All I have done is drawn some lines to a map from Our World in Data – eight straight lines and one with a single curve.

As I said, I cannot explain it, but I can rule out some things.

Its not government policies that are critical. Our World in Data has multiple maps of government responses, and there seems to be no sign of correlation.

Its not GDP either.

My first though was of a link with GDP, but while most of the worst affected countries are rich ones, there are two many execpetions both ways.

I cannot see any obvious link to how healthy populations are either.

It occurs to me that Japan, by far the biggest (in terms of population) first world country with a low Covid death rate has an unusually healthy population: in particular a healthy diet and very low rates of obesity. Maybe some combination of wealth and health is the explanation.

In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic we cannot claim it was unforeseen. Many people had warned of it, pandemics have occurred before and it was inevitable others would in the future. It was no black swan event.

There were tsunami warning systems, and people knew the 2004 tsunami was heading towards South Asia, but no one had given any thought to how to pass warnings to countries outside those involved in the warning system, and while they dithered, people died.

We will now be well prepared for a viral pandemic for the next few decades but there might not be another this serious for a century. Will we really stay prepared for that long?

In the meantime there are other things that may happen, and dealing with one disaster does not make us any better prepared for another. How well are we prepared for another Carrington Event, event for example? Very few people have even head of it, as a solar storm did little damage in 1859 so it was not a disaster then, but it would be one now, knocking out electricity, telecommunications, positioning systems like GPS, and a lot more. This is despite a near miss in 2012 which should have acted as a wake-up call.

Many of the changes in response to COVID are actually making us more vulnerable solar storms and the like. More working from home, greater use of electronic payments, more online shopping, and the general reliance on electronics which will simply stop working.

When we do successfully anticipate and prevent a disaster, many people regard it as a non-event – take the millennium bug, for example. Many people say “nothing happened, so it was a pointless scare”. Nothing happened because it was dealt with.

There are many other disasters we are unprepared for. Meteoroid strikes sound like something out of science fiction or prehistory, so they get filed as “not real”. They are real, and have occurred not much longer ago than the last killer pandemic. The Tunguska Event happened in Siberia in 1908, so, although it destroyed many tens of millions of trees, it did not kill many people. That was luck, it could just as easily have hit a densely populated area.

In Arthur C Clarke’s book 2001, a meteoroid defense system was built after Venice was destroyed by one. Sadly, that is probably what it will take to persuade humanity to prepare for it. In the meantime we are doing very little.

Space weather is on the UK’s “National Risk Register Of Civil Emergencies” but without public discussion and scrutiny it is impossible to know what, if anything, is being done to help us cope. There are no serious plans anywhere to deal with meteoroids, not even real warning systems. These are threats far worse than COVID – they really could be the end of the world, or at least civilization and most human life – but lets “cross that bridge when we get to it”, and its far too late.

Her first complaint is power cuts, and the resulting interruptions to her work. In the third world its normal. Buy a generator, an in-car charger or an external battery pack.

Her next complaint was that the bank was closed though bother businesses were open. After 10 years she has not worked out why every calendar in the country shows three different types of holiday: “public” holidays for the state sector, “mercantile” holidays for the state sector, and “bank” holidays for … can you guess? It is archaic, but it has a certain inertia and it would be hard to change if it meant depriving some people of holidays they currently have. It is a nuisance, but it is hardly a major issue.

The next is a failure to understand how she was to behave at a wedding. Again, she does not know a fairly common custom (did I mention she has lived in the country for 10 years?) and is then embarrassed when someone stops her doing the wrong thing. It happens, and its mildly embarrassing. Big deal, I am sure similar things happen to anyone in an unfamiliar culture.

Next, she is patronising at being a guest of honour at the wedding of a couple she barely knows. I am guessing she is a lot more affluent (or perceived as more affluent) than the couple. This is common practice in Sri Lanka: you get the most important person you can. If you have lots of clout you get someone like the president or an ex-president. If you do not have money of influence you get a freelancer who seems more affluent than most people around. It is not a practice I like, but in essence its fairly harmless showing off no worse than a lot of things people do at weddings (and a lot less harmful than spending more than you can afford on them, which is also common).

She then complains that she has to pay more for entry at tourist attractions because she is white. Simply not true. She has to pay more because she is not a Sri Lankan citizen. There are white Sri Lankans (now very few after decades of mixing and emigration) and they will pay the Sri Lankan price. She could have applied for Sri Lankan citizenship if she wants to pay local rates. Contrary to what she says, compared to the privileges many countries give their citizens over resident foreigners, paying more at tourist attractions seems pretty trivial. If anything, Sri Lanka tends to privilege foreigners over its own citizens (see below).

She then talks about how unfair this is to foreign residents on local salaries who pay taxes. Where did she find those? The last European I met who claimed to be on a “local salary” turned out to be getting well over double the pay of Sri Lankans doing the same job in the same organisation. I did once meet someone who was on a genuinely local salary: a temporary job while setting down. In fact, foreigners in Sri Lanka almost always get paid a lot more than locals (usually getting the western salaries that the Sri Lankans who could have done the job have emigrated to get, plus an expat allowance). In fact, people are often paid expat salaries for jobs that it would be easy to hire a local for far more cheaply: apparently some organisation cannot find Sri Lankans to do IT jobs (you know the sort of thing that gets outsourced to South Asia…).  Some organisations even have set separate local and expat salary scales. All this would be illegal in most (if not all) developed countries.

She then objects to referred called a “suddhi” (white woman), but seems to fail to understand that this is not a derogatory term. Race in Sri Lanka is not even primarily determined by skin colour, and the adjectival form even used by some families as part of the nick-name for the lightest-skinned member.

Next comes her objection to being disturbed by an exorcism that she describes as a “Hindu religious ceremony”. I believe that there are such things, but given where she lives it may have been a Buddhist ceremony, or even witchcraft and not a religious ceremony at all. She has a general prejudice against religion, the strangest part of which she is that she describes herself as “a non-believing, non-practising Catholic”. I used to be one of those: I called it “being an agnostic”. The Dawkins like tone of her writing suggests that she is an atheist: was it really necessary to the phrase “loopy shit”? It is a bit strange if you are not used to it, and I do not know much about it, but I am sure you can find quite a lot of equally strange stuff in any country. I do not believe in it, so, apart from the inconvenience of it being noisy, I do not care one way or another if my neighbours do it.

Next she complains about gecko shit. This is an entirely valid complaint, if you think it important or likely to have much impact on your life.

Finally a long rant about belief in karma. She expects this to be controversial, but its an argument that lots of people have made before.

So what is the real purpose? It varies, but the key in most cases is to control consumers. Consider the the Amazon Kindle and the DRM Amazon applies to books. Again, the content is available without DRM through the Kindle Cloud Reader: although, as far as I have been able to find out it is in any case fairly simple to remove the DRM from Kindle ebooks, so no one bothers the more awkward process of intercepting the DRM free content in Cloud Reader.

The real purpose of Kindle DRM is to make it expensive to switch to to another device. A consumer who has a collection of books and wants to switch to another ebook reader must purchase new copies of every single book they want to keep. This ties consumers down, maintaining market share against existing competitors and making it very difficult for a new entrant into the market to gain share at all. The tech savvy minority will strip the DRM, but for the majority of customers switching will simply not be an option.

Of course many services have exceptions to DRM: much of the music Apple sells is now DRM free, and Amazon Kindle software can be used to read Kindle books on an Android tablet (and the Cloud Reader to read on any platform), but the remainder is still a very high barrier to switching. Furthermore, none of these are guaranteed to remain available: they may turn out to be a  way of leading customers into lock-in, and may be withdrawn once their purpose has been sufficiently served. In Apples case its customers are locked in in multiple ways, not just DRM, so selling some content without DRM does not loosen the lock very much.

The bottom line is that DRM is a way of limiting competition; a way of routing around free market competition.

Industrial/technological civilisation is inevitably doomed

Lets start with the most grandiose and pessimistic ideas. There are, in fact, several possibilities here, united in that they are explanations of the Fermi paradox, which means that they must apply to any civilisation (not just ours) and any intelligent beings (not just humans). From the Drake equation there should be someone out there, but we cannot find them. An inevitable doom is one explanation.

So, we what could this inevitable doom be?

1. The inevitable invention of a technology that destroys civilisation. We have already invented nuclear weapon and biological weapons, and are likely to invent more. There is a fair amount of potential for biotechnology or nano-technology to produce something nasty enough to bring down civilisation.
2. Resource shortages: his hardly needs explanation. We know we will run out of oil and other fossil fuels, as well as some metals (lithium for example). Even basic materials like wood are in danger. All of these are needed to sustain out civilisation. So far we have kept ahead of Malthus with advancing technology, but there may be some limit that will end this and stabilise the world at a minimal standard of living. See below for more.
3. Natural disaster: not the most probable. We know that really large natural disasters (such as those that caused mass extinctions) happen tens of millions of years apart. This is too infrequent, and, unless the earth is a very safe place compared to other planets the maths will not work.
4. The berserker explanation. This is named after Fred Saberhagen’s berserker books. There is a hostile force (or forces) that destroy every civilisation they find. They may do this to ensure potential rivals never do the same to them, or as a result of past wars. All civilisations are either destroyed or hide themselves, maintaining radio silence.

As we do not maintain radio silence, and, at the very least, anyone with a radio telescope within a 60 light year or so (and expanding) radius will see that there is something in the solar system emitting far more microwave and radio radiation over many wavelengths than the sun should. Given how useful these are (we use them for cooking, radar, communications, medicine and more) it is hard to imagine any technological civilisation not emitting a comparable amount.

Global cooling

One of the commonest criticisms of global warming (as a hypothesis) is that until recently scientists expected a global cooling leading to a new ice age — so why should we think the models are right this time? Suppose that the models were right both times. How can this be possible? It could be true if we were heading for an ice age that was warded off by anthropogenic global warming.

We unlikely to be able to control human activity to balance the two because we would need very accurate models and iron discipline to do so. It would also be made impossible by any positive feedback effects (e.g. from growing/shrinking ice sheers reflecting more/less sunlight back into space).

If we are lucky we may have a choice about whether to regulate human activity to bring about a hothouse or an ice-age.

Some one nasty has some of the missing uranium

A lot of uranium (and other dangerous substances) seems to go missing, much of it weapons grade. Not only is Uranium missing in Iran, but over the years almost every country that has fissile materials seems to have lost some, including some quite large amounts in the US. States that mine uranium include some pretty unstable places, and one wonders whether it really all tracked from mine onwards in the first place — aside from what we know they have lost.. The hundreds of failed attempts to smuggle fissile materials out of Russia alone suggest that some must have been successful.

On the positive side, a small nuclear bomb will only get a section of a reasonably large city, so we are not talking about an end of the world scenario here. On the other hand most press coverage only looks at weapons grade uranium, whereas what is used in civilian reactors (of which there are many) is quite adequate to make a dirty bomb.

Big solar flares are more likely than we think

The big shiny thing in the sky is constantly flaring up like a teenager and causing interference with things like short-wave radio. Most of the time its nothing most of us would even notice. However, a really big solar flare would cause a lot of damage, knocking out telecommunications, satellites and even electricity grids. A big solar flare in 1859 not only set telegraph systems on fire, it generated enough electricity to allow them to operate with power disconnected. The effect on more delicate modern electronics could be much worse. In a society dependent on computers and telecommunications a really big solar flare, or series of them, could d enough damage to bring essential services to a stand still: maybe even for long enough to bring down civilisation. A few days of disruption to power, food and communications could suffice.

We have reached the limits of technological advance

One possible explanation for the slowdown in technological innovation is that we are reaching the limits of what is possible. All the basic key technologies that matter have been invented, and there is no more to come. As continuing technological advance is what had kept us ahead of Malthus, providing replacements for scarce materials, the ability to grow and transport more food, and allowing us to use resources more efficiently, the result of a failure to keep advancing will be reducing resources per capita, and falling living standards: until we reach the point where the death rate (from malnutrition and disease) rises to stabilise the population.

It is natural to think of climate models as being physical simulations (which they are) and therefore similar to many proven applications such as aerodynamic models used to design aircraft. The difference is that the models used by engineers are proven by testing and use. You can can test a model of aerodynamics against the results of wind tunnel tests and measurements taken on real aircraft.

Climate models have only one earth to test their models against. This is worse than many economic and finance models which may be tested against multiple economies, markets or securities. It is closer to financial models than to most used by engineers and scientists in that it is not possible to deliberately construct an experiment to test the model: one has to wait patiently for the world to produce the data to test against.

The solution is to back-test a model. The problem is that back testing needs a lot of historical data. Accurate deliberate measurement of temperature and other climate indicators is very recent compared to the pace of geological change.

Back testing also needs to cover periods in which a full range of conditions occurred: a model of financial markets needs to cover multiple serve bubbles and crashes. Similarly, a model of climate change needs to be back tested against multiple ice-ages and warm periods.

Some of the data is available from tree rings, ice-cores and similar sources, but, as far as I am aware, they are limited in the coverage they offer. In practice, as mentioned in my previous post, climate models appear to be tested against a few hundred years of data or less. This is for forecasts covering centuries and processes that take hundreds of thousands of years. By comparison the bank’s risk models (which only needed to make comparatively short term forecasts), look positively well tested.

The other problem with back testing complex models against limited data is that it is possible to construct many models that pass back-testing but which contradict each other when it comes to forecasts. Which are correct? The biggest problem with limited data is that it is possible to keep tweaking a fundamentally wrong complex model until it fits all the available data.

Another similarity is that climate models consist of many mutually interacting factors that cannot be analysed and modelled separately because they affect each other. In a climate model this may mean ocean and air temperatures in different parts of the world, in a financial model it may mean profit and capital investment. The global climate is clearly more complex than the subjects of most financial models (companies and markets), and can be better compared to models of national economies (not something that I would believe long term forecasts about).

Another problem with complex models is that they are very sensitive to small tweaks: a very small change to the model or to the data input into it can mean a huge difference in the output. This means that the results are uncertain because it is difficult to be sure which finely balanced choices to make.

This also creates a problem on the human side of modelling. The first problem is that small mistake or convenient simplification can drastically affect the results. The other is that models become biased towards the existing consensus.

A model that makes predictions very different from the consensus tends to be checked for mistakes far more carefully than a model that confirms the consensus view. This means that mistakes that cause a deviation from the consensus are far more likely to be found than those that wrongly confirm the consensus view.

Anyone who puts forward a model that gives very different results from everyone else’s is taking a risk: you look foolish if your model is found to be faulty or if the predictions are incorrect. Sell side analysts are notorious for running with the herd (when I was one I did not look at anyone else’s forecasts, and I still think that is a good idea when possible). At least financial modelling offers you the possibility of financial rewards if you are right when the consensus is wrong. Climate models lack even this (inadequate) counter-incentive as you will be long dead by the time your forecast is vindicated.

The forecasts that most matter made by climate models are those for hundreds, or even thousands, of years in the future. It is also forecasting a very slow process: it takes many years to establish trend or the breading of a trend. This means that it will take a long time for any mistakes in a models to become evident.

What is the solution? To rely on simple models (which are not so susceptible to tweaking to fit), to rely primarily on what the data actually shows has happenned, and to treat complex models as unproven theories.

Update, Sept 2012: That website is no longer up, as the school failed to renew the domain name. I believe they have plans for a new site.

Update, April 2015: My daughter moved to another school some time ago as well.

Firstly, I question that the competition is unfair. Yes, Mark Shuttleworth is in a position to through money at Ubuntu because of his personal wealth. So what? If he is doing so because he thinks it will make a profit, then that is just capitalism in action.

If he is subsidising Ubuntu even though it does not make economic sense, he is putting money into Linux development and strengthening network effects around Linux — the area where Windows is hardest to compete with.

Ubuntu’s big achievement has been marketing. The combination of Shuttleworth’s high profile and willingness to spend on marketing has got people to use Linux who otherwise would not have done.

Ubuntu has certainly changed the market: it has badly damaged some distros, encouraged Ubuntu (and Debian) derived distros, and hugely damaged KDE by exposing new users to the badly implemented Kubuntu.

I agree with Adam that Mandriva is currently better than Ubuntu: its control centre, easy installation, good KDE implementation and helpful (to a large extent thanks to Adam) forums more than make up for its shortcomings (less dependable package management and lots of bugs in less popular packages). I have used Mandriva for years (when it was Mandrake, starting with version 8), and even paid for some versions. I would pay again if the shortcomings were fixed.

The problem is that Mandriva (and other distros) never got the momentum going that Ubuntu has. They did not do it before Ubuntu appeared, and I do not believe they would have done it if Ubuntu had not appeared.

I do think Mark Shuttleworth genuinely does want to make Linux a real competitor to Microsoft (i.e. with comparable market share), and the sort of aggressive promotion that takes is bound to squash some other Linux companies. Eventually, we end up with bigger and better Linux. Overall, its a win for Linux.

In Sri Lanka your race is that of your father. This is not merely a matter of social convention, but of official record. Race is (appallingly) recorded on birth certificates and must be stated when making a statement to the police (as must religion). In addition nationalists regard Sri Lanka as a Sinhalese Buddhist country — much as some American conservatives regard the US is a white Christian country.

In addition, there is enormous social pressure to follow behaviours dictated by race. The most important of these are to follow a religion that is considered usual to one’s race, and to marry within one’s ethnic group, religion (and often caste). This is on top of the usual pressure to marry within one’s class — very restrictive constraints in combination.

The pressure to follow your parent’s religions degrades religion to ethnicity suffused with superstition, rather than a search for truth. The pressure comes from both society and agencies of the state. Someone who declares that they follow a religion that is not associated with their ethnicity will not be believed. It is also not possible to declare oneself to be an atheist or agnostic, as most people have never heard of these concepts — and declarations of religion are officially required. The pressure to conform, and the lack of knowledge of important options means that although freedom of religion is guaranteed by the constitution, it is not meaningful to most people.

All this also means that one can almost always deduce someones race, religion and (where it exists) caste from their name.

In Britain racial classifications often follow the nationality of one’s ancestors. For example Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. These would obviously be very different is the partition of India had not happened, or if Bangladesh had not broken away from Pakistan. Race is based on comparatively recent political developments. Different classifications of ethnicity cut across these groups: for example Bengali Indians and Bangladeshis share common ancestry, language and culture.

This classification exists partly to avoid mentioning another subject that difficult to discus is Britain: class. The Indians are largely middle class, the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis working class. That is why the former do better educationally and integrate better with British society. More elaborate explanations are redundant.

My own experience of the inconsistencies of classification are the differences between Britain and Sri Lanka. I am sufficiently dark skinned (by British standards) to be unambiguously classified as Asian. My Dutch surname (and, to a lesser extent, my light skin my Sri Lankan standards) means that I am equally firmly classified as a Burgher — strictly speaking this means of Dutch ancestry, although a less snobbish common usage includes those of Portuguese ancestry as well.

One perspective that I lack on this issue is how it feels to be a member of a majority. Even places like Hultsdorf ceased to be somewhere someone of my ancestry could blend in seamlessly long before I was born.

My own conclusion is much like that of Willem Buiter’s post. It can be stated as God (literally) knows who I am, nothing else is necessary. Alternatively (and this was obviously more relevant when I was an agnostic), this can be stated as what Terry Pratchett readers might recognise as a Granny Weatherwax approach: I am me.