Marcus Aurelius, the snuggly emperor

It's been said that there are three types of people when it comes to politics : hobbits, who are inoffensive but just don't care very much, hooligans, who are wildly passionate but also stupid, and the rare, precious Vulcans, who are more intelligent and passionate than the hobbits and able to rise above the mud-slinging of the hooligans.

Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome from 161-180 A.D., was a Vulcan.

Yes, yes, I know there are no horses on the planet Vulcan, and he didn't have pointy ears or do the Vulcan death grip or even try and mind meld with anyone. In fact, he'd have probably hated the very idea of having to share someone else's brain, because his Meditations suggest a deeply melancholy soul who was acutely aware that he had the weight of the known world on his shoulders. Marcus, a fierce introvert, would far rather have been left alone, preferably tucked up nice and snug in bed :

At break of day, when you are reluctant to get up, have this thought ready to mind : "I am getting up for a man's work. Do I still then resent it, if I am going out to do what I was born for, the purpose for which I was brought into the world ? Or was I created to wrap myself in blankets and keep warm ?"

The most powerful man in the world and all he really wanted was to be nice and snuggly. Likewise though he usually praises philosophy, meditation and learning above all things, sometimes he has to remind himself that he ought to bloody well go outside and do something :

And give up your thirst for books, so that you do not die a grouch, but in true grace and heartfelt gratitude to the gods.

The ruler of the world was a snuggly bookworm. It's a good thing the Romans hadn't discovered cocoa, because Marcus probably would have drank it to extinction if they had. Wine ? Women ? No – snuggles and books for this Imperator.  It's hard to read the Meditations without wanting to give him a great big hug. Unlike so many other emperors – not least of which his own son Commodus – Marcus was no hedonistic pleasure-seeker who cared about no-one but himself. Instead he seems to be constantly reprimanding himself for not being the very best emperor he could possibly be. He continues his conversation with himself :

"But this is more pleasant."Were you then born for pleasure  – all feeling, not action ?"But one needs rest too."One does : I agree. But nature has set limits to this too... The point is you do not love yourself, otherwise you would love both your own nature and her purpose for you... you have less regard for yourself than the smith has for his metal-work, the dancer for his dancing, the money-grubber for his money, the exhibitionist for his little moment of fame. These people, when impassioned, give up food and sleep for the promotion of their pursuits, and you think social action less important, less worthy of effort ?"

That's a sentiment which is found throughout the whole work. Somehow, Marcus manages to blend an awareness of his own supreme importance without falling victim to arrogance - conscious that "the whole Earth is a mere point in space... the whole of present time is a pin-prick of eternity." He might have thought himself better than a blacksmith or a dancer, but he also knew that the limits of his earthly power were truly minuscule.

And sometimes all he wanted to do was stay in bed with a good book. Who can blame him for that ?

Just like a Vulcan, Marcus wasn't devoid of emotions – he only sought to control them. As a Stoic, he believed that we have an internal choice as to how to respond to external crises, that things can only hurt us if we let them. The essence of it is very Buddhist-like and easy enough to understand :

One man prays : "How can I sleep with that woman ?
Your prayer is : "How can I lose the desire to sleep with her ?"

Marcus doesn't seem to have felt the need to remind himself to stop fooling around with all the sexy ladieeez very much. Most of his reminders to himself are about his own mortality, the need to treat people with decency, and that only his own responses are what cause difficulties – not the problems themselves. That he has to keep reminding himself of this is testament to the fact that while he may have succeeded in controlling his responses, he never became an unfeeling automaton. But sometimes it can feel like he takes this to absurd extremes. In the same passage he says something that's not nearly so comfortable :

Another : "How can I save my little child ?"
You : "How can I lean not to fear his loss ?"

While we can probably all accept that we can be driven mad with anger or lust or ennui*, the idea that we shouldn't fear the loss of a child is an altogether more disturbing idea. Marcus wrote his Meditations as private thoughts to himself, so we don't know exactly what he meant by this. He doesn't appear to have been a callous or cruel man; had he gone around not caring who lived and who died he'd be up there with the likes of Nero and Caligula. Perhaps in an era of high child mortality, this quotation would have been viewed more as an unavoidable practical necessity. Or perhaps he only meant that one should not go so mad with grief as to become incapable of taking sensible actions.

* Or Justin Beiber music or the Go Compare guy.

That's the great paradox of Marcus' stoicism : if it's only Marcus' own reactions that mean anything, if he's just an insignificant mote in the infinite cosmos, if his life is basically irrelevant and his soul either immortal or non-existent, why then should he bother doing anything at all ? "A king's lot : to do good and be damned", he says at one point. Or even worse :

Just as you see your bath – all soap, sweat, grime, greasy water, the whole thing disgusting – so is every part of life and every object in it.

Yet somehow he clearly managed to drag himself out of his nice warm bed and away from his beloved books, and either "teach or tolerate" those who made the world such a disgusting place to live. But there were some things that really ticked him off, like smelly people and grammar Nazis. Seriously :

Are you angry with the man who smells like a goat, or the one with foul breath ? What will you have him do ? That's the way his mouth is, that's the way his armpits are, so it is inevitable that they should give out odours to match. 

From Alexander the grammarian : not to leap on mistakes, or captiously interrupt when anyone makes an error of vocabulary, syntax, or pronunciation, but neatly to introduce the correct form of that particular expression by way of answer, confirmation, or discussion of the matter itself rather than its phrasing – or by some other such felicitous prompting.

If someone puts to you the question, "How is the name Antoninus spelt ?", will you shout your way through each of the syllables ? What then if they get angry ? Will you lose your temper too ? Will you not rather calmly go through the sequence of letters, telling each one in turn ?"

So there you have it. At one point, all of Europe was ruled by a nerdy bookworm who loved being snuggly and hated smelly grammar Nazis – and he's widely revered as one of the most successful rulers of all time. Nerd power !

Crime : it's all in your breath

I've heard of the lead-crime hypothesis before, but this seems to be more general.

 The most polluted days correlated with the worst test scores. On days where the air quality was cleanest, students performed better. “We could see a clear decline [of performance] on days that were more highly polluted,” says Roth. “Even a few days before and a few days after, we found no effect – it’s really just on the day of the exam that the test score decreased significantly.” 

In 2018 research his team analysed two years of crime data from over 600 of London’s electoral wards, and found that more petty crimes occurred on the most polluted days, in both rich and poor areas. It's important to note that this finding is purely correlational – but Roth has reason to believe that there is a causal link. 

His team also compared very specific areas over time, as well as following levels of pollution over time. A cloud of polluted air, after all, can move around depending which direction the wind blows. This takes pollution to different parts of the city, at random, to both richer and poorer areas. “We just followed this cloud on a daily level and see what happened to crime in areas when the cloud arrives… We found that wherever it goes crime rate increases,” he explains.

Importantly, even moderate pollution made a difference. “We find that these large effects on crime are present at levels which are well below current regulatory standards.” In other words, levels that the US Environmental Protection Agency classifies as “good” were still strongly linked with higher crime rates.

The most obvious question is how much does air pollution drive crime. The BBC article doesn't say, but it provides a direct link to one which does. And it's not small.

The researchers found that a 10 point rise of the air pollution measure, the Air Quality Index (AQI), increases the crime rate by 0.9 per cent. This means that the crime rate in London is 8.4 per cent higher on the most polluted day (AQI 103.6) compared to the days with the lowest level of pollution (AQI =9.3).

That seems too strong to ignore. At the same time, it's far too small to blame all crime on air pollution. But chemicals which impair reasoning and judgement that push the criminally-inclined over the edge ? That I can believe. Pollution would seem to be an important contributing factor, but no more or less than that. Naively, the short timescale argues in favour of a direct causal connection but I'd be interesting in alternative interpretations.

How air pollution is doing more than killing us

In the future, police and crime prevention units may begin to monitor the levels of pollution in their cities, and deploy resources to the areas where pollution is heaviest on a given day. This may sound like the plot of a science fiction movie, but recent findings suggest that this may well be a worthwhile practice.

Wanna learn maths ? Go clubbing !

This procedure is not recommended.


“I was very shallow,” he laughs. “Life rotated around girls, partying, drinking, waking up with a hangover and then going out and chasing girls and going out to bars again." Maths wasn’t on his radar whatsoever.

But on the night of Friday 13 September 2002 everything changed. While out with friends, Padgett was attacked and robbed by two men outside a karaoke bar. They took his already torn leather jacket. Padgett staggered to a hospital across the street where he was told he had concussion and a bleeding kidney thanks to a punch to the gut. “They gave me a shot of pain medication and sent me home,” he remembers.

But while Padgett was experiencing all these negative consequences [extreme OCD] from his attack, something incredible was happening too. The way Jason was seeing things, changed. Everything that was curved looked like it was slightly pixelated,” he explains. “Water coming down the drain didn’t look like it was a smooth, flowing thing anymore, it looked like these little tangent lines.”

While in the MRI scanner, hundreds of equations, including fake ones, flashed on a screen in front of Padgett’s eyes. The researchers then watched which parts of his brain lit up in response.

“They found that I had access to parts of the brain that we don’t have conscious access to and also the visual cortex was working in conjunction with the part of the brain that does mathematics, which obviously makes sense,” says Padgett.

...Brogaard believes the brain injury Padgett sustained caused him to develop a form of synaesthesia where certain things triggered visions of mathematical formulas or geometric shapes, either in his mind or projected in front of him. She also hypothesised that synaesthesia made Padgett an acquired savant.

I find it fascinating that synaesthesia can make you better at maths. Does it actually change the computations the brain is doing, or only make you more aware of them ? Or just lead to a drive to understand what's happening by changing perception, hence the great deal of time he spent learning mathematics online and in college courses ? Anyway, this all ends happily :

Since his diagnosis, Padgett has published a book about his experience called Struck by Genius, he’s toured the world telling people his story and educating them about maths. He started a company called Outliers which helps produce movies about people who have had unique or rare/interesting life stories. He even sells his drawings of fractals.

The two men who attacked him that fateful September night were never convicted despite Padgett identifying them and pressing charges. Years later, however, one of the men, Brady Simmons, wrote to Padgett to apologise while he was undergoing treatment for prescription drug addiction following a suicide attempt. In a sense, two lives were changed in the years that followed the attack. “I’m a completely different person,” says Simmons. “When I look back the abysmal person that I was in the past, I just don’t see how I existed on that level.”

So essentially : bit of a lad gets beaten up by douchebags, becomes mathematical whizz, turns life around; douchebag repents their earlier ways, doesn't become mathematical whizz but does turn life around. The universe indeed works in mysterious ways.

The violent attack that turned a man into a maths genius

Jason Padgett sees maths everywhere. Even something as ordinary as brushing his teeth is governed by mathematics - he turns the tap on and dips his toothbrush into the water 16 times. "I don't know why I like perfect squares," he says.

Dodging the bullets of Brexit

It's fair to say that I've never been as nervous about any political decision as last night's vote to extend Britain's exit from the EU. True, all of the noises beforehand were about the length of the delay, not whether there should be one at all. And no-one seemed to want to repeat the previous mistake of a mere technical extension of a couple of weeks, which, while it did finally push the Maybot onto a new track, moaning and wheezing as it went, it didn't and couldn't actually solve anything. But it was still possible that the Maybot might have squeaked something especially foolish or that Macron would have been feeling more vindictive. Fortunately the stars were reasonably well aligned.

For me, the stakes are extremely high. While the Czech Republic (to its great credit) has made a lot of positive noises about protecting the few thousand British workers residents here, that depends on the British government reciprocating the rights of Czech workers resident in the UK. The official statement says the UK will do this for all EU workers currently resident there, but a statement of intent is not the same as a legally binding agreement. So it was entirely possible that come Saturday morning I could technically have been rendered an illegal immigrant. Not a fun prospect at all.

Granted, that wasn't very likely. And granted further that doesn't mean the Czech Republic would kick me out of the country. It may not even have been very likely that if I left the country (which I'm planning to do for Easter) I wouldn't have been able to get back in. But it's awfully difficult to find much assurance in probabilities when its your neck on the line. Would Britain have been treated instantly as a third country ? Would some special arrangements have been made ? We'll never know. The bottom line is that I didn't sleep much last night.


I recently suggested what sort of Brexit I could tolerate, were there to be no way of averting it entirely. The closer we are to Brexit In Name Only, the better. My ideals would be membership of the customs union, single market, and freedom of movement, thus preserving the major economic advantages and political ideals of EU membership, though sacrificing the political influence that comes with it. Where my red lines would be drawn I honestly don't know. I like freedom of movement as an ideal from a moral standpoint, but I also have an obvious selfish reason to support it. What might make me feel better about the whole prospect would be if there was some vaguely plausible plan proposed as to how to deal with withdrawing it : how am I, as a non-permanent resident on a (basically) permanent contract supposed to deal with this ? What exactly is it I'm supposed to do ? Just how much more restricted would I be ? Presumably not totally - there are, after all, plenty of non-EU citizens living here, but without knowing for sure this is an enormously uncomfortable position to be in.

The stay of execution that's been granted leads me to wonder along similar lines of compromise. Never mind what might actually happen next. My question is : what's the most reasonable course of action politicians could now take ? I mean reasonable in the real world, that is, accounting for the different opinions and strength of feelings on all sides, including - especially ! - those I don't agree with.

There are still three possible end states : leaving with an agreement, leaving without an agreement, or not leaving at all. The middle option now seems very unlikely but it's not impossible. The question is what process we should use to decide between the available choices. We're not out of the woods yet - we're in a clearing in the woods, a rather pleasant sunny spot, but the dark and gloomy woods still surround us, still filled with ravenous creatures and dangerous pitfalls that eventually we have to confront.

A 6 month extension is not quite as long as might be ideal, but long enough - as Tusk said - to allow us to completely change strategy. Therefore the most reasonable option would seem to be to continue the cross-party talks for a few weeks or perhaps a month. Either the talks will produce something acceptable to both sides, or they won't. If they fail, then it's either a general election or a second referendum. The problem with a general election is the risk of another hung Parliament so that might not solve anything. The most reasonable thing to do, in that case, would seem to be a second referendum.

If the talks succeed, then the leaders have to go back to their parties and gain wider support - at least enough to put it to a parliamentary vote. If it fails, we have some time to resume the talks, but not much. We might be able to vote a few times on revised compromise agreements, but not indefinitely. Again, a general election or second referendum would be necessary.

It's also unclear if Labour could accept any kind of deal without a confirmatory referendum. If it was BINO or close then they might, but anything else seems doubtful - they'd be risking very large numbers of defections and electoral catastrophe. It is possible, though, that the House would vote on and reject a second referendum. In which case Labour could probably escape blame, the deal would go through, and there wouldn't be much we could do about it.

If a general election wouldn't necessarily break the impasse, would a second referendum do any better if it was to occur ? Perhaps. Polls show that Remain is in the lead, followed by No Deal and then - oddly - May's Deal. My guess is that the first two are clear options that people understand, whereas May's Deal is a weird, highly uncertain compromise - even if it's objectively better than No Deal, no-one likes it. So while Parliament has all but rejected No Deal, it would be foolish to exclude this from the options. Brexit supporters would never accept the legitimacy of such a vote. Heck, I don't think we can really have a vote in which the second most popular option is disallowed, even if it's a really shitty option. Also, excluding it would likely lead to massive loss of faith in the political system, driving voters towards ever more extreme parties. Giving them the option won't stop them protesting if they lose (nor should it !), but does prevent them claiming the result is invalid. The risk that people would vote for No Deal is real, but denying them the option is only likely to inflame support for it even further, alienating those who might have voted Remain instead.

The trickiest part is how to get a decisive result from a referendum which needs at least three options. One of these will be May's Revised Deal, which might be more popular than the current version. Still, an equal split would be just as bad as a hung parliament. We could in principle select the option which wins the most votes, but because the choices are not entirely dissimilar this wouldn't help. For instance, if slightly more voted for No Deal, then there could still be an overall majority for a softer form or no Brexit at all. Conversely, if slightly more voted for Remain, then there could be an overall majority for leaving (with or without a deal). If only, say, 40% voted for Remain with 30% each for Deal or No Deal, who (apart from Noel Edmunds) could honestly say that the people preferred to stay in ?

So while a second referendum could in principle settle the issue decisively, it might well not. The way to avoid this is probably through a transferable vote, where everyone ranks their preferences such that their second preferences are counted if there's no majority for any one option. This guarantees a majority for a single decision and forces voters to compromise. That option is not possible for Parliamentary elections but could be applied to a second referendum.

All of these options carry risks and uncertainties. All of them still allow the most radical options of leaving without a deal or simply calling the whole thing off. The question now that everyone should be asking themselves is simple : which option do I dislike the least ? We might yet get a definitive clean break or choose to stay, but if we're going to get anywhere at all we have to at least try and compromise.

(Here's my secret preference : go back to the EU and get an indefinite extension. They could allow us to leave whenever we want (the deal includes a 2 year transition period, so no cliff edge), so long as we ratify the withdrawal agreement. Let's just make our status as "cats-who-want-to-leave-but-not-really" official and be done with it.)

Thanks, Google...

Sometimes Google translate goes haywire. This email was supposed to be about someone expecting a delivery.



A BEAUTIFUL DAY,

IN THESE DAYS PAVLU SUCHAN SHOULD LOAD A SHIP.

IF YOU ARE BORING THE COURIER WHICH WILL BE DELIVERED, PLEASE SAVE
HER.

YOU WILL NEED TO ACCEPT THE ACCEPTANCE CODE THAT IS:

29 29 90.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

THANK YOU

Aphantasia : a weird lack of mental imagery

Sounds like the name of a ghostly Disney princess but actually it's much more interesting than that :

The former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios says he has a "blind mind's eye". Most people can close their eyes and conjure up images inside their head such as counting sheep or imagining the face of a loved one. But Ed Catmull, 74, has the condition aphantasia, in which people cannot visualise mental images at all.

I don't need to close my eyes - is that normal ?

Eventually Ed realised he was not alone and that, perhaps counter-intuitively, some of the greatest talents in animation could not visualise either. Oscar-winner Glen Keane, who created Ariel (The Little Mermaid), also has no visual imagery. Ed told the BBC: "He is truly extraordinary, he's one of the best animators in the history of hand-drawn animation. "[And] he said that he could never visualise either."

The homework also revealed stark differences between two artists and good friends of Ed's who had worked on Frozen. One can see an entire movie in his head and play it backwards and forwards and never needs to see a movie twice because he can visualise it. The other cannot see anything at all.

Okay, I can't do that.

He added: "People had conflated visualisation with creativity and imagination and one of the messages is, 'they're not the same thing... you would think if a person could visualise, they're more likely to be able to draw. [But] If you open your eyes and you take out a pencil and pad, how many people can draw what they see? The answer is a very small number, so if you can't draw what is in front of you then why would we expect that you would be able to draw what you visualise?"

And very few people can draw something as common as a banknote from memory. To some extent mental images could be the brain providing a sense of the experience of visualising something without providing the visual cues themselves, as in the cases where impossible occurrences in dreams seem completely normal. We could be, in effect, imagining that we're seeing all the details but really we're not, a sort of internal blindsight (where the brain receives visual information and can produce accurate responses to it but the conscious mind is unaware of it). So that would mean :

• Hallucinations are when you mistake your internal visualisation for external perception.
• Blindsight is your brain forgetting to create the internal visualisation stage - you perceive things, but not in the usual way.
• Internal hallucinations are when your brain tells you you're seeing something in your mind's eye but actually you're not.
• Internal blindsight would be when you hallucinate that you're having a hallucination, that is, you may think you're not seeing something internally but actually you are (hence the surprising drawing skills).

How on Earth you would know if someone is really able to see something internally versus them just thinking that they can (they might be shite at drawing), I have no idea. All I know is that if you can't ever be sure that what you perceive is real or external or internal or you brain fooling you into confusing these states, then defining knowledge is clearly flippin' complicated.

My head hurts.

'My mind's eye is blind' - ex-Pixar chief

The former president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation Studios says he has a "blind mind's eye". Most people can close their eyes and conjure up images inside their head such as counting sheep or imagining the face of a loved one.

Put your thinking cap on

Working memory is where your mind keeps temporary information, and has been described as the "sketch pad of the mind". You need your working memory to write down a phone number as someone reads it out to you. Problem-solving, mathematical calculations and decision-making all involve working memory too. Robert Reinhart, an assistant professor at Boston University, and one of the researchers, says: "It's essentially where consciousness lives." 

Working memory declines naturally with age. But the older adults' performance improved with brain stimulation. Dr Reinhart said: "We can bring back the more superior working memory function that you had when you were much younger. 

The team at Boston University, in the US, gave people in their sixties and seventies the working memory of someone in their twenties. The effect lasted at least 50 minutes after the stimulation stopped. But larger studies are now needed to see if stimulation could help people in the "real world" or in treating brain diseases like Alzheimer's.

According to a podcast on the Financial Times, the 50 minutes was how long the study was scheduled to last, so no more measurements were taken after this. The researchers expect the effect to persist for "hours at least".

The study showed that brainwaves become out of sync - like musicians giving a disjointed performance - as we age. The team at Boston University started by recording people's brainwaves with an electroencephalogram. They used electricity stimulation - specifically high definition transcranial alternating current - to strengthen and resynchronise the brainwaves. 

Dr Reinhart says: "I think it is possible to sort of turbocharge even normal, healthy, cognitive functioning people, including young people. "But the largest improvements appear in the people with the greatest deficit at baseline... people who are struggling the most."

I wonder what other effects might be possible. For instance it's possible to induce blindsight by wearing magnets.Perhaps a Penfield mood organ or a dream machine is not so outlandish...

Precise brain stimulation boosts memory

Using electricity to precisely stimulate the brain can boost people's working memory, a study suggests. The team at Boston University, in the US, gave people in their sixties and seventies the working memory of someone in their twenties. The effect lasted at least 50 minutes after the stimulation stopped.

Meanwhile, in post-Soviet Russia...

Professor Dvorkin is worried that kundalini yoga, which has roots in Hinduism, "could lead to uncontrollable sexual arousal... and in consequence to the development of homosexual relationships between inmates," according to the Moskovsky Komsomolets report. He said this raised security concerns, as some prisoners "might go on hunger strike in protest" if they thought inmates serving their food were gay, the paper says.

I mean, those yoga pants... DAAAAMN !

Fortunately, even Russia isn't quite that mad :

But the prison authorities have decided to disappoint both of these moral crusaders, as official research shows that yoga is beneficial to inmates and has no links to homosexuality.

Prison Service Deputy Chief Valery Maximenko told Govorit Moskva radio that inmates who practice yoga need less medical attention, and that "nobody is being drawn towards homosexuality by it. But, even if they are, we have democracy in our country, and everyone has the right to choose their own path... within the law," he added, in an unusually candid statement for a senior Russian official.

And as a bonus there's a second weird story from Russia today on how to declare victory over General Winter :

"You can't be serious??? A photo from 3 April (!!!) to show you dealt with the mounds of ice at the bus stop I complained about on 25 January!!!," she tweeted to the council's Our St Petersburg customer portal... An unimpressed Natalya Vakhlova tweeted the photos, noting that "given it's been well above freezing for some time now, it's not hard to work out that the ice melted on its own."

Council official Sergei Malinin told the site that the street cleaners simply hadn't had time to take photographs while on the job, and acknowledged that sending victory reports with sunny pictures "could look like making fun of citizens". He said the council would try to do better, but one St Petersburger had a better idea. "They should wait until June and declare all the problems solved in one go," he told Fontanka.

Normally I could point and laugh at the silly Russian monkeys. I can't very well do that with half the UK thinking that getting out of the world's largest economic bloc would be a good idea though, now can I ? Stupid Brexiteers won't let me have any fun !

Russian jails drop yoga ban

Russia is reinstating prison yoga classes that were suspended after a complaint based on the concerns of a leading opponent of religious minorities. Senator Yelena Mizulina asked the prosecutor-general to check the legality of kundalini yoga classes introduced on a trail basis in Moscow remand centres, and they were duly suspended during the subsequent investigation, Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper reports.

SABRE : it's actually gonna work

The SABRE air-breathing rocket engine is designed to drive space planes to orbit and take airliners around the world in just a few hours. To work, it needs to manage very high temperature airflows, and the team at Reaction Engines Ltd has developed a heat-exchanger for the purpose. This key element has just demonstrated an impressive level of performance.

"We're now able to prove many of the claims we've been making as a business, backed up by very high-quality data," REL's CEO Mark Thomas told BBC News. "In this most recent experiment, we've near-instantaneously transferred 1.5 Megawatts of heat energy - the equivalent of 1,000 homes' worth of heat energy."

In 2012, REL put the pre-cooler in front of a Viper jet engine and sucked ambient air through the heat-exchanger. The gas stream immediately dropped to minus 150C. Now, the company has flipped the set-up, putting the jet engine from an old F-4 Phantom fighter-bomber in front of the pre-cooler to drive hot gases directly across the piping array. The completed Colorado experiment replicates the thermal conditions corresponding to flight at Mach 3.3, the record-breaking speed at which the American SR-71 Blackbird spy plane used to operate.

"This technology has wide application, not just in the immediate, obvious domain of high-speed flight but across the aerospace industry more generally, and into more commercial applications - anywhere there's a significant heat-management challenge and you're looking for ultra-lightweight, miniaturised, high-performance solutions," Mr Thomas said.

Let's hope we do actually manage to capitalise on this then. It looks like we'll soon need all the advantages we can get.

Super-fast engine tech in new milestone

UK engineers developing a novel propulsion system say their technology has passed another key milestone. The Sabre air-breathing rocket engine is designed to drive space planes to orbit and take airliners around the world in just a few hours.

Pinker's populism

There's one more chapter from Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now I think deserves its own short post before I look at it more generally. Pinker is almost remorseless in his assertion that the world is getting better and is likely to continue to do so. And in at least some respects he's dead right. So what does he make of Donald Trump ?

Pinker's explanation for the election of this bizarre orange blob isn't complete, nor is it pleasant, but it might just be true. It boils to something so simple that it's fashionable among intellectuals to dismiss it as their own bias : racism. It might be nice to think that it was the economically worse-off, and that by improving the well-being of those at the bottom this wouldn't have happened, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence for it.

There are several key things to remember in any analysis of the Trump election. Russian interference (and the influence of social media in general) cannot be neglected - Niall Ferguson is convinced this is a major factor. That Hilary won the popular vote by 3 million is also essential. But perhaps the most important is just how close the vote was. For a so-called man* as horrendously, tragically offensive as Trump, to gain anything more than a handful of votes from lunatics - much less nearly half the vote - demands explanations with deeper roots than campaign tactics or foreign meddling. This is not to say that those factors couldn't have provided the decisive edge and therefore be responsible for the result, but there is simply no way such transient effects could gain as many votes as were actually won.

* Anything can be made offensive by prefixing it with "so-called".

For all that those at Trump's rallies may appear to be working class, they are not the demographic that won Trump the election. In fact the BBC ran a nice piece shortly after the election (I thought I did a post about it but apparently not) which showed this very clearly :

What's more : "In fact, just over half of those with incomes of less than $30,000 (£24,000) voted for Mrs Clinton. Conversely, those on more than $100,000 (£80,000) a year only preferred Mr Drumpf by the narrowest margins."

Pinker's analysis implies that Trump was actually rather more popular with the highest earners, saying, "a majority of voters in the four highest income brackets  voted for Trump", though this is not necessarily incompatible if that majority was small. It is at least clear that the economically "left behind" were not responsible. What Pinker says is key, that the BBC article did not dwell on, is education :

This is hardly a massive difference (it's far more pronounced in the case of Brexit). But perhaps it doesn't have to be, given the closeness of the overall result. It remains baffling that so many with graduate-level educations could consider voting for Trump. On the other hand, education may not play such a dramatic role in shaping ideologies. It was not so long ago that even tenured professors were unashamedly racist because pretty nearly everyone else was too. The BBC article doesn't say anything about racism but it does show one striking graph :

Pinker, being of the evangelical sort, is not at all afraid to say it more directly : Trump voters were a bunch of bigots. I think he rather overstates the case for the role of education here but it's certainly worth considering :

Education exposes people in young adulthood to other races and cultures in a way that makes is harder to demonise them.... Education, when it does what it is supposed to do, instils a respect for vetted fact and reasoned argument, and so inoculates people against conspiracy theories, reasoning by anecdote, and emotional demagoguery. 

Elsewhere Pinker says that learning by rote makes people less critical - they do not generalise from specific examples by themselves but must be told explicitly, or better yet be encouraged to find the patterns by themselves. This could explain why education is not nearly as strong a predictor of Trumpism than race. Since the shift was so much greater with Brexit, does this mean British universities are better at fostering critical thinking ? I dunno. It could instead by that they are more multi-cultural. Again, I dunno.

Silver found that the regional map of Trump support did not overlap particularly well with maps of unemployment, religion, gun ownership, or the proportion of immigrants [I would expect it would show that higher immigration = lower Trump support]. But it did align with the map of Google searches for the word nigger... The regions  of the country that gave Trump his Electoral College victory are those with the most resistance to the decades-long process of integration and the process of minority interests (particularly racial preferences, which they see as reverse discrimination against them).

An important point here is that while a move towards equality can feel like oppression, education can fight this. Indeed, if you don't train people specifically about this, I would say it's an entirely natural response. It isn't their fault. One still has to wonder what kind of degree-level education doesn't include this, but it's at least plausible. Pinker goes on to say that rather than considering the economic inequality that's arisen, we should consider the cultural inequality. He quotes political analyst Paul Taylor :

The overall drift is toward more liberal views on a range of issues, but that doesn't mean the whole country is buying in.

A very interesting caveat that some have raised is that America may, in fact, be polarised more on issues of identity than issues; more vulnerable to corporate lobbying of its leaders than being unable to forge a consensus in its electorate.

But more authoritarian views are not the whole story. Pinker says that another crucial aspect is pessimism :

69% of Trump supporters felt that the direction of the country was "seriously off track", and they were similarly jaundiced about the workings of the federal government and the lives of the next generation of Americans... I believe that the media and intelligentsia were complicit in populists; depiction of modern Western nations as so unjust and dysfunctional than nothing short of a radical lurch could improve them... The problem with dystopian rhetoric is that if people believe that the country is a flaming dumpster, they will be receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues.

Which I think is a very valid point. While things are probably not going as well as Pinker would have us believe (more on that elsewhere), that living standards have undergone an overall arc of improvement is unquestionable. This doesn't mean that there aren't pronounced variations or very real problems that need urgent addressing. But we tend to focus on the problems with myopic exclusivity, and forget the stupendous improvements at our peril.

What of the future ? Happily, Pinker dismisses the notion that we get more right-wing or populist as we get older. Rather, it seems that older generations were more authoritarian to begin with : they've carried their views with them, but even those cohorts have actually become more liberal than when they started (for caveats on effects specific to individual generations see this).


Taken all together, the election of an abject monster can be explained. America has been getting more liberal, but not equally. Its education has improved, but not sufficiently in terms of multicultural values. It may not have the huge KKK rallies of the past, but it still has a significant demographic unable to distinguish equality from oppression. Its media have been painting an absurdly pessimistic view of just how bad things are whilst forgetting the gains that have been made, encouraging people to believe the system is so broken that the only fix is to smash it to bits - or at least not participate in what they see as a pointless process. Add in external interference and new methods of mass misinformation, and the victory starts to look at least vaguely coherent with the overall state of affairs.

There's just one problem with this, one that I've been struggling with and concluded that I simply don't get it. How exactly does anyone look at Trump and not conclude within five minutes or less that he's a colossal arsehole ? The idea that ordinary people think a billionaire can represent them more-or-less makes sense, even if it's not exactly sensible, but... a complete and total dick ? Someone who thinks it's okay to denigrate women, minorities, the disabled ? Who is demonstrably less intelligent than auto-predicted text messages ? In short, how is that that they either overlook, excuse, or even actively support the malignant and deficient character of this manifestly villainous cretin ?

On the edge of chaos

As I near the end of Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, the meaning of one his peculiar phrases has at last become clear to me. Progressives, he says, hate progress. What he means by this is that they hate the real-world kind of progress, which tends to be incremental. They would prefer their own variety of revolutionary progress that sets the whole world fully to rights in one fell swoop. They forget that incremental, largely hidden changes are working a quiet transformation that's bringing wealth, education and freedom to billions of unremarkable lives. In short, they hate Pinker's preferred kind of progress and want their own instead.

Neither approach is without merit. Revolutionary zeal is undeniably appealing, but largely unrealistic and liable to disappoint with its over-reaching rhetoric. But what Pinker often forgets about incremental progress is just how hard-won it has been. Achieving the smallest kind of moral victory - women's suffrage, gay rights, black rights - requires tremendous effort and often bloodshed. It feels as though we're perpetually on the edge of chaos, that what we rail against is not so much the current state of the world as how perilously close it feels to sinking into the abyss.

Pinker, of course, refutes this, saying that the underlying forces propelling the world forward are larger currents in the flow of history, and that any setbacks that do occur will tend to be minor and soon overcome. He has a point. And yet this article belies at least to some extent the reality of contemporary politics as being indeed on the edge of chaos. For many decades, it has seemed as though liberal democracies were a remarkably stable form of government, that all the sound and fury of political theatre mainly signified nothing. And usually, when the voting is done and the policies enacted, all the angry voices fade like so many echoes in the wind. People profess to care about the issues far more than they actually do; they use hyperbole to engage and enliven, but its routine application cheapens debate and undermines issues of genuine import (hilariously exemplified when a Liberal Democrat MP once compared the dangers of wheelchair grannies to the threat of the Luftwaffe).

Genuinely important issues are certainly a lot rarer than political debate would have you believe - but they do, unfortunately, exist. I'm sorry to keep going on about Brexit of late, but it is one of those issues, and we appear to be very much in the endgame and the outcome is still unforeseeable. Right now, in the thick of the moment, it appears quite impossible to see which way the wind is blowing. It may well be that the whole thing is abandoned or a face-saving compromise reached that limits the damage. But it appears equally plausible that entire thing could collapse into ruin, or that even if Brexit itself was implemented in a non-disastrous way, that would not stop the political currents that led us to the brink. Perhaps Pinker is right and they are not currents so much as turbulent eddies carried along in the larger flow of history - I hope so. But this greater process, when you're caught in the middle of it, when you have a very real sense that your entire lifestyle has come under serious threat*, is very, very hard to see. That's something Pinker would do well to recognise.

* I depend on the right to live and work in the Czech Republic. The Czech government has committed to protecting the rights of British workers until the end of 2021 provided the UK government does the same. The UK's official position all but endorses this, but there was no compulsion for either side to do this. Indeed, the Brexit campaign brought into clear focus just how many people do not understand freedom of movement.

That's my prelude. On to the article :

Seriously, the United Kingdom, the world’s fifth-largest economy — a country whose elites created modern parliamentary democracy, modern banking and finance, the Industrial Revolution and the whole concept of globalisation — seems dead-set on quitting the European Union, the world’s largest market for the free movement of goods, capital, services and labour, without a well-conceived plan, or maybe without any plan at all. 

Both Conservative and Labour members of Parliament keep voting down one plan after another, looking for the perfect fix, the pain-free exit from the E.U. But there is none, because you can’t fix stupid.

Yes. Nevertheless, there are varieties of Brexit far worse than others. At this late stage, I believe it's important for all sides to lay out their preferences if they are compelled to make an ugly choice.

We’re living in a world that is becoming so interconnected — thanks to digitization, the internet, broadband, mobile devices, the cloud and soon-to-be 5G wireless transmissions — that we are becoming interdependent to an unprecedented degree. In this world, growth increasingly depends on the ability of yourself, your community, your town, your factory, your school and your country to be connected to more and more of the flows of knowledge and investment — and not just rely on stocks of stuff.

That's it exactly. To have useful knowledge in a rapidly-changing world, we must continually update. We cannot simply amass a great number of books and declare ourselves the winners. We must continue to adapt to an ever-changing world by managing the flow of ideas and the people who propose them.

Keeping your country as open as possible to as many flows as possible is advantageous for two reasons: You get all the change signals first and have to respond to them and you attract the most high-I.Q. risk-takers, who tend to be the people who start or advance new companies. The best talent wants to go to the most open systems — open both to immigrants and trade — because that is where the most opportunities are. Britain is about to put up a big sign: GO AWAY.

The freedom of movement enabled by the EU ought to be its most cherished accomplishment. Its economic benefits cannot be divorced from its political ideology. Once you have freedom of movement, any restrictions inevitably send a signal that immigrants are now less valued and less welcome. There was never any threat of immigrants stealing jobs (impossible - you cannot steal a job, you can only compete for it) or benefits. Most immigrants arrive, start working and therefore immediately paying taxes, and then they leave. They receive far less in benefits than natives because they tend to spend their dependent years (of youth and old age) in their original countries. Thus they come over here, enrich our economy, and go home again. I say this as an immigrant myself.

[The government is] being led by a ship of fools — a Conservative Party bloc that is now radical in its obsession with leaving Europe and a Labour Party that has gone Marxist. If the people here can’t force their politicians to compromise with one another and with reality (there’s still a glimmer of hope that this might happen), there is going to be a crackup of the British political system and some serious economic pain. This is scary.

I've made my objections to Corbyn often enough that I'll not restate them. I stand by my concerns. Right now there is simply no other option than to accept the brown-coated little despot as leader. Before we can even contemplate the next crisis, we must lurch ourselves through the present one. If that means doing a deal with the devil, then so be it.

To re-iterate my main point, it's the total uncertainty that is worrying. It is truly remarkable how Brexit has rendered the political system, always dynamically unstable but somehow able to keep itself upright, almost entirely and farcically impotent. The risk of collapse appears credible (I don't mean civil anarchy, that only happens in movies - I mean a Parliament that remains in a protracted state of paralysis). While fortune's wheel is ever turning, often allowing remarkable recoveries from ruinous calamities, sometimes things do just turn out as disasters. Eventually, of courser, we will recover. But on what timescale ? With the current set of politicians, and a media so incapable of rational insight that they attack and support anyone and anything on the flimsiest bit of information, it's very hard to see a positive way forward in the immediate future. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps May and Corbyn will agree something tolerable to sufficient numbers that the nay-sayers will once again signify nothing - I hope so, but the risk that they will not appears entirely credible. Progress, my dear Pinker, is not an inevitability.

Opinion | The United Kingdom Has Gone Mad

The problem with holding out for a perfect Brexit plan is that you can't fix stupid. LONDON - Politico reported the other day that the French European affairs minister, Nathalie Loiseau, had named her cat "Brexit."

Turning air into oil

A technology that removes carbon dioxide from the air has received significant backing from major fossil fuel companies. British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown that it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way. It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP.

Carbon Engineering says that its direct air capture (DAC) process is now able to capture the gas for under $100 a tonne. With their new funding, the company plans to build its first commercial facilities. These industrial-scale DAC plants could capture up to one million tonnes of CO2 from the air each year.

Carbon Engineering's barn-sized installation has a large fan in the middle of the roof which draws in air from the atmosphere. It then comes into contact with a hydroxide-based chemical solution. Certain hydroxides react with carbon dioxide, reversibly binding to the CO2 molecule. When the CO2 in the air reacts with the liquid, it forms a carbonate mixture. That is then treated with a slurry of calcium hydroxide to change it into solid form; the slurry helps form tiny pellets of calcium carbonate. The chalky calcium carbonate pellets are then treated at a high temperature of about 900C, with the pellets decomposing into a CO2 stream and calcium oxide. That stream of pure CO2 is cleaned up to remove water impurities.

The captured CO2 is mixed with hydrogen that's made from water and green electricity. It's then passed over a catalyst at 900C to form carbon monoxide. Adding in more hydrogen to the carbon monoxide turns it into what's called synthesis gas. Finally a Fischer-Tropsch process turns this gas into a synthetic crude oil. Carbon Engineering says the liquid can be used in a variety of engines without modification.

"The fuel that we make has no sulphur in it, it has these nice linear chains which means it burns cleaner than traditional fuel," said Dr McCahill. "It's nice and clear and ready to be used in a truck, car or jet."

I'd have to wonder about just how clean this is, but I don't agree with the concerns about this being used to allow more fossil fuels or that reducing energy consumption is in and of itself somehow a good thing. Carbon sequestering is something that ought to be encouraged. Humans have already caused enough damage to the planet and have a responsibility to clean up after themselves. It's like waking up hungover in someone else's house and realised you've made a horrible, horrible mess : do you just run away or do you, in a ghastly fit of sobriety, at least offer to help them clean up ? Of course if you do find you're actually not as sober as you thought, then you stop, make your apologies, and leave them the hell alone, but to not make the initial offer is just really rude. So we should absolutely try for all clean forms of power. If this is carbon neutral, or better yet carbon negative, then I see no reason whatsoever to avoid it.

Climate change 'magic bullet' gets boost

British Columbia-based Carbon Engineering has shown that it can extract CO2 in a cost-effective way. It has now been boosted by $68m in new investment from Chevron, Occidental and coal giant BHP. But climate campaigners are worried that the technology will be used to extract even more oil.

May's dangerous game (II)

Theresa May will meet Jeremy Corbyn later to see whether there is common ground to break the Brexit deadlock. Mr Corbyn said he was "very happy" to meet Mrs May and recognised his own "responsibility" to try to break the deadlock. Mrs May said she wanted to agree a new plan with Mr Corbyn and put it to a vote in the Commons before 10 April - when the EU will hold an emergency summit on Brexit. She insisted her withdrawal agreement - which was voted down last week - would remain part of the deal. If there is no agreement, Mrs May said a number of options would be put to MPs "to determine which course to pursue".

The face-value interpretation is that both sides have belated realised they actually do need to make a choice and try to come to an acceptable compromise. The cynical version is that May is trying to shift the blame to the opposition; one last chance, perhaps, to force them to accept her deal warts-and-all. Or she might be hoping that the next Conservative leader will ignore anything agreed here, as the SNP have suggested.

It's impossible to know Theresa May's true intentions, but the sound and fury of the Brexiteers at this development may well be signifying something. Would they all remain silent if they thought she was trying a clever political maneuver ? None of them have shown any political skill more sophisticated than that of an enraged and horny gorilla, so I very much doubt it. Booking odds have shifted sharply away from no deal. In addition, Barclay's accurate declaration of the "remorseless logic" of the numbers game means that any compromise is going to displease MPs, but the smallest section of her party that she can alienate are the hard Brexiteers.

It's more probable that May has, at last, realised that the will of the House is towards a softer Brexit. That doesn't mean she won't try and get her own deal enacted, at least the withdrawal agreement if not the long-term political declaration. And it doesn't mean the talks will be successful either. Corbyn could well be playing his own political game in order to appear as the saviour of Brexit whilst trying to appease Remainers, or, more cynically, to show that he negotiated "in good faith" but in reality trying to show how May was stubborn and refused to yield. Or the talks may simply fail due to good old-fashioned incompetence, which is in superabundance these days. It could certainly all just collapse into a disastrous burning heap.

Given these uncertainties there seems no point speculating as to what kind of Brexit we might actually get, or if we'll end up with a general election and/or second referendum - the possibility of either has scarcely diminished. But, since we're already in injury time, a choice must be made. MPs almost succeeded in this but were, as Nick Boales said, unable to compromise. Another day of talks might - and might still yet ! - have resolved the deadlock. So it seems only fair to ask what choices I would be willing to make.

I would suggest that things be phrased in a slightly more hypothetical way than they have so far. As a Remainer, the question I see is, "If, given that some form of Brexit must be enacted, what form would be most acceptable to you ?". To which the answer I would give is, "the softest one possible, that preserves as many of the economic advantages as possible while sacrificing no more of the political alignment with the EU than is necessary". Common Market 2.0 looked like the best option in that sense. Preserving most of the economic benefits, including, crucially, that of freedom of movement, is a hell of a lot better than jumping off the cliff that is no deal. The hypothetical aspect of the question emphasises that this is hardly my first choice; I would far rather that we simply stayed in and got the benefits of having a say in the rules (or had a second referendum). There are a lot of shitty aspects to leaving in any circumstances. But we no longer have the option of pretending everything will be rosy, so if we must leave, that's my preference. It follows that the harder the Brexit, the more I dislike it.

The converse question then needs to be put to the Brexiteers : "if we leave, what's the softest form of Brexit that would be most acceptable to you ?" And that one I don't know how to answer.

PM expected to meet Corbyn for Brexit talks

Theresa May is expected to meet Jeremy Corbyn later after she said she wanted to work with the Labour leader to break the Brexit deadlock. The prime minister hopes she and Mr Corbyn can come up with a modified version of her withdrawal deal with the EU that can secure the backing of MPs.

Changing minds on social media

Ages ago there was this really interesting article on how social media can be used to combat polarisation on highly divisive issues. The main key there was to avoid any kind of political labelling and focus on the issue rather than who was saying it, since normally we evaluate who as much as what. While Google Plus was great for attracting good faith debates with those outside your ordinary social circle, it still had its share of flamewars. This article describes a more dedicated project. It works - or at least it appears too - largely due to very common sense policies.

Reddit’s Change My View forum, founded in 2013 by Kal Turnbull, is an online space that promotes respectful conversation between people who disagree with each other. Its mission statement says that the subreddit is “built around the idea that in order to resolve our differences, we must first understand them.” Turnbull says that he created Change My View because of what he saw as a lack of places to turn to if you wanted to discuss an issue with people who took the opposite perspective. 

Change My View’s success largely rests on its strict rules and the dedicated team of moderators who enforce them. The rules are one of the main things that users like about the forum, both because they mean that anyone who is behaving in a disruptive way is removed and because they set expectations about the environment that mean that users can operate under an assumption of good faith. Change My View’s rules system works because it is consistent, intuitive, and transparent. The moderation is predictable, and users modify their behaviour accordingly.  

Change My View’s most important lesson is one that applies beyond its moderated walls, one that anyone who has tried to engage in a productive political argument likely already knows. If you want to convince, meet people where they are rather than where you want them to be. “People respond better if you don’t start out guns blazing, accusing them of being dumb or nefarious,” Weeks says. “The most important thing you can do is listen to people,” says another moderator, Brett Johnson, a project manager in Houston who is 36. “If people feel heard and understood, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say.” 

“People feel that changing their view is somehow losing … that it’s this embarrassing thing,” he says. “We are trying to change that perspective.” To an impressive extent, he has succeeded. Johnson says that this attitude is what initially intrigued him about Change My View when he came across it three years ago. “I found it to be a unique place,” he says. “Most places on the internet, most places in the world, they reward you for being right. But this was a community that celebrates being wrong.”

Of course the most obvious question is how much of a selection effect is at work, both in terms of visitors and those who are removed. It seems plausible that if you're going to visit such a site, you're more likely to be receptive to having your mind changed anyway - you'll be more receptive to reasonable arguments than if you encountered a stranger on the street or dark alleys of the internet. And if all the people who don't cooperate get banned, wouldn't that also increase the perceived level of success ? There are more subtle aspects to this too :

Some of them view the conversations they have there as a game; these users tend to be law students practising for the bar exam, or former high-school debate stars who think of argument as a sport. 

I'll take this opportunity to repeat my arguments against rhetoric. Learning rhetorical techniques is a fine thing, but if you don't actually understand the arguments at hand, they're at best distracting and at worst dangerous. This is my problem with politics at the moment (or at least more so right now than in recent years). Watch the UK House of Parliament in a debate and you will witness politicians deftly dodging and parrying each others' verbal swipes. You'll see them unfazed by attacks and turn their defensive postures into aggressive ones. All this requires oratorical skill and argumentative experience... but what you will see precious little of is them actually answering the f*"!@ing question. They have learned to be rhetorical rather than analytical, fixated on - to use a horrible cliché - style rather than substance. They've learned how to slander and discredit their opponents, not address their arguments. Learning rhetoric is valuable, but as Plato pointed out at length, it does not make one more critical or engender a more sincere desire to get at the truth.

A final point :

“But at the same time, the more people see those views being surfaced, they become normal. Are we contributing to an atmosphere where really terrible views that previously would have had no place to go are given a little bit of sunlight?”

Without knowing that much about the site, my gut instinct would be, "no". One internet forum is not nearly enough to legitimise views so I doubt it could significantly contribute to growth, especially with strict moderation. Discussion of views is also very different to promotion. If people really are engaging in truth-seeking dialogue, then terrible views ought to come out thoroughly discredited. As they say, such views might otherwise find safe harbour elsewhere where they will be actively encouraged rather than challenged. And if you don't at least provide counter-arguments to a claim, then anyone searching for that claim will inevitably only find arguments in favour of it.

The difficult part is how to implement such forums as the norm rather than the rule.

Civil Discourse Exists in This Small Corner of the Internet

The subreddit Change My View is built on the proposition that we've at least got to listen to people we disagree with. Imagine a place on the internet where a post that begins with "I'm not a feminist" is met with comments quoting Virginia Woolf and asking serious, clarifying questions.

Now you see it, now you... oh...

You may have heard of blindsight, where the eye functions perfectly, the brain processes the signals... but doesn't deliver them to the conscious mind. In such a state, people can avoid obstacles whilst being unable to see them. I've often wondered how much this goes on normally, i.e. when we start imagining things we don't start walking into walls. Turns out there's an even more subtle aspect that bridges the gap between full blindsight and normal consciousness.

A magician sat at a table in front of a group of schoolchildren and threw a ball up in the air a few times. Before the final throw, his hand secretly went under the table, letting the ball fall onto his lap, after which he proceeded to throw an imaginary ball up in the air... what was truly surprising is that more than half of the children claimed to have seen an illusory ball leave the magician’s hand and disappear somewhere midway between the magician and the ceiling. This was clearly an illusion because on the final throw, no ball had left his hand; the children had perceived an event that never took place.

My intuition about the role of my gaze was correct, for the illusion was far less effective when I looked at my hand that was concealing the ball. These findings reveal some interesting insights into the illusion. They illustrate that the illusion is mostly driven by expectations, rather than perceptual afterimages. More recently, we have shown that even when you simply pretend to throw a ball up in the air without ever having thrown the ball for real, more than a third of people still experience the illusion. In some ways, we are behaving like dogs who run after the stick their owner simply pretends to throw.

So you see things because your brain is expecting to see them and fills in the gaps. This is weird enough, but we're more or less familiar with this from optical illusions. What's even stranger is that consciousness is operating on different levels with regard to perception. Some levels are indeed fooled by the expectation illusion, but others aren't.

 Although most of our participants experienced an illusory event, the eyes were not tricked. When the ball was thrown for real, most of the participants managed to look at it when it reached the top of the screen. During the fake throw, participants claimed to have seen the illusory ball at the top of the screen, but they did not move their eyes there, which suggests that our eyes are resilient to the illusion. This result took us by surprise, but it dovetails with several other findings and highlights another truly amazing feature of visual illusions.

Richard Gregory and colleagues have shown that if participants are presented with a hollow mask and are asked to point to the nose, they point to a location outside the mask. This is because they consciously perceive the face as being solid. However, if you ask them to quickly flick the nose, their hand moves inside the mask and touches the correct location. This is because flicking is a visually guided action that is driven by the dorsal stream, the visual system that requires reliable spatial information, and thus is not fooled by the illusion. Our eyes are also driven by the dorsal stream, so even though your conscious perception has been fooled by the illusion, your eyes have not.

What's perhaps most impressive of all is that your perception isn't what's happening right now. All the processing required takes time - about a tenth of a second. The brain, amazingly, is able to extrapolate all the information it receives to correct for this by extrapolating into the future. Everything you see is your brain's best guess as to what the world is likely to look like right now. It's accurate enough to catch fast-moving balls and other objects... in a crude but literal sense, we're living in our own simulation.

Neural signals are initiated in the retina and then pass via different neural centers to the visual cortex and higher cortical areas, which eventually build a mental representation of the outside world. Neural processing is not instantaneous because neural signals are passed along neurons at a finite speed. It takes about a tenth of a second for the light registered by the retina to become a visual perception in the brain.  Let me put it in context: if you are walking at a modest speed of about one meter per second, a tenth-of-a-second delay will result in you perceiving the world as lagging 10 centimeters behind you. This is quite hard to believe because you simply do not experience the world as lagging, and such a perceptual error should certainly result in many early-morning collisions. 

It is only once you start thinking about some of the huge day-to-day challenges our visual system constantly faces that the true wonders of the brain start to emerge. Our brain uses a really clever and almost science-fictional trick that prevents us from living in the past: we look into the future. Our visual system is continuously predicting the future, and the world that you are now perceiving is the world that your visual system has predicted to be the present in the past.

A Magician Explains Why We See What's Not There - Issue 70: Variables - Nautilus

Norman Triplett was a pioneer in the psychology of magic, and back in 1900, he published a wonderful scientific paper on magic that, among many other things, discusses an experiment on an intriguing magical illusion. A magician sat at a table in front of a group of schoolchildren and threw a ball up in the air a few times.

Brexit : how TF did this happen ?

Two good articles from the Guardian on Brexit. The first, linked below, I have no problems with. The author summarises May's main mistakes very well :

The first was to act at the start as if the only people who mattered were the 52% of voters who backed Brexit while treating the 48% as an irrelevance to be ignored or insulted. Where she might have endeavoured to bind together a fractured nation and forge an alliance of the sane Brexiters and the pragmatic Remainers, her language and approaches have further polarised the country and radicalised opinion on both sides. This was compounded by concentrating her energies on trying to please the unsatisfiable subset of Brexiters who wanted the most impossibilist versions of the enterprise.  

I suppose I should interject here and say that there are forms of Brexit I would be prepared to accept (not that I have any real choice about it). To be sure, I'd prefer to just call the whole thing off, or put it to another vote and then abide by whatever the result of that was. But if we absolutely have to go with it, then there are very clearly softer versions of Brexit that would do a lot less harm than others.

The second major mistake was to call the hubristic snap general election in the spring of 2017, squander her majority with an atrocious campaign and then respond as if, to use one of her most notorious phrases, nothing had changed. A bolder and more agile leader would have reached out to the opposition benches to see if a consensus could be moulded. I grant you that this would not have been easy when Labour is led by Jeremy Corbyn, as tribalistic as Mrs May in his own fashion. She could still have made an effort to build bridges with the many reasonable people on the opposition benches, but she didn’t even try.

Her third large misjudgment has been the conduct of the endgame. Once it was very apparent her withdrawal agreement was neither popular in parliament nor attractive to the country, she persisted with trying to bludgeon it through. When it became evident this simply was not going to work, she might have pivoted to another strategy. She could have looked at alternative versions of Brexit. She might have allowed MPs to explore other ways forward, as they are very belatedly doing now. 

The rigidity of her personality has been a key component of her failures. She is not the first prime minister to be awkward, shy and introverted, but these are very serious disadvantages in a political age that demands a high level of communication skills from leaders.

Being shy and introverted are fine; May's energy and indefatigably are seriously, genuinely impressive. Unfortunately they are matched by her complete inability to see that she might be in the wrong, which has nothing to do with being shy. As in Braveheart :

Uncompromising men are easy to admire. But it is the very ability to compromise that makes a man noble.

What's curious is not the May is not that she's inflexible - she's done plenty of u-turns in her time - but that she always chooses exactly the wrong stance. She tries to be rigid and "strong" when she should bend. She yields when she should fight back. She's far from stupid, but she has all the political acumen of a dead hamster. Each morning I wake up wondering, "oh no, what fresh hell will Discount Thatcher : Maybot Edition wreak upon us today ?". And so many of these political disasters feel totally unnecessary.

On to the second article, which is rather more radical.

There’s one obvious lesson which Westminster, despite centuries of dire experience, still fails to learn. Do not kick Irish cans down the road. Some contain Semtex. All have a way of rolling back and tripping you up. There’s an English habit of not thinking about Ireland lest it spoil a nice afternoon... It was Nicola Sturgeon who gave Theresa May the smartest epitaph: “The only leader in modern times who tried to fall on her own sword and managed to miss.”

The machine has broken down. This is because it wasn't built to take the strain of minority governments. Incredibly, nobody knows what the law of state is. Where is final authority – in the sovereignty of parliament (a weird old doctrine), in the “peoples’ vote” by a referendum or in the “executive”, the cabinet claiming to embody the royal prerogative? In this fog, the 2017 election left a minority government unable to steer a divided house composed mostly of Remainers: MPs and even cabinet ministers who were pledged to honour the referendum result but didn't really believe in what they were doing. 

Laws are made by Parliament, not the executive or the people. That seems clear enough to me, though it's true that the referendum has muddied the waters due to the useless way it was advertised to the public.

The Westminster power machine is still heavily authoritarian. In parliament, it has operated through the massive majorities created by “first past the post” voting. This conceals the fact that “parliamentary sovereignty”, in the narrow local sense that the Commons could order a government about, has mostly dwindled to myth. The Brexit struggles with Mrs May’s minority administration have been horribly revealing. They show how far executive power has crept forward in recent years, to the point at which the Commons can only wrest back control over its own agenda by cunning and ambush.

There is certainly some truth in that. Since Parliament is designed for majority governments, and we're used to them, campaigns and manifestos are built around the principle that, "if we get in, we'll try and do as much of this as we can". This is very democratic, but it means that prospective MPs and parties do not know how to campaign in a more representative, cooperative system, e.g., "here are the values I will negotiate on, here's how we'll try and work with/argue against the other proposals available". The system works well enough in a majority case but I'm definitely coming round to a more flexible approach.

What I'm less keen on is the article's sentiment that the system is fundamentally broken. It needs, I think, reform more than it needs remaking. Brexit in particular feels like the perfect way to torpedo a weak spot in the system, more than it does the machinery itself breaking down. What we've suffered from is a unique set of circumstances which we would have been able to avoid under most other conditions. Consider :

- The referendum was advertised with the strong message that the result would be respected, despite not being legally binding. This created a serious legal tension that should never have been allowed (we can blame Cameron's hubris for that one).
- Rules on fraudulent political advertising are lax, with incredibly minor penalties for infractions. The Brexit bus was a lie. Vote Leave were fined minuscule amounts for over-spending. Such things ought to give us pause to reconsider the result.
- No-one prepared a leaving plan. While it was possible to make reasonable extrapolations about what a Remain vote would mean in practice, this was not the case for voting Leave because no-one - no-one at all - said how they would implement the result. This too could have been avoided.
- The Tory party was split by about 2:1 in favour of Remain:Leave. This gave any leader a serious headache, but they elected Theresa May... a truly feckless Remainer with absolutely zero talent for building bridges and an almost delusional obliviousness to reality. Meanwhile Labour were staunchly Remain but had, to everyone's great surprise, elected a leader who is basically pro Leave. Both of them are stubborn in the absurd : May keeps repeating votes on her same rejected deal while Corbyn didn't step down after badly losing a vote of no confidence. Getting either of them to change course on policy is like pulling teeth from an enraged sabre-toothed cat - you can do it, but you really don't want to.

No-one can know what would have happened if the referendum had been called under a different government. But my guess is that things would have been very different. True, the system itself has probably encouraged the individuals we happen to have in charge right now and thus the result (I mean the whole sorry package, not just the referendum result) we got. But sheer bad luck has also played a role. More flexible leaders, able to adapt to changing situations and bring forge a consensus on what should be a cross-party issue, would not have had us in this mess. The system most certainly needs reform, but it may yet escape with mere evolution rather than revolution.

On the other hand, I worry that the damage done may already be too great. Brexit has exposed the soft underbelly of Parliamentary democracy, but it's not yet clear if it's been dealt a nasty blow, eviscerated its very guts, or actually stabbed through the heart. I suspect and hope it's somewhere between the first and second options, that this is something that needs serious treatment, but isn't going to need full-on organ transplants. Well, we'll see...

Theresa May was dealt the worst of hands and has played it spectacularly badly | Andrew Rawnsley

She got the keys to Number 10 because Tory MPs thought her a safe bet. She's been anything but

ACRONYM

In this note, we present Acronym CReatiON for You and Me, or ACRONYM, a command-line code that identifies English acronyms from any arbitrary string of text. All "astronomy-valid" acronyms, as well as the appropriate capitalization of the input phrase, are returned to the user, sorted with longest (and therefore best) acronyms first. With widespread use, ACRONYM should revolutionize the field of astronomy by freeing researchers from the burdensome task of brainstorming convoluted acronyms for their projects, adding back countless hours of productive work to the research cycle.

This actually works, and was trivial to install. Some examples :

acronym "Radio astronomy survey of gas in the Virgo cluster" :

• RADIANCE RADIo astronomy survey of gAs iN the virgo ClustEr
• RADIATES RADIo astronomy survey of gAs in ThE virgo cluSter
• RADISHES RADIo astronomy survey of gaS in tHE virgo cluSter
• RAISINGS RAdIo aStronomy survey of gas IN the virGo cluSter
• RAVENOUS RAdio astronomy surVEy of gas iN the virgO clUSter
• REGISTER Radio astronomy survEy of Gas In the virgo cluSTER
• RESINOUS Radio astronomy survEy of gaS IN the virgO clUSter
• RESOLUTE Radio astronomy survEy of gaS in the virgO cLUsTEr
• REVOLTER Radio astronomy survEy of gas in the VirgO cLusTER
• ROARINGS RadiO AstRonomy survey of gas IN the virGo cluSter
• ROASTETH RadiO ASTronomy survEy of gas in THe virgo cluster
• ROMANIST RadiO astronoMy survey of gAs iN the vIrgo cluSTer
• ROMANTIC RadiO astronoMy survey of gAs iN The vIrgo Cluster

acronym "neutral hydrogen in virgo" :

• NEARING NEutrAl hydRogen IN virGo
• NEUTRAL NEUTRAL hydrogen in virgo
• NUDGING NeUtral hyDroGen IN virGo
• NEARER NEutrAl hydRogEn in viRgo
• NEGRO NEutral hydroGen in viRgO
• NUDGE NeUtral hyDroGEn in virgo
• NAIN NeutrAl hydrogen IN virgo
• NEAH NEutrAl Hydrogen in virgo
• NEAR NEutrAl hydrogen in viRgo
• NERO NEutral hydrogen in viRgO
• NING Neutral hydrogen IN virGo
• NUDE NeUtral hyDrogEn in virgo

 acronym "Inspecting FITS files in three dimensions"

• INCLINED INspeCting fits fiLes IN threE Dimensions
• INCLINES INspeCting fits fiLes IN three dimEnsionS
• INFESTED INspecting Fits filES in ThreE Dimensions
• INSISTED INSpectIng fits fileS in ThreE Dimensions
• INSPIRED INSPecting fits files In thReE Dimensions
• INCEST INspeCting fits filES in Three dimensions
• INCHES INspeCting fits files in tHree dimEnsionS
• ISIS InSpecting fits files in three dimensIonS

ACRONYM: Acronym CReatiON for You and Me

Each year, countless hours of productive research time is spent brainstorming creative acronyms for surveys, simulations, codes, and conferences. We present ACRONYM, a command-line program developed specifically to assist astronomers in identifying the best acronyms for ongoing projects.

Lessons from Google Plus

Google Plus is about to die. Enough has been said about the mismanagement of the last great social media network elsewhere; I'll not waste space on repeating things that others have expressed with far more insight than I can manage. Instead, as Plus enters its long night, let me reflect on what made it such a much-loved venue. Whether some of these features were by accident or design hardly matters. What's important is that they really worked, and any other network ought to consider imitation as the highest form of flattery. At its zenith, Google Plus was absolutely superb.


It was an anti-social network

I fell into G+ by accident because it was provided automatically by virtue of integration with Gmail. There was no good reason not to try it. Since there was hardly anyone on it, at first I was using it as little more than a glorified form of email, able to send pictures and messages to people I actually knew. At some point, helped largely by the actions of people like Winchell "Atomic Space Kitty" Chung and Ciro "Most Likely To Be Part Of The Borg Collective" Villa, I began to use it properly.

And it was perfect ! Back in the PhD office in Cardiff, all I'd ever heard about Facebook was people checking it constantly, posting pictures of drunken escapades and who was "friends" with who. G+ wasn't like that at all. It was a place for people to discuss common interests, in my case astronomy. It wasn't devoid of more traditionally social topics, but they weren't high priority either. It was a place for discussion. Actual intelligent conversation with diverse people, almost all of whom were similarly against the "let's share out drunken photos" pointlessness of Facebook. That most basic aspect of "we're here to discuss what we find interesting", rather than talking about each other, that's what made the whole thing work.

We all know this isn't quite true, but this isn't the place for a deep analysis.

It was also its greatest weakness. Most people I know who are on FB aren't there to discuss the news with strangers - they want to connect with people they already know and use it as a convenient mass-messaging service. There was, and almost certainly will continue to be, no good reason from them to switch to anywhere else. What would be the point ? They would only be holding the same conversations in a different venue. At the same time, this provided a powerful selection effect towards people who did want to hold interesting conversations. Ironically, for a network that wasn't really terribly social in the conventional sense, it thrived because of its awesome community.


Collections and Communities

Not that G+ was entirely devoid of people-management capabilities by any means. Its two greatest developments were Collections and Communities. Collections were highly customisable ways of organising your posts with a series of convenient labels. People could choose, say, only to follow your Awesome Astronomy collection (even if they weren't interested in astronomy in general) and, conversely, ignore your ones about Epic Food Porn (even if they were normally very interested in food), or follow every single thing you ever posted. It meant that if you wanted to, you could very easily only see discussions on science or politics from people you trusted, and you didn't have to deal with people who abused the system because you could simply choose not to follow their Collections.

Communities were a places where you could interact with a potentially much larger audience on whatever topic the Community was based around. It was my privilege to moderate (and eventually co-run) the Space community, which at our peak had 879,091 members. G+ left running Communities largely up to their owners, which meant that they could develop however their members and owners wanted. At the same time, if you reported a Community for being dangerous (as I did for several white supremacist communities) then they were swiftly taken down. This was a powerful and sensible use of allowing self-developed networks but tempered judiciously with common sense hierarchical oversight.

What made these features work was that they were not filter bubbles. By basing the discussions around common interests, not self-labels of political affiliation or whatever, you could interact with a very diverse audience. This didn't mean that some people didn't choose to wall themselves in, but for my part I found the most interesting people were the ones from outside my particular background. And that's a key message for any social network : encourage diversity of thought through choice, not diktat.


Circles

Circles were G+'s first Big Thing. Like Collections, you could customise these yourself. G+'s model was that you could follow people rather than being friends with them. That meant that you could see what they posted and there was no need for them to reciprocate, like subscribing to a YouTube channel. A Circle was simply a list of a subset of the people you followed, organised however you wanted, e.g. you might have a Family Circle or a Mesoamerican Architecture Circle or whatever. You could share your posts with everyone or just particular Circles of people who you knew where interested in a topic.

Circles had some serious limitations. Something posted to a Circle could not be reshared by other Circle members to the general public (useful in principle, but some people used this for absolutely everything no matter how innocuous), which made discovery difficult. Many people shared posts exclusively to Circles, which meant that if they followed you, you'd have no way of knowing what they themselves tended to post - so you'd have to follow them to find out. To be honest it was a bit of a mess, especially because real people tend to post about multiple topics. Circles let you organise your stream by social group, but not really by subject matter. On the other hand, you could share Circles with other people, making it possible to rapidly grow your following. Unfortunately this meant the feature became abused and Circles were eventually ignored by basically everyone.

I can't help feeling that combining Circles with Collections would have been a huge breakthrough. Grouping Collections, rather than people, into their own Circles, would have been a far more powerful way to organise what I was seeing.

What was really important was that you didn't have to share to a Circle if you didn't want to. While G+ didn't really have a way of seeing every public post by every user, you could at least make posts visible to any user (who happened to have the link) by making them Public. You could also send a notification to your Circle if you posted there, making it much more likely your post would actually be seen. This was somewhat messy and asymmetrically implemented, as was the feature whereby if you plussed a post then sometimes your followers would see that action. These were good features but in need for further development, e.g. allowing followers more control of what they saw so no-one need to ask someone to turn off a feature that others would prefer to stay on.


Long form posts

At least, you could if you wanted to. There was nothing to stop you waffling on almost indefinitely. You could only do some very basic formatting but that was enough to write long, detailed posts (it should go without saying that you could edit them afterwards). Some people abused this and wrote stupidly long essays in a format that was quite unreadable, but in the main it meant that detailed discussions were not discouraged. You could limit yourself to a single quote or write page after page if you wanted. And the post would be given its own URL so you could link back to this from external sources, as long as it was public : what happened on G+ didn't have to stay on G+ unless you wanted it to. Choice was again a key aspect. You didn't have to write long posts, but you had the option.


It was free

And even more importantly, it was free of adverts. That meant the only manipulation of your feed was done to show you things you might have missed overnight or to highlight people and Collections you might like to follow. Now this didn't always work so well - it was a constant niggle that your stream could look slightly different each time you saw it. But it was billions and billions of times better than the advert-driven model of FB, which has led to nothing but woe and civil strife. Driving discussions and intelligent conversations by increasing profits for mega-corporations is such an obviously gaaaaagggghhhh flaw that I see no reason to expound any further on that point; it's been done to death elsewhere already anyway.


You could block idiots

If you wanted to you could exclude whoever you like from participating in your conversations. That was a very permanent (though you could unblock someone), very total solution - they couldn't even see anything you posted. Their comments would remain on your posts but you could also choose to delete them.

I used this feature sparingly, with a total of 43 blocks (out of ~2100 followers - it was never a ghost town !) over the full run of the service and most of them were spam accounts. Others used it very much more liberally. While it would have been much better to have some more nuanced people management, e.g. banning them from only certain Collections or individual posts, having this absolute exclusion was a necessity more than a luxury. Sure, it's good to hear the other side. But it's no good if you have a private dinner party on the theme of herpotology and a robot barges in and won't shut up about the cellular structure of hagfish (on the internet this can literally happen). This feature didn't need to be used much, but it was essential in making life bearable. It only takes one unfettered idiot to ruin the whole social media experience.


Integrated services

At its peak of good management, if you got a comment on a post you could see the entire thread, with correct formatting, in your Gmail inbox. You could automatically translate selected posts and comments. You could embed YouTube videos at a reasonable size, upload photos directly (including obscure formats like 360 panoramas). And all this was very easy to do.

This integration was a fundamentally good thing, but sometimes Google bungled this in obviously hideous ways. Integrating YouTube and G+ comments was by far the worst case, where suddenly your nice, sensible G+ discussions could be bombarded by hordes of screaming idiots for no obvious reason. Google, it's been suggested, could have made G+ really work if they'd focused on having it as a sort of central hub for their other services. I suspect there's truth in that had Google handled things rather better than they did, but that road not taken is not something I care to explore. It was too good a service to rage against the dying of the light. Better to celebrate what it got right than complain about a failure I had no way of preventing.



Farewell, Google Plus

These then are my key lessons for any social media network hoping to make a difference. It should ideally be free, but more important is to avoid advertising. It should allow users to self-direct, but not completely without oversight. It needs to allow people to choose and organise what they see and who they follow with a clear, accessible interface. Google Plus gave us ways to break out of filter bubbles. It gave us intelligent discourse with people of opposing views who were not simple-minded baboons. It surely deserved a better fate.

For all that the system itself encouraged its success, it was the users above all who made Google Plus what it was. I won't pretend it was perfect, or that sometimes I didn't think a whole bunch of people were complete morons. But to you, my fellow refugees, I say this : for the countless discussions, thank you. For making me realise when I was wrong, even if I never admitted it, thank you. For the things I laughed at but never plussed or reshared, thank you. For making me realise how diverse, weird, wonderful and crazy you all are, thank you. For being such an awesome and interesting bunch, thank you. For those of you who won't be moving to a new social media home - the best who lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity - you will be missed. After nearly eight years, at least we had a damn good run.

As I said in my very first post, back in July 2011 : So... social networking eh ? How 'bout that.