Status-Q

One of the things that has always intrigued me about Elon Musk is that he’s not really a great speaker.

Most people who are leading the types of operations he’s leading, having the impact he’s having, are very confident, eloquent orators. Elon, in contrast, has these wonderful world-changing ideas and yet bumbles on about them in the sort of way that, perhaps, you or I might do. I think that’s part of what makes him so attractive. He feels like, well, one of us, but with just a bit more confidence in his gut feelings. Oh, and a few more billion dollars, but that isn’t the thing you notice most.

That’s not to say that his words, stumbling though they sometimes are, don’t have real nuggets of gold in them. It’s well worth watching this TED talk where Chris Anderson asks about his various projects, though with too little time to go into any one in any depth, alas. It’s all intriguing stuff, but the best bit is at the end:

Chris Anderson:

Elon, it almost seems, listening to you and looking at the different things you’ve done, that you’ve got this unique double motivation on everything that I find so interesting. One is this desire to work for humanity’s long-term good. The other is the desire to do something exciting. And often it feels like you feel like you need the one to drive the other. With Tesla, you want to have sustainable energy, so you made these super sexy, exciting cars to do it. Solar energy, we need to get there, so we need to make these beautiful roofs. We haven’t even spoken about your newest thing, which we don’t have time to do, but you want to save humanity from bad AI, and so you’re going to create this really cool brain-machine interface to give us all infinite memory and telepathy and so forth. And on Mars, it feels like what you’re saying is, yeah, we need to save humanity and have a backup plan, but also we need to inspire humanity, and this is a way to inspire.

Elon Musk:

I think the value of beauty and inspiration is very much underrated, no question. But I want to be clear. I’m not trying to be anyone’s saviour. That is not the…

I’m just trying to think about the future and not be sad.

The one pound coin was introduced in 1983. I remember my excitement when I got my first one!

Well now it’s being phased out in favour of a shiny new one, launched last week and dubbed ‘the most secure coin in the world’. You can read all about it on www.thenewpoundcoin.com. The last one, of course, was a little too early to have its own website. I wonder what URL they’ll use when this one is replaced? But perhaps URLs and websites will seem very quaint and old-fashioned in 30 years’ time.

Anyway, over there, they tell you about some of its security features. Not all of them, of course – there is a much-speculated-about system — called, amusingly, iSIS — which supposedly allows genuine coins to be identified easily with a simple scanner, but nobody really seems to know yet how it works. Security, for the time being, through obscurity. It will be fun finding out its secrets in due course.

In the meantime, you have until October to spend your old ones…

Poetry is language at its most distilled and most powerful. — Rita Dove

A good friend of ours, Glen Cavaliero, is a poet. An exceedingly good one, in fact, and highly-regarded among the cognoscenti. Over the decades, in addition to his academic books, he has published numerous slim poetry volumes but, now approaching his ninetieth birthday, he wanted to gather them into a more substantial collection; not quite a ‘complete works’, but something of that ilk.

Glen, however, owns no technology more advanced than a typewriter, and so one of our side-projects over the last couple of years has been to help him with the process of self-publishing this 500-page masterpiece, which finally saw the light of day towards the end of 2016.

If you or any of your friends are seriously interested in good poetry, I recommend The Flash of Weathercocks. Some of the poems are dark and gritty, some light and cheery, some funny, some melancholy, some deeply thoughtful, some highly accessible, others filled with subtle literary allusions. Very few of them are easy reading. But all of them are expertly crafted by a master of the language.

You can find it in:

• hardback
• paperback
• Kindle
• iBooks
• Google Play

Now, I’ve learned a few things in this process. One is that poetry is much harder to typeset than prose: even trying to ensure that page-breaks come in sensible places in the middle of verses was quite a challenge for the publisher, but to add to this, for many of Glen’s pieces, the careful indentation of each line is important…

The other revelation for me was a clearer understanding of the effect Amazon has on the publishing world, especially the self-publishing world. I’m a huge fan of Amazon in general, but the margin they take on books is pretty severe! In our case, the publisher charges 15%, so when people buy from the publisher’s site, the author gets 85% of the cover price to offset against his or her up-front printing costs. That is all very reasonable.

Amazon, however, charges a further 60%, so the author gets 25%. Or, to put it another way, once you’ve established the printing costs, you need to set your cover price to four times that amount if you are just to break even on Amazon sales. Since poetry, by its very nature, tends to involve small print runs with a high per-unit cost, this would make the cover price prohibitive for Glen’s book. And so, in fact, we had to pick a cover price where he will lose money on every sale through Amazon, and make money if people buy from the publisher or directly from him.

I created a spreadsheet where we could estimate, for various values of X, that X times as many people are likely to buy from Amazon as from elsewhere, and settled on a price where he should just about break even overall. Our job now is to publicise the non-Amazon links as much as possible!

Above all, it’s clear to me that, even if you have tributes from the likes of Sir John Betjeman on your back cover, poetry is definitely something you create for love, rather than for money!

But I do think this is a significant work of literature, and since there’s no way I’m ever going to produce one of those myself, I’m delighted to have been at least instrumental in helping it come into existence!

This was in the Olden Days, when the Romans were top nation on account of their classical education…

— 1066 and All That

My curious mix of state and private education left me, to paraphrase Ben Jonson, with almost zero Latin and less Greek. Perhaps because of this, although I can be something of a language pedant, I would normally refer to, say, ‘the next item on the agenda’, and would only talk about ‘the next agendum’ in a spirit of playful fun. ‘Agendas’, however, would make me wince. I do know, deep down, that ‘agenda’ is a plural.

Similarly, even though I work with rather a large amount of data, I have almost never used the word ‘datum’ except in one of its specialist meanings. Indeed, for most science, if you have little enough data to think of each item individually, then you probably don’t have enough to draw useful conclusions!

And so, like most people, I think of data rather as a fluid substance, to be measured by the bucket-load — megabytes of data, like pints of milk or glasses of wine — rather than as a plural. Few people would say ‘there are a dozen data in this table’ unless they were classicists, who would never actually have to deal with it. So you’ll note that in the previous paragraph I said “if you have little enough data”. If I had instead opted for “if you have few enough data”, you would probably have assumed that I was making a point, one that wasn’t actually to do with the data at all.

Nonetheless, etymology has always intrigued me, and I love the fact that Norman Gray can write a long, sensible and interesting discussion of this very topic, which I can read over breakfast before going off to analyse a datum or two…

Status-Q is fifteen years old today. There have been times when I’ve done several posts in one day and others when long periods of silence have gone by. This last week, for example, my life has involved rather more ‘flu than inspiration. Sorry!

Status-Q has never been a high-traffic site, mostly because it’s random personal scribblings, rather than having a strong theme. I started it as a kind of diary and aide-memoire rather than anything else: other models of blog-writing weren’t plentiful at the time! The regular readership, as near as one can measure these things, is in the hundreds rather than thousands, and I find even that somewhat astonishing. But the wonder of search engines also means that some of my posts — especially ones dealing with technical problems — are found and commented on a decade or so after I posted them.

So I’m very grateful to those who keep reading and who send me encouraging messages, despite my inconsistency. Those of you who choose to receive it in your email inbox are particularly worthy of my respect and love!

Today, I’ll just leave you with this little mathematical proof that I found somewhere online, which should cause you some concern if, say, you plan to perform any financial transactions today, or travel in any form of transport that required engineering to build it. You’ll see that each step follows logically from the previous one, and the result is somewhat surprising.

If, on the other hand, you still feel safe riding your bicycle after reading this, please don’t post anything in the comments explaining why: that would spoil the fun! (I can provide a little enlightenment for those who email quentin@pobox.com, if wanted…)

Now here’s a downside to self-driving cars that I had completely failed to consider: An article on Slate’s website points out that the current desperate shortage of organ donors is only going to get worse:

It’s morbid, but the truth is that due to limitations on who can contribute transplants, among the most reliable sources for healthy organs and tissues are the more than 35,000 people killed each year on American roads (a number that, after years of falling mortality rates, has recently been trending upward). Currently, 1 in 5 organ donations comes from the victim of a vehicular accident. That’s why departments of motor vehicles ask drivers whether they want to be donors.
It’s not difficult to do the math on how driverless cars could change the equation. An estimated 94 percent of motor-vehicle accidents involve some kind of a driver error. As the number of vehicles with human operators falls, so too will the preventable fatalities. In June, Christopher A. Hart, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said, “Driverless cars could save many if not most of the 32,000 lives that are lost every year on our streets and highways.” Even if self-driving cars only realize a fraction of their projected safety benefits, a decline in the number of available organs could begin as soon as the first wave of autonomous and semiautonomous vehicles hits the road—threatening to compound our nation’s already serious shortages.
Fewer people will die, overall, of course. But it’s tough if you happen to be in the wrong group…

In Cambridge marketplace, there’s one of those installations that I presumed was supposed to be art, and as I walked by I pondered all the other things that taxpayers’ money could usefully be spent on… It was labelled, so I thought, ‘Litter of light’.

Yeah, yeah, green eco modern art, blah blah…

But then I realised that ‘Liter of light’ wasn’t actually a typo — I’m so unused to the American spelling of ‘litre’ that I misread it initially. And looking at the sign got me interested enough that I went to the organisation’s website, only to find that it isn’t, well, ideal, for someone who’s trying to find out what this is all about. But with a bit of perseverance and some searching elsewhere, I pieced it together.

The story, in fact, goes back to 2002, when a Brazilian chap named Alfredo Moser realised that, if you live in a shack with no windows, you can still bring sunlight into your home using water-filled recycled plastic bottles as diffusing skylights.

Liter of Light is a foundation that, as well as installing and encouraging the installation of vast numbers of these around the world, is now bringing them up to date by adding solar panels, batteries and LEDs, meaning that your bottle can provide light at night as well as during the day.

All in all, a very nice use of simple technologies to meet a real and widespread need! I love this kind of thing.

At a dinner at a friend’s house tonight, we finally worked it out.

Donald Trump is Zaphod Beeblebrox.

For those well-versed in late-20th-century literature, a lot of things then suddenly make sense.

I’ve always liked this particular link. I can pretty much guarantee that there will be at least something on the other end of it that you don’t know.

How do I know that?

Well, that link takes you to a random page on Wikipedia. Since the English version of Wikipedia has over 5 million pages, the chance of you hitting one on a subject about which you have any reasonably complete knowledge is really quite small. (At least, it would be for me!)

So, go ahead, click it and learn something new!

(If, by any chance, you hit a page where you find the subject matter somewhat uninteresting, then you can instead marvel at the fact that somebody found it interesting enough to create a page about it!)

Those of you who are kind enough to read my random musings on a regular basis often do so via the RSS feed or Twitter, and many others got their updates via Facebook until I started my period of abstinence.

But this is just a reminder that you can also get Status-Q in your inbox, and what could be more exciting than that?!

I used to do this via a rather cobbled-together system based on IFTTT, but there's now a button on the right hand side of the Status-Q pages (which links to here), where you can sign up to a much more sophisticated system based on MailChimp.

Thanks to those of you who have already tried it out! Hope it's useful, or at least occasionally helps you start your day with a wry smile…

I often wonder whether the manufacturers of tennis balls see their primary market as:

• tennis players, or
• dog owners?

Mmm.