Thanks to the modern electric grid, you have access to electricity whenever you want. But the grid only works when electricity is generated in the same amounts as it is consumed. That
said, it’s impossible to get the balance right all the time. So operators make grids more flexible by adding ways to store excess electricity for when production drops or consumption
rises.
About 96% of the world’s energy-storage capacity comes in the form of one technology: pumped hydro. Whenever generation exceeds demand, the excess electricity is used to pump water up
a dam. When demand exceeds generation, that water is allowed to fall—thanks to gravity—and the potential energy turns turbines to produce electricity.
But pumped-hydro storage requires particular geographies, with access to water and to reservoirs at different altitudes. It’s the reason that about three-quarters of all pumped hydro
storage has been built in only 10 countries. The trouble is the world needs to add a
lot more energy storage, if we are to continue to add the intermittent solar and wind power necessary to cut our dependence on fossil fuels.
A startup called Energy Vault thinks it has a viable alternative to pumped-hydro: Instead of using water and dams, the startup uses concrete blocks and cranes. It has been operating
in stealth mode until today (Aug. 18), when its existence will be announced at Kent Presents, an ideas festival in Connecticut.
On Saturday 22nd September and Sunday 23rd September we will be having the first ever Oxford IndieWebCamp!
It is a free event, but I would ask that you register on Eventbrite, so I can get an
idea of numbers.
IndieWebCamp is a weekend gathering of web creators building & sharing their own websites to advance the independent web and empower ourselves and others to take control of our
online identities and data.
It is open to all skill levels, from people who want to get started with a web site, through to experienced developers wanting to tackle a specific personal project.
I gave a little presentation about the Indieweb at JS Oxford earlier this year if you want to
know more.
Many online accounts allow you to supplement your password with a second form of identification, which can prevent some prevalent attacks. The second factors you can use to identify yourself include authenticator apps on your phone, which generate codes that change every 30 seconds, and
security keys, small pieces of hardware similar in size and shape to USB drives. Since innovations that can actually improve the security of your online accounts are rare, there has
been a great deal of well-deserved enthusiasm for two-factor authentication (as well as for password managers, which make it easy to use a different random password for every one of
your online accounts.) These are technologies more people should be using.
However, in trying to persuade users to adopt second factors, advocates sometimes forget to disclose that all security measures have trade-offs . As second factors reduce the
risk of some attacks, they also introduce new risks. One risk is that you could be locked out of your account when you lose your second factor, which may be when you need it the most.
Another is that if you expect second factors to protect you from those attacks that they can not prevent, you may become more vulnerable to the those attacks.
Before you require a second factor to login to your accounts, you should understand the risks, have a recovery plan for when you lose your second factor(s), and know the tricks
attackers may use to defeat two-factor authentication.
…
A well-examined exploration of some of the risks of employing two-factor authentication in your everyday life. I maintain that it’s still highly-worthwhile and everybody should do so,
but it’s important that you know what you need to do in the event that you can’t access your two-factor device (and, ideally, have a backup solution in place): personally, I prefer
TOTP (i.e. app-based) 2FA and I share my generation keys
between my mobile device, my password safe (I’ll write a blog post about why this is controversial but why I think it’s a good idea anyway!), and in a console application I wrote
(because selfdogfooding etc.).
There’s a YouTube video from 2014 simply titled “Batman Suit-up Compilation.” As that description suggests, the 106-second clip, which has received approximately 1.86 million views,
is a highlight reel of different times in Batman movies in which the Caped Crusader dons his Batsuit.
It’s a fairly innocuous video, but it’s generated more than 550 comments. And the first responder basically sums up the discussion that continues down the rest of the page: “Was there
any point of showing Batman’s ass? Furthermore, why were Bats and Robin wearing codpieces? ”
Earlier this year, 2 friends and I decided to take on a hitch-hiking challenge to raise money for a charity called ‘The Campaign Against Living Miserably’. Last Friday Magnus, Sergio
and I set off from Brick Lane with the intention of reaching the town of ‘Twatt’ on the Archipelago of Orkney – we gave ourselves…
An especially-good post by Robin as part of his 52 Reflect series in which (among other adventures), he… hitches a lift on an
aeroplane! Well-worth reading!
A letter I got recently and a question I was asked in another forum really got me to thinking. The question was: How did you come to realize that poly-amorous relationships were
right for you? Now …
A letter I got recently and a question I was asked in another forum really got me to thinking. The question was: How did you come to realize that poly-amorous relationships were right
for you? Now that you live this lifestyle, do you think that it’s for everyone, or more “natural” than monogamy? I answered:…
I was pleased to see that one of my favourite poly bloggers came out and said what I’ve always argued: that polyamory might well not be for everyone! I’m a big fan of the idea
that everybody can learn some useful relationship-negotiation and communication skills from studying the practice of polyamory, but I’m certainly not suggesting that my lifestyle ought
to be everybody else’s!
Oh my Goat! We just finished reading this awesome pick-a-path story that helps children learn the power of kindness. Have a go… #OatTheGoat
Discovered this fun interactive storybook; it tells the tale of a goat called Oat who endeavours to climb a mountain (making friends along the way). At a few points, it presents as a
“choose your own adventure”-style book (although the forks are artificial and making the “wrong” choice immediately returns you the previous page), but it still does a reasonable job at
looking at issues of bullying and diversity.
If you happened to flip through a PC gaming magazine in the late 1980s or early 1990s, you would’ve probably seen an ad for a game called Leisure
Suit Larry, or one of its many sequels. It was a graphic adventure game first released in 1987 with the primary goal of helping its protagonist get laid. Since most games then
leaned heavily into cartoon violence, Larry’s sexual innuendo stood out. To young boys at the time, it had the mystique of a shrink-wrapped Playboy in a convenience store.
For the past 9 months I have been presenting versions of this talk to AI researchers, investors, politicians and policy makers. I felt it was time to share these ideas with a wider
audience. Thanks to the Ditchley conference on Machine Learning in 2017 for giving me a fantastic platform to get early…
Summary: The central prediction I want to make and defend in this post is that continued rapid progress in machine learning will drive the emergence of a new kind of
geopolitics; I have been calling it AI Nationalism. Machine learning is an omni-use technology that will come to touch all sectors and parts of society. The transformation of both the
economy and the military by machine learning will create instability at the national and international level forcing governments to act. AI policy will become the single most
important area of government policy. An accelerated arms race will emerge between key countries and we will see increased protectionist state action to support national champions,
block takeovers by foreign firms and attract talent. I use the example of Google, DeepMind and the UK as a specific example of this issue. This arms race will potentially speed up the
pace of AI development and shorten the timescale for getting to AGI. Although there will be many common
aspects to this techno-nationalist agenda, there will also be important state specific policies. There is a difference between predicting that something will happen and believing this
is a good thing. Nationalism is a dangerous path, particular when the international order and international norms will be in flux as a result and in the concluding section I discuss
how a period of AI Nationalism might transition to one of global cooperation where AI is treated as a global public good.
Excellent inspiring and occasionally scary look at the impact that the quest for general-purpose artificial intelligence has on the international stage. Will we enter an age of “AI
Nationalism”? If so, how will we find out way to the other side? Excellent longread.
Underappreciated video presentation on how only a few small changes to the timeline of the Internet and early Web results in a completely different set of technologies and companies
becoming dominant today. Thought-provoking.
This white paper describes our current position on quantum key distribution (QKD). QKD is an approach to key distribution that relies on the properties of quantum mechanics to
provide security.
…
For all the practical, business and security reasons given above, at this point in time we:
do not endorse QKD for any government or military applications
advise against replacing any existing public key solutions with QKD for commercial applications
The UK should continue its research and development of QKD systems. But this should be balanced by a growing body of practical QKD vulnerability research, and accompanied by the
development of methods for quantifying and validating the security claims of real-world QKD systems. Responsible innovation should be accompanied by independent validation.
…
Wise words from the NCSC here:while QKD continues to depend upon conventional components that often lack battle-testing they may have vulnerabilities. Furthermore, current
implementations of quantum cryptography fail to address the bigger and harder problems of authentication and identity – key distribution, while not perfectly solved, is still
something that we understand very well… and many real-world attacks target other parts of the process (which QKD does not seek to solve).
Either I’m getting older or movies are getting longer… and longer … and longer. So which is it? I took a look at the numbers. I studied the running time of
the top 100 US-grossing films since 1994 (2,200 films in total) and all films shot in the UK 2005-14 (2,142 films). In summary… The median length of …
Either I’m getting older or movies are getting longer… and longer … and longer. So which is it? I took a look at the numbers.
I studied the running time of the top 100 US-grossing films since 1994 (2,200 films in total) and all films shot in the UK 2005-14 (2,142 films). In summary…
The median length of a top 100 US-grossing films between 1994 and 2015 was 110 minutes
Running times have increased in six of the past seven years
The longest films are historical and western films and the shortest are animations and documentaries.
Peter Jackson makes the longest movies in Hollywood, with a median running time of 169 minutes.
The median running time of UK feature films (2008-14) was 94 minutes.
Films with lower budgets have shorter running times
The complete extended Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies are a combined 21 hours long
…
It’s reassuring to read that I wasn’t the only one to observe this trend in filmmaking, and to find that somebody else had done the research to save me from feeling the need to do so
myself! The full article also makes a number of other interesting observations; worth a read.
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably
— did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten […]
My home computer in 1998 had a 56K modem connected to our telephone line; we were allowed a maximum of thirty minutes of computer usage a day, because my parents — quite reasonably —
did not want to have their telephone shut off for an evening at a time. I remember webpages loading slowly: ten to twenty seconds for a basic news article.
At the time, a few of my friends were getting cable internet. It was remarkable seeing the same pages load in just a few seconds, and I remember thinking about the kinds of the
possibilities that would open up as the web kept getting faster.
And faster it got, of course. When I moved into my own apartment several years ago, I got to pick my plan and chose a massive fifty megabit per second broadband connection, which I
have since upgraded.
So, with an internet connection faster than I could have thought possible in the late 1990s, what’s the score now? A story at the Hill took over
nine seconds to load; at Politico, seventeen seconds; at CNN, over thirty seconds. This is the
bullshit web.
But first, a short parenthetical: I’ve been writing posts in both long- and short-form about this stuff for a while, but I wanted to bring many threads together into a single document
that may pretentiously be described as a theory of or, more practically, a guide to the bullshit web.
A second parenthetical: when I use the word “bullshit” in this article, it isn’t in a profane sense. It is much closer to Harry Frankfurt’s definition in “On Bullshit”:
It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.
In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have
achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has
been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of
people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and
spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
[…]
These are what I propose to call ‘bullshit jobs’.
What is the equivalent on the web, then?
…
This, this, a thousand times this. As somebody who’s watched the Web grow both in complexity and delivery speed over the last quarter century, it apalls me that somewhere along the way
complexity has started to win. I don’t want to have to download two dozen stylesheets and scripts before your page begins to render – doubly-so if those additional
files serve no purpose, or at least no purpose discernable to the reader. Personally, the combination of uMatrix and Ghostery is all the adblocker I need (and I’m more-than-willing to add a little userscript to “fix” your site if it tries to sabotage my use of these
technologies), but when for whatever reason I turn these plugins off I feel like the Web has taken a step backwards while I wasn’t looking.
After The Obsuritory – a blog providing reviews of old and less-well-known video games – published a
review of 1994’s Wolf, they followed-up with this additional review… written for a wolf.
