Which, if taken at the flood leads on to fortune.” So says Brutus to Cassius in Julius Caesar.

Interesting, Because upward of forty years ago we at LSS were already advocating the construction of a huge barrier across the estuary of Britain’s Severn river to provide a valuable source of energy. We were mocked by those on the political Right who said “why bother, when we have so much oil and coal”? Those on the Left took an opposite view-“why bother when we have all that coal and oil”? How times change.

For the time has come for all island nations, indeed all those with a good ocean coastline to get serious about a source of energy that is at once cheap, green clean and above all predictable, in a way that winds are not-until we have much better computers that is. That is why we are so encouraged by the University of Plymouth and their sterling efforts to tap the power of the ocean currents, and give these islands a whopping 11% of its energy. French, Japanese, American readers-could your country do this?

We have placed a number of links at your disposal. Tidal power has a nice starters’ guide for the uninitiated. [2] and [3] give you the pioneering efforts of the University of Plymouth and its admirable scientists and engineers. Of course they’re not the only ones, there is hope gentle readers where there is human thought and ingenuity. So we will end with the full quote from William Shakespeare, who was clearly hundreds of years ahead of this time:

T_{here is a tide in the affairs of men/which. if taken at the flood, leads on to fortune/omitted, all the voyage of their life/is bound in shallows and in miseries/on such a full sea as we are now afloat/and we must take the current when it serves/or lose our ventures}

[1] http://www.tidalpower.co.uk/

[2] https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/news/tidal-stream-power-can-aid-drive-for-net-zero-and-generate-11-of-uks-electricity-demand

[3] https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/coast-engineering-research-group/tiger

#tidalpower #renewables #global warming

_{we thank Mr G Herbert of Buckinghamshire for this story}

a weekly review of stories that caught our eye

Will Russia invade Ukraine? Just about the scariest story running now is the Russian build up on the borders of Ukraine, with its potential to spark a world war. We at LSS are no fans of the Russian regime: but as almost anything is better than war, at least let’s seek some balanced opinions. This piece by Phil Stewart of Reuters at least presents Putin’s point of view, however hard it may seem for us to understand.

ttps://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/lot-of-concern-over-russian-military-activity-near-ukraine-top-u-s-general-says/ar-AARpjHG?

Baubles, bangles, bright shiny beads If you’re buying someone jewellery this Christmas, your choice may be very old indeed. Nature has a lovely piece on what seems to be the oldest bit of bling yet found on our continent:

A 41,500-year-old pendant carved from a piece of a woolly mammoth tusk could be the oldest known example of decorated jewellery in Eurasia made by humans. The purpose and meaning of the designs on its surface are unclear, but they could represent a counting system, lunar observations or a way of scoring kills. The pendant was found in the Stajnia Cave, in Poland, alongside a 7-centimetre-long awl — a pointed tool used for making holes — shaped from a piece of horse bone.Nature | 4 min read
Reference: Scientific Reports paper

Rain drives out snow “It’s raining down on me” sung the Darts in their 1978 hit. It certainly is in the Arctic, more than it snows apparently. Richard Hodgkins is worried for The Conversation:

https://theconversation.com/why-increased-rainfall-in-the-arctic-is-bad-news-for-the-whole-world-172930?

Sussex Dolphins If we are going to clear up the appalling mess previous generations have left behind, everyone must get involved. That’s why it’s so good to see local initiatives, like this one from the Sussex Dolphin Project, who are trying to save these amazing animals from the brutalities of the trawler industry India Wentworth reports for the Worthing Herald

https://www.worthingherald.co.uk/news/people/sussex-dolphin-charity-launch-new-campaign-3480828

#russia #ukraine #war #paleolithic #jewellery #art #climate change #nature #dolphins

It’s Friday night and normally fans of LSS would be getting ready to enjoy one of our scintillating cocktail revues. But we’ve come across a story that is so moving that we felt that you had to know about it. Because it casts a disturbing light on the future stabilities of all our societies and we doubt that this is just a British phenomenon.

You’ve heard of energy poverty, right? It’s been around since the 2008 crash, where people have had to choose between heating or eating, because they’re so poor. Well now a third dreadful choice has come along-they have to choose between heating, eating and keeping clean. They can no longer afford cheap essentials like soaps and toothpastes-if they want to keep eating, that is. Our link [1] to the hygiene bank will tell you all you need to know. Good people, they are.

Why does this worry us at LSS? Because it’s a clear sign that society is now going backwards. For over 150 years one of the clearest trends in human history is that people have generally been getting cleaner. It’s not as if soaps and disinfectants are particularly expensive, either. Their manufacture and distribution should be facile in a modern society. If suddenly people are getting dirtier, something somewhere is seriously wrong.

It was always our conceit that capitalism was the least worst of economic systems, in that it always ensured some distribution of basic necessities, however unequally. Its competitors, the various socialist and theological societies, have always tended to fail on this basic fact. A sure sign of the coming failure of the Soviet system was its shortages and rationing of basic items.

If our own system is beginning to show these symptoms(and others, like declining life expectancy) then that is worrying indeed. In Britain this will be a particular problem for the Conservative Party. It has been both politically and ideologically dominant for decades, pushing the ideology of low taxes and necessary inequality, along with the vast media ecosystem of newspapers, think tanks and pundits that support it. Yet all propaganda systems fail in the end: even readers of The Sun will eventually notice shortages and hardship. History has given no more guarantees to the Conservatives than it gave to the Communist Party of the USSR. Will they act in time?

[1]ttps://thehygienebank.com/who-we-are/what-is-hygiene-poverty/#:~:text=What%20is%20Hygiene%20Poverty%3F%20Hygiene%20poverty

#poverty #hygiene poverty #inequality #capitalism #socialism #communist party #islam #christianity #health

Fans of the popular Terminator movie franchise will recall the chilling moment in the series’ second outing when the Arnold Schwarzenegger character explains that all went wrong when an utterly superior AI system took over the world by starting nuclear war-and the rest was history indeed.

Ever since the ground-breaking work of Alan Turing, thinking persons have nursed the secret dread that one day there will be artificial intelligences which can out smart us at every turn. Humanity will be driven rapidly into second place, and its survival options look grim. If this prospect scares you, turn away now-for a new book has come to our attention which discusses this very real scenario. Along with some brighter ones, we admit. We’ll let Amazon introduce their product The Age of AI and our Human Future by Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Daniel Huttenlocher as below:

An AI learned to win chess by making moves human grand masters had never conceived. Another AI discovered a new antibiotic by analyzing molecular properties human scientists did not understand. Now, AI-powered jets are defeating experienced human pilots in simulated dogfights. AI is coming online in searching, streaming, medicine, education, and many other fields and, in so doing, transforming how humans are experiencing reality.

In The Age of AI, three leading thinkers have come together to consider how AI will change our relationships with knowledge, politics, and the societies in which we live. The Age of AI is an essential roadmap to our present and our future, an era unlike any that has come before.

But what impresses us is the track record of the heavyweight authors That’s right, it’s the Henry Kissinger, the man who used to rule the world when Terry Jacks was top of the UK Hit Parade with Seasons in the Sun and the most advanced IT you could buy was a quadraphonic HiFi set.

We include a slightly jaundiced review by Kevin Roose of the New York Times.[1] for balance. But basically Henry and the boys are on to something, we think. And remember this-if you thought AI was dangerous, wait for quantum computing, which is actually up and running. Plus ca change!

[1]

_{we thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for this story}

#AI #quantum computing #henry Kissinger #technology #future

If you want to know how England works, you have to understand that we have a class system like no other advanced country does. Deeply entrenched fault lines of education and money, religiously policed, run through us like the veins of ore in a clapped out mine. No where is this more deeply betrayed than in our voices-a point foreign language learners could never grasp. “how you know, teacher, this woman private educated?” they reeled in disbelief at my reaction to a short voice over in some language software programme. “You learn quickly when you career-and your life” depend on it. ” I replied.

One man exposits all this in a way that is far clearer, funnier and more intelligent than we could ever hope to be. That man is Nick Cohen. Foreign readers, if you really want a glance into another country, in this case England, read his piece which we have appended below.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/27/why-do-we-britons-still-genuflect-before-age-old-class-caricatures

We have always loved flight, even if we get a little nervous. From the Montgolfier Brothers onwards the idea of invading another environment without a single genetic change, showed humanity at its most awesomely intelligent. We still believe that its ability to whisk millions around the globe will slowly erode the chains of xenophobia.

The downside is of course glaring: every time your jet whisks you off to Benidorm or Bahrain, you make the seas below a little deeper, the air around a little more poisonous….until all our dreams dissolve in a catastrophic ecological crash. We need to get the petrol out of planes. But what else has the sheer power, apart from cracking carbon molecules, to lift all that steel and glass and humanity safely off the runway, and deliver it to any viable economic distance? “Ay, there’s the rub”, as Hamlet once said before he went into the cigar business.

The answer has always seemed to lie in electrically powered planes. But there have always been real doubts about their power and range. But it seems that the people at Rolls Royce just won’t be beaten. This week they unveiled an electric plane which can fly for 30 minutes; that reached 387.4 mph (623.45km) and could climb to 3000m in in 202 seconds. Look at the report by Shivali Best of the Mail [1]if you don’t believe us; it’s packed with data, pictures and videos.

Seen it? Good-what does it remind you of? Like nothing so much as one of those early 1930s fighter prototypes. Which in their day broke all kinds of new rules on power plants, streamlining, materials and controls. This thing won’t get you to Majorca. But it means that something based on it will-quite soon. The power of human intelligence is the best way to soothe our current angst. But try telling that to the vast number s who still believe in conspiracies and populist politicians.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-10229341/Rolls-Royce-unveils-worlds-FASTEST-electric-plane-Aircraft-reaches-387-4mph.html

[2] https://www.rolls-royce.com/innovation/accel.aspx

#rols royce #greenaviation #electric flight #global warming #climate change #transport

Remember the far off decade of the 2000s, when every acned adolescent interjected the words “like” and “cool” into every sentence? Apparently they were following a trend set by teenage girls in California’s San Bernadino Valley. But it made ordinary conversations-such as those in the hall of a bank-almost impossible to pursue with the young, fashionable and misguided.

That plague seems to be past its worse. But a regular reader, Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire, has drawn our attention to another-the rise of so. Scarily, the educated and discursive(people like us) seem more vulnerable to the infection than mere adolescents are.

Normally this humble little English word functions as a vital but near-invisible component of our thoughts, both as conjunction and adverb. However according to Mr Seymour and a host of experts (see [1] [2] below) there is a baleful trend to use it as meaningless conversational interjection, to hide meaning and lead conversation off in a different direction from the answer the interlocutor was expecting. John Humphrys dissects this for the Mail, while Christina Sterbenz was charting its rise for Business Insider as far back as 2014.

And so we invite you, good readers to watch out for this word and its use by communicators of all types, but especially politicians in every interview you listen to. Has the speaker uttered it to clarify their meaning, or obscure it? Is what they are saying logical? Does it clash with with any other things they say? So now you have a little task. Clear communication is so important.

[1] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3132195/SO-wrong-John-Humphrys-rage-little-word-invades-everyday-speech.html

[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-everyone-is-starting-sentences-with-the-word-so-2014-5?r=US&IR=T

Does your immune system remember? An intriguing study reproduced in Nature suggests your previous exposure to pathogens influences your response to current ones. Which in turn raises questions about what we mean by “memory-and is it molecular? How childhood colds affect Covid

Evidence is building that people’s immune responses to COVID-19 could be affected by previous infections with common-cold coronaviruses. The phenomenon, evocatively dubbed original antigenic sin, has been documented for influenza: some people are better at fighting off seasonal flu when the strain of virus is similar to the first one they encountered in childhood. However, to what extent it affects people with COVID-19 — and whether it provides enhanced protection or hampers the immune response — is still unclear.Nature | 7 min read

Brexit Bounce LSS promised readers that we would be resolutely neutral on Brexit. So when some negative news on the subject emerges, such as the recent statistics from the Office of National Statistics, we’ll try to balance with some positive! Here’s one such from the Financial Times by George Parker and Jude Webber: Northern Ireland’s Post-Brexit trading advantage lures packing giant.

https://www.ft.com/content/0b6f751d-363b-424d-a452-7a235e13eb00

Wild at heart Everyone would love to see iconic large predators, such as wolves or lynx, re-introduced. Unless it’s near where they live. Hannah Petterson in the Conversation has a thought-provoking piece on the social, economic and ecological problems of trying this out with wolves in Spain.

https://theconversation.com/how-to-live-with-large-predators-lessons-from-spanish-wolf-country-167326?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%

It’s a junk yard up there As early as the 1960’s far-seers like Arthur C Clarke worried that Earth might end up with rings like Saturn’s, only made entirely of junk, like bits of old spacecraft, missing tools and unspeakable piles of the remains of spacefarer’s lunches. But it’s not funny if a bit of this slams into you at 28000 km per hour. Fortunately, someone wants to clean it up, and make a bit of cash as they do. Thanks Tory Shepherd of the Guardian

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/nov/20/gas-station-in-space-new-plan-to-make-rocket-fuel-from-junk-in-earths-orbit

Well, there’s four to choose from. Have a happy weekend

#rewilding #immunity #covid-19 #brexit #space

Our choice for cocktails tonight is that old favourite Campari. This cheeky refreshing drink has been a barman’s standby by for centuries. Well, decades anyway. It’s another one of those bottled mixers we have alluded to in the past like Martini, Cinzano or Dubonnet. They mix so well and fit to so many occasions, from birthday parties, pre dinner drinks, diplomatic receptions to baby’s christening.

So we can do no better than link you to their colourful, picture-packed lively web site. Pick one to enjoy, Because we will.

https://www.campari.com/our-cocktails

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A few months ago (LSS 18August 2021) we published a piece entitled Nuclear Fusion: Is this a case of jam tomorrow? It was a bit sniffy and pessimistic. We noted current progress and astute readers will have sensed that we were still less than carried away by the whole thing. Nuclear fusion offers the promise of cheap abundant green energy which will transform the world. But people have been making these promises for more than sixty years. We remember the rocket of cold fusion soaring and falling back to earth in 1989. And anyway-isn’t there a free fusion reactor called the Sun handily close? All you need is a few photovoltaic panels.

But greater minds than our own think differently. We refer to that superb publication Nature Briefings, and will always pay attention to what they say. Today they run a review of latest commercial progress on the various efforts to tame the power of colliding nuclei. Nature puts its faith in advances in both materials and the supporting information technologies which should allow better designs of the reaction technologies, and hopes that these finally get researchers over the line.

It’s not that we’re against fusion, goos readers. We hope that our pessimism is unfounded. Read the article in that light, and keep your fingers crossed

The start-ups chasing fusion energy

Long derided as a prospect that is forever 30 years away, nuclear fusion seems finally to be approaching commercial viability. There are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, attracting billions in private investments. Advances in materials research and computing are enabling technologies other than the standard designs that national and international agencies have pursued for so long. “Sooner or later this will be cracked,” says Chris Kelsall, chief executive of the fusion firm Tokamak Energy in Culham, UK. “And it will be transformative.”Nature | 15 min read

#fusion #energy #climatechange #nuclear fusion #power