Van dingen die voorbijkomen

Many Americans might think of Rip Van Winkle as the first man to nod off and wake up in the distant future. But as often seems to have been the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the French got there first. Almost 50 years before Washington Irving’s short story, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s utopian novel L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771) sent its sleeping protagonist six and a half centuries forward in time. Read today, as it is in the new Kings and Things video above, the book appears in roughly equal parts uncannily prophetic and hopelessly rooted in its time — setting the precedent, you could say, for much of the yet-to-be-invented genre of science fiction.

Published in English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred (of which both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned copies), Mercier’s novel envisions “a world where some technological progress has been made, but the industrial revolution never happened. It’s a world where an agrarian society has invented something resembling hologram technology, where Pennsylvania is ruled by an Aztec emperor, and drinking coffee is a criminal offense.” Its setting, Paris, “has been completely reorganized. The chaotic medieval fabric has made way for grand and beautiful streets built in straight lines, similar to what actually happened in Haussmann’s renovation a bit under a century after the book was published.”

Mercier couldn’t have known about that ambitious work of urban renewal avant la lettre any more than he could have known about the revolution that was to come in just eighteen years. Yet he wrote with certainty that “the Bastille has been torn down, although not by a revolution, but by a king.” Mercier’s twenty-fifth-century France remains a monarchy, but it has become a benevolent, enlightened one whose citizens rejoice at the chance to pay tax beyond the amount they owe. More realistically, if less ambitiously, the book’s unstuck-in-time hero also marvels at the fact that traffic traveling in one direction uses one side of the street, and traffic traveling in the other direction uses the other, having come from a time when roads were more of a free-for-all.

L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais offers the rare example of a far-future utopia without high technology. “If anything, France is more agrarian than in the past,” with no interest even in developing the ability to grow cherries in the wintertime. Many of the inventions that would have struck Mercier’s contemporary readers as fantastical, such as an elaborate device for replicating the human voice, seem mundane today. Nevertheless, it all reflects the spirit of progress that was sweeping Europe in the late eighteenth century. Mercier was reformer enough to have his country abandon slavery and colonialism, but French enough to feel certain that la mission civilisatrice would continue apace, to the point of imagining that the French language would be widely spoken in China. These days, a sci-fi novelist would surely put it the other way around.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

If you know more than a few millennials, you probably know someone who reveres Calvin and Hobbes as a sacred work of art. That comic strip’s cultural impact is even more remarkable considering that it ran in newspapers for only a decade, from 1985 to 1995: barely an existence at all, by the standards of the American funny pages, where the likes of Garfield has been lazily cracking wise for 45 years now. Yet these two examples of the comic-strip form could hardly be more different from each other in not just their duration, but also how they manifest in the world. While Garfield has long been a marketing juggernaut, Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson has famously turned down all licensing inquiries.

That choice set him apart from the other successful cartoonists of his time, not least Charles Schulz, whose work on Peanuts had inspired him to start drawing comics in the first place. Calvin and Hobbes may not have its own toys and lunchboxes, but it does reflect a Schulzian degree of thoughtfulness and personal dedication to the work. Like Schulz, Watterson eschewed delegation, creating the strip entirely by himself from beginning to end. Not only did he execute every brushstroke (not a metaphor, since he actually used a brush for more precise line control), every theme discussed and experienced by the titular six-year-old boy and his tiger best friend was rooted in his own thoughts.

“One of the beauties of a comic strip is that people’s expectations are nil,” Watterson said in an interview in the twenty-tens. “If you draw anything more subtle than a pie in the face, you’re considered a philosopher.” However modest the medium, he spent the whole run of Calvin and Hobbes trying to elevate it, verbally but even more so visually. Or perhaps the word is re-elevate, given how his increasingly ambitious Sunday-strip layouts evoked early-twentieth-century newspaper fixtures like Little Nemo and Krazy Kat, which sprawled lavishly across entire pages. Even if there could be no returning to the bygone golden age of the comic strip, he could at least draw inspiration from its glories.

Ironically, from the perspective of the twenty-twenties, Watterson’s work looks like an artifact of a bygone golden age itself. In the eighties and nineties, when even small-town newspapers could still command a robust readership, the comics section had a certain cultural weight; Watterson has spoken of the cartoonist’s practically unmatched ability to influence the thoughts of readers day on a daily basis. In my case, the influence ran especially deep, since I became a Calvin and Hobbes-loving millennial avant la lettre while first learning to read through the Sunday funnies. It took no time at all to master Garfield, but when I started getting Calvin and Hobbes, I knew I was making progress; even when I didn’t understand the words, I could still marvel at the sheer exuberance and detail of the art.

Calvin and Hobbes also attracted enthusiasts of other generations, not least among other cartoonists. Joel Allen Schroeder’s documentary Dear Mr. Watterson features more than a few of them expressing their admiration for how he raised the bar, as well as for how his work continues to enrapture young readers. Its timelessness owes in part to its lack of topical references (in contrast to, say, Doonesbury, which I remember always being the most formidable challenge in my days of incomplete literacy), but also to its understanding of childhood itself. Like Stephen King, a creator with whom he otherwise has little in common, Watterson remembers the exotic, often bizarre textures reality can take on for the very young.

He also remembers that childhood is not, as J. M. Coetzee once put it, “a time of innocent joy, to be spent in the meadows amid buttercups and bunny-rabbits or at the hearthside absorbed in a storybook,” but in large part “a time of gritting the teeth and enduring.” Being six years old has its pleasures, to be sure, but it also comes with strong doses of tedium, powerlessness, and futility, which we tend not to acknowledge as adults. Calvin and Hobbes showed me, as it’s shown so many young readers, that there’s a way out: not through studiousness, not through politeness, and certainly not through following the rules, but through the power of the imagination to re-enchant daily life. If it gets you sent to your room once in a while, that’s a small price to pay.

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The Comiclopedia: An Online Archive of 14,000 Comic Artists, From Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, to Mœbius and Hergé

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

Kan de bank je verplichten om afstand te doen van je bitcoins? Die vraag kwam ik tegen op de blog van het AMLC. Het ligt iets juridischer: schiet een bank tekort in haar zorgplicht door een klant mede te delen dat zij de bankrelatie zou beëindigen als deze haar bitcoins niet zou verkopen. Voor iedereen die naar de “Sell”-knop grijpt: het antwoord is negatief.

Het AMLC legt uit: Het gaat om een bedrijf (Decos, AE) dat zich richt op de ontwikkeling van nieuwe technologie, waaronder blockchain. Sinds 2013 kocht en verkocht het bedrijf zo nu en dan bitcoins. Het bedrijf gebruikte haar posities in bitcoin vooral als reserve om liquiditeit aan te vullen. Eens per jaar werden delen verkocht en in het jaar daarop werden bitcoins aangekocht. De Rabobank deed op zeker moment onderzoek naar deze klant van haar, en notdekte “dat de onderneming middels het aan- en verkopen van Bitcoins, alsmede het minen van virtuele valuta, niet voldoet aan het beleid Rabobank virtuele valuta”. Ophouden daarmee dus, of je gaat eruit als klant. Voor een bedrijf een kleine ramp natuurlijk.

Wat was dan de noncompliance, of iets algemener welk beleid heeft de Rabobank? “Het CDD beleid is uitsluitend voor intern gebruik, deze kunnen we helaas niet delen. Dit betekent dat wij ook op onze website geen informatie hebben over ons beleid.” Een bank heeft volgens de wet een zorgplicht, en mag een bancaire relatie daarom niet zonder meer eenzijdig opzeggen op grond van het beleid en/of de eigen algemene voorwaarden. Daar staat tegenover dat een bank ook bepaalde regels moet navolgen, zoals de antiwitwasregels uit de Wwft.

Levert handel in bitcoins een risico rond die regels om? Niet direct: Dat Rabobank strikt beleid hanteert ten aanzien van (de handel) in virtuele valuta door ondernemingen is gelet op de door Rabobank genoemde risico’s niet onbegrijpelijk. Het staat Rabobank in beginsel vrij om dit beleid te voeren. Ook wanneer dit beleid betekent dat zakelijke klanten geen virtuele valuta via Rabobank kunnen verhandelen of aanhouden. De stelling van Rabobank dat de Wwft haar ertoe verplicht dit beleid te voeren, berust echter op een onjuiste interpretatie van de door Rabobank aangehaalde bepalingen uit deze wet. De wet eist immers dat je onderzoek doet bij verdachte transacties, niet dat je de klant eruit gooit als het verdacht riekt.

Dan blijft over de contractsvrijheid: mag Rabobank als private partij ervoor kiezen om strenger beleid te maken dan de wet van haar vergt? Ja, aldus het Gerechtshof. Die contractsvrijheid is er, zolang je er maar netjes mee omgaat. Wederom die zorgplicht. En daar gaat het hier op mis: Op grond van de bancaire zorgplicht is Rabobank verplicht haar klanten te informeren over haar beleid op het moment dat zij daar om vragen. Je moet als zakelijke klant bij een bank weten dat er vast regels zullen zijn over virtuele valuta, maar je hoeft echt niet te weten dat een bank ze wel eens zou kunnen verbieden. Als dát het beleid is, dan moet dat expliciet uitgedragen worden zodat je je keuze voor een bank daarop kunt afstemmen.

De volgende stap is dat je de toepassing van het beleid motiveert. Oftewel: welke risico’s zien we hier. Enkel zeggen “er kúnnen risico’s zijn dus het mag never nooit niet” is niet genoeg: Rabobank heeft echter niet aangevoerd dat zich verhoogde risico’s voordeden bij Decos. Rabobank heeft daarmee haar aanzegging in feite alleen gebaseerd op (categoriale) bezwaren aangaande virtuele valuta. Ten aanzien van de aan- en verkoop van bitcoins door Decos heeft Rabobank op geen enkel moment duidelijk gemaakt op basis waarvan het risico zodanig hoog werd geacht dat er van Decos mocht worden geëist dat zij haar volledige portefeuille binnen drie maanden zou verkopen. Als laatste is die periode van drie maanden ook nog eens onredelijk kort. Gezien de langlopende bancaire relatie, het grote belang dat Decos had bij de voortzetting daarvan en het gegeven dat de mogelijkheid van overstappen naar een andere bank op zijn minst onzeker was en ook meer tijd in beslag zou nemen dan drie maanden, had Rabobank aan haar eisen in elk geval een redelijke(re) termijn moeten verbinden. Alles bij elkaar had de bank dus onrechtmatig gehandeld door deze verplichting af te dwingen. Alleen, wat is de schade? Het bedrijf hanteerde de bitcoins als een soort reservepotje voor als de gewone geldstromen wat krapper werden. Het is dan logisch dat ze normaliter in ieder geval een deel van de bitcoins zouden hebben behouden. Maar welk deel, en of dingen als transactiekosten meewegen, dat moet in een aparte procedure worden bepaald.

Ondertussen lijk ik beleid te ontwaren op de Rabobank-site.

Arnoud

Het bericht Kan de bank je verplichten je bitcoins te verkopen op straffe van verlies bankrekening? verscheen eerst op Ius Mentis.

If you need six minutes of comic relief, this might do the trick. For those who don’t get the underlying reference, watch here. Enjoy! :)

Enlarge (credit: OsakaWayne Studios)

As if we didn’t have enough reasons to get at least eight hours of sleep, there is now one more. Neurons are still active during sleep. We may not realize it, but the brain takes advantage of this recharging period to get rid of junk that was accumulating during waking hours.

Sleep is something like a soft reboot. We knew that slow brainwaves had something to do with restful sleep; researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have now found out why. When we are awake, our neurons require energy to fuel complex tasks such as problem-solving and committing things to memory. The problem is that debris gets left behind after they consume these nutrients. As we sleep, neurons use these rhythmic waves to help move cerebrospinal fluid through brain tissue, carrying out metabolic waste in the process.

In other words, neurons need to take out the trash so it doesn’t accumulate and potentially contribute to neurodegenerative diseases. “Neurons serve as master organizers for brain clearance,” the WUSTL research team said in a study recently published in Nature.

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Enlarge / Scientists are homing in on how navigation skills develop. (credit: Knowable Magazine (CC BY-ND))

Like many of the researchers who study how people find their way from place to place, David Uttal is a poor navigator. “When I was 13 years old, I got lost on a Boy Scout hike, and I was lost for two and a half days,” recalls the Northwestern University cognitive scientist. And he’s still bad at finding his way around.

The world is full of people like Uttal—and their opposites, the folks who always seem to know exactly where they are and how to get where they want to go. Scientists sometimes measure navigational ability by asking someone to point toward an out-of-sight location—or, more challenging, to imagine they are someplace else and point in the direction of a third location—and it’s immediately obvious that some people are better at it than others.

“People are never perfect, but they can be as accurate as single-digit degrees off, which is incredibly accurate,” says Nora Newcombe, a cognitive psychologist at Temple University who coauthored a look at how navigational ability develops in the 2022 Annual Review of Developmental Psychology. But others, when asked to indicate the target’s direction, seem to point at random. “They have literally no idea where it is.”

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For months, Change Healthcare has faced an immensely messy ransomware debacle that has left hundreds of pharmacies and medical practices across the United States unable to process claims. Now, thanks to an apparent dispute within the ransomware criminal ecosystem, it may have just become far messier still.

In March, the ransomware group AlphV, which had claimed credit for encrypting Change Healthcare’s network and threatened to leak reams of the company’s sensitive health care data, received a $22 million payment—evidence, publicly captured on bitcoin’s blockchain, that Change Healthcare had very likely caved to its tormentors’ ransom demand, though the company has yet to confirm that it paid. But in a new definition of a worst-case ransomware, a different ransomware group claims to be holding Change Healthcare’s stolen data and is demanding a payment of their own.

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Enlarge / The Nesjavellir Geothermal Power Station. Geothermal power has long been popular in volcanic countries like Iceland, where hot water bubbles from the ground. (credit: Gretar Ívarsson/Wikimedia Commons)

Glistening in the dry expanses of the Nevada desert is an unusual kind of power plant that harnesses energy not from the sun or wind, but from the Earth itself.

Known as Project Red, it pumps water thousands of feet into the ground, down where rocks are hot enough to roast a turkey. Around the clock, the plant sucks the heated water back up to power generators. Since last November, this carbon-free, Earth-borne power has been flowing onto a local grid in Nevada.

Geothermal energy, though it’s continuously radiating from Earth’s super-hot core, has long been a relatively niche source of electricity, largely limited to volcanic regions like Iceland where hot springs bubble from the ground. But geothermal enthusiasts have dreamed of sourcing Earth power in places without such specific geological conditions—like Project Red’s Nevada site, developed by energy startup Fervo Energy.

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Enlarge / Takeda Pharmaceutical Co. Adderall XR brand medication arranged at a pharmacy in Provo, Utah, in November 2023. (credit: Getty | George Frey)

Drug shortages in the US have reached an all-time high, with 323 active and ongoing shortages already tallied this year, according to data collected by the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists (ASHP).

The current drug shortage total surpasses the previous record of 320, set in 2014, and is the highest recorded since ASHP began tracking shortages in 2001.

"All drug classes are vulnerable to shortages," ASHP CEO Paul Abramowitz said in a statement Thursday. "Some of the most worrying shortages involve generic sterile injectable medications, including cancer chemotherapy drugs and emergency medications stored in hospital crash carts and procedural areas. Ongoing national shortages of therapies for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] also remain a serious challenge for clinicians and patients."

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Enlarge / Generic, non-Western Digital SD cards. (credit: Getty)

Western Digital plans to release the first 4TB SD card next year. On Thursday, the storage firm announced plans to demo the product in person next week.

Western Digital will launch the SD card, which follows the SD Association's Secure Digital Ultra Capacity (SDUC) standard, under its SanDisk brand and market it toward "complex media and entertainment workflows," such as high-resolution video with high framerates, using cameras and laptops, the announcement said.

The spacious card will use the Ultra High Speed-1 (UHS-1) bus interface, supporting max theoretical transfer rates of up to 104MB per second. It will support minimum write speeds of 10 MB/s, AnandTech reported. Minimum sequential write speeds are expected to reach 30 MB/s, the publication said.

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Highly capable hackers are rooting multiple corporate networks by exploiting a maximum-severity zero-day vulnerability in a firewall product from Palo Alto Networks, researchers said Friday.

The vulnerability, which has been under active exploitation for at least two weeks now, allows the hackers with no authentication to execute malicious code with root privileges, the highest possible level of system access, researchers said. The extent of the compromise, along with the ease of exploitation, has earned the CVE-2024-3400 vulnerability the maximum severity rating of 10.0. The ongoing attacks are the latest in a rash of attacks aimed at firewalls, VPNs, and file-transfer appliances, which are popular targets because of their wealth of vulnerabilities and direct pipeline into the most sensitive parts of a network.

The zero-day is present in PAN-OS 10.2, PAN-OS 11.0, and/or PAN-OS 11.1 firewalls when they are configured to use both the GlobalProtect gateway and device telemetry. Palo Alto Networks has yet to patch the vulnerability but is urging affected customers to follow the workaround and mitigation guidance provided here. The advice includes enabling Threat ID 95187 for those with subscriptions to the company’s Threat Prevention service and ensuring vulnerability protection has been applied to their GlobalProtect interface. When that’s not possible, customers should temporarily disable telemetry until a patch is available.

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Enlarge / An image of a boy amazed by flying letters. (credit: Getty Images)

Some weeks in AI news are eerily quiet, but during others, getting a grip on the week's events feels like trying to hold back the tide. This week has seen three notable large language model (LLM) releases: Google Gemini Pro 1.5 hit general availability with a free tier, OpenAI shipped a new version of GPT-4 Turbo, and Mistral released a new openly licensed LLM, Mixtral 8x22B. All three of those launches happened within 24 hours starting on Tuesday.

With the help of software engineer and independent AI researcher Simon Willison (who also wrote about this week's hectic LLM launches on his own blog), we'll briefly cover each of the three major events in roughly chronological order, then dig into some additional AI happenings this week.

(credit: Google)

On Tuesday morning Pacific time, Google announced that its Gemini 1.5 Pro model (which we first covered in February) is now available in 180+ countries, excluding Europe, via the Gemini API in a public preview. This is Google's most powerful public LLM so far, and it's available in a free tier that permits up to 50 requests a day.

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An accomplished and prominent transplant surgeon in Texas allegedly falsified patient data in a government transplant waiting list, which may have prevented his own patients from receiving lifesaving liver transplants, according to media reports and hospital statements.

Memorial Hermann-Texas Medical Center halted its liver transplant program on April 3 after finding "irregularities" with donor acceptance criteria, the Houston Chronicle reported based on a statement from the hospital. At the time there were 38 patients on the hospital's wait list for a liver. Earlier this week, the hospital also halted its kidney transplant program, telling the Chronicle that it was pausing operations to "evaluate a new physician leadership structure."

Memorial Hermann has not named the surgeon behind the "inappropriate changes," but The New York Times identified him as Dr. Steve Bynon, a surgeon who has received numerous accolades and, at one point, appears to have been featured on a billboard. Bynon oversaw both the liver and kidney transplant programs at Memorial Hermann.

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Epic Games has filed a proposed injunction that would stop Google from restricting third-party app distribution outside Google Play Store on Android devices after proving that Google had an illegal monopoly in markets for Android app distribution.

Epic is suggesting that competition on the Android mobile platform would be opened up if the court orders Google to allow third-party app stores to be distributed for six years in the Google Play Store and blocks Google from entering any agreements with device makers that would stop them from pre-loading third-party app stores. This would benefit both mobile developers and users, Epic argued in a wide-sweeping proposal that would greatly limit Google's control over the Android app ecosystem.

US District Court Judge James Donato will ultimately decide the terms of the injunction. Google has until May 3 to respond to Epic's filing.

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Enlarge / From magnets we came, to magnets we return. (credit: Garner Products)

There is the mental image that most people have of electronics recycling, and then there is the reality, which is shredding.

Less than 20 percent of e-waste even makes it to recycling. That which does is, if not acquired through IT asset disposition (ITAD) or spotted by a worker who sees some value, heads into the shredder for raw metals extraction. If you've ever toured an electronics recycling facility, you can see for yourself how much of your stuff eventually gets chewed into little bits, whether due to design, to unprofitable reuse markets, or sheer volume concerns.

Traditional hard drives have some valuable things inside them—case, cover, circuit boards, drive assemblies, actuators, and rare-earth magnets—but only if they avoid the gnashing teeth. That's where the DiskMantler comes in. Garner Products, a data elimination firm, has a machine that it claims can process 500 hard drives (the HDD kind) per day in a way that leaves a drive separated into those useful components. And the DiskMantler does this by shaking the thing to death (video).

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