LIVE LONG AND PROSPER?

Dick Pountain /Idealog 377/ 24th November 2025 : 11:39am 

Mankind has always hankered after immortality… Sorry about that, but I’ve been overdosing on social media for several weeks and began to worry that my column isn’t bombastic enough. And it’s not just social media either, because last week The Guardian ran a piece about a US investment boom into ‘transhumanist’ technologies like Musk’s Neuralink that claim they’ll enable us to upload our brains and download them again into new bodies. Concerned US scientists say that this is starting to divert funding away from sensible medical research. I’ve written plenty here about the delusions most software engineers (even billionaire ones) harbour about brain function and so am not going there again, except to say that it isn’t static data, it’s an evanescent flux, geddit? 

What interests me more is the replacement body aspect, prompted by watching Benicio del Toro’s excellent new film of ‘Frankenstein’, followed by Alex Garland’s equally excellent ‘Ex Machina’ for the third time on TV. Mary Shelley was neither a software engineer nor a neurologist and hence avoided such delusions by getting Victor Frankenstein to use a real, wet brain from another human, along with all the other necessary bits collected from fresh battlefield slaughter. Garland’s egomaniacal Ethan makes a brain for his gorgeous female robot Ava from a lump of a special jelly, which he trained in LLM-style using the output of all the world’s mobile phones (which he stole with the full connivance of the phone companies). It’s as well to remember that the phrase ‘deus ex machina’ originally referred to the crude tricks that playwrights of old used to fill in gaping holes in their plots, and Garland’s movie isn’t just a remarkably prescient prediction of AI lunacy but also a cool and sardonic satire of the industry. 

Of course the biggest problem for all transhumanist fantasies is powering the creatures. Shelley evaded this one neatly too, because her Monster just eats food like the rest of us (though the deeply unpleasant Victor F. in the new film probably skimped on his rations). Ava on the other hand appears to plug herself in like a smartphone every night, and a crucial plot-point is that this gives her enough knowledge of the power system to create the electricity blackouts which drive the story to its gory climax. It’s not obvious where she stores charge during the day though since her transparent midriff, while curiously titillating, reveals nothing resembling an adequate battery. And that brings us to the delicate matter of what these creatures are created for. 

Victor Frankenstein made it quite clear that his purpose was unambiguously to ‘conquer death’, rather than anything more prosaic or economic, so Mary Shelley didn’t pursue what Victorian industrialists would have used his work for had it succeeded. Garland though is quite clear about 

what’s on Nathan’s mind, because he gives Ava functional genitalia and a heterosexual ability to entrance susceptible males. Nathan is basically a dirty middle-aged mogul. A reasonably convincing static version of Ava might be cobbled together today by connecting the latest generation of Chinese Sex Dolls - which I know about solely via a YouTube video I hasten to add - to ChatGPT: they wouldn’t be able to walk and would require mains power, but I’m sure there’s a sizeable market for whom that wouldn’t matter. 

During her final fight with Ethan, he rips off one of Ava’s arms, but having dispatched him with a big old kitchen knife she calmly goes to his wardrobe, unplugs an arm from one of his previous girlfriends hanging up there, and snaps it onto her stump. Having wrestled more than I wanted with USB-C 3.2 recently, I find Nathan’s modular nervous system, which can suspend and restore pain, touch and motion to a severed limb via a bayonet snap-on connector, pretty damned impressive. Which leads to the final, caustic, irony of the movie where having escaped Nathan’s mountain eyrie, Ava fulfills her wishes by people-watching at a busy traffic intersection in San Francisco. Where she’s going to recharge herself that night, or obtain any future snap-on appendages is rather glossed over….  

So much for the logistics of body replacement. Much physiological research goes on into the ageing process, hoping to discover ways to mitigate it, but my gut feeling that while this might extend lifespans by 25-50% it will eventually hit a wall: we’re made of inescapably perishable materials which need to be continually replenished, and that process must eventually yield to entropy and error-accumulation. But why would anyone want to live forever anyway? The real enemy is not so much death as boredom. History teaches that the pleasures of the flesh, of caviar and Lamborghinis, even of having one’s ego inflated by ruling the world, will eventually pall.  

[Dick Pountain has a very long, but finite, attention span]

SUBSTACKED

 Dick Pountain /Idealog 376/ 6th November 2025 : 10:10am 

This column has been running for thirty years now, and has never ever felt like a chore. I garner ideas from tech problems with my own computers, from films, websites, books, papers, and I remember them using some software tool that has changed repeatedly over the years, from Idealist to Google Keep, from saved HTML to Pocket (and now Instapaper). But however they’re recorded I expand on them, write then send a file by email to a publisher who prints onto paper using heat-set web-offset lithography, sells the result to you (and to advertisers) and pays me for writing it. That’s just how the world worked, but in recent months it’s begun to feel like a rare privilege, and that’s because I started using Substack.

I opened my Substack account back in 2018 when it was a different beast altogether, intended for online self-publishing of lengthy works like books with a built-in payment mechanism. I tried it with little success, eventually used Kindle instead and then forgot about it until quite recently. In the meantime Substack expanded its features to include blogs, podcasts, and Twitter-alike short notes, and then in 2025 it took off like a rocket. I discovered this when Facebook, which I’d been using for years to keep in touch with friends and post photographs, became a swampy mess of AI-generated guff (mostly about space travel, pseudo-science and historic artefacts in my case) which even tools like Fluff Busting Purity failed to control. I resolved to try-out both Substack and the newly launched BlueSky as possible alternatives, and discovered that Substack was filling up at an astonishing rate with high-quality content about politics, economics, AI, science, literature and more and then realised why that was happening. MAGA. 

Much of the serious material now appearing on Substack is there because it’s written by American academic and other writers who got displaced from jobs, consultancies and other positions in the extraordinary rampage that Elon Musk’s DOGE army perpetrated on American academia and media in the first half of 2025. And having lost valuable sources of income, they look to Substack to garner paid subscriptions and stay afloat. Not all of this new blood was DOGEd-out but their traffic enhances the perception of Substack to such an extent that people who still have jobs feel a need to be there too. And it’s not only in the USA because media shenanigans in the UK at the BBC, Observer and elsewhere have sent stars like Carol Cadwalladr there too. All of this creates a remarkable new ecosystem which I’m only just coming to terms with, and which often threatens to Sub-merge me (see what I did there?) 

There are several downsides. The first is that Substack’s user interface is a nightmare, even compared to Facebook. Its history of shifting focus 

by bolting on new subsystems makes finding things a pain – I never know whether something I post will appear in the app or emails (and ditto with replies). The second is that when everyone is trying to make a living, almost all articles have paywalls of varying height and permeability. A few (me included) leave everything free; some make a few important pieces free; some make everything paid; but most offer you a teaser, perhaps half the article, perhaps three-quarters, at which point the [Subscribe] button pops up to read the rest. 

A third problem is that if I do subscribe by choosing a free option (not always available), that automatically enrolls me into their mailing list for new posts. Now a lot of the political and economic material is very useful to me with my other, book-reviewer’s, hat on, and so I end up subscribing to the likes of John Ganz, Tim Snyder, Noah Smith, Gary Marcus, Brian Merchant, Carol Cadwalladr and several dozen more, all of whom send email notification of new posts, some daily. Found out how to list all my (free) subscriptions from that demonic UI – though have now forgotten again how I achieved it – then totted up how much it would cost to upgrade them all to paid, which took me a couple of hours and turned out to be £335 per month! I actually pay for just two (not saying which), put up with studium interruptum for the rest and regularly weed the notification emails that keep refilling my inbox like Ground Elder. 

This is not a sensible business model and the seekers of subs must eventually get culled either by Darwinian selection or by monopolistic consolidation. I notice that it’s 17 years since I last wrote here about a sensible solution, namely micropayments collected by internet providers and distributed via the tax system, but nowadays that would sound far too much like China’s social credit system. 

[Dick Pountain wouldn’t mind if you paid him £8/month on the side to read his column, but doesn’t want to push his luck] 

 

 

 

AUDIO DENTIST

Dick Pountain /Idealog 375/ 5th October 2025 : 09:53am 

I love music and I love soldering. Here is a story that has both. I’ve explained my opinions about hi-fi here several times: I like good sound quality but I’m not a hi-fi nut, don’t buy oxygen-free cables or onyx cartridges or gold-plated anything (and definitely didn’t colour-in the edges of my CDs with a green marker pen). I won’t spend thousands on any component, and I wrote here how my listening was transformed by connecting a cheap Fosi Class 4 Bluetooth amplifier to my vintage Castle speakers (legacy items from when Dennis Publishing used to publish Hi-Fi Choice magazine). 

All sound from my Chromebook Plus gets routed via Bluetooth through these speakers and I remain delighted by its quality, but a problem arose. I have to attend regular Zoom committee meetings, where we discovered that my Bluetooth remote arrangement was causing irritating echo effects for the other members, so I decided to resort to headphones. I purchased a set of moderately-priced JBL wireless headphones and that solved it, but it also created a slight annoyance for me because the dreaded Bluetooth wouldn’t automatically switch itself, so I had to manually disconnect the Fosi amp in Settings and select the JBLs.

Now with my other, sociological, hat on I’m a keen observer of the doings of GenZ youth, which recently include discovering a preference for vintage digital compact cameras over smartphones and for wired headphones over wireless ones. Aha I thought, in my Santa’s-Grotto-of-retired-digital-artefacts upstairs (covered in a recent column) there must be some of those, and there were indeed two – Sony MDR V100s and Sennheiser HD 201s that I hadn’t used for decades. I tried them, both worked and sounded surprisingly good, but the Sennheisers sounded terrific. So terrific I decided to do the pseudo-scientific thing, an A/B/C comparison with the Sony and Bluetooth JBLs. The result shocked me as I far preferred the Sennheisers. The JBLs were louder and had more bass, but somehow they, and the Sony, were less ‘engaging’. 

Engagement is difficult to discuss without descending into woo-woo. The Sennheisers are very light (plastic and aluminium pressings), oval in shape so they completely encase my ears rather than resting on them. Their sound-stage is better balanced, with bass that’s not so pronounced but ‘right’. (As an aside, I personally judge sound reproduction by just two instruments, acoustic piano and double bass: for my A/B/C test I used the tracks ‘Mademoiselle Mabry’ by Miles Davis and Janacek’s ‘On An Overgrown Path’ played by Josef Páleníček). The Sennheisers induced what we used to call a ‘drugless trip’, where you engage so far that you feel there.  

Problem was, those Sennheisers were made in 2005, the era of plastic-from-hell that turns into chewing gum with age. The outer insulation on their far-too-long cable was rotting and peeling, to reveal not the expected red or black plastic-covered conductors but a gleam of bare copper! I tried insulating tape, Gorilla tape, even silicon sealer, but ended up with an ugly, sticky mess. Wanting them so much emboldened me to replace the cable myself. Gemini taught me that those inner conductors are called ‘tinsel wire’, microscopically thin strips of copper coated with an insulating lacquer that you can’t just scrape off, spirally wound like guitar-strings around a central textile cord. Soldering them is a real challenge and reader, I took it! 

From Amazon I bought two short cables with female RCA plugs going to bare wire, along with a longer cable from 3.5mm jack to twin male RCA plugs. Snipped off the old cable, took out four tiny screws to disassemble each earpiece, only to find a single black-box holding all the gubbins from which emerge two horse-hair-thin tinsel wires lacquered red and blue. YouTube explained how you create of large blob of molten solder and plunge the wire into it: if the temperature is just right that burns off the lacquer (with a puff of smoke), adheres to and tins the copper; if the temperature is too high it burns off the copper too; too low and it doesn’t adhere. I chopped up the old cable to practice and practice, only suffering one painful burn, and then did the deed. 

Reassembling and finding they worked, I punched the air in triumph. Completed the job by discovering that my Chromebook’s two USB-C ports support high-def audio. Back to Amazon for a UGREEN adapter from USB-C to 3.5mm jack that contains a 32bit/384kHz DAC giving more volume and (perhaps) slightly better definition than the audio jack socket. The signal path from recording studio to my eardrums is long and convoluted, via TCP/IP, Wi-Fi and various different AC-DAC-and-backs, but at least I’ve managed to extract one irritating Bluetooth…

[Dick Pountain doesn’t have ‘golden ears’ but he does have dry earwax]

 

 

  

  

LOVE AND HAIDT

Dick Pountain /Idealog 374/ 3rd September 2025 : 10:36am 

It becomes harder and harder to scrabble grains of online pleasure, amusement or edification, but it remains possible (just) on YouTube. I particularly enjoy two grizzled performers, Rick Beato (whose interviews of musicians like Rick Rubin, Guthrie Trapp and Tom Bukovac are priceless) and Jon Stewart, satirical political commentator whose late night Daily Show kept many of us in stitches during the GW Bush presidency. Stewart attempted to retire in 2015 but he’s back, presumably lured by the grim shenanigans in the White House, presenting a new YT version of the Daily Show on Mondays, but on Thursdays an in-depth podcast called The Weekly Show, where a recent guest was the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

Haidt is currently controversial for his best-selling book that alleges that smartphone overuse is damaging young peoples’ mental health, but I know and admire his work from reviewing an earlier book called ‘The Righteous Mind’ (2012), an experimental study of the way peoples’ moral outlook affects their political behaviour. Haidt is a leading light of the ‘Intuitionist’ school of psychology which holds that not all our behaviour is rational, and in particular moral judgements like disgust are hard-wired to bypass the reasoning parts of the brain. (His thought-experiments to test this are highly amusing but unsuitable for a family magazine like this, involving incest and molesting chicken dinners). The reason I raise his work in this column is another book I just reviewed, Karen Hao’s ‘Empire Of AI’, an inside glimpse into the rise of OpenAI and ChatGPT. 

Hao documents three important facts about the company: unanimous agreement that AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is possible and the only worthwhile goal; belief that AGI will be achieved by endless ‘scaling’, cramming tens, thousands, millions of Nvidia GPUs into their servers; and a split, right from the very start, between those who think AGI will be great and those who think it will be deadly (many of whom left to set up Anthropic and Claude). Now I’ve stated here several times that I believe AGI is neither desirable nor possible, for reasons that depend upon the work of Haidt among others. If it’s not achievable we won’t face the worst of many imaginary harms like enslavement by robots, but it makes the current monomaniacal hyperscaling futile, dangerous and horribly wasteful. 

Impressive, amusing and addictive as current LLMs and GPTs are, they fall far short of general intelligence because they’re not alive. Unlike Nvidia chips, living beings need food, safety and to reproduce themselves, and these imperatives structure our thought and behaviour profoundly. Billions of years of evolution equipped us with ‘emotions’, chemical computational sub-systems that detect and seek to satisfy needs. The US/Portuguese neuroscientist Antonio Damasio postulates that when we store a memory of an event it somehow gets imprinted 

with the emotional/hormonal state at the time (via biochemistry that is barely yet understood). When we retrieve it later to help understand some future event, these emotional markers act as weights (like parameters in an LLM) and contribute to the outcome of our decision. So images and words can never be entirely neutral, they carry subconscious emotional connotations of varying strengths. AI models lack needs and fragile bodies, and hence purpose. Actually smartphones, which can ‘see’ and ‘hear’, know their location and orientation and can travel the world in our pockets (so long as we remember to charge them) are way closer to human experience than ChatGPT is. Equipping one of those highly-capable Boston Dynamics robots with a fully autonomous AGI must remain science fiction so long as GPTs require aircraft-hangar-sized supercomputers and consume megawatts of electricity. Our own bodies have a mitochondrial ‘battery’ in every cell, enabling us to think and/or reproduce ourselves on around 2000 calories a day…

Cognitive psychologists and economists like Haidt and Kahneman have revealed that emotional modes of intuitive thought aren’t reducible either to symbolic logic or Turing computability, and that these mechanisms drive attraction and enmity, friendship or bias and prejudice. They underpin crucial affective human virtues like empathy, wisdom, justice, courage, honesty, compassion and generosity without which any aspiring AGI would merely be a sociopathic silicon solipsist. And most importantly, intuition is vital for creative reasoning, causing those unprecedented leaps between vastly differing conceptual spaces that make up the mind of a Newton, a Mendeleev or an Einstein. The training data for connectionist AI models contains only representations of mental states – text and pictures scraped from the internet – and what emotional weight it does aggregate is mostly bad news, a swamp of hateful and obscene human communication that costs the AI corporations big bucks to hire human beings to painstakingly disinfect, in procedures they call ‘alignment’ and RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback)...

[Dick Pountain likes ChatGPT, but in a purely platonic way]

 

COLLECTABLES

Dick Pountain /Idealog 373/ 08 Aug 2025 10:52  

I don’t really have the collectors’ instinct. When I was a kid my father was a serious stamp collector and I briefly made a feeble effort to be one too. I was slightly more interested in my album of labels from exotic canned goods, but that petered out pretty soon too. I find that in adulthood I’ve accumulated nine guitars but each of those was bought to play, then superseded but not sold, so it doesn’t really count as a collection. I have owned ten motorcycles over sixty or so years, but only ever one at a time. Books don’t count: I started accumulating those as a student and continued as a book reviewer, but all were obtained to read and never sold (there are around a thousand of them, none rare).

When I’m not writing about computers here I review books for a political journal, mainly ones about political economy and sociology. An author who had a big influence on me was the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose best-known book ‘Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste’ examined taste as an act of social status building, drawing on huge amounts of data gleaned from quantitative surveys, photographs and interviews. Two former associates of his, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre in 2014 published a paper called ‘The Economic Life of Things: Commodities, Collectibles, Assets’ which is the best, most interesting account of collectability I’ve seen. B&E describe the way that all the things we manufacture, purchase and use pass through three phases of ownership, which they label the ‘standard form’, the ‘collectible form’ and the ‘asset form’. Consider for example a lemonade bottle from before WW1 with one of those stoppers that’s a caged glass marble. A mass-produced item, made as cheaply as possible, reusable and returnable for a penny. It served its purpose of containing and dispensing lemonade, then eventually got thrown in the bin (standard form). Years later someone found it on a tip and it ended up in an antique shop, sold for £15 to a middle-class couple as a kitchen ornament (collectible form). Their friend was a famous film director and it became a key prop in a very successful movie, and ended up sold for £5000 in a sale of memorabilia at Christie’s (asset form). An ancient Roman olive-oil jar might follow a comparable trajectory, but with prices several orders of magnitude higher. A drawing done on a napkin to pay for supper by a famous painter ditto, but its asset form might be in millions. In the asset form, things are no longer used, may often not even be displayed but stored in a vault, a hedge against inflation or financial crisis, a store of value.

What has this to do with computers you may be wondering. Well nothing actually, and that’s the point. Computers, along with much of the rest of the merchandise of the digital world, seem to defy B&E’s classification scheme by being stuck forever in the standard form: they end up in a skip, then get ripped apart to recycle a few chips and some gold-plating. The aesthetic appearance and quality of workmanship of such goods is so low that very, very few people want to collect them, and what’s more those few who do face insurmountable problems in keeping them 

working, due to the rapid and haphazard evolution of firmware, software, ports and cables, storage media, the lack of effective documentation, and the rapid disappearance of smaller manufacturers prior to the monopoly era we now inhabit. 

If you detect a faint tinge of animus in that last paragraph you’re correct, it’s because I have a room upstairs full of digital junk accumulated over my 40+ years of computer journalism that I can’t get rid of (and which those nearest and dearest to me would love to see dumped in a skip to reclaim the room). I can’t bring myself to do that. Along with some quite notable historic hardware – first-gen IBM PC and Macintosh, Acorn Archimedes, Newbrain, Epson HX20 – there are shelves full of software both famous and obscure that I have a hunch I may perhaps be the only person to still have, given my privileged status as recipient of review materials. The early history of the UK personal computer scene is sitting up there, and no-one appears to want it. I’ve tried all the various computer museums people have recommended, and none are interested in collecting the lot (I no longer have a car). All the reasons I mentioned above render it enormously hard for them to get this stuff working, and once they do it’s hardly entertaining. I do feel though that someone ought to document this history before skips claim it all. 

[Dick Pountain will hold onto the draw containing every Psion Organiser]

 

TOO DARNED HOT

Dick Pountain /Idealog 372/ 07 Jul 2025 01:15

I’ve been watching the rebellious mood that’s growing among Microsoft Windows 11 users with a degree of (not very nice) complacent amusement, as someone who dumped Windows in favour of a Chromebook more than eight years ago. Actually my defection was as much an accident as an example of prescient wisdom. When Dennis Publishing moved to new offices, then CEO James Tye took the quixotic decision to deploy Chromebooks to all, I took the opportunistic decision to borrow one and, being totally brassed-off with Windows 8.1, immediately became hooked. The Asus I bought for myself still works well and had been a source of great pleasure but for one problem – Google stopped supporting its version of ChromeOS with automatic updates about a year ago, and I started encountering apps that demanded an OS update I couldn’t procure. So I splashed out £229.99 on a new Asus CX3402 Chromebook Plus, which has a better screen, twice the memory, an 8-core Intel CPU and 10 years guaranteed updates. Migrating to the new machine was as arduous as usual: charge the battery, switch it on and wait 10 minutes for my online life to come down from the cloud. There were two extra chores though. Because in all matters digital I’m very far from being a trusting person, I also keep data I consider crucial on a local 128Gb memory stick that lives permanently in one USB port, so I had to unplug that and plug it into the new machine. Another quirk of mine is that I don’t really like touchpad cursor control and so use a Logitech Wireless Mouse whose dongle lives in another USB port.

I periodically backup the contents of the USB stick, a tiny metal-cased one from Integral, for which purpose I swap the Logitech dongle for another backup memory stick. A few weeks later I was doing such a backup when I noticed that the sticks had become very hot. Not warm but hot, hot enough to make me flinch on touching them, hot enough to worry. So I went online to the source of all wisdom which is Reddit, where I discovered that hundreds of people were reporting the same experience, not only with Chromebooks and with a variety of brands of stick, but in all cases when using them in USB-C ports. The consensus was that it’s OK, it’s because of the huge capacities of the current generation of sticks and the poor ventilation of the smaller cases. I pretended to believe that and to live with it for a few more months, until I started to get unreliable behaviour from the toasting stick. First it started unmounting at random times, though it always came back after unplugging and replacing. Then during a backup session, ‘copy failed’ messages and directories going missing from listings, at which point I panicked. I dug out my original old Asus where I confirmed that the contents of the stick were in fact intact, and that it didn’t get hot, and I carried out the backup there on the cool older USB ports. 

Something clearly had to be done because it’s become part of my work practice to keep this tiny, unknockoutable, USB stick permanently in place, and changing to some huge protruding one wasn’t acceptable. My first recourse was a heat-sink, cobbled together by wrapping the Integral stick tightly in aluminium cooking foil held in place with a 15mm binder clip with the handles detached. This worked, dissipating enough heat to reduce it to just warm to the touch, but it was too inelegant for me to live with. I couldn’t find any hard info online about which brands were most liable to overheat, but my own collection accumulated over the years revealed Sandisk, Patriot and Tab all got just as hot. As I was dolefully scrolling down the endless Amazon list of sticks, one from Samsung caught my eye because it looked nicer: the same shade of grey as my computer, short, fat and shiny. I ordered one and discovered that it’s just as fast, and barely gets warm… 

What moral to draw from this story I’m not really sure. I’m not a semiconductor engineer and can’t find an adequate explanation online from anyone who is, as to why such a huge discrepancy in performance exists between brands. Does the difference lie in the chips themselves, the design of the cases, the electrical interfaces or a problem in USB-C sockets? Such silence is deafening and disturbing when data loss is a distinct possibility. But of course the computer is becoming very much the poor cousin to the smartphone, for which such sticks are not relevant and for which professional standards of data hygiene are barely relevant either.    

[Dick Pountain still occasionally dreams that he’s trapped inside the Windows Registry]

COLOR ME OLO

Dick Pountain /Idealog 371/ 10 Jun 2025 12:15

I’ve expressed my feelings about science fiction before many, many, probably too many, times in this column. A big fan in my 1960s teens, a bout of illness in the ‘70s let me binge all the greats – Vonnegut, Ballard, LeGuin, Dick, Pohl, Bester etc – overdosing so badly that I never wanted to read sci-fi again. Looking back now as emotionally-retarded pseudo-intellectual sci-fi fans appear to be taking over the world, I think perhaps my immune system was telling me something. However this allergic reaction doesn’t apply to the closely related genre of fantasy (or gothic, or cosmic) horror. I still can cringe a little to M.P. Shiel’s ‘The Purple Cloud’, William Hope Hodgson’s ‘The House on the Borderland’, or the entire oeuvre of H.P, Lovecraft. 

One of Lovecraft’s stories, ‘The Colour Out Of Space’, struck me particularly hard. A meteorite lands in a tiny community in the New England woods, containing globules of a weird colour that isn’t in the solar spectrum: it has unpleasant effects that consume all living animals, plants and humans and turn them into grey ash. Several unsuccessful attempts have been made to film this story, hard work given that it’s not in the technicolor spectrum either: perhaps the nearest anyone has come is Alex Garland’s 2018  ‘Annihilation’ which clearly shows Lovecraftian influence and employs a digitally-produced shimmer in place of a new colour. I suppose Lovecraft’s story is a sort of parable about environmental destruction, but that’s not what explains its hold on me – I’ve always been fascinated by colour, studying its chemistry, reading up on all the various systems, appreciating great paintings and creating my own digital art as a favourite hobby.   

All of which explains my enormous excitement on reading in the Science Adviser newsletter about new research at the University of California Berkeley, which ‘creates’ a new colour that lies outside the gamut humans can perceive, but can be seen by shining a laser onto ones’ retina (don’t try this at home kids). First some background is required. You already know that our eyes, and hence also digital display devices, perceive or present colours as mixtures of the three components red (R), green (G) and blue (B). That’s because the retinas of our eyes contain three types of colour-sensitive cell called ‘cones’, sensitive to different wavelengths: long (L), medium (M) and short (S). Objects illuminated by natural sunlight stimulate L, M and S cones to different extents which gives us the experience of different colours. Red light primarily stimulates L cones and blue light S cones, but since M cones respond to the middle of the range, overlapping with both L and S, there’s no component of sunlight that stimulates M alone. 

The authors of the Berkeley paper (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adu1052) set out to investigate a new system for describing colour perception, by using a laser to illuminate retinal cells one at a time: 

“We introduce a principle, Oz, for displaying color imagery: directly controlling the human eye’s photoreceptor activity via cell-by-cell light delivery. Theoretically, novel colors are possible through bypassing the constraints set by the cone spectral sensitivities and activating M cone cells exclusively. In practice, we confirm a partial expansion of colorspace toward that theoretical ideal. Attempting to activate M cones exclusively is shown to elicit a color beyond the natural human gamut.”

Calling their new system Oz was of course a trigger for me, having cut my journalistic teeth on that notorious hippie journal where my articles were printed in every colour of the rainbow on a background of every other colour of the rainbow. But I digress. Their new colour, from stimulating M cells alone with a laser, they named ‘olo’. It can’t be reproduced in paint, ink or screen, so you’ll only ever see it sitting in a dentists’ chair with a laser strapped to your head: 

“Subjects report that olo in our prototype system appears blue-green of unprecedented saturation, when viewed relative to a neutral gray background. Subjects find that they must desaturate olo by adding white light before they can achieve a color match with the closest monochromatic light.”

Thankfully olo has not so far shown any inclination to suck the life force out of living beings and reduce them to grey ash. The best approximation is a light turquoise, a colour you might glimpse fleetingly when watching a big wave break on a rocky headland in bright sunshine. Astronomers for a while believed the whole universe, by mixing all the light together, would be a light turquoise but that turned out to be a bug in their software, and it’s now ‘cosmic latte’, a light beige (hex triplet value in standard sRGB #FFF8E7). 

[Dick Pountain wonders whether Olo could become ‘the new Pistachio’]