Belarusian man imprisoned fos showing Canadian flag

Has it come to this? A Belarusian living in the capital city of Minsk, has been imprisoned for 15 days for hanging a Canadian flag in his window. Not because it is illegal to support Canada in Belarus, but because the red-and-white maple leaf flag is suspiciously similar to the red-and-white flag of the Belarus pro-democracy protest movement.

Siarhey Panin has never been to Canada, but the Canadian flag was sent to him by a friend in Ottawa. He was imprisoned when he refused to take the flags down in protest at Lukashenko's rigged election victory last August. It seems that the Belarus authorities do not share Mr. Panin's sense of humour.

Is Scots actually a distinct language?

I read recently about the "Scots language", and I thought, "oh, you mean the Scots dialect?" But apparently there is indeed such a thing as the Scots language. Or at least the Scots think so.

It's the language of "auld lang syne", of "wee bairns" and "bonnie lassies". It's the language of Robbie Burns, which, as you might know, can be pretty indecipherable for us Sassenachs: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain / For promis'd joy", and all that.

But as that snippet shows, it is essentially the same as English with some local words and a strong accent, which in other cases is referred to as a dialect. So, is Scots really a language in and of itself?

The Scots Language Centre website certainly believes so. In fact, it suggests that the Scots language has its own set of dialects, including Shetlandic, Orcadian, Doric, Caitnes, Mearns, Borders, etc.

Hell, there's even a Scots language version of Wikipedia, although it only has about 41,000 articles, and many of these were apparently written by an American teenager, not a native Scots speaker (not surprisingly, there have been many complaints about the quality of the Scots language throughout the site).

The Dictionaries of the Scots Language website argues that Scots has a much larger number of special vocabulary words than other English dialects. and that it even has its own grammatical conventions. It also argues that the very existence of a body of literature (albeit a pretty small one) in the Scots language is proof enough in and of itself. 

As The Economist points out, though, whether Scots should be considered a language or a dialect is, to a large extent, a political question rather than a linguistic one. In these days of independence and Brexit referendums, Scotland is keen to claim anything that would support their independence and their differentness.

Me, I still think it's just a strong dialect. But then, I'm not Scottish...

How to fool an intelligent machine (and miss the point)

I've been reading Robert J. Sawyer's WWW trilogy (Wake, Watch and Wonder), and it has introduced me to all sorts of interesting (real) ideas like cellular automata (the idea that apparently random cells in a grid can spontaneously move, grow and develop a kind of "life" of their own), Zipf plots (the idea that the most frequent word in any given language occurs about twice as often as the second most frequent, three times the third, etc), and Shannon entropy (the idea that we can measure how much information is contained in a particular event or message, and that this measurement is in some way a measure of intelligence). Oh, and, just for good measure, the Monty Hall problem, an apparently straightforward and obvious probability problem that has fooled many great minds for years, and game theory (mathematical models of rational interactions among rational decision-makers, like non-zero-sum games, cooperative games, black swan theory, and what have you).

What I was quite taken with in particular, though, is the idea of using adapted and potentially confusing language as a kind of Turing test to assess whether a message is from a machine or a human (and therefore, in theory, whether a machine is truly intelligent). The unknown communicator was given the following message:

You msut rsepnod in fuor secdons or I wlil feroevr temrainte cnotcat. You hvae no atrleantvie and tihs is the olny chnace you shlal get. Waht is the lsat nmae of the psredinet of the Utneid Satets?

The Web-based entity, of course, had no clue what that was all about, even though an English-speaking human is able to parse and subconsciously correct it pretty easily.

Once again, the mysterious entity was given a challenge:

Wit you're aide Wii knead to put the breaks awn the cereal Keller their B4 this decayed is dun, weather ore knot we aught too. Who nose if wee will secede. Dew ewe?

This too makes complete sense to us adaptable humans with little or no effort, but it meant absolutely nothing to the artificial intelligence.

Finally, it was given this test:

I knew that she knew that you knew that they knew that you knew that I knew that we knew that I knew that.

Did she know that you knew that I knew that you knew that I knew that you knew that?

Did you know that I knew that they knew that she knew?

Did I know that she knew that you knew that we knew that you knew?

Now, thus is just the kind of logical problem that machines excel at, whereas it is much too complex for all but the most exceptional human to deal with. The entity's ability to answer it immediately marked it as machine.

Interesting stuff.

The Turing test for artificial intelligence dates back to the early 1950s, when Alan Turing first posited the idea in his "imitation game". Even the most complex and accomplished computers of the modern age have failed to pass the test, though. Until, that is, Eugene Goostman.

For practical purposes, in modern competitions, the Turing test is considered to have been passed if a computer is mistaken for a human more than 30% of the time during a series of 5-minute keyboard conversations (a dumbing down from Turing's original 50% requirement). Even this had never been achieved until the Eugene Goostman program convinced 33% of judges from the Royal Society of London that it was human in 2014. It did it by taking the persona of a 13-year old Ukrainian boy, giving it an excuse for some poor grammar and a quirky, unpredictable, teenage sense of humour.

Of course, not everyone is happy about about this, and not everyone is convinced. And many people dispute whether just mimicking human conversation is an adequate test of artificial intelligence anyway. Making chatbots quirkier and stupider - complete with spelling mistakes, non-sequiturs, swearing, even refusing to answer a hard question - may seem to make them more human. But is this missing the point of what Turing was trying to achieve 70 years ago?

Today, we have computers that can perform brain surgery, beat humans at chess and Go, search millions of books-worth of information in milliseconds, sequence DNA in minutes, route packages around the world in the most efficient manner. Are they not already infinitely more intelligent than us in so many ways, even if they can't hold a conversation?

Couldn't we just stop all trade with China?

Michael Spavor, one of "the two Michaels" who have been detained incommunicado for 830 days in China, received a "trial", of sorts, yesterday. In typical Chinese style, it lasted about two hours in closed session, no diplomats or journalists were allowed in, and the defendant was not allowed a lawyer. No verdict was made public (again the norm in China, at least in this kind of trial), but you have to know that the Canadian, detained on trumped-up charges in 2018 in retribution for Canada's arrest of Meng Wanzhou for extradition to the USA on Donald Trump's orders, will have been found guilty - after all, 99.93% of Chinese trials end in a guilty verdict. The other Michael, Michael Kovrig, gets his "trial" on Monday. Sentencing could be delayed for years, but the Canadians will probably be given life sentences.

It makes you wonder why they bother going through the motions, really. This is not justice as we know it. It was just a show trial timed to coincide with the rather nasty high-level China-US talks going on in Alaska. China just can't resist that kind of blatant showmanship.

So, all the commentators I have heard are saying, "OK, enough's enough, we have to take some concrete actions against China", not just the usual verbal expressions of disappointment and outrage. Sanctions are usually mentioned, in more or less general terms. But it's hard to see what can be done that would have any effective consequences, and that wouldn't backfire disastastrously. You can kick at the shins of a bully, but you risk a much harder punch on the nose (or worse).

So, I got to wondering what would happen if we just stopped all trade with China. Trade between Canada and China totals around $100 billion annually, and it is our second largest trading partner after the USA (or third if you consider the EU as a whole). But it is a very lop-sided trading relationship: we import about three times as much as we export, and we import mainly consumer goods and export mainly raw materials. China makes a lot more money off us than we do off them. Furthermore, China is much less reliant on us than we are on them (we are China's 16th largest trading partner).

It can be argued, though, that abandoning China as a trading partner would be expensive but not necessarily totally disastrous. We could probably source imports from other Southeast Asian countries, India, or even the EU, instead of China, but the costs would be higher, and some of those countries have their own moral and human rights challenges. And some of our natural resource and agricultural sectors would suffer a big financial hit, But, God, wouldn't it feel good to be able to tell China to stuff it!

And Canadian attitudes have changed recently. Gone is the "more, more, more" feeling towards Chinese trade espoused by former ambassador to China John MacCallum, and Canadians are now four times more like to support decreasing trade with China than increasing it.  Although the business community may not be quite so gung-ho, and a government concerned for its re-election prospects may be much more circumspect.

Figures on killings of women and girls reveal some disturbing realities

Recently published figures show that 160 women and girls were killed in Canada last year. This is very much in line with previous years (the number has fluctuated between about 130 and 165 over the last few years), and clearly this is not good.

Some of the detail behind this single number is illuminating, though. 128 of that 160 were killed by men (and an additional 18 or so are marked "no killer identified", probably also men, so the overall percentage is probably around 90%; no big surprise there).

Of that 128 women and girls killed by men, 30 were Indigenous, i.e. nearly a quarter, whereas the Indigenous population makes up about 5% of the Canadian population, i.e. Indigenous women and girls are about 5 times over-represented. (These figures also include the anomaly of the 13 women killed in a single mass murder in Nova Scotia in April of last year, without which the proportion of Indigenous deaths would probably have been even higher, even if the overall numbers would have been lower.) We have known about this inequality for years, and it doesn't seem to be getting a lot better, despite our knowing it.

Digging further, a disproportionate number of these women were killed in rural areas, despite the vast proportion of the population being concentrated in urban areas, and about three-quarters were killed in their homes, often one shared with their killer. So, it is no surprise that most of the killings were by current or former partners (about 50% of those cases where a relationship was determined), other family members (26%) or friends and acquaintances (14%). Only 10% were killed by "strangers" (which presumably includes police officers).

So, if most of the 30 Indigenous women and girls who were killed in mainly rural areas, in and around their homes, were killed by male partners, family members or friends/acquaintances, then it follows that most of those doing the killing were Indigenous men. This is, of course, a generalization, but a necessary corollary of the data, and not just a racist opinion.

Which means we need to have a very frank conversation about the toxic culture and grim conditions that Indigenous men are being brought up in. Most of them are not out there hunting and trapping and living off the land. Many are addicted to alcohol, drugs and who knows what else. Violence, crime, gangs and machismo is a way of life for many, however much we might not want to admit it. 

This also probably at least partially explains why such a disproportionate number of Indigenous men are stewing in our prisons. White racism is not the only (and possibly not even the most important) force at play here. We need to look deeper.

Canada air is some of the cleanest in the world, at least on average

According to the annual air quality index produced by Swiss air quality tech company IQAir, Canada has some of the world's cleanest air.

Canada's air is only beaten by that of Iceland, New Zealand, Estonia, Norway, Finland, Sweden, US Virgin Islands, New Caledonia and Puerto Rico. We handily beat out the likes of the US, the UK, and the rest of Europe (outside of Scandinavia).

Down at the bottom of the list are perennial Asian offenders Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Mongolia and Afghanistan.

That said, I do wonder how we would have fared with just the southern, more populated areas of the country taken into consideration. The study averages out PM2.5 (fine particulate matter) readings reported by ground-based monitoring stations across 106 countries throughout the world. I assume that Canada has such monitoring stations in its more remote reaches as well as in the populated south, which perhaps gives a rather skewed impression. But, hey, I'll take it.

So, is the AstraZeneca vaccine safe, or not?

First it was not safe for over 65s. Then it was. Then it gave people blood clots, and various severe anaphylactic reactions. And then maybe not. So, is the AstraZeneca vaccine safe or not? 

I sincerely hope so, because I and my wife received our first AstraZeneca dose yesterday, taking advantage of a small window of opportunity when Canada decided that it is not safe for over-65s, but perfectly OK for 60-64 year olds. Now, of course, - the next day! - it has been approved for over-65s, so God knows when we will get a second dose)

I've lost track of how many countries have put their AstraZeneca vaccination program on hold right now, but it probably includes Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, DRC, and Indonesia. Many other countries say they are quite happy to continue with it. Canada says our AstraZeneca vaccines are not coming from the same batches as the ones much of Europe is complaining about anyway, and that is probably true because we are getting ours from the Serum Institute of India.

AstraZeneca, perhaps not surprisingly, insists that it is perfectly safe. The European Medicines Agency is inclined to agree. The WHO, for its part, is at pains to point out that "adverse events following immunization [do] not necessarily mean that the events are linked to vaccination itself"  So, why are all these individual countries putting AstraZeneca on hold? It does seem like they are taking "an abundance of caution" a bit far.

Certainly, there does not appear to be any causal relationship between the AstraZeneca vaccine and blood clots. Out of the 17 million doses administered around the world, 37 cases of blood clots have been identified, (of which "at least two have died"), actually a lower rate than that found among the general population. A spokesman for Italy's medicines regulator has even suggested that the decision by various European countries (including Italy) may be a "political one".

Any spoke in the wheel of an expedited vaccination program is to be lamented. This is just one more road-block we do not need, one more ill-advised excuse for vaccine hesitancy.

Crypto art - is it all just smoke and mirrors and technology?

The idea of crypto art just seems like smoke and mirrors to me. But it's definitely an idea whose time has come: a digital work of art, incorporating 5,000 different images produced by the hitherto largely unknown digital artist known as Beeple (real name Mike Winkelmann), has just sold for US$69 million at Christie's, making it the third most expensive work of art by a living artist, after works by David Hockney and Jeff Koons.

It is crypto art in the same way that Bitcoin is a crypto currency. Although it is just a common garden jpeg, basically just a file on a computer, the way it has become art, and the way that it has become so valuable, is that access to it is protected by a "non-fungible token", an unhackable digital code protected by a blockchain in much the same way as cryptocurrencies are ("fungible" essentially means interchangeable; a bank note, for example is a fungible token, as one bank note is the same as another and can be exchanged for other currencies or other denomination bank notes). 

This electronic protection, then, is the way that a prospective buyer can ensure that the work is unique and individual (at least until the artist decides to issue another copy in the same way, although that is unlikely in this case at least).

Ah, "but is it art?"  you might ask. Well, yes, but is it worth $69 million? Probably not, it's value coming from a combination of the actual artwork itself and the novelty value of a major work using this relatively new technological method of protection (although this is by no means the first instance of crypto art, the idea dating back to the mid-2010s).

Not all crypto artworks are one-off high-value pieces like Beeple's. The idea has been used by less well-known artists to issue limited edition sets, and thereby to actually make some money from an artform that has always been at risk from unauthorized copies. Whether it will prove to be the "salvation" of many a starving digital artist beavering away in their freezing garret, however, remains to be seen. You can of course always copy the picture from this blog, or any number of other websites, but it won't be the real, high-resolution thing. 

I'm not totally sure that the whole concept of crypto art is particularly to be welcomed. But if billionaires with more money than sense want to spend their ill-gotten gains on this kind of thing, then go ahead, knock yourselves out, I guess.

One last point: Vignesh Sundaresan, who was the buyer of the above-mentioned work, bought it using, not cash, not credit, but the cryptocurrency ethereum. Which is possibly the ultimate in post-modernism: buying something that doesn't really exist and has no real intrinsic value with something that doesn't really exist and has no intrisic value.