Creative Connectivity

An End to Gas Cookery

Food has led to some strange and deeply held customs about the right way to do things. Should you add milk to the cup before or after you pour the tea in? Does the jam or cream go on to your scone first, and should butter should be allowed as a further layer? And whether it’s better to cook with electricity or gas?

All of these are largely societal behaviours learnt from your parents, or determined by where you live. In the case of gas or electric, that’s heavily based on location. If you grew up in a town, you’re likely to favour gas. If your upbringing was more rural, where you’d not have had a gas supply, electricity would be the preference. Both have strong advocates, and the web is full of opinions and rabbit holes to fall in, but it looks as if that won’t remain a choice for long, as the UK Government is considering ways of stopping us cooking with gas.

A world without 14 nanometres. Or how things could fall apart.

I recently wrote about how our current generation of technical achievements is critically dependent on just one company in Taiwan. TSMC is the only chip company in the world that is capable of making the most advanced chips that drive our latest smartphones and data centre servers. Without them, we might need to wait another five years for AI or 6G to progress, and Apple would probably be unable to make anything more recent than an iPhone 12.

It’s an example of how so much of what we rely on is bottlenecked by a single company. In this case, it’s also a single country, as it’s proving difficult to replicate TSMC’s engineering experience outside Taiwan, despite hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown at the problem. These bottlenecks aren’t uncommon. They may be due to a company that make a component, a company that makes the tools to manufacture that component, or even the raw materials. If any part of this chain is disrupted, things will start to fall apart.

We saw some elements of this during Covid, but those were mostly supply chain issues, where things were in the wrong place. Manufacture didn’t stop; shipping became difficult and some industries failed to plan for the resulting extended lead-times. But what if, at some point in the future, manufacturing did stop?

Has the audio industry lost its imagination?

If you read the glossy audio magazines (audio enthusiasts still buy them), or spend some time browsing Amazon, you’ll see an audio industry which appears to be in good health. Depending on your personal preferences you can get something that’s smaller, shinier, lossless, retro, or virtually any adjective you can think of. But if you strip off the marketing glitz, it’s questionable whether audio quality has improved much in the last seventy years.

For the first 25 years, families huddled around horns. Then, in 1925, loudspeakers appeared, bringing sound to everyone in a room. The industry spent the next quarter century improving quality, to the point where most music lovers thought that audio reproduction was about as good as it was going to get. 1950s and 60s novels were populated with characters enthusing about their preamplifiers and graphic equalisers as they listened to the finer points of Mozart and Beethoven.

Then the focus changed. Other priorities took over, as multiple disruptions changed the way we listen to music. What’s interesting is that each of these disruptions was accompanied by a reduction in audio quality, as consumers decided that other features were more important. It’s not a message that the audio industry likes to acknowledge, as trying to push “higher” quality often seems to be the limit of their imagination. But history suggests they may be about to have another shock. So, let’s look at the reality of what happened. It all started in 1957 with:

Why Grabbing Greenland could kill 6G and burst the AI bubble

You’ve probably noticed that there’s a bit of a penchant for land grabbing at the moment. Russia wants Ukraine, Israel wants Palestine, China wants Taiwan, and now, America wants Greenland. The problem is that as more of it goes on, the behaviour becomes normalised and the international barrier to grabbing is lessened. America’s Christmas foray into Venezuela has further regularised the concept of interference, which means there’s probably a mandarin in Beijing who’s already cancelled their summer holiday and written “Taiwanese unification” on their wall calendar.

The problem with grabbing Taiwan is that it’s not just land-grab. It comes with some interesting unintended consequences, which may profoundly alter the technology balance between China and the US, bursting the AI bubble and upsetting telecoms evolution along the way.

The Class of STEM

I recently wrote an article about various Government and industry initiatives in the UK to recruit more engineers to build our brave new world of net zero. It’s an important subject, as it’s one of the few things that everyone agrees on. It’s very clear that we don’t have enough engineers in the workforce; but we don’t seem to have any credible plan to increase the numbers in the short term.

What was interesting was the discussion that followed that article, which suggested that the class system still has a surprising hold on engineering status, particularly here in Britain. It reminded me of the famous Frost Report “Class” sketch from 1966.

Should Screwfix take over Labour Policy?

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an Energy Minister in possession of a net zero policy, must be in want of a Clean Energy Engineer. Or so thinks Ed Miliband.

Equally, it is a truth universally acknowledged, that an anyone in possession of a dripping tap, must be in want of a plumber. Or so thinks Screwfix.

It’s possible that only one of those two statements is true, but it’s been an odd few weeks, with two very similar policy documents being published about the need to train more engineers for the future of the UK. One from Ed Miliband, highlighting the need for another 420,000 engineers by 2030 to support his Clean Energy Superpower Mission, which he believes will transform the UK. A few days before that announcement, Screwfix – one of the UK’s largest builder’s merchants published a Voice of the Trade skills survey identifying a similar shortfall of 250,000 tradespeople in the same timescale, who they believe are needed to build and maintain our homes and workplaces. Whilst Ed Miliband’s introduction to the Clean Energy Superpower Mission reads like a Government edict from “1984”, exhorting us to “take back control from petrostates” and an end to “union-free zones” in the industry, the Screwfix manifesto is a lot more pragmatic, calling for the Government to make it easier for young people to take up a career in trade through apprenticeships.