Crosstown Traffic - the prequel

I love the history of technology, for a thousand reasons. Technology is evolution at warp speed: until humans came along, species changed and spread through nature over hundreds of thousands of years. You needed bigger teeth, or a thicker shell, or a way to tap into a particular food source, you had to wait for the right random mutation and enough generations of natural selection to get there. God, it took ages.

If humans wanted sharper teeth, they knapped flint to a knife. A thicker shell; carve a shield out of wood or weave plant fibres into a coat. You could think it up in an afternoon, tell everyone about in a day, have it everywhere in a month. (The inter-relationships between language and technology are severely in need of a good rummage, but, y'know, linguists are a tribe who tread their own path.). So, technology turns us from creatures that have to adapt at the speed of biology, to ones that can adapt at the speed of making things. Evolution is about creating advantages better than the other critter, so we're now really, really, really good at evolution. Of course we've taken over the planet. 

That alone would make the history of technology just the juiciest antelope to hunt - the grand view. But the tiniest stuff is equally delicious.A medical friend tells me the story about how, when she was doing her first house work in a London hospital, the common room got its first colour TV. It had just been installed; it was a Saturday afternoon, and five doctors were clustered around the set excitedly watching the football. Two men in brown shop-keeper coats came in, unplugged the telly - "Sorry, gents, there's a fault, we have to take it away" - and walked out with it. 

There was no fault. The men were audacious thieves. It was worth going to all that risk and trouble to take a TV out from under hte noses of its owners, because the thing was worth so much money. Now, nobody steals them any more: property crime in the NHS is down! TVs-as-a-thing, despite being just as much a part of our culture as before, have almost vanished.They're paper-thin. They cost very little, and their resale price is even less. What was an enormous, specialised collection of esoterica - a mammoth vacuum-filled glass tube with a particle accelerator built-in, fed by a 25 thousand volt power supply, connected to machinery with hundreds of adjustments and thousands of individual bits - is now a couple of chips costing tuppence and a glass panel that's printed with chemicals the same way a newspaper is printed with ink. Which, not coincidentally, is roughly what used to be a fax machine has become, what was a typewriter is now, where the souls of videorecorders and telephones and cameras and walkie-talkies now live, what large parts of an aircraft cockpit are, what an oscilloscope or a heartbeat monitor or whatever is. Everything is a couple of chips and a plate of glass. (Oh, and radio waves. We'll get onto those, be sure of that.)

And this in its own way is part of the digitisation of human culture,  the freeing of our information - which is to say, a large part of being human - from the need to evolve at the speed of making things. Instead, it - and thus to a large part we - now evolve at the speed of having ideas and writing them down. Look what happened last time we made that kind of leap. What a time to be alive.

And you say technology is dull? Jeez. 

None of which is what this blog was going to be about when I started it - which was about how the Cold War (another of my obsessions) hasn't gone away but has embedded itself, like viral DNA, in the tiniest, most intimate details of our everyday life. That'll have to wait until next time. 

Strike a light - LiFi's dim prospects

I'm a fan of new technology, and a bigger fan of anything that makes communications faster, cheaper and easier for all. So I should be excited by a new-ish technology which calls itself LiFi.

I'm not. There are good technical and practical reasons why - but something rather more disturbing has made me even less of a fan.

The basic idea is simple enough, and has been around since Edison. Take an ordinary light and wobble the voltage to it fast enough, and some distance away those wobbles can be picked up by a photodetector and turned back into an electrical signal. Do it with voice, and you've got a telephone that works by light. Do it with data and you've got... well, that's how fibre optics work. These days, it's commonplace to push gigabits a second across oceans using the technique.

In fact, the original wifi specification included an LED option, sending around a megabit over the sort of LEDs you find in remote controls.

LiFi takes this idea and says 'let's do it with ordinary room LED lightbulbs'. Feed them with Internet, and you've got an alternative to wifi with none of that dreary old frequency congestion ("Radio spectrum is running out!"), Instead you get better privacy ("Light can't go through walls!") and much faster connections. And it'll be cheap!

And this is all true,now we have low-cost powerful LED room lighting. But is it useful?

There are three major drawbacks. First is the obvious one - it doesn't work in the dark. You may never want to use the Internet in the dark, of course, and you may never put your mobile phone into a pocket or your tablet into a bag. But if you do, it's lights out for your Internet connection.

The second is slightly more subtle. Lightbulbs make lousy receivers, and bright lights are very power-hungry. So how do you get your connection from your mobile device back to the Internet? You can't have another great lightbulb plugged into your iPhone, and you can't easily build in some super-sensitive receiver device into your room lightbulb. So, if you just want to use LiFi, you'll have to install special receivers in each room - and some sort of bright flashy thing on your mobile device.

LiFi has a development kit, called Li-1st, that has a separate transmit/receive dongle you leave under a special LiFi celing-mounted receiver/modulator that transmits from an LED lightbulb, which is pretty much how we've always done this sort of thing. You do get a massive 7(ish)Mbps both ways over a huge three metre range, mind. (I'd be interested in how much radio frequency interference it generates by zapping an ordinary LED luminaire at megahertz.)

Lastly, there's the small issue of getting the Internet to the lightbulb in the first place. You can install networking-over-powerline gateways, but lighting circuits tend to be separate from ring mains and I'm not sure that'll work terribly well. They're also not very good at doing fast - and it's another thing to install. Or you can install wired Ethernet to your lightbulb sockets: precisely the sort of thing wifi was designed to eliminate. (The Li-1st goes down this route, so you'll need ceiling Ethernet to play.)

Of course, you could solve the problem of the backchannel from your mobile and the data-to-the-lightbulb problem by using, er, wifi. Doesn't solve the darkness problem, and it introduces one of its own - why do you need LiFi at all?

These are the sort of problems that sank the original wifi-over-light idea, as well as various other efforts to fill ordinary rooms with light-based data. As far as I can tell, LiFi's sole original idea is that you can use standard LED room lighting, and that doesn't actually fix much.

It doesn't work for me: it has the scent of the wrong technology trying to fix the wrong problem. There are red herrings in its spectrum: wifi, which it aims to replace, is very fast and cheap and getting better all the time. (It also works in the dark.)  Stuff like 90 GHz radio has just as much chance of fixing the radio spectrum crunch.

Plus, LiFi has a problem all its own - it's hideously overhyped. Visible light communication (VLC) can indeed go very fast, but headline speeds have no practical application (let alone commercially interesting ones) in the use model for the technology is "Internet everywhere by changing your lightbulbs". And very fast optical comms are nothing new; they are indeed useful in specialist applications.

And there is a lot of interesting research being done in the UK by the Ultra-parallel visible light communications (UP-VLC) project. on the basic technology of doing very clever things with solid-state lighting, which most certainly includes data transmission. Some time in the future, some of these ideas will have some cogent and practical applications. Some may be revolutionary.

Nonetheless, this is how it's being pushed - replace all the lightbulbs in the world with LiFi lightbulbs, and magic happens. Thirty movies a second from your Anglepoise! Billion dollar markets around the corner! Buy our technology! Invest now to beat the rush!

But my heart was finally hardened by the latest bright future emission from LiFi's head bulb, Professor Harald Haas, chair of mobile communications at the University of Edinburgh. He's involved in the research group mentioned above, but is also founder of pureLiFi, the company pushing LiFi's vision of the future.

The Scotsman printed his new screed without comment or criticism (although, since I'm informed there's just one science correspondent in the whole of Scottish media, one can't expect too much.) It's the usual breathless hyperbole, but with a little added twist - "It is also free from the health risks of Wi-Fi, which the World Health Organisation still deems to be potentially carcinogenic."

Really, Professor Haas? You want to go there? Well, it's true that a study group of the WHO did classify low-level radio frequency energy as being in Group 2B of potential carcinogens - in other words, in the group of agents that nobody can show to be harmful but which merit further work. It's a huge group, including hundreds of things such as industrial chemicals, pharmaceuticals, paint additives, food additives, nickel, coffee and the sort of magnetic fields generated by - among other things - mains equipment. Such as lighting.

In other words, bringing this up as a competitive advantage is - in my opinion - grossly irresponsible. It's using the Spectre of Cancer about things that haven't been shown to be dangerous, often after huge amounts of work, and if you really, really want to start bandying that you'd better be very sure that what you're selling is free of Group 2B agents. It's especially irresponsible from a Chair of Mobile Communications - who, one assumes, mostly works with radio frequency radiation and will be well aware of the actual evidence for health risks from wifi in particular  - which is much lower power and non-intrusive than mobile phone signals.

So - data over light is nothing new. The invention of solid-state LED lighting may open up some new uses for it: indeed, I'm sure it will. LiFi, however, is not only over-egging the pudding but is edging into snake-oil territory (sadly, not categorised as Group 2B). You don't need to be that hyperbolic, and to consistently ignore the genuine problems, if you've got a genuinely good idea.

The shiniest thing about LiFi isn't its future, it's the marketing.

A Song For Europe

This blog may be a little unusual, in that it has its own theme tune. The tune itself will be revealed in good time, alongside its connections with European bloodshed, gin, and a pure, clean, amusing virgin.

Let’s have some fun first.The story starts forty years ago, in a rambling Georgian vicarage set in a green valley on the banks of a tributary stream of the Tamar just to the north of Plymouth.

It is night, and the vicarage sleeps beneath the winter constellations. But the thick walls conveniently shelter the goings-on in one bedroom from another. The young son is wide-awake and agog at a literal war of words; his guardian angels know nothing of the clash of armies in his bedroom. The Cold War is in full spate.

The young son - the larval form of your correspondent - has discovered shortwave radio. In the pre-computer, pre-Internet age, this was seething with nations speaking unto nation, each with powerful transmitters telling the world of their version of the truth.

It was a jungle of shouts and murmurs, exotic noises and urgent signals. And music: concerts, ethnic, John Peel and Chinese orchestras.

One kind of music stands out as peculiar to the genius of the airwaves - the interval signal. To help listeners tuning in among the chaos, often with old or unreliable sets, it was the tradition for broadcasters to repeat short musical phrases in the minutes leading up to the start of programming. There were hundreds of these, from Poland’s Chopin to Israel’s urgent trumpets, and most of them have now been silenced, although you can raise them through seances in places like the Interval Signals Online archive

Some stuck fast in my musical memory. One in particular was Radio Netherland’s chiming call, ten bars in 2/4 time, little ascending minor key phrases with a pleasing resolution. (You can hear it captured from shortwave by Greg Shoom in the late 70s, 43 seconds into this recording from the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive) The young lad was much taken with it, and left recordings of it playing in hidden places at school as a sort of treasure hunt. Geek.

Forty years on: this Christmas. A flat in lively, downtown Edinburgh. The festive stresses are being kept at bay by whatever means necessary: in this case, London gin and John Dowland. Experimentally, the (still spectacled, still geeky) son of the manse has asked Spotify to shuffle through what Dowland it has, while his partner quietly hunts down obscure 6th century Middle Eastern religions online. For fun.

A new track politely plucks in from cyberspace, and in a nanosecond we’re back in the vicarage. It’s exactly the same tune - no, not exactly, but almost note for note. There’s a grab for the playlist - John Dowland, yes, and “What If A Day”. But why on earth would the Dutch use an Elizabethan English tune for a nationalistic beacon? It’s very pretty, to be sure, and perhaps more than that, but Dowland wasn’t Dutch. Was he? To the googles!

At first, each new fact just whipped up more mystery. The Radio Netherlands tune, it turned out, was called Merck toch hoe sterck (“Look, how strong”). and came from 1626 during the Eighty Years War between the Dutch and the Spanish. It has lyrics, too, which call on the doughty fighters of the Nederlands to hold out against the Spaniards who were doling out the biffing with no niggardly hand. (There’s a short Radio Netherlands talk about all this, three minutes into the same recording mentioned above.)

The Dowland, on the other hand, probably wasn’t Dowland at all but Thomas Campion, from roughly 1600. It is the setting for a poem that dwells on the randomness of fate and the evanescence of earthly pleasures. Wistful and tinged with mortality, it’s a very long way from a European slaughter song.

But how do you get here from there? How did Campion - or was it really Dowland? - get conscripted into the Cold War?

There are advantages in shacking up with a fully-armed historian. She dug away and came up with a monograph from Modern Philology, vol 4 no 3, Jan 1907 on the song and its history.

According to this century-old research, the tune starts life in a Scottish Metric Psalter in the mid-late 1500s, but at that point was just a couple of stanzas long. Campion vastly expanded and solidified it around 1600, and it then set off on hundreds of years as an evergreen, ever-mutating favourite across Europe. The main vector of infection was thespian; the song was made part of various plays and then dispersed throughout the Continent by travelling English troupes.

By the time it transmogrified into Merck toch hoe sterck, just a quarter-century after Campion had launched it, the tune was noted as  an Italian dance melody described as a "Comedianten Dans” with the name (according to Google’s Dutch-English elves, who may be having a giraffe) "Pure clean amusing virgin" - all trace of its origins gone.

There is much unanswered. How many tunes made this sort of journey? How long did they stay at the top of the pops? If it was Campion who effectively wrote it (I’m not convinced by the psalter connection), why does everyone still think it’s Dowland?

The search goes on. But as a tune that links my obsessions with shortwave radio, early music and Europe, it’s a fitting choice as this blog’s theme.

A Day In The Life

Welcome to my new blog. 

Various other blogs of mine litter the cyber-landscape like crashed spacecraft on Mars. Some worked for a while, some didn't survive the descent, others lost their support system and bleep, forlornly, into the void. 

But where would NASA be if it gave up when things went wrong, eh? The Russians kept going, even after the sky fell in. And who can ignore the glorious history of the British space programme? The only national effort with a 100 percent record of successful native payload insertion into orbit on native launcher technology. And it's still up there.  

So, per hardware ad Astra. Up and at 'em, boys.