, like Spotify, that I use often enough that subscription makes sense, but I do rent 100Gb of extra cloud storage from Google for a very reasonable £20 per annum. What has me seriously irritated though is the recent wave of small and far-from-essential vendors rushing into the rental-only model, presumably as a survival tactic in the face of dwindling revenues. 

I recently went shopping for several music-related Android apps, including a guitar chord guide, a DAW (Digital Audio Workstations) and a video editor, and was astonished to find that so many of the competent ones now employ the same come-on, a ‘free’ 7-day trial but give us your credit card number now (tantamount to inertia selling, the weapon of encyclopaedia salesmen through the ages). I did eventually find one of each that was good enough and offered an old-fashioned “give us £XX to remove the ads and own it” deal with which I’m perfectly happy.  

A similar Gadarene rush into rent-seeking appears to have infected many of the content sources I’ve seen relying on for years, who have recently started teasing with the first few paras of an article before greying-out the rest and demanding my wallet. I’d often be prepared to pay a reasonable sum for a single article (though many academic sites want far-from-reasonable bucks, assuming your institution is paying) but I really don’t need yet another monthly subscription.

I’ll confess that over the years I’d cultivated an Artful-Dodger-like skill in getting over, around or under paywalls: once it was enough just to Google the article title outside the site (they got wise to that), then more exotic tricks like reading the Pocket-saved version (they got wise to that too). Now I just don’t bother with them as I have too much to read anyway, and I suspect many others feel the same way. 

This is not a traditional kind of rent seeking which exploits monopoly over an essential service, but instead vendors manipulating the sheer ease of the buy-now, one-button-press billing/payment process to convert customers to ‘subscriptions’ that they neither want nor need. It’s always been a problem for software vendors that their products are expensive to develop, cheap to copy and become out-of-date quickly and rental can look like a solution to all those problems, but it really does diminish the incentive to innovate or improve features: shrink to a skeleton team of maintenance developers, move to a subscription model, hey presto all revenue becomes almost pure profit, which keeps investors happy and pressures your competitors toward a rent-seeking model too.

Because people can be persuaded that digital goods aren’t quite like physical goods, renting them may weaken ownership rights over a purchase that can be turned off if you don’t pay up. This is what has the EU worried, not just about the services themselves but about the users’ private data – invalidating ownership rights without the explicit consent of the owner is tantamount to theft. Call me old-fashioned but I prefer to own the tools of my trade. I carry out pretty frequent audits of my subscriptions, of how much I use them, and dump without mercy. 

[Dick Pountain finds the ads on Facebook more hilarious than most of the content]

 

MY OTHER COMPUTER IS A LENOVO?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 352/ 06 Nov 2023 12:56

I’ve had a vague intuition that Android might become the number one OS in the world – simply because of its ubiquity on smartphones – but I wasn’t prepared for the actual market shares recently announced: Android 42%, Windows 28%, iOS 17%, macOS 7%, ChromeOS 1.3% and desktop Linux 1.2% (as of April 2023). 

This being so I wasn’t too surprised to read last week that Lenovo is teaming up with Android specialist Esper to revamp its ThinkCentre M70 line into an all-in-one desktop Android PC, using Intel Core processors all the way from an entry-level i3 up to i9s. I’ve made no secret in this column that nowadays I use a Chromebook rather than a Windows PC, but what I’ve not emphasised is that in effect it’s an Android laptop. ChromeOS offers a pleasant enough basic cloud file system, but ChromeOS apps are largely rubbish and its Web Store is a joke. Apart from Google Docs, in which I’m writing this, everything I do is done via Android apps. Strictly speaking of course Android runs inside ChromeOS on top of Linux, but I rarely go there, so let’s not.

It all works remarkably well and the common fallacy that there aren’t any grown-up Android apps is just not true (though admittedly it’s taken me a while to find them). Apart from Docs I now have an excellent photo-editor, draw/paint apps, MIDI editor and DAW that serve very well in place of Office, Photoshop and Ableton. Freedom from Windows upgrades and malware horrors is delightful, and backup ceases to be a nightmare, except…Except, I’m so paranoid by temperament that although everything is ‘safe’ in Google’s cloud, I want it local too. Hence I keep a tiny 128Gb USB stickette permanently occupying one port and write all my data – not apps – to that. (A couple of times a year I also copy this stick to a separate hard-drive for archive). Google wouldn’t approve, but it keeps me happy. This does somewhat restrict my choice of Android apps to only those grown-up enough to recognise external drives, and it complicates my mental image too because now there are three separate memory spaces to consider: the Cloud, the Chromebook’s internal memory and the USB. Such triplicity turned around to bite my hand, albeit mildly, recently. I’d started getting messages that the computer was running low on space, and the Files app did indeed show that only around 30Mb of the 24Gb internal memory were free. It turns out, unsurprisingly, that most of the space was being eaten up by Android apps, which appear under a tree called Play Files (named after the Android Play Store). Within that tree 6.5Gb of the space was being consumed by the subfolder Android/data, and when I peeked in there I felt a familiar creeping spine-shiver – familiar because it reminded me of years of trauma in the dank, dripping Windows Registry. It seems that most Android apps you install create their own subtree there, but few remove it fully, or indeed at all, when you uninstall them. And it was then that I discovered you can’t delete folders in Play Files using the Files app, because you lack the Linux permissions.  

After an exciting couple of days where I saw ChromeOS naked, not a pretty sight, an alternative file manager called Cx File Explorer told me that Play Files is really called system/storage/emulated/0/ and the USB drive is called system/storage/7875C92D409CB3B4F21633193CC4E1DFSAE2FAB7 (system programmers are a curious breed, a bit like that bloke in The Hurt Locker). It also let me delete most of the cruft, with much pondering over which might still be important. One alone, DCIM, the digital camera folder, still resisted deletion and reported its size as 635Gb, clearly absurd. Eventually I nuked that one from orbit using the Linux console and nothing broke: photos now arrive in Downloads just fine and I can keep a workable 6Gb of free internal memory.

The moral of this story? I still like Android a lot, it’s an excellent cushion-cover for the prickly horror that is Linux, and I’ve even acquired the ability to write GUI apps in Python for it. What’s more I’m not ashamed of my belt-and-braces affection for local storage and hope that perhaps Lenovo’s partnership with Esper might prod Google into completing the proper integration of ChromeOS with Android that it promised back in 2015 but never delivered. Given Microsoft’s never-ending nightmares with post-10 Windows versions, and given a whole generation reared on Android phones, Lenovo could be onto a winner if it dares go beyond its stated targets of the retail, hospitality and healthcare industries and tests whether keenly-priced Android PCs could become giant killers. 

 [Dick Pountain sometimes feels his own internal memory is down to 30Mb]

FAKING FRIENDSHIP

Dick Pountain /Idealog 351/ 07 Oct 2023 02:08

“Man told to kill the Queen by his AI girlfriend!” History may some day recognise that as the most perfectly-formed tabloid headline ever, but right now it’s merely a symptom.To put it another way, it’s an answer to the question ”what do you get if you cross a moral panic with a feeding frenzy?” I’ll have to admit that I hesitated before embarking on yet another column on AI, which I’ve been covering for over 40 years, right from the days of Lisp, Eliza and ‘expert systems’ up to creating pictures of yucky seafood dishes with Stable Diffusion. A couple of events forced my hand though, convincing me that evading the topic isn’t an option this month.   

The first of those events was the CogX Festival 2023. I first covered this event back in 2019 when it was held near where I live, at the newly-opened King’s Cross Granary Square site. Around 10,000 people attended some 500+ sessions given by leading AI techies from the UK and USA. The audience was overwhelmingly young, 20-somethings wearing backpacks and plaid shirts and either already working as AI developers, or wanting to. I was given a press pass and heard genuinely revelatory talks about deep-learning convolutions and IPU (Intelligence Processing Unit) architectures. 

During the Covid years CogX continued via Zoom and was inevitably far less exciting, but I still ‘attended’ perhaps a dozen sessions. CogX 2023 has just been held in the 02 stadium and attended by around 90,000, hearing over 1000 speakers on 10 stages, including celebrities like Stephen Fry and the Queen of Jordan. I didn’t even bother applying for a press pass and the ticketing structure was quite byzantine - you could get a free pass to get in, but then had to purchase ‘add-ons’ to actually hear anything, which could amount to anywhere from £500 to over £1000. I’d guess that’s simply because the emphasis is now on attracting investors rather than recruiting plaid shirts: AI has arrived, applications and commercialisation take precedence over research and development. 

The other significant event took place at home where, among several old friends we had to dinner were a director of an important science picture library and a professional photographer for a large media corporation. Both were apprehensive about the effects of AI on their businesses. The main AI large-language models have already ‘scraped’ the entire contents of R’s picture library, and there’s currently nothing they can do to prevent this. J travels the world photographing hard-to-capture events: a picture of his that once went viral was of a huge wave hitting a lighthouse in which the face of Poseidon appeared among the foam. He pointed out that nowadays anyone can replicate such a picture in Midjourney in five minutes without leaving their sofa. 

CogX to its credit still records the festival sessions and releases the videos for free on YouTube after it’s finished, so I went through the list of videos looking for in-depth technical ones that might spark a  future column. I found very few of those, but did find one that was highly relevant to that question I posed above – Gillian Tett of the Financial Times interviewed Yuval Noah Harari, author of the best-selling popular philosophy/anthropology book ‘Sapiens’.

Harari’s take on our current situation is that the first wave of social media sought to capture our attention by using clicks and likes, and sold these on to advertisers at colossal profit. But this will soon be displaced by a coming second wave of AI-driven media that instead solicit our affection by mimicking human feelings. AI agents will in effect give back attention to the alienated, isolated millions who believe that no-one is listening to them. This is a far more dangerous matter – instead of encouraging passive scrolling and shopping, it may recruit people to perform actions (like killing the Queen). Harari argues that AI needs to be regulated, sensibly but avoiding a total ban that would throw away all the potential benefits, and to this end he suggested to Tett three concrete policy proposals:

 1) To gain public trust, AI regulation will require international institutions that will have to be financed by a 20% levy on tech companies profits.         

 2) There should be an absolute ban on passing off AI agents as human beings (with jail penalties like those for counterfeiting or fraud).

 3) Bots must not be granted freedom of speech, and their owners should remain legally responsible for all their utterances.

I’d probably add to these that royalties be paid for content scraped from existing sources, similar to those from music streaming services (which themselves urgently need reforming). And perhaps some kind of vetting of AI girlfriends for homicidal impulses might be a good idea too.   

[Dick Pountain was disturbed to find that ChatGPT has better musical taste than many of his friends]

 

 

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]