No, not post-covid nor even post-final Heineken or six-nation rugby 2020 🙁, but rather the default drink of the networker. As Bronowski might have said of a golden period of 20th century physics: it was done as much in coffee houses an in laboratories. Is imbibing alone also subject to that other familiar disapprobation?

What began as an obscure berry from the highlands of Ethiopia is now, five centuries later, a ubiquitous global necessity. Coffee has changed the world along the way. A “wakefull and civill drink”, its pep as a stimulant awoke Europe from an alcoholic stupor and “improved useful knowledge very much”, as a 17th-century observer put it, helping fuel the ensuing scientific and financial revolutions. Coffeehouses, an idea that travelled with the refreshment from the Arab world, became information exchanges and centres of collaboration; coffee remains the default drink of personal networking to this day.

The Economist | The big grind

There is lots about covid-19 that I do not understand — the biology and all that. But the NHS and government’s responses are something else. I find it hard not to assume that every statement has an ulterior motive: they are, it seems, strangers to the truth. Here is Bruce Schneier (the security guru as the Economist once called him).

Crypto-Gram: May 15, 2020 – Schneier on Security

“My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value,” Bruce Schneier, a privacy expert and fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, told BuzzFeed News. “I’m not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does anybody think this will do something useful? … This is just something governments want to do for the hell of it. To me, it’s just techies doing techie things because they don’t know what else to do.”

He writes:

I haven’t blogged about this because I thought it was obvious. But from the tweets and emails I have received, it seems not.

It has nothing to do with privacy concerns. The idea that contact tracing can be done with an app, and not human health professionals is just plain dumb.

Testing, testing and more testing, please.

Katherine Rundell writes in the LRB about the Greenland shark. I learn that these beasts who inhabit the cold deeps can live for up to 600 years. Not surprisingly, they run their lives — and their metabolism — slow: moving at 1-2mph, and only requiring the equivalent of a biscuit or two to keep a 200kg beast turning over for a day. If you wish to choose between a biscuit and the shark flesh, go for the familiar. Their fins smell of pee and the urea in their flesh is poisonous to humans. Seemingly, you have to bury the meat for months, allowing it to ferment, before hanging it out for yet several more months. She writes that for some it is a delicacy, for others an abomination. I don’t need persuading.

But, as R.H. Tawney once observed, shifts to collective provision are only realised after demonstrations that ‘high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from cholera, typhus and ignorance’: many elements of the coming future ought to be favourable to the left, though only if they are shaped politically, and if blame – always elusive in the UK’s diffuse system of responsibility – is correctly apportioned.

James Butler · Follow the Science · LRB 4 April 2020

The value of wine exchanged yearly between consumers, connoisseurs and collectors—the secondary market—has quadrupled to $4bn since 2000, says Justin Gibbs of Liv-ex, a wine-trading platform. He reckons that just 15% of those buying wine on his website are doing so to drink it. The rest see it as a store of value.

Amateur buyers of fine Burgundy fear a speculative bubble – Smoking barrels

Annoying, isn’t it? But we all tend to a naive idea of value. Especially when we think about pricing drugs.

One of the pleasures of retirement from medical practice is not being on the General Medical Council (GMC) register. If you were able to listen in on many doctors private conversations, and run some Google word analytics, the word you might find in closest proximity to the term General Medical Council (GMC) would be loathe. There would be other less polite words, too. As the BMJ once wrote: there is very little in British medicine that the GMC cannot make worse. It is a legalised extortion racket that fails to protect the public, messes up medical education and makes many doctors’ lives miserable.

The following are quotes from the Lancet and the FT. They are about the horrendous crimes perpetrated by a surgeon, Ian Paterson. The full Independent Inquiry report can be found here. I am not surprised by anything I have read in the  investigation into these crimes and the attacks on those who attempted to draw attention to them.

Health-care workers reporting concerns often come under substantial pressure from health-care management, and sometimes have to justify their own practice and reasons for speaking out. Four of the health-care professionals who did report Paterson were subject to fitness to practice scrutiny by the GMC during the later investigation because they had worked alongside him

Complicit silence in medical malpractice – The Lancet

The FT draws up some lessons. Here is number four:

The fourth lesson is that those who speak up are likely to suffer. Some of Paterson’s colleagues were worried about his practices. When six doctors raised concerns with the chief executive of the NHS trust where Paterson worked, four were themselves investigated by the General Medical Council because they had worked with him.

Maybe after clapping this Thursday evening people need to take a long hard look at the culture of NHS governance and its proxies in the UK. Pandemics just open up the cracks of incompetence that are hidden in plain sight.

As a human being, and a citizen of this country, I deplore almost everything that’s going on in public life,” Mr Herron says. “As a novelist with a bent towards the satirical, it’s a gift.

Mick Herron quoted in the Economist.

Mick Herron’s novels are a satirical chronicle of modern Britain – Spy fiction

Cito, longe, tarde.

(Leave quickly. Go far away. Come back slowly.)

Faced with a highly contagious, lethal disease for which there is no known cure, President Donald Trump has ignored that timeless advice.

Instead, like a medieval demagogue, Trump is spouting quackery and hatred straight out of the 14th century, when panicked Europeans confronting the Black Death strapped live chickens to their bodies, drank potions tinged with mercury and arsenic, and blamed the Mongols and the Jews when none of it worked.

Covid-19 Highlights Trump‘s Malignant Narcissism

The papers — at least the FT and Guardian — are full of woes about COVID-19 and Higher Education in the UK (and to a lesser degree, elsewhere). My old VC (Tim O’Shea) pointing out that few UK universities are capable of delivering reasonable online teaching in the near future. As Warren Buffet is reported to have said, when the tide goes out you can see who has been swimming without a costume. Answer: lots of people. It is just that many universities preferred the bums on (lecture) seats’ fees, since the only people who were embarrassed by them were the students.

Below is a quote from Steven Downes from last week

But it doesn’t matter. I think any genuine futurist in the field of online learning could and should have seen this coming. As I’ve repeated through the years, “educational providers will one day face an overnight crisis that was 20 years in the making.” Now it’s here.

After all, it is nearly a full quarter of a century after Eli Noam published his paper in Science with the title Electronics and the Dim Future of the University. We (?or they) were warned.

Some non-covid-19 recreational reading. Although the bees might be here longer than us..

Hive Mentalities | by Tim Flannery | The New York Review of Books

According to Thor Hanson’s Buzz, the relationship between bees and the human lineage goes back three million years, to a time when our ancestors shared the African savannah with a small, brownish, robin-sized bird—the first honeyguide. Honeyguides are very good at locating beehives, but they are unable to break into them to feed on the bee larvae and beeswax they eat. So they recruit humans to help, attracting them with a call and leading them to the hive. In return for the service, Africans leave a small gift of honey and wax: not enough that the bird is uninterested in locating another hive, but sufficient to make it feel that its efforts have been worthwhile. Honeyguides may have been critical to our evolution: today, honey contributes about 15 percent of the calories consumed by the Hadza people—Africa’s last hunter-gatherers—and because brains run on glucose, honey located by honeyguides may have helped increase our brain size, and thus intelligence.

Review of Buzz: The Nature and Necessity of Bees

by Thor Hanson. Basic Books.