Boris' horns

Boris Johnson, if as seems likely, becomes the Tory's next leader and Britain's next prime minister, will be walking on the horns of a dilemma. To aid Trump in whatever he wants in the hopes of getting post-Brexit trade deal, or risk upsetting the Orange Narcissist and crash our of Brexit with nothing else in place.

He has no friends in Europe to help him, having alienated them all with his all or nothing hard Brexit stance. And if Trump decides to take on Iran, he will likely dangle a trade deal to get Boris on board.

The Brits should be very wary of any promises Trump makes on Trade. Until it's passed by the Congress it Trump's assurances are nothing but vacuous showboating. Even if Congress does pass legislation, Trump has shown that he can still ignore legislation until forced to comply in court, a length (and costly for UK exporters) eventuality.

Brexit can't be delayed until there is a new occupant in the White House, even if that were 2021. So Boris is going to have to make some tough choices; become Trump's puppy dog and keep his finger's crossed, crash our of the EU with no US trade deal in place, or, perish the thought, embrace a soft Brexit.               

The Last Build

For several years I have been contemplating building a new desktop computer. Looking back through my Newegg order history, I found that I had  been using the Intel Quad core Q9300 since May 2008!  Time flies ever faster these days.

The Last Build has been a wish-list on Newegg for at least two years; this May, with some heavy data analysis for CATOE on the horizon, I decided to pull the trigger, on an almost no compromise machine. That didn't include going crazy with whizzy graphics card, but did include:

• AMD Rayzen 7 1700X 8 core processor
• 64GB of RAM 
• Water cooling
• 960MB M.2 SSD (and no Winchester (mechanical) disks!) 
• Mint 19.1
• GIMP 2.10 (which supports 16 bit image files)

Issues so far include a problem with keyboard lag which for the moment is solved by plugging the mouse's USB receiver (!) into the front rather than the back of the box, Code::blocks crashing every 3 minutes or so, and the DVI-display port cable not working.

Otherwise the system is fast and quieter then the old machine. I am not going to overclock and have no case fans other than the two on the radiator, all in the interests of lowering the background noise. 

This configuration should last me at least until retirement (and probably the rest of my life). That's a sobering thought. 

Chernobyl

Craig Mazin, the writer and director of the HBO's mini-series based on the Chernobyl disaster, and Johan Renck, have created one of the most compelling pieces of television drama this year. Yes, there are things that aren't historically accurate; the helicopter crash over the open reactor core and the composite character of Ulana Khomyuk. But to harp on these is to completely miss the point. The story here is of incompetence and cowardice, juxtaposed with genius and bravery. It is of our limited ability to control the complex systems we create.

Stellan Skarsgard does a tremendous job of portraying the tension between political correctness (Soviet style) and reality, as in the first two episodes, he begins to understand the enormity both of what has happened to the reactor and to him (radiation poisoning). The show paints a wonderful picture of short-cuts, miss-steps, heroism, callousness and patriotism. It shows how in complex systems, both technical and societal, small deviations can aggregate and amplify to create catastrophic outcomes.

The Chernobyl explosion was in part a technical flaw, but one that was brought to the fore though a series of human stupidity, ambition, loyalty and obedience. The control room supervisor, Anatoly Dyatlov, acted recklessly (with a dose of arrogance that may or may not have been "historically accurate"). But, as Lagasov notes in the final courtroom scene, he may have been relying on the AZ-5 emergency reactor shutdown procedure working to make the core safe. But the Soviet system had suppressed a finding that suggested that the graphite tips on the control rods might cause a problem when the rods were reinserted into an out of control core.                       

The series is beautifully crafted, with moments of calm interspersed with high drama. It is satisfyingly complete with the exposition of the disaster in the first episode and a more detailed recapitulation of the disaster woven into the final scenes. And it is chock full of shocking small reminders of the enormity of the event; the chunk of graphite from the core that burns a firefighter's hand, the radiation burns on the face of the technician Dyatlov sends into the reactor building just after the explosion, the sealing of the dead firefighters' coffins, first in lead-lines steel jackets, welded shut, and then interred in a concrete filled mass grave. Or the "bio-robots" (soldiers) running across the roof of the reactor building throwing radioactive debris back into the core, or the crews sent to shoot any animals still alive in the vicinity of the plant. All is set against the ominous backdrop of police state surveillance coordinated by by a frighteningly evil head of the KGB in a wonderful understated portrayal by Alan Williams.         

In the end the message is simple; with the best will in the world, and clearly that was sorely lacking in many instances in Soviet Russia, complex systems are hard to control and can quickly blow up in your face. And that lesson is as applicable to the complex system of checks and balances in American democracy and the slow moving catastrophe of man-made climate change (or the global financial markets), as it is to the Soviet nuclear power industry in the 1980s.