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It’s easy to be a bit learned these days, what with all the Universities, internets and libraries there seem to be about. But how clever would you have been in if you had lived in Europe in the year 1000 AD when there were no Universities? When 99% of the population were illiterate and spent their time either in farm labour or in killing people from horseback? In circumstances like those it takes real character and belief to kindle the flame of learning. Gerbert of Aurillac (c.940-1003), had such a character.

He came from a humble background, but was quickly talent-spotted by his local monastery because of his flair for mathematics. This was then the most practicable of the great sciences, as all you needed was a pencil and some parchment. Gerbert was taken up by a Spanish nobleman, who invited him to Barcelona. In Spain, he must have come into contact with Islamic scholars, who were then at the cutting edge of research in astronomy, mathematics and anything else that had a hint of knowledge about it. When he came back from Spain, he brought Arabic numerals and pioneered their use on the abacus, which was a bit like the computer of its day, except it was made of wood and metal.

Finally he hooked up with holy Roman Emperors like Otto 1 and his grandson Otto 111, who conspired to make Gerbert Pope Sylvester 11. He wasn’t a great success as Pontiff, being a little too scholarly and intelligent. But compared with the venial line who had proceeded him in the office ( historians call it “The Pornocracy“) he was at least honest, decent and hardworking.

He supported learning, such as it was at the time, in many fields. Though he and contemporaries had many facts wrong, their spirit of honest enquiry never faltered. Before Gerbert, learning spluttered, and often threatened to go out in Europe. After him, it never ceased to grow brighter, until the age of the great scholastics like Roger Bacon and St Thomas Aquinas arrived, from which we have never looked back. Whatever your system of beliefs, he was truly inspirational, and learned people everywhere owe him a debt of immeasurable proportion.

Links If you want a quick read up, try our wikipedia link below

Pope Sylvester II – Wikipedia

But if you want to try a learned but very readable book that points Gerbert in context, we cannot do better than to tip God’s Philosophers by James Hannam, Icon 2009.

#philosophy #knowledge #middleages #islam #papacy #holyromanempire

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Get a quantum computer. Well perhaps not quite yet. But very soon the one you are using today will look very old and slow. Because quantum computing will revolutionise lives the way that the arrival of semiconductors did back in the 1970s. And some. We’ve got two guides for you today. In Wired, Amit Katwala [1] has a nice easy-to- read overview- what they are, how they work, what they can do, etc. ( hint: LSS found they take a second to solve problems for which the best current supercomputers need a week.) If you like it so much that you want to get started for your self, IBM[2] has a real guide for the serious hobbyist. There’s qubits, entanglement, Grover algorithms and a whole lot more stuff some of you will be dying to learn about. We have a small personal problem here; apparently quantum computers only work at temperatures a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, and our freezer won’t go that low.

So now we live in the twenty first century par excellence. The existence of things like epigenetics, climate change, quantum computers and CRISPR will change things so much that the responses and data we learned in the twentieth are obsolete. There can be no going back, however much we try. New technologies soon bring new forms of society and mores. The trick is to embrace them-as soon as possible.

1Quantum computing and quantum supremacy, explained | WIRED UK

2 Learn quantum computing: a field guide – IBM Quantum

#quantumcomputing #qubit #informationtechnology

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We earnestly hope that the pictures that flank the header on this blog convey an accurate picture of ourselves as brutish ignoramuses who had never heard of Ada Lovelace, (1815-1852), mother of the digital computer and joint author of the greatest near miss in human history. Confession over, let’s start the story

Imagine you are at a party and you meet one of those super high fliers who tells you : ” Oh yeah-I’m the daughter of Lord Byron, but my own field is cutting edge IT research.” You might be forgiven for raising an eyebrow, or feeling acutely for your own shortcomings. But Ada Countess of Lovelace was the real deal. Brought up by a gifted mother who chucked out Byron soon after the child’s birth, Ada grew up in an atmosphere of striving and mathematical learning. Well connected, she was soon moving in the company of some of the most able minds, and it wasn’t long before she met Charles Babbage. And the two of them started on a project of such breathtaking audacity for the timethat it still makes our hair stand up-to build the first digital computer.

The story of their adventures reads more like that of 21st century tech entrepreneurs than nineteenth century toffs. There were meetings with venture capitalists, Prime Ministers and international learned societies, mainly in the quest for funds. They came up with joint ideas for amazing things like logic systems, input devices, programs and algorithms. Ada and her mother toured the Midlands, then the most technologically advanced place on the planet, in the hope of finding someone who could build the hardware for the prototype. Meanwhile, Ada got married and started a family. And Babbage, so able in some aspects, was a nightmare to manage and work with in others.

Ultimately, the project failed. To build a mechanical computer was beyond the technological capacity of the age. It is a measure of how agonisingly close they came to realise they even had the pioneering electric expert Wheatstone on board at one time. And Ada, who had more of the business brain, died young of cancer. Although remembered, there was no direct technological link between them and twentieth century pioneers like Turing.

So imagine if computers had been developed in 1844 and not 1944. On that scale, the breakthrough in protein structures we advertised in our last blog (LSS weekly round up 24 July) would have occurred in 1921. So what would the alternative 2021 have been like?

Ada Lovelace led one of he great might-have-beens of history. It is sad that she failed. But here courage, hard work and determination were never in doubt, and from now one we at this site will honour her as one of the greats.

Ada Lovelace – Wikipedia

Ada Lovelace: Founder of Scientific Computing (sdsc.edu)

#computers #IT #technology #womeninscience

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another weekly look at stories which we still think will be significant in five years’ time-and more!

Protein Breakthrough– LSS has long advocated the use of Artificial Intelligence in medical research. Now Google’s Deep Mind subsidiary is paying dividends of incalculable benefit. Its Alpha-fold project has predicted the structure of all human proteins, which will be of immeasurable importance in fields like drug design and curing chronic disease. Here’s Nature, reliable as ever:

AlphaFold has predicted the structure of nearly the entire human proteome (the full complement of proteins expressed by an organism) and made it available through a public database. The deep-learning neural network, developed by Google’s artificial-intelligence firm DeepMind, predicts the 3D structures of proteins from their amino-acid sequences. AlphaFold has also predicted almost complete proteomes for other organisms, ranging from mice and maize (corn) to the malaria parasite. The more than 350,000 protein structures vary in their accuracy. But researchers say the resource — which is set to grow to 130 million structures by the end of the year — has the potential to revolutionize the life sciences.Nature | 6 min read

Let it rip It was so tempting to let the coronavirus roam free, so that everyone could go back to work. The trouble was that viruses mutate. That pesky delta variant can churn out copies 1000 times faster than the old fashioned ones. And we wonder-how much worse will the next variant be? Great link in Nature, again

Since first appearing in India in late 2020, the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2 has become the predominant strain in much of the world. Researchers might now know why Delta has been so successful: people infected with it produce far more virus than do those infected with the original version of SARS-CoV-2, making it very easy to spread. A study of some of the first people in China to be infected with Delta showed that their viral load — a measure of the density of viral particles in the body — was roughly 1,000 times higher than in people infected with the original coronavirus strain.Nature | 4 min read

Green investing One question many people like to ask is “is this company really concerned with the future, or are they just putting out a lot of Greenwash?” Green bonds have long been mooted as an answer to this very understandable dilemma. Catarina Cardoso of the University of Westminster, that centre of the highest learning excellence, weighs up the pros and cons for the Conversation.

https://theconversation.com/green-bonds-can-help-finance-clean-energy-as-long-as-the-projects-they-fund-are-transparent-164108?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversatio

A little glass of something Sorry there was no cocktail column this week-forgive us for having too much work on. But we can honestly say that there is no better drink for a warm summer evening than a glass of chilled rose wine. From dry, refined Provence or Touraine, to lively fruity Californians or Australians-there are so many you could choose from. And it’s all so much quicker than mixing up a cocktail!

#alphafold #deepmind #google #covid-19 deltavariant #sqars-cov-2 #evolution #greenbonds #universityof westminster

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Some people have accused LSS of being a political blog. It isn’t. We may cover Politics. We’re not Partisan. We welcome any party that takes a stand on issues dear to our hearts, from antibiotics to climate change. And there’s something else, as dear friends have pointed out- you never know where help might come from.

At first sight Alexander de Pfeffel Johnson‘s track record on women isn’t exactly inspiring, at least on the personal level. Yet his government has appointed, and backed, Victoria Atkins to a herculean but utterly noble task, a decision which reflects well on all concerned. For she it is who will become Parliamentary Under Secretary (it’s a kind of Minister, overseas chums) on all matters concerning the safeguarding of women, including against such barbaric crimes as rape, stalking, genital mutilation and forced marriages. Recently she gave an impassioned speech in the UK Parliament to which we link via the Mail below [1]

And what a task lies ahead! Forget all the special interest religious and cultural issues just for a minute. Because everyday contempt for women is ingrained in all societies, as feminists have known for decades. What is it like just to walk by a building site and be whistled at by leering, ignorant vulgarians? To be followed in the street by some unjailed sociopath who thinks it’s all so-called “banter”? If those aren’t a genuine denials of basic liberty, well forgive us, because we don’t know what is.

Somewhere, a Minister will now take a stand on such issues. It may be little, but it’s a start. Perhaps poor Victoria will fail. But someone, somewhere will pick up the torch and we’ll all try again until this battle is finally won.

[1]Video: Victoria Atkins gives impassioned speech on violence against women | Daily Mail Online

#vitoriaatkins #women #rape #fgm #harrasment #violence #sexism

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Overseas readers may accuse us of navel gazing, but the human dramas of UK affairs may have universal relevance. Or so we fondly believe. So the news that former special advisor Dominic Cummings has launched another venomous attack on Prime Minister Alexander de Pfeffle “Boris” Johnson fills us with curiosity: why do old buddies fall out?

In December 2019 this accomplished pair had the world at their feet, or at least the British bit of it. Having recently won the earth shattering Brexit referendum they then achieved a trouncing win in a General Election. They complemented; the one a tactician of something like genius, the other a shrewd communicator who deeply resonates with the key elderly C2D voters who shape British national life. Both belonged to the same ruling-class background-prosperous families, private education, Oxford, then thriving in the well financed ecology of British Conservatism-journalism, think tanks, “advisory” roles- before pushing their way into the top jobs. Both might have been forgiven for yelling “The future belongs to me!” on that distant winter morning. So why, oh why, the big bust up? We can’t be sure. But history offers us some intriguing parallels.

Brotherly Love However close you started out, however much you went through together even the closest relationships can come under strain. The well-documented travails of the Gallagher brothers of Oasis fame or the Windsor brothers Harry and William (they of the eponymous castle) show that even the bonds of DNA will snap in time. What bond then in strangers, especially when the fruits of success must be delivered? Which leads us to:

The Pressure Cooker The old saying of the 49ers on the trail to the west was that three weeks cooped up a waggon, coping with the conflicting pressures of Indigenous Native Americans, wolves, desperadoes, poor weather. baked beans and non existent cellphone signals, were enough to make you want to murder anyone, for any transgression, even your own wife. It is easy to write columns, and blogs, about what Governments should do. Just as it is easy to walk along a wooden plank laid out conveniently on a garden lawn. Try walking the same plank across Niagara falls. You will find that the mood alters somewhat.

The woman The oldest triangle in history is the King, the Queen, and the Chief Advisor. Augustus had Livia, who saw to the extermination of Agrippa and his line. Edward II had Mortimer and Isabella. Fans of the Barchester Chronicles will recall how Mrs Proudie engineered the downfall of the oleaginous and double dealing Mr Slope, up to then her husband’s right hand man. Can we carry this analogy further, without weak puns?

We got it all wrong What do you do when the act is no longer pulling the crowds, or The Project has gone all wrong? The bust up between Judas and Jesus has been fairly well documented. But what about Marshall Bernadotte? Until 1810 he was one of Napoleon’s Main Men. But realising the little guy was starting to get it seriously awry, he jumped ship, got himself a plum job as King of Sweden and spent the next few years stabbing his old chum in the back. Even closer to our time, remember how former pals Hitler, Goering and Himmler fell out when the events in the war panned out “not necessarily to Germany’s advantage”? Worms turn, but trust is not like gold-you can’t buy it back at any price.

Our prediction For now Johnson still has the support of the papers, which still bring their crucial constituency of voters with them. Cummings can be dismissed as an embittered loser. But a careful reading of Government newspapers shows evidence of growing doubts. For now these are mild and coded. But a Prime Minister, especially a Conservative one, is there to protect the economic interests of the English landed and monied classes. If these start to be seriously threatened, then Cummings’ scribblings will be revived. With glee.

#borisjohnson #dominiccummings #covid-19 #brexit #conservativeparty #primeminister #josef goebbels

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That’s right, good readers, this news is so encouraging that we broke our own Sunday embargo to bring it to you, as you’re always telling us that you like a bit of hope. And it’s extra easy for you today, because we found the same article by Anthony King in both Spanish (El Pais) and English (Horizon) 1,2

The once-disparaged phages are now coming up fast on the rail. A company called Pherecydes, 3 led by the intriguingly-named Guy-Charles Fanneau de la Horie is pioneering the use of phages against the so called deadly three that plague our hospitals. Astute readers will know we refer to Staphylococcus aureus, Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, whose resistance to conventional antibiotics will soon make surgery and hospital care almost impossible. The team are just starting to trial their discoveries in a limited number of patients in Lyon and hope that licensing will let them go large as soon as possible.

Over in Dublin Siobhan McClean and Bactivax 4 seem to have found a weak spot in Pseudomonas. They think this is in the protein it uses to attack our cells, and hope to develop a vaccine so the body can fight it without the need for antibiotics.

We at LSS are no microbiologists. But the way that intelligent people are thinking differently, and above all trying, fills us with hope. The ignorant and the superstitious seem be having their day during these last few years. But their way of thinking can offer nothing compared to these scientists, and one day we shall be back.

1Las bacterias resisten a los antibióticos, pero los virus y las vacunas podrían ayudar | Ciencia | EL PAÍS (elpais.com)

2 More bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics – here’s how viruses and vaccines could help | Horizon: the EU Research & Innovation magazine | European Commission (horizon-magazine.eu)

3 Pherecydes Pharma (pherecydes-pharma.com)

4 Bactivax

#antimicrobialresistance #bacteriophage #vaccine #hospital #infection #gramnegative

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We’ve waited a long time to use that headline, but with temperatures soaring in southern England from where this blog originates, we thought that the time had come. So with the help of Hamlyn’s The Ultimate Cocktail Book, here’s a list of long cool refreshers to get you through the ordeal ahead.

Summer Cup: Take a large clean cocktail bowl and add 1 bottle of cold Reisling, 1 bottle of red wine, 75ml of Drambuie, then 750 ml of cold lemonade . Next slice up some sweet apples, an orange or two, and some diced strawberries. Mix in with as many ice cubes as Spartans fell at Thermopylae and serve to chilled glasses. Great to kick start the atmosphere at a barbecue Ms RS of Southend on Sea asked us if the washing up bowl would do. No, it won’t.

Havana Beach Ok the current situation in Cuba isn’t one to delight Trotskyists and other assorted Lefty chums. But those Cubans can still knock out a mean cocktail, provided there’s enough electricity for the blender! Cut up a lime into pieces and put into the said blender, along with 2 measures of pineapple juice, 2 measures of white rum, 1 teaspoon of sugar and blend to smooth. Put ice into a hurricane glass, and pour the mix over. Now top up with cold ginger ale. Serve with an eco-friendly paper straw and decorate with a slice of lime or lemon.

Frozen Pineapple Daquiri Where drinks meet desserts, you might say, so spoons at the ready! Wash out that blender and refill with crushed ice, 3 slices of pineapple. 1/2 measure of fresh like juice, 2 measures of white rum and 1/2 measure of Cointreau. Add 1 teaspoon of sugar syrup and blend to smooth, as before. You can pour to a cocktail glass or one of those funny shaped daiquiri glasses with the sticky-out bits round the sides. Either way, a pineapple slice makes a good decoration.

There’s many more ideas in Hamlyn, The Bartenders Guide and of course our new acquisition, the Savoy. So whatever you choose, mix well and enjoy as as the delicious barbecue aromas waft into the evening sky , and savour the restrained sounds of JS Bach, or even Camila Cabello, which means “hair” in Spanish.

#marxism #cocktails #fruit #summer drinks

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Our weekly collection of stories that we think will still be relevant in years to come

The Size of infinity: Infinity can be a frightening thing, particularly if you have to face your e-mail in box on Monday morning. A new report in Nature tells us just how bad it really is: Maths Proof hints at the true nature of infinity

A landmark mathematical proof seems to disprove a long-standing hypothesis about the nature of infinity. The upshot is that there are many sizes of infinity: all the ‘real’ numbers, all the ‘natural’ numbers… I could go on. The new result strengthens the case that an extra size of infinity sits between the first and second infinitely large numbers. Still, things are far from settled — and that’s the fun part. “It’s one of the most intellectually exciting, absolutely dramatic things that has ever happened in the history of mathematics, where we are right now,” says mathematical logician and philosopher Juliette Kennedy.Quanta | 13 min read
Reference: Annals of Mathematics paper

Richard Lewontin, A Man for All Reason The 1970s was a squalid little decade, when entirely provisional science results were hijacked to give justification for a nasty ideology of utter selfishness, tax-dodging and hyperconsumerist neuroses. One man who stood against the tide of simplification was the humane and decent Richard Lewontin. Here’s Nature again on his life and times. A geneticist who fought for justice

Richard Lewontin, a geneticist best known for bringing molecular tools into evolutionary biology, has died aged 92. Lewontin wrote and campaigned extensively against the use of biology to justify racist ideology, especially with regard to IQ testing, writes historian of science Michael Dietrich. Lewontin also disliked biography and its celebration of the individual. When asked how he’d like to be commemorated, “He pulled out of his desk a list of every graduate student, postdoc and visitor at his laboratory — more than 100 people — and said I should write about all of them,” writes Dietrich. “They were his greatest source of pride as a scientist.”Nature | 5 min read

Space Tourism, on the large We wish Branson, Bezos and co. well, but their few minutes of sub orbital ride cannot equal this breathtaking footage of Jupiter and Ganymede, captured by the Juno probe. The inimitable Stacy Liberatore covered it for the Mail like this:

NASA’s $1.1 billion Juno spacecraft snaps ‘starship captain’ view images of Jupiter and Ganymede | Daily Mail Online

for more on matters extra terrestrial, NASA has a great website of its own:

NASA

We think that’s enough for one weekend. Sympathies to our European readers who have suffered so badly from climate change. It could be any of us, anywhere, in any season

#NASA #space #mathematics #genetics #sociobiology

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It is July 1972. Donny Osmond tops the UK pop charts with his best selling single Puppy Love. Britain is gripped by a major docks strike, while in London the first Gay Pride March is planned. The best selling car of the year is the Ford Cortina Mk 111: we can’t find its fuel consumption, but we doubt that was a prime user requirement in those far-off days. If you wanted to escape all the politics, the top film is John Boorman‘s Deliverance, with its notoriously different take on the road movie genre.

In the midst of all this you could have been forgiven if you missed a report from the prestigious MIT which predicted a total societal breakdown by 2040 if we continued with our present ways of hyper-consumption was wastrel living. It looked at ten key indices including food production, industrial output and population. All would tend to peak around 2030, followed by sudden crashes as resources ran out. Gloomy reading: but was it the famous boy crying wolf or the canary in the mine, truly singing of impending disaster? You can see the graph here in an excellent Mail piece by Stacy Liberatore, whose excellent work we have showcased before in these pages. 1*

Support for the canary comes from a re-examination of the MIT work by Gaya Herrington of KPMG, no less. Who are hardly a hotbed of lefty green ideas. Running the data again through more advanced models showed that basically MIT had it spot on. The canary was in the mine, right back there in ’72.

One of the distinguishing features of science is that it makes predictions which can be tested. So that when they come true, you have to take them seriously. When societies suffer ecological collapse, the results aren’t vey nice as both Romans and Mayans found out. Conclusion: we can’t go on like this. Perhaps the only hope came from Johnny Nash, then sadly only at number 5: I can see clearly now.

*1 MIT’s 1972 prediction of the collapse of society is on track to happen by 2040, study reveals | Daily Mail Online

Official Singles Chart Top 50 | Official Charts Company

#globalwarming #ecology #climatechange #MIT #stacy liberatore #alternative energies #green