Odds and Sods

Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela (Rolihlala, his given Xhosa forename, means "troublemaker" by the way ) died yesterday. I've never been a fan of the "Great Man" theory of history, believing that it is systemic - but in this one case, I'd make an exception. There is no need for the Beloved Country to cry, but to rejoice in what he has achieved, not least the prevention of bloody civil war. In my view the principles of Truth and Reconciliation should be made globally mandatory after any conflict.

Satire has a marvellous way of telling deep truths via humour, and internet newspaper The Onion sums up Madiba's impact perfectly (above)

RIP Madiba

(We went to the same university, so I like to think I walked in his footsteps just a tiny bit - mainly to the canteen, I suspect, in my case......)

...or not. But if we cannot remember the past, we are doomed to repeat it. And some modern trends look worryingly like trends in the 1910's and 1930s.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. Elaine Morgan died this year, she helped develop a fascinating thesis of a part of human evolutuion, and was a very talented woman.

On her thesis - like many I was curious about why, of all the land mammals, only humans and pigs have little body hair and do have subcutaneous fat, whereas all sea living mammals have them. Morgan wrote about the Aquatic Ape theory. (Wikipedia):

Morgan first became drawn into scientific writing when reading popularizers of the savannah hypothesis of human evolution such as Desmond Morris. She described her reaction as one of irritation because the explanations were largely male-centered. For instance, she thought that if humans lost their hair because they needed to sweat while chasing game on the savannah that did not explain why women should also lose their hair as, according to the savannah hypothesis, they would be looking after the children. On re-reading Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape she encountered a reference to a hypothesis that humans had for a time gone through a water phase, the so-called aquatic ape hypothesis. She contacted Morris on this and he directed her to Alister Hardy. Her first book The Descent of Woman (1972) was originally planned to pave the way for Hardy's more academic book, but Hardy never published his book.

Morgan's first publication was mentioned by E. O. Wilson in 1975, comparing it to other "advocacy approaches" such as The Imperial Animal as an "inevitable feminist" counter, but describing the method as less scientific than other contemporary hypotheses. Morgan accepted this criticism and her later books were written in a more scientific tone, or more "po-faced" as she herself described it. As an outsider and a non-scientist she claims to have encountered hostility from academics. Consequently many of her books seem to be written as much to counter the many arguments put forth against the Aquatic Ape Theory as to advance its merits.

I remember being delighted when I read "The Descent of Woman" in the late 70's, as it was clear it was both a fascinating hypothesis and tweaked the nose of the existing heirarchy. The theory is still at the sidelines of scientific thought (though there is still no good explanation of why we and pigs are more like Dolphins in so many ways), but good for Elaine for squaring up to the scientific establishment and rocking it.

She was also a fascinating character and quite the Renaissance woman (Wikipedia again) :

Elaine Morgan began writing in the 1950s after winning a competition in the New Statesman, successfully publishing, then joining the BBC when they began to produce her plays for television. Morgan's works included popular dramas, newspaper columns, and a series of publications on biological anthropology. Morgan wrote for many television series including the adaptations of How Green Was My Valley (1975) and Testament of Youth (1979). Her other work included episodes of Dr. Finlay's Casebook (1963–1970), the biographical drama The Life and Times of David Lloyd George (1981) and contributions to the Campion (1989) series.

She won two BAFTAs and two Writers' Guild awards. She also wrote the script for the Horizon documentary about Joey Deacon, the disabled fund-raiser. This won the Prix Italia in 1975. She was honoured with the Writer of the Year Award from the Royal Television Society for her serialisation Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth (1979). In 2003 she started to write a weekly column for the Welsh national daily newspaper The Western Mail, and in this role was awarded Columnist of the Year for 2011 in the Society of Editors’ Regional Press Awards. She was awarded an honorary D.Litt. by Glamorgan University in December 2006,[7] an honorary fellow of the University of Cardiff in 2007, and awarded the Letten F. Saugstad Prize for her "contribution to scientific knowledge"

RIP Elaine, Renaissance Woman in an over specialised age.

Ronald Coase died yesterday, he won his Nobel Prize for understanding transaction costs in business value chains and externalisation of costs (eg pollution), these have been critical to understand online economics and tehe volution of digital business, social business just being the latest iteration. Wikipedia:

Coase is best known for two articles in particular: "The Nature of the Firm" (1937), which introduces the concept of transaction costs to explain the nature and limits of firms, and "The Problem of Social Cost" (1960), which suggests that well-defined property rights could overcome the problems of externalities (see Coase Theorem). Coase is also often referred to as the "father" of reform in the policy for allocation of the electromagnetic spectrum, based on his article "The Federal Communications Commission" (1959), where he criticizes spectrum licensing, suggesting property rights as a more efficient method of allocating spectrum to users. Additionally, Coase's transaction costs approach is currently influential in modern organizational economics

He is also famous for his take on lies, damn lies and statistics - "If you torture the data enough, nature will always confess"

MG Siegler on Tech Blog News:

A few months ago, I found myself in an odd position — with some time off. A lot of it. Naturally, I decided to use the time not to disconnect, but instead to double-down on tech news. I set out to achieve “Pocket Zero” and catch up on nearly everything I had saved to read later but never got to over the past year or so.

A few dozen articles in, a pattern started to emerge. By the time I had read a few hundred articles, I had my thesis for what I’ll call the “75 — 20 — 5 Rule”.

That is, on any given day, I’d say 75 percent of what you read in the tech press is somewhat accurate, 20 percent is complete bullshit, and 5 percent is actually true.

Only 20% is complete bullshit? I think that way underestimates it! When you get large numbers of scribblers who barely understand the technology, have little grasp of economics and Kiplings 5 Servants, but loaded to the gunwales with opinions and funded by vested interests, you are not going o get a lot of truth.

MG references the PandoDaily whoopsie, where whispered innuendo, repeated enough times, eventually got reported as fact, but as he notes they are just a notable outlier in the dynamic:

There has long been a “speed versus accuracy” debate within the tech blogosphere. When I was in that world, I was definitely in the “speed” camp. Get something out there and let the truth reveal itself — process journalism, baby. If the readers aren’t comfortable with that, let them read elsewhere.

But my fear now is that we’re veering too far into the world of half-truths and straight-up bullshit. Everything reported on, no matter how inaccurate is often taken as gospel and spread further. Speed and exaggeration have won, accuracy and nuance are nearly dead. It’s not quite another age of yellow journalism yet, but we’re getting there.

Siegler does note that the mainstream media is generally more accurate, which, 10 years after the Great Blogging Revolution began, signals the beginning of the end of the Pirate Days, when newcomers invade with alternate funding and agressive business practices to steal market hare off incumbents (see chart above, predicting in 2008 that the end would have begun by 2013, oddly enough)

Anyway, I think the figure of 95% of news being somewhere on the spectrum of complete bullshit to somewhat bullshit is probably about right, which is of course what has given Broadstuff such a rich ecosystem to feed on. Finding material to write mildly satirical stories about the industry since 2006 has been like shooting fish in a barrel*

*And the fishy story stocks are not depleting, either. We could push out Tech satire Onion style, in Mashable volumes if we desired.

A true renaissance woman, and author of the fascinating thesis that man was at one time an aquatic ape. An outsider who shook the field of evolutionary anthropology.

There are a number of great old Victorian cemeteries in London (the Magnificent 7, they are called). Highgate in North London is the most famous as Karl Marx is buried there. A chance meeting with some members of the Friends of West Norwood Cemetery put me wise on some of their famous corpses - including two serious Geeks Of Yesteryear - Hiram Maxim (most famous for his machine gun) and Henry Bessemer (for the Bessemer steel making process). However, in reality these two were also real geek entrepreneurs and reading about their expolits can be quite instructive for anyone starting in business today. A bit of Wikipedia:

Maxim:

Maxim, a long-time sufferer from bronchitis, patented and manufactured a pocket menthol inhaler and a larger "Pipe of Peace", a steam inhaler using pine vapor, that he claimed could relieve asthma, tinnitus, hay fever and catarrh.[19] After being criticized for applying his talents to quackery, he protested that: "it will be seen that it is a very creditable thing to invent a killing machine, and nothing less than a disgrace to invent an apparatus to prevent human suffering".

He also invented a curling iron, an apparatus for demagnetizing watches, magno-electric machines, devices to prevent the rolling of ships, eyelet and riveting machines, aircraft artillery, an aerial torpedo gun, coffee substitutes, and various oil, steam, and gas engines.

A large furniture factory had repeatedly burned down, and Maxim was consulted on how to prevent a recurrence. As a result, Maxim invented the first automatic fire sprinkler. It would douse the areas that were on fire, and it would report the fire to the fire station. Maxim was unable to sell the idea elsewhere, but when the patent expired the idea was used.

Maxim developed and installed the first electric lights in a New York City building (the Equitable Life Building (New York City) at 120 Broadway) in the late 1870s. However, he was involved in several lengthy patent disputes with Thomas Edison over his claims to the lightbulb. One of these actions regarded the incandescent bulb, for which Maxim claimed that Edison was credited by means of his better understanding of patenting law (though in England Joseph Wilson Swan had already obtained the first patent in 1878). He claimed an employee of his (Maxim's) had falsely patented the invention under his own name, and that Edison proved the employee's claim to be false, knowing that patent law would mean the invention would become public property, allowing Edison to manufacture the lightbulb without crediting Maxim as the true inventor.

A lesson there on patent trollism for today from Mr Edison to boot....

And Bessemer:

Bessemer was a prolific inventor and held at least 129 patents, spanning from 1838 to 1883. These included military ordnance, movable dies for embossed postage stamps, a screw extruder to extract sugar from sugar cane, and others in the fields of iron, steel and glass. These are described in some detail in his autobiography.

After suffering from seasickness in 1868, he designed the SS Bessemer (also called the "Bessemer Saloon"), a passenger steamship with a cabin on gimbals designed to stay level, however rough the sea, to save her passengers from seasickness. The mechanism - hydraulics controlled by a steersman watching a spirit level - worked in model form and in a trial version built in his garden in Denmark Hill, London. However it never received a proper seagoing test as, when the ship demolished part of the Calais pier on her maiden voyage, investor confidence was lost and the ship was scrapped.[15]

Bessemer also obtained a patent in 1857 for the casting of metal between contrarotating rollers - a forerunner of today's continuous casting processes and remarkably, Bessemer's original idea has been implemented in the direct continuous casting of steel strip.

As another famoues dead person said, those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. WE have looked at the evolution of technology over the last 200 odd years a number of times:

The Role of Bubbles

The Mathematics of Paradignm Shifts

And Are we more Innovative than 100 years ago....

And one of the lessons that comes overagain and again is that technology is a waveform, and what is to come has already been in some shape or form, as Carlota Perez noted (summarised here by Alex Sherman):

The critical point Perez makes is that technology revolutions occur in regular cycles (she calls them “surges”) that can generally be analyzed within a recurring conceptual structure. To that end, she divides each technological surge into two basic periods, each lasting roughly 20-30 years: the installation period, in which a radically new technology enters a mature economy and significantly disrupts the incumbent technologies; and the deployment period, in which the new economy reshapes itself around the new technology. These two periods are joined via a turning point, in which the frenzied investment surrounding the initial growth of the nascent technology creates a large market bubble and financial collapse, thus clearing the way for the more sound and controlled growth of the deployment period. Perez also explores the role of capital investment within each period of the surge, and asserts that the installation period is driven by the interest (and folly) of financial capital, while the deployment period is perpetuated through the measured and diligent investment of production capital.

Anyway, I trotted along on the last Open Day, and took the photos of these two Great (dead) Geeks (pictures at top of post), but also realised that this huge 42 acre cemetery, with some of its very Gothick tombs and wild growth, is also absolutely zombietastic (below).

Science Fiction writer (Culture series) and "Normal" fiction novelist Iain Banks (Wasp Factory etc) has died, aged 59.

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you. May he rest in peace.

At the top of the South Sea Bubble of 1711-1720, investors were eagerly pouring money into an enterprise advertised as:

"a company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is"

At the (current) top of the Bitcoin Bubble (2011 - ?) investors are pouring money into:

"a company* for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, with a currency that doesn't exist, generated by a method that nobody is to know what it is (and wouldn't understand if they did)"

This time, of course, It Will Be Different.....

Or alternatively, read George Santayana


* I use the term loosely

Guardian's April Fool joke was Guardian Goggles, a device that makes the avidly right-on personista happier by removing sights that are vexatious to their tender souls:

"Now, when you're out shopping, you needn't have memorised our recent features on ethically sourced foods. Just call up the 'Mini-Monbiot' app, and the products you're looking at will be rated in front of your eyes."
Related software can detect the destinations featured in holiday brochures, warning wearers before they book trips to countries with problematic human rights records.

The spectacles also feature optional built-in anti-bigotry technology, which prevents exposure to non-Guardian opinions by blacking out columns by Melanie Phillips or Richard Littlejohn, among other writers, as soon as the user attempts to look at them.

The real joke though, is that this really exists today, as people are increasingly selective about the opinions they seek on the Internet leading to a wider polarization of views. It even has a name - Selective Exposure. None so blind as those that can see.....