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The Line
The Line or Neom

The Line or Neom is a building project in Saudi Arabia. It is a 110 mile or 170 kilometre long building. It will be 200 metres wide and 500 metres or 1,600 feet tall. Inside the structure will be a city to house 9 million people, amenities like school and leisure, their work and public transportation.

NEOM advert in the FT

The Line will be run on renewable energy and involve some sort of smart grid to optimise the living experience. They’ve apparently already started the earth works on construction and expect to have it completed by 2030.

Dystopian

The Line has been criticised in western media as dystopian. The mind immediately turns to science fiction visions like Judge Dredd’s Mega City One or William Gibson‘s cityscapes in his sprawl trilogy books: Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive. They would likely consider ‘ideal’ to look more like the Bosco Verticale in Milan, or the STH BNK in Melbourne, Australia, both of which look very nice. However, isn’t necessarily a panacea as one forestry expert noted.

″I think it’s very important that trees are given space,” Cecil Konijnendijk, from the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry, told CNBC.

“We know that soil — what we call soil volume — is really important, so the trees have to have space underground, maybe even more so than over ground,” he added.

“And then of course trees will have to have time to develop, so you won’t have instant trees. You’ll have to take the time to make sure they grow up and then they provide the benefits that we want to get from them.”
Cecil Konijnendijk, from the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry on CNBC

And it wasn’t just the media who were critical, there were people who spoke out on social media or wrote to the FT like Mark Hudson of Blandford Forum, Dorset.

While the developers claim that it has green credentials and is a harbinger of a low carbon future, there are concerns about its effect on local fauna, flora and migrating birds.

Retrofuturism

Moonwalk 1 Artist: Andy Warhol, 1987 Media: Silkscreen on paper Description: The famous image of astronaut Buzz Aldrin standing on the Moon has become an icon of popular culture. It became material for Warhol’s silkscreen series of nationally known images printed on vibrant, retro, poster colors. Image Credit: Andy Warhol for the NASA Art Program

When I saw the adverts for The Line, I was reminded of two things. NASA’s Art Program and the visual futurism of Syd Mead.

A poster apparently designed by Syd Mead for the 1983 World Sports Fair in Japan

Syd Mead created designs and conceptual art for clients including Ford Motor Company and Philips Electronics.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Mead and his company provided architectural renderings, both interior and exterior, for clients including Intercontinental Hotels, 3D International, Harwood Taylor & Associates, Don Ghia, Gresham & Smith and Philip Koether Architects.

As the 1980s came around Mead developed working relationships a number of Japanese corporations including Sony, Minolta, Dentsu, Dyflex, Tiger Corporation, Seibu, Mitsukoshi, Bandai, NHK and Honda.

Mead cemented his place on popular culture with his work on
Mead’s world, was the world that my generation were promised but was never delivered. Instead we got social media. (If you want to see more of Mead’s work I suggest Sentury and Sentury II.)

NEOM advert in the FT

NASA has an art program that is still running, all be it in a diminished form today. During the 1970s NASA Art Program artists and researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center explored what a future space colony might look like.

Toroidal Colony – Cutaway view, exposing the interior. Art work: Rick Guidice. NASA Ames Research Center

Torus Interior. Interior view. Art work: Don Davis. NASA Ames Research Center

That feeling of retrofuturism might not be accidental. An architect writing in the FT commented on the similarity between The Line and a concept proposed (as more a provocation or thought experiment) by a group of Italian artists called Superstudio who proposed a white gridded wall across the Arizona desert in the late 1960s called Il Monumento Continuo or Continuous Monument in English.

The case for a city like The Line

Firstly, Saudi Arabia has to do something, doing nothing isn’t an option.

At the moment, the population is growing at about 1.65% a year and the average age of the population is just below 30 years old. By comparison the population in the UK is 43. Energy consumption tripled from 1981 to 2010 and if things carry on like this the country will soon move from being the worlds largest energy exporter, to a net importer.

The Saudis only have so much time to do something before the favourable petro-economy conditions turn against them.

The demand for oil won’t dry up completely, but the economics change when oil becomes about supplying legacy transport in the developing world, which will likely go on for a long while, together with a small amount of vintage vehicles run by enthusiasts.

To give you an idea of how long this can be. Leaded petrol started its phase out in cars back in 1975, in the US, and only stopped being sold in 2021. Leaded fuel is still used for some aviation power plants.

Then there will also be a continued need for chemical feedstocks for the likes of the pharmaceuticals sector and manufacturing. At the moment Saudi Arabia’s GDP is just under 600 billion pounds a year, but that doesn’t mean that it will stay at this level for long, or by how much it will decline.

Then there is the challenge of making Arabian peninsula liveable during climate change. They’ve seen the Arab spring in Egypt and Tunisia, or the Syrian civil war and they don’t want it to happen in Saudi Arabia.

Concentrated populations in cities are better for the environment than having them spread out homesteading or living in suburbia. Less environmental impact delivering services. All of which Stewart Brand puts the case for; far more elegantly than I could in his Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto.

Where does my own opinion lie on The Line?

I can understand why the Saudis have gone there. They have sound pragmatic reasons for doing something.

I also feel nostalgic about the childhood future I dreamed of seeing when I looked at Syd Mead and the NASA space colony art work in children’s science books and a sense of a bright future lost.

But I don’t know how much of it will actually work.
- Will the Saudis be able to find design fixes for migrating birds or animals in the same way that roads have developed overpasses or underpasses in the west?
- Will the smart city systems work?
- What about the renewable energy capacity?
- Will there be an economy inside The Line? What will it look like?
- What kind of society will be constructed inside The Line?
- Will The Line be able to cope with an extreme weather event like a sandstorm, or the flash floods from rare rainstorms that occasionally happen even in the desert?
- How will the infrastructure be repaired or upgraded once its all built?
- Will the Saudis be able to afford completing The Line, or will they run out of money? The 2008 financial crisis crushed development in Dubai the following year and the aftershocks are still being felt through stretching out debt deadlines. Dubai property developers like Limitless went through successive rounds of financial restructuring. The Line is a project on a far grander scale.
August 15, 2022
The Visual MBA
Jason Barron’s book The Visual MBA looks to distill down business principles into more easily understandable formats. The Visual MBA has been translated into a number of European languages since it was published in 2019, which is a good indicator of the book’s utility. So I thought I would take the time to review The Visual MBA and see how I got on with it and whether it lives up to its premise.

Areas covered in The Visual MBA

The content of The Visual MBA is broken down into a number of areas including:
- Leadership
- Corporate financial reporting
- Entrepreneurship (management and financial focus)
- Management accounting
- Business finance
- Marketing
- Operations management
- HR
- Strategy
- Ethics
- Decision making
- Startups
The book itself is a robust hardback book that would be fine in a daypack lugged around campus. As with any book there are things that could be put in and taken away. My impression of the content is that would be useful to someone studying business at A’level or in the first year of an undergraduate degree. I personally found the marketing section frustrating. Part of the reason for this is that the depth of the subject was barely scratched. Readers were not prompted to even ask the right kind of questions.

There was nothing that would spur you to read more and read widely. I suspect that this would be the case with the other areas covered by the book as well. It creates the false confidence that would appeal to a surface player. I think that is dangerous for readers and the businesses that they work for.

Do I think the premise of the book works?

The book neatly summarises many of the key concepts that would be taught in a general business course and it explains the points in a simple manner. For instance the idea of balance sheets reminded me of the first semester in the first year of my marketing degree in terms of its explanations.

Where I am less sure of the book’s benefits was whether the illustrations would make me retain any better the content of the book? I will ignore the fact that for some pages the drawings weren’t illustrated but instead representations of the headlines in a hand drawn typography. I might the book beneficial if they were my diagrams that I was sketching in my notes. But I don’t think they have the same effect on a reader of the book.

In summary I would recommend that one buys the book as a simple guide to business studies or commerce rather than the visual aide memoire that the book seems to promise. If this sounds of interest to you you can get more information here.
August 9, 2022
Peugeot 505 + more stuff

Peugeot 505

Before there were minivans, MPVs (multi-purpose vehicles) and people carriers there was the the Peugeot 505 estate. It had three rows of seats. As a child, I remember that the diesel version was used for private hire cars transporting families to the airport and similar uses. At the time, private hire companies used to have names like ‘Airport Express’ and other terms. This was decades before Addison Lee or Uber. The Peugeot 505 could still be seen in Africa and the middle east well into the 2010s, which gives you an idea of how robust the Peugeot 505 and the relative simplicity of repair. It was Peugeot’s last rear wheel drive vehicle. The Peugeot 505 could be found in turbo and GTi versions and was converted by Dangel to become a port-SUV. Four wheel drive, but a monocoque chassis rather than the frame-and-ladder structure still used by serious four wheel drive vehicles like the old model Land Rover Defender, and current Toyota Land Cruiser, Lexus LX and Toyota Hilux pick-ups.

Consumer behaviour

The Secret to Being Lucky | WIRED – we’re only as lucky as we think we are. We only find luck when we look for it. Better still—for those who like action items—luck begets luck. You look for sunny weather, you’re more likely to find it; you find it, you come to think you’re lucky; you try your luck looking for more sunny weather and you luck out again. In Aeon magazine, Hales wrote, “Luck might not be a genuine quality of the world at all.” Fine. But neither is beauty or justice. At the same time, the Bloomsburg researchers discovered “a significant positive correlation” between people’s temperaments and how lucky they thought others were. “One of the things this means is that the more optimistic you are, the more you think others are lucky.” For “optimistic,” I might substitute “happy-go-lucky.”

The airline lounge has arrived at destination undignified | Comment | The Sunday Times – It’s summer 2022, a weekday morning and at Heathrow terminal 2 the “fast track” is closed to premium travellers (lack of staff) and, over at terminal 5, passengers are confusing the BA lounge with a branch of M&S, an adult daycare centre and their living rooms. Buffets are raided and carry-ons filled with cans and bottles, grown men and women are wandering around in what they think is chic athleisure but is really just synthetic jammies, trainers are propped up on tables and every other passenger seems to be suffering from an overheating crotch as legs are splayed wide open. – nice summation of British consumer behaviour

Design

Most expensive cars sold at auction | CAR Magazine – the Mercedes 300 SLR Uhlenhaut coupe is beautiful, but more as a piece of art than something you would want to drive

Economics

Mexico: A development puzzle – by Noah Smith – Noahpinion

Finance

Sinema is significant beneficiary of private equity lobbying machine | Financial Times

Innovation

A.I. Is Not Sentient. Why Do People Say It Is? – The New York Times

Audi’s digital matrix headlights: do they work? | CAR Magazine – I would not of thought that DLP chips would find their way into car headlights to provide a MEMS powered version of the old swivelling headlights that I remember of Peugeots of the 1990s

Sony will work with Honda to build EVs | CAR Magazine – If I had the money and was in the market I would be happy buying a Sony branded car – a ‘Sony Driveman’ if you will. It makes sense that Honda would partner for electric vehicles. I think that this and Toyota and Hyundai‘s separate hydrogen programmes are a couple of the most exciting developments at the moment

Ireland

Russia Has Stolen Over 400 Commercial Jets and No One Seems to Care | SOFREP – many of these were from Irish aviation leasing companies

Legal

Amazon acquires Roomba maker iRobot for $1.7bn | Financial Times – Amazon is in a tussle with the European Commission over the placement of its own-brand products on its platform. Antitrust regulators suggested Amazon was using its size, power and data to prioritise its own items over competing merchants on its ecommerce platform. The commission is seeking views by September 9 on concessions offered by the tech company that aim to address the issues raised – what will the iRobot purchase tell Amazon about the inside of our homes?

Media

MoFi Records has been using digital all along, a scandal in the audio community – The Washington Post

Parrot Perspective: Hollywood Tries to Get Gaming Right | Parrot Analytics

Meta reports drop in revenue for the first time ever | Medium

Online

Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google. :: Reasonably Polymorphic – The primary purpose of the web today is “engagement,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for “how many ads can we push through someone’s optical nerve?” Under the purview of engagement, it makes sense to publish webpages on every topic imaginable, regardless of whether or not you know what you’re talking about. In fact, engagement goes up if you don’t know what you’re talking about; your poor reader might mistakenly believe that they’ll find the answer they’re looking for elsewhere on your site. That’s twice the advertising revenue, baby! But the spirit of the early web isn’t gone: the bookmarks I’ve kept these long decades mostly still work, and many of them still receive new content. There’s still weird, amateur, passion-project stuff out there. It’s just hard to find. Which brings us to our main topic: search. This fits in really interesting with The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the ‘Old’ Internet | Gizmodo

Security

On cruise missiles and precision weapons. There is an interesting paradox between usage and the very slow replacement rates for missiles which affects Russia and western powers.

Software

Tracking the Faceless Killers who Mutilated and Executed a Ukrainian POW – bellingcat – Using the face of the main person of interest, the website search4faces returned a profile on Odnoklassniki, a Russian social network, which contained this individual’s name. This, in turn, allowed researchers to discover a Facebook profile linked to this individual which contained more photographs – these were useful, given that most images of this individual on his other social media profiles were at least six years old. A search on PimEyes using a photograph from this Facebook account returned frames from the aforementioned RIA and RT videos in which the person of interest was visible. As seen in the perils of widely-spread misidentification on Twitter, Russian-created facial recognition algorithms perform poorly with non-Caucasian faces. While the algorithms used by these tools are not openly accessible and verifiable, it is plausible that this poor performance is due to the ethnic and racial bias within the user bases of large Russian social networks such as VKontakte and Odnoklassniki. A 2020 Harvard study revealed facial recognition algorithms’ biased results when working with non-white faces, though most of these studies have focused on American examples and Black faces. – interesting points on facial recognition software used by western and Russian internet services. I imagine that would be different biases in Chinese machine learning algorithms

Taiwan

President Tsai responds to the live-fire military exercises China has initiated around Taiwan – YouTube – great example of a steady hand at the tiller

Web of no web

Young Gamers and the Metaverse: How the Rules of Success Are Changing | Bain & Company

Kim Jones designs skins and vintage car for Dior’s gaming debut | Vogue Business

What Gen Alpha’s Habits Tell Us About The Future Of Gaming – GWI

Metaverse Majors Struggle as User Base Falls Short of Market Expectations

August 8, 2022
Gentler place to work + more stuff
Gentler place to work

Saying out loud the quiet bit about work-life balance; tectonic plates of streaming move again – I’ve found myself thinking about one panel in particular – the participants in the session on advice for aspiring leaders went beyond the usual platitudes, and shared a couple of uncomfortable truths about an industry which is trying to rebrand itself as a gentler place to work. – I think that we’ll see more of this move away from a gentler place to work as companies look to cut staff. I entered the workforce in the middle of recession before I went to college, this was the time of micro serfs and mcjobs. The idea of a gentler place to work seemed to be a transient one to me – one that would come and go with economic growth. Zero hour contracts really grew during and after the 2008 financial crisis, which is as far away from a gentler place to work as you can get.

China

Take down Pelosi’s plane’: Chinese react online to Taiwan visit | Financial Times

Displaced Syrians voice anger as bombed-out town doubles as film set | Financial Times – film being produced by Jackie Chan as demand in China for conflict porn grows alongside nationalistic fervour

Consumer behaviour

Children between the ages of 10-12 are spending the most on video games, survey reveals / Digital Information World

‘I am borrowing to live’: pawnbrokers enjoy golden era as UK hits hard times | UK cost of living crisis | The Guardian

Economics

How rising tensions across the Taiwan Strait could threaten global trade | Financial Times

Ideas

Primary care physicians need 26.7 hours in the day – Futurity

Why Is the Web So Monotonous? Google. :: Reasonably Polymorphic – The primary purpose of the web today is “engagement,” which is Silicon Valley jargon for “how many ads can we push through someone’s optical nerve?” Under the purview of engagement, it makes sense to publish webpages on every topic imaginable, regardless of whether or not you know what you’re talking about. In fact, engagement goes up if you don’t know what you’re talking about; your poor reader might mistakenly believe that they’ll find the answer they’re looking for elsewhere on your site. That’s twice the advertising revenue, baby! But the spirit of the early web isn’t gone: the bookmarks I’ve kept these long decades mostly still work, and many of them still receive new content. There’s still weird, amateur, passion-project stuff out there. It’s just hard to find. Which brings us to our main topic: search. – It is more than search, there is also motivation and consumer behaviour change in the old web versus the new one – The Founder of GeoCities on What Killed the ‘Old’ Internet | Gizmodo

Innovation

How the American semiconductor industry claimed back technological and market leadership from the Japanese

Microrobots in swarms for medical embolization — Nano Magazine

Turning fish waste into quality carbon-based nanomaterial — Nano Magazine

Ireland

Lidl Ireland removes mandatory retirement age of 65 | RTE

Legal

EU starts competition investigation into Google Play store terms – report – Telecompaper

Luxury

Telfar gets Beyoncé boost, but so does Hermès despite Birkin snub | Vogue Business – rappers don’t drive luxury sales, middle class Asians do

Media

Visa and Mastercard cut ties with ad arm of Pornhub owner MindGeek | Financial Times

Retailing

Ocado, the online supermarket – is this a legitimate content partnership with Disney? Something feels a bit off about the Ocado | Disney inspired meals. The ‘inspired by Disney’ tagline and the Lion King themed ‘green grub pasta’ feels weird.

Security

Missfresh hit by lawsuits from investors and employees | Financial Times

Starlink’s Space Speed-Up: A Battle for Internet Leadership – EETimes

Government concerns over China-owned CCTV company embedded in UK – Channel 4 News – There are more than a million of Hikvision’s cameras installed across the UK – monitoring every aspect of our lives. But Channel 4 News has learned that there are growing concerns within the government about the Chinese state-owned tech company.

Next Generation Post-Quantum Encryption May Not Be As Secure As Many Tech Experts Had Hoped / Digital Information World

China’s war games spur Taiwanese business to rally to island’s defence | Financial Times

Web of no web

Air Force Pilots to Fight AI-Based Enemies Using AR Helmets

Apple’s Next-Gen CarPlay Is Scaring the Car Industry. Here’s Why. – Robb Report UK

Some interesting business takes on the commercial decline of ‘metaverse‘ platforms:
August 6, 2022
Objectified garlic + more things

Objectified garlic puts up a stink in Korea

I didn’t expect to be writing the words objectified garlic in such close proximity, ever. The reason for this post is down to an advert put together by an area of South Korea to promote its high quality garlic to Korean city dwellers. The advert was full of double entendres and was accused by critics of having objectified garlic.

The house I grew up in

Hiscox home insurance did this TV advert that makes really good use of projection mapping to tell a story. I can’t believe that this is now eight years old as an execution.

Fuzzy logic versus cloud based AI

I have written a good deal before on the benefits of fuzzy logic which is a much more efficient technology than machine learning for a lot of challenges, particularly if the machine learning is based on cloud computing a la the internet of things (IoT).

E-mu Systems SP1200

Back in the 1980s E-mu Systems were known as one of the pioneers of sampling with their Emulator series of keyboards, alongside the likes of CMI with the Fairlight and New England Digital’s Synclavier. They were bought out in 1993 by Creative Techology like rival Ensoniq – eventually they were both merged together. The SP1200 was a sample based drum machine and sequencer that came out in 1987. It gets its distinctive sound from 12 bit sampling done at about 26 KHz. By comparison, a CD based on 16 bit sampling at 44.1 KHz. It was beloved of hip hop producers from the late 1980s though to the mid 1990s. It is still sought after now.

This video gives you a good idea of how it is operated and hints at the benefits of hardware controls over software interfaces on modern digital audio workstation applications.

August 6, 2022