Just Finished Reading: You are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier (FP: 2010)

Billed as a ‘dazzling polemic’ and ‘short and frightening’ I was quite looking forward to this – especially as it’s from a definite insider and early pioneer of Virtual Reality. To be honest I was more than a little disappointed. It’s possible that, 5 years after its first publication, I’d heard it all before or maybe it’s that such criticism peppered throughout this short (that got that right at a mere 207 pages) has kind of moved on in the intervening years.

It is entirely possible that ‘provocative’ criticism of Internet institutions, such as Facebook, Google, Wikipedia, and Twitter were indeed much more controversial back then so maybe a lot of the initial impact has been lost – that’s probably it. These days the author’s digs at the power of Facebook (which he criticises quite a bit) seem rather tame. Likewise his lament at the power of Wikipedia seems, at least to me, out of place. Personally I use it for quick reference – usually to settle arguments at work or with friends on-line – but I’d certainly never use it for anything serious. If I’d tried that in University a few years back I would have been laughed out of my seminar room. Although I was shocked a few years back when someone I knew referenced Wikipedia in their dissertation. How times change! Wikipedia is, I feel, one source of information. It is not, and certainly should not be regarded as, the only (or even primary) source of information.

I certainly ‘got’ much of what the author had problems with. He posited that because of lazy programming (as much as anything else) that people are expected to shoehorn themselves into applications that, because of their inherent limitations, dehumanise their users. Up to a point I understand that. Again personally I use the Internet as a tool and (largely) for fun – or to occasionally buy something (I’m looking at you Amazon). I don’t feel as if I’m being used by the Internet (or its designers) but maybe that’s because I’m not on Facebook? Do my Facebook using readers feel that the application is dehumanising them in any way?

I use Google a lot. If I want to know something or find something I, like millions of other people across the globe ‘Google it’. Yes, I also rarely, actually very rarely, go beyond the first page of hits – unless my search criteria is so vague that Google throws up all kinds of things. Then, generally, it’s my fault rather than the search engine itself. Sure there are dangers relying on Google and not going beyond the first page but they are dangers I recognise and am conscious of. I don’t expect Google to supply all of my answers or even point me in the direction of all (or even most) of them – but it helps, a lot. Yet again Google is a tool and should be used that way. After the results come up you need to use your own brain and your own experience to narrow the search further and decide when to stop looking – that’s the human part of the process.

I think possibly the author is too close to his subject and too close to the people who use the Internet without thought to write the book this is billed as being. Things are nowhere near as bad as he thinks they are. Sure, enough people use the various Internet applications without a great deal of input and a great deal of thought both before and after. People like that have always existed. It’s just that now they’re both more obvious and (probably) more vocal. I’m sure that there are lots of people who use the Internet as a tool and (generally) don’t let themselves be used by it. More than the author believes at any rate. Obviously the Internet is far from criticism free but I think that this book is far from the criticism that it needs. It may have broken the mould 5+ years ago but is now looking pretty dated. More up to date criticism to follow! Reasonable.

The Shortest Day....! Longer days from now on! [Does Snoopy Dance!!!]

Cartoon Time.

Name to a Face?

Met office says 2016 'very likely' to be warmest on record

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent for BBC News

17 December 2015


A new global temperature forecast from the UK's Met Office says that 2016 is likely to be even warmer than 2015. This year has already been provisionally declared the warmest on record thanks to a combination of global warming and a strong El Nino. The Met Office believes that temperatures in 2016 could be 1.1C above pre-industrial levels. Last week in Paris, countries agreed that the world should pursue efforts to limit the rise to 1.5C.

The new forecast, a combination of computer models and statistical methods, says that the global average temperature for the next 12 months is likely to be 0.84C above the 1961-1990 average. When compared to the pre-industrial levels, the forecast predicts that next year's temperature will be 1.1C above the 1850-1899 average. This is edging closer to the 1.5C level that governments agreed last week they would do their best to keep under in the long term.

Last year, the forecast for 2015 predicted a central estimate of 0.64 above the average. Observational data from January to October this year shows the global mean temperature so far this year is running at 0.72 above 1961-1990. "The forecast for next year is on the back of some other strong years," said the Met Office's Prof Adam Scaife. "In 2014 we had 0.6 which was nominally a record, 2015 so far we've had 0.7 which is also nominally a record, and next year we are talking about 0.8 - so you can see that very rapid rise over three years and by the end of 2016 we may be looking at three record years in a row."

The impact of the strong El Nino that started this year continues through the first half of next year. It's already been responsible for a reduced monsoon season in India, it's also weakened the Atlantic hurricane season and been involved in the early winter storms in Northern Europe in the past few weeks. The forecasters at the Met Office say it is responsible for up to 0.2C of next year's value. In combination with continuing climate change, the forecasters believe it will lead to new records.

"There is an uncertainty range, the bottom end of the range for 2016 is very close to the current value for 2015, so it's not impossible that it will come out the same as 2015 but it is very likely to be higher," said Prof Scaife. The Met Office says that the rise in temperature predicted for next year may not continue indefinitely - and may slip back under 1 degree over the coming years. But they argue that the growing warming signal can combine in unpredictable ways with smaller natural fluctuations leading to "unprecedented events". "It's when the natural variability rides on top of the climate change and gives us something we have not seen before," said Prof Scaife.

[It’s certainly been very mild here for the last month or more with daily temperatures around 10 degrees above ‘normal’ for the time of year and is predicted to be milder than usual well into the New Year. Lucky for us that Global Warming is a myth!]

It's good to know that I can use this word when people think I'm just lazy...... [grin]

Had to be done I suppose...........!

Name to a Face?

Just Finished Reading: Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (FP: 1916)

It was all just a matter of survival, that and luck. That’s how you got through the days and especially the nights in the trenches. The focus of the whole squad was keeping warm, keeping dry (if you could) and getting enough to eat. Speculating about what was happening on other parts of the Front was as pointless as wondering what the officers, briefly glimpsed from time to time escorting journalists or rushing along the narrow trench on a mysterious assignment intended to do with them next. No one told them anything except in the form of orders given moments before whatever action was demanded – the repair of the trench or the building of new ones, a temporary relocation behind the lines for rest and repair or an attack on the Bosche trenches sometimes as little as 40 metres away. Being old hands with over a year’s experience they knew to keep their heads down even without the prompting of enemy artillery in all its many vocal forms. They had seen enough random and bloody deaths from a snipers bullet to recklessly put their heads above the parapet without a very good reason. But it wasn’t the bullets or even the shells that defined their lives – it was the ever present lice, the rats and the mud and of course the ever present smell of shit and death. Their admiration for stretcher bearers knew no bounds. Men who risked their lives each day to retrieve not only the wounded but the dead from battlefields swept by machine gun fire deserved nothing less. Of course they were crazy which helped though not as crazy as the gunners who ran into no-man’s land to recover fuses from unexploded German shells to discover esoteric details of the guns which fired them and where they could be located and therefore killed by counter battery. Yet, as always it seemed, it was the poor bloody infantry that did the work with pick, shovel and bayonet that ended up paying the price and the butcher’s bill each time an attack was ordered. Each day the squad diminished as veteran after veteran fell to the random mechanical death dealt out by enemy machine guns. Little wonder that, when taken alive, they were executed on the spot and laughed at as they died. This was not a war fought between gentlemen but by bakers, postmen and common farm labourers. Gentlemen fought in the air with chivalry, here on the ground, in the mud, men murdered each other.

This is a well-deserved classic (and not just in France). It’s also rather unusual. For one thing it was published during the war rather, like many others, after the conflict had ceased. It also went against the grain and showed the soldiers as average men rather than as iconic heroes. Although they occasionally thought about what they would do after the war their main focus was surviving that day and the day after. Long term thinking didn’t make a lot of sense when so many were dying each day in a war they seemed to go on forever. Narrated in the first person by the author who served in the trenches in the early years of the war before being invalided out the story had a gritty visceral intensity at times that was almost breath-taking. Two sections in particular jumped out at me. One in which the narrator walked back an injured squad mate across the battlefield they had so recently crossed at a run to an aid station showing the number of dead and dying required to gain a few hundred metres of ground and later the shelling of the same aid station by enemy artillery and the chaos and death it caused. There are stomach churning moments throughout the narrative as this is as far from a tale of glory and heroism as you can get. Such things are almost taken for granted these days but at the time such an anti-war novel was quite a shock to those safely back home being fed a daily diet of official propaganda. Definitely a must read for anyone interested in WW1.

Translated from the French by Robin Buss.  

The start of an 18 day break...... and relax.

Cartoon Time.

Except of course they didn't............ [grin]

Name to a Face?

Just Finished Reading: Titanic Lives – Migrants and Millionaires, Conmen and Crew by Richard Davenport-Hines (FP: 2012)

In April 1912 the greatest ship ever built sailed on her maiden voyage confident of a great future ahead of her. Days later she lay in pieces on the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean taking over 1500 people with her to the bottom – including some of the greatest names of the age. Shocked into disbelief the Edwardian world would not see death on this scale until the killing fields of the Western Front a mere two years away. The sinking of the apparently ‘unsinkable’ Titanic caused a deep psychic wound on both sides of the Atlantic and caused many to question man’s domination of nature and his hubris in challenging nature on its own terms. The death of so many seemed to indicate that humanity had finally gone too far.

This is the story of that great ship (and her two sisters Olympic and Britannic) from concept and design, to construction in Belfast and finally her destruction in mid-Atlantic. But it is far more about those who sailed on her. Refreshingly it did not dwell exclusively (or even extensively) on the super-rich ‘jet-setters’ of their age who crossed and crisscrossed the Atlantic on a regular basis for business or pleasure. It also had much to say for the migrants from all over Europe hopeful and confident of a life in the New World free from prejudice, political and religious oppression. Confident also in making a better life for themselves and for their villages back in the old country to which they sent some of their hard won dollars. The Titanic was, more than anything else a microcosm of early 20th Century society with its mix of sharp class distinctions and of the new rich who broke through previously unbreakable barriers which left them with millions in the bank but a deep insecurity about their social position.

It was also an age all too recently transitioned from sail to steam and one supremely confident in its material and technological capabilities. Each year bigger, faster and more luxurious liners crossed the Atlantic with seeming impunity. Disdaining the fitting of enough lifeboats for all – which not only ruined the elegant lines of the ship itself but seemed superfluous as the ship itself was one huge lifeboat – it did seem for a while that no limits existed (or should be allowed to exist) in the design of the new behemoths. Until, that is, the fateful night when the Titanic met and side-swiped an iceberg she saw far too late to avoid. With six compartments holed and watertight bulkheads that only went up so far (to save money and weight) the ships doom was inevitable. Knowing that a large number of passengers and crew would inevitably die unless rescuers appeared swiftly only made the situation more poignant. Women and children first often seemed to mean women a children only with boats being lowered into the water two thirds or sometimes half full despite their being men (and boys) available to fill them. Oddly it was the 2nd Class men who suffered most losses seemingly living up to the expectations of their betters.

The radically divergent tales of the two nearest ships – the Carpathia who rushed to Titanic’s aid in vain to the Californian who (apparently) ignored Titanic’s distress signals from much closer – are well known though fairly lightly covered here. Tales of the survivors surprised me more than a little. Subdued by their ordeal and, no doubt by the publicity that followed, many slipped into depression and a rather surprising number ended their own lives apparently unable to cope with the aftermath of the greatest maritime disaster to date.

Even for a story so well-known and so often written about this book gripped and captivated from the first page to the last. I learnt so much from this book – not only about the ship and her crew but the society that her voyage was embedded in – that I was, at times quite overwhelmed by it all. On an emotional level it was also quite a journey. In relating the lives of many passengers and crew you began to know them as people rather than statistics and became overjoyed when you learnt of their survival or equally devastated to learn that they, their spouse or children did not survive the incident. One final thing was the knowledge that two passengers who had my rather unusual surname both perished in those freezing Atlantic waters never to reach their hoped for destinations in the New World. Where they actual relatives – I don’t know. I did a tiny bit of research which seemed on the face of things to indicate not, but who knows? That’d be quite a claim to fame.

If you’re interested in the Titanic tragedy or the pre-war period then this is definitely the book for you. This is very well written social history at its best and I can highly recommend it. This is also the first of three books on the subject. Next up is survivor tales followed by the search for, and incredible discovery, of the wreck itself. Watch this space.

Cartoon Time.

Actually, we hardly think at all and emote far too much.........

NASA Space Assets Detect Ocean inside Saturn Moon 

From NASA

April 3, 2014

NASA's Cassini spacecraft and Deep Space Network have uncovered evidence Saturn's moon Enceladus harbors a large underground ocean of liquid water, furthering scientific interest in the moon as a potential home to extraterrestrial microbes.

Researchers theorized the presence of an interior reservoir of water in 2005 when Cassini discovered water vapor and ice spewing from vents near the moon's south pole. The new data provide the first geophysical measurements of the internal structure of Enceladus, consistent with the existence of a hidden ocean inside the moon. Findings from the gravity measurements are in the Friday April 4 edition of the journal Science.

"The way we deduce gravity variations is a concept in physics called the Doppler Effect, the same principle used with a speed-measuring radar gun," said Sami Asmar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., a coauthor of the paper. "As the spacecraft flies by Enceladus, its velocity is perturbed by an amount that depends on variations in the gravity field that we're trying to measure. We see the change in velocity as a change in radio frequency, received at our ground stations here all the way across the solar system."

The gravity measurements suggest a large, possibly regional, ocean about 6 miles (10 kilometers) deep, beneath an ice shell about 19 to 25 miles (30 to 40 kilometers) thick. The subsurface ocean evidence supports the inclusion of Enceladus among the most likely places in our solar system to host microbial life. Before Cassini reached Saturn in July 2004, no version of that short list included this icy moon, barely 300 miles (500 kilometers) in diameter.

"This then provides one possible story to explain why water is gushing out of these fractures we see at the south pole," said David Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, one of the paper's co-authors.

Cassini has flown near Enceladus 19 times. Three flybys, from 2010 to 2012, yielded precise trajectory measurements. The gravitational tug of a planetary body, such as Enceladus, alters a spacecraft's flight path. Variations in the gravity field, such as those caused by mountains on the surface or differences in underground composition, can be detected as changes in the spacecraft's velocity, measured from Earth.

The technique of analyzing a radio signal between Cassini and the Deep Space Network can detect changes in velocity as small as less than one foot per hour (90 microns per second). With this precision, the flyby data yielded evidence of a zone inside the southern end of the moon with higher density than other portions of the interior.

The south pole area has a surface depression that causes a dip in the local tug of gravity. However, the magnitude of the dip is less than expected given the size of the depression, leading researchers to conclude the depression's effect is partially offset by a high-density feature in the region, beneath the surface.

"The Cassini gravity measurements show a negative gravity anomaly at the south pole that however is not as large as expected from the deep depression detected by the onboard camera," said the paper's lead author, Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome. "Hence the conclusion that there must be a denser material at depth that compensates the missing mass: very likely liquid water, which is seven percent denser than ice. The magnitude of the anomaly gave us the size of the water reservoir."
There is no certainty the subsurface ocean supplies the water plume spraying out of surface fractures near the south pole of Enceladus, however, scientists reason it is a real possibility. The fractures may lead down to a part of the moon that is tidally heated by the moon's repeated flexing, as it follows an eccentric orbit around Saturn.

Much of the excitement about the Cassini mission's discovery of the Enceladus water plume stems from the possibility that it originates from a wet environment that could be a favorable environment for microbial life.

"Material from Enceladus’ south polar jets contains salty water and organic molecules, the basic chemical ingredients for life," said Linda Spilker, Cassini's project scientist at JPL. "Their discovery expanded our view of the 'habitable zone' within our solar system and in planetary systems of other stars. This new validation that an ocean of water underlies the jets furthers understanding about this intriguing environment."

[Old news but still excellent news. An ocean of any size, and I’m guessing that this one is going to be huge, is a valuable multi-niche environment that has endless possibilities for life. A chemical soup, even under miles of ice, left to its own devices for countless millions of years (most probably) has had plenty of time and opportunity to get very creative. Personally I would be overjoyed if they just found the predicted microbes but I’m guessing that there’s probably much more down there. I don’t see any reason why higher life forms couldn’t have evolved. After all we have the weird and wonderful creatures at the bottom of our own oceans to go by and guide us as to what’s possible in the dark depths. I’d be very surprised if we don’t find actual fish down there. If we found completely alien aquatic animals – completely divorced from anything here on Earth then the possibilities for life on far flung worlds becomes a practical certainty in my mind. Let’s hope that they can get a submersible mission to Enceladus soon and go fishing!]

Name to a Face?

Just Finished Reading: The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg (FP: 2012)

When the austerity measures began to bite, especially when the daily cups of coffee dropped to two and pastries withdrawn altogether, it was the final straw for Martha Andersson. From that point on revolution was in the air. But she couldn’t do it alone. Any good conspiracy needs conspirators and Martha was lucky to have some close at hand – very close as they all lived in the same retirement home in Stockholm. What they needed was money, lots of it and fast. The only way to do that, a constant refrain from her extensive reading of crime novels reminded her, was to plan a brilliant robbery, so that it was she’d do. Escaping the retirement home thanks to the temporary theft of the buildings master key the newly formed League of Pensioners plan their first heist which nets very little. But practice makes perfect and their next crime will be sensational. Next door to their hotel is a world famous art gallery with some of the most expensive paintings in the world housed within. Carefully the case the building and select a pair of paintings that can be hidden by their Zimmer frames and those they are able to lift off the wall without too much upper body strength. The police are baffled having expected career criminals and fast cars rather than 79 year old Martha and her friends as they hobble out of the gallery on their way back to their expensive hotel room. Flushed by their success they demand a huge ransom for the return of the paintings fully expecting to get caught in the act and be sent to a much more comfortable prison than their increasingly uncomfortable retirement home. But, as with even the best plans things don’t quite turn out the way they’d hoped. With the police as a loose end it looks like the League will get away with their crime. The only question is what they’ll do with all that money – if they can lift the bags of cash onto their trolleys and make a leisurely get-away.

I think I picked this up in my local supermarket because it looked like it was fun and different. It certainly was both. Told with a wry sense of humour (you could almost see the author writing this with a continual smile on her face) this was amusing and somewhat sweet rather than laugh out loud funny – though it did make me do that a few times. All of the main protagonists from the retirement home, even the slightly annoying ones, grew on you (Martha herself was excellent and I’d love to have someone like that as an aging Aunt I could laugh with). The crimes themselves were well thought out and actually plausible – after a fashion. There was even a few tense moments when the League came up against ‘real’ criminals who threatened to overturn their plans and even do them some harm. The police did turn out to be rather silly which I couldn’t help finding a bit annoying but it was very much a minor annoyance. It did take a bit to get started but then so did the old dears before they started eating properly and taking gentle exercise. I was highly amused by one of the Leagues children (in their 40’s) who not only admired their mother’s renewed love of life and daring but actually helped the League in some of their later endeavours (without giving too much away.

Written with obviously a lot of love for the characters as well as more than a sprinkle of anger at the way older people are treated today, this was a delightfully different crime novel that turned out to be part comedy and part a heart-warming tale of pensioners who can do things for themselves. Recommended if you want a gentle read that will leave you smiling for days afterwards.

Translated from the Swedish by Rod Bradbury

 [2015 Reading Challenge: A funny book – COMPLETE (30/50)]

Cartoon Time.

Name to a Face?

My Favourite Movies: A Night to Remember (1958)

After completing an excellent book on the sinking of the Titanic I felt the urge to re-watch this classic British movie. Based largely on the classic book by Walter Lord and advised by some of the survivors this tells a pretty accurate account of what happened on that fateful night in 1912.

Of course being the kind of movie it was I can easily lay the blame of liking it so much at the feet of my father who introduced me to it and to one of his (and later my) favourite actors – Kenneth More who played 2nd Officer Lightoller. The story is, of course, about the ship, its maiden voyage across the Atlantic towards New York, the iceberg (dead ahead!), the inevitable foundering and great loss of life (not equalled for 70 years). The shock that reverberated across the world matched the hubris – so it’s said – of man claiming his conquest of nature by building an ‘unsinkable’ ship. Such a claim is made throughout the film though (I believe) was barely mentioned in real life before the voyage itself.

For those who have seen the updated 1997 James Cameron version this is, in my opinion at least, much better and manages to get a good story across without the DiCaprio/Winslet love story. It’s a tale of rich and poor thrown together (kind of) in a tragedy much bigger than all of them. The First Class passengers are aloof – indeed at times seemingly oblivious to the fact that most of them are going to die – the Second Class try to behave like their betters and the Third Class (incorrectly called ‘Steerage’ in the movie) party and then panic like the cannon fodder they’ll become in just two short years. I did find it interesting that the lifeboats shown in the film are all pretty full (of women and children mainly) whilst in real life many of them where only 2/3 full or even less. There’s also an interesting scene where More/Lightoller stops a 13 year old boy getting into a lifeboat and then relenting. In real life the boy was shamed into staying on board, despite their being room, and told to ‘behave like a man’ subsequently dying like one. Maybe that kind of reality was too much for 1950’s audiences and would have tarnished both the reputation of the British merchant marine and the international star that was Kenneth More.

Even after seeing this movie many times over the years it still managed to bring a lump to my throat when the captain of the Carpathia – the hero of the hour played by Anthony Bushell (pictured above on the left) – first heard Titanic’s distress call (one of the earliest examples of SOS) and rushed to her aid at top speed despite the ever present danger of ice. Then, of course, was the villain of the piece (no, not the iceberg) the captain of the Californian who apparently ignored all signals from the Titanic despite the fact that she was only 10 or so miles away and could’ve probably saved everyone on board if he’d been paying attention. Apparently Lightoller hated him until his dying day and vilified him at every opportunity.

The slow death of the great ship is handled brilliantly from the shock of impact to the chief designers sad shaking of his head when he calmly reports that she will sink in 90 minutes. Captain Smith, again played superbly by Laurence Naismith, looked suitably shocked and then stoic as he considered the fact that without enough lifeboats and with the Carpathia four hours away at top speed that over 1,000 people are going to die on his watch. Overall this is still a powerfully emotional film – despite the lack of emotion on screen for most of the time. I think that’s one of the things that increases the impact. These people are finding their situation hard to credit (one reason why so many stayed on board – they simply couldn’t believe that it would sink) and yet giving up their loved ones knowing in their heart of hearts that they’re going to die. It’s very affective and effective. If you haven’t seen this classic of the British cinema I recommend that you do especially if you have an interest in the actually event – oh, and look out for original footage of both the Titanic and the Carpathia.      

Cartoon Time.

Name to a Face?

Humans are 'unique super-predator'

By Jonathan Amos

BBC Science Correspondent

20 August 2015


Humans' status as a unique super-predator is laid bare in a new study published in Science magazine. The analysis of global data details the ruthlessness of our hunting practices and the impacts we have on prey. It shows how humans typically take out adult fish populations at 14 times the rate that marine animals do themselves. And on land, we kill top carnivores, such as bears, wolves and lions, at nine times their own self-predation rate. But perhaps the most striking observation, say authors Chris Darimont and colleagues, is the way human beings focus so heavily on taking down adult prey. This is quite different from the rest of the animal kingdom, for which the juveniles of a species tend to be the most exploited. Part of this is explained by the tools that human hunters exclusively can deploy. We can tackle adult prey at minimal cost, and so gain maximum, short-term reward, explained Prof Darimont from the University of Victoria (UVic), Canada. "Advanced killing technology mostly excuses humans from the formerly dangerous act of predation," he told reporters. "Hunters 'capture' mammals with bullets, and fishes with hooks and nets. They assume minimal risk compared with non-human predators, especially terrestrial carnivores, which are often injured while living what amounts to a dangerous lifestyle."

This concentration on large adult prey is triggering extinctions, as well as driving an evolutionary shift towards smaller fish sizes and disrupting global food chains, say the authors. Prof Tom Reimchen, a UVic co-author on the study, uses a financial analogy to explain the damaging consequences of hitting adult populations hardest. He calls the adults the system's "reproductive capital" - the equivalent of the capital held in a bank account or a pension fund. And he says we are eating into this capital when we should really be living off the interest - the juveniles, which many species will produce in colossal numbers, expecting a good fraction to be doomed from the moment they are born via predation, starvation, disease, accidents and more.

The heavily biased preference for adults was not a sustainable strategy long-term, which ought to be clear from fundamental biology, argued Prof Darimont: "In the overwhelming number of cases as fishes age, they become more fecund. That is to say, they produce more eggs, have more babies, and, in fact, in many cases, many of those babies are more likely to survive and reproduce themselves. So when a predator targets that reproductive age class and especially the larger more fecund animals in those populations, we are dialling back the reproductive capacity of populations." In the natural world, predator populations decline when prey are reduced.

However, much of the standard conservation management today is based on the notion that it is the "tiddlers" that should be let go, to ensure robust numbers for the next generation. Trawl nets are often designed specifically to support this approach. Doing it the other way would be challenging, but the technical solutions were available, said Prof Reimchen. "There are traps that can define the entrance to a net, which then very easily allows you to exclude fish above a certain size - in other words, the reproductive capital. Once the motivation is in place, clever people will work out how this transition from the reproductive capital to the interest could be brought about." As for quotas, these should more closely align with the numbers taken out by natural predators, the team suggests.

Dr Chris Carbone studies predator-prey relationships for the Zoological Society of London, UK. He described the research as an interesting study that aimed to put some actual numbers on phenomena that many in the field would recognize. But he cautioned that as broad as the investigation was, the data was still sparse, especially in the marine environment. And as for refocusing the age class to take more juveniles, Dr Carbone argued that it would very much depend on the species in question. Not all species would react in the same way. But he said there was perhaps an even more fundamental problem, which was the density of human predators versus their prey. "We exist at vastly higher densities than natural predators," he told BBC News. "It might be that 100 zebras could support a lion, but in the case of humans we can outnumber our prey in many instances, and that throws the system. So even if we didn't have the efficient hunting technology, we'd still have problems with sustainability."

[Killing is our business and business is good. Humans are indeed very efficient in wiping other species out. It’s because we have no limits, nothing stopping us killing whole groups, decimating whole environments, pushing whole species to extinction. Our more natural competitors kill to eat, while we kill to dominate, for power, status, to prove a point, for revenge, to prevent other predators from eating and, worse, for sport. That is why when humans move into a new environment mass extinctions follow in our wake. We might be described as 'super-predators' but we are much more than that. We are killers – plain and simple.]

Name to a Face?

Just Finished Reading: Turing’s Cathedral – The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson (FP: 2012)

No doubt Sarah Conner would find it more than a little ironic that the origins and development of computers and nuclear weapons are so intertwined. Indeed it is more than likely that without early electronic computers nuclear weapons would have had no outcome on WW2 and probably would not have appeared until the 1950’s if at all. The existing computers of the day – human beings using mechanical calculators – where simply incapable of producing the required artillery range tables in good time, never mind calculating effective anti-aircraft gunfire or multiple shockwaves within an atomic bombs critical mass. For that you really needed something much, much faster.

Luckily (for many reasons) the groundwork had already been laid by Alan Turing who postulated the existence of a Universal Machine capable of being programmed (and reprogrammed) to do any conceivable calculation. With this theory already in the public domain it was only a matter of time before a group of mathematicians and engineers would attempt to make theory into reality – driven by the fear that the Germans (and later the Russians) would get the bomb first or figure out how to make bigger bombs and ways to get them to their targets. At the head of this group was the polymath John Von Neuman based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Driven by his singular intellect and surrounded by some of the best and brightest minds in existence – ironically many who had fled the German advances in Europe as well as those who had been ‘encouraged’ to leave occupied territory – they literally created the world we take for granted from the ground up and from first principles. Nothing like this had ever been tried before and no one really knew what could and could not be done. That, of course, was half the fun to those involved. They lived, worked and played on the cutting edge of technology with hard deadlines and, to begin with at least, unlimited amounts of money (from the US Military). It was an exciting time for everyone and most of them realised that they were involved in ground-breaking epoch making things.

Told with an insider’s knowledge and awareness (his father was involved in the programme in the 1950’s) this was often a fascinating insight into the birth of the electronic age. Focusing mostly on Von Neuman as the hub of all of this activity and of the nuclear weapons programme it was designed to facilitate the author throws a great deal of illumination on what was, at the time, often a highly secret activity. We learn a great deal about the people involved, the internal politics of the group(s), the fight to gain recognition in the academic world where engineers in particular were regarded as little better than tinkerers who might possibly fix your equipment but couldn’t possibly produce anything new of value. We also learn about the pet projects some of the mathematicians dabbled in in-between the war or later military work – weather prediction and control, Artificial Intelligence, the stock market, Game Theory and the first hints of a computer network that would, generations later, become known as the Internet.

A little hard going at times (when it drifted into too technical talk about early computer components and mathematical theory) this was generally a fascinating look at the origins of the modern world which made me appreciate just how revolutionary and transformative the process was. The invention of electronic computers – even ones as crude as these back in the 1940’s and 50’s – was an absolute game changer. The world can I think be divided into a pre and post computer age with too great a sense of hyperbole. It really was that important and this book helps to explain exactly why. Recommended.    

Cartoon Time.