So far: chatty, superficial, confessional, informative, irritating ..

Amazon link

From her introduction:

"There may be a number of reasons you have picked up this book. Perhaps it was the word ‘sex’. Perhaps it was the word ‘robots’. Perhaps it was the two words together: a compelling mainstay of science fiction now becoming science fact. Perhaps you judged the book by its cover? It’s a nice cover.

Or perhaps you bought it as a present for someone to embarrass the hell out of them.

Hello, recipient.

Perhaps, though, you were curious as to how this could possibly be a subject of any scientific merit whatsoever? That’s a perfectly valid starting point and I hope that in the course of the next ten chapters you will allow me to lay out before you the wonderful stories, ideas, science and state of the art technology that show that there is much, much more to a topic that initially seems so trivial."

Here's my review.

Bach's Chaconne - Maxim Vengerov and John Feeley

Yehudi Menuhin called the Chaconne "the greatest structure for solo violin that exists".

Violinist Joshua Bell has said the Chaconne is "not just one of the greatest pieces of music ever written, but one of the greatest achievements of any man in history. It's a spiritually powerful piece, emotionally powerful, structurally perfect."   [Wikipedia].

Bach is said to have written the Chaconne in memory of his first wife, Maria Barbara Bach (who died in 1720); in any event, it is often conceived as being suffused in grief.

"We are walking to an infirmary block in Auschwitz to hear something beautiful - the great Russian violinist Maxim Vengerov performing the chaconne from Bach's D minor Partita No 2 ..."

With its polyphonic structure, the Chaconne is at the limits of playability on the violin:

"The Chaconne is often performed on guitar. Marc Pincherle, Secretary of the French Society of Musicology in Paris, wrote in 1930: "If, insofar as certain rapid monodic passages are concerned, opinion is divided between the violin and the guitar as the better medium, the guitar always triumphs in polyphonic passages; that is to say almost throughout the entire work. The timbre of the guitar creates new and emotional resonance and unsuspected dynamic gradations in those passages which might have been created purely for the violin; as for instance the variations in arpeggi."

The most well-known transcription for guitar is the Segovia transcription. Many guitarists today prefer to play the Chaconne directly from the violin score."

I particularly like this performance by John Feeley, the Irish classical guitarist.

---

Maxim Vengerov's performance screams with searing agony; John Feeley is quiet and reflective, a meditation on grief.

Slavery after the fall of empire

Amazon link

From "Conclusion. After the fall: Roman slavery and the end of antiquity" - (my emphasis).

"The transition from Roman to post-Roman societies in the west was not a shift from one mode of production to another (slave, feudal, or peasant). The transition was from an unusually complex society to much simpler forms of social and economic organization.

The fall of the empire saw a dramatic loss of structural complexity. Roman society, with its exceptional levels of commerce and urbanism, fostered an unusually complex stratification of wealth. Roman society knew a staggering, tripartite hierarchy of wealth; not only were the rich unimaginably rich, but beneath them was a social element — modest by modern standards, exceptional by pre-modern measures — living above subsistence.

In the post-Roman centuries, the decisive middle was gradually lost, and a simpler, binary division of wealth asserted itself. The process of social simplification asserted itself at both the top and bottom of society. Post-Roman aristocracies changed as much as the lower classes.

Wickham has highlighted the structural, economic importance of the change. The Roman aristocracy was unusual in being a civilian aristocracy; the upper tiers of the status hierarchy were based, quite nakedly, on wealth. The Roman elite was an agro-commercial elite. There were changes already in the long fourth century — the rise of an imperial service elite (whose salaries, however, provided them with capital) and, even more fatefully, the rise of an ecclesiastical elite.

After the fall of Rome, it is the civilian, commercial aspect of the aristocracy which suffered most; the military and ecclesiastical castes were pushed to the fore. This is the elite we can follow in the colorful pages of Gregory of Tours' history, with its Roman bishops clinging to a civilized past and its violent Merovingian overlords roaming the landscape.

What we need to imagine, behind the new, vividly drawn social figures, is the different relation between the aristocracy and agricultural production which lies behind the story.

The fate of the lower classes in the post-Roman west is a more difficult problem. We should resist the temptation to compress all laboring dependents into a single undifferentiated mass. The idea of a centuries-long "merger" among the lower classes, leading eventually to serfdom, has occupied a place in the historiography that is neither empirically nor analytically justified."  (pp. 500-501).


"... The successor societies of the post-Roman west, from ca. AD 450-650, inherited sizeable slave populations, and the violence of the age continually created new captives, new slaves. But the reduction in the demand for slaves was ultimately the decisive secular trend. The recession of exchange-oriented production [ie of luxury, non-subsistence goods] undermined the demand for higher-risk, controllable forms of estate labor. [ie slaves]

The demise of the towns obliterated the premature middling element of Roman society, along with its slave-owning habits. The status system rooted in Roman civil law lost its moorings but never totally collapsed. Germanic forms of dependence surely had an impact.

Men and women also came to think of their identity in religious and not just civil terms. The slaves in the post-Roman sources — on papal estates, in the will of Remigius, in the letters of Gregory the Great or the histories of Gregory of Tours — are slaves, and it would be unwise to deny this fact.

But slaves and slave-owners were increasingly exceptional, marginal. The archaeological record provides incomparable testimony to the slow recession of commercial exchange and the consequent slacking of elite control over agriculture. Yet, these were truly post-Roman societies in a way that societies of the Carolingian era were not. [Carolingian Empire: 800-888]

This is of primary significance for the history of slavery, and for the history of labor and dependency in general. After a long arc of decline, by the seventh century the basic vocabulary of status was capable of undergoing radical change. This change was possible only because slavery had been in decline now for two centuries."  (pp. 502-503).

The key idea here is the economic regression after the collapse of the effective Roman state in the west (described with precision by Kyle Harper in his book, "Climate collapse and pandemics: the fall of Rome").

It was the Roman state which guaranteed the social position of the commercial elites with their enormous effective demand for specialised luxury goods. It was the Roman state which secured trade routes and the inviolability of commercial contracts. And it was the state which stabilised the inherently volatile social formation of institutionalized slavery.

Absent this state all those things declined and then collapsed. The new mode of production which rose from the ashes of the dark ages was based on fundamentally different production relations: the feudal relations of honour and obligation between nominally free individuals.

See also: "Semper timere .." for more about the violence required to reproduce the institution of slavery. When slavery is woven into the the very fabric of elite life (every wealthy household had slaves) it requires a continual pervasive miasma of patronal violence. Slaves not kept in a chronic state of abject fear will shirk, overstep their social bounds, escape or rebel. As property they have little stake in the status quo.

Such systematised, chronic despotism fundamentally conditions laws, culture and the very nature of the slave-state itself. It's difficult to image a feudal society in which slavery was an essential institutionalised layer (although there were plenty of slaves in feudal societies).  I suspect that like capitalism, institutional slavery is hard to get started.

Adding ginger to your diet

Just back from Waitrose

From The Times today (Peta Bee):

"Drink ginger tea or use it in your cooking — in July food biologists at the Technical University of Munich in Germany discovered that gingerol, the compound that gives ginger its distinct flavour, also acts to stimulate the enzymes in saliva that break down the substances that cause halitosis.

Professor Thomas Hofmann, the study’s author, found that the levels of one odour-fighting enzyme, sulfhydryl oxidase 1, shot up sixteen fold seconds after ginger was consumed."

Ginger is so good for you in so many ways:

"Digestion

The phenolic compounds in ginger are known to help relieve gastrointestinal (GI) irritation, stimulate saliva and bile production, and suppress gastric contractions as food and fluids move through the GI tract. At the same time, ginger also appears to have beneficial effects on the enzymes trypsin and pancreatic lipase, and to increase motility through the digestive tract. This suggests ginger could help prevent colon cancer and constipation.

Nausea

Chewing raw ginger or drinking ginger tea is a common home remedy for nausea during cancer treatment. Taking ginger for motion sickness seems to reduce feelings of nausea, but it does not appear to prevent vomiting. Ginger is safe to use during pregnancy, to relieve nausea. It is available in the form of ginger lozenges or candies.

Cold and flu relief

During cold weather, drinking ginger tea is good way to keep warm. It is diaphoretic, which means that it promotes sweating, working to warm the body from within. To make ginger tea at home, slice 20 to 40 grams (g) of fresh ginger and steep it in a cup of hot water. Adding a slice of lemon or a drop of honey adds flavor and additional benefits, including vitamin C and antibacterial properties. This makes a soothing natural remedy for a cold or flu."

Truly a wonder food/supplement. Once again, we'll believe try anything we read in the paper.

Semper timere ..

Amazon link

From Chapter 5.

"Lashing caused excruciating physical pain. The lacerations were visible for days, as slaves bore the "marks of cruelty" on their bodies. Chrysostom warned masters they should not tear through the tunic when they beat their slaves, and he chided masters whose cruelty was evident on the slave's body when the slave was at the public bath.

Jerome called it an "everyday custom" for a slave to use the time between blows to ask for death as a reprieve. Basil of Caesarea, criticizing the rich, said they could see their wicked deeds all around them, including the "slaves whom you have ripped to shreds."

The violence of lashing could of course be chaotic and disorderly. The incentive model should not lead us to forget that the actors involved were human beings, with all that implies about fallibility and passion and unpredictability, in which one party possessed extreme power over another.

Iamblichus said that philosophers never lashed their slaves while they were still in a state of anger — implying that the average man did. Masters might chase their slaves around the house punishing them.

Arnmianus reported that a slave who was slow to serve received 300 lashes. The context is clearly one of exaggeration, but the point to notice is that the blows were numbered. Chrysostom spoke of thirty or fifty lashes as a high number. A really bad whipping was one in which the blows were "countless."  ...

Fear was perhaps the primary strategy of mastery in the Roman slave system. In the corpus of late antique writings, no attribute was more often associated with slavery than fear. It was the most keenly felt element of the relationship.

"To fear is the symbol of slavery."

"Who does not know that the one who is a slave by nature and employed in a master's power cannot be without the emotion of fear?"

"To fear was in the nature of slaves."

"Nothing is more particular to slavery than the eternal fear."

Semper timere. We hear so much of this emotion because it was precisely what masters sought from their slaves.

"If a slave is under fear and the lash, and immediately trembles when anything is said to him by the master, lest he hear he is to be beaten, certainly the master rejoices in this situation."

Fear was a means of maintaining the constant labor and subjective annihilation demanded of slaves. Violence commuted into its potential, spread out into all corners of the relationship, tinged all interaction between masters and their human property.

Physical punishment was not the only means of corporal control over slaves, and psychological manipulation was not limited to the threat of violence. Perhaps nothing breaks down the strict dichotomy between pain and positive incentives like the use of food as a tool of domination in the Roman slave system.

With a few important exceptions, the use of hunger and the promise of dietary satisfaction have been terribly neglected by ancient historians. ..."

Thanks to modern genetics and/or AI we'll be so much more enlightened. Our android slaves will live to do our bidding - there will be little reason to starve them or beat them to a pulp.

Semper amare.

Isaac Asimov tried to do it with cognitive rules .. but emotions are so much more reliable.

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See also: "The Economics of Roman Slavery - Kyle Harper".

The Joke

Amazon link

From the Wikipedia synopsis:

"Ludvik was a dashing, witty, and popular student who supported the Party. Like most of his friends, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the still-fresh Communist regime in post-World War II Czechoslovakia.

In a playful mood, he writes a postcard to a girl in his class during their summer break. Since Ludvik believes she is too serious, he writes on the postcard,

"Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!"

His colleagues and fellow young-party leaders did not see the humour in the sentiment expressed in the postcard. Ludvik finds himself expelled from the party and college and drafted to a part of the Czech military where alleged subversives form work brigades and spend the next few years working in mines."

"The Joke" is not the most popular of Kundera's novels (that would be "The Unbearable Lightness of Being") but we've all been there.

1. Smart young man meets earnest, attractive young woman. 
2. Woman expresses some achingly right-on proposition. 
3. Young man fancies her a bit, decides to tease her. 
4. Makes sardonic over-the-top response. 
5. Waits to see how she reacts.

Will she recognise flirtatious humour? Or will she double-down on righteous outrage?

Jokes are dangerous things, particularly when third parties like your employer or the state get involved. Just ask the editor of Waitrose Food magazine, William Sitwell.

Ex-editor.

Freelance journalist (and Vegan) Selene Nelson

Just ask yourself: why would any young man wish to tease Ms Nelson?

Machine Common Sense (MCS) - DARPA

The DARPA challenge

A past DARPA challenge kickstarted the self-driving car phenomenon. Will this new attempt to equip robots with common sense reasoning and interpersonal skills be as successful?

For some value of 'successful' of course.

DARPA's proposal starts with a short review of the disappointing record on 'common sense'.

"Since the early days of AI, researchers have pursued a variety of efforts to develop logic-based approaches to common sense knowledge and reasoning, as well as means of extracting and collecting commonsense knowledge from the Web.

While these efforts have produced useful results, their brittleness and lack of semantic understanding have prevented the creation of a widely applicable common sense capability."

DARPA breaks its new challenge into two substreams. The first bases itself on human infant cognitive development, as theorised by developmental psychology.

"The first approach will create computational models that learn from experience and mimic the core domains of cognition as defined by developmental psychology. This includes the domains of objects (intuitive physics), places (spatial navigation), and agents (intentional actors). Researchers will seek to develop systems that think and learn as humans do in the very early stages of development, leveraging advances in the field of cognitive development to provide empirical and theoretical guidance.

“During the first few years of life, humans acquire the fundamental building blocks of intelligence and common sense,” said Gunning. “Developmental psychologists have founds ways to map these cognitive capabilities across the developmental stages of a human’s early life, providing researchers with a set of targets and a strategy to mimic for developing a new foundation for machine common sense.”

To assess the progress and success of the first strategy’s computational models, researchers will explore developmental psychology research studies and literature to create evaluation criteria. DARPA will use the resulting set of cognitive development milestones to determine how well the models are able to learn against three levels of performance – prediction/expectation, experience learning, and problem solving."

The second stream is more bookish, mining the web.

"The second MCS approach will construct a common sense knowledge repository capable of answering natural language and image-based queries about common sense phenomena by reading from the Web.

DARPA expects that researchers will use a combination of manual construction, information extraction, machine learning, crowdsourcing techniques, and other computational approaches to develop the repository.

The resulting capability will be measured against the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) Common Sense benchmark tests, which are constructed through an extensive crowdsourcing process to represent and measure the broad commonsense knowledge of an average adult."

I am impressed by neither approach.

It's too tempting to theorise a situated agent in terms of ungrounded abstractions, such as the belief–desire–intention software model. In this way we think of the frog, sat in its puddle, as busily creating in its brain a set of beliefs about the state of its environment, a set of desires such as 'not being hungry' and an intention such as 'catching that fly with a flick of its tongue'.

While we may describe the frog in such unecological folk-psychological terms - as is the wont of developmental psychologists - Maturana et al pointed out that is not what the frog does.

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At this point it is tempting to bring in Daniel Dennett's ideas about first and second order intentionality but I distrust even this. Treating another animal as an agent (rather than an instrumental object in the environment) which is the hallmark of second-order intentionality, seems extraordinarily rare in the animal kingdom. The Wikipedia article, "Theory of mind in animals", suggests there is partial - but not compelling - evidence for it only in the case of some social animals. But the concept remains ill-defined.

We use a reified intentional language (note: language) with modal operators such as believes and desires to describe those objects we classify as agents. By virtue of  'possessing' their own beliefs, desires and intentions (= plans) they are taken to exhibit autonomy. We don't normally use such language to describe bricks and cauliflowers. We do use such language to describe spiders, mice and roombas - first-order intentional systems.

Some systems (such as people) seem able themselves to characterise objects in their environment (possibly including themselves) in intentional terms. They have the capability, for example, to look at us and see us as agents. We call these systems second order intentional systems. I would include cats and dogs and children here, noting how they manipulate us (spiders, mice and roombas don't seem to notice us as agents).

So how do they do that? That's the interesting architecture question DARPA is asking, and nobody knows.

I expect that a biological second order intentional system possesses neural circuitry which encodes a representation of intentional agents in its environment as persistent objects, together with links to situations (also neurally-encoded) representing beliefs, desires and intentions relativised to that agent. Think of the intuitions underlying Situation Semantics, implemented as computationally-friendly semantic nets: I wrote about it here.

I used to think that the only way forward was to design the best higher-order intentionality architecture possible, embody it in a robot child and expose it to the same experience-history as that involved in human infant socialisation. But I notice that DeepMind and similar have made huge leaps forward in simulated environments which decouple cognitive challenges from the messy (and slow) domains of robotic engineering.

So I imagine that's where the smart money will be.

"AngloArabia" - David Wearing

Amazon link

Given the recent killing of Jamal Khashoggi, who would not be interested in learning more about Britain's ties to the Gulf States?  This book is an edited version of David Wearing's PhD thesis (and more about that later).

Wearing's contribution is summed up in his concluding chapter from which I copiously quote.

"This book has attempted to map the deep underlying structures of UK relations with the Gulf Arab monarchies."

The book is centred around Britain's historical links and current relationships with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries: Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

"Gulf hydrocarbons and the petrodollar riches that are generated by their production are important to the UK not only for narrow commercial reasons but also because they play a vital role in addressing some of Britain's specific and fundamental needs as a major capitalist power. London built its relationships with the GCC monarchies through a century and a half of imperial dominance of the Gulf region and another half-century of developing and maintaining those ties beyond the end of formal empire. ...

"The primary significance of the Gulf lies in its vast energy reserves, first because the stability of the global economy depends on the reliable flow of oil and gas from the region, second because control over those resources constitutes a major source of geostrategic power for any state or states interested in global hegemony, and third because the revenues generated by Gulf hydrocarbon production can be 'recycled' to the leading capitalist states in a number of advantageous ways."

Given the importance of oil to strategic adversaries such as China, exclusive control of the Middle East oil fields has been a continuing major priority for the West.

"London therefore seeks to support and complement the projection of US military power into the region, protect the Gulf monarchies from internal and external challenges, and maximise petrodollar recycling in various forms that benefit British capitalism and the UK's status as an international power, from capital inflows to the City of London to major arms purchases. ...

"Britain is not directly energy-dependent on the Gulf, although disruptions in the region's hydrocarbon exports would have a damaging indirect effect on the UK economy. "

That surprised me. It turns out that most Gulf hydrocarbons are sold to Asia. Britain's major import from the region is Qatari gas. Britain gets most of its imported oil from Norway, Algeria, Nigeria and Russia.  Only 3% comes from Saudi Arabia and an insignificant amount from the other Gulf states (p. 52).

"There is a 'dual logic' shaping British and American energy strategies relating to security of Gulf energy flows and US control over them, based on the increasing importance of Gulf oil and gas in meeting global demand and on the growing dependence of emerging Asian powers - China in particular - on Gulf energy imports.

"The UK also has a major commercial interest in Gulf hydrocarbons given that two of its largest corporations - BP and Shell -are among the leading international energy firms. The Gulf has always been important to those firms, and is becoming increasingly so. While they have had to absorb some setbacks in recent years, they have also enjoyed notable successes and remain in a fairly strong position in a region that, overall, remains economically dependent on energy production."

The book documents some remarkable examples of the intertwined links between the British oil majors and the Foreign Office and relevant embassies.

"Gulf petrodollars recycled through UK-GCC trade and investment play an important role in addressing the key macroeconomic challenges facing the British economy and in maintaining Britain's status as a leading capitalist power. This has been particularly true in the period following the sharp rise in oil prices around the turn of the millennium.

"The region has become a key export market relative to others in the developing world. UK-based banks were more successful in attracting Gulf capital than those in other financial centres, and those inflows were highly significant by the standards of the global south, if not the global north. The Gulf bailout of Barclays Bank in 2008 demonstrated that GCC capital could play a highly significant stabilizing role in certain circumstances."

Also a rather opaque one.

"Perhaps the most important role played by Gulf capital, especially Saudi petrodollars, is in financing Britain's large current account deficit, thus also indirectly helping to maintain the status of the pound sterling. In this regard, these net capital inflows are significant compared with those from any other source, whether in the developing or the developed world.

"British arms exports to the GCC states help the UK to maintain the military-industrial capacity required as the basis for global power projection. Exports to the rest of the world are in steady long-term decline while those to the Gulf market have steadily risen in parallel. When questions of corruption have arisen over these arms deals, Whitehall has gone to considerable lengths to avoid formal scrutiny, going so far as to defy the wishes of Washington and some major City investors in the process. "

The UK's SFO (Serious Fraud Office) bribery investigation against BAE - which was somewhat scandalously dropped - is a case in point (pp. 171-177).

"British commitments to the protection of the Gulf monarchies, while plainly of less significance than those of the US, are nonetheless wide-ranging, extensive and multi-layered. The UK's continuing support for Bahrain in the wake of its violent crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrations in 2011 amounted to a major strategic vote of confidence in the Al Khalifa monarchy, just as the wider deepening of military ties with the GCC states against the background of the Arab uprisings was a clear expression of support for the conservative regional order.

"Meanwhile, the large-scale material and practical assistance London provided to the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen despite numerous credible reports of indiscriminate bombing, the unfolding of a major humanitarian disaster, and considerable consequent pressure on the British government to suspend arms sales - demonstrated both the extent of Whitehall's commitment to military cooperation with the Saudis and the extent of the latter's dependence on the UK (not only the US) in wartime."

It's not in the West's interests to have an Iranian-backed regime at Saudi Arabia's southern border exerting control over the Bab-el-Mandeb strait connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden - a major oil route. Public angst is really driven by Saudi Arabia's incompetence in waging the war, its failure to bring about a swift victory.

"When evaluating the extent to which each side needs the other in the relationship, we should also consider what each side needs the other for. London needs to support American domination of the Gulf as part of its commitment to supporting US global hegemony, but this commitment is ultimately a choice.

"London needs the GCC states to spend their petrodollars on major arms purchases to sustain its domestic military industry, but only because it has chosen to attempt to preserve its status as an international military power. The social wellbeing of the British population is not necessarily dependent on London retaining this status (many prosperous societies manage very well without it).

"In economic terms, Britain needs Gulf capital inflows to help finance its current account deficit, but that deficit is in no small part the product of a choice to balance the UK economy away from visible exports and towards financial services as part of the move to neoliberalism in the 1980s.

"By contrast, the Gulf monarchies' need for support from the leading capitalist powers is of a more existential nature. The United States is their main protector, but the UK's complementary role and its own state-to-state defence agreements with the Gulf states are not insignificant. Seeking such protection, for monarchical governments with uncertain levels of domestic legitimacy and support, is less of a choice and more of a necessity.

"For the UK, while the difficulty of effecting a departure from long-established geopolitical and economic strategies should certainly not be underplayed, it remains the case that Britain's close relationship with the Gulf states is based on a series of choices, each of which have possible alternatives."

Wearing suggests that Britain could choose to swap its support for Washington's global hegemony for a more neutral and peaceful position, abandon international power projection, restrict its military posture to direct self-defence and move its high-tech manufacturing capacity away from arms production towards sectors such as renewable energy.

The capitalist class is, of course, aware of these options and chooses not to take them. Wearing must therefore have in mind countervailing social forces which could compel his alternative strategy (one which the dominant fraction of the UK elite would consider highly suboptimal and damaging). He does not, however, enlighten us further as to what these might be.

Let me return to the evaluation of this book. The format of PhD theses is heavily formalised and choreographed. You need a literature review, a survey of work already done, the presentation of new material in a thorough and dispassionate form, and an emphasis on sources and detail. All of this generally makes for exceedingly dry reading.

Wearing has done his best, but his book is tedious. It's heavy on facts and somewhat underweight on analysis. It will suit those who are studying the region and need the details but for the average reader it's just too much of an effort to keep the pages turning.

Our future of total surveillance (Jamie Susskind)

Amazon link

Susskind's book was reviewed in The Sunday Times today (here).  It's about a dystopian future of AI super-surveillance sourced from sinister tech companies like Google (I am not being ironic).

I was struck by this quote:

".. the children decide to go on a demo. They heard about it from their friends; artificial-intelligence systems had prevented them receiving online information. Their phones warn them about rain and traffic, but there is none. A drone records their progress. Then, on their internet-enabled glasses, they see pictures of people being interrogated in stress positions; each has the face of one of them. They turn back."

Actually, demonstrators within authoritarian regimes face far stronger disincentives than those described above. Demonstrations still happen because when people get mad enough they'll brave prospects of torture. Or perhaps they lack imagination or think it won't happen to them. All of the above probably.

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There have been a few lone-actor atrocities in the US over the last few days. The so-called 'MAGA bomber', Cesar Sayoc, was found particularly rapidly after fingerprints and DNA were apparently found on suspect devices. Easy to cross-check as Sayoc had a criminal record.

Wikipedia tells us, "According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,220,300 adults were incarcerated in US federal and state prisons, and county jails in 2013 – about 0.91% of adults (1 in 110) in the U.S. resident population."

That's a great dataset for machine learning applied to GWAS. Genome to facial appearance is a quick win: you can almost always get a scene-of-crime DNA sample, and all criminals are on Facebook, aren't they?

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I read the review carefully but I'm not convinced there's much new in Susskind's book ..

"His writing is clear and precise; he is a lawyer, he is making a case. Irritatingly, he puts in too many (one would be too many) cheeky-chappy asides such as, “At last, someone has found a use for spinach.” But, on the whole, he steers a course to the future that is as convincing as it is shocking. We can fix this, is his message, but there is also the nagging sense that we probably won’t."

We won't until we do. I'll give the book a miss.

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Related post: Über-surveillance.

A second review of "Beyond Weird" by Philip Ball

Amazon link

Roy Simpson has written his own review of the above book which I'm pleased to guest-post here. He previously guest-reviewed "The Order of Time" by Carlo Rovelli.

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Review of Philip Ball: Beyond Weird (2018)

By Dr. Roy Simpson, October 2018

This review was requested by Nigel Seel and could be read in conjunction with his review of this book.

In reviewing a book such as this it is tempting to first review the style and content of the book, then secondly to add comments concerning one's own view and approach to these matters.

Having been familiar with the basic equations of quantum mechanics for a long time I am not able to say for sure whether the book actually requires the prior familiarity with quantum mechanics suggested in the Seel review. Certainly one has to be interested in physics and its foundations. The book contains a good introduction to the structure and key components of quantum mechanics and eventually leads us towards the questions of interpretation and meaning.

The unusual nature of the formulation of the subject is neatly captured in a chapter comparing the axioms of quantum mechanics with other physics theories. For example we have Newton's Laws:

1. Every moving object keeps moving at the same speed if no force is applied to it. If it is still to begin with, it stays still.

2. If a force is applied to an object it accelerates it in direct proportion to that force .. .

3. For every force that one body exerts on another, the other body exerts an equal force back in the opposite direction.

Special Relativity can be presented with similar physically comprehensible (and experimentally checkable) axioms. By contrast for quantum mechanics we have:

1. For every system, there is a complex Hilbert Space H.

2. States of the system correspond to projection operators onto H.

3. Those things that are observable somehow correspond to eigenprojectors of Hermitian operators.

4. Isolated systems evolve according to the Schrödinger equation.

Now all physics theories have a mathematical content and even Newtonian mechanics can be presented using mathematical structures such as symplectic manifolds, Noetherian moments and differential forms. However Newtonian theory has a basic physical form as stated above. The issue is: what is the Quantum equivalent?

Without an answer to that question it can be difficult to be convinced that the theory has been fully understood, despite the success of the mathematical formulation. So this situation is deemed philosophically unsatisfactory and also impedes progress towards reconciling quantum theory with General Relativity (which also has a physical explanation as well as a successful mathematical form).

The book takes a long look at the most basic interpretation (as these attempts to connect the mathematics with any physical reality are called) of quantum mechanics, called the Copenhagen interpretation.

The book then follows with a more cursory and dismissive view of the Bohm-de Broglie interpretation as an example of a key distinction between such interpretations: are they Ontic (the mathematical entities represent real physical structures in the usual physics sense); or are they Epistemic (the mathematical entities describe the observer's knowledge of the – perhaps unknowable – physical system).

The Copenhagen leans towards the Epistemic, whereas the Bohm is Ontic. Other interpretations are also discussed by the book such as the very Epistemic Qbism interpretation and the Ontic GRW and Penrose-Diosi models. These latter are not just interpretations but are modifications of some of the mathematics (making a physics explanation easier, in the latter case by invoking gravity).

There is also a long and useful discussion of “decoherence”. However this book does not include any mathematics and although that makes the book easier for some audiences, it does detract from some clarity and rigour in the arguments the author wishes to make.

Another interpretation dismissively discussed in the book is the Many Worlds Interpretation. A recent summary of this section is available in an online article by the author here.

There are over one dozen interpretations of quantum mechanics and they are not all discussed in the book. New interpretations appear regularly with an example “The Montevideo Interpretation” (which this reviewer has not yet studied). So the book is not comprehensive in its account of interpretations.

The book gives a long account of the Bell Theorem, which is an experimentally checked theorem implying the non-locality and non-contextuality of quantum mechanics. The discussion here is interesting, but this reviewer has uncovered a recent examination of the Bell Theorem which is more precise about the nature of the “superluminal effects” involved in the statement of the theorem.

Apparently there were two forms of Bell's Theorem: a “coarser” form, and 10 years later a more precise form, which makes clearer what is and is not prohibited by the theorem. However the book does not discuss this level of distinction, and the possible consequences.

The book eventually focuses on the idea of an information-based interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, and recent work related to this. This area of work is largely stimulated by the subject of Quantum Computation, and the intriguing question as to whether all of the “engineering” problems in that area are purely engineering problems and not also some scientific (i.e. quantum interpretational).

Of particular interest is the idea of “quantum reconstruction” and “information causality”. Here the attempt is to address the lack of a physics basis by trying to find one in axioms - often based on “information” based ideas. From the present reviewer's perspective this work is encouraging in the sense that the results may be converging on a class of invariant mathematical objects that are being studied in 21st century mathematics.

So overall the book is a good comprehensive account of quantum interpretation and meaning from an early 21st century perspective, especially as viewed by a physical-chemist who has a “user” view of quantum mechanics.