Newest thoughts →

December 2021

An interesting, if alarming, conversation with immunology last week re. patients with secondary immunodeficiency. In many ways, the most dangerous part of the pandemic is coming up for this group for a few reasons.

1. as antibodies gradually filter into immunoglobulin products, they will only be, at first, at very low levels and only acting against earlier variants, thereby creating good conditions for immune escape, apparently

2. the continued profile of unmitigated spread and people thinking it won't harm them doesn't help this vulnerable group

3. BUT, the new antivirals ARE anticipated to make a huge difference and the immunologist did say that he thought I stood "a good chance of surviving" if I received these.

So all a bit of a mixed bag at the moment.

Last night, we watched THE TRUFFLE HUNTERS. It is a quirky portrait of very old men and their dogs searching for truffles in rural Italian settings, contrasting with the international truffle trade. It paints a charming picture of the men's affection for their canines.

It's definitely overly sentimental and playing into the continental quirkiness aspect, but I still greatly enjoyed it. The relationship between Aurelio Conterno and his lovely dog Birba was just gorgeous to watch.

One of the things that I am surprised hasn't been developed in response to Sci-Hub is a legit, cross-publisher "just give me a PDF" facility. People use Sci-Hub even when they have legit access because it's just so damn easy. You put in a doi. You get the article.

By contrast, logging in legitimately takes the user on endless oAuth loops, down ridiculous warrens of library discoverability systems, redirects back to pages that are not the article that you wanted.

You'd just think, although it still wouldn't be as good as the endless access of Sci-Hub, publishers might try to cooperate to make something comparable on the *usability* front, if S-H really is as big a threat as they claim.

I know about the OA Button BTW as I don't live under a rock. The point I am making is that publishers keep saying what a threat Sci-Hub is. But they keep pushing out a product that is infinitely crapper than it, even if it weren't just about access restriction.

You'd think if they wanted seriously to compete with it, they could make a "just give me the PDF from the DOI" service for your legit access.

This is good news. However, with a doubling time of 48hrs it only gives a few days of lead time before hospitalisations are at the same level as previous variants?

Huge thanks to the immunologist today who gave me his email and said he'd ensure I get anti-viral meds ASAP if I got covid. This kind of care makes such a difference.

My rheumatoid arthritis has decided to give me an early Christmas present by flaring to the point where I can't walk. Feeling quite sorry for myself 😔

This year, 3 of us have isolated for 10 days and are going to see my Nan for her 101st Christmas.

Admittedly, this was zero change for us...

“The issue seems innocuous enough: how many buttons should a mouse have?” - Thierry Bardini

Me: 🍿🍿🍿 FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT 🍿🍿🍿

Other news from the clinical trial I am involved in is mixed. Only ~50% of patients with my condition made any antibodies in response to vaccine (I wasn't one of them). But we did mount a T-cell response. And my immune replacement drugs are beginning to show covid antibodies.

Wow.

I just got a very good email from the NHS saying that I am eligible for antiviral treatment if I get Covid. They are sending me a PCR kit to store at home and if I get it, they say I'll now be given the treatment within 24hrs. This sounds very promising.

Hit the 70,000 word mark today on PAPER THIN and feel I _could_ pack up this work for Christmas. However, it also feels as though the writing is getting easier now, as though I've broken the structural backbone of it and it's just unfolding. So think I'll keep going.

Must say, I love Douglas Engelbart's five-bit idea of resurrecting the "chord keyboard", which you operate with a single hand, but play "chords" with in order to type. (So a "C major triad" could be an "H" for example.)

Requires only a single hand to operate. Could be really quick once you'd learned it. But did anybody want to go to a new (old) system of playing chords when they'd already taken on the incorporated practice of typing? Of course they didn't.

The thing is, the current policy of not limiting the spread of this virus seems, to me, incompatible with having a modern healthcare system.

Patients in hospital are inherently vulnerable. So if staff at hospitals are infected, because the virus is running wild, anybody vulnerable in hospital is also at risk.

Further, I've heard of 3x routine hospital appointments for people I know cancelled this week because so many NHS staff are off sick. We don't have a functioning and safe healthcare system at this point, due to Covid.

Interesting history of computing/pagination fact that I've just learned. In Douglas Engelbart's NLS (oN-Line System), an early 1960s computer prototype system, files were called "scrolls" and users "jumped" to specific points in them. Before the metaphor of memory paging.

Because I am a glutton for reviewing punishment, I've just accepted a third term on the AHRC's Peer Review College until 31 December 2025.

Urgh. Made a catastrophic mistake formatting the wrong disk on one of my servers and now am in boot-repair hell. Send thoughts and prayers.

Yes! Rescued it!

'mandatory jabs for healthcare staff will have a “calamitous” impact on dental services in England, as a survey revealed that 1 in 10 dentists have not been double-vaccinated.'

Ya know what's actually had a calamitous impact on my ability to go to the dentist? Unjabbed dentists.

In March 2020, everybody on my immunology ward was asking about Covid, of course. A room full of the most vulnerable, panicked people. The answer to "how long will this last" was "2-3 years minimum". We're not at that minimum yet.

An indication of how utterly irresponsible our nation's strategy is re. the virus and the impact it has on hospital care. Rheumatology just now said they really need to get me in an MRI scanner to appraise hip damage. But they say it's not safe for me to come in at present.

This afternoon's reading, while I wait for a rheumatology video appointment, will be Thierry Bardini's Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). Looking forward to this one!

One of the most interesting parts of this was learning how influenced the original designers of computational graphical user interfaces were by now-debunked ideas of linguistic relativity (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis).

So I've now finished this. One of the most frustrating things here is the framing of this book around the idea of "bootstrapping". It's a case where there was, clearly, a demand that the book have "an argument", so it puts it within this setup.

But the book would have been much better without that framing, as a descriptive history that stands on its own, without the need to try to cast everything within this mode. I know all history has a frame of sorts, but I felt this was what let this book down.

Wheat and chessboard problem. Good for understanding why "doubling every 2 days" is really really bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem

If a chessboard were to have wheat placed upon each square such that one grain were placed on the first square, two on the second, four on the third, and so on (doubling the number of grains on each square), how many grains of wheat would be on the chessboard at the finish?

18,446,744,073,709,551,615

Or

an estimated 772.64 million metric tonnes

This week should see the launch of my new music single, aptly named "Losing It", which took a year to make, and my book, Warez, which has taken me eight years to write.

I did write 9 other books in between, mind.

My wife has become slightly obsessed by Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade, playing it on loop, and I must say it is a pretty captivating piece.

A well-meaning friend said to us, on a call the other day, that they "respect our choice" to remain isolated.

I am certain this was innocuous, but we did think: what "choice"? If I get the virus, there's a good chance I will die.

Do you say to people with fatal peanut allergies that we "respect their decision" not to eat peanuts?

"Covid live: Javid says ‘we’ve got to act early’ over Omicron"

Also "Covid live": Javid does nothing over Omicron except hope that boosters save the day.

🤷‍♂️

Getting in on the owl action with my newly arrived @BirkbeckUoL tote bag. Also pictured for the theme: our gorgeous Victorian stuffed owl, "Methuselah".

@matt1nnes

We have quite a few owls

Had a dream featuring Christmas carols where everyone sang "So God imparts to HUMAN hearts" from O Little Town of Bethlehem with the "huMAN" in the way of the Ferengi off Star Trek.

This AM we've been dealing with more permissions hell.

"We're an open-access online academic journal. We'd like to buy a perpetual license for open digital dissemination."

"OK, so you can allow 1,000 users for six months in these regions."
🤷🏻

I would like institutions of higher education now to reach out to vulnerable staff, pre-emptively, to ensure that working conditions are safe in the light of the Omicron variant. We cannot wait for government, who may exempt HE, to force our hand and must protect this group.

Risk registers need updating now. Home working and/or remote teaching for this group needs to be a basic right. If we don't pre-empt this, people will die, and that's not an exaggeration.

A huge congratulations to my (now ex!) Ph.D. student, @floatingstones, who passed her viva today with a thesis on the "typoetics" of Hansjörg Mayer. Congratulations, Dr Ferran!

"Your password must contain at least one special character"

"Password cannot contain " % * ' [ ] \ / # space & < >"

"Your password must contain at least one SQL injection attack"

Quick Portico preservation audit of @openlibhums today. Good to see the content preserved here and in CLOCKSS, giving reassurance to authors, editors, readers and... me!

Of course, there's also THIS preservation infrastructure, which sits underneath my desk...

I realised today that the amusing thing about how I get excited about new technology -- like a new phone -- is that I then set it up in precisely the same configuration as the gear it is replacing. Hence I get some better hardware but with a near-identical experience.

Today is International Day of People with Disabilities. A reminder that many vulnerable and disabled people are still having to shield due to ongoing high levels of viral transmission.

If you want to know why Knowledge Unlatched could be sold in the first place, it's because it struggled as a not-for-profit to attract investment and its initial founder drew down her entire personal pension savings to fund it. See this interview.

https://poynder.blogspot.com/2018/11/the-oa-interviews-frances-pinter.html

Do I think that was *right*? Not necessarily. It was certainly brave and gutsy. It's more than I could have done.

It's a shame that an idea as good as KU ended up in the hands of a massive for-profit.

But we need to examine the challenges of NFP sustainability to understand it.

The basic fact is: sustaining not-for-profits is really hard. You can't have massive overheads to back you up and so are exposed to year on year fluctuations. The pool of (generous nonetheless) philanthropic orgs is relatively small.

So, if you "tie yourself to the mast", like Odysseus, you can sail past the luring songs of the for-profit sirens.

But don't expect plain sailing. And some ideas, like KU, which has made more books OA than any other, would never have existed.

Sure. It's not the way I've gone. But I do think it's quite complicated.

The World Health Organisation on Omicron:

“Persons who are at increased risk of developing severe disease and dying should be advised to postpone travel to areas with community transmission.”