We worry about the “dangers” of radiation, but the risk seems to be overplayed, and that has harmed progress. CC-licensed photo by John Jones on Flickr.
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A selection of 10 links for you. High energy. I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. On Bluesky: @charlesarthur.bsky.social. Observations and links welcome.
How to lie about radiation • Works In Progress
Alex Chalmers and Ben Southwood:
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Chernobyl is the only accident in commercial nuclear history that has exposed people to large enough doses of radiation to poison and kill them. But even it has caused only hundreds of early deaths, despite the exposure of millions of people in the exclusion zone and nearby. Radiation impacts on Scandinavia and Germany, where there were major fears about the effects of the fallout, were nugatory. Evacuations and relocations to avoid small additional background radiation levels may have caused more harm than they averted. The same is true of Fukushima and Three Mile Island, the other two large nuclear disasters, but to an even greater extent: neither saw any responders die of the direct effects of radiation, and neither shows any clear impact on cancer rates.
Two years before Chernobyl, an explosion at a pesticide plant in Bhopal, India, released toxic methyl isocyanate gas that killed at least 2,000 people instantly, permanently disabled another 4,000, and caused 550,000 injuries in total. In 1975, the Banqiao Dam in China failed, flooding 12,000 square kilometers, drowning at least 25,000 people, and destroying perhaps five million houses.
Whereas Chernobyl is a household name, Bhopal and Banqiao are mostly familiar only to specialists. People have much greater familiarity with and concern about the risks created by nuclear power, and the world’s international radiation protection regime is based on the idea that any release of radioactive material from a nuclear power plant is intolerable. This has led to regulations that have increased the costs of nuclear electricity over time to the point where it is widely considered a slow, backward, and ineffective technology.
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Chalmers and Southwood argue – with data! – that we are far too cautious about radiation; that the studies which suggest that any amount, even the tiniest, will accrue like savings in a bank account are wrong, and that instead it’s more like drinking beer: you’d drink one a night for a year without effect, but drinking 365 in a night would do all sorts of harm. Chernobyl and, after it, Fukushima show the latter model is more like the truth. Which means we’ve been squashing nuclear energy for no good reason for decades.
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WhatsApp to let people chat without swapping phone numbers • BBC News
Zoe Kleinman:
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WhatsApp is set to let people chat without having to reveal their phone number – by exchanging unique usernames instead.
It will be rolled out globally to the platform’s three billion account holders over the next few months, the platform said.
From Monday, users will start being able to reserve a name via the app, although it will not be compulsory.
The firm said people would be able to remove or change their usernames at any time.Once it is fully activated, WhatsApp users will be able to connect after exchanging usernames only. There will still be options to block or report unwanted messages.
Names will be limited to 35 characters and there will be few restrictions, with the exception of some high profile officials and celebrities whose names will not be made available to anyone else. So it’s unlikely WhatsApp will be overrun with users calling themselves Donald Trump, for example.
The Meta-owned firm described usernames as a privacy feature.
Alice Newton-Rex, WhatsApp’s head of product, said she had heard from users that they didn’t always want to share their phone numbers in order to be in contact with others, particularly in group chats.
She said she hoped the feature would “give users control over how they choose to show up” on the app.
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Signal has had this feature for a while, I believe. It’s going to be a fun few months while this all gets ironed out and people jockey for position. Will a username be tied to a phone number, though? If you change phone number, what happens to your username?
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AI has lots of people digging out their iPods • Harvard Gazette
Sy Boles spoke to Sara Watson, an analyst who looks at social trends in relation to technology:
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I’m noticing a resurgence in interest in going offline, “grandma hobbies” like knitting or crochet. Aesthetics like punk zines, hand lettering, collage. Another version of that is cyberdecks — people creating their own custom-built computers and keyboards in a converted purse or a suitcase. It’s all highly customized, hyper-personalized, and it’s all about increasing control over our devices. I would put iPods into this category as well — people finding vintage iPods and saying, “Isn’t it nice to have my entire music collection without ads, without needing a WiFi connection?” There is a particular desire to be offline. I know folks with flip phones or Light Phone devices. L.L. Bean is selling boat bags embroidered with “analog” and “off the grid.” Land’s End catalog proclaimed “analog summer.” The trends are real.
What these trends have in common is definitely “friction-maxxing,” in today’s parlance. But I also think it’s a bit of a refusal of the economic logic behind these platforms that have driven us down the algorithmic attention rabbit hole. I see it as a form of resisting the system. Sure, some of it still results in consumer behavior — the irony of posting on Instagram what you carry around in your analog bag — but to me it’s a reflection of, “OK, if we’re a market economy, one of the best tools I have in resisting the direction of this market is to demand alternatives and reflect that in my consumer behavior.”
The other underlying theme is not only that we’re taking our attention back, but we’re also trying to reassert the fact that we have bodies. There’s a kind of nostalgic, embodied, tactile factor to these trends. The Y2K-aesthetic CD players were a joyful, tactile experience. We enjoyed typing on a mechanical keyboard as opposed to glass screens.
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Apple to fight $500m patent bill at UK Supreme Court • Financial Times
Alistair Gray:
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Apple is heading to the UK’s highest court to fight a $500mn bill that judges have said the tech giant must pay to embed patented mobile technology in its devices, such as iPhones, worldwide.
The Supreme Court case, due to begin on Monday, is the climax of a bitter, long-running dispute over patents for highly technical standards that underpin voice and data communications between mobile devices.
Apple, which is being supported by a powerful coalition including chipmaker Intel and leading Hollywood film studios, has warned that if it loses the case other device makers could face large patent bills, threatening to stifle innovation and increase prices for consumers. Legal principles established in the case will set a precedent that will help shape global royalty rates for other technologies.
Original contributors to complex protocols that underpin mobile connections, including Ericsson, Samsung and Panasonic, sold a selection of the patents in stages to a group called Optis.
Optis is owned by funds managed by New York hedge fund and private equity manager Brevet Capital.
Negotiations over licensing terms between Apple and Optis collapsed in 2019, prompting the patent owner to sue in England, where the courts have the power to set global royalty rates. In 2023 the High Court in London ruled that Apple had to pay $56m to Optis, but the Court of Appeal last year increased the iPhone maker’s bill ninefold to $502m.
The Court of Appeal arrived at the figure in part by using a deal that Optis struck with Google as a baseline.
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These sorts of patent fights used to be a constant backdrop to tech news. You can read all about it on the Supreme Court website. The hearing will only last until Wednesday, but it’s anyone’s guess when the decision will come down.
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Supreme Court ruling guts government’s use of geofence warrants • Ars Technica
Ashley Belanger:
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The Fourth Amendment protects a user’s “location history,” the Supreme Court ruled Monday.
The same logic already applied to a cellphone’s tracking, and the high court found “no good reason exists to reach a different result for Location History” collected by third parties like Google.
Split 6-3, the majority agreed that the government needs a warrant and must show reasonable cause to turn a phone’s location-tracking services into a government surveillance tool.
The decision came in a case where cops used so-called geofence warrants to track down an armed bank robber from a list of all phones logged in the area. Applying a three-part process, cops worked with Google to narrow down the list of suspects and eventually arrested Okello Chatrie, who had opted in to share his location with Google every few minutes. Chatrie was sentenced to 12 years in prison but challenged the geofence warrant as an unconstitutional search.
The US tried and failed to argue that no search was conducted under the Fourth Amendment, partly because they only searched a little bit of Chatrie’s location data, which the government considered too small to warrant privacy protections.
They also claimed that Chatrie was aware that voluntarily sharing his location with Google could mean that law enforcement might get access to the data. And along similar lines, the government argued that Chatrie’s data simply showed his movements in public, where he supposedly had no reasonable expectation of privacy.
However, Justice Elena Kagan, penning the majority opinion, said it didn’t matter how much data the government obtained. It was still a search under the Fourth Amendment because people carrying cellphones today commonly opt in to location-tracking, so that their apps work.
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The original search was inspired – a clever way to track down a bank robber – but the efforts afterwards to claim that “it wasn’t a BIG violation” looks a bit desperate.
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Today programme suffers ‘body blow’ as BBC prioritises social and digital content • The Guardian
Michael Savage:
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The task of briefing the nation on Radio 4’s agenda-setting Today programme has been one of the most urgent tasks facing the BBC’s top journalists for decades.
Insiders at the corporation, however, say that duty has effectively been downgraded, after an edict that will result in correspondents prioritising making content for TikTok, Instagram and other digital platforms.
The Guardian understands that staff at Today were told last week that social and digital platforms were now the top priority for correspondents, effectively deprioritising traditional television and radio – including the flagship show.
Combined with cuts to the number of journalists, some fear the change will increasingly mean Today being forced to use non-BBC reporters and spokespeople, especially in the early part of its three-hour run.
“This feels like a tweak but it’s actually a body blow,” said one Radio 4 insider. “Today has stayed healthy in the digital age by being well resourced and dependable … if something happens and you need to know about it – perhaps before going to work – then no other broadcaster can match it.
“But the plan appears to be for Today to hear from, for instance Steve Rosenberg [the BBC’s Russia correspondent] if Putin dies, only after Steve has satisfied people who get their news on TikTok. Those 10 minutes serve to chip away the relevance of Today to the life of the nation. This is an act of vandalism pure and simple.”
Some staff were said to be alarmed and despondent about the new priority given to digital and social media content.
Others believe the shift is inevitable and will not stop prominent BBC names from appearing on Today. Like all news organisations, the corporation is attempting to adapt to the rapid shift in audiences towards digital platforms, where many younger age groups get their news.
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There is a certain obstinacy about this. Rosenberg would probably reach more people with that news on TikTok than will tune in to the Today programme, which claims 5 million listeners. Does it become more important by being on the Today programme? Or should the aim be to reach more people?
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The patient barely lost weight on GLP-1s. He got better anyway. Why? • Substance Over Noise
Michael Albert:
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Marcus [a composite of multiple patients] came to me to lose weight. He was 54, carrying about 110 extra pounds [50kg], and every approach the internet had sold him had already failed to deliver lasting results. We started semaglutide. We titrated carefully. And a year later, he had lost a little under 5% of his body weight.
By the standard scoreboard of my specialty, Marcus was a non-responder. A disappointment. The kind of result that makes a patient feel like a personal failure and makes a physician start reaching for the next intervention.
Then I looked at the rest of his chart.His A1c had dropped into the normal range. His liver enzymes, elevated for years, had quietly normalized. His blood pressure was down. His wife reported he had stopped snoring. He could walk the dog the full loop now without his calves seizing up, and his knees hurt less on the stairs. The man had barely moved the needle on the scale, and almost every meaningful marker of his health had improved anyway.
That was the moment I stopped trusting the scoreboard. Marcus wasn’t a non-responder. I had been measuring the wrong thing.
Here is the question that has reorganized how I practice. If a weight loss drug improves a patient’s heart, kidneys, liver, and airway without the weight loss, then what exactly is it treating? Because it cannot be the fat. The fat is still there.
The answer turns out to be the most important story in metabolic medicine right now. It is buried in a stack of Phase 3 trials published over the past 18 months, and almost nobody outside the field has put the pieces together. Let me do that here.
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The short version: Albert reckons that GLP-1s reduce low-grade inflammation, and that that has positive effects all over the body even if there’s minimal weight loss.
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Has Ukraine turned the tide? • The American Prospect
Ryan Cooper:
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This year, the [Ukrainian]air campaign against Russia has stepped up a lot, and with much heavier ordnance. Ukraine has hit oil refineries, storage vessels, pipelines, factories, ships, and many other targets. Several Flamingo missiles were used in a successful recent attack on Cheboksary, about 600 miles from the Ukrainian border. Damage to the Russian oil industry seriously dented its ability to profit from the price increase caused by Trump’s war on Iran. Midrange drones have made the region behind Russian lines extremely dangerous, and badly tangled up its logistics.
Ukraine has even managed to hit Moscow, which is 300 miles from the Ukrainian border and has elaborate air defenses. On June 18, Ukrainian forces hit a major oil refinery on the outskirts of the city, and on June 26 they carried out the largest drone attack of the year so far, hitting targets from Moscow to Crimea. In the latter location, fuel is now critically short and the government has declared a state of emergency.
On the ground at the front lines, as Jack Watling writes at Foreign Affairs, while last year Ukraine was struggling with a chronic infantry shortage and an inability to rotate its troops off the front lines, it has since reorganized its structure and training system, and growing air dominance is allowing troops to get away for vital rest and recovery time.
Something of the opposite situation is taking hold on the Russian side, with undertrained recruits being slaughtered or deserting so quickly that it can’t stay ahead of the losses despite some 30,000 recruits per month. Corruption is also eating Russian forces from the inside. As the military analyst Perun points out, corruption can undermine military performance in many ways far beyond the obvious waste or theft of resources. For instance, when units bribe their commanders to skip out on an attack, or pretend to take a position by snapping a quick picture and running for it, commanders higher up the chain of command lose track of what is actually happening on the battlefield, and which forces are where. Morale and unit cohesion are undermined.
…Incidentally, all this implies that the Biden administration’s nuanced support for Ukraine—which I’ll admit, I supported at the time—was far too timid and limited. If Ukraine had had full access to ATACMS long-range missiles in 2023, they could have inflicted untold damage with a surprise strike on Russian forces, who were seriously overstretched and vulnerable at the time. A no-holds-barred approach might have ended the war by now.
At any rate, this conflict is far from over. Vladimir Putin could attempt a full-scale war mobilization and bring Russia’s superior manpower and economic heft to bear. But this would create massive disruptions in Russian society and its economy. The labor shortage would get much worse, and inflation might get out of hand, touching off serious unrest.
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Xbox reportedly pausing new third-party Game Pass deals, developers say • Video Games Chronicle
Jordan Middler:
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Xbox is slowing down the frequency of third-party Xbox Game Pass deals, according to Fernando Rizo, Partner at Kaboodle Games, citing conversations with fellow developers.
While Xbox Game Pass has largely sold itself on the inclusion of first-party Microsoft games at launch, the service has also been home to many third-party titles, both AAA and indie.
Specifically in the indie space, these Game Pass deals have often been lauded as a way to mitigate risk for developers, offering guaranteed money rather than facing market uncertainty.
Now, speaking on The Business of Video Game Podcast, hosted by Shams Jorjani, CEO of Arrowhead Game Studios, Rizo alleged that those Game Pass deals may be slowing amid an uncertain period for Microsoft’s gaming brand.
“I was at a trade show in Italy, had some nice lunches, some nice dinners with industry colleagues,” said Rizo. “Word on the street was that loads of people who were in the frame for Game Pass deals, i.e, you know, nothing was inked yet, but the deals were in advanced discussions… Everybody got the rug pulled out from under them.”
When Jorjani asked whether Rizo thinks new deals are “kiboshed,” Rizo replied that they’re “on pause.”
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I’m starting to feel that there are huge question marks over the entire Xbox franchise and its future, and that now spreads to the people and companies making games for it.
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AI reporters churn out error-strewn stories for football websites • Press Gazette
Rob Waugh:
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Three reputable sport news websites – She Kicks, Football Blog and Sportscasting – have introduced AI-generated reporters whose reports are strewn with errors and fabrications.
All three sites were bought by digital marketing outfit Clickout Media in recent months, a business which has a history of buying once-viable websites to harvest their good reputations with Google to market online casinos (whilst replacing human writers with AI avatars).
Previously, these three football brands employed multiple human journalists. She Kicks is the website for Britain’s oldest women’s football magazine, which has been published since 1996, with the website live since 2001. Football Blog has been published since 2004.
New reporters have steadily appeared on She Kicks, such as Isabella Torres, producing AI-written versions of articles which have previously appeared elsewhere online.
A recent report on this year’s Women’s FA Cup Final pitting Manchester City against Brighton (published, then rapidly taken down, but screenshotted by Press Gazette) is riddled with basic errors.
The report got the score wrong (2-0, whereas in fact it was 4-0), with the goalscorers and descriptions of the goals also incorrect.
There were also multiple players described as playing who are either not in the teams or who had already left.
…Clickout Media’s turnover was £40m in 2024, the last year for which data was available, although the company declared a loss of £3m and thus paid no tax.
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This article disappeared from Google’s search results after someone or some organisation lodged a “copyright claim”. Rather hard to know what Google’s examination suggested was in breach of copyright.
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| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
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The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 