Status-Q

I hadn't come across the singer 'Madelline' before, but I've been somewhat entranced by her track 'Dopamine', not just because it's a pleasant song, but because of this particular version.

To the same backing track, you hear her singing it in both French and English at the same time.

If you listen through a single phone speaker, it just sounds like a bit of a jumble, but if you have headphones or anything else with decent stereo separation, then the effect of hearing the same person, singing the same song, at the same time, to the same backing, but in your left ear in French and your right ear in English, is quite bizarre, especially if you have reasonable fluency in both.

It does slightly weird things to my brain, but it's also interesting to see the flexibility in translation needed to get roughly the same concepts into the same lines.

"Nobody wants 'backup'. Everybody wants 'restore'."

-- Heard on the Self-Hosted show, one of my favourite tech podcasts.

Today, I got yet more evidence that the web is sinking in a world of AI-generated slime.

Our otherwise-fine Dualit toaster has, after many years, started to have occasional hiccups with its timer... I think the clockwork has become a little dodgy. So I did a quick search to see if others had the same experience, and I got this page back as one of the top hits:

I quote: "Nowadays, there are so many products of dualit toaster timer keeps sticking in the market and you are wondering to choose a best one."

There's a danger that we may soon move past the time of useful online search --- Peak Google, if you like -- and the alternative approach of trying to ask questions of an AI will only make things worse, since studies have already shown that training AIs on AI-generated content quickly leads to madness (for the AIs, that is, not the users, though that too would probably follow soon afterwards).

So making the most of online content in the future may depend, more than ever before, on being able to ensure that it comes from a trusted human source. Who's old enough to remember when the web was small enough that human-generated indexes were the best way to find things?

But this is also why, as John Naughton nicely reminds us in an Observer piece this weekend, the best human-generated and human-curated content out there is often available via your RSS reader, not your search engine. (I happen to like News Explorer, and have used it for a few years.)

RSS -- a system for telling you when your favourite sites, especially blogs, have been updated without you needing to go and look at each one every day -- has existed since long before Facebook and these other trendy things now called 'social networks' existed, and I suspect will still be around after they've gone. But if RSS doesn't appeal for some reason, much of the best content -- including, of course, John's blog and this one -- is also available via an even more time-tested channel. Your email inbox.

Regular readers will know that I like electrifying things. Our car has been electric for nearly a decade now, and we also have a lawnmower, a strimmer, two hedge-trimmers, two bicycles and a range of other devices powered by batteries. We also generate most of our own electricity, and buy the rest overnight at cheap rates from renewable sources. All very satisfying.

Perhaps my favourite such purchase, though, is our electric outboard motor, which makes powered boating as pleasant as sailing, and has provided us with no end of peaceful enjoyment.

Larger boats, however, are a problem, when it comes to electrification.

Though there are some bigger ships and even some car ferries powered by batteries, they tend not to cover very great distances. Meanwhile, traditional shipping burns vast amounts of fuel, and typically very dirty fuel, because the big diesel engines can make use of far less refined oils than the stuff we use on land. (And, ironically, something like 40% of all global shipping consists of the transport of fossil fuels themselves to other places that want to burn them!)

I can't help wondering whether more shipping could be powered by nuclear reactors. This is, of course, already used for submarines, primarily because nuclear reactors don't depend on oxygen. But suppose you want propulsion that doesn't depend on carbon either? Still, nuclear fission does have some challenges of its own.

So I think many people are hoping that the big cargo ships of the future will carry hydrogen tanks instead of diesel tanks, and that will be the eventual answer to how we make them cleaner, at least until we have mobile fusion reactors that can extract deuterium from the sea water en route...

But there may be another important option, which comes not so much from the future, as from the past.

Last month, for the first time in nearly a century, a large cargo ship set off across the Atlantic powered almost entirely by sail. (See this Fast Company post for the details.) These are sailing ships for the modern age, taking advantage of carbon-fibre masts, meteorological forecasts tied to the routing software, and automations that allow them to be sailed by a very modest crew. Winds are easier to predict than in the past, and spars and sails can be bigger while still being manageable. TOWT, the French company behind the ships, has two in operation now, and six more on order.

I've no idea how significant a part of our future shipping needs could be met this way, but I really hope they can play a substantial part, because, quite apart from everything else, aren't they beautiful?

Continuing the theme of Good Stuff Spotted on Mastodon, this comes from Natasha Jay:

There was a young man
From Cork who got limericks
And Haikus confused.

From Phil Giammattei's Mastodon feed...

Lord, grant me the acumen to automate the tasks that do not require my personal attention,
the strength to avoid automating the tasks that do,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

(Thanks to Rupert Curwen for reposting.)

I've just come back from bobbing about in a small boat on the crystal blue waters of the Greek bit of the Mediterranean - a marvellous excerience!

I'm sitting in the tender here because, as anyone who has tried it will confirm, it's much easier to land a drone on a boat that doesn't have any rigging!

But just before I set off in the wake of Odysseus et al, I decided to spend a day in Athens visiting the Parthenon. Should you wish to spend a few minutes in my company doing the same, you can find a short video here.

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I haven't posted for a while, partly because I'm on a small boat here in the Argolian Gulf, courtesy of my kind friend Philip Sargent. The photo above was taken just a couple of minutes ago.

It's my first trip to Greece, and I'm loving it. The temperatures well into the 30s are hard to take, but there's quite a bit of compensation in the fact that if you step off the boat into the turquoise water, as I do a couple of times per day, it cools you pleasantly to its 29C.

I can't really blame my radio silence on lack of connectivity, though, since absolutely everywhere I've been has had excellent 5G coverage, including at this tiny port where we spent last night.

Why can the Greeks manage this when, at home, just a couple of miles from the high-tech hub that is Cambridge, I can only get a poor 4G signal?

Yes, I know, some of it is to do with the fact that they have mountains here, and that a lot of the signals are travelling over water, and so on, but I can't help feeling that perhaps the gods on Olympus look more favourably on cellphone users than some other deities.

YouTube, at its best, can be a wonderful way to discover real talent. A little while ago, I came across some songs by the Cotton Pickin Kids - a very talented family from Alabama - and I shared one or two favourites, like this one, with friends and family.

Well, after that, the YouTube algorithm decided I must like groups of talented siblings, and offered me so many of them that I expected I would suddenly be presented with the Von Trapp family's previously undiscovered channel...

Just as I was thinking that all of this might be a bit too much of a good thing, today I spotted a girl and her two brothers who call themselves 'Life in 3D'... for the simple reason that their names are Devon, Daylon and Daura.

Oh well, I thought, let's give them a try.. and I've since been browsing through their songs, and been seriously impressed. To inject a little positivity into your day, I offer, somewhat at random, the one I discovered first:

(Direct link)

The story they tell on their website is that they used to sing while doing the dishes and other household chores, and when they finished, their parents said, "Hey, don't stop!". So a couple of years ago, they bought a proper microphone, recorded themselves, and posted their first video to YouTube.

Man, what a start!

(Direct link)

Not only can they sing, but there are some pretty impressive production values here. It was listening to them with the volume turned up that made my realise how good the speakers are on my MacBook Pro. Treat yourself, and don't just listen to this on a tinny little phone speaker.

If you like what you hear, you might enjoy their fabulous rendition of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', or watch them having fun with U2's 'With or without you'.

But I've enjoyed lots of them, and I hope they improve your day in the same way they did mine!

Two long-established names in the world of journalism are approaching the challenges of AI in very different ways.

The New York Times is suing OpenAI, in an expensive landmark case that the world is watching carefully, because it could have very far-reaching ramifications.

The Atlantic, on the other hand, has just done a deal with them.

This isn't a subject I normally follow very closely, but in what I found to be an intriguing interview, Nicholas Thompson, the Atlantic's CEO, explains how and why they made this decision, and explores areas well beyond the simple issues of copyright and accreditation. It's an episode of the Decoder podcast, hosted by The Verge's Nilay Patel, who is an excellent and intelligent interviewer.

Recommended listening if you have a car journey, commute, or dog-walk coming up -- just search for 'Decoder' on your favourite podcast app -- or you can get the audio, and/or a transcript, from the link above.