Fortnightnotes: Tesla coils, miscellany
A highlight from this year's Wilderness Festival was Arcadia Spectacular - a small portion of the show was Lords of Lightning.
Lords of Lightning - Musical Tesla from Arcadia Spectacular on Vimeo.
Looking forward to more Tesla coil action at Wuthering Bytes festival day in a couple of weeks - as ever, a stunning line up of talks on all kinds of science, tech and culture topics. Grab a ticket now and join us in Hebden Bridge for the most authentic tech festival in the UK!
An interview with Martin Kleppmann, on formal verification and distributed systems. Formal verification is one of the bits of computer science I think is least well known in the wider 'digital' world; this is regrettable, as it is one approach to tackling some of the problems people encounter with computer systems. It's been great to work slightly with Martin whilst at the Computer Lab in Cambridge.
A study finds "older drivers aged 55-75 removed their eyes and attention from the road for more than 8 seconds longer than younger drivers aged 21-36 when programming navigation or tuning the radio using in-vehicle voice-command or touch-screen technology".
The US Navy is looking to get rid of touchscreens because they are a distraction from what people should be concentrating on. Give me a physical control with tactile feedback any day.
Finally, a report looking at the transport needs of elders in the US based on data from a non-profit transport network, highlighting that many requirements would not be met by unstaffed software-driven vehicles. People need help with parcels, mobility aids, and more.
Tech ethics got some mainstream coverage again, mostly summed up as "there should be a Hippocratic oath for tech" based on remarks from Hannah Fry in advance of her Royal Institution Christmas lectures. I'm not sure it's as simple as that... Steven Murdoch tweeted this article on the code of Hammurabi as related to builders, and how it might apply to code.
Social infrastructure in Britain is breaking down.
A report from the Ctrl-Shift summit, focussing on alternatives to capitalism, and mutual currencies. The Stafford Beer stuff as ever seems useful, but to my mind gets awfully bogged down in having no simple expression. If you try to skim read, you get a general sense of management and organisational development common sense, and the specialness of the decentralised concept is much less clear than the proponents of the system would probably want.
A thoughtful and worrying piece about how we've lost sight of the importance of land, and what the IPCC's recent warning might mean for it
It's great to see ClimateAction.tech getting some real momentum - and producing an excellent overview and getting started document. There's work being done to prepare a pledge for tech workers around climate issues, to be available alongside the climate strike planned on September 20th. There's a request for help if you can join us and and assist with this.
On infrastructure (and, incidentally, interesting reads in the form of Twitter threads): via Steve Song I learned of Sunil Tagare, who founded OpenCables. Steve's twitter thread is the best reference I've found for Tagare's ideas to support open, competitive cables. Tagare has a recent article tearing into Google's latest plans for fibre to Africa.
Beau Woods briefly notes how the history of automotive (and later, plane) technology involved perfectly reasonable architectural and threat model choices in a pre-internet era, and failed to adapt the core network systems when connectivity arrived. Top marks for illustrating the thread!
Nice thread on the 9th August power issues in the UK, the role of renewables and what cost would we accept on bills to reduce the risk of this sort of thing:
Sam Smith depressingly insightful as usual around the government's new wheeze for NHS AI.
This FT article [paywall?] considers how the UK's short term executive incentive arrangements discourage innovation (which naturally takes a while to pay off). In many cases - more than half the FTSE350 - "long-term incentive plans" actually run for 3 years only.
Via Nadia Eghbal, thoughts from Robert Rich on what it's like to be a creative artist with a modest number of fans - life in the long tail, both pre-internet and now.
A depressing but detailed research survey of sexism in academia.
Friedrich Lindenberg tweeted this NPR report highlighting concerns of Westerners 'helping' in poor countries and disregarding local safety and care norms.
This is in startling contrast to Glia's humanitarian ethos. Via Patrick Tanguay, a detailed feature on humanitarian maker extraodinaire Tarek Loubani. Tarek is designing systems to help today and tomorrow, attempting a structural shift. The article explaims how international aid often fails people - providing incompatible equipment, and leaving a sense of learned helplessness. It also highlights how proprietary systems cause damage and trouble down the line. The need for resilience in a region where supply chains, power and even locations are unreliable (with bombing an eventual inevitability) is clear. Glia use solar power because mains electricity is unreliable - but obviously they need batteries and inverters for that to work. We have solar here in the UK, but hardly any of it would function as a meaningfully resilient distributed system. Tarek pursues decentralisation as a radical act.
Microfinance is often cited as a great way to lift people out of poverty, especially in the global South. This detailed article explores the history of Kiva and the challenges of scaling microfinance and actually delivering impact.
Chocolate has 6 crystalline forms - a fact I learned via The Prepared.
Lords of Lightning - Musical Tesla from Arcadia Spectacular on Vimeo.
Looking forward to more Tesla coil action at Wuthering Bytes festival day in a couple of weeks - as ever, a stunning line up of talks on all kinds of science, tech and culture topics. Grab a ticket now and join us in Hebden Bridge for the most authentic tech festival in the UK!
An interview with Martin Kleppmann, on formal verification and distributed systems. Formal verification is one of the bits of computer science I think is least well known in the wider 'digital' world; this is regrettable, as it is one approach to tackling some of the problems people encounter with computer systems. It's been great to work slightly with Martin whilst at the Computer Lab in Cambridge.
A study finds "older drivers aged 55-75 removed their eyes and attention from the road for more than 8 seconds longer than younger drivers aged 21-36 when programming navigation or tuning the radio using in-vehicle voice-command or touch-screen technology".
The US Navy is looking to get rid of touchscreens because they are a distraction from what people should be concentrating on. Give me a physical control with tactile feedback any day.
Finally, a report looking at the transport needs of elders in the US based on data from a non-profit transport network, highlighting that many requirements would not be met by unstaffed software-driven vehicles. People need help with parcels, mobility aids, and more.
Tech ethics got some mainstream coverage again, mostly summed up as "there should be a Hippocratic oath for tech" based on remarks from Hannah Fry in advance of her Royal Institution Christmas lectures. I'm not sure it's as simple as that... Steven Murdoch tweeted this article on the code of Hammurabi as related to builders, and how it might apply to code.
Social infrastructure in Britain is breaking down.
A report from the Ctrl-Shift summit, focussing on alternatives to capitalism, and mutual currencies. The Stafford Beer stuff as ever seems useful, but to my mind gets awfully bogged down in having no simple expression. If you try to skim read, you get a general sense of management and organisational development common sense, and the specialness of the decentralised concept is much less clear than the proponents of the system would probably want.
A thoughtful and worrying piece about how we've lost sight of the importance of land, and what the IPCC's recent warning might mean for it
It's great to see ClimateAction.tech getting some real momentum - and producing an excellent overview and getting started document. There's work being done to prepare a pledge for tech workers around climate issues, to be available alongside the climate strike planned on September 20th. There's a request for help if you can join us and and assist with this.
On infrastructure (and, incidentally, interesting reads in the form of Twitter threads): via Steve Song I learned of Sunil Tagare, who founded OpenCables. Steve's twitter thread is the best reference I've found for Tagare's ideas to support open, competitive cables. Tagare has a recent article tearing into Google's latest plans for fibre to Africa.
Beau Woods briefly notes how the history of automotive (and later, plane) technology involved perfectly reasonable architectural and threat model choices in a pre-internet era, and failed to adapt the core network systems when connectivity arrived. Top marks for illustrating the thread!
Nice thread on the 9th August power issues in the UK, the role of renewables and what cost would we accept on bills to reduce the risk of this sort of thing:
Sam Smith depressingly insightful as usual around the government's new wheeze for NHS AI.
This FT article [paywall?] considers how the UK's short term executive incentive arrangements discourage innovation (which naturally takes a while to pay off). In many cases - more than half the FTSE350 - "long-term incentive plans" actually run for 3 years only.
Via Nadia Eghbal, thoughts from Robert Rich on what it's like to be a creative artist with a modest number of fans - life in the long tail, both pre-internet and now.
A depressing but detailed research survey of sexism in academia.
Friedrich Lindenberg tweeted this NPR report highlighting concerns of Westerners 'helping' in poor countries and disregarding local safety and care norms.
This is in startling contrast to Glia's humanitarian ethos. Via Patrick Tanguay, a detailed feature on humanitarian maker extraodinaire Tarek Loubani. Tarek is designing systems to help today and tomorrow, attempting a structural shift. The article explaims how international aid often fails people - providing incompatible equipment, and leaving a sense of learned helplessness. It also highlights how proprietary systems cause damage and trouble down the line. The need for resilience in a region where supply chains, power and even locations are unreliable (with bombing an eventual inevitability) is clear. Glia use solar power because mains electricity is unreliable - but obviously they need batteries and inverters for that to work. We have solar here in the UK, but hardly any of it would function as a meaningfully resilient distributed system. Tarek pursues decentralisation as a radical act.
Microfinance is often cited as a great way to lift people out of poverty, especially in the global South. This detailed article explores the history of Kiva and the challenges of scaling microfinance and actually delivering impact.
Chocolate has 6 crystalline forms - a fact I learned via The Prepared.