The Guardian: “The paranoid fantasy behind Brexit”

The other crucial idea here is the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers. If England is not an imperial power, it must be the only other thing it can be: a colony. And, as Deighton successfully demonstrated, this logic can be founded in an alternative English history. The moment of greatest triumph – the defeat of the Nazis – can be reimagined as the moment of greatest humiliation – defeat by the Nazis. The pain of colonisation and defeat can, in the context of uneasy membership of the EU, be imaginatively appropriated.

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Britain was genuinely in a topsy-turvy situation, the winner that had been surpassed by the losers. Why not draw a topsy-turvy conclusion: in a dark stratum of the reactionary mind, we must think of ourselves as a defeated nation? And if Britain was to be defeated, the EU must be its invasive oppressor. Must be, because there was no other possible candidate. The very absurdity of this notion was its strength. The paranoiac must at some stage ask himself: but why are they out to get me? Since there was no actual evidence of any western European hostility, the answer must lie in some deeply hidden motivation. How could they hate us when we saved them in the war? The proto-Brexiteers came up with a counter-factual truth that was at the same time highly satisfying: they hate us because we saved them.

Fintan O’Toole

Fascinating reflections on the hidden and irrational motives behind Brexit. I don’t know enough about their culture and imperial self-image to confirm or deny it, but the article does seem to present a plausible picture, however twisted. Problem is, Brexiters, and the rest of the country along with them, must now live with the consequences of this historic decision, but are still refusing to accept responsibility and keep trying to delay things further. At this rate, Brexit and the relationship between the EU and UK will to be a constant issue for years to come.

The Guardian: “People v mosquitos: what to do about our biggest killer”

While our counterattacks are reducing the number of casualties she perpetrates – malaria deaths in particular are declining rapidly – the mosquito remains the deadliest hunter of human beings on the planet.

Taking a broad range of estimates into account, since 2000, the average annual number of human deaths caused by the mosquito was around 2 million. Humans came in a distant second at 475,000, followed by snakes (50,000), dogs and sandflies (25,000 each), the tsetse fly, and the assassin or kissing bug (10,000 each). The fierce killers of lore and Hollywood celebrity were much further down our list. The crocodile was ranked 10th, with 1,000 annual deaths. Next on the list were hippos with 500, and elephants and lions with 100 fatalities each. The much-slandered shark and wolf shared 15th position, killing an average of 10 people per annum.

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They are masters of evolutionary adaptation. Mosquitoes can evolve and adapt to their changing environments within a few generations. During the Blitz of 1940–41, for example, as German bombs rained down on London, isolated populations of Culex mosquitoes were confined to the air-raid tunnel shelters of the London Underground, along with the city’s resilient citizens. These trapped mosquitoes quickly adapted to feed on mice, rats and humans instead of birds, and are now a species distinct from their above-ground parental ancestors.

What should have taken thousands of years of evolution was accomplished in less than 100. In another 100 years, jokes Richard Jones, former president of the British Entomological and Natural History Society, there may be separate Circle line, Metropolitan line and Jubilee line mosquito species in the tunnels below London.

Timothy Winegard

Throughout human history, mosquitos have been a constant companion – and source of plagues and suffering. Despite recent technological advances, diseases spread by mosquito bites continue to cause large numbers of deaths each year, prompting people to invent new strategies to keep the insects at bay. My personal favorite: zapping them with autonomous laser beams!

Engadget: “iOS 14.5 will let Apple Watch owners unlock iPhones while wearing a mask”

There is, unfortunately, one major caveat: the feature only works if iPhone’s owner is also wearing an Apple Watch. So long as the Watch itself is already unlocked, you’ll just need to look at your iPhone as usual; after that, you’ll get a haptic buzz on your wrist letting you know that the unlock was successful. As we understand it, the feature — which must be manually enabled before use — allows Face ID to proceed with an unlock despite much lower facial recognition accuracy because the nearby Watch has already been authenticated. You’ll also be able to lock your phone from your Apple Watch, though it’s worth noting that all other actions that might rely on a face unlock — like, say, approving an App Store purchase — can’t be handled this way.

Given the need for frequent mask use, Apple has attempted to address this issue last May with an update that prompts Face ID to more quickly kick users into their passcode input screen when their faces are obscured. While a good idea in theory, the change wasn’t particularly elegant in practice — users have frequently been left waiting while iOS seemingly decides what to do. With all of this in mind, it’s little surprise that Apple is reportedly testing optical in-display fingerprint sensors that could debut in iPhones as soon as this year.

Chris Velazco

These days, Apple’s solution to each and every problem people have boils down to: purchase another Apple product! This is especially true for problems Apple themselves introduced through previous design decisions: headphone jack removed ▶ buy AirPods; included iPhone charger removed ▶ buy a separate one; all MacBook ports except USB-C removed ▶ buy Apple dongles; and now TouchID removed, coupled with ubiquitous face masks ▶ buy an Apple Watch! Zero empathy for people who may have lost jobs or income this past year during the pandemic. But hey, it’s a great way to make money and improve stock market performance!

Kotaku: “Google Stadia shuts down Internal Studios, changing Business Focus”

Still, without offering an all-you-can-play service nor offering killer exclusive games, Stadia struggled to get its footing. Meanwhile, Microsoft ramped up its xCloud cloud gaming service as part of its Game Pass Ultimate bundle, and Stadia became less and less alluring to the kind of hardcore gamer who can build buzz for a new gaming service.

Google seemingly built for the future with the creation of first-party studios and a leadership team consisting of accomplished studio heads and creative directors, but those efforts weren’t enough to stave off the fate many people feared when hearing about this Google initiative: that it would lose support from within before it got ample time to realize its potential.

Stadia isn’t quite done. The Stadia tech could still succeed. By many accounts, Stadia runs games great. But as a game-maker, Google appears to have packed it in. Said one source familiar with Stadia’s first-party operations, citing another tech giant’s widely publicized failure to create video games: Google was a terrible place to make games. Imagine Amazon, but under-resourced.

Stephen Totilo

Less than two years after launch, Google is restructuring Stadia, abandoning exclusive gaming content from the internal development team SG&E and closing its two game studios. Among tech giants, Google seems the poster child of the internet era: interested in a wide variety of things, but quickly loosing focus, lacking the patience to iron out details and develop projects for the long term. But I guess it is less complicated and more lucrative to milk the ad market through backroom deals with Facebook.

The New York Times: “Tech C.E.O.s are in Love with their Principal Doomsayer”

As we boarded the black gull-wing Tesla Mr. Harari had rented for his visit, he brought up Aldous Huxley. Generations have been horrified by his novel “Brave New World”, which depicts a regime of emotion control and painless consumption. Readers who encounter the book today, Mr. Harari said, often think it sounds great. Everything is so nice, and in that way it is an intellectually disturbing book because you’re really hard-pressed to explain what’s wrong with it, he said. And you do get today a vision coming out of some people in Silicon Valley which goes in that direction.

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He said he had resigned himself to tech executives’ global reign, pointing out how much worse the politicians are. I’ve met a number of these high-tech giants, and generally they’re good people, he said. They’re not Attila the Hun. In the lottery of human leaders, you could get far worse.

Some of his tech fans, he thinks, come to him out of anxiety. Some may be very frightened of the impact of what they are doing, Mr. Harari said.

Still, their enthusiastic embrace of his work makes him uncomfortable. It’s just a rule of thumb in history that if you are so much coddled by the elites it must mean that you don’t want to frighten them, Mr. Harari said. They can absorb you. You can become the intellectual entertainment.

Nellie Bowles

I have never quite understood the admiration and reverence some people have developed for Yuval Noah Harari. It seems to me that he is just taking existing ideas and repackages them in a more digestible form for the masses – basically a historian version of Paulo Coelho. This might partially explain the benevolence of the tech elite: he is simply introducing some of big tech’s long-term plans to the public and CEOs like that he is building acceptance in advance for these ideas. Or they are so confident of their grip on power that his criticism poses no threat to them, a distraction so minor that it has become entertaining.

Wired: “The banana is dying. The race is on to reinvent it before it’s too late”

Despite its ubiquity, the Cavendish is something of a genetic outlier among crops: because it has three copies of each chromosome, it is sterile and can only reproduce by creating clones of itself. This makes the Cavendish an ideal crop to grow at scale – farmers know how a plantation of Cavendish bananas will respond to pesticides, how fast its fruit will ripen, how many bananas each plant will yield. You know what’s going to happen to a Cavendish banana when you pick it, says Bebber. When you put it in a refrigerated container, you know exactly what’s going to come out of the other end most of the time. Cavendish plants are short, so they don’t blow over easily in a hurricane, are easy to spray with pesticides, and reliably produce lots of bananas.

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So far, Latin America, which grows almost all of the world’s export bananas – including those for the US and Europe – has escaped TR4. But, Ploetz says, it’s only a matter of time. Our concern in Central America is that if somebody has an outbreak on their property, they are going to keep their mouths shut, and then it’ll have spread widely by the time people realise it’s there, he says.

Faced with a crisis that could see the Cavendish gone forever, a handful of researchers are racing to use gene-editing to create a better banana and bring the world’s first TR4-resistant Cavendish to the market. To get there, they will butt up against not only the limitations of technology, but resistance from lawmakers, environmentalists and consumers wary of GM crops. But as TR4 closes in on Latin America, gene-editing may be the last chance we have to save the one banana we have chosen above all others.

Matt Reynolds

For people who like bananas, an interesting insight into their biology and cultivation – coupled with an impending threat of extinction, from a pathogen, naturally. I am generally wary of attempts to solve issues with our food supplies through gene editing, but the banana could be an exception. Because it only reproduces through cloning, a single precise genetic modification to make this variety resistant to TR4 could rapidly replace vulnerable crops. At the same time, there is no danger of the spliced genes spreading to wild banana populations, because the plants themselves are sterile.

Musings on Markets: “The Storming of the Bastille: The Reddit Crowd targets the Hedge Funds!”

To put the GameStop trading frenzy in perspective, let’s start with the recognition that markets are not magical mechanisms, but represent aggregations of human beings making investment judgments, some buying and some selling, for a variety of reasons, ranging from the absurd to the profound. It should therefore not come as a surprise that the forces playing out in other aspects of human behavior find their way into markets. In particular, there are three broad trends from the last decade at play here:

1. A loss of faith in experts (economic, scientific, financial, government) […]
2. An unquestioning worship of crowd wisdom, combined with an empowering of crowds […]
3. A conversion of disagreements in every arena into the personal and the political […]

As I look at the GameStop episode play out, I see all three of these at play. One reason that the Redditors targeted GameStop is because they viewed hedge funds as part of the “expert” class, and consequently incapable of getting things right. They have used social media platforms to gather and reinforce each others’ views, right or wrong, and then act in concert quickly and with extraordinary efficiency, to move stock prices. Finally, even a casual perusal of the comments on the Reddit thread exposes how much of this is personal, with far more comments about how this would teach hedge funds and Wall Street a lesson than there were about GameStop the company.

Aswath Damodaran

As expected, Prof. Damodaran presents a detailed and thoughtful analysis of the Reddit-GameStop explosive situation, concluding with reasonable advice for the people involved – advice that will likely be missed or ignored, as he himself acknowledges. I get the sense that this phenomenon is a perfect storm of lockdown frustration, economic and social marginalization, and generalized loss of trust in experts and regulations. The storm rages on for now…