ROGER
& FRANS PAGES |
OCCASIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL AND OTHER THOUGHTS
#009 DOES ZUCKERBERG UNDERSTAND IRONY? This is a précis of an article by Annalee Newitz published in the New Scientist dated 27th November 2021. I agree with the concerns voiced - namely that whizz kids who have developed and run the Worlds major Social Media platforms are generally "techie geeks" - and that as such they lack the sense of irony necessary to understand the Frankenstein nature of their inventions. SURREAL news from Silicon Valley: Facebook has
rebranded itself as Meta. This is because the boss, Mark Zuckerberg,
wants to exploit his procurement of Oculus - a company making virtual
reality headsets - to launch a product called The Metaverse, a shared
virtual reality world. |
#008 CLIMATE-FRIENDLY COMPUTING? Well, Climate-Friendlier anyway. Against a
background of recent headlines about Bitcoin mining using as much energy
as a Country the size of Paraguay, there has been one small piece of
good news. Small is the operative word. IBM have built a 2-nanometre
chip, which it claims potentially uses 75% less energy and delivers 45%
higher performance than the current 7 nanometre chips in general
production. |
#007 I LIKE THIS QUOTE ABOUT LOVE “Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defences, you build up a whole suit of armour so that nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one day, like kiss you or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so simple a phrase like 'maybe we should be just friends' turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain." ~ Neil Gaiman |
#006 HOW MUCH DID WE GAIN BY LEAVING EUROPE ? The answer seems to be not
a lot, and overall we have a lot more rules to follow when we need to
trade with Europe. The following article by Chris Morris was published
on the BBC News website after the agreement had been published. It is
noticeably silent on the vexed issue of controlling immigration of
non-EU citizens. That is because the rules have not changed - we already
had the rights and control responsibility for agreeing how many non-EU
migrants came to the UK. The concept of "taking back control" was one of
the principle lies put about by the Brexit campaigners. What we have
achieved is to control the level of EU migrants - at the expense of
excluding the rights of British citizens and Companies to be able to
access European countries. |
Brexit deal: What is in it? 1. Fishing One of the most difficult issues in the negotiations: How many fish will EU boats be able to catch in UK waters in future, and how long will any transition period last before new measures come into full force? Officials involved in the negotiations say the UK initially wanted an 80% cut in the value of the fish caught by EU boats in UK waters, while the EU initially proposed an 18% cut. Who has given more ground? Answer: The value of the fish caught by the EU in UK waters will be cut by 25% - which is a lot less than the UK initially asked for. The cut will be phased in over a transition period lasting five and a half years - which is a lot shorter than the EU initially asked for. Once the transition period is over, the UK will fully control access to its waters, and could make much deeper cuts If it decides to exclude EU fishing boats they can be compensated for their losses, either through tariffs on UK fishing products or by preventing UK boats from fishing in EU waters. 2. The "level playing field" What will the rules on fair competition look like, to ensure that businesses on one side don't gain an unfair advantage over their competitors on the other? The definition of what constitutes reasonable levels of state aid, or government subsidies for business, will be important.
Answer:
There are level playing field measures which commit both the UK and the
EU to maintain common standards on workers rights, as well as many
social and environmental regulations. This was a key EU demand. They
don't have to be identical in the future, so the UK does not have to
follow EU law, but they do have to be seen to protect fair competition. 3. Dispute resolution This will be the subject of years of negotiations to come. How will the deal actually be enforced if either side breaks any of the terms and conditions? If the UK chooses to move away more radically from EU rules in the future, how quickly can the EU respond? Will it have the ability to impose tariffs (or taxes on UK exports) in one area (for example on cars) in response to a breach of the agreement in another (fish, for example)? Answer: If either side moves away from common standards that exist on 31 December 2020, and if that has a negative impact on the other side, a dispute mechanism can be triggered which could mean tariffs (taxes on goods) being imposed. It is based around a "rebalancing" clause which gives both the EU and the UK the right to take steps if there are significant divergences. This clause is much stricter than measures found in other recent EU trade deals, and was a key demand on the European side. It is a mechanism we may hear a lot more about in the coming years. The overall policing of the trade agreement also means that tariffs can be targeted at a specific sector as a result of a dispute in another. There will be a binding arbitration system involving officials from both sides. It means that even though this is a tariff-free agreement, the threat that tariffs can be introduced as a result of future disputes will be a constant factor in UK-EU relations. 4. European Court of Justice (ECJ) The EU's highest court will remain the ultimate arbiter of European law. But the UK government has said the direct jurisdiction of the ECJ in Britain will come to an end. So, will the European court play any role in overseeing the future relationship agreement? Answer: The EU has dropped its demand that the ECJ should play a direct role in policing the governance of the agreement in future. That was a clear British red line. One place where the ECJ will still play a role is Northern Ireland, which has a special status under the terms of the Brexit withdrawal agreement. It will remain subject to EU single market and customs union rules, which means the European Court will remain the highest legal authority for some disputes in one part of the UK. 5. Travel What will the rules be for British people who want to travel to the EU from 1 January 2021? We already know some of the details but will there be any additional agreements on things like social security or vehicle insurance? And will there be any detail on any arrangement to replace the European Health Insurance Card (EHIC)?
Answer: UK
nationals will need a visa if they want to stay in the EU more than 90
days in a 180-day period. They will still be able to use their EHICs
which will remain valid until they expire. The
UK
government says they will be replaced by a new UK Global Health
Insurance Card (GHIC), but there are no further details yet on how to
obtain it. 6. Financial services The trade agreement is primarily about the rules for goods crossing borders. It will say far less about the trade in services. Is there going to be a separate statement from the EU which will recognise UK rules governing financial services as roughly "equivalent" to EU rules? That would make it much easier for UK firms which export services to continue doing business in the EU market. Answer: There is, as expected, not a lot in this agreement for service companies to cheer about. The UK will still be hoping that the EU issues an "equivalence" decision on financial services in the near future, but service companies in general have not got as much help in this deal as the British government had been pushing for. The guaranteed access that UK companies had to the EU single market is over. 7. Data This is a really important issue. What will the data protection rules be for UK companies that deal with data from the EU? Again, the UK is hoping the EU will issue separately what's known as a data adequacy decision recognising UK rules as equivalent to its own. But the detail will need to be scrutinised carefully.
Answer:
Both
sides say they want data to flow across borders as smoothly as possible,
but the agreement also stresses that individuals have a right to the
protection of personal data and privacy and that "high standards in this
regard contribute to trust in the digital economy and to the development
of trade." 8. Product standards We know there will be more bureaucracy and delays at borders in the future, for companies trading between the UK and the EU. But will the two sides agree any measures to make things a little easier? There's something called "mutual recognition of conformity assessment" which would mean checks on products standards would not need to be nearly as intrusive as they otherwise might be.
Answer:
There's
no agreement on conformity assessment even though the UK government had
hoped there would be. It's just one reminder of how many new barriers to
trade there are going to be. In future, if you want to sell your product
in both the UK and the EU, you may have to get it checked twice to get
it certified. 9. Professional qualifications A lot of people, from accountants to chefs, work in different EU countries and didn't have to worry about crossing borders multiple times while the UK was part of the EU. But will UK professional qualifications be recognised across the EU in the future, and what restrictions will there be? Answer: The short answer is no - they won't be recognised automatically. That will make it harder for UK citizens supplying any kind of service to work in the EU. They will often have to apply to individual countries to try to get their qualifications accepted, with no guarantee of success. There is a framework in the deal for the UK and EU to agree on mutually recognising individual qualifications but that's weaker than what professionals have now. 10. Security It's not just about trade. The UK will lose automatic and immediate access to a variety of EU databases which the police use every day - covering things such as criminal records, fingerprints and wanted persons. So what kind of access will they have, and how will security co-operation work in the future?
Answer:
The UK
loses access to some very key databases but will have continued access
to others, including the system which cross-checks fingerprints across
the continent. But overall, security cooperation will no longer be based
on "real time" access. And in some cases, such as access to data on
which flights people take, that data will only be made available under
much stricter conditions. |
#005
DEEPMIND FOLDING PROTEINS |
Almost a century ago, a chance discovery
revolutionised medicine. Alexander Fleming left a petri dish of bacteria
out while he went on a two week holiday. On his return he found that the
dish had been contaminated by a fungus that produced an antibacterial
substance. He named it penicillin, and it has since saved millions of
lives.
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#004
PHILOSOPHY OF FLINT
Organisms such as sponges (on the macro scale) and radiolaria/diatoms (on the micro scale) use silica from sea water to manufacture the biogenic opal which forms their skeletons. When the organisms die and the organic parts decay the microscopic silica is scattered on the sea bed and becomes incorporated in the accumulating sediment. At depths of 1 to 5m within this sediment, the biogenic opal breaks down, enriching the water between the sediment particles (sediment pore water) with silica. At sediment depths of less than 10m, there is an oxic-anoxic boundary where hydrogen sulphide rising from the decomposing organic material within the sediment diffuses upwards and meets oxygen diffusing downwards from the water column above. At this interface, the hydrogen sulphide is oxidised becoming a sulphate and creating hydrogen ions as a by-product. The hydrogen ions lower the local pH, dissolving the chalk and thereby increasing the concentration of carbonate ions. These act as a seeding agent for the precipitation of silica. The molecule-by-molecule replacement of chalk precipitates out as silica; which is initially in the form of crystalline opal but gradually transforms to quartz (flint) during later burial and with time. The chalk sea bed is deeply burrowed by many different organisms, such as shells, echinoids and worms etc. Some of these burrows are quite deep or branching, or have open living spaces. The burrows fill with sediment after the organism has died, but this is a slightly different material from the sediment around it and forms a preferential pathways (conduit) for the chemical reactions to occur. Flint therefore tends to form within these old burrows, often with a nodular shape which reflects the whole, or part of, overgrown remnants of such burrow systems. Flint also tends to form in bands or layers - a less well understood phenomenon for which there are two current theories. Firstly this might be because both chalk sedimentation and climate change (which impacts the flora and fauna within the sea) occurs in cycles; and secondly because the process described above exhausts the silica within a given depth of sediment and flint formation can only recommence when enough new sediment has accumulated with enough new silica to start the process again.
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#003
EXISTENCE IS THE MOTHER OF ALL HUMOUR
A horse walks into a bar and orders a pint....
Actually this story is about Descartes' famous philosophy
of "I think, therefore I am" - but to explain that before the story
would have been putting Descartes before the horse.
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#002 IT'S LIFE JIM, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT
The following
extract from The New Scientists "2018 Collection" shared
on 29th August 2018:
This is a précis of an article about whether there
is other life in the Universe.
How do living cells work?
Making organic molecules: easy. Making
complex organic molecules: hard.
Where does the energy come from?
May the force be with you
Alkaline Thermal Vents
Prokaryotes v Eukaryotes.
Complex life seems to be a fluke of nature
Life on other planets
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#001 INSIGNIFICANCE? The following extract from
an episode of BBC Radio 4's "The Infinite Monkey Cage"
There is a problem of insignificance, especially when looking at
the night sky. You can understand that when dealing with such magnitudes, people can feel like specks - less than specks - barely the dust of our universe. After watching a lecture on the grandeur of the Universe, hearing about the light years between the billions of galaxies and the speed of expansion of the Universe, with everything getting further apart by the second; that sense of tiny speck-ness can become palpable. You don't have to travel far from the Earths surface for human beings to become indistinguishable from the rivers, rocks and sea; and from a little further away you'll find that there is no visible trace of the civilisation which from our perspective glows and pulses as we walk through it. The average human is insubstantial next to Mount Everest, negligible compared to the size of Jupiter, and almost nothing in comparison to the large Magellanic Cloud. However, this insignificance is just one of size. It is judging magnitude solely by height and girth. But size is not everything. We may not stand tall, but we are incredibly complex by the standards of everything else we have observed so far in this Universe. Our structure and behaviour is far less predictable than that of a planet or a galaxy. How many more equations are required to summarise the behaviour of a gnat compared to the equations that predict the behaviour of a pulsar? What processes are required to crawl and catch a fly, compared to the comparatively simple processes that cause a star to shine? We can understand nuclear fusion in the heart of our sun - the conversion of hydrogen to helium and the light produced - yet we have very little idea of how and why we can be consciously aware of that sun - far less understand what it is that drives us, among all other animals on the planet, to question how it works! Our temperament can be volcanic. Our behaviours can be giddy. Our emotions can be tumultuous. Our ability to predict even our own changes of mental state can be scant at the best. It is our ability to perceive our insignificance that marks out our significance. Most of space is "empty". If you were teleported to a totally random place in the Universe, it is highly unlikely that you would find yourself near anything solid. if you were lucky enough to land yourself on another planet, it is highly unlikely - from what we know and currently understand - that the planet would be able to sustain life, let alone complex life. Already you are significant despite being a speck! Added to the complexity of your biological structure, even by Earth's standards, your brain is exceedingly complex and questioning. You may be small but you are unusual, and you know it, and there is nothing else in this solar system beyond earth that could say that. Or indeed, could say anything at all! Every human, therefore, is a thing of great significance in a restricted but very important sense. On a cosmic scale our physical presence is of no consequence, We are each a temporary assembly of ten billion billion billion atoms which in a century or less will all be returned for recycling. But for the briefest of moments these atoms are able to contemplate themselves and other atoms. The atoms we are composed of were born in stars and spent an eternity in darkness before we existed; and they will spend an eternity in darkness when we are gone; Our purpose should be to extend their moment in the light as best we can.
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