CHINA SYNDROME

Dick Pountain /Idealog 357/ 08 Apr 2024 01:09

Unless you live permanently as an avatar in Second Life [does that even still exist?] then it  can’t have escaped you that the world we actually live in has become very much more ‘interesting’, that is dangerous, over the last few years. What with epidemics, wars and deepfakery, the dot-com boom begins to feel as remote as the Middle Ages. A couple of incidents last week pushed me toward these reflections…

The first was the announcement that the US DoJ (Department of Justice) was launching an antitrust lawsuit against Apple Corp, for restraint of trade and monopolising the smartphone market. The DoJ’s complaints all arise from the ‘walled-garden’ attitude that Apple has maintained ever since its very first days under Steve Jobs, with strict control over software development and peripheral manufacture so as to completely exclude smaller companies from entering, and restrain the businesses of their larger competitors. Some of the charges are aimed at contractual restrictions, fees and taxes on the creation and distribution of ‘super apps’ for daily functions like social media, payments, banking and video messaging; hindrance of streaming apps like Spotify, Netflix and Google Photo; restricting crucial API access in the smartphone sector and excessive control over how smartwatches operate on the iOS platform, and control over digital wallets that restricts cross-platform wallets on the iPhone.

I’m very far from being an Apple fanboi: the last one of their machines I owned was an Apple IIe and I was an enthusiastic early adopter of the open architecture IBM PC – which is how I ended up here. Wearing my other hat as a commentator on politics I’m an equally enthusiastic advocate of antitrust regulation, an admirer of the Norwegian-American economist Thorstein Veblen whose theories about conspicuous consumption and the leisure class were influential during the last great bout of US antitrust action in the 1890s which curbed the excessive power of ‘robber baron’ industrialists like the Rockefellers, Mellons, Carnegies, Vanderbilts and J. P. Morgan, ushering in a century of industrial growth and lessening inequality in the US (admittedly helped by two world wars). That progress went into reverse in the late 1970s, to a point where even Forbes Magazine now believes regulatory action is justified and that ”Apple’s business will be fundamentally changed by this lawsuit”, citing the example of Microsoft which “successfully rebounded from its own tumultuous years with regulators and has become the most valuable company in the world, ironically by becoming more open and embracing open source rather than shunning it”. 

If the DoJ were to win this suit they would almost certainly then go after Google, Amazon, Facebook and the rest, but as Forbes also points out the case will run for years – and the Democratic Party has at best a 50:50 chance of retaining the presidency after this November. It’s impossible to predict what a second-term, enraged Trump would do, but pursuing the case may not be high among his priorities. A horrible vision arises of Silicon Valley giants panicked into allying with him to create a doomsday authoritarian plutocracy, administered by AI robot warriors out of a Vaughn Bode comic…  

Which brings me to my second event. I’m something of a fan of the quirky, German, ex-particle-physicist-and-YouTuber Sabine Hossenfelder, who last week posted on her channel a remarkable lament/confession about why she left academic physics. She’s already written a book, ‘Lost In Math’, excoriating her contemporaries for being seduced by pursuit of mathematical beauty away from experimental verification. In the new video she paints a gloomy picture of a profession where young physicists have to tramp the world taking short-term posts, forced to churn out less-than-important papers on topics enforced by credit-stealing superiors, all originality snuffed out. And addiction to ChatGPT and its ilk looks set to make this deadening toil worse still.

And my point? Regardless of whether Biden or Trump is POTUS this time next year US relations with China will continue to deteriorate. America will keep on withholding leading-edge semiconductors from China and attempting to repatriate fabrication abilities from Taiwan to the continental USA. China will continue to build its own semiconductor research and fabrication (even if it doesn’t actually grab Taiwan) and will prevent its best students from winding up in the USA. The decline that Hossenfelder depicts in Western academic physics will therefore become an alarming strategic deficit. I’m not of the party that hungers for war against China, and I’m sceptical whether China and Russia could ally to start such a war, but I recognise that Western physics is likely to depend ever more on Silicon Valley and less on academia, which will make the handling of regulation a matter of some delicacy and diplomacy.  

[Dick Pountain is pretty handy with chopsticks]  

TANGLED COSMOS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 356/ 06 Mar 2024 03:39

For all its faults, YouTube is a resource that offers a quite unprecedented breadth and depth of content – all kinds of music, craft, sport, even streaming movies, and both science and mathematics. OK, much of what it offers is of increasingly dubious, click-baity quality, and that even applies to a lot of the science. I view a lot of YouTube mathematics vids, and while they lack the professional depth you can find on Wikipedia, they often make up for that by exploiting visualisation in original and useful ways. Unsurprisingly the science on YouTube is dominated by cosmology and particle physics, those perennial playgrounds for opinionated nerds who know that Einstein or Bohr were wrong (or right, or whatever). To be sure it’s created a handful of stars like Sabine Hossenfelder and Derek Muller who talk sense and explain stuff well, but the nature of the medium means these get drowned out by the charlatans for most non-scientist viewers.

There are however certain ‘brands’ that guarantee seriousness, and one of the best is the Royal Institution, which gave us Humphry Davy, Faraday and Bragg. I always watch their Christmas lecture, because I like bangs, but this year YouTube offered me as follow-up a lecture by Professor Tim Palmer, who I’ll confess to not knowing before. His lecture, which was about uncertainty and probability, more or less blew my mind, and pushed me to read his book ‘The Primacy Of Doubt’ which merely reinforced that effect. 

Palmer studied mathematical physics and became an expert on chaos theory, before turning that knowledge to practical use in weather forecasting. The huge extension of reliable forecasting in recent years, from a couple of days to around a week, is largely thanks to the method of ‘ensemble’ forecasts he pioneered. Shocked by the infamous failure of the Met Office to predict the 1987 UK hurricane, Palmer realised that the deterministic supercomputer models then in use were prone in rare cases to chaotically wrong prediction, which could be alleviated by feeding the model multiple starting conditions that differ by small additions of randomness – instead of a single prediction this produces a brush-like clump of predictions, the central trend of which is more likely to be right.The theory behind his method involves the Lorenz Equations, which describe the behaviour of chaotic dynamic systems. Solving these equations doesn’t lead to single precise solutions, but to infinitely convoluted fractal graphs called attractors. Palmer’s explanation of Lorenz’s discovery in his RI lecture is superb, and he does it without writing any algebra or calculus on the blackboard, admirably accessible. That however is not what blew my mind: that happened when Palmer turned his method to cosmology. 

In addition to his work in chaos theory Palmer (who is now an Oxford Professor of Climate Physics) obtained his doctorate in General Relativity, so it was no surprise that he has tried to bring the two subjects together. Taking off from Einstein’s theory that gravity is the effect of the curvature of space/time by matter, Palmer postulates that rather than being smoothly curved it may be that space/time itself has fractal complexity, sort of like the Lorenz attractors of chaotic systems. I don’t understand his ‘Invariant Set Postulate’ well enough to attempt further explanation here, but well enough to know that if true it would resolve several of the knottiest problems that currently occupy both cosmology and quantum physics. 

Subatomic particles traversing a fractally convoluted space/time would explain quantum uncertainty without having to invent multiple universes, could offer a theory of quantum gravity more plausible than any of the current candidates, and even do away with ‘non-locality’ and the spooky action at a distance that so annoyed Albert Einstein. 

You’ve probably gathered by now that I’m one of those same opinionated nerds that I was deriding above. I’ve ranted in this column before against people who employ their shaky grasp of quantum uncertainty to declare everything from ‘there’s no such thing as reality’, to multiple universes that provide mechanisms for magic and telepathy. As a humble chemist rather than a mathematical physicist I’m not equipped to refute them in the way Palmer may be in the process of doing. I believe that the very real world that we live in is ruled by thermodynamics, not quantum mechanics, whether that be the crappy battery in your electric car, the catastrophic increase in your utility bills, or those massive perturbations of atmospheric energy that we call our climate (and which may yet see the end of us if we don’t start concentrating). Tim Palmer knows that better than almost anyone, and I have no hesitation in recommending that you watch his RI lecture here https://youtu.be/RkiEV47KPX4?si=BvcXzGzhNqOCiAuv.  [

 Dick Pountain is still just about capable of performing useful work on his surroundings]    

CLOUDY THOUGHTS

Dick Pountain /Idealog 355/ 05 Feb 2024 01:24

Internet culture was once expected to join the whole world together, and in some ways – for example email – it still comes closer than any previous technology. However in other ways it divides us up into radically different camps and silos, especially when it comes to publishing one’s own multimedia content. 

This thought occurred to me recently when I finally succumbed to curiosity by opening a Substack account. I’d been hearing about this service for several years, as used by many people whose work I read, so I decided to put up some of the material from my existing Blogger blogs and website. First impressions were of deep confusion, greater even than that I feel on Instagram. Substack combines a blog for publishing new short material with a website for long-form essays, an email distribution and publication system and a system for getting paid. I find its UI quite opaque right now, and it suddenly flashed on me how many places I now have my own ‘stuff’ online, most of which don’t pay anything at all.I generate content in the following media: text, like this column you’re reading, plus book reviews for other print publications; pictures, photographs and digital art; music, some computer generated, some played, some just curated playlists of other musicians’ work. I currently keep text online on Blogger, Medium, Substack, OpenDemocracy, The Political Quarterly and several smaller publications, and a book published in Amazon’s Kindle store. I have photographs online at Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and my own website. I have music on YouTube, SoundCloud, Bandcamp and my own website plus hundreds of playlists on Spotify and YouTube. That makes at least 20 different places with different addresses and logons, some with payment systems (which only generate any revenue if I spend to advertise). 

I maintain my own website, http://www.dickpountain.co.uk hosted for free on Google Sites and very plain in appearance and features, though I did recently port it to their New Sites standard. It contains a few short essays on computing, music and politics but largely exists as a hub from which to access all those 20+ other repositories. My SEO skills are fairly modest so people are probably more likely to arrive at one of those by Googling rather than via my site, and when they do arrive they’re unlikely to cough up any cash because I spend nothing on promotion. Making a living online has never figured among my life goals, but I do like people to see my work.

The one online medium I’d never tried was the podcast, partly because I don’t really like my flat, East Midlands speaking voice very much when recorded. However I did recently participate in one, via an extremely circuitous tour of the contemporary media landscape. In 1990 I drove to Prague with my brother-in-law Pip in his vintage 1937 Lagonda car, our purpose being to see Vaclav Havel installed as president and to witness Pip’s friend Berty – who’d had to flee the Russian invasion in 1968 – be given the keys to the city. Fast forward to 2017 when an old friend and colleague Mark Williams started a magazine called Classic Motoring Review and asked us both to write up our trip for him. Skip forward again to October 2019, Mark’s magazine has sadly folded, but I post our article from it to Facebook. Flashback: in 1983 Pip had founded the Scotch Malt Whisky Society to spread knowledge of the virtues of unfiltered, cask-strength single malts. Forward again to Oct 2023, Pip shows my Facebook post to the editor of the society’s magazine Unfiltered who decides to republish a full-colour version with an attached podcast of us reading it. 

Now Pip lives in Montrose, I live in London and the society is in Edinburgh so meeting to record was out of the question. I scrambled to test Android audio editing apps, found two that worked (Lexis Audio Editor and Bandlab), recorded my half and you can judge the result here https://unfiltered.smws.com/unfiltered-01-2024/smws-adventures-prague.While it was quite satisfying to add voice to my media types, it did prompt a rather morbid thought. The world’s in a febrile and unstable state right now (to put it mildly) so how long can one expect one’s cloud content to survive, say after a catastrophic cyber-attack like the one in the recent movie ‘Leave The World Behind’. That could wipe the lot. Once upon a time when an author died, people went through his or her papers, the books on their bookshelf, visited their publisher. All solid, material stuff – paper, cardboard, photo prints, paintings, film, tape. How’s that going to work in cloud land? Once Google goes down it’s all just so much scattered data. 

[ Dick Pountain needed a dram of Caol Ila after he finished this column]