Gripping article in this week’s New Scientist on the gradual escalation of nuclear arms between the word’s superpowers, and this:
In June 2016, the British submarine Vengeance test-fired a Trident missile, the UK’s nuclear deterrent. Something went badly wrong, and the missile may have veered towards the US.
The missile was not carrying its nuclear warheads and was destroyed. The UK government has remained silent on what might have caused the incident, but “the failed Trident test is consistent with cyber interference,” says Paul Ingram of the British American Security Information Council, a think tank in London.
Finally, it’s here – a smartwatch that has it’s own cellular connection and so doesn’t require you have your phone with for it key functionality to work – while also not looking like an ASBO tag.
I’m impressed that Apple were able to cram this new functionality into a watch that’s almost the same size as the previous generation. The ability to go out for a run, to a gig or to the pub for the evening and leave your phone at home is a game changer. Being able to listen to music, get directions, take calls and respond to calls without anything on your person is something I imagine to be a very freeing experience. It’s still early days, and I expect the new watch to have significantly worse battery life when the cellular connection is used. Just as the current generation suffers when you use the GPS and heart rate monitoring functionaries, the new models will see less battery life if you use them away from your iPhone a lot of the time. In two or three years time however, when battery and processor efficiency has improved even more, these watches will be capable of replacing our phones for many of their core uses. Will people want to replace their phones though? No camera, no web browser, no games. I doubt it. Having the option though, can be only a good thing. If you can leave your phone at home more and more often, you might even consider a bigger phone, or just having a tablet-sized device instead of a phone. Or perhaps we’ll just pull down out Apple Glasses when we need a bigger screen.
So will I be upgrading to the Series 3? In short, no. I bought an Apple Watch last year, and I’m going to make it last.⌚️
I’m beginning to come around to the idea of cancelling my Netflix subscription. With the latest series of House of Cards being, well, dismal, and other new shows starting to feel a bit tied and formulaic (Ozark was good, but it was basically Breaking Bad) it seems to have lost its shine, and don’t get me started on the quality of films available. One additional reason though, is high quality of drama coming out coming out of the BBC these days. The latest of which aired recently: Trust Me.
About a nurse who fakes her identity to get a job as a doctor, it’s a nail-biting thriller that forces viewers to confront a fear that anybody who’s ever had complex medical treatment or surgery must have had at one point; does the doctor really know what they’re doing? The subtle social commentary is not lost either, with the nurse’s life in a small terrace house hunting around in her purse for small change transformed into a bourgeois life of a doctor living in a swanky apartment and frequenting dinner parties.
I forget who came up with the adage that in a TV or movie, you can always tell whether a character is well written if you can imagine them staring in their spinoff show. It holds true, and demonstrates the excellent writing in this drama, as indeed most of the secondary characters could hold their own if called upon.
So I recommend anyone who can catch this while it’s available on iPlayer.
