Wednesday 28 April 2021

FRONTAL ATTACK ON AN ENGLISH WRITER (2017)



I have read quite a bit about information over the years (and entropy and noise and inference, all of which are related). It's a tricky thing to understand and there are not so many plain English descriptions of what information, bits and Claude Shannon are about.  James Gleick's book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood is very good. But also pretty long. 

HERE is a very well written and readable shorter piece by Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni that explains the early work of Claude Shannon and his 'invention' of information theory.

Tuesday 27 April 2021

My father was famous as John le Carré (2021)

A wonderful piece HERE by David Cornwell, on the deeply affectionate collaboration between his parents Jane and David - who wrote as John le Carré.

Very few, very wise people saw through them both, of whom the most recent and the most absolute is Richard Ovenden, who examined the papers my father loaned to the Bodleian library in Oxford and observed a “deep process of collaboration”. His analysis is a perfect match for my recollection: “A rhythm of working together that was incredibly efficient … a kind of cadence from manuscript, to typescript, to annotated and amended typescripts … with scissors and staplers being brought to bear … getting closer and closer to the final published version.”

 

 

 

 

Friday 2 April 2021

The 3.5% Rule (2019)


 

Berelson & Steiner (1964) Human behavior: An inventory of scientific findings, is a classic of social science research. It offered a threefold grand summary of all of the social science research they had analysed: (1) Some do, some don't. (2) The differences aren't very great. (3) It's more complicated than that.

HERE is a summary article about a wonderful piece of social science research which stretches the third of the classes of study in this 3 fold summary. In short it shows that nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those which have engaged more than 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.  

Thursday 1 April 2021

The Lab-Leak Hypothesis (2021)

  


A thought provoking and non-hysterical article by Nicholson Baker in the New York Magazine about how the Covid-19 virus came to be. The introductory paragraph summarises his story:

What happened was fairly simple, I’ve come to believe. It was an accident. A virus spent some time in a laboratory, and eventually it got out. SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, began its existence inside a bat, then it learned how to infect people in a claustrophobic mine shaft, and then it was made more infectious in one or more laboratories, perhaps as part of a scientist’s well-intentioned but risky effort to create a broad-spectrum vaccine. SARS-2 was not designed as a biological weapon. But it was, I think, designed. Many thoughtful people dismiss this notion, and they may be right. They sincerely believe that the coronavirus arose naturally, “zoonotically,” from animals, without having been previously studied, or hybridized, or sluiced through cell cultures, or otherwise worked on by trained professionals. They hold that a bat, carrying a coronavirus, infected some other creature, perhaps a pangolin, and that the pangolin may have already been sick with a different coronavirus disease, and out of the conjunction and commingling of those two diseases within the pangolin, a new disease, highly infectious to humans, evolved. Or they hypothesize that two coronaviruses recombined in a bat, and this new virus spread to other bats, and then the bats infected a person directly — in a rural setting, perhaps — and that this person caused a simmering undetected outbreak of respiratory disease, which over a period of months or years evolved to become virulent and highly transmissible but was not noticed until it appeared in Wuhan.