Word of the day: fungibility
April 12th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of its parts is indistinguishable from another part.
For example, gold is fungible since a specified amount of pure gold is equivalent to that same amount of pure gold, whether in the form of coins, ingots, or in other states. Other fungible commodities include sweet crude oil, company shares, bonds, other precious metals, and currencies.
Fungibility refers only to the equivalence and indistinguishability of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity, and not to the exchange of one commodity for another.
OK, now that you understand fungibility, how about the current excitement over non-fungible tokens? Know all about those?
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. NFTs can be used to represent items such as photographs, videos, audio and other types of digital files.
Access to any copy of the original file, however, is not restricted to the buyer of the NFT. While copies of these digital items are available for anyone to obtain, NFTs are tracked on blockchains to provide the owner with a proof of ownership that is separate from copyright.
So, now you know …
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The Duke of Edinburgh and I
April 9th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I understand that the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme has invited particants to share their stories on social media. I achieved the Bronze Award in the early 1960s but never took it further.
As a bright lad, I found most of the stages of the award something of a doddle. The problem was the requirement to spend a night camping.
As a Manchester lad, I’d never spent a night under canvas (and, since then, I’ve never spent another night in the open). I went on the trip with a school friend from Derbyshire in the hills around his town of Glossop and we were massively underprepared.
We had no tent poles but used a snooker cue instead. While trying to plant the cue in the hard ground, it snapped, so we stood the end on a rock.
I spent all of that bitterly cold night wrapped around that cue trying to keep it upright as the wind had other ideas. I still remember seeing the moon rise, move slowly across the sky, and finally fall – as I pledged “Never again”.
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Has physics found a fifth force?
April 8th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In physics today, there is something called “the core theory” which asserts that everything consists of particles (such as electrons, protons and neutrons) and forces (namely, the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity) that arise out of fields (such as the Higgs field).
Now, for decades, scientists have sought to reconcile the general theory of relativity (which explains the cosmos) and quantum mechanics (which explains the sub-atomic world), that are known to be inconsistent with one another, into a grand unified theory (GUT) or theory of everything (ToE).
Different ideas have been proposed. Loop quantum gravity – a theory of which Carlo Rovelli is both a leading advocate and developer – has now replaced string theory – which Stephen Hawking used to propose – as the best contender for a Theory of Everything (a term used by Hawking and others but not Rovelli).
Now there is an experiment, based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, USA, which searches for signs of new phenomena in physics by studying the behaviour of sub-atomic particles called muons. The latest stage of this experiment has come up with the proposition – yet to be conclusively confirmed – that there is a fifth force in physics which could radically transform how we understand, well, everything.
More information here.
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A review of the 2018 film “BacKkKlansman”
April 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Nobody makes movies like African-American director Spike Lee who has chronicled much of the black experience in the USA. This film was actually nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture although the one of the six nominations that the work received went to Best Adapted Screenplay.
The adaptation is from the memoir by Ron Stallworth, so – incredibly – this is a true story, although some major plot features are dramatic inventions. In the early 1970s, Stallworth – convincingly played by John David Washington – was the first black officer on the Colorado Springs Police Department and, while working in the intelligence division, manages to make telephone contact with the local division of the ultra-racist Klu Klux Klan (hence the clever title of the film) because he is fluent in both the King’s English and jive.
When Stallworth is invited to meet KKK members, he has to enlist a white colleague to impersonate him. In the book, the identity of his partner remains secret but, in the film, he is ‘Flip’ Zimmerman and ably portrayed by Adam Driver. Zimmerman is Jewish which was not the case with Stallworth’s actual colleague but adds to the dramatic tension.
Real life characters with important roles are Stokely Carmichael aka Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) and KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace).
In this powerful work, Spike Lee connects the dots of historical racism in America with clips of films “The Birth Of A Nation” (1915) and “Gone With The Wind” (1939) and newsreel from the Charlotteville rallies (2017).
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Word of the day: irenic
April 2nd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
It means “tending to create peace”.
The word comes from Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, who also gives us the name Irene.
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A review of the film “The Hitman’s Bodyguard”
April 1st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This intriguing title put me in mind of the 1967 action comedy “The President’s Analyst” – what happens when the counsellor to POTUS has his own mental issues? In this 2017 movie, what happens when one of the world’s most accomplished hitmen (Samuel L Jackson) needs to be protected by one of the world’s top bodyguards (Ryan Reynolds)? There’s a good deal of profanity, an enormous amount of shooting, driving, and exploding, and some humour.
The hitman’s wife (Salma Hayek) and the bodyguard’s ex-girlfriend (Élodie Yung) are both very capable of looking after themselves as well (in real life Yung is a black belt in karate), but this is a buddy movie so we see too little of them and Gary Oldman too is underused as the baddie with an endless of supply of heavies lining up to be disposed of by the hitman and the bodyguard. But I was pleased to see location shooting in Amsterdam which I’ve visited several times.
This is what i would call a popcorn movie and did well enough at the box office to spawn a sequel.
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A review of the classic novel “All The King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren
March 31st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This 660-page work, published in 1946, is a classic example of the great American novel. Indeed it won the Pulitzer Prize and is often rated as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It has twice been made into a film: first in 1949 (winning the Academy Award for Best Picture) and much more recently in 2006. In fact, it was only after seeing both movies that I used the third lockdown of the global pandemic to tackle the novel, but I’m pleased that it did because it is a finely-written and cleverly constructed work – although of its time (so one has to overlook a few uses of the N-word).
It is set in the !920s and 1930s and written from the point of view of Jack Burden, a political reporter who covers the ascent to power of charismatic populist Willie Stark and then becomes the right-man man of the dynamic but corrupt governor of the unnamed southern state. It is widely believed that the story was inspired by the record of Huey Pierce Long (1893-1935) who was the radical populist governor of Louisiana (whom Warren was able to observe closely while teaching at Louisiana State University), a controversial character who was eventually assassinated.
Although the focus of the novel is initially Stark (usually called “the Boss”), it increasingly becomes about Burden who states: the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story”.
“All The King’s Men” presents a deeply cynical view of “poly-ticks”. Willie Stark insists several times: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” The ‘something’ is the part of a man’s record that permits him to be bullied into submission or bribed into compliance.
The novel reads like a Shakespearean tragedy with the unexpected consequences of various characters’ actions leading to a succession of deaths. Indeed a major theme of the work is that life is all about consequences. As Stark puts it: “politics is always a matter of choices and a man doesn’t set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice.” As the final words of the book put it, we all have to accept “the awful responsibility of Time”.
These days it is impossible to read the novel or view either of the film adaptations without thinking of Donald Trump.
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How does the current global pandemic compare with the influenza pandemic of 1918?
March 30th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
The influenza pandemic is usually called the Spanish flu. However, it was only called that because it came to the attention of the media more in Spain since this country was neutral and had a freer media than the Great War combatant nations of Britain, France and Germany where the flu was initially prevalent.
We don’t know for sure the origin of that pandemic but recent research suggests that it might have been a military establishment in the USA. It is highly likely that Covid-19 originated in Wuhan in China, but we can’t yet be totally certain of that. The virus might have been present in other countries before being detected in China.
The technical term for so-called Spanish flu was the H1N1 influenza virus. The technical term for the coronavirus currently rampaging through the world is SARS-CoV-2.
The Spanish flu lasted from February 1918 to April 1920, so approximately two years. The current pandemic started in December 2019 and therefore, so far, it has been running for almost a year and a half.
The Spanish flu infected around 500 million people which was about a third of the world’s population at the time. So far, Covid-19 is believed to have infected 127 million out of a current world population of 7.9 billion .
We don’t know the death toll from the Spanish flu. It is usually estimated as between 20 – 50 million, but the lowest estimate is 17 million and the highest is 100 million. The current pandemic is far from over but currently the death toll stands at 2.78 million.
The flu of 1918-1920 was experienced in four successive waves. The present pandemic is not over, but the UK and USA have had two waves and much of Europe is currently experiencing a third wave.
Most flu epidemics disproportionately kill the very young and the very old, but the Spanish flu caused a higher than expected mortality rate for young adults aged 20-40. So far, Covid-19 has disproportionately killed the over 70s.
In 1918-1920, there were no antiviral drugs and no vaccines. Already a range of treatments exist for Covid-19 and a number of different vaccines have already been developed and approved.
A final thought: the Spanish flu may have killed as many as the Great War, almost every town and village in Britain and France has a memorial to the war dead, but when was the last time you saw a memorial anywhere to the flu victims of 1918-1920? Indeed the event hardly seems to figure in history books or people’s consciousness. Which begs the question: how will the pandemic of 2019-2021(?) be remembered and memorialised?
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Joe Biden could well become a truly transformational president
March 27th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Supporters of Joe Biden’s primary challenger Bernie Sanders were convinced that he was too moderate; Biden was branded as ‘Sleepy Joe’ by his presidential opponent Donald Trump; and even many of his supporters thought that he would would Obama Mark 2, that is decent but cautious even conservative.
But, after only a couple of months in the White House, Biden is proving surprisingly successful and radical. He has already overseen the inoculation of 100 million Americans against covid and secured a $1.9 trillion economic recovery package. As Jonthan Freedland states in this article, this could be just the beginning of a performance that could rank him with FDR and LBJ:
“If he can get the pandemic under control and the economy on track, Biden is signalling that he’s ready to act big, and fast, in other spheres. In the pipeline is a green energy and infrastructure plan that, coupled with an education bill, carries an astonishing $3tn price tag. He’s also under pressure to fend off Republican voter suppression efforts, aimed chiefly at keeping black Americans away from the ballot box, by passing a voting rights act, and to make other democratic reforms, whether granting statehood to the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico or scrapping the filibuster mechanism – both of which would offset the inbuilt advantage the current system gives to America’s white, rural minority.”
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How I survived a year of lockdowns in this crazy year of a global pandemic
March 23rd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
As soon as the breakout of Covid-19 in Wuhan became news, I was following events there with great interest, not least because I have visited the city twice [some notes here].
Then, exactly a year ago today, Britain went into its first national lockdown. I noted in my diary: “Although this was widely expected and I am already more-or-less in compliance, it is a truly shocking development.” The television news that evening announced that the UK death toll was 335 of which 148 were in London where I live.
A week earlier, we had been warned that, if the country went into lockdown, a death toll of 20,000 would be “a good outcome” but that, without a lockdown, deaths could be up to 260,000. A year later, the official figure for deaths is just over 126,000 – one of the worst records in the world.
I don’t really know how long that first lockdown lasted because the restrictions were eased gradually, but I suppose it was around three months before we were able to have a reasonably normal summer. Then, in November, we had a second lockdown – this one for a month. At the beginning of January, we went into a third lockdown and are now almost three months into this.
I find myself reflecting how it has all been for me. The bottom line is : 1) I am alive; 2) I’ve not had covid; 3) I’ve had a first dose of the vaccine and next week with have my second dose; 4) I’m in good health physically and mentally. But it has been tough. Since I live alone and I’m gregarious, there has been some loneliness, isolation and boredom – nothing compared to the experience of many, many other people, but enough to make me reflective.
So, how have I coped with all these lockdowns?
I’ve walked a lot – every single day, whatever the weather. To give my walks some direction and purpose, I’ve taken photographs of many corners of central London and posted them on Facebook. The response of my FB friends has been a source of real encouragement in these isolated times.
I’ve read a lot – including some huge books such as “The Mirror And The Light” by Hilary Mantel (900 pages), “Churchill” by Roy Jenkins (900 pages), “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama (700 pages) and “All The King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren (650 pages).
I’ve watched a lot of television – not all these series about crime and violence which seem to have been so popular with so many, but the BBC and CNN news, “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah, a Sky Arts series on film directors, and as many films that I can find that I haven’t seen already. I even appeared on television – in a Valentine Day edition of “First Dates”!
I’ve written a lot – my daily diary, my blog, my website, Twitter, Facebook.
Perhaps above all, I’ve done a lot of video calls on Zoom, FaceTime, and WhatsApp. Since I’m retired, I’ve had no work calls unlike most people. Instead, in the first lockdown, I gave 26 history lessons to two 10 year olds who were away from school. In the first and third lockdowns, I’ve done a weekly film quiz with a young friend (we’ve now clocked up 16). And, of course, throughout there have been lots of chats with family and friends for which I’m deeply grateful.
But I am SO looking forward to seeing all these family and friends, to drinking and eating in cafes and restaurants, to seeing films in cinemas, to visiting art galleries and museums, and – one day – to travelling abroad again. Also I badly need a haircut.
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