Ulster Rambles

WITH DAVID ULSTER RAMBLES

I began my article for the previous edition of The Irish Scene as follows: “As well as a new decade, it seems like a new era.’ I mentioned how optimistic many of us were for the years ahead. ‘I hope the decade has started off well for all you readers out there and of course for everyone else as well. Lately, it seems that Boris (probably not him but one of his cronies) has had an idea to link Ulster to Scotland; No, not politically but by means of a bridge.’

Well the optimism did not last long. How depressing that 90% of our news is about one item only. The other 10% is about the weather! I will try my best to avoid it here so, wish me luck. Perhaps I can now clear up the thinking of Boris. It appears that the prime minister’s commitment to “levelling up” the country should not be doubted, and so it should not be ruled out that his promised bridge between Scotland and Northern Ireland is not actually intended to be a bridge, but merely a national thought experiment. It is only a few weeks after I mentioned it in my last article that the bridge (that cannot be built) was dredged up again, and inflicted once again on the public conscience. We now learn that the Scottish secretary Alister Jack, thinks the bridge should, in fact, be a tunnel. Well why not. After all, Alice was able to find great adventure when she fell down one. Someone even wrote a very popular book about her adventures. Alister reasoned that a tunnel would be cheaper, apparently, and “more weather proof”. He has told a committee of the Scottish parliament that he has raised the prospect of a tunnel, instead of a bridge. The tunnel would, he said, be a “cheaper” alternative. Why not a floating castle on a cloud, I ask you? Why not carry people from Scotland to Northern Ireland on the back of that weird dragon from The Neverending Story? Bring back Finn McCool. He was able apparently to nip over to Scotland frequently and easily. Enough of this nonsense! To be honest I had more faith in Trump’s wall, though to expect Mexico to pay for it was going way too far. OK, I can hear you ask if I have lost my mind. I am trying desperately to avoid what is in the news at present but I am finding another topic of interest difficult to find. Anzac day will have passed by the time you are perusing the magazine. It will probably be published online only, so you will not be sitting on the couch with the great little “mag” in your hand but sitting in front of a monitor or fiddling around with your thumbs on a flash phone or iPad. Never mind, you are alive and well. May it remain so! I once sang ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’, Eric Bogle’s famous song, to eight hundred school children. This year I will be singing it to our eight neighbours if they all show up. Well there are only ten houses in our road. I believe it to be the shortest road in Australia if not the world. We are so lucky to be able to communicate with our friends, relations and loved ones by means of the ubiquitous iPhone. I actually like many of the clips sent to me from all over the world by means of WhatsApp, Messenger and of course email. With Facetime and Zoom we can now have conferences with lots of people at once or, like my good wife from Dublin 4, we can have meetings with our friends and chat with all of them together. I noted that my wife’s group had to make up a set of rules for it to work as at the beginning, at least three would be talking at the same time. They came up with the fabulous idea that they would ‘mute’ themselves while one only was able to talk. It worked. How did the iphone come about? Certainly Steve Jobs did not do it all on his own. For example the iPhone wouldn’t be the iPhone without its iconic touch-screen technology. The first touch screen was actually invented way back in the 1960s by Eric Arthur Johnson, a radar engineer working at a government research centre in the U.K.

While the Righteous Brothers were losing that lovin’ feeling, Johnson was publishing his findings in an Electronics Letters article published by the Institution of Engineering and Technology. The 1969 patent that followed has now been cited across a whole host of famous inventions—including Apple’s 1997 patent for “a portable computer handheld cellular telephone.” Battery Low. Blink, blink. We all know iPhones soak up a lot of power, yet they’d be nowhere without the rechargeable lithium battery. British scientist Stanley Whittingham created the very first example of the lithium battery while working in a lab for ExxonMobil in the ‘70s, carrying forward research he’d initially conducted with colleagues at Stanford University. Previous research had already indicated that lithium could be used to store energy, but it was Whittingham and his team that figured out how to do this at room temperature—without the risk of explosion. Of course we cannot leave out the Internet and the World Wide Web or www. When Apple engineer Andy Grignon first added internet functionality to an iPod in 2004, Steve Jobs was far from enthusiastic: Apparently he was quoted as saying “This is bullshit. I don’t want this. I know it works, I got it, great, thanks, but this is a shitty experience.” The painstaking work of multiple Apple teams took a “shitty experience” and made something revolutionary—all collective human experience and knowledge right there, in your back pocket, at the touch of your fingertips. Well who invented the WWW? I won’t bore you here with that information just to say that Sir Tim Berners-Lee is widely credited with the invention. But even Berners-Lee cannot be given solo credit. While the modern iPhone is now 120 million times more powerful than the computers that took Apollo 11 to the moon, its real power lies in its ability to leverage the billions of websites and terabytes that make up the internet. There are countless other research breakthroughs without which the iPhone would not be possible. It is an era-defining technology. Era-defining technologies do not come from the rare brilliance of one person or organization, but layer upon layer of innovation and decade upon decade of research, with thousands of individuals and organizations standing on each other’s shoulders and peering that bit further into the future. In our age of seemingly insurmountable global challenges, we must not only remember this but be inspired by it. We must encourage openness and transparency at the heart of research, ensuring it is disseminated as widely, quickly and clearly as possible. We must remember that every delay and distortion matters. Research integrity and reproducibility, transparent peer review, open access, diversity—these are more than just buzzwords. They are exciting steps toward reforming the infrastructure of a global research ecosystem that has always been our best hope for the future. Our future is looking a little grim at present but the human mind is resourceful, inventive and adaptable. We will come out of this crisis eventually and will be much the better for the experience. Well I almost achieved it; not mentioning what is uppermost in all our minds. Ulster has not fared well but then most countries are in the same boat. I wish you all wellness in the months ahead. 35 Troode St (next to Licensing Centre) West Perth. Email perthcity@tyrepower.com.au

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