It’s hard to explain to someone who didn’t live through it how transformation technology has been. When I was a child a computer was something mysterious. My Dad has managed to work his way up from the shop floor of the shipyard where he worked and into the planning office.
One evening he broad home some computer paper. I was fascinated by the the way the paper hinged on perforations and had tear off side edges that allowed it to be pulled through the printer with plastic sprockets connecting through holes in the paper.
My Dad used to compile and print off work orders using an ICL mainframe computer that was timeshared by all the shipyards that were part of British Shipbuilders.
I used the paper for years for notes and my childhood drawings. It didn’t make me a computer whiz. I never had a computer when I was at school. My school didn’t have a computer lab. I got to use Windows machines a few times in a regional computer labs. I still use what I learned in Excel spreadsheets now.
My experience with computers started with work and eventually bought my own secondhand Mac. Cut and paste completely changed the way I wrote. I got to use internal email working for Corning and internet connectivity when I went to university. One of my friends had a CompuServe account and I was there when he first met his Mexican wife on an online chatroom, years before Tinder.
Leaving college I set up a Yahoo! email address. I only needed to check my email address once a week, which was fortunate as internet access was expensive. I used to go to Liverpool’s cyber cafe with a friend every Saturday and showed him how to use the internet. I would bring any messages that I needed to send pre-written on a floppy disk that also held my CV.
That is a world away from the technology we enjoy now, where we are enveloped by smartphones and constant connectivity. In some ways the rate of change feels as if it has slowed down compared to the last few decades.
The politics of Prada challenged what I knew about the luxury brand. I knew that Prada started off as a handbag company that then pivoted into apparel. I also realised that some Prada items probably borrowed from military clothing design and fabric technology, such as Prada’s iconic black Pocono fabric backpacks.
This is pretty common across Italian design with Stone Island CP Company being prime examples. If you would have asked me about the politics of Prada, I would have expected it to be part of the wider anarcho-far left hatred of all prestige brands.
I didn’t realise that Miuccia Prada’s clothing designs reflected her own left wing, pro-feminist politics. The connections of Prada with yachting has less to do with the politics of Prada and more to do with the passion of her husband and business partner Patrizio Bertelli.
One forgets how politics in Italy, had elements of the far left with the Communist Party and the Red Brigades pitted against reactionary right including the Propaganda Due (P2) masonic lodge and the Bologna central station bombing on August 2, 1980. The politics of Prada is by its nature Italian. More related content here.
Aimé Leon Dore x DJ Stretch Armstrong
Aimé Leon Dore got Stretch Armstrong in for a set playing sublime vintage soul 45s.
Scott Galloway on the intersection of economics and technology
Professor Scott Galloway on the intersection of economics, social trends, consumer trends and technology.
Iran-Contra affair
The Iran-Contra affair was how the president Reagan administration, specifically ‘rogue’ elements within it like Oliver North and John Poindexter, came to swap heavy weaponry with the terrorist sponsoring government of Iran in exchange for the release of American hostages, and how money from these deals came to be diverted to a secret and illegal war in Central America.
Sean Munger provided one of the best accounts of it that I have seen outside of the Congressional report.
The most Hong Kong thing I saw all week
HKIB News – a cable and online TV news channel featured a news story about the first trip of local bus company KMB’s electric double decker bus. At the bus stop was a mix of young and middle aged (mostly) male business enthusiasts. In Hong Kong, bus enthusiasts is much more mainstream in the UK. There are shops that sell die-cast scale models of buses in different liveries, so you can get an exact period-correct bus. Bus enthusiasm and the continued popularity of radio controlled car builds as mainstream hobbies were two distinctive aspects of Hong Kong culture for me.
Much of this is down to the limited size of Hong Kong and the public transport infrastructure. Generations of small children have enjoyed some of their happiest memories starting and ending with a bus trip. Buses are the first line of public transport. Hong Kong, (and Singapore) have a good number of young men and women for which it is the dream career. Which is remarkable given that these are part of the developed world and have a good education system.
Instead in the UK, you have a job that pays minimum wage that no one dreams doing.
LK99 is some sort of lead phosphate compounds called lead apatite with small amounts of copper in it. Apatites are a class of mineral, found in everything from marble to bone and teeth enamel. In marble and other rocks apatites tend to be clear but soft crystals. However, these apatites usually are made of calcium or potassium rather than lead.
The material was discovered by two people at Korea University in 1999.
What’s happened about room temperature semiconductors?
In March, a paper was put online by Korean researchers that proposed a theoretical model of room temperature semiconductors using LK99 as a material. A video was put online that is alleged to support a practical test of a room temperature superconductor.
The theoretical paper was formerly published at the end of April in a Korean journal.
In July, they put a paper online and submitted it for peer review claiming that LK99 had exhibited room temperature superconducting properties. EETimes Europe immediately picked up the paper and pointed out its current pre-publication, pre-peer review status. Early reactions to the paper from experts interviewed by Scientific American indicated a high level of skepticism.
Some claims about about LK99, such as the material’s structure have been verified but at the time of writing the substantive claims of room temperature superconductivity have not been replicated.
What’s a superconductor?
A superconducting material allows electricity to pass through it without resistance. This will also exhibit magnetic properties as a magnetic field occurs at right angles to a flow of electricity.
Superconductivity usually occurs at temperatures near absolute zero.
High temperature semiconductors
In the mid-1980s, IBM Research got everyone excited when it did foundational work on creating special materials that allowed superconductivity to happen at higher temperatures. High temperature superconductivity meant that you could cool the materials with liquid nitrogen, rather than having to use liquid helium. So still extremely cold and often also under extreme pressure. The most common high temperature semiconductors operate at up to -163 centigrade, or 100 Kelvin. The jump from semiconductors operating at -270 centigrade to -163 centigrade bought a lot of hope at the time that a boundless future was just in front of us.
Modern superconductors are used in hospital MRI scanners, which is where most people will get to see them. They are used in these machines to create powerful electro-magnets. High temperature superconducting materials have yet to be used widely in applications like this due to cost.
Potential uses
Cost effective superconductors operating at room temperatures open up a range of possibilities:
Much smaller and cheaper to operate hospital scanners
Improved efficiency for electricity generation and transmission
Improved electric vehicle performance such as practical magnetic levitation railways ushering in aircraft level speeds of travel
More efficient electric motors
Lower power consumption in electronic devices
Commercially viable nuclear fusion for power generation
Launching satellites via a rail gun rather than a rocket
Convention weapons of unimaginable speed and power
If this sounds too good to be true, it might be because it is; or we can’t conceive of the technology to do it successfully yet. Think about how unrealistic an iPhone would have seemed to the boffins of Bletchley Park in the 1940s.
If LK99 were real, it could herald in an exciting future.
Best case scenario, commercialisation takes a long time
Even if LK99 was proven to be a room temperature superconductor, it would take decades to make the technology commercially usable. For example, the forerunner of the modern lithium ion battery was invented by a researcher at Exxon in the early 1970s. They tried to commercialise the battery technology, but eventually stopped due to safety concerns. (Given that this was the 1970s, those safety concerns must have been real and reasonably harsh.)
The Exxon work was built on by multiple universities including Stanford. In 1983, a Japanese team at a joint venture company between Asahi Kasei and Toshiba built an initial prototype, which they then modified and came up with a prototype of a battery close to what we use today in 1985. Sony went on to commercialise the batteries in 1991 and the Asahi Kasei-Toshiba joint venture did so a year later. Sony introduced lithium ion batteries on their Sony CCD-TR1 consumer camcorder in 1991. This was a small (allegedly ‘passport sized’ but more like a stout paperback book to read on holiday) high-end machine at the time featuring Hi-8 (high-band 8mm video recording).
The Ericsson T28 cell phone was notable at the time for its use of a lithium ion battery when it launched in 1999.
Worst case scenario
LK99 adversely affects the reputation of Korea University, one of Korea and the world’s most foremost research universities. There is a lot at stake. You can find out more about materials here.
An interesting documentary from 1971 that explores the idea of ‘The Irish Race’ – it is one episode in a 10-part documentary series ‘We The Irish’. It features some of Ireland’s leading public thinkers at the time including Conor Cruise O’Brien and Seán Ó Faoláin. ‘Race’ as a term is more problematic now than back then as there were so few Irish people who weren’t white European looking as Ireland was a next exporter of people rather than welcoming inbound migrants until recent decades. Secondly, the Irish people were constantly having to establish their identity, culture, language and accomplishments in the shadow of their former colonial rulers.
Ó Faoláin an internationally famous short-story writer, a key part of the Irish arts establishment and a leading commentator and critic – a role played by the likes of Fintan O’Toole today.
The discussion about the Irish race was an essential part of decolonising the Irish identity; by emphasising Irish distinctiveness and salience rather than reinforcing racial superiority. A process that countries like Singapore and Malaysia would wrestle with in subsequent decades too.
Tracing The Irish Race
Ó Faoláin starts his discussion with the book Facts About Ireland that was published for over three decades by the Irish Government. The book itself is like a more in-depth version of the CIA World Fact Book profile on Ireland. It was available in souvenir shops up and down the country, my parents probably have my copy of the 1979 edition that I purchased from Salmon’s newsagent and post office in Portumna
O’Brien was part of the Irish elite. His father was a journalist for a Republican newspaper pre-independence and he married into the political establishment of the Irish Republic. But that shouldn’t take away from his achievements in the various facets of his career by turns was an Irish diplomat, politician, writer, historian and academic.
The series also marks a different kind of high brow factual television than we are used to seeing now.
The Case for a Hard Break With China | Foreign Affairs – U.S. theorists and policymakers ignored the potential risks of integration with an authoritarian peer. Globalization was predicated on liberal economic standards, democratic values, and U.S. cultural norms, all of which were taken for granted by economists and the foreign policy establishment – the arguments in the article are not new, what’s interesting is that they are being run in Foreign Affairs magazine and that should worry China
Tesla’s secret team to suppress thousands of driving range complaints | Reuters – Tesla years ago began exaggerating its vehicles’ potential driving distance – by rigging their range-estimating software. The company decided about a decade ago, for marketing purposes, to write algorithms for its range meter that would show drivers “rosy” projections for the distance it could travel on a full battery, according to a person familiar with an early design of the software for its in-dash readouts. Then, when the battery fell below 50% of its maximum charge, the algorithm would show drivers more realistic projections for their remaining driving range, this person said. To prevent drivers from getting stranded as their predicted range started declining more quickly, Teslas were designed with a “safety buffer,” allowing about 15 miles (24 km) of additional range even after the dash readout showed an empty battery, the source said – fundamentally dishonest
Six Bubble Tea Chains Plan IPOs in Bet on China Consumer Revival – Bloomberg – Firms with fast franchise growth not allowed to list onshore. Mixue, ChaBaiDao, GoodMe among firms weighing listings. Who is to say that these businesses won’t be like Luckin Coffee? If the Chinese government won’t allow them to list at home and they don’t want to list in Hong Kong, one has to wonder about the state of these businesses
A couple of things about this video. Major Australian TV network asked YouTuber ColdFusion to make this documentary. YouTubers are now competing against TV production houses for production briefs. Secondly, the video offers a positive take on how machine learning may impact healthcare.
JustoffJunction.co.uk – genius app for planning British motorway travel, the reason why you would care would be the inflated prices at motorway services stops
The two stand out films of the summer are Barbie and Oppenheimer . Oppenheimer is a biopic of scientist and Manhattan Project lead J. Robert Oppenheimer, based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer went on to lead the projects Los Alamos lab. Los Alamos National Laboratory has gone on to do scientific research on defence projects as well as health related projects. Casting of Cillian Murphy provides a good physical resemblance of Robert Oppenheimer.
J. Robert Oppenheimer biopic
Oppenheimer is a complex film with the story told in the form of flashbacks. It also tries to reinterpret Oppenheimer for the present day, with a sense of guilt that Oppenheimer never personally expressed. But Oppenheimer had been concerned about the nuclear arms race and weapons proliferation. He opposed the subsequent development of the hydrogen bomb. These positions along with his friendships with communist party members in the US, led to him losing his security clearance in 1954.
J. Robert Oppenheimer via the US Department of Energy
Barbie
Barbie looks to bring to life Mattel’s toy characters Barbie and Ken. Barbie was introduced in 1959 as a copy of a German fashion doll line. The fashion doll line came out of a cartoon strip in the Bild tabloid newspaper. Mattel went on to buy the German originator and shut it down. But by this time the German doll moulds were bought or copied by manufacturers in Hong Kong and Spain.
1990s vintage Barbie
The Barbie movie addresses head on the cultural and design legacy of Barbie alongside present-day culture wars
Barbie starts off in a matriarchal fantasy world; Ken is represented as a boy toy
Eventually Barbie and Ken end up in the real world. Barbie meet her owner who accuses her of setting unrealistic beauty standards
Ken learns about the male patriarchy, which means a battle of the sexes ensues when they both return to toyland
Barbeheimer
Both Barbie and Oppenheimer were released in the cinema at the same time going head-to-head with Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part One. This led to cinema goers taking advantage and buying a ticket to see each film one after the other. The practice of watching Barbie and Oppenheimer as a double-bill became so common it was given its own name Barbenheimer, when then became a thing in the news, on podcasts and social media. It has been credited with listing the business performance of cinemas, while sit on the edge of a recession. In fact in the UK, for some of the weekend, both Picturehouse cinemas and Vue cinemas websites were having trouble handling customer traffic.
Google Tests A.I. Tool That Is Able to Write News Articles – The New York Times – One of the three people familiar with the product said that Google believed it could serve as a kind of personal assistant for journalists, automating some tasks to free up time for others, and that the company saw it as responsible technology that could help steer the publishing industry away from the pitfalls of generative A.I.
I was taken back to to memories of Skeleton Records in Birkenhead during the early 1990s due to a Taylor Swift album mispress. As a young record buyer I used frequent secondhand record shops to pick up promo copies of records. A rock orientated shop would often not realise what they had, this was before widespread internet access.
The gaunt middle-aged shop assistant was sat behind the counter looking at a picture disc of Fish – State of Mind on picture disc. Fish had recently left then popular rock band Marillion and State of Mind was a single from his first solo album Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors.
Apparently one of his customers worked as an assistant shop manager, realised what they had and ‘lost’ the record before the distributor came to collect all the copies of the mispress. The reason why the distributor would want to collect the records? Because they played Madonna’s Cherish instead. The shop assistant said to no one in particular, that will be worth something one day. He wasn’t wrong, I have seen prices quoted as high as 650 dollars paid – if the right Madonna or Marillion completist collector actually finds a copy for sale.
Taylor Swift Speak Now Concert at Heinz Field by Ronald Woan
A similar thing happened to Taylor Swift fans this week, who ordered her latest album and ended up with Taylor Swift artwork, but songs from the early 1990s electronica compilation Happy Lands volume 1 playing instead.
This mispress became know as the ‘cursed version’ presumably because of its dark electronic sounds featuring Cabaret Voltaire and others. They might be able to take heart when they realise the such mispresses have become collectors items in the past with an appreciating value.
Back when I was a child, the oil refinery was a cathedral to industry rather than a climate crime scene and working in the oil industry was a cut above working in other industries.
3D printing industry gripped by intrigue, litigation and churn | Financial Times – 3D printing or additive manufacturing is currently used for small batch manufacturing by the likes of GE, Rheinmetall, Airbus and Lockheed Martin. You had a similar set up with CNC milling (including multi-axis machines) and multitasking machines which were confined to manufacturing ‘cells’ until Apple went out and bought thousands of them and had them running in parallel on Foxconn lines manufacturing iPhone chassis’. Additive manufacturing needs its ‘iPhone moment’ to cross the chasm to mainstream use. That is reliant on an innovative client rather than supplier innovation and the current players like Stratasys aren’t in a position to drive this next stage of innovation, but their customers might be.
Letter Statement March2023 | DAIR – Tl;dr: The harms from so-called AI are real and present and follow from the acts of people and corporations deploying automated systems. Regulatory efforts should focus on transparency, accountability and preventing exploitative labor practices.
