Current Affairs

Things that are in the news now…

Time to Divorce the Car…

humanist55

We have gone far beyond a love affair with the car, the motor car, the automobile, we are beyond the comfortable love of wedded bliss and we have reached the time when divorce must be considered, with all the compromises and new freedoms that implies…

The Love Affair

And it was a Love affair to begin with! Admittedly, one that could only be pursued by the rich – the freedom given to those Edwardian pioneers, to go further than on horseback, to travel in a group, and oh! the speed – think of Toad in The Wind in the Willows – “Poop, poop!”! Then came The First World War with lorries and ambulances. The interwar years when cars spread to the middle classes and finally, after The Second World War, we were truly wedded to the car, cars for all but the poorest and our world and lives changing beyond recognition.

Urban Sprawl and the Escape to the Country…

How were we seduced into these changes and what form did they take? It’s a tale of city and countryside, of congestion and the freedom of “the open road”. We live, mostly, in cities and towns but we dream, most of us, of living in the country. How many people drive 4-wheel drive monsters that were originally designed for country-dwelling landowners but became must-have status symbols of the urban elite – Chelsea Tractors as they are known – how many of those owners ever go off-road or ever use their 4-wheel drive? Incidentally, these huge cars, often justified as being safer for your family (if you can afford them)- take an unjustified amount of both materials and energy to construct, so that’s a very un-Green and inequitable contribution to Climate Change right there!

Advertising campaigns focus on a romantic image of
the SUV as the car of the great outdoors.

Levelling Up

Recent changes in internet technology and in working practices stimulated by the Covid lockdown, mean that we can work wherever we want to – from home or at the office, the office usually being in the city and the home wherever we choose or can afford. But in this respect, those who live in the country, are still disadvantaged since the high-speed optical transmission available in cities, has not always yet reached the countryside. There is a clamour from rural populations for a levelling up so that the commuters, enabled post-war, by the motor car to live outside the cities, and commute in to work, may not be disadvantaged by slower broadband, that they may take full advantage of living in the country.

There are other things not available in the rural areas, such as supermarkets – another phenomenon that grew with the car, because even if you live in the city, the supermarket, unlike the corner shop, is likely to be some distance away from home and how else are you to manage to get a weekly shop home without a car? Food, DIY, furnishings, and any kind of specialist shops are in the urban environment and unavailable out in the country – at least if you want to touch and feel goods – because we now have online shopping. Assuming your broadband is fast enough for shopping online, you can order things online, have them delivered (by motor vehicle – anything from a lorry to a private car) and if it does not match the expectation (that touch and feel would have obviated) you can send it back, by vehicle again – still it’s better to have one vehicle doing a round of rural locations than dozens of rural dwellers motoring into town and back… This leads to other, less obvious environmental impacts – clothing retailers are very poor at standardising garment sizes so consumers may order a minimum of three items to bracket their size and having tried them on, return two of them, which the retailer cannot be bothered to repack and resell – best case they go to a third-party retailer like TK Maxx – worst case, they go to landfill, still in their torn-open plastic bags. 92 million tons of clothing end up in landfills. Only 20% of textiles are collected for reuse or recycling globally.

The Suburban Deserts…

It is not just country- dwellers who are dependent on cars – as the car became more widely owned between the war – ribbon development spread out along the arterial roads stretching out from the cities towards those aspirational countryside locations and post-Second World War, the spaces between those roads were infilled with suburban housing estates. These estates were not provided with shops or pubs and buses –  buses still modelled on earlier urban trams, did not, on the whole, extend their routes into these estates (as they do now, using smaller buses) – so another “driver” towards mass ownership of the car. There is now guidance on how to design housing estates in order to be bus-friendly but it depends on local authorities being prepared to press this home.

-and “Liberation”

Once you had a car, many other uses for it became apparent and were catered to, holidays at the coast demanded an ever-improving road network and the upgrading of A-roads to motorways and with car ferries and later, the Euro-Tunnel, motorists could even take their cars abroad if only to stock up with beer and fags on a day trip to France. How much was saved when the petrol was factored in, I wonder? Trips to the dump, car-boot sales, lazy trips to the corner shop, driving the kids to school, sometimes even when the distance is walkable and the exercise would do both kids and parents good, Z-cars (car crime demands police cars), driving to watch motor racing, banger racing, picnics in the rain, dogging, actually making babies, babies being born and too many people dying in cars– and so it goes on – the love affair was over and we became truly wedded to our cars.

Divorce

Divorce is going to be painful and it is going to have to happen, because there can no longer be any doubt that climate change is happening and happening faster and more damagingly than we imagined possible. The time for tinkering about with lightbulb replacement is past, we must all take more serious steps towards doing our bit to arrest the worsening problems affecting rich and poor countries alike, though the effect on poor countries is worse and the contributory factors of any kind of mitigation lie with the rich ones. Changing lightbulbs was, initially, a costly outlay because the energy-efficient bulbs were not cheap, but then came LED and suddenly lighting fixtures themselves changed and every public building must change colour constantly at night. However, even changing lightbulbs was a struggle to sell to people initially – because of the cost – even if the long-term effect was a saving – it was cash upfront and savings later and we humans are not good at deferred gratification. If lightbulbs were hard, how much harder will it be to make serious changes in our car usage? No wedded person wants to get divorced, not least because of the massive cost both financial and emotional and this divorce is no different – when you blow up a life together, it’s hard to believe there might even be any upside, or be able to see beyond the chaos to a new and settled life…

Like a divorce, changing our relationship with the car is not going to be a single, simple matter, no more than you can change housing, separate finances, account for custody of children, divvy up the record collection, who gets the dog, who keeps the friends, let alone the emotional toll, good breakups, the bad breakups, the goodbye sex, the loss of support and confidant –  divorce is messy and the solutions are multi-faceted and often unique to each couple and it will be no different with the car. Going electric is only a part of the story and presently, a dubious part at that – so let’s examine some of the many parts that might contribute to the solution.

Social Changes

There are two avenues to be considered – the technological and the behavioural and neither is easy or straightforward. Taking the social first, there have been studies showing that already, some people would save money by ditching their own cars and simply hiring a car for those occasions that they need them – holidays, weddings, big shopping trips but many would question the use of the word “simply” because nothing is without any cost – yes you would need to plan ahead and make a booking but is that really so onerous? Yes – you would no longer have a status symbol that you feel reflects something about you sitting on your drive and some people might think you “gone down in the world” for leaving the ranks of the car owners – but then again, many would applaud you…

Good Government – Hands On or Hands Off?

Another example of the need for social attitude change is the term “Public Transport” which now carries a whiff of class distinction – let us rechristen it as Green Transport or Make a Friend Transport – for in the words of a British railway advert – “Let the Train Take the Strain!” – I can vouch for this as after breaking hip in a car crash, I was unable to drive for at least a year and enjoyed travelling by bus to my nearest city, some 35 miles away so much, that I didn’t return to driving a car for five years. Not only was I able to more fully enjoy the beautiful scenery where I lived back then, but the bus afforded me the opportunity to meet people I would otherwise not chanced to talk to… By contrast, the Conservative party here in the UK, took great pride in announcing via posters at railway stations, how the UK had the lowest subsidy for railways of any country, however the list that the poster detailed, might have been the list of railway operators from best to worst, with the UK at the bottom. The Conservatives are the party of the car and they also adopted, as part of Neoliberalism, the idea that for governments to govern – to make considered decisions about what works best for the country and nudge or even legislate for it – is a bad thing and that market forces (read unabashed greed and profiteering) should determine the course of things. They sold off (euphemism – De-nationalised) British Rail, breaking it up into a series of franchises operated by the highest bidder and disastrously, made the rails themselves, the purview of another company. Operating for profit almost always means cutting corners and this, plus the disjuncture between infrastructure and operators, contributed, in large part to many incidents, the worst of which was the Reading Station crash in which six people died and sixty-one were injured.  Major rail crashes also occurred at Southall, Ladbroke Grove, Hatfield, Potters Bar and Stonehaven.

There are already schemes bringing commuters together such as Car Pooling where people who work together, or in nearby home/job locations, share car and/or petrol expenses – what if we took this idea further wherein people within a given neighbourhood would belong to a co-owned carpool and could book a car suitable for “the day that’s in it “– a small runaround for taking and collecting the kids from school or doing the weekly shop and an estate car for that annual holiday – perhaps even a sports car to impress on that first date… There might need to be changes to insurance rules to facilitate such schemes but it’s not insuperable. In Canada, the distances to be travelled are vast and although it is illegal to hitchhike anywhere except at a petrol station, it is common to accept passengers who pay their share of the petrol. All these ideas are facilitated by online connections – either informal or actual websites, and this demonstrates both that people are willing to co-operate for a change benefitting the environment, even if there are some small inconveniences in co-ordinating themselves and secondly that these things, once mooted, can be organised from the grassroots up – with a minimum of governmental interference but perhaps the odd facilitation.

The Lessons of Oxford

I grew up in Oxford and would naturally have ridden a bicycle as soon as I was old enough even if I hadn’t had a father who became a crusader for “Intermediate Technology” (simple rather than high-tech solutions). I never learned to drive until I was 35 and had stopped living in London where I continued to ride a bicycle when possible or took public transport – busses or trains if the weather was inclement. If more people took to bikes and public transport, there would be fewer cars on the road and the benefits would be safer cycling, healthier bodies as well as the immediate environmental benefits – think Amsterdam or Oxford. Oxford has embraced and been the testbed for every measure to try and reign in the motor car. First it built a Ring Road or Bypass coupled with creating one-way streets that made it less attractive to go through the centre. Far from killing commerce in towns, many places have discovered that a more car-free city centre is such a boon that it promotes shopping, eating and sightseeing! Next, Oxford introduced bus lanes (which also facilitate bicycles and taxis) and shortly after, Park-and-Ride schemes. The latest scheme in Oxford has however, brought a backlash, not exclusively from those immediately affected (or benefitted, depending on your point of view) but as a rallying point for car defenders from far and wide who see Oxford’s latest experiment as the thin edge of the wedge – the enforcing of automotive divorce. What is this dastardly attack on the institution of marriage to the car? It stems from the idea of the “Fifteen Minute City” That every city be divided into neighbourhoods within which all the essential needs for living – shops, pubs, meeting places, bus routes out – should all be found within a fifteen-minute walking distance – innocuous you might think, but Oxford’s implementation – a retrospective planning measure, is to ring-fence such neighbourhoods with car-barriers to limit ingress and egress for cars – and this has been seen by some as a totally unwarranted attack, not just on car owners, but on their very human rights! Protesters were not merely local residents but car supporters from far and wide who flocked to oppose the dastardly council who dared to challenge the rights of the motorist! In our necessary divorce from the motor car – a front line has been drawn… True, such cellular enclaves have been devised before by town planners – anyone who has visited a friend in the suburbs of that planned city, Milton Keynes, will know the nightmare of entering such a cell and then not being able to find the way out. Not least, this is because the suburban cells of Milton Keynes were designed without the shops and facilities that would have made them into 15-minute solutions but would also have provided landmarks for navigation in a sea of identical housing. Planning for the future means making sure that housing estates are more than just housing, that the cars are parked or garaged around the outside of neighbourhoods, or at least, like the mews coach-houses of old – at the back of the houses with pedestrian thoroughfares leading to shops et al, at the front. Private developers are particularly notorious for neglecting to build any community facilities and merely cramming as many houses with concomitant roads, drives and garages as it takes to carry the occupants out of their housing only ghetto. Reto-fitting is, as Oxford has discovered, more challenging still…

Technological Options

Turning to the technological options for environmental solutions to divorce us from the CO2 emitting motor cars, vans and lorries – “What of the electric vehicle?” I hear you say. Setting aside the fact that you still have to generate the electricity to power electric vehicles and all the difficulties in weaning power generation off fossil fuels, there are major flaws in the current approach to electric cars.

The current generation of electric cars is predicated on the idea that people want a car that does exactly the same things as the cars they will be giving up – carry five people, travel at 70 miles per hour or more, have a capacious boot, carry forward all the crumple zone technology which keeps us safe, up to a point, in the event of a crash – and it is worth remembering that it has been determined that once over 30 m.p.h. – there is very little that a driver can do to influence the outcome of a crash and also, that the speed of impact in a collision between two cars is the sum of their two speeds so two cars travelling at 30 m.p.h. smash together at 60 m.p.h. Of course, if we travelled much slower, then such high-speed collisions and the ingenious and weighty crumple zones which have been designed to protect us in such events, would be less necessary.

What has disappointed me about these new electric cars is that they look exactly as before, take the same massive amount of energy and share of Earth’s resources to construct, worse if you think of the issues around Lithium for the batteries and they are, at this stage affordable only by the relatively rich. I had imagined a wholly new style of lightweight runarounds – cars perhaps a little like the Smart cars – economical two-seaters, but if you want to achieve all the old requirements of a car listed above, then you have to go big – as big as existing cars, because you cannot fit a big enough battery to supply the range or speed to carry the weigh of all that crumple zone protective steel in a small car. It just can’t be done, and in any case, the first adopters of electric cars are the better off and it has been much easier to sell them the idea of going green by simply changing to a “greener” propulsion of an equally capable large car rather than that of a small one which they are not in the market for anyway.

Small is Beautifull…1

If we accept the reality that people who live and mostly drive only in cities, neither need a high-performance large car nor can utilise the capacities of such cars due to congestion slowing things down, then would it not be better, for when you need to use a car, to have a small electric vehicle! There is a class of cars termed Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles (how friendly does that sound!)  which are small, light weight, much less greedy in manufacturing and material costs, and travel at the modest speeds actually suitable for driving in urban environs. That they have not gained greater popularity is in part due to the hazard of driving such lightweight cars in a mix with larger, faster, heavier beasts and partly due to the failure to grasp the necessity of switching to such vehicles.

The  Renault Twizy  was launched in Europe in 2012 and it is classified as a heavy quadricycle. (Wikipedia)

Electric cars are not a new idea, in fact, they were quite common until petrol engines gained ascendancy, what about the electric milk-float – operating with heavy lead-acid batteries rather than the current lighter-weight Lithium ones, these workhorses carried a good load, travelled at moderate speeds and had enough range to get the job done – proof that a realistic spec. for an urban vehicle is eminently possible!

An electric milk float in Liverpool city centre, June 2005 (Wikipedia)

How Do We Get There From Here?

What if, instead of trying to change habits by applying punitive Low Emission and Congestion Charges to big cities (which become rallying points for the motoring rights lobby) we take joined-up government decisions to promote cities being small electric vehicle zones? What does joined up mean in this context? It means first promoting the manufacture of such vehicles up to and past the point of mass adoption, facilitating charging points by legislation where necessary (ie. all new homes to include them), and only then enforcing the adoption of the small vehicles in cities. Those who want to retain their old-style monsters might be forced to leave them in outskirt car parks and continue their journeys inward with a small vehicle or a bus. To get there from here is never going to be a single simple solution but always many parts that will eventually be greater than the sum of those parts.

My vision of the future is that there will be a two-tier division between town and country and it will probably reflect the difference in wealth that already exists between many (but not all) rural dwellers and those who live in towns and cities. Having said that, there will be a levelling up in many ways –  more bus routes in town and out; smaller electric busses, electric vehicles in town and even in the country, they could be used to get to the station or connect with a bus route; status will not be judged by the car you own, in fact, ownership might not be the prime model.

New Ways of Doing Things

In Liverpool they have a company operating a fleet of electric scooters that registered users can pick up and use wherever they find them and are charged by distance travelled. All GPS locatable, the company goes round at night and collects the scooters to take back to base for recharging. Imagine how this might work for Neighbourhood Electric Vehicles. For sure you couldn’t go around with a car transporter picking them up at night – but wait! There are other clever technological solutions available! Firstly, if you operate a reasonably expensive drone, the last thing you want is for it to run out of power and crash miles away from you – so they have a sensor such that when they only have just enough power to get back to you – that’s exactly what they do – turn tail and use GPS to automatically get themselves back to you. Combine that with driverless cars – and a company could automatically retrieve vehicles back to base and deliver them to customers’ doorsteps for whenever they have been ordered. One of the issues around driverless technology is that it is aiming to be used in current type motor cars up to and including a mix of lorries and cars on motorways – imagine how much safer it would be if the technology were used to control new, slower, lighter vehicles around town.

There are so many aspects of our necessary divorce from the motorcar as we now use it and just as the effects of the growth of the car brought incremental consequences, so the solution to how to adopt a new relationship must also be incremental and multi-faceted.
Let me leave you with one last anecdote that shows the interconnected nature of things. There are fleets of electric buses already operating and some of them are contributing to solving one of the problems of the regulation of power supply – especially renewable power supply which can be occasionally irregular. When the busses return to their depots after taking commuters home, they arrive back at the very peak time when those same commuters are cooking their suppers. So the buses can return whatever charge is left in their batteries to the grid and then later in the night, when the TV goes off, the buses recharge their batteries ready for the morning. Building storage batteries to smooth out the supply and demand for energy from renewable sources is one of the major drawbacks and costs to switching to those power sources but in this case, we can see how buses, and perhaps even private electrical vehicles could become part of the battery solution – food for thought…

What can you do?

The most useful thing that an individual can do at this moment is to examine the situation both personally and in terms of the wider picture – take an inventory of your own circumstances and figure out whether you could change things in your own relationship with the car as things stand now. If not – then what would need to change to make it possible for you – petition for more bus routes; wait for electric vehicles to get smaller and more affordable; buy a bike and start to use it for more than just leisure or exercise; discover car-sharers in your area or advertise if you can’t find any. So much depends on attitudinal change that you might start discussions with other people to explore the problems and solutions – knowledge and insight are vital to change.

And please, if you have responses, questions or opinions on what I have said – post a comment and start the discussion…

Image generated with Midjourney AI by Andrew Wilson

© Andrew Wilson, 2023

  1. – “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered” is the title of a book by  E F Schumacher.

It’s Time to Divorce the Car…

humanist55

It’s time to divorce the car!
The car is killing the planet

Cars and ships and planes too
Busses and  bikes are healthier alternatives

The health of the planet needs us to be healthier
You can’t walk away from this but you should walk more

Walk, cycle, car-share if you must, help yourself to help the planet
The time for tinkering with changing lightbulbs is in the rear-view mirror

A rear-view mirror magnifies the causes of global warming
but now is the time to look forward and act decisively

It is not just governments that need to act but you!
Changing your relationship with your car will be hard

The solutions are multifaceted but
For you, it’s simply time to divorce the car!

Generated in Midjourney

© Andrew Wilson, 2023
Responding to Björn Rudberg (brudberg) in Meeting the Bar: over at dVerse Poets Pub…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence Number Three

humanist55

I decided to make a Header Image (above) for this little series of posts and have retrofitted it to the two previous posts here and here. So I asked the Midjourney app on Discord, to depict a silver-skinned Android, firstly, standing at an easel painting, and then at a computer typing. I am fairly sure that the AI known as Midjourney had no sense of the irony of asking it to anthropomorphise an Android doing these activities, because current forms of AI are so far from having the sentience required to appreciate concepts as subtle as irony. Spoiler alert, I approached this evaluative exploration with certain preconceptions about the likely conclusion although I didn’t know for sure, how those conclusions might be reached because I didn’t know how AI’s work, in detail. What I am going to show you today is what I have learned, but I am also going to link you to a very erudite analysis of why we should not be worried about AI taking over the world – in a piece called “Why the AI Doomers Are Wrong“, Nafeez Ahmed explains why the direction of travel of AI development, simply can’t lead to a human-brain-like sentience. I will quote from his article later.

First of all, look at the left-hand side of the header picture, in particular, the easel. On close inspection, you can see that the easel is the wrong way round and that the painter/android, is standing behind the easel. Midjourney produces four images by default, in the remarkable time of about 60 seconds which is almost like magic – indeed, in 1962, Arthur C. Clarke, a science fiction writer, stated in his book “Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible” that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. So despite the apparent magic of creating these images so quickly, the AI has made a fundamental mistake that reveals that it doesn’t really understand what an easel is or how it should be used. Nafeez Ahmed is mostly talking about text generative interactions with AI – ChatGPT and the like, but what he says below, is equally applicable to images generated by AI…

The stunning capabilities of the new chatbots and their uncanny ability to engage in human-like conversations has sparked speculation about sentience. Yet there is zero tangible evidence of this beyond a sense of amazement.
What many miss is that the amazing nature of these conversations is not a function of an internal subjective ‘understanding’ by an identifiable entity, but rather the operation of algorithms made-up of hundreds of billions of parameters trained on massive datasets of human text to predict words that should follow given strings of text. {…} This is not a breakthrough in intelligence, although it is, certainly, a breakthrough in being able to synthesise human responses to similar questions and thereby mimic patterns in human interaction. This model of AI, therefore, cannot, in itself, generate fundamentally new knowledge or understanding – let alone sentience.

Nafeez Ahmed

Nafeez goes into great detail about how the research is headed in the wrong direction and indeed, how it is unlikely it is that it will ever succeed in equating to human sentience, so if you want to put your mind at rest about a Terminator-style future in which humans are subjugated by machines – nip on over and read the full article. Meanwhile I am going to show you some more examples of how Midjourney gets things “wrong” and how to get the “right” results and what that says about how useful such a programme can be.

You interact with the Midjourney app by sending it a message (just as if it was really an intelligent entity) containing a prompt, and once you receive your four images, you can choose one to enlarge, if you are satisfied with it, or run variations on one or all of them. Here is the prompt that produced the above set of images. “Silver android painting at an easel by Roy Lichtenstenstein” – the AI places most importance on the object at the beginning of the prompt, then on the activity described and lastly, it attempts to produce the images, in this case, in the style of the Pop Artist Roy Lichtenstein – famous for painting s in the style of close-ups of comic book pictures. These close-ups show the dot screens that were used to shade the illustrations of the comic book plus the hard black outlining and Midjourney has picked up well on these style features, particularly the top right and bottom left pictures. The top-left shows a sculpture vaguely resembling an up-cycled easel made of silver and the bottom right shows a silver-skinned figure with dot-screen effect, holding a brush and painting a picture but with no easel. In the [op-right picture, the top of the easel is just showing in the bottom corner and the android “artist” is holding a small blank canvas in her hand and drawing on it. Having seen the header image at top, and these pictures were as near as I could get to what I wanted, from multiple attempts, you can see that what I wanted was an all-over silver-skinned android and in the images above, top-right has a human face although “her” body is robotic – perhaps cyborg is a better description, whilst the other pictures show a sculpture, a woman and a totally abstract figure. So I decided to change the prompts to “Robot” rather than “Android” which produced better results. The reason I had started with “Andriod” was because robots range from automatic hoovers that move around your rooms looking like little miniature flying saucers sucking up dirt to more anthropomorphic devices – which is what I wanted.

“standing silver robot painting at an easel by Roy Lichtenstein” produced(among others) the above image in which the robot, possibly standing, is grasping what looks like the top of an easel but the “painting” does not appear to be on the easel. So I tried “Robot standing painting at an easel” and got this rather cute robot who looks like he is sitting on an invisible chair – “Hey Midjourney” just because you don’t show the chair, doesn’t make it standing!” Notice that with the style reference to Roy Lictensten gone, this image is very different. I would like to show you more of the iterations but Midjourney froze and when I reinstalled it, it had lost the entire session of work – you just can’t get the staff…

Another thing that I have discovered in my experiments, is that both Midjourney and ChatGPT, like to add unspecified embellishments – remember in my first report, how ChatGPT found the correct explanation for the phrase “Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” but then added a totally made up explanation? Well Midjourney does the same thing too. Here is a picture of the railway viaduct at Knaresborough in West Yorkshire , an hours drive from where I live.

https://www.visitharrogate.co.uk/explore/knaresborough

I wanted to see if Midjourney could produce a collage image using fragments of maps which it tried but didn’t really understand the concept – although I am not saying that it can’t, but at the very least, my prompt wasn’t sufficient (one of the oldest sayings amongst computer programmers is “Garbage in – garbage out!”) Here is Midjourneys best effort…

There are some map elements and the whole scene has been chopped up and rearranged but not in a way that makes sense – this one is closer to the real view…

But my first attempt, before I added the collage style, was simply to see how Midjourney would find and represent the viaduct and it generated the four images below. The top left image, Midjourney has added another railway running beneath the viaduct, likewise, lower-left it has added a canal and in the images on the right, Midjourney has transported us into a past sans Knaresborough and a post apocalyptic future where vegetation is growing over the viaduct.

Enough with all the pretty pictures – what does all this reveal about the way that the AI Midjourney works! Referring to the work – Erik J. Larson in his book, The Myth of Artificial Intelligence, Nafeez Ahmed cites a summary of the work by Ben Chugg, lead research analyst at Stanford University (Iknow – quotes within quotes) as follows:-

“Larson points out that current machine learning models are built on the principle of induction: inferring patterns from specific observations or, more generally, acquiring knowledge from experience. This partially explains the current focus on ‘big-data’ — the more observations, the better the model. We feed an algorithm thousands of labelled pictures of cats, or have it play millions of games of chess, and it correlates which relationships among the input result in the best prediction accuracy. Some models are faster than others, or more sophisticated in their pattern recognition, but at bottom they’re all doing the same thing: statistical generalization from observations.
This inductive approach is useful for building tools for specific tasks on well-defined inputs; analyzing satellite imagery, recommending movies, and detecting cancerous cells, for example. But induction is incapable of the general-purpose knowledge creation exemplified by the human mind.”

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-false-philosophy-plaguing-ai-bdcfd4872c45

Nafeez goes on:-

Current AI has become proficient at both deductive and inductive inference, with the latter becoming a primary focus.
Larson points out that human intelligence is based on a far more creative approach to generating knowledge called ‘abduction’. Abductive inference allows us to creatively select and test hypotheses, quickly eliminate the ones which are proven wrong, and create new ones as we go along before reaching a reliable conclusion. “We guess, out of a background of effectively infinite possibilities, which hypotheses seem likely or plausible,” writes Larson in The Myth of Artificial Intelligence. {…}
And here is Larson’s killer diagnosis: We don’t have a good theory of how abductive inference works in the human mind, and we have no idea how to recreate abductive inference for AI: “We are unlikely to get innovation if we choose to ignore a core mystery rather than face it up,” he writes with reference to the mystery of human intelligence.
Before we can generate genuine artificial intelligence that approaches human capabilities, we need a philosophical and scientific revolution that explains abductive inference. “As long as we keep relying on induction, AI programs will be forever prediction machines hopelessly limited by what data they are fed”, explains Chugg

https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/why-the-ai-doomers-are-wrong?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

To relate this back to my experiments with Midjourney, the AI could identify what an easel looked like and include it in an image but it didn’t really know what it was or how it was used. Easels are probably present in thousands of pictures of artist’s studios as well as adverts but I bet there isn’t a Painters 101 that “First you will need an easel and this is how you use it” because when a human artist goes into a studio and sees canvasses fixed into easels, even if he has never seen one before, he is there to paint canvasses and it is obvious what they are and what they are for. It might be obvious to a human being with our ability to use inference, deduction and abductive capabilities, but an AI might identify an easel, but without finding a clear description of the usage, it cannot fully fathom how to use it…

As for the the tendency to add extraneous details, well the algorithms that govern Generative AI’s, are designed to mimic human conversational style, so when it has found a relevant answer to the requested information or task, it looks to extend the conversation in what it has learned might possibly follow – it doesn’t know whether it is true or not, because that is way above it’s paygrade ( a metaphor which it probably wouldn’t understand either). This phenomena of AI’s making things up is called hallucination – a very anthropocentric term…

I will make one more report on my attempts to get exactly what I wanted from Midjourney and how I found a compromise to be able to work with the results…

Exploring and Evaluating Generative Artificial Intelligence, Number Two…

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ChatGPT is not the only flavour…

ChatGPT is the AI offering from OpenAI and is probably the most talked about Bot since its launch last year – however it is not the only one so today I am going to compare it with Writesonic and see how they handle a piece of promotional writing. I still work 2.5 days as a manager at a gelato and pudding factory – sounds great unless you are diabetic like me. Anyway, we are trialling some new gelato flavours and I thought it a good moment to see how an AI generative writer might handle promoting this.

ChatGPT

Having no idea what might emerge, I started by putting a very simple prompt in “Promote a new gelato flavour – Caramel Popcorn Gelato” and this is what emerged a minute or so later.

“Introducing the newest addition to the world of gelato: Caramel Popcorn Gelato! This delectable treat is the perfect blend of sweet and savoury, with creamy caramel gelato swirled with crunchy popcorn pieces.
One spoonful of this delicious gelato and you’ll be transported to your favourite movie theatre, with the aroma of freshly popped popcorn and the indulgent taste of caramel. The creamy texture of the gelato perfectly complements the crispy texture of the popcorn, making for a truly delightful dessert experience.
Whether you’re looking for a sweet treat to enjoy on a warm summer day or a cosy dessert for a movie night in, Caramel Popcorn Gelato is sure to satisfy your cravings. So go ahead and indulge in this delicious new flavour – you won’t be disappointed!”

I have changed the spelling of Flavor to Flavour but otherwise, this is straight from the horse’s mouth and for so little guidance, is a pretty remarkable effort in just 128 words. As a marketing piece it leads straight to the movie/popcorn evocation as well as describing the mouthfeel and flavour.

Writesonic

The process of specifying and even joining the bot service was much more complicated – it assumed that I was a business user and gave me 10,00 free words to trial the product. Then it asked for a Subject for the piece and offered to search for Keywords if I did not supply them, which I did – the name of the flavour, it asked d what sort of Tone the piece should have of which I picked Excited, and it then generated Ideas for the article followed by a default three Outlines for an Article. I could have had more outlines but reading through the three that was quite sufficient and I then had a chance to add or remove the ten or so points that the article would consist of and I narrowed it down to five points – the rest would be useful further along in the promotion. Finally I pressed Generate and in short order got my article. I had tried to indicate a length of 130 words to be compatible with ChatGPT but Writesonic did its own thing – 465 words which together with the preliminary stages, reduced my 10,000 words to 9,271. Here it is, complete with photo and in the style of a blog post article:

A Delicious Breakthrough: New Caramel Popcorn Flavour Gelato

This was the image that Writesonic sourced from the internet which it merely credited to Unsplash – I have reverse-searched and added the full credit link –
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

As a gelato lover, I’m always on the lookout for exciting and unique flavours to try. So, when I heard about the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato, I couldn’t wait to give it a taste. As soon as I took my first spoonful, I knew that this flavour was going to be a game-changer. In this blog post, I’m going to share my thoughts on this delicious breakthrough.

The Inspiration Behind the Creation of the Flavour

What inspired the gelato makers to create a caramel popcorn flavour? The answer is simple: the love of movies. Think about it, what’s a movie without a tub of popcorn? And what’s better than caramel popcorn? That’s right, a caramel popcorn flavour gelato!

The gelato makers wanted to create a flavour that would bring the movie theatre experience to your taste buds. They experimented with different combinations of caramel and popcorn, trying to find the perfect balance. They wanted to create a flavour that was sweet and buttery, with a hint of saltiness. After many attempts, they finally found the perfect recipe.

How to Pair the Caramel Popcorn Flavour Gelato

Now that we know the story behind the creation of the flavour, let’s talk about how to pair it. The caramel popcorn flavour gelato is perfect for those who love sweet and salty combinations. It’s a great flavour to enjoy on its own, but it can also be paired with other flavours to create a delicious dessert.

One of my favourite ways to enjoy the caramel popcorn flavour gelato is to pair it with a chocolate flavour. The richness of the chocolate complements the sweetness of the caramel, while the saltiness of the popcorn adds a nice contrast. Another great pairing is with a fruit flavour, such as raspberry or strawberry. The tartness of the fruit provides a nice balance to the sweetness of the caramel popcorn.

Conclusion and Final Thoughts on the New Flavour

In conclusion, the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato is a delicious breakthrough that’s perfect for movie lovers and gelato enthusiasts alike. The gelato makers behind this flavour deserve a round of applause for their creativity and dedication to bringing new and exciting flavours to the table.

If you haven’t tried the caramel popcorn flavour gelato yet, I highly recommend giving it a taste. It’s a flavour that will take your taste buds on a journey and leave you wanting more. So, go ahead and indulge in this sweet and salty treat – you won’t regret it!

CTA: Head to your nearest gelato shop and try the new caramel popcorn flavour gelato today!

Which was best?

ChatGPT did an amazing job for such a skinny prompt, but I can see that Writesonic would deliver a much more refined article with a lot more options to craft the result, which was fully SEO optimised, for those of you with a nerdy disposition.

A Midjourney image generated by the prompt –
“salted caramel popcorn flavour gelato in the style of a Baskin-Robbins ad“

To conclude, I am going to show you another gorgeous image generated by Midjourney AI bot from the prompt “Wild Rose and Lonicera in the style of Tenniel –version 5 –tile”…

Sesame, Steamers and Supply Chains…

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If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…

Photo by Slashio Photography on Unsplash

Okay, so eating sesame on its own is a bit of a stretch but I had to shoehorn it into this A2Z because I love sesame and keep it in my kitchen in several forms. I honestly can’t remember whether the first time I encountered sesame was in the form of Sesame Snaps (bought ones but a recipe here) or Gomasio which is a delicious condiment made simply of salt and toasted sesame – it is so long ago and these things seem always to have been in my life…

Gomasio
1. take 2 cups of raw sesame seeds and toast them in a wok or frying pan carefully stirring till just turning brown
2. Add the toasted seeds and one tablespoon of sea salt to either a mortar and pestle or a grinder/blender and grind until it forms a coarse meal
3. Store in an airtight container and use in place of ordinary salt – it adds a nutty savour to your food. Some people like to add seaweed to Gomasio, kelp, dillisk (dulse), nori – all these can also be lightly toasted before combining with the salt and sesame and grinding for extra taste and minerals such as iodine.

Sesame seeds have little taste when raw but blossom with flavour once toasted so they are ideal to sprinkle on top of bread or cakes (see above) where they automatically get the toasting treatment. The other way of adding the nutty taste of sesame is to use Sesame Oil – this is something I gleaned early on from Chinese cookery – I will use a mixture of sunflower and sesame oil when making an omelette quick style (mess the eggs up with a fork and chuck it into hot oil in a frying pan as opposed to the separating the egg whites and beating to a froth kind). When you have a Chinese dish such as egg fried rice, this how they make the egg part and add it to the fried rice at the end.

Steamers

Nothing to do with supply chains – ships are diesel-powered, not steam these days lol, but more of supply chains later. No this is about cooking vegetables and other things – they are not exclusively a vegetarian implement – in fact I always use them for that logistic nightmare which is Christmas Dinner – carrots in the water at the bottom, sprouts in the next layer and frozen peas at the top. Cooking all these things together uses only one ring on your hob and uses less fuel so good for the planet.
Vegetables are not the only things you can use a steamer for – you may have had a Chinese or Japanese meal including steamed or even steamed and fried dumplings, meat or vegetarian, and thought that they involved some arcane Asiatic magic cookery techniques, but they are really easy to make. The first ones I tried used sausage meat as the basis with various additions, but since the object of these posts is to move towards vegetarianism (with the cost of meat going up) here is a recipe for steamed dumplings filled with stir-fried vegetables which is first steamed and then fried to give them a crispy bottom – it even tells you how to freeze them…

Supply Chain Issues…

Supply Chains mean the linking of one or more sequential factors in the supply of food. Initially sparked by Covid19 but exacerbated by the war in Ukraine, these problems look to get worse as 2022 progresses. They might include the following, failure at the farm side, failure in the picking, failure to deliver, and failure at the food processors. At the farm or faraway plantation, covid reduced the workforce available and likewise to harvest produce. Of course, in Britain, we are especially cursed by our insane decision to leave the EU and close the door to migrant workers who used to plant and pick vegetables. Likewise, abattoirs are short of skilled butchers. Brexit also compounded the shipping of produce with lorryloads of strawberries and fish rotting as they failed to get through to the ports in time, mired in red tape which the Tory government promised would not be a problem… Supermarkets and food processors all have staff shortages and if you have problems at all these possible stages, you got you a Supply Chain Issue. Some of these issues are relatively local, but the increase in oil prices means the shipping of say, apples from New Zealand to the UK, might be prohibitively expensive – it is a challenge to globalization.
Is there a silver lining? Well everybody from nations to individuals, could grow their own. British apples, because of their seasonality, have decreased in popularity as they have been supplanted by apples from every part of the apple-growing world until it’s too much trouble for supermarkets to host UK produce during it’s season. Well not anymore! Learn to embrace your local seasonal produce, grow your own in your garden or allotment – if life hands you lemons…

Rhubarb and the Return of Mercantilism…

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If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…

https://gardenerspath.com/plants/vegetables/tips-growing-cooking-rhubarb/

There are two themes running through my A2Z challenge this year and whilst you may think that rhubarb and Mercantilism are pretty random blog-fellows, in fact, the one illustrates the historical application of the other nearly perfectly! Some years ago, I was reading the lengthy series of historical novels – Poor Man at the Gate, by Andrew Wareham when I came across a passage in which the protagonist, by this time a member of the government, was discussing the reasons for a chronic shortage of silver in circulation. The reason given was that the Chinese were insisting on being paid for goods, not in trade for other goods, but exclusively in silver. The goods we so wanted, were silk, tea and rhubarb! I did a double-take thinking “how would you even ship rhubarb halfway around the world?” I had to investigate… The Chinese were acting out Mercantilism, one of the tenets of which, was that you should try to accumulate silver and gold to make a country rich, and you did that by trade restrictions – restrictions on imports and pushing exports for hard currency. The opposite philosophy, which came in the mid-19th century, was liberalism which pushes entrepreneurship and free trade – Liberalism favours individuals getting wealthy whereas Mercantilism favours the State accumulating money. Mercantilism confuses monetary wealth with the wealth that a wide selection of goods offers. The state – which is big in mercantilism, may grow wealthy in money, but the population came off badly. The British tried to get around the import bans by trading with merchants upstream from the government and eventually resorted to selling opium and getting a nation hooked on it – not one of our finest hours… The Chinese government retaliated by completely withholding the rhubarb – of course, it was not the fruit, but the powdered root which had medicinal value – it was touted as a cure for digestive disorders, flatulence and constipation. So much of the medicine did we buy, that the Chinese reasoned that we Brits must be really bunged up and that withholding the vital rhubarb would soon bring us to our knees – perhaps literally! If you want to read more fulsome explanations of Mercantilism then you can find them here and here.

The thing is, mercantilism has never really gone away, indeed the Chinese (and several other south-east Asian countries) have done very well for their economies by practising this economic philosophy whilst in the US and Europe, we have embraced the liberal and neo-liberal philosophies – there has been some meeting in the middle with globalism – China, South Korea and Taiwan exported lots of geegaws to the West which our consumers happily consumed, but with the fallout from the war in Ukraine threatening globalism, a resurgence of protectionist policies – apart of mercantilism is on the cards…

Enough with the economic philosophy stuff – now to the fun bit – Rhubarb as food! Rhubarb is properly speaking, a vegetable that we happen to regard as a fruit. It is the petiole, or leaf stem that we eat, never the leaves which are quite poisonous – containing a lot of oxalic acid – very bad for your kidneys. The fleshy stems can even be eaten raw – especially when young and tender – my partner used to eat it as a child, by dipping the end in sugar… Rhubarb stems contain vitamin K and also the antioxidants – anthocyanins (which give it its red color) and proanthocyanidins. Brought to Europe for its medicinal properties, the increasing cheapness of sugar, meant that by the 18th century, rhubarb was transitioning to culinary usage. It needs sugar because it is quite tart or acid so although it is a favourite in pies and crumbles, it is also (like gooseberries) a good sauce element to serve with oily fish like Mackerel. I have shot myself in the foot for a recipe by talking about Rhubarb and Ginger jam in my post about ginger, for this is a classic pairing. I also talked about how to concentrate young and tender rhubarb stems so they don’t cook to mush and that technique can be used for any soft fruit that has the same tendency – such as strawberries. Strawberries are also sometimes paired with rhubarb – to the disgust of rhubarb purists…

MONTY RAKUSEN/GETTY IMAGES from https://www.tasteofhome.com/article/forcing-rhubarb/

I will leave you with this magical image of the forcing sheds where early season rhubarb is picked by candlelight for early season, extra sweet shoots. We live near the Yorkshire Rhubarb Triangle where such sheds abound, if you live in the US, then half of all rhubarb comes from Pierce County, Washington. Here in Yorkshire, this is the time of year…

Lemons and Land Use…

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If you have seen my Theme Reveal for the A2Z Challenge 2022, then you will know that I am writing about becoming Vegetarian gradually as a response to the crisis in food supply chains sparked by the pandemic and made worse by the WAR in Ukraine. As well, I am keeping to the theme I originally planned of food which can be eaten in its own right as well as becoming an ingredient in other dishes…

Giant Lemon from Crete

In case you are thinking that nobody eats Lemons in their own right, I have a guilty pleasure to confess – when nobody around me is looking I eat the slice of lemon from my, say – Gin and Tonic – and maybe even my partners. Zest, which is the name for the outer layer of citrus fruit and contains the oils, also means enthusiasm for and so, when I owned a Frozen Yoghurt shop – I called it Zest!

To be fair, Lemons are mostly used as an ingredient for other dishes and rather than following the trite maxim “If Life Gives You Lemons – Make Lemonade!” here is a list of the many wonderful things you can make with Lemons. For example, the giant lemon pictured above next to a normal lemon, is cooked by the Greeks, in syrup and served on yoghurt or ice cream. We hid in Crete for six months whilst the pandemic was at its worst and from our apartment balcony, you could reach over the rail and pick lemons from a tree which reminded me of Andrew Marvell’s – The Garden in which he describes the bounty of cultivation thus:-

What wond’rous life in this I lead!

Ripe apples drop about my head;

The luscious clusters of the vine

Upon my mouth do crush their wine;

The nectarine and curious peach

Into my hands themselves do reach;

Stumbling on melons as I pass,

Ensnar’d with flow’rs, I fall on grass.

Lemon Curd
Lemon Meringue Pie
Lemon Marmalade
Lemony Greek Roast Potatoes
Limoncello
Preserved Lemon Mayonnaise
Lemon Drizzle Cake
Lemon Sorbet
Lemon Posset

I invite you to contribute your own favourites using this yellow skinned, zesty miracle…

Lastly, I want to share some more about the issue of the land it takes to raise meat compared to a vegetarian diet. I take this quote from here.
“A Bangladeshi family living off rice, beans, vegetables and fruit may live on an acre of land or less, while the average American, who consumes around 270 pounds of meat a year, needs 20 times that.

Nearly 30% of the available ice-free surface area of the planet is now used by livestock, or for growing food for those animals. One billion people go hungry every day, but livestock now consumes the majority of the world’s crops. A Cornell University study in 1997 found that around 13m hectares of land in the US were used to grow vegetables, rice, fruit, potatoes and beans, but 302m were used for livestock. The problem is that farm animals are inefficient converters of food to flesh. Broiler chickens are the best, needing around 3.4kg to produce 1kg of flesh, but pigs need 8.4kg for that kilo.

Other academics have calculated that if the grain fed to animals in western countries were consumed directly by people instead of animals, we could feed at least twice as many people – and possibly far more – as we do now.”

There is a lot more in that article… If you have been trying to cut down on the amount of meat you eat in order to save money, or the world, whether as a result of the ideas shared here or because you were already on this track, please share how it is going for you and what you would like to know more about or see discussed…

I is for Information…

humanist55

 My goal in the 2021 A2Z Challenge is to complete a novel I started a few years ago but which has languished for lack of love (writing!). Each Post, daily in April (Sundays excepted), will consist of some aspect of the novel plus a chapter from it. I hope that the Alphabetical items will give a bit of extra background, muse on the writing process, but most of all, help me develop certain ideas to improve the novel. Some 12 chapters are already written so I have a bit of a head start…

Please comment with any opinions good or bad – you have no idea how much I need feedback at this stage…



We are living in an age of Data – the fruit of the 20th Century’s revolution in Information Technology. Computers can do things undreamed of even in my childhood and the proliferation of information, or data proceeds at an exponential way. In addition to commercial “in-house” server farms proliferate to store all this data “in the cloud”. Huge unprocessed collections of data are known as “Data Lakes” and whilst lakes and clouds evoke lovely images of the natural world – the truth is that data storage is a growing threat to the environment. A friend who worked for the storage division of a famous computer firm explained it thus, at a party. “You have just taken a video of the party on your smartphone and will later post it to the group and various members will decide to download it to their computers or perhaps they will store a copy in their piece of the cloud. So what started off as 1% of a gigabyte on your phone might have grown 20 fold in a couple of hours…” 

By 2025, the amount of data generated each day is expected to reach 463 exabytes globally. If you are a real nerd or a serious environmentalist, you will go and check out that link and find out what an exabyte is – but my point is it’s a shit load of trouble for the environment. Just to give one more example, Bitcoin – the much touted new form of currency, is created by solving complex mathematical puzzles which make each coin something impossible to forge. To do these calculations takes so much computing power that the amount of electricity being consumed by the process, is equivalent to the consumption of a not insignificant nation-state! You couldn’t make it up! 

My book is a work of Science or Speculative, Fiction, but the premise in it, that our original Earth was destroyed by environmental catastrophe, caused not least by the exponential growth of data, is not a complete fiction. Cat videos, porn, unnecessary social media – Just Say No! That is a nod to one of the slogans of the so-called War on Drugs. And is it not worth considering our addiction to data as being dangerous to our health in the same way that criminally sourced drugs are? The war on drugs will never succeed and we should instead substitute a medical treatment approach – but that’s a post for another time. However, the following chapter does touch on the use of drugs on Hawaii 2 and beyond…


Chapter 9
Underbelly 

Jack stood outside a front door in the least salubrious part of New Orleans. It being Hawaii 2 that was not saying a great deal – denizens of the least salubrious parts of the other human colonies would have thought they had died and gone to heaven to find themselves in this particular suburb. Nevertheless, by the standards of Hawaii 2, Lowtown, situated along the river banks downstream of the port of New Orleans lived up to its name. Originally named for a marshy area, one of the last to be reclaimed and built, the soubriquet described the nature of the suburb well and it was a favourite argument of intellectuals as to whether the name created the character of Lowtown or whether it was the geography. Either way, Lowtown was the focus of what passed for rebellious youth, home to the alternative lifestyle of the alternative planet. Jack recalled his first conversation with Stig at the treehouse when Stig was posing as the Investigator and, presumably to add verisimilitude to his role, was talking about how people on the other colonies imagined life on Hawaii 2 to consist of lying around doing nothing, because nobody was forced to work. Lowtown, thought Jack, was the only place on Hawaii 2 where life in any way resembled that imagining, and even then, it differed in so many ways.

Residents of Lowtown were not enthused by civic duty so the periodic communal clean-ups ubiquitous to other communities, when people would get together to pick up litter and repaint the playground equipment in the parks, did not happen in Lowtown. Not that there was much litter except of the natural variety such as leaves – even in Lowtown, the civic duty not to litter, inculcated from an early age still held sway over Hawaii 2’s rebels.

Since everybody got paid their stipend regardless of whether they worked or not, there was little crime of the variety that usually funds the lifestyle of societies’ underclasses. Drugs were not illegal so another reason for crime was missing but since drug users like to group together for a shared experience, at least on the outward surface of things, Lowtown was the focus of young people experimenting with the doors of perception and many artists also made Lowtown their base. The legality of drugs made them cheap with no dealers ramping up the price and pushing their customers into crime or prostitution to fund their habits. In fact, serious long-term addiction was rare on Hawaii 2, even in Lowtown and mostly young people drifted into the area, sowed wild oats, dabbled in drugs and eventually moved away again when they were ready to take a more productive part in society again. Despite the many different aspects of society on Hawaii 2, teenage rebellion remained a fact of life, parents blamed hormones and waited for the phase to pass. It’s hard to sustain rebellion when there is nobody to kick against… 

The house Jack stood outside of, was an old friend of his from school who had accompanied Jack on his rite of passage trips to Lowtown in search of adventure and experience but unlike Jack, who had grown beyond that excitement, Clem had actually moved there and still remained, doing what? Well – Jack couldn’t really imagine. Stig had suggested a hotel for Jack to rest up in after their eventful day, it not being considered wise for him to return to the treehouse, but Jack had said he would rather stay with a friend, Stig suggested someone he wasn’t in regular contact with and Jack had come up with Clem in Lowtown which Stig had agreed to and an unmarked government car had spirited Jack away from the underground car park beneath the Parliament building.

Now, finally, the front door opened after a long wait, considering that Jack had rung Clem first to ask if he could come and stay for a few days and Clem was thus expecting Jack. Jack had not relished standing in the open for so long even though the car driver had assured him they were not being followed, the recent events had induced a healthy degree of paranoia in Jack. “Jack! How the Devil are you?” Jack, no slouch himself, was enveloped in a bear hug by a six-foot six-inch giant of a man dressed in a kaftan and with twelve inches of bushy untrimmed beard resting on his ample chest. “I’m good Clem, thanks for this.” “No problem mate, I’ve missed you!” Clem pulled Jack through the door and closed it behind him – series of dead-bolts clicking into place automatically. “Come through and make yourself at home.” Clem led the way through to a large living room furnished with large comfortable settees that begged Jack to sink down and relax. “I heard about the train wreck Jack, I am so sorry for Anna, I only met her at the wedding but she seemed perfect for you…” An awkward silence followed. Jack had been so wrapped up in Douglas since he got back from hospital that he had not seen many friends and had to experience the double-edged sword of condolences – the bitter-sweet of shared memory. “I hear you have a son though! Miracle eh?” Jack could have gone down the route of telling Clem about Douglas but he had realised that everyone on Hawaii 2, almost everyone, believed the story that the train wreck had been a gas explosion in the galley and he suddenly felt the need to tell the truth to another soul. “About the crash – it wasn’t an accident!” he blurted out. “What! What do you mean Jack, it was in all of the papers? You were the top subject of conversation for weeks after the explosion and again when you came round.”

“I mean it was a bomb, not a gas explosion.” “What the hell! Who would do such a thing?” “We don’t know, and this is just between you and me, right?”

“Sure Jack! Who is we?”

“People from the government”.

Jack had been warned by Stig not to discuss events with anyone but he and Clem went way back and besides, just by staying here he might be putting Clem in danger. It was only fair he knew what was going on although Jack stopped short of telling him about Stig and his background as a protector of Hawaii 2, for that was how Jack now thought of him. Clem fetched a couple of drinks and Jack unfolded the story of the last few days referring to Stig simply as an official investigator. Clem whistled when Jack described the intruders at his mother’s house and again, when Jack described the meeting with the President. Not that the President was so elevated from the ordinary citizen of Hawaii 2, nor hidden behind a wall of security, there was no need, but nevertheless, it was unusual for someone you knew to be having official meetings with him.

“So that’s it and here I am, a fugitive from – I don’t know what…”

“Well mate you’re safe here! But I can’t get over it – what possible motive could anyone have to do such a thing?” “The government think it could be something to do with Anna’s research. She went to Hawaii 1 to follow up some earlier stuff she saw which might mean an alternative way of accessing space from Hawaii 2 other than the space-lift and they think if the Trans-Planet Corporations got wind of it they would use it to open up the planet whether we liked it or not and our whole society would change.” “That could be true, I certainly know…” Clem suddenly shut up as if he had said too much. “You know what? Jack sat up as Clem twisted his hands looking uncomfortable. After a moment, Clem began. “Look, Jack, I don’t make a secret of what I do here although if I did it on any of the other colonies I would probably be locked up, albeit it might be in a research facility. You remember our first trips here to Lowtown?” “I do, though I am not sure I remember all the details!” said Jack with a laugh.

“Exactly, sex, drugs and rock and roll! And for me, it was the drugs that were foremost which is why I ended up moving here although by that time my interest in them was slightly different.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, I got interested in the manufacture, the pharmacology, even the history of drugs. Lots of recreational drugs started out as medicinal back on Earth, cocaine – anaesthetic, ecstasy – couple counselling dis-inhibitor, poppers – muscle relaxant and so on. By the 21st century, the molecular chemistry was so well understood that things moved to synthetics – drugs with great purity, before they hit the street anyway, and with predictable effects, in the majority of users anyway. Now things went the other way – occasionally one of the synthetics was found to have application in the world of medicine, and that is what interests me, Jack. These days, the recreational side of things is secondary to me although I am always concerned with finding safer highs… Come and look at this.” Clem got up and led Jack through to the back of the house and then downstairs to a basement. To his amazement, Jack stepped into a gleaming white-tiled laboratory in contrast to the scruffy but comfortable décor upstairs.

“Yup this is me now – Doctor Clem!”

“Seriously Clem you are a Doctor?”

“Well, not a medical doctor though I do have a doctorate in Pharmacology” grinned Clem. They spent the next half hour looking around the lab with Clem explaining the function of various pieces of equipment and how he was directing his research more and more towards medical drugs and searching less for new, recreational highs. He even had a separate room housing animals for initial toxicity testing.

“Of course, anything I discover in this microscopic lab has to go on to be tested rigorously by the big boys off-world, we don’t have much of a pharmaceutical industry here on Hawaii 2 – probably because we are so much happier than the other colonies so we don’t need many of the drugs that are given out to treat depression, anxiety and stress. Many other physical illnesses that follow on from those conditions are also reduced and require shorter treatment when they do occur. Mental illnesses are also less frequent, which we put down to a happier social environment, and again, when they do occur, we treat them a lot more with talking therapies which means all-in-all, we use so few drugs it’s easier to buy in what we need, even though drugs come into the low-weight high-value export that we can send up the space lift.”

They were back upstairs in the living room now. “I’m glad you have found your niche Clem, I was starting to worry about you, especially when you moved to Lowtown – I thought you were becoming a professional addict!”

“No, I was almost through that phase when I moved here and starting to take a more useful interest in pharmacology. Actually, I am quite a rich man now albeit off world!”

“Really Clem – and you the man least likely to…!”

“I know, it’s mad isn’t it! Not that it makes much difference to me, I mean I still get my stipend like everybody else, and there’s not much I can or need to spend money on here. This house was paid for initially from the recreational drugs I developed but then I came up with a pain killer with fewer side effects than lots of existing ones and sold it to TransPharm. The upfront deal was derisory looking back, I was naïve but then the percentage on sales whilst small, has paid me a fortune because it took off like a rocket! Then TransPharm tried to make it up to me by offering me a position at their R. & D. on Hawaii 1, but I didn’t want to go there and be a wage slave. Then they offered to send in masses of equipment at great cost and pay for staff but again I turned them down and bought what I needed out of my own money and God knows I could afford it and so kept my independence. Whilst nothing I have developed since, has had the success of that first drug, I have made some significant discoveries and – I am my own man and I work on whatever I want, whatever interests me.”

“Wow! That’s fantastic Clem, good for you. It even proves that the ethos of Hawaii 2 works better in R. & D., small scale, intellectual freedom, personal motivation other than money, incredible!”

“Exactly! But TransPharm still doesn’t get it – they keep on asking me when I am going to come and enjoy all the money I’ve earned and can’t understand that I have everything I need and want here – chiefly my work.” 

The two of them sat sipping the drinks Clem had poured them in the companionable silence only possible between the kind of old friends who can pick up where they left off after a long time apart. Eventually Jack broke the silence. “Do you believe in God?”

“You’re kidding me, Jack, no I might have found my profession since I saw you last but I haven’t found God! Why do you ask?”

“It’s just an expression you used ‘God knows I could afford it’. I mean you and I and probably most of the population of Hawaii are Atheist apart from the small groups who came to achieve religious freedom and they don’t make much headway gaining followers and yet we still use expressions like ‘God knows’ all the time!”

“Ha! True enough. I suppose we could say ‘goodness knows’ but that posits goodness as a thing and I am as sure there is no more such a thing than there is God. Goodness is what we do, by choice, the very idea of goodness, or God come to that, only exist in the minds of human beings because we are able to make that choice.”

“My thoughts too. Even after learning that the train wreck was really caused by a bomb, and not knowing who or why someone did such an awful thing, I still don’t think that evil exists any more than good or God, not as concrete things. And if anything were going to make one change one’s mind it might be something like that. I mean we don’t have much crime here, bad things done by people don’t happen and the bad things that are natural, well we seem to cope well enough with them without turning to religion for comfort.”

“Yeah, well, even those religious groups that did come here with the initial colonisation are withering away, young people drifting away. Maybe it’s because society isn’t so bad that religious leaders have to contain their flocks against a world of sin. Sin! What even is sin?”

“I think you’re right Clem.” And they lapsed into silence again. This time it was Clem that broke it.

“Talking of bad people, I’ve just been thinking about something, I don’t know if it’s connected to the train wreck but it happened about the same time.”

“Really Clem, what was it?”

“Well about two years ago there was a guy, a drug user, one of the ones who used to test out my new highs and distribute them to other selected users and get them to report back on any side-effects. I am lucky, or good at what I do, don’t know which, but so far there have never been any serious side effects to anything I have produced. Anyway, this guy, Gervald, he hung around a lot and was interested in what I was doing, so much so I was urging him to study too which eventually he did. Then he was able to be useful doing some of the routine work and it was good for his course work. During that time, I came up with a recreational drug that whilst not the greatest high in the world, was exceedingly cheap and easy to produce. I don’t tell TransPharm about my recreational drugs, there are enough drugs on the other worlds and because politicians are not brave enough to deal properly with the issue, there is still a separation between legal and illegal drugs. The criminals lobby politicians not to change the status quo otherwise they would stop making money and so the users have to pay prices that are well above legal drugs like alcohol. So how do they pay for their hit – they steal, so more criminality. The freedoms we have here on Hawaii 2 do away with all that criminality and as you know, most users drift away from drugs in the end. It’s an experiment that was tried on Earth in a country called Holland and whilst it had some success, it was skewed because all the other countries around didn’t join in, so Holland became a destination for addicts from everywhere else. At least that can’t happen here with our restricted access but I wonder about what Gervald might have been up to, something always nagged away about him at the back of my mind.”

“How do you mean Clem?”

“Well, you’ve seen my setup here, I mean I have locks on my front door which I keep locked and that’s more than most people do here, and even then it’s not against theft, but in case some idiot comes in here stoned and causes mayhem. If this was any other planet there would be cameras and security and all sorts of regulations which would mean I probably wouldn’t even be allowed to operate in the suburbs like this. But with Gervald it reminded me of what I’ve read of those other places, a bit paranoid, edgy, as if we were doing something illegal which of course we were not, in fact as I moved into medical drugs more and more, it was even less questionable – were it on any planet! Yet he had this clandestine feel to him.” “You think he had something to hide?”

“Maybe but I could never figure it out. And then he disappeared under what you might call suspicious circumstances. In fact, it was about two days after your accident, well or not, as the case may be.”

“Oh, it was definitely a bomb and no accident, the authorities are sure of that, it’s just that they don’t have a clue who or why!”

“Well two days after the train wreck, Gervald’s house went up in flames, a really bad fire although not so bad that they couldn’t rule out the fact that no body turned up in the ruin and they couldn’t figure out how the fire started either. The door was locked which you know, is unusual but they couldn’t say whether accelerants were used to start it because it turned out he had been storing quite a lot of chemicals there. In fact, it looked as if he had his own lab there. And Gervald had disappeared. Completely!”

“How did you find out the details – I mean aren’t the police quite cagey about giving out information?” asked Jack.

“Well yes, usually they are, but firstly they were all busy with the train wreck and this didn’t rate high on their priorities, although at any other time it would probably have been their top case. But secondly, they questioned me as a known associate of Gervald and then asked for my help as a sort of expert witness.” “Expert on what?” “On drug-making – on the equipment in particular. After the fire, they found a lot of machines in the ruins but so badly burnt they didn’t know what to make of them – so they brought me in.”

“And could you tell what they were?”

“Oh yes, easily. I had expected to find equipment related to Gervald’s studies although I had no idea how he would be able to afford such things, so expensive to import we all used the university labs even though it meant working at silly o’clock sometimes to get your slot. But here’s the thing, it wasn’t a student setup at all, no, it was a manufacturing plant, small but capable of turning out quantities of a single line of drugs. So how the hell did he manage to import that lot? And what was he producing and who for? There are a couple of guys who make the drugs used here on Hawaii 2, medical and recreational and the latter are closely monitored by the authorities both as to quantities, usage trends and price. As even the recreational drugs are available over the counter in pharmacies, there is no clandestine world of dealers and no new producer would have a way to sell his product.”

“So, what do you think happened to Gervald, where did he disappear to?”

“Still more questions than answers, Jack. Bit like your case! I wasn’t officially on the investigation but you know how it goes here, things are a bit more relaxed than they are on other colonies and a bit more pragmatic. Hey! Have you ever thought about the fact that we get plenty of ideas about how it is on all the other worlds through the vids, all those crime dramas but they have no idea how things are here ‘cos we don’t really have a film industry and if we did, we’re so boring there’s no crime to film anyway!” Both men laughed at this old chestnut about life on Hawaii 2.

“Well that was the case anyway…” said Jack more soberly.

“True!” replied Clem and they lapsed into silence for a minute. “So, you’re a father now Jack!”

“Yes indeed!” A wave of longing for little Douglas overwhelmed Jack and he spent a few minutes telling Clem all about the strangeness and wonder of coming round from the coma to find himself a father and how great it was looking after this new little person except that the person who he had always imagined sharing the experience with was not there. With that Jack welled up and Clem went off to make a cup of tea for them both giving him space to let flow the tears. Putting the cup in his hand, Clem put a firm hand on Jack’s shoulder and Jack pulled himself together again. “If there’s anything I can do Jack… In any case I can’t wait to meet Douglas…”

“Thanks Clem and so you shall when all this mystery is settled…”

“I’ve been thinking about that and the more I think about it, the more I wonder if it was just coincidence that this thing with Gervald happened so close to the train wreck.”

“How do you mean? You didn’t finish saying what happened in the investigation?” “Yes, well, as they didn’t find a body, they tried to find him but it was then that I realised that he never really talked about where he came from, I mean he obviously wasn’t from around here. But you know a lot of people who wind up in Lowtown don’t really want to talk much about their past and you get used to not prying – when they want to talk, they will. So I couldn’t be much help to the police there, hell I didn’t even know the guy’s second name and that’s par for the course around here too. He had a camper van and that was missing too so the police put out an alert for that but by the time that happened, it was four or five days after the fire so if he took off in that he was long gone – assuming that’s what he did. It’s a mystery, who he was, where he got the equipment and what he was doing with it and if he disappeared voluntarily, then why he gave up a promising career, his college reports were good, or whether, as the police seemed to think, there was foul play.”

“It’s certainly strange. And you really don’t have any idea why he had a drug manufacturing set up – couldn’t you tell from the equipment? And why do you think it might be connected to the train wreck.” asked Jack.

“I don’t have any concrete thoughts, it’s just a hunch brought on by your describing your mystery and maybe I am just connecting them because they have superficial similarities, you know explosions and an absence of motive or hint of a perpetrator. But in answer to your first question, my best idea of what he might have been making was that drug I mentioned, I called it Sunset because of the way the high faded. I told you it was simple to make and cheap too and that’s because there were certain stages of manufacture that were unnecessary in making Sunset compared to other recreational drugs and the machines he had seemed to match the process. I told the police that, but it didn’t make any sense – there are much better drugs available here and indeed when Gervald was trialling it with the users, they didn’t dislike it, but there wasn’t a demand for it either, so I didn’t pursue it directly, only kept it in mind for ways of incorporating it into future medical applications. So why would Gervald set up to manufacture it with no market? Talking to you, I suddenly thought, what if he was sending it off world? Not only is it cheap and easy to make but Sunset is tiny in volume, like the original LSD which could be impregnated into a dot of paper – ideal for smuggling, especially given our unique access to space and its weight limitations. We were just thinking about it wrong looking for a local market.”

“So Gervald knew how to make Sunset?” “Well, I never specifically gave him the formula or the method but he was around enough, and he did have access to my computer files for the bits of work he did for me. I don’t have very elaborate security on the system, I never felt I needed it, and although the files were password-protected I suppose it wouldn’t have been difficult for him to hack them. That’s what I told the police anyway and they suggested I beef up security, which I have since done – even though it goes against the grain.”

“Well, if he was smuggling Sunset off-world, what would the advantage be, to the people at the other end that is?” asked Jack “And why destroy the lab and the train that takes you to the means of getting the product off-world – it doesn’t make sense!”

“Let’s face it none of this makes sense but thinking about your first question what would the advantage be?” Clem sat thinking for a minute head in hands. “Okay, so it’s a new source of product which the authorities wouldn’t be looking for, especially with that source being Hawaii 2 with its noticeable absence of exports. Secondly, if it is being smuggled, then the transport is not being paid for in the regular way, it could be impregnating the packaging of one of the other small, high-value exports we do send so it’s cheap that way as well as cheap to buy from the originator, let’s presume that’s Gervald. But then what’s the point for Gervald, he can’t spend the money here on Hawaii 2 because you don’t need lots of money, and conspicuous consumption is frowned on and, well, conspicuous!”

“But let’s say he wasn’t from here, or he was from here, but could get off-world eventually to spend his money?”

“I suppose that’s possible,” Clem said, “I mean people do come and go, hideously expensive as it is. I have been myself to meet with TransPharm and spend a bit of my own ‘drug money’ though to be honest, I couldn’t wait to get back!”

“Really. Why’s that, I’d love to go?”

“Oh I enjoyed the trip, especially going up in the space lift, it’s so slow – but it gives you time to enjoy the view of this beautiful planet of ours. Although apparently, some people can’t deal with it, it gives them vertigo and they have to travel in a windowless lift capsule – mad eh?”

“Too right, I want to see it all when I go, – if I ever go! You know in the early days of space-flight, when they used rockets, you got into orbit in ten minutes or so but you couldn’t see anything because you were crushed into your seat looking at the inside of your capsule. Anna told me that…”

“I can’t imagine what you’ve gone through losing her Jack and though it can’t bring her back, I hope the bastards who did it get caught!”

“So! What didn’t you like about going off world?” said Jack to change the subject and move away from the subject that was still too raw to cope with in daylight and with company.

“It’s the people mainly, at least the one’s I had to deal with at TransPharm. They were so up themselves with their limousines and salaries and expense accounts. I think they were trying to show me a good time and boy did they pull out all the stops to impress me, but although I tried not to show it, they did just the opposite. When we were driving around in the city, you could catch glimpses of how the majority of people live and if you really looked hard you could see the really poor people in the alleyways, going through trash looking for food. But I never got to meet anyone outside of business – they said they were protecting me but I felt like an asset being guarded. I told them I wanted to spend some money going somewhere exotic so they arranged for me to go to this hotel somewhere in the tropics but it was just like being in the city except for the scenery – which was beautiful I grant you. But everyone was rich and you couldn’t even talk to the staff privately, they were all terrified of being seen fraternising with the guests. I actually ordered a prostitute, not for sex you understand, but because I thought at least it would be somebody I could talk to but she was so drugged up she couldn’t understand I only wanted to talk. Her one thought was that if I wasn’t satisfied by her then she would get into trouble. When I insisted I didn’t want sex and asked her to go, she burst into tears saying it was too quick and they would know she hadn’t pleased me so I let her sleep in the bed beside me till morning and then promised I would give good feedback if anyone asked – which they did in a thinly veiled way next morning. After that, I just wanted to get back here to normality. So I’m not likely to spend the money I earn, and I’m looking into some charities – medical aid for those who can’t afford it – it’s all charged for there you know!”

“So, going back to Gervald, let’s suppose he doesn’t have the same scruples about spending the money he’s earned and hopes to leave Hawaii 2 sometime, or maybe it’s a case of returning to wherever he’s from, what happened, why destroy the lab that’s making you money and why disappear?”

“Maybe he didn’t do the destroying, maybe it was the people he worked for.”

“But why? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Maybe they had got all they needed from him.” Said Clem thoughtfully.

“You mean enough product? Surely drug dealers never have enough…”

“No! I mean maybe they got the formula out of Gervald. After that they wouldn’t need him anymore, they could make it wherever, and without all the complication of smuggling. They are very hot on what you take up the space lift you know. It’s not that they are looking for contraband, I don’t think there is anything here worth smuggling, well until now perhaps, but it’s the weight, everything has to be calculated exactly for the lift system to work properly, worst case it could damage the cable if the loads were unbalanced. Sometimes you can’t go up immediately if there isn’t a balancing load coming down or sometimes the cargo sits in space waiting for upcoming traffic. It’s weird you know, when you get to the middle of the cable which is the geostationary point, there are all these freight containers just sitting in space not moving, I mean they do tether them but they are so still, while you are all over the place experiencing weightlessness for the first time. Eventually you manage to stop bouncing around and then there you are stock-still too – weird!”

“Well, there’s a whole lot of speculation around Gervald, including the idea of some connection to the train wreck but I suppose it’s worth putting it to Stig, he might get things moving, I mean it sounds like the investigation got a bit side-lined or de-prioritised or something.” said Jack.

“I think you’re right Jack, the train wreck took all the energies of the authorities and if Gervald took off in his camper van, well, it’s a big planet to search, plenty of wilderness to hide out in…”

“Well let’s hope he did take off and get away and that if he can be found he might shed some light on his mystery at least. I’ll talk to Stig tomorrow. Now, have you got anything to help a man sleep?”

“Is the Pope a Catholic?” laughed Clem as he took the lid off a massive carved wooden bowl to reveal a cornucopia of brightly coloured tablets. “Just like old times!” said Jack with a smile.

Locusts…

humanist55

It is not my intention to make this a nature blog, but when a locust, an animal of mythical status quite literally, drops into your hand, or to be precise, onto the USB cable you have in your hand – it is worthy of a photo at least. They do occur in small or rather, regular numbers here in Crete but I understand they rarely get triggered into the massive swarms possible in nearby Africa. A quick search of the internet shows there are many species of even the European Locust but I was not able to identify this one easily – any entomologists out there?

Locusts are an apt metaphor for the outsourcing companies that the UK Tory government see fit to issue with contracts for Covid 19 Test and Trace as part of their ideological drive to centralise power with the Cabinet, richly reward their donors and no doubt themselves at some point down the line. It is the latest version of neo-liberalism and driven on the ideological side by Dominic Cummings (principal advisor to Boris Johnson) who is determined to curb what he sees as the bloated power of the UK Civil Service. However, as the linked article shows, this outsourcing is highly inefficient and costly. to give one example, local authorities in the UK have highly skilled tracing teams for use in sensitive areas such as STD cases but the government ignored this resource at the outset of the pandemic when it could have made a great difference in holding back the tide – preferring to centralise power to itself, not to mention the profits inherent in outsourcing. The outsourcing teams were undertrained, the privacy issues minimised for centralised efficiency and due to general inefficiency, were underused (staff reported being paid to sit on standby for calls and not receiving any) and when they did get calls, their efficiency in tracing (64%)was much lower than that achieved by local authority teams in their fields (97%). Still the locusts swarm around the government who are secretive about the amount they are dishing out but may very well run into billions on track and trace alone…

Meanwhile, here on Crete where our personal escape plan seems to have succeeded, that is to say, we arrived by air without so far, displaying any sign of having Covid 19 (touch wood). Due to the UK government first saying it was impossible to issue travel/quarantine on return bans for anything less than a whole country, they then did one of their trademark U-turns and following a planeload of returning holidaymakers from just one Greek island, the government imposed a 14-day quarantine on all people coming from all Greek islands. This ignores the fact that it was those British holidaymakers who probably took the disease with them and shared it amongst themselves as well as the islanders. Consequently, many people cancelled their Greek holidays, unable to take unpaid holiday leave to quarantine on their return and their employers unwilling to grant it anyway. Our own direct flight to Crete was one of the casualties and we had to fly via Athens which was a rushed and harassing connection.

The effects on the Greek tourism industry have been catastrophic – especially on the islands which often depend on tourism and considering that the total covid record for the whole of Greece amounts to say – one day in the UK, this seems very unfair and it is quite ironic that one should be expected to quarantine passing from the comparative safety of Greece to the dangers of out-of-control Britain. Given that most Greeks do not know anyone who has contracted covid 19, even at several removes, the level of compliance in mask-wearing in shops and by those serving in restaurants, is all the more remarkable. I feel that in the long term, people will look back on this pandemic and see the apparently limited numbers of victims compared say, to Spanish Flu) as opposed to the long-term effects which we are just beginning to suspect the extent of and be amazed at the initial good response of people to something they could not see happening for themselves and the squandering of that good effort by some governments due to concerns for economic health. The Greek islanders – through no choice of their own (unlike say, New Zealand) – have been forced to take the economic hit but been saved, so far, the health hit – it remains to be seen whether they will feel blessed by that…

Meanwhile, Barbara and I are still in the process of settling in to what is clearly more than a holiday (at a projected three-month minimum) and yet not an outright move to live in another country. This is what exercises our minds presently…

P.S.

On the millipede front, I was wondering what other creature might benefit from the bonanza of the beast’s appearance since this seems to be axiomatic fodder from our watching of nature documentaries. Every morning there are many dead bodies on the steps down to our apartment and no sign of anything eating them – so imagine my surprise when I saw the not merely dead, but somewhat desiccated body of a millipede moving with apparently unnatural animation – a sideways movement impossible for a live millipede. The cause was an ant, a fraction of the millipede’s size who not only dragged the beast on the horizontal, but up a 7cm step. Unfortunately, I missed this feat by the time I got the video up on my phone but below is some of the heroic event on the flat – David Attenborough eat your heart out!


An open letter to my MP

humanist55
Dear Mr Moore


It is with ambivalence that I write to you and with which, I imagine you will receive this letter since you are one of the MP’s who replaced – in our case, a very good and well-liked MP – on the strength of a facile slogan “Let’s Get Brexit done!”. Whether that was one of Boris Johnson’s own efforts or the handiwork of Dominic Cummings is a moot point but you undoubtedly owe your seat – in part – to the behind the scene machinations of Cummings – BUT – and here is my point, you may well lose it due to the catastrophic misjudgement of Dominic Cummings and his “boss”, the Prime Minister, if not now, then in the long run.

The Tory handling of the Coronavirus has been woeful, if understandable in their terms – the economic consequences of the crisis are inconceivable and immeasurable at present (though they will emerge in retrospect ) but it now appears that the delay of a week to eleven days at the outset whilst considering “herd-immunity” (a Cummings idea?), has cost many thousands of lives. If this was in any way a reflection of the work of the Prime Minister’s Chief Advisor, it was not well done, but we are unlikely to know that. What we DO know, is that Cummings – supposedly the great reader and manipulator of British public opinion – has got this one very badly wrong. Either he thinks the public stupid (but they are not, and with all the time in lockdown, are well supplied with the facts and incentivised to understand the facts) or Cummings is arrogant and dismissive – or both.

Cummings is a self-professed Disruptor and this was his modus operandi over Brexit – disrupt the status quo by taking us out of Europe and I don’t know whether he even cares if the beneficiaries are neoliberal profiteers – I feel the disruption is an end in itself for Cummings. He says a great deal about what he doesn’t like but very little about what he does like which suggests that whilst he at least knows how to disrupt efficiently – it gives me no faith that he has anything constructive  to offer the Prime Minister, your party and the country in terms of fixing the economy .

When an advisor acts so inadvisably, surely he must go! Perhaps he “has something on Boris Johnson” which accounts for the seeming hold over him and I am sure that he is telling Boris to hold his nerve and all this will go away, but I ask you to keep the pressure upon the Prime Minister, to remove Cummings forthwith because, apart from anything else, the public will not forget this element of the crisis when and as the full analysis of it takes place. Your party has a large majority with a full term but…

Kind Regards
Andrew Wilson