Glory Glory

Yesterday I wrote that the Metropolitan Police and Durham Police had hardly covered themselves in glory in pursuing lockdown-deniers. But to be fair the police forces of this country were given a poisoned chalice by Parliament [And by Parliament I mean not only the Government but also the far-too-compliant OINO (Opposition In Name Only)], which gave the police new laws to enforce without any new resources with which to do so. I think we can assume that police officers up and down the land were not just sitting around with nothing to do, just waiting for some new laws to enforce. We can probably assume that they were quite busy doing proper policing - catching criminals, for instance. So it was entirely reasonable for them to be circumspect in how enthusiastically to chase people who were meeting 'illegally' in groups of six or more people. My impression is that they mostly focussed on particularly large gatherings of people egregiously breaking the rules.

I was always against criminalising lockdown rules, not only on the resource issue, nor the likelihood or otherwise of people being willing to follow man-made laws as opposed to what we might call guidance on civilised norms, e.g. respecting our fellow citizens, but also as a simple matter of personal liberty. If you are thinking this makes me a libertarian, right-wing lunatic then I readily confess to two of those. Free speech and free action, within unarguably fundamental law, are to me values of a democratic society which we should not be too ready to dilute. In this I am pretty much a fundamentalist: I cannot condone social media companies imposing their own judgments on what should be published on their sites - within the law, obviously. Twitter should not have banned Trump from tweeting, for instance. Are our democracies so fragile that we are frightened of the power of contrary views? Perhaps we have to work harder to build civilised consensus.

The UK Government's Online Safety Bill, currently progressing through Parliament, includes a proposal for online providers to remove “legal but harmful” content. Who says what's "harmful"? If it's harmful, pass a law against the specifics. If not, keep your nose out of my business.

I'm not by any means diminishing the importance of holding politicians to account for their actions but my guess is that public outrage would have been just as great against government (or opposition) lockdown gatherings if those were against the spirit of guidelines rather than specifically breaking (clearly ill-defined) laws. Because of those laws, we (inflamed by the media) are spending months debating whether obviously arrogant behaviour was illegal, the extent to which a Fixed Penalty Notice is a criminal offence and police forces are having to divert resources from crime busting to pseudo political decision making. Are we collectively insane?

That's it for now. Very few people read this any more. Sometimes I just have to let off steam, though. Is it the end? Who knows?

Be brave, Kier

Forget the Daily Mail. Forget the wailing Conservative MPs. Forget the Durham Police who, following in the footsteps of the incompetent Metropolitan Police, have hardly covered themselves in glory. The only fact that matters is that, if you are given a fixed penalty notice for that glass of beer, you will have to resign as Labour party leader. If you did not, and you tried to weasel your way out of it, the public would never believe any of the words you will have to say when the inevitable further fines and the final Sue Gray report emerge over the next few weeks and months.

So you should get out in front now. Immediately after reading this. State unequivocally that, f you are given a FPN, you will resign. Distance yourself from our weaselly PM and make the stand for honesty and decency in politics. After all she has said on this subject, Angela Rayner should do the same. There is no wiggle room.

Labour would survive your departure, even be enhanced by its setting a standard for integrity.

This is your test. Don't fail it.

1 in 13

1 in 13 people (adults? not sure) in England now have covid. Which is the same ratio of people wearing masks in the crowded indoor Exeter services this morning. Connection? Who knows. tbh I no longer have any idea where or when I should wear a mask or, given I had my Spring Booster yesterday, what my chances of catching or surviving the virus are. Sore upper arm today. Three Pfizers previously and now a Moderna in my collection. The nurse explained the relative efficacy and sustainability of various vaccines but (a) I wasn't really listening and (b) it was the only option available anyway. 

We live on ... stay safe everyone.

Cosmic Girl

The Cornish are going to space!

Cosmic Girl is a modified Boeing 747-400, which will take off from Newquay Airport this summer, in the UK's first ever space launch. Under its wing will be LauncherOne, a Virgin Orbit rocket, with a payload of small satellites, which are used for tracking shipping and other (undisclosed) things. LauncherOne will be released at 35,000 feet and fire its booster to zoom the satellites into orbit.

The fact that the operations team includes the Ministry of Defence, the Border Force and the National Crime Agency leads us to suspect that the satellites may be above our heads but not necessarily above board. Rumours that the People's Front of Cornwall are planning a second launch, PeFroCorn, to track LauncherOne have not been denied. As have suggestions that one of the satellites will be in a geostationary orbit above an asylum seeker processing centre in Rwanda. And another that one of the satellites will be targetting [did I mean tracking?] vulnerable people crossing the  English Channel in small boats.

Cynicism aside, we should perhaps celebrate Cornwall's entry to the twenty first century - skipping the twentieth, obviously - and watch the skies this summer. Perhaps.

Ask the Swiss

The Swiss system. I'm trying to understand it. Invented by Julius Müller for a chess tournament in Zürich in 1895, it provides a (perhaps optimal) solution to the problem of having a number of competitors too large for them to all to play each other in the time available. I'm interested because UEFA's Champions League format from 2024-25 will use it.

There will be 36 teams competing in the Champions League and they will all be within one league table. Clearly it's not possible for all to play all, particularly as the tradition is to play home and away ties. Hence the Swiss system. In round 1 there is a completely random draw. In the second round, each team will play another team with a similar record. Thus if Real Madrid wins their first match, they will then play another of the first round winners in the second round. If they win again, they play another team that has two wins and so on. You can see how eventually all the teams get sorted by their results, the cream rising to the top and Tottenham Hotspur trending to last place. Just kidding, Spurs fans! You won't even be in it.

For 36 competitors, a number of matches around 10-12 will be deemed mathematically to be optimal: at that point the Champions League system will move the top 8, plus 8 more from playoff games, into the traditional knockout phases. It feels like a system designed to please everyone - traditionalists and radicals - although it's arguably also a solution in search of a problem.

I seem to remember playing something like this system in croquet tournaments. I'm told it is widely used in Scrabble. Wikipedia tells me the system is used for the selection of the English national pool team. [Who knew that even existed?] Also Pokémon championships. And the World Universities Debating Championship. And ... you get the gist; it's widespread. I'm not aware of any blogger tournaments though.

If you're playing in a chess tournament, where all players are gathered in the same venue at the same time, waiting to find out who your next opponent is is not a problem. For football teams, playing their matches in different countries, hundreds or thousands of miles apart, I think it's a major disadvantage for logistics such as travel for clubs and fans, interacting with domestic match schedules and so on. I guess there may will be a sense of "let's see how this works" in the first year.

I'll get back to you around Christmas time in 2024.

Unpredictable Humans

In the kind of computer games where you, the human player, compete against the computer's artificial intelligence (AI), you have a huge advantage: you're human. Humans are unpredictable, unlike the predictable AI. In Civilization VI, on the highest difficulty level - Deity - playing single player against computer (AI) opponents, you can still beat the AI even with the huge advantages they are given by the game. Defending your city against massed ranks of AI units, you can predict what they will do but you - the unpredictable human - can outwit them by doing something crazy. City nearly dead to an AI unit? Send out a builder to distract the unit; they will take the builder, I will then attack and they have gained a builder but lost the war. The AI doesn't think strategically.

Which is my problem with driverless cars. I was driving out of Tesco this morning, about to turn right. Being careful. Car approaching from the right. Signalling left, to go into Tesco. That's OK, I can go .... whoa! The other car is going straight on, not into Tesco! Still signalling. Screeching of brakes, near collision. OK, exaggerating a little. No actual collision although a few words exchanged. I assume that the driver wasn't aware that their indicator was still on but maybe it was just a last minute change of plan.

How would my (mythical) driverless Tesla deal with this unpredictable behaviour? I imagine the Tesla AI can see the flashing indicator and assess the probability of the car behaving as expected, i.e. turning left. Of course, my Tesla doesn't know whether the other car is also driverless - therefore predictable - or human. Therefore there is a knowledge gap, which is a problem for an AI. My guess is the Tesla would sit there waiting for a gap in the traffic. This is the ultimate safety play but this is Tesco, so it's possible that there's a long stream of traffic, all turning left and with their indicators on. Because they are human, some might not be indicating but still intend to turn left. We'll be there for ages.

Then there's the potential moral dilemma. I read a really interesting article on this on the BBC's Science Focus website, positing for instance the decision making a driver might have to go through in a situation where every possible decision will result in potential death but the lethalities are unequal - adults vs children, ten passengers vs one, others vs me. For humans the speed of the situation is too much for us and means we react purely on instinct, with decisions which will not be the same for all of us; we are unpredictable. But the driverless car AI can process all possible outcomes virtually instantaneously and make a 'moral' decision to pursue one (probable) outcome.

When driverless cars were first mooted, my reaction was "terrific, I can read a book while my car takes me safely and speedily to my destination". I still think that, but with one proviso - that all the other vehicles on that particular stretch of road - perhaps a specially built highway - are also driverless and (preferably) powered by the same software (or industry standard algorithms). While we are (for my lifetime and for decades after, I suspect) in a hybrid situation where some cars could be driven by predictable AI and others by unpredictable humans, I'm against the idea.

What do you think?