Google; Men; Women

Physicist Bee has a somewhat complicated (I suppose some would say "nuanced") take on the matter of Google sacking that guy Damore.    As for me, it's outraged that alt.right, so I find it hard to be believe Google can be completely in the wrong! 

I think the NYT article "The Alt-Right Finds a New Enemy in Silicon Valley" is pretty good, and it notes that some hope it may be the start of a sort of right wing internet (which I think would not be a bad thing, as the alt.right's base is not, I reckon, as big as it thinks it is):

There is a certain poetic justice in the alt-right, largely an internet-based political movement, turning against the companies that enabled it in the first place. Like most modern political movements, the alt-right relies on tech platforms like YouTube and Twitter to rally supporters, collect donations and organize gatherings. In that sense, Silicon Valley progressivism isn’t just an ideological offense to the alt-right — it’s an operational threat.

In an attempt to build a buffer against censorship, some alt-right activists have begun creating their own services. Cody Wilson, who describes himself as a “techno-anarchist,” recently opened Hatreon, a crowdfunding site that bills itself as a free-speech alternative to Patreon. Gab, a Twitter clone, was started last year after Twitter barred several conservative users. RootBocks, a right-wing Kickstarter knockoff, bills itself as “a crowdfunding site that won’t shut you down because of your beliefs.”

These companies are still tiny by Silicon Valley standards, but their supporters say that one day they could serve as the foundation for a kind of parallel right-wing internet where all speech is allowed, no matter how noxious or incendiary.

In another NYT report on the matter, they do point one pretty good sounding reason why he was sacked:

Mr. Damore’s comments also raised another issue around Google’s peer-review system. Employees at the company are expected to judge their colleague’s work in a peer-review process that is essential to deciding whether someone gets promoted. By expressing certain beliefs — such as that women are more prone to anxiety — the concern was that he could no longer be impartial in judging female co-workers.

For a company steeped in a rich history of encouraging unconventional thinking, the problem was not that he expressed an unpopular opinion, but a disrespectful one, according to Yonatan Zunger, who left Google last week after 14 years at the company to join a start-up.

“We have a long history of disagreement over everything from technical issues to policy issues to the most mundane aspects of building management, and over all, that has been tremendously valuable,” Mr. Zunger said in an email. “The problem here was that this was disrespectful disagreement — and there’s really no respectful way to say, ‘I think you and people like you aren’t as qualified to do your job as people like me.”

Good point.

My modest same sex marriage suggestion

While I think a compulsory plebiscite on same sex marriage, held at the next election as a way of minimising cost, is not a bad idea, it is hard to understand the point of a voluntary postal plebiscite on the topic.

It will, surely, simply be a deeply methodologically flawed attempt at gauging the public's opinion, at the enormous cost of $122 million.

If the Coalition were honest about it, why could they not acknowledge that a more reliable way of gauging public opinion would be to pay for, say, Newspoll, to devise an exceptionally large sample one off poll on the matter, with a simple question, so as to gauge public opinion nation wide within a very small margin of error.

The methodology could be devised so as to capture more than your standard landlines, no?

How much could that cost, really?    I would take a stab and say that it couldn't be more than $5 to $10 million. Wouldn't some department or other have the funds to commission it, without getting the sanction of Parliament?

So, savings of at least $110 million, and a more accurate outcome.   Much less for Labor to complain about.

What is wrong with this idea?

An exceptionally good optical illusion

Noticed at Boing Boing, which I rarely visit these days:

Impossible hurdles

I have a hunch that the Impossible Burger, if it's as good as people claim, will make lab grown meat hardly worth pursuing.    

But the NYT notes that the company is having trouble convincing the FDA that it should declare the key magic ingredient - it's blood tasting soy leghemoglobin - safe to consume.   Which is odd, given that they can sell the burger without that endorsement.

It wouldn't stop me from trying it.

By the way, one of the best fake meat things I tried in the last couple of years were some type of frozen nugget made from shiitake mushrooms.  They went very well in a butter chicken sauce, and had the firmer texture that is often missing from soy based fake meat (or Quorn, which is too expensive and also too soft).  They were from an Asian supermarket, but I haven't seen them there again.  I can't even remember where they were made.  Anyway, it's a pity, because I did like them.

Re: North Korea

This story:

North Korea now has a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can be mounted on a missile, according to an analysis by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, the Washington Post reports. North Korea has claimed to have this capability for some time now, and for planning purposes, U.S. military commanders had already been working under the assumption that those claims were true. However, Tuesday’s revelation is a much stronger confirmation.

seems a little conveniently timed, doesn't anyone think?

I see that the Right, at least in the form of Trump supporting Ace of Spades, is already getting comfortable with the idea of a pre-emptive nuclear strike:

A pre-emptive nuclear strike is not a great option, but we're out of great options, and now down to only the less-bad ones.

So, all we need now is for ageing Rupert Murdoch to email the producer of Fox and Friends  that they should run a "US should strike first" line, and Trump will be reaching for the phone to the Pentagon.

I see one expert in Time says it might be best to do nothing:

As things stand, neither diplomacy nor sanctions seem likely to derail the North’s nuclear program. So regime change looks more and more attractive. But better that it come from within. Given Kim’s reckless habits—drinking and driving are two of his favorite pastimes—a self-inflicted biological solution is more than possible. So is the chance that an insider will finally get angry enough to take him out, never mind the consequences.

Update:    Uh-oh.  Fox News already getting on talking heads seemingly suggesting pre-emptive strike (possibly nuclear) not such a bad idea:

On Fox Business, Trish Regan interviewed former Lt. Gen. Ralph Peters, a military pundit, on the next steps the administration should take. “I don’t want this to be a war,” he said. “I don’t want it! Nobody in their right mind wants it. But we cannot allow North Korea to have an array of missiles, an arsenal of missiles, of nuclear-tipped missiles that can hit the United States. If it comes to that, I would hit them first and hit them hard knowing that it will be bloody and ugly if we do so."

Message to Jason, future Buddhist

Or, you could become a Buddhist. A lot less sweat and pain involved.  Not to mention very little risk of concussion. *

Speaking of Buddhism (I fear people are thinking that I am at risk of conversion to it due to a fondness for Monkey King movies from Hong Kong/China), there's a book out by Robert Wright called "Why Buddhism is True" which is attracting some attention. 

There's a short interview with him at NPR.

In his new book, Why Buddhism is True, Wright makes the case that some Buddhist practices can help humans overcome the biological pull towards dissatisfaction.

"I think of mindfulness meditation as almost a rebellion against natural selection," he says. "Natural selection is the process that created us. It gave us our values. It sets our agenda, and Buddhism says, 'We don't have to play this game.' "

He says:

Certainly when you think about the logic of natural selection, it makes sense that we would be like this. Natural selection built us to do some things, a series of things that help us get genes into the next generation. Those include eating food so we stay alive, having sex — things like that.

If it were the case that any of these things brought permanent gratification, then we would quit doing them, right? I mean, you would eat, you'd feel blissed out, you'd never eat again. You'd have sex, you'd, like, lie there basking in the afterglow, never have sex again. Well, obviously that's not a prescription for getting genes into the next generation. So natural selection seems to have built animals in general to be recurrently dissatisfied. And this seems to be a central feature of life — and it's central to the Buddhist diagnosis of what the problem is.

Well, I think I have a bit of a problem with this.   It seems to me that you can respond to a recurrent bodily desire (the satisfaction of which gives pleasure) in one of two ways:  resenting the fact that the desire keeps returning, or celebrating the repeated satisfaction of it.   (Assuming you can satisfy it.)

I tend to think Buddhism's attitude is too much like the former, whereas other religions take the more physical life affirming view.   Sure, you can say that Christianity or (say) Hinduism thinks asceticism has spiritual value too, but I don't think you could ever say that it thought it was for everyone.  With Buddhism, I'm always getting the feeling that it thinks people are fooling themselves if they feel good after, say, a good meal and good sex.  (No doubt, some Buddhist would argue I'm completely misunderstanding it.)

The other fundamental problem I've always had with Buddhism is that it seems in its purist form to be a philosophy which de-emphasises the value of charity and help to others.    I know Buddhists will argue about that too, but I'm not so sure.  It seems a philosophy primed for the argument "hey, poor starving person, you need to realise that your desire for a full stomach is an illusion - I will help you meditate to overcome your hunger pains"  instead of getting in and helping them build a better farm.
Wright is perhaps on stronger grounds when he notes some similarity between Buddhism and cognitive therapy (a therapy I've always thought sounded sensible and valuable):

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works by kind of interrogating people about the logic behind things like fears and anxieties, like, Is there really much of a chance of you projectile vomiting while speaking to a crowd? You've never done it before. ... So there's a suspicion there about the logic behind feelings.

Well, in Buddhism there's a suspicion of the logic behind feelings more broadly, I would say. But as a practical matter, Buddhism works at the level of feeling. They don't interrogate the logic explicitly, but you deal with the feeling itself in a way that disempowers it. And there's a kind of bridge between cognitive therapy and Buddhist practice in evolutionary psychology; because evolutionary psychology explains that, indeed, a lot of the feelings we have are not worth following, for various reasons. They may have literally been designed to mislead us to begin with by natural selection. ... We live in an environment so different from the environment that natural selection designed us for that we have these counterproductive feelings, like fear of public speaking. So evolutionary psychology gives a back story, explaining why it is that we so often are misled by feelings ... and then Buddhist meditation tells us what to do about that.

*  For other readers:  comment made as a result of his tweet that he felt this article came uncomfortably close to describing the reasons for his own "athletic obsessions".   

Speaking of poisonous social media

The threads of Catallaxy work as a form of social media, where (as I have taken to repeating), the foolish and obnoxious find comfort in other people who share their foolish and obnoxious views, or at the very least,  not call them out for it.  

I've mentioned their fondness for armed revolution fantasies before, and I see they're (OK, to be fair, some) are still at it:

I've called out nutty Bosi before - an ex SAS twit who would not be out of place in one of the US armed militia fantasy clubs that thought they would liberate the nation when Obama started kicking their doors in to confiscate every gun in the land.

Yes, please publish your violent fantasy paper on Catallaxy.   Free speech and all that, hey Sinclair...

Young adult fiction eats itself

There's a long, interesting article at The Vulture about the silly, silly modern political correctness in social media campaigning about young adult novels that dare to have characters that say something offensive to current PC sensibilities.  

The article shows how one precious dill led an attack on a novel by selecting particular un-PC lines, and completely ignoring the bigger picture - that the novel is about a character recognising and coming out of intolerance.  But gullible followers of said dill use social media to join in the attack without even reading the book and understanding they are being mislead.   I like the way one agent comments:  

“None of us are willing to comment publicly for fear of being targeted and labeled racist or bigoted. But if children’s-book publishing is no longer allowed to feature an unlikable character, who grows as a person over the course of the story, then we’re going to have a pretty boring business.”

This is an area ripe and overdue for ridicule and satire, is it not?   But have the PC Left enough power to even prevent that?  I doubt it.

One thing I do know - you don't cure the madness of lefty, over precious social media crowds via a counter attack by mad, more than happy to offend, alt.right social media crowds.  If anything, that surely is counterproductive.   There is something very poisonous and corrosive about social media campaigning, no matter which side it is coming from.   Social scientists will be studying this for many years yet, I bet.

Fanciful thinking on elevators

So, architects, at least, are thinking about what could be done if elevators went away from steel cabled up and down things, to something more like the "go anywhere" deal on the Starship Enterprise.

All sounds very cool, but I would have thought that the destruction of the World Trade Centre, and recent London and Dubai fires, are making the idea of living or even working on (say) the 100th floor less attractive than ever.  Not sure that I had realised how high a building going up in Jeddah was going to be:

Today there is a 1,000-meter (167-story) building under construction in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Even taller buildings are possible with today’s structural technology.

Cohen talks Taleb

I see that Nick Cohen gets stuck into Taleb's ridiculously aggressive, alt.right style behaviour towards Mary Beard, and it's a good read.

I am amused to see one twitter comment about it:

A load of old rubbish

Good title for a post about last night's depressing 4 Corners program on waste and recycling failures in Australia, no?

[By the way, that new ABC reporter continually reminds me of Daria.  She does come across as a tad over-earnest, if you ask me.]

But if you want to watch an episode full of men looking uncomfortable during interviews, you should watch it.   The guy from NSW EPA looked particularly guilty, if you ask me; and the other stellar shonky bit of government seemed to be the Gosford council.   And who knew that there are mountains of broken glass in warehouses around Australia, or that Ipswich, a town with an image problem even before last night,  had seemingly become the dumping ground for much of the rest of Australia's unwanted rubbish?

The odd story of the Rabbit God

It always seems to me that the historical Asian take on male homosexuality had a much higher emphasis on romanticism than much of the modern Western image of it:   if you ask me, it's not like a gay pride parade featuring drag queens, men and lesbians in leather, and many guys in speedos and feathers can be easily said to be emphasising romanticism over in-your-face eroticism/fetishism.  I think you still see this in Asian countries today, with oddities like straight Japanese women who are fans of young men in love manga and anime.

Further evidence of the importance of romance in Asian thoughts on homosexuality comes from this article that I stumbled across yesterday, from Taipei, where gay marriage had a sudden and unexpected legal endorsement recently.  There's a small Taoist temple there, to cater for gay men:

All religions address both spiritual needs and issues of here and now. New deities and even new religions often emerge to address needs or during times of social change. The founding of the Gay Rabbit God Temple in Taipei is one such example.

About five years ago (2005), a Taoist priest made spiritual contact with the Rabbit God and decided that should five same sex couples approach the temple for prayers or spiritual help, he will establish a temple dedicated to the Rabbit God.

Although at that time, they did not have specific programs for gay couples, five couples did indeed turn up. The priest took this as a sign and officially established the Rabbit Temple.

More on the background to this god, here:

The god isn't very well known, nor commonly worshipped, but he is based on an historical figure. According to the Tale of the Rabbit God that appears in the Zibuyu (子不語), a collection of supernatural stories written by Qing Dynasty scholar and poet Yuan Mei (袁枚, 1716-1798), Hu Tianbao (?#32993;天保) was an official in 18th-century, Qing Dynasty China. He fell in love with a handsome young imperial inspector of Fujian Province, but because of the inspector's higher status, Hu was afraid to reveal his feelings. After Hu was caught peeping at the inspector through a bathroom wall, he confessed his admiration for the inspector, who had him beaten to death. One month after his passing, the story goes, Hu appeared to a man from his hometown in a dream, claiming that the king of the underworld had appointed him the Rabbit God. As such, his duty was to govern the affairs of men who desire men. In the dream, he asked the man to erect a shrine to him.

As a priest, Lu often heard complaints from homosexual Taoist adherents that there was no god to answer their prayers. Believing one of his missions is to tend to the needs of people alienated from mainstream society, he set out to revive the forgotten deity.

 As his research suggests, Hu was an upper class historical figure who lived in Fujian from the late Ming Dynasty to the early Qing Dynasty. However, according to Michael Szonyi, associate professor of Chinese history at the department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard, the Rabbit God is a pure invention of Yuan, the poet, since the image of the rabbit deity doesn't appear in any other sources from Fujian.

While some aspects of the story may be fabrications, the existence of the cult of Hu Tianbao in Fujian in the 18th century is well documented in official Qing records.

This priest reckons the Rabbit God is a particularly helpful one, if you treat him respectfully:

The Rabbit God is perceived to be an affable deity, Lu said, who is willing to assist his followers in every aspect of life. Since he works for Cheng Huang (城隍), the City God, he has both the erudition and social network in the spiritual world to solve any problem mortals have, according to Lu.

Homosexuals may have an edge in the spiritual world because, "Hu Tianbao is rather self-abased both because of the way he died and the somewhat belittling title of rabbit. So if you are willing to believe in him, he will be much more grateful and work harder than other deities," Lu said.

There are several methods of worshipping, asking for and receiving answers from this divine being, but sincerity is what counts most, Lu said. For this reason, followers should address the god as Ta Yeh (大爺), or master, rather than Rabbit God. Then, those with needs can write down their names, addresses, birthdays and prayers on pieces of paper money and burn them to make sure the messages are sent to heaven.

Well, I thought it was interesting, anyway.

Gay peace for our time

Isn't it odd how everyone (well, the media and conservatives) are waiting for Turnbull to emerge and make a "peace in our time" speech regarding same sex marriage.  I'd do a photoshop, if I had time.

I do feel a bit sorry for Malcolm - he is genuinely being wedged every which way, by conservatives in his party, Labor and the Greens, his own gay party members, and more moderate voices too (with the fairly silly idea of a postal plebiscite), all on an issue that the population at large doesn't rate as very important, but which the media is happy to devote plenty of attention to.    It must be very, very annoying.  

Dangerous sea creatures great and small

First, the large:

Six men are lucky to be alive after a whale threw their boat metres into the air in the Whitsundays.

The group was returning from a reef fishing trip on Saturday afternoon, when the large humpback breached underneath the 8.5-metre aluminium vessel, near Gloucester Island.
The impact of the collision with the whale and the water was so great that those on board were violently thrown around the boat, with two men knocked unconscious.

And then, the small - the Melbourne sea lice attack.   That really is a surprising story, but apparently sea lice can be particularly ferocious down there.   There will be few toddlers allowed to play in the water near Melbourne for a while, I imagine.

Dressed against global warming

Graham Lloyd's favourite "climate scientist" Jennifer Marohasy had this photo in The Australian last week, on top of one of Lloyd's dire pieces about the controversy of one thermometer which needs checking when it records very cold minimums:

It's a bit transparent, isn't it?:  she's trying to disprove global warming by showing how much she has to dress up on a really cold day.  And is that a dead animal around her neck?

She looks at a tad batty, if you ask me.

Monkey Kings

SBS Viceland (I still don't really understand that change) showed The Monkey King 2 last week, and it's still able to be watched on SBS on Demand.

This is at least the second Chinese film I have seen lately that features at some point a massive heavenly Buddha intervening on Earth.  It would seem that the government doesn't have a problem with such ideas being promulgated in cinema, which I suppose shows how technically communist states have moved on a bit.

I find something rather watchable about movies loosely based on the Monkey King story now.  I'm even tempted to read the book.    I knew someone once (an Australian but from an Asian family) whose secret ambition in life was to produce a movie that did proper justice to the book Journey to the West.  He evidently has not achieved that.

Update:  One thing about Buddhism - if a Catholic were to become one,  the Mahayana version is surely the type to which he or she should feel more affinity (given the Communion of Saints idea is not a million miles away from bodhisattvas being able to help):

Mahayana Buddhism agrees with Theravada Buddhism that the human problem is suffering; it holds the Four Noble Truths as fundamental. But whereas Theravada holds out the ideal of the individual striving alone on the Eight-fold Path towards nirvana, Mahayana adds helpers who provide shortcuts and assistance out of compassion for those who are suffering. These helpers are called bodhisattvas, and are beings who have worked towards enlightenment and nirvana. But rather than enter nirvana, once they are able, they turn around and bring their store of wisdom, power and merit to help others along the same path. This simple idea has a number of ramifications for the goal of humanity.

1) All human beings participate in the Buddha's nature; that is to say, all humans have the essence of Buddha within themselves. Thus the goal of Mahayana Buddhism is for everyone to realize their true Buddha nature. This goal is the same as attaining nirvana (the Theravadan goal), but it is focused on the Buddha and each person's imitation of the Buddha, rather than on the release from samsara.

2) The Buddha was a bodhisattva. In contrast to the Theravadan view, Mahayana holds that the Buddha (i.e., Gautama) did not just attain nirvana. At the point at which he could have extinguished his existence in samsara, he instead returned to this world and taught other people how to attain nirvana. If he had not, then humanity would not know how to attain it. It was Buddha's compassion for the suffering of humanity that motivated him to remain in this life and to teach and preach for forty more years. Thus, the Buddha used the merit, power and wisdom he gained while striving for enlightenment to help others. He was a bodhisattva.

3) Since humans should imitate the Buddha, the Mahayana ideal is to become a bodhisattva and help others. The Theravadan ideal of the arhat is seen as too selfish, too focused on the individual, and thus without benefit for humanity in general. By emphasizing that the goal is to be a bodhisattva, Mahayana shows that it cares about the rest of humanity as a whole, not just as individuals.

4) Once a person becomes a bodhisattva, then they have the ability to help people towards nirvana and enlightenment. They may create new paths to higher stages that can be accomplished by lay people as well as monks. In fact, many forms of Mahayana focus on the laity, almost to the exclusion of interest in the sangha. Pure Land is a good example of this. Amitabha Buddha (who was initially a monk, then a Bodhisattva, and finally attained Buddha-hood) created a "pure land"--a paradise--in the "west" (i.e., in the Buddha-fields). He vowed that anyone who would call on his name could enter this land. There they could remain, or they could strive towards enlightenment, which would be much closer.

Something wrong with Taleb

Mary Beard talks about being under attack from the alt.right, and Nassim Taleb's jumping into the fray, not on her side.

Look, I don't care how smart he might be in some areas - I think it is very clear from his twitter feed and many of essays that he has some serious personality issues.   He's a thin skinned jerk, in other words.

The Atlantic had a look at the matter, and questions Taleb's reliance on DNA evidence.

Yet more Dunkirk

I was interested to watch the 2017 documentary "Dunkirk:  The New Evidence" on SBS last night.

It's pretty good.   A couple of things relevant to the movie:

*  the town of Dunkirk was a lot more damaged in real life than the movie depicted;
*  the RAF was a lot more hated on the ground than even Nolan indicated - there was an interview with a veteran who still seemed to be resentful of them after all these years.  Yet the biggest point the documentary made was that the RAF was working hard both over the channel, and far behind enemy lines preventing a lot of German planes getting to the beach;  it was just that those stuck on the beach could not see what was going on high and skies and quite some distance from them.

I recommend it.   See SBS on Demand.

An optimistic take on education

In an endeavour to get a teenage son interested in what he might do in tertiary education and future employment, my wife and I dragged him along to two recent University open days in Brisbane: last Sunday, it was QUT (Gardens Point), and today it was the University of Queensland.

We sat in on a few talks at each, and wandered around marvelling (well, I did anyway) at the astounding amount of student friendly services (by way of food and other facilities) that are available at Universities like these today.

I am old enough that I actually went to QUT before it was officially a university - back in the late seventies, early eighties.  Facilities then included one cafeteria (of dodgy quality - I rarely ate there), a licensed club that I didn't actually join (I was pretty much only a weekend drinker, and I wasn't in the clique of students who immediately took up membership), and a cinema which I recall going to once, and having to leave before the movie finished to catch a train.  It was pretty basic.

The QUT campus is now dramatically different, and to my mind, extremely attractive.  Old Government House (which I seem to recall being under near continuous restoration back in my day) is still at its heart, and is now always open as a heritage site and a very attractive one at that. 

It now has some great looking buildings and student facilities around it (I should have taken photos,) and the entire campus, though small in area, is full of trees and green spaces to a much greater degree than it did 35 (gosh) years ago.

The University of Queensland is, by contrast, not as different from those days, by my reckoning.  Sure, it also has much better student facilities, but the look of the campus, which still has very large amounts of open space around it, has not changed to the same extent.

But apart from appearances, I have to say that the impression gained from each talk we attended was a very positive one of the tertiary sector.  Sure, I guess Universities don't care for their worst lecturers or academics to be talking to the public and potential students at these events, but I still came away with the feeling that there is a much greater degree of professionalism in how universities teach and manage themselves these days.

I also have continually had that feeling when interacting with my kids' State high school.   I went to a pretty ordinary one in a working class area, but I doubt it was all that unusual for the way it seemed some pretty disinterested teachers could still make a living putting in what seemed the bare minimum effort.

That's really not the impression I get now - nearly all teachers in the State school system do genuinely seem much more professional and more enthusiastic than in my youth.     

I won't say that I don't have some misgivings about modern education:  I'm sure I posted before about how it seems to me that maths education is too heavily "verbal" in primary school these days; and I also think that there is a tendency for high schools to chose too many "young adult" novels that don't have lasting qualities in english.

But by and large, I think the education system has improved a great deal over my life time, and all the kvetching about it from the Right (and sometimes the Left) seems very undeserved.

Another radio station mystery

Apart from the creepy shortwave numbers radio stations, BBC Future has a story about another mysterious radio signal from Russia:

In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War.

It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.

Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.

A good read.