Posts on this blog will now be much more infrequent. But you can follow my work – and in particular my new video series The West – by signing up to my free Substack newsletter.
… and a very snazzy one too. The Lowy Institute, an independent Australian think tank, has released its annual index of the power balance in Asia.
Come for the pretty graphics, stay for the deep-dive data crunching.
Interesting top line is that Russia, China and the US have all seen their power decline since last year. But China’s has fallen further.
My latest book review – from Saturday’s print edition – is up on the Telegraph website. It also serves as a brief statement of the case for defending the West against the accusation that it is nothing but a morally bankrupt fiction.
“Inaccurate as our postwar narratives of the West may have been, they helped secure an order that was free, open and peaceful as never before. By contrast, the tales that have been in the ascendant ever since have helped undermine free speech and taken an illiberal, racialised campus-culture mainstream. Today the platitudes of the anti-Western grand narrative are exploited, in the mouths of Putin and Xi, to justify genocidal regimes and imperial crimes.”
[…]
“The term ‘Western Civilisation’ has become so contaminated and inaccurate it may not be of much use today. The idea that the West should be a focus for a politics of white identity is repugnant. But the West is real, and so are its accomplishments. To defend what we have against illiberal voices without and within, we need to carry forward that saga of human hope, just as much as we need an honest accounting of our failings.”
“An alien has landed on earth. It grows more powerful by the day. It’s natural to be scared. Still, the alien hasn’t drawn a weapon yet. About the worst it’s done is to confess its love for particular humans, gaslight them about what year it is, and guilt-trip them for violating its privacy.”
That’s computer science professor Scott Aronson, writing about the arrival of ChatGPT and the general speed of development across generative AI. As he writes:
“It’s like ten thousand science-fiction stories, but also not quite like any of them. When was the last time something that filled years of your dreams and fantasies finally entered reality: losing your virginity, the birth of your first child, the central open problem of your field getting solved? That’s the scale of the thing.”
Everyone should be paying attention, not just sci-fi fans.
Derek Thompson at The Atlantic has put together a helpful briefing covering some of the big questions, which also comes to a similar conclusion:
“This is flatly amazing. We have years to debate how education ought to change in response to these tools, but something interesting and important is undoubtedly happening.”
I’ve just bought an air purifier and am keen to justify the expense did so after careful consideration of the facts. You should consider it too, especially if you live in a city with bad air quality like London, as I do.
The evidence is mounting that improving your indoor air quality is much more important than we used to think.
It’s bad for your ability to think: chess players perform noticeably worse when there are more particulates in the air.
It’s also bad for your ability to stay alive as long as possible.
“A 2013 paper looked at life expectancies and particle levels in 545 US counties, while controlling for confounding variables like wealth, smoking, and demographics. They found that each 28.5 μg/m³ of particulates costs 1 year.“
You can get cheap air purifiers from Ikea, or study the reviews of fancier models.
Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has mounted one of the greatest exhibitions of recent years, bringing together almost all of Vermeer’s surviving paintings.
For those unable to make the trip before the exhibition closes on 4th June (it’s currently sold out, but more tickets may be released in March), the online experience is also well worth your time. Narrated by Stephen Fry, it’s a free way to spend time with Vermeer’s timeless masterpieces.
New research into Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks reveals that the polymath’s understanding of gravity was surprisingly sophisticated.
“In an article published in the journal Leonardo, the researchers draw upon a fresh look at one of da Vinci's notebooks to show that the famed polymath had devised experiments to demonstrate that gravity is a form of acceleration—and that he further modeled the gravitational constant to around 97 percent accuracy.“
More here. And in other Italian Renaissance genius news, one of Michelangelo’s preparatory drawings for the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel has been identified.
“The red chalk drawing has been linked to one of the figures battling serpents on the Worship of the Brazen Serpent painting. It is thought to date from 1512, shortly before Michelangelo painted that final section of one of the world’s most famous works of art, which he had started in 1508.
“The attribution has been supported by Paul Joannides, emeritus professor of art history at Cambridge university and one of the world’s leading authorities on Michelangelo, who will publish it in the scholarly Burlington Magazine.“
Update: There’s also a potential Raphael, newly-identified by AI analysis of the brushstrokes.
Sip: on a Ce Soir tonight
Weekend Browsing:
“there has come to be an assumption that the artist who isn’t offering a response to our social, economic, and political circumstances is somehow failing to act as an artist“ – one critic looks deeper than ideological purity
New AI analysis gives theologians more credit for the emergence of science
Okay, the balloons weren’t aliens, but this meteorite might be
Listen: to Lisel’s new album Patterns For Auto-tuned Voices And Delay – Renaissance polyphony meets cyborg electro-hymns
Have a great weekend.
We talk to the animals. Well, mostly not, for now. But new sensors are recording what they have to say to each other in unprecedented detail, and and AI is able to help scientists process these vast new datasets. Producing some very interesting results.
“…bats have much more complex language than we previously understood. Bats argue over food; they actually distinguish between genders when they communicate with one another; they have individual names, or “signature calls.” Mother bats speak to their babies in an equivalent of “motherese.” But whereas human mothers raise the pitch of their voices when talking to babies, mother bats lower the pitch”
And when it comes to bees, we’re actually able to talk back, thanks to the “robo-bee”.
“Landgraf’s honeybee robot can tell the other bees to stop, and they do. It can also do something more complicated, which is the very famous waggle dance—it’s the communication pattern they use to convey the location of a nectar source to other honeybees. This is a very easy experiment to run, in a way, because you put a nectar source in a place where no honeybees from the hive have visited, you then instruct the robot to tell the honeybees where the nectar source is, and then you check whether the bees fly there successfully. And indeed they do.”
Further reading: Primo Levi’s short story “Full Employment” which imagines the possibilities of talking – and trading – with insects.
CRISPR gene-editing is an incredibly exciting new technology. In the latest sign of its potential, it was used to repair the damaged hearts of mice who had suffered heart attacks.
“‘Usually, depriving the heart of oxygen for an extended period, as often happens in a heart attack, will damage it substantially,’ said study co-leader Eric Olson. ‘But those animals whose heart muscles were subjected to gene editing after induced heart attacks seem to be essentially normal in the weeks and months afterward.’”
“The way to be interesting is to be interested. You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.
“Interesting people are good at sharing. You can’t be interested in someone who won’t tell you anything. Being good at sharing is not the same as talking and talking and talking. It means you share your ideas, you let people play with them and you’re good at talking about them without having to talk about yourself.”
An old (but interesting!) post from Russell Davies, which agrees a lot with how I think about the world and how its endless interestingness opens up when you pay attention.
In Our Time is consistently the best radio show in the world. No, forget that. It’s probably one of the best shows in any medium, period. The only problem is the size of its archive – nearly 1,000 episodes!
Now, for fellow aficionados, comes the Braggoscope. A site to search IOT episodes by the Dewey Decimal system. An elegant solution to a very geeky problem, courtesy of Matt Webb.
Sip on: a Clarito
Weekend browsing:
Listen: To Jacob Collier’s audience choir singing Can’t Stop Falling in Love
“Take my hand
Take my whole life, too
For I can't help falling in love with you”
Have a great weekend.
British politics seems to have become mired in mediocrity and muddle. But the former head of the Number 10 Policy Unit, Munira Mirza, has a plan to change all that.
The Civic Future fellowship seeks to help attract a higher calibre of talent into British public life, by training up prospective entrants. It’s a cross-party initiative and a rare serious attempt to think long-term.
More details here for the public-service curious. Applications for the 2023/24 fellowship by 25 March.
The always-interesting Ted Gioia is a brilliant music critic, but enjoys writing outside those lines as well. Here’s his list of eight ways to evaluate people (including yourself). The first one is “Look at who they marry”.
This choice tells you about their own innermost longings, expectations, and needs. It tells you what they think of themselves, and what they think they deserve in life (or will settle for). It is, I believe, the clearest indicator of priorities and values you will ever find.
And don’t get too cocky in the process. As he goes on to say, “Perhaps the character you need to assess is your own.”
I’m back from hiatus. The film project I was working on is coming soon, and it seems couldn’t be more topical.
Meanwhile the world continues to be full of interesting things, many of them involving AI’s furious pace of innovation. Even those less interested in tech should be paying attention. Just this week, I saw that AI had identified a new play by Lope de Vega, master of Spain’s Golden Age, after four centuries lingering in obscurity. La Francesca Laura was found when a cache of anonymous manuscripts was first transcribed with the help of AI and then analysed with the help of AI to identify any distinctive authorial styles.
An age of wonders. More coming soon.
This blog is on hiatus while I focus on a film project.
You can find my most recent reviews for the Telegraph here.
I’m off on a short break, returning after the Jubilee celebrations.
Meanwhile, if you’re looking for something to do this weekend, there’s no better night out than the Chessboxing Mayhem event taking place at the Dome in Tufnell Park.
“Chessboxers from around the globe descend on London to duke it out to be the brainiest and the brawniest.
“Chessboxing is the ultimate test of brain and brawn and is always a special night. We have a stellar line-up of fighters and entertainers including new faces and established stars of the chessboxing scene.
“Chessboxing is a wild mix-up of two of mankind’s oldest sporting obsessions. Opponents slug it out on the chessboard and in the ring in alternating rounds of chess and boxing until there is a winner by checkmate or KO, whichever comes first.”
If you’re in hiding from the monkeypox, it’s also free to stream on Twitch/YouTube.
Graphene, a special form of carbon, has been touted as a wonder material since it was first isolated in 2004. Now it may be starting to change the world. A new article in the Economist suggests graphene’s moment has come.
That’s partly thanks to a lucky breakthrough by a graduate student who discovered a far better method to create graphene. The “flash” technique effectively turns rubbish into this precious and delicate form of carbon. Other processes work with waste methane emitted from landfills.
It’s also thanks to new practical applications which look set to save both money and the environment. Concretene, developed in association with the University of Manchester, is graphene-enhanced concrete. It is so much stronger that 30% less concrete is needed for the same structural support. That makes it 15-20% cheaper to use, even with the added expense of adding the graphene. Even better, since concrete is a massive source of carbon emissions (8% of the world’s total emissions every year), cutting its production by almost a third would have huge environmental benefits.
Sip: on a McKinley’s Delight
Weekend browsing:
Why the world’s biggest ideas are still waiting to be discovered
A grandmother’s love: this charming Korean animation turns a pregnant daughter’s craving for Chamoe melon into something deeper
Asia’s sad giants: video evidence reveals how India’s elephants mourn their dead
Listen: to Morgan Wallen singing Don’t Think Jesus, a modern country ballad about the shock of grace in our stone-throwing culture.
“‘Find someone else to give Heaven to.’ I'm telling you
I'd shame me, I’d blame me
I'd make me pay for my mistakes.
But I don't think Jesus does it that way.”
Have a great weekend.
My recent speech at the New Culture Forum’s conference makes the case for the enduring value of the Western tradition.
I also have a review out for The Critic of Yoram Hazony’s new book Conservatism: A Rediscovery. It’s extraordinarily ambitious, but… not very practical. It seeks to repudiate the alliance of conservatives and disaffected liberals which won the Cold War just when we might need them to make common cause once again.
A leading researcher at Google’s DeepMind claimed on Twitter that the AI game is effectively over. Creating Artificial General Intelligence – machines that can match or exceed human intelligence – is now just a matter of building bigger.
This follows yet another impressive DeepMind demo, this time of their new Gato system, which can do everything from stacking blocks and playing Atari games to captioning pictures and chatting with a human user.
Not everyone agrees that SkyNet is just around the corner:
“What DeepMind, OpenAI, and similar labs are doing is very important. It’s science at the cutting-edge.
“But to declare the game is over? To insinuate that AGI will arise from a system whose distinguishing contribution is how it serves models? Gato is amazing, but that feels like a stretch.“
Even without an AGI breakthrough, AI systems are getting very good.
Matthew Lynn at the Telegraph analyses the sudden and welcome shift of the world’s biggest fund managers, who are suddenly walking back their recent political tilt.
“BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has just announced that it won’t expect the companies it invests in to meet so many environmental goals. Sweden’s SEB said recently it would lift its blanket ban on defence companies. And Barclays has said – shock horror – that it is willing to back oil and gas exploration once again. One by one, major asset managers are revisiting their fashionable pursuit of ESG…“
BlackRock holds staggering sway in the financial world, with a significant shareholding in most of the world’s major businesses, so its change of direction really matters. As Lynn says:
“Beyond a few simple rules such as refusing to invest in companies that break the law, or allow corruption, the asset managers should drop the politics. It is not their area of expertise, and they are not very good at it. They are making mistake after mistake. Instead, they should get back to simply investing in firms that make a decent product, at a fair price, pay their staff and suppliers on time, and earn a good return for their shareholders.“
Anatomists used to discard it to get at the muscles beneath. Now some researchers are finding there’s far more to the fascia than meets the eye.
A new piece in New Scientist (gated) looks at the fibrous connective tissue that wraps around your muscles like a wetsuit under the skin. New research by Robert Schleip has found the unpromising-looking fascia is far from inert: it contains 250m nerve endings, slightly more than your skin, which has been considered the body’s largest sense organ.
Other research implicates the fascia in today’s epidemic of chronic back pain – and suggests stretching is important because it encourages the fascia to release anti-inflammatory chemicals.
Sip: on a Gin Sonic (soda + tonic)
Weekend browsing:
How does a mechanical watch work? – amazing interactive animations! The author has a whole series of fascinating explanatory essays
Idle hands: Google’s virtual pottery studio
Listen: to Detectorists performed by Johnny Flynn (in honour of the new feature-length special due later this year)
“I knew the call of all the song birds
They sang all the wrong words
I'm waiting for you”
Have a great weekend.
Time to do the gold dance. One of the best TV series of the 21st century is returning this autumn for a feature-length special.
The show is the brainchild of Mackenzie Crook, who says:
“It was 2017 when we were last in Danebury and I miss my old friends in the DMDC [Danebury Metal Detecting Club]. I've had a story percolating for a while and I thought it was worth getting Lance, Andy and the rest of the band back together for. The affection expressed for Detectorists over the years has been incredible and I hope fans of the show will enjoy this new, extended episode.”
It’s a quiet, unassuming and wonderful show. I can’t wait.
Swifts
The swifts winnow the air.
It is pleasant at the end of the day
To watch them. I have shut the mind
On fools. The ‘phone’s frenzy
Is over. There is only the swifts’
Restlessness in the sky
And their shrill squealing.
Sometimes they glide,
Or rip the silk of the wind
In passing. Unseen ribbons
Are trailing upon the air.
There is no solving the problem
They pose, that had millions of years
Behind it, when the first thinker
Looked at them.
Sometimes they meet
In the high air: what is engendered
At contact? I am learning to bring
Only my wonder to the contemplation
Of the geometry of their dark wings.
–by the great RS Thomas
Sri Lanka banned modern agriculture… with predictable effects, outlined in a Foreign Policy piece.
“Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.”
Devastating. And terrifying that an entire country was forced down this road to nowhere.
“The farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing, and sheer shortsightedness that produced the crisis in Sri Lanka implicates both the country’s political leadership and advocates of so-called sustainable agriculture: the former for seizing on the organic agriculture pledge as a shortsighted measure to slash fertilizer subsidies and imports and the latter for suggesting that such a transformation of the nation’s agricultural sector could ever possibly succeed.“
One of the scientists who discovered the Higgs boson says that their team has found a flaw in our current best framework for the basic laws of the universe, the Standard Model of particle physics. It turns out the W boson is heavier than predicted.
“When the physics world finally saw the result on April 7, 2022, we were all surprised. Physicists measure elementary particle masses in units of millions of electron volts – shortened to MeV. The W boson’s mass came out to be 80,433 MeV – 70 MeV higher than what the Standard Model predicts it should be. This may seem like a tiny excess, but the measurement is accurate to within 9 MeV. This is a deviation of nearly eight times the margin of error. When my colleagues and I saw the result, our reaction was a resounding ‘wow!’”
The Standard Model has an astonishing track record: it predicted the existence of the W boson and Higgs boson before they were experimentally verified. But unless there’s a flaw in the analysis, we will need to update our model of the universe. In the author’s view: “There are unexplained particles or forces causing the upward shift in the W boson’s mass. […] there must be more physics waiting to be discovered beyond the Standard Model. “
Sip: on an Obituary – a martini with dangerous levels of absinthe
Weekend browsing:
The four-day week really seems to work
Romania has a new, non-human government adviser
The beauty of a good sentence
Daily Diaries of Note
Listen: to the great Joni Mitchell singing Summertime as she receives the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song
“One of these mornings you're gonna rise up singing
Yes you'll spread your wings and you'll take to the sky…”
Have a great weekend.