Steven Shapin · Through the Trapdoor: Roger Penrose’s Puzzles

Not the sort of thing you read everyday:

‘When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by a multinational to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission,’ the director of Pentaplex said, ‘then a last stand must be made.’

The is the story of the patent protection given to the late mathematical genius Roger Penrose’s tessellated designs. The full quote is below.

One Penrose production that did break through was his tessellated tiling. You can now buy Penrose floor tiles and wallpaper; you can have your sofa upholstered and your duvet covered in Penrose tile fabric; and, naturally, there are Penrose tile jigsaw puzzles. In the mid-1970s, alive to such possibilities, Penrose obtained patent protection for the tiling designs, and entered into an agreement with a company called Pentaplex to commercialise them. But then one day Penrose’s wife went shopping in an Oxford supermarket and brought home rolls of toilet paper embossed with what appeared to be Penrose tile designs. (Tile-embossed paper was supposed to feel softer and the sheets had less tendency to stick together on the roll.) The professor was miffed: he and Pentaplex sued Kimberly-Clark, the manufacturer of the loo rolls. ‘When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by a multinational to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a knight of the realm without his permission,’ the director of Pentaplex said, ‘then a last stand must be made.’ The case was eventually settled out of court and the loo paper withdrawn; four rolls of it are now lodged at the Science Museum in South Kensington to commemorate the dispute.

I too was fascinated by the MC Escher designs. But skipped the maths.

Terence Kealey has an excellent piece on the ruination of a single UK university and by extension most UK universities. He and I used to do clinics together. Historically, he approaches politics very differently, but if he is 10% wrong on the details he is (as AJP Taylor might have said) 100% right about the important things.

Power and money – by Jonty Bloom – Jonty’s Jottings

Musk is lucky, if he was in Russia he would be learning how to fly out of a sixth floor window or in China he would just find his billions didn’t stop him being under house arrest for years.

Jim Dickinson over at WONKHE.

If you are interested in higher education this article is worth a sympathetic and nuanced read. Some of it is outside my area of interest or expertise, but it provides another example of the ability of the political classes (aided by consultancy services) to fuck things up. I don’t go along with all the mental health messaging but we have built a wasteful and expensive system that does not do what people say it does. Many students are ripped off, as is the tax payer, and there is plenty of blame to apportion to the new higher education business. The quote below is worth serious attention. Yes, measurement systems are imperfect, but we have built a monster that consumes potential wealth in plain sight.

The 2023 PIAAC (Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) results reveal that UK graduates, particularly those from England, perform relatively poorly compared to graduates in many other OECD countries across literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem-solving assessments.

The scale of the underperformance is stark. Adults in Finland with only upper secondary education scored higher in literacy than tertiary-educated adults in 19 out of 31 participating countries and economies, including England. While England has seen a 13 percentage point increase in the proportion of tertiary-educated adults between 2012 and 2023, average skills proficiency has not increased correspondingly. The PIAAC data show no significant gains in literacy or numeracy among our growing graduate population.

In other words, we’re “producing” graduates faster and more efficiently than most other systems, but they’re demonstrating lower levels of the foundational competencies that their qualifications should represent. UK tertiary-educated adults scored around 280 points in numeracy compared to over 300 in Japan and Finland. In problem-solving in technology-rich environments, only about 37 per cent of UK tertiary-educated adults reached the top performance tiers, compared to over 50 per cent in countries like the Netherlands and Norway.

That suggests that our model of “compressed intensity” may be producing credentials rather than capabilities. The three-year norm, rigid subject specialisation, grade inflation and high completion expectations all appear to prioritise the award of qualifications over the mastery of skills.

The implications are profound. If degrees are not effectively developing human capital – the literacy, numeracy, and problem-solving capabilities that employers, society and students themselves expect – then the entire economic justification for higher education expansion with its considerable personal investment comes into question.” [emphases added]

Trump tariffs bring furrowed brows to Ireland’s Botox town

But a reprieve looks increasingly unlikely. The US commerce department has launched a “Section 232” investigation into the sector which would allow the president to restrict imports deemed a threat to national security

I’m trying to keep a straight face

Patient data could power the NHS. Much of it is still stuck on paper

There was an extremely depressing article in the FT last week about how data ‘could power the NHS’ and how revolutionary the NHS app will be. I am trying hard to avoid the obvious conclusion: GPT doesn’t know what it is talking about. Snuck within, were the following paragraphs which are still damaging my wellbeing.

Charlotte Refsum, director of health policy at the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said: “The traditional argument is that having all your data in one place makes it easier for a doctor to provide care, but I think there is an added imperative in the AI era.”

“The reason a unity of records is important is that AI is eroding the asymmetry of information that exists between doctors and patients . . . you need somewhere to hold all that information in one place,” she added.  

“One of the unique features of AI is it enables you to predict — and if you can predict, you can prevent. So for the first time AI is allowing us to move from an era of ‘see and treat’ to ‘predict and provide’.” 

Note the ‘AI era’ that ends the first para and the invocation of ‘imperative’. We now know we are dealing with insider dealing. Read on.

The clue is the facile availability of the ‘Get Brexit Done’ aphorisms. They are the pathognomonic mark of the KPMG/EY/PW/McKinsey professional services bullshitter. They are used because the target is not patients or doctors but their own executives and politicians. As Alan Kay almost once said, the three word epithets are necessary because the C suite has difficulty with anything longer. Context — or even reality— doesn’t fit on the ‘deck’.

AI or complex information processing is at least 70 years old. AI is not unique in the ability to predict future events; a range of statistical approaches do this very well. For some narrow domain areas modern machine learning / AI technology is wonderful and may supplant or usefully augment human performance.

Just because you can predict, does not mean you can prevent. We know a lot about the pattern of human mortality but this does not mean we can stop everybody dying. You can predict who will get Huntingdon’s (and you don’t need AI to do this) but sadly this does not mean we can stop the development of this awful disease. Same goes for the weather.

And what are we to make of the claim that AI moves us from ‘see and treat’ to ‘predict and provide’. Why such weaselly words? Vapourware.

At least the final paragraph of the FT article had a touch of Private Eye about it. I suspect the journalist, too, was making a statement.

With the stakeholder engagement process still under way, officials were unable to say who would create the new system, when it would launch and how it would be rolled out.

Escape from capitalism…

There are two great challenges to overcome in writing a history of capitalism, as John Cassidy has in his new book, “Capitalism and Its Critics”. The main one is that almost anyone, when confronted with the words “history of capitalism” and a 600-page doorstopper, will start wondering what’s on Netflix.

The Economist

Jean-Pierre Rives

JP was present at the Toulouse vs Racing game the other week. Apparently, he has little to do with rugby now. His career, or calling, post-rugby is as a sculptor and artist. When the camera found him, he was introduced as:

“one of the iconic non-Welsh rugby players of the 1970s”. Made me smile.“I was there” as the saying goes..

Yes, I know the denominators are different, but still an eye opening comparison

The U.S. healthcare industrial complex is bigger than the entire German economy.

The Fix | No Mercy / No Malice

Pope Francis’s illusions – New Statesman

If Francis was defeated in his efforts to shape the world, defeated in his attempts even to direct his Church, it was because popes can preach, appeal, convict – but not compel. The power of the papacy is, in this sense, like the light of the moon: a beautiful illusion. St Peter’s throne is also his prison cell.