Category Archives: General

Keeping active during a lockdown

As a result of the virus, and its effect on my consultancy clients, my ‘work’ has fallen to about half its normal level. I hope this doesn’t carry on for too long, because my income has also fallen by about two-thirds. But, just at present, I’m rather enjoying it, and, as people usually say when they retire, “I’m busier than ever”.

The fact that it’s been sunny here at the same time is just icing on the cake. I’ve even been doing some serious lawn maintenance, which perhaps indicates that I’m closer to retirement than I had previously thought. (I used to joke that I knew I was getting old when I voluntarily went to a garden centre as a weekend activity. But in recent times it’s been even worse: I’ve noticed that I’m not even the youngest person in the garden centre! Sigh.)

Anyway, since I have no kids to home-school, the lockdown’s giving me an excuse at least to start catching up with the huge backlog of tasks that I’ve been putting off for months. There are the important ones, which I’m sure we all attend to first: tweaking the configuration scripts in our home automation systems, for example. Making sure our lightbulbs have up-to-date firmware. Redeploying our web services using the container orchestration framework du jour. That kind of thing.

But eventually we get to the more mundane but essential tasks of daily modern life. You’re probably considering some of these too:

  • Is my home and off-site backup system working reliably?
  • Are all my family members using a good password manager? (And can they get access to mine if anything should happen to me?)
  • Do I still have any remaining email accounts with so-called ‘free’ providers, who read it in order to sell me things?
  • Have I merged all the photo and video projects from my laptop onto my main desktop machine?
  • Is my blog properly backed up, and where?
  • Are there any rooms in the house which don’t have proper ethernet cabling yet?
  • What do I still need to scan in my filing cabinet before I can be truly paperless?

Fortunately, I have plenty of other projects to distract me before I can get down to these, which means that we may need to be in lockdown for some months before I actually do old-fashioned things like descaling the coffee machine or looking through the piles of dead trees in my in-tray.

And this is good, because it’s important for people to be able to stay active in their old age.

Especially when the garden centre is closed.

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A Network for the Un-networked?

Suppose you’re an older person who has been told you should really stay at home. You have no symptoms, but you decide to go into voluntary total self-isolation.

It’s not easy and you get pretty lonesome, but presumably, after 14 or perhaps 21 days, you have proven yourself to be safe. You could then walk, drive or cycle over to visit any friend who had been through the same purification ceremony, without risking either of you.

There could be a society for those who choose to do this proactively, for those who have sworn an oath to forego all human contact for a short period now in order to have a restricted amount of it thereafter. First of all, though, it needs a name.

I suggest “The Lone Rangers”.

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Pannellum in Pittenweem

I’ve had fun in the last year or so playing with spherical cameras (often known as 360-degree cameras) and I’ve posted a few on here. But they’ve always had a problem: you really need a plugin to view them, which is untidy. This one of the Sacré-Coeur, for example, relies on a plugin from the Ricoh site.

So I’ve been delighted to discover Matthew Petroff’s Panellum, a panorama viewer created using just HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and WebGL, which means it runs in most modern browsers natively.

Here’s an example from Pittenweem, a favourite spot I discovered on my campervan trip over Christmas, just north of Edinburgh.

You can drag the image around to look in different directions, and you can zoom in and out by scrolling, or using Shift & Ctrl keys.

On my early experiments, it seems to work very well, even on my fairly elderly laptop. It even has a full-screen button…

So you may be seeing a few more of these here in the near future!

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Some more Coronastatistics

In a response to my post yesterday, my friend Jonathan pointed me at this excellent article by Tomas Pueyo. It’s long, and I’m not, of course able to check many of his numbers, and there are some places where he has to make estimates and assumptions, and rely on official Chinese figures more than some would think appropriate. But you should read it none the less; the basic model is very useful. I mention some highlights below.

My question yesterday was about when the virus-based health risk of travelling to an event in the UK would actually become more serious than the risks involved in the road travel to get there. Italy has passed that point (and their road-death statistics are much worse than ours!) My own guess while writing was that it would probably be about two or three weeks here, and it hadn’t escaped me that confirmed cases are a week or two behind the dates when those people actually contracted the virus, so probably the real answer was that coronavirus would be more dangerous than driving in the UK in about a week’s time (using my very crude metric). Others have pointed out that the stats suggest that we’re not that far behind Italy, so coronavirus may already be more dangerous than driving.

What I hadn’t fully appreciated, and this is the thrust of the article, was just how effective a lock-down can be. A key graphic is this one:

(Click for a full-size version)

The orange bars show diagnosed cases. The grey bars show when infection must actually have happened; something you can only deduce with hindsight, because it takes a couple of weeks. At the time Wuhan went into lock-down, they had 444 reported cases. There were probably about 12,000 actual cases at the time waiting to appear. And if we believe the official figures, the growth stopped pretty instantly once they imposed a lock-down; the kind of lock-down that perhaps only an authoritarian regime can effectively implement.

At the time, of course, this wouldn’t have been clear; the number of reported cases would have gone on rising for another 10 days or so.

Pueyo then goes on to demonstrate the effect of delaying this kind of lock-down by one day — the very significant impact it can have on the number of cases that actually appear.

This in turn affects the ability of healthcare systems to cope, which then affects the mortality rate, and so once you pass a certain threshold, the impact of each day’s delay is amplified more than you might expect. He posts this graphic by Alexander Radtke – I’ve seen similar ones online recently:

You’ll note that this graph is purely an illustration of a concept without any real data, but it’s a useful one. What’s good about Pueyo’s analysis in general, though, is that he’s trying hard to use real numbers wherever he can. He may be right, he may be wrong, and in particular his analysis may be more or less relevant to the particular situation in the UK, but it’s worth taking seriously.

So, today’s update:

  • Coronavirus in the UK will very soon — probably in a few days — be more dangerous than driving. Maybe even more dangerous than Italian driving. But still not a cause for panic.

However,

  • We’ll know in a couple of weeks just how dangerous it is today.
  • By then it will be a lot more dangerous.
  • Waiting to find that out is the best possible way to ensure that it will be even worse!
  • We’re at the point where each day is very significant.

Therefore:

  • Actions like panic-buying of loo rolls are not a rational response to something that is currently much less dangerous than the drive to the supermarket.
  • Actions like locking down the entire country to restrict movement as much as possible may actually be a perfectly rational response to the same thing.

Fascinating stuff.

Now, here’s my next question:

You may remember the analysis a few years ago that showed that more people died after the 9/11 attacks than during them. This was because so many people were scared of flying in the following days and weeks that they drove long distances instead. Driving is so much more dangerous than air travel that the resulting death toll was higher than that on the day itself.

Now, one result of coronavirus lock-down, I hope and expect, will be that a lot more people will discover the practicality and benefits of working from home. (I’ve been doing it half-time for many years, using long Skype calls to keep in touch with my colleagues, some of whom are only a few miles away.)

If this continues on any scale after the virus threat has receded, how long will it be before the number of lives saved by the reduction in mileage and air pollution outweighs the lives lost in the epidemic?

Update: please read the comments below as well!

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Some Coronastatistics

At the time of writing, the number of deaths in UK as a result of Covid-19 since records began is six. Interestingly, that’s about the same as the number of people who died on UK roads…. yesterday. (The number who sustained serious injuries yesterday is about 11 times as high.)

Now, I don’t want to minimise the virus threat, and I do understand that one of those numbers is likely to increase exponentially while the other isn’t, etc. So I’m also taking appropriate precautions like everyone else. But it also explains why I’m happy to go out to a restaurant for dinner tonight… even a Chinese restaurant! If we manage to survive the journey there and back, any sources of contagion we might encounter in a busy restaurant should be child’s play in comparison.

Ironically, Italy, which is suffering a much more serious viral issue than we are, also has one of the highest rates of road fatalities in Europe. Their death rate from the virus has now reached 631, which is about twice as many as road deaths — even at Italian rates — in the same period. We are still a very long way from that here, for the time being, at least. There’s something to be said for living on an island.

For UK readers, though, I think this is an interesting metric to watch, though, to keep a rational sense of the scale of the problem: How long will it be before letting your kids go to a sporting event at school is actually more dangerous than driving them there and back?

**Update: see the next day’s post. **

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Inverse Covid-19 protection?

For the last two or three years, I’ve been getting a ‘flu vaccination in the autumn. In the past, most winters would see me knocked out for at least a few days, maybe a week, at some point by a ‘flu-like bug. But once I discovered how easy it was — for people in the UK who aren’t eligible to get it free on the NHS, you just book an appointment at your local Boots and pay 12 quid — I realised this was a small price and well worth paying! Recommended.

Now, the jab obviously won’t protect you against the current coronavirus. It doesn’t even protect you against all strains of normal ‘flu. But it occurs to me that if everybody had had a recent injection, it would probably stop a lot of false alarms. You’d be much less likely to come down with something ordinary that might cause you unnecessary concern, and when you did start exhibiting ‘flu-like symptoms, you would be able to take them more seriously.

I don’t, however, know anything about the seasonality of this. New vaccinations are usually developed to cover the winter period, and I’m not sure about the value of taking one now that was created that many months ago.

But it seemed to me an idea worth considering. Is it worth doing an updated spring vaccination to help protect you against current bugs that are not Covid-19, just to assist with the detection of the real thing?

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Whither the weather?

As a campervan owner, I’d like a kind of backwards weather-forecasting website.

Instead of saying, “I’m here, what’s the weather going to be like at the weekend?”, I’d like to say, “Where do I need to go to get the best weather this weekend?” (within a certain radius).

Does anybody offer such a service?

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Thought for the day…

You never truly appreciate the wisdom of older people…
Until you are one of them.

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A coming revolution in startup financing?

I remember when my parents got their first credit cards. This new method of paying for things materialised in the UK in the mid-60s, shortly before I did, but they only became widespread in the 70s and 80s, and my childhood was filled with advertisements for them. Anyone else here old enough to remember “Access – your flexible friend”?

American Express was also desperately promoting its alternative charge-card model with advertisements promising the earth. These were nicely satirised by the brilliant team from Not the Nine O’Clock News.

For some reason, it was a very memorable sketch for a young teenage boy, not used to seeing anything like that on British TV at the time!

Two other things, though, made a lasting impression on me at that age:

  • The first was a presenter on a humorous BBC radio programme starting a new section with these words: “Credit, of course, is a nice new word for the nasty old situation we used to call debt”.

  • The second was a speaker at a youth camp who gave some exceedingly good advice, which I have followed ever since, and strongly recommend to the youth of today: “Never borrow money for anything smaller than a house.” Seriously, I recommend it.

Debt, however, is not always bad. If you’re a business with reasonably predictable future revenues, debt-based financing can be attractive when compared with the alternatives, but in the tech industry of the last couple of decades, it has very seldom been a viable option for small companies and we’ve had to resort to venture capital instead.

But in a fascinating article entitled ‘Debt is coming’, Alex Danco suggests that this may be about to change, and that the trend for technology products and services to move to subscription-based models opens up new ways of financing startups, that may not depend on selling your company’s soul to the VCs.

Here is a widely believed cause-and-effect relationship I bet you’ve never thought to invert before: because most startups fail, therefore equity is the best way to finance them. Have you ever considered: because equity is how we finance startups, therefore most startups fail?

The article’s worth reading in full if you’re at all interested in this area.

Maybe, if I can get over my dislike of subscriptions, I’ll also be able to get over my dislike of debt!

Thanks to Pilgrim Beart and Tim O’Reilly for the link to Alex’s article.

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How I Flitted away my Friday afternoon!

Today, I got to ride the Flit Electric Bike! It was great fun!

Actually, it was much better than that; I was invited to visit their office in Cambridge and got to spend quite a bit of time meeting the team and distracting them from what they ought to have been doing. But they were great people, and very patient as I quizzed them endlessly to find out more about what I think is a really nicely-designed product.

A bit of personal background: I own an elderly (non-electric) Brompton folding bike which I got from my parents, and there’s a story behind why I’m particularly fond of that brand. My father had bad arthritis in his ankles meaning that, from an earlier age than one might expect, walking any distance was difficult, but he could cycle just fine. Some of us got together and gave him a Brompton, little knowing that it really would prove to be quite a life-changer. He could take it with him almost everywhere he went, and it allowed him to join in on family walks, get exercise, and see new places in a way he never could have done without it. For him it genuinely was a mobility vehicle, and I think it kept him out of a wheelchair for probably 10 years longer than might otherwise have been the case. My mother also got one soon afterwards, and until fairly recently, their car always had two bikes in the boot. So yes, I have a soft spot for this brilliant bit of British engineering, designed by a Cambridge engineer and finally brought to market after a long hard struggle.

To be fair, almost everybody loves Bromptons, though for most people the value is that you can cycle at all on something that folds away so ridiculously small; it’s not really the bike you’d probably choose to ride just for the joy of riding. There are compromises in rigidity, in cycling position, etc., which are apparent when you compare it to any regular bike (though I gather newer models may be a bit better than my ancient and well-travelled example!). And when Brompton came to build their battery-assisted version, they didn’t want to change too much of the basic design which had been so successful for so long. They did an ingenious and careful job of electrifying it, but it was always a retrofitting exercise to an existing layout.

The Flit bike, on the other hand, was designed from the ground up as an electric bike, yet it folds almost as small as a Brompton, and weighs a bit less than their electric model. At present, it’s also cheaper, because Flit are selling direct; you can’t yet walk into a dealer and buy one. And in fact, even buying direct, you’ll need to be patient; they expect the first batch to ship in July. So the one I was trying was a pre-production model, but they’ve managed to sell quite a number through their crowdfunding campaigns, initially on Kickstarter and now on Indiegogo, which is impressive given that very few of those people, presumably, will have had the opportunity to go and try it out just a few miles from home, as I did!

But I don’t think they’ll be disappointed. I found it great fun and comfortable to ride, a good weight to carry, and easier to roll along the floor than any other folding bike I’ve tried. I can definitely see that if you lived a few miles from your nearest train or bus station, this would be a great way to get there. Or, say, to carry in your motorhome or yacht for trips to the nearest pub or grocery shop. OK, so it doesn’t fold quite as small as a Brompton. And it doesn’t have the load-carrying capacity of, say, the much larger and heavier Tern Vectron. Both of those are fine machines, but the Flit is noticeably cheaper than both of them at the moment and (in my opinion) nicer to ride than either.

I shall watch with interest as they ramp up production, and follow their blog, and I hope they have the success they deserve!

]9 Alex Murray

My thanks to Alex Murray, the Managing Director, for the invitation. (I first heard of Flit, by the way, on this excellent podcast, which I recommend for anyone interested either in bikes or startups or both!)

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Cookie Monster

It’s so easy to focus on the more disastrous aspects of Brexit that I’d like to raise the spirits of UK citizens by pointing out one possible very positive outcome. But we’re going to have to work for it, make our voices heard, and bring freedom for our nation from a pan-European menace that has plagued us for years!

I am referring, of course, to the outrageously stupid legislation that requires websites to display those notices telling us that they use cookies.

It clearly hadn’t occurred to the idiots who crafted these rules — enforced first in the EU’s e-Privacy directive and implemented in the UK’s Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) — that basically every site on the web uses cookies. Therefore, unless you only ever visit the same half-dozen sites, you’re adding a burden to vast numbers of online interactions.

So it’s no surprise that nobody actually reads the notices. I have to agree to several of these every day, and I don’t think I’ve ever read any of them. It’s a fundamental and obvious part of user interface design that if you make users mechanically perform the same task too often, they’re not going to read the text in the dialog box before clicking OK. I have about five devices on which I regularly browse the web, so I need to click the OK button on each of them, even for sites where I’ve already said I don’t object.

And here’s the thing that makes it even more stupid…

Suppose you don’t actually want cookies stored on your machine, and you say ‘no’ when the website asks if it can store them. I don’t know if there’s anybody in Europe who actually does this, but let’s pretend for a moment. How do you think the website could remember your decision? Why, by storing a cookie on your machine, of course. That’s the only way. But you’ve just said it can’t do that, so you are going to get the stupid pop-up every single time you visit that site. If you are consistent about your refusal, then almost every page on the web is going to have this annoyance every time you visit it. (That’s in addition to all the ones that can’t work at all without storing cookies, because they need them to remember important things about your logged-in session, etc.) If this legislation was meant to enhance people’s privacy protection, it also gave them a big incentive to agree to giving it away.

I presume these rules must have been designed by people who only ever visited Facebook and one or two other sites, so they assumed that your preferences could be set in just a few clicks. They hadn’t fully understood the nature of the beast they were unleashing.

So we should start a determined post-Brexit campaign to end this madness, at least for Britons. If we can’t remove the requirements completely, then there are trivial technological solutions which could make it go away. Imagine, for example, that I could configure my browser to say, as a general rule, “Yes, I’m happy with that category of cookie and no, I’m not happy with this one”. It could send that as part of each HTTP request, or each HTTP request to a new site, and only if those headers are not present, or if the site wanted to use cookies for something else, would it be required to ask. If necessary, the browser could be required to prompt you every year to make sure your preferences hadn’t changed. And if you don’t want any cookies at all, you’d set that option and, while large chunks of the web wouldn’t work for you, at least you wouldn’t be prompted on every page.

In fact, most browsers allow you to change various settings on a per-website basis already, so you can decide whether or not you like cookies in general and enable them for sites you trust. People already had the ability to enforce some control of cookies for themselves. But even if you want the website to be told, for example, that you’ll allow cookies for some things and not for others, the legislation doesn’t allow that information to be transmitted to the site in place of an immediate, human, per-site interaction. And so we end up with this silliness.

It’s time to get this fixed. To whom do we write our letters? Or is one of those online petitions the best way to get started? If we demonstrate that it doesn’t have to be this way, we can set a precedent for our neighbours, and the rest of Europe will love us again at last!

Update: Some useful feedback in the Comments; see below!

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How to detect AI snake oil

This is a great set of slides by Arvind Narayanan of Princeton, on the dangers of assuming that current AI, powerful though it is, can make much in the way useful predictions when it comes to complex social factors.

His key claim:

For predicting social outcomes, AI is not substantially better than manual scoring using just a few features.

It would be nice if he had more than one example in the talk, but the one he’s picked is a good one, and these are very readable slides.

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