Tag Archives: media

“Something very strange is happening here”

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Watching Maite Alberdi’s The Eternal Memory for New Scientist, 1 November 2023

Sometimes, to really understand a process, you have to follow it, without flinching, even if it upsets you, even if it breaks your heart.

Oscar-nominated director Maite Alberdi won the Sundance Grand Jury prize in 2023 for The Eternal Memory, a documentary made from original footage, home movies, newsreels and tapes smuggled out of Chile during the darkest years of General Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year-long dictatorship. Its subject is the Chilean writer and journalist Augusto Góngora, who’s living — and by the last reel very obviously dying — with Alzheimer’s disease.

Góngora (who passed away earlier this year aged 71) spent the years between 1973 and 1990 editing an opposition newspaper and shooting and smuggling VHS recordings out of Chile, as part of a desperate attempt to document and share years of national turmoil and horror. It was dangerous work. In 1985 a fellow journalist on the project, Jose Manuel Parada, had his throat slit from ear to ear for his trouble. This violent episode haunts Góngora, whose sense of self comes to depend increasingly on the presence (real or imagined) of friends and family.

From 1990 Góngora’s films recording “17 years of death” were succeeded by 18 years of cultural programming, as he went about interviewing writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians — people he believed could help bring his newly democratised nation out of its forced (book-banned, movie-less) forgetfulness, and reawaken its once vibrant culture.

Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2014, Góngora readily embraced his wife’s plan to record his physical and cognitive decline. Such a record would, at very least, be a testament to their 25 years together. Assembled, edited and capstoned with much new footage, The Eternal Memory is that and more: a meditation on what we can and cannot expect from memory.

The spine of the film is an honest, frank but never voyeuristic account of how Augusto Gongora succumbs to his neurodegenerative disease. Early on we see his wife, the actress and politician Paulina Fernández, taking the couple’s portrait off the bedroom wall before they settle to sleep. If she doesn’t take it down, the sight of two strangers staring down at him from the wall in the middle of the night might send Augusto into a panic.

Gongora’s deterioration is relentless: soon he is talking to the strangers in mirrors and glass doors. “Something very strange is happening here,” he muses. Soon he will not even recognise Paulina’s face.

Paulina’s plight is given its proper weight. Tirelessly she recites the basic facts of her lover’s life to him, and for a while, this litany brings comfort. “They’re always with me,” Augusto mutters, over and over, “and they love me, every day.” But no respite lasts for long, and the toll all this takes on Paulina is shocking.

What’s extraordinary about this film is that, even as it records the disintegration of memory in a single individual, it celebrates the way memories — set down in books, recorded on videotapes, delivered as witness statements or transmuted into art or drama or music — work collectively to bring an all-but-broken nation back to life.

Because for all the sadness here, this, too, must be said: that Gongora, through his films and through the three volume collection of remembrances La Memoria Prohibida (published at last in 1989), kept the memory of his country alive, and by doing so, he preserved its identity.

One line from that three-volume work of national renaissance echoes through the film: ”Without memory, there is no identity”. “I’m not myself any more,” Gongora weeps, near the end of the film. Even as Gongora loses his identity, however, his people are seen regaining theirs.

At a time when the idea of national identity is little more than a political football, it is worth remembering that a people’s idea of itself is a living thing, worth defending against the amnesia of tyrants.

Reality trumped

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Reading You Are Here: A field guide for navigating polarized speech, conspiracy theories, and our polluted media landscape by Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner (MIT Press)
for New Scientist, 3 March 2021

This is a book about pollution, not of the physical environment, but of our civic discourse. It is about disinformation (false and misleading information deliberately spread), misinformation (false and misleading information inadvertently spread), and malinformation (information with a basis in reality spread pointedly and specifically to cause harm).

Communications experts Whitney Phillips and Ryan M. Milner completed their book just prior to the US presidential election that replaced Donald Trump with Joe Biden. That election, and the seditious activities that prompted Trump’s second impeachment, have clarified many of the issues Phillips and Milner have gone to such pains to explore. Though events have stolen some their thunder, You Are Here remains an invaluable snapshot of our current social and technological problems around news, truth and fact.

The authors’ US-centric (but universally applicable) account of “fake news” begins with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Its deliberately silly name, cartoonish robes, and quaint routines (which accompanied all its activities, from rallies to lynchings) prefigured the “only-joking” subcultures (Pepe the Frog and the like) dominating so much of our contemporary social media. Next, an examination of the Satanic panics of the 1980s reveals much about the birth and growth of conspiracy theories. The authors’ last act is an unpicking of QAnon — a current far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a secret cabal of cannibalistic Satan-worshippers plotted against former U.S. president Donald Trump. This brings the threads of their argument together in a conclusion all the more apocalyptic for being so closely argued.

Polluted information is, they argue, our latest public health emergency. By treating the information sphere as an ecology under threat, the authors push past factionalism to reveal how, when we use media, “the everyday actions of everyone else feed into and are reinforced by the worst actions of the worst actors”

This is their most striking takeaway: that the media machine that enabled QAnon isn’t a machine out of alignment, or out of control, or somehow infected: it’s a system working exactly as designed — “a system that damages so much because it works so well”.

This media machine is founded on principles that, in and of themselves, seem only laudable. Top of the list is the idea that to counter harms, we have to call attention to them: “in other words, that light disinfects”.

This is a grand philosophy, for so long as light is hard to generate. But what happens when the light — the confluence of competing information sets, depicting competing realities — becomes blinding?

Take Google as an example. Google is an advertising platform, that makes money the more its users use the internet to “get to the bottom of things”. The deeper the rabbit-holes go, the more money Google makes. This sets up a powerful incentive for “conspiracy entrepreneurs” to produce content, creating “alternative media echo-systems”. When the facts run out, create alternative facts. “The algorithm” (if you’ll forgive this reviewer’s dicey shorthand) doesn’t care. “The algorithm” is, in fact, designed to serve up as much pollution as possible.

What’s to be done? Here the authors hit a quite sizeable snag. They claim they’re not asking “for people to ‘remain civil’”. They claim they’re not commanding us, “don’t feed the trolls.” But so far as I could see, this is exactly what they’re saying — and good for them.

With the machismo typical of the social sciences, the authors call for “foundational, systematic, top-to-bottom change,” whatever that is supposed to mean, when what they are actually advocating is a sense of personal decency, a contempt for anonymity, a willingness to stand by what one says come hell or high water, politeness and consideration, and a willingness to listen.

These are not political ideas. These are qualities of character. One might even call them virtues, of a sort that were once particularly prized by conservatives.

Phillips and Milner bemoan the way market capitalism has swallowed political discourse. They teeter on a much more important truth: that politics has swallowed our moral discourse. Social media has made whining cowards of us all. You Are Here comes dangerously close to saying so. If you listen carefully, there’s a still, small voice hidden in this book, telling us all to grow up.

An inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers

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Watching iHuman dircted by Tonje Hessen Schei for New Scientist, 6 January 2021

In 2010 she made Play Again, exploring digital media addiction among children. In 2014 she won awards for Drone, about the CIA’s secret role in drone warfare.

Now, with iHuman, Tonje Schei, a Norwegian documentary maker who has won numerous awards for her explorations of humans, machines and the environment, tackles — well, what, exactly? iHuman is a weird, portmanteau diatribe against computation — specifically, that branch of it that allows machines to learn about learning. Artificial general intelligence, in other words.

Incisive in parts, often overzealous, and wholly lacking in scepticism, iHuman is an apocalyptic vision of humanity already in thrall to the thinking machine, put together from intellectual celebrity soundbites, and illustrated with a lot of upside-down drone footage and digital mirror effects, so that the whole film resembles nothing so much as a particularly lengthy and drug-fuelled opening credits sequence to the crime drama Bosch.

That’s not to say that Schei is necessarily wrong, or that our Faustian tinkering hasn’t doomed us to a regimented future as a kind of especially sentient cattle. The film opens with that quotation from Stephen Hawking, about how “Success in creating AI might be the biggest success in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.” If that statement seems rather heated to you, go visit Xinjiang, China, where a population of 13 million Turkic Muslims (Uyghurs and others) are living under AI surveillance and predictive policing.

Not are the film’s speculations particularly wrong-headed. It’s hard, for example, to fault the line of reasoning that leads Robert Work, former US under-secretary of defense, to fear autonomous killing machines, since “an authoritarian regime will have less problem delegating authority to a machine to make lethal decisions.”

iHuman’s great strength is its commitment to the bleak idea that it only takes one bad actor to weaponise artificial general intelligence before everyone else has to follow suit in their own defence, killing, spying and brainwashing whole populations as they go.

The great weakness of iHuman lies in its attempt to throw everything into the argument: :social media addiction, prejudice bubbles, election manipulation, deep fakes, automation of cognitive tasks, facial recognition, social credit scores, autonomous killing machines….

Of all the threats Schei identifies, the one conspicuously missing is hype. For instance, we still await convincing evidence that Cambrdige Analytica’s social media snake oil can influence the outcome of elections. And researchers still cannot replicate psychologist Michal Kosinski’s claim that his algorithms can determine a person’s sexuality and even their political leanings from their physiology.

Much of the current furore around AI looks jolly small and silly one you remember that the major funding model for AI development is advertising. Most every millennial claim about how our feelings and opinions can be shaped by social media is a retread of claims made in the 1910s for the billboard and the radio. All new media are terrifyingly powerful. And all new media age very quickly indeed.

So there I was hiding behind the sofa and watching iHuman between slitted fingers (the score is terrifying, and artist Theodor Groeneboom’s animations of what the internet sees when it looks in the mirror is the stuff of nightmares) when it occurred to me to look up the word “fetish”. To refresh your memory, a fetish is an inanimate object worshipped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit.

iHuman’s is a profoundly fetishistic film, worshipping at the altar of a God it has itself manufactured, and never more unctiously as when it lingers on the athletic form of AI guru Jürgen Schmidhuber (never trust a man in white Levis) as he complacently imagines a post-human future. Nowhere is there mention of the work being done to normalise, domesticate, and defang our latest creations.

How can we possibly stand up to our new robot overlords?

Try politics, would be my humble suggestion.

Technology vs observation

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Losing my rag at the Royal Academy for New Scientist, 13 December 2017

When the schools of London’s Royal Academy of Arts were opened in 1769, life drawing — the business of sketching either live models or the plaster casts of worthy sculptures — was an essential component of an artist’s training.

As I wandered around From Life, an exhibition devoted to the history as well as the future of the practice, I overheard a curator explaining that, now life drawing is no longer obligatory in Royal Academy art courses, a new generation of artists are approaching the practice in a “more expressive” way. The show’s press release claims even more: that life drawing is evolving “as technology opens up new ways of creating and visualising artwork”.

There was little of this in evidence when I visited, however: two-and-a-half of the three virtual-reality experiences on offer had broken down. Things break down when the press turns up – you might even say it’s a rule. Still, given their ubiquity, I’m beginning to wonder whether gallery-based VR malfunctions are not a kind of mischievous artwork in their own right. In place of a virtual sketch, a message in an over-friendly font asks: “Have you checked your internet connection?” At least Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s wild mobiles of the 1960s had the decency to catch fire.

How can new technologies like Google’s Tilt Brush and HTC’s Vive VR platform bring artists into a more intimate relation to their subject — more intimate than might be achieved by, say, standing a metre away from a naked stranger armed only with a bit of charcoal?

Jonathan Yeo has had a stab at the problem, using Tilt Brush’s 3D painting tech to fashion a sculptural self-portrait. The outsize bronze 3D print of his effort — an assemblage of short, wide, hesitant virtual “brushstrokes” — has a curiously dated feel and wouldn’t look out of place in a group retrospective of 20th-century British sculpture. As an advert for a technology that prides itself on its expressivity (videos of the platform at work usually resemble explosions in a paint factory), it’s a curiously laborious piece.

On a nearby wall hang Gillian Wearing’s photographic self-portraits, manipulated using the sort of age-progression technology employed by forensic artists. In this way, Wearing has captured her appearance 10, 20, 30 years into her future. It’s an undeniably moving display, and undeniably off the point: life drawing is about capturing the present moment, which leaves Wearing’s contribution resembling those terms and conditions that appear at the bottom of TV advertisements – Other Moments Are Available.

Yinka Shonibare (best known for his ship-in-a-bottle sculpture on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square) comments on the show, rather than contributes to it, with a 3D VR conceptualisation of a painting by the 18th-century Scots artist and dealer Gavin Hamilton.

Hamilton once sold a Roman sculpture to a collector. Shonibare has scanned a plaster cast of this Townley Venus, then placed it on a plinth in a largely imaginary VR garden (you catch only a glimpse of this space in Hamilton’s painting). He has covered its plaster-white surface with batik designs (referring to common sub-Saharan African fabric, though it was originally a Dutch export) and as a coup de grâce, he has stuck a globe on Venus’s torso in place of her head. The point is that we can never copy something without to some degree appropriating it. Whether you like what he’s done will depend on whether you like art that makes a primarily intellectual point.

In a gallery environment increasingly besotted by (and bested by) technology, such acts of cultural orienteering may be necessary; they’re certainly inevitable. The new work gracing From Life at least attempts to address the theme of the show, and its several failures are honest and interesting.

Still, I keep coming back to the historical half of the exhibition — to the casts, the drawings, the portraits of struggling young artists from 1769 to now. Life drawing is not obligatory for artists? It should be obligatory for everyone. If we never learn to observe honestly, what the devil will we ever have to be expressive about?

It’s coming at you!

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Exploring volumetric capture for New Scientist, 13 December 2017

OUTSIDE Dimension Studios in Wimbledon, south London, is one of those tiny wood-framed snack bars that served commercial travellers in the days before motorways. The hut is guarded by old shop dummies dressed in fishnet tights and pirate hats. If the UK made its own dilapidated version of Westworld, the cyborg rebellion would surely begin here.

Steve Jelley orders us breakfast. Years ago he left film production to pursue a career developing new media. He’s of the generation for whom the next big thing is always just around the corner. Most of them perished in the dot-com bust of 2001, but Jelley clung to the dream, and now Microsoft has come calling.

His company, Hammerhead, makes 360-degree videos for commercial clients. Its partner in this current venture, Timeslice Films, is best known for volumetric capture of still images – the business of cinematographically recording forms in three dimensions – a practice that goes back to founder Tim MacMillan’s art-school experiments of the early 1980s.

Steve Sullivan, director of the Holographic Video initiative at Microsoft, is fusing both companies’ technical expertise to create volumetric video: immersive entertainment that’s indistinguishable from reality.

There are only three studios in the world that can do this with any degree of conviction, and Wimbledon is the only one outside the US. Still, I’m sceptical. It has been clear for a while that truly immersive media won’t spring from a single “light-bulb” moment. The technologies involved are, in conceptual terms, surprisingly old. Volumetric capture is a good example.

MacMillan is considered the godfather of this tech, having invented the “bullet time” effect central to The Matrix. But The Matrix is 18 years old, and besides, MacMillan reckons that pioneer photographer Eadweard Muybridge got to the idea years before him – in fact, decades before cinema was invented.

Then there’s motion capture (or mocap): recording the movement of points attached to an actor, and from those points, constructing the performance of a three-dimensional model. The pioneering Soviet physiologist Nikolai Bernstein invented the technique in the early 1920s, while developing training programmes for factory workers.

Truly immersive media will be achieved not through magic bullets, but through thugging – the application of ever more computer power, and the ever-faster processing of more and more data points. Impressive, but where’s the breakthrough?

“Well,” Jelley begins, handing me what may be the largest bacon sandwich in London, “you know this business of the ‘uncanny valley’…?” My heart sinks slightly.

Most New Scientist readers will be familiar with Masahiro Mori’s concept of the uncanny valley. It’s a curiously anglophone obsession. In the 30 years since the Japanese engineer published his paper in 1970, it has been referred to in Japanese academic literature only once. Mori himself says the idea was never meant to be taken scientifically. He was merely warning robot designers at a time when humanoid robots didn’t exist that the closer their works came to resemble people, the creepier we would find them.

In the West, discussions of the uncanny valley have grown to a sizeable cottage industry. There have been expensive studies done with PET scans to prove the existence of the effect. But as Mori commented in an interview in 2012: “I think that the brainwaves act that way because we feel eerie. It still doesn’t explain why we feel eerie to begin with.”

Our discomfort extends beyond encounters with physical robots to include some cinematic experiences. Many are the animated movies that have employed mocap to achieve something like cinematic realism, only to plummet without trace into the valley.

Elsewhere, actor Andy Serkis famously uses mocap to transform himself into characters like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, or the chimpanzee Caesar in Rise of the Planet of the Apes, and we are carried along well enough by these films. The one creature this technology can’t emulate, however, is Serkis himself. Though mocap now renders human body movement with impressive realism, the human face remains a machine far too complex to be seamlessly emulated even by the best system.

Jelley reckons he and his partners have “solved the problem” of the uncanny valley. He leads me into the studio. There’s a small, circular, curtained-off area – a sort of human-scale birdcage. Rings of lights and cameras are mounted on scaffolds and hang from a moveable and very heavy-looking ceiling rig.

There are 106 cameras: half of them recording in the infrared spectrum to capture depth information, half of them recording visible light. Plus, a number of ultraviolet cameras. “We use ultraviolet paint to mask areas for effects work,” Jelley explains, “so we record the UV spectrum, too. Basically we use every glimmer of light we can get short of asking you to swallow radium.”

The cameras shoot between 30 and 60 times a second. “We have a directional map of the configuration of those cameras, and we overlay that with a depth map that we’ve captured from the IR cameras. Then we can do all the pixel interpolation.”

This is a big step up from mocap. Volumetric video captures real-time depth information from surfaces themselves: there are no fluorescent sticky dots or sliced-through ping-pong balls attached to actors here. As far as the audience is concerned, volumetric video is essentially just that, video, and as close to a true record as anything piped through a basement full of computers is ever going to get.

So what kind of films are made in such studios? Right now, the education company Pearson is creating virtual consultations for trainee nurses. Fashion brands and car companies have shot adverts here. TV companies want to use them for fully immersive and interactive dramas.

On a table nearby, a demo is ready to watch on a Vive VR headset. There are three sets of performances for me to observe, all looping in a grey, gridded, unadorned virtual space: the digital future as a filing cabinet. There are two experiments from Sullivan’s early days at Microsoft. Thomas Jefferson is pure animatronic; the two Maori haka dancers are engaging, if unhuman. The circus gymnast swinging on her hoop is different. I recognise her, or think I do. My body-language must be giving the game away, because Jelley laughs.

“Go up to her,” he says. I can’t place where I’ve seen her before. I try and catch her eye. “Closer.”

I’m invading her space, and I’m not comfortable with this. I can see the individual threads, securing the sequins to her costume. More than that: I can smell her. I can feel the heat coming from her skin.

I know she’s not real, but my body doesn’t. Every bit of me that might have rejected a digitised face as uncanny has fallen hook, line and sinker for this super-real gymnast. And this, presumably, is why the bit of my mind that enables me to communicate freely and easily with my fellow humans is in overdrive, trying to plug the gaps in my experience, as if to say, “Of course her skin is hot. Of course she has a scent.”

Mori’s uncanny valley effect is not quantifiable, and I don’t suppose my experience is any more measurable than the one Mori identified. But I’d bet the farm that, had you scanned me, you would have seen all manner of pretty lights. This hasn’t been an eerie experience. Quite the reverse. It’s terrifyingly ordinary. Almost, I might say, human.

Jelley walks me back to the main road. Neither of us says a word. He knows what he has. He knows what he has done.

Outside the snack shack, three shop dummies in pirate gear wobble in the wind.

VR: the state of the art

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For New Scientist

THEY will tell you, the artists and engineers who work with this gear, that virtual realities are digital environmental simulations, accessed through wearable interfaces, and made realistic – or realistic enough – to steal us away from the real world.

I can attest to that. After several days sampling some of the latest virtual environments available in the UK, I found that reality righted itself rather slowly.

Along the way, however, I came across a question that seemed to get to the heart of things. It was posed by Peter Saville, prime mover of Manchester’s uber-famous Factory Records, and physicist Brian Cox. They explained to an audience during Manchester’s International Festival how they planned to fit the story of the universe on to sound stages better known for once having housed legendary soap Coronation Street.

Would The Age of Starlight, their planned immersive visualisation of the cosmos, give audiences an enriched conception of reality, or would people walk home feeling like aliens, just arrived from another planet?

Cox enthused about the project’s educational potential. Instead of reading about woolly mammoths, he said, we will be able to “experience” them. Instead of reading about a mammoth, trying to imagine it, and testing that imagined thing against what you already know of the world, you will be expected to accept the sensory experience offered by whoever controls the kit.”We will be able to inject people with complex thoughts in a way that’s easier for them to understand!” Cox exclaimed. So, of course, will everyone else.

Institutions of learning, then, had best associate their virtual reality experiments with the most trustworthy figure they can find, such as David Attenborough. His First Life is the London Natural History Museum’s joyride through perilous Cambrian shallows, built on the most recent research.

“When the film starts, try to keep your arms to yourselves,” begged the young chap handing out headsets at the press launch, for all the world as though this were 1895 and we were all about to run screaming from Louis Lumière’s Arrival of a Train. The animator, given free rein, renders tiny trilobites on human scale. This is a good decision – we want to see these things, after all. But such messing around with scale inevitably means that when something truly monstrous appears, we are not as awed as we perhaps ought to be.

VR sets awkward challenges like this. From a narrative perspective, it is a big, exciting step away from film. Camera techniques like zooming and tracking ape the way the eye works; with VR, it is up to us what we focus on and follow. Manipulations have a dreamlike effect. We do not zoom in; we shrink. We do not pan; we fly.

Meanwhile, virtual reality is still struggling to do things everyone assumes it can do already. Accurately reading a user’s movements, in particular, is a serious headache. This may explain the excitement about the two-person game Taphobos, which solves the problem by severely limiting the player’s movements. Taphobos, a play on the Greek words for “tomb” and “fear”, traps you in a real coffin. With oxygen running out, the entombed player, equipped with an Oculus Rift headset, must guide their partner to the burial site over a radio link, using clues dotted around the coffin.

“This combination,” say the makers, master’s students in computing at the University of Lincoln, UK, “allows you to experience what it would be like if you were buried alive with just a phone call to the outside world.” Really? Then why bother? By the time you have addressed virtual reality’s many limitations, you can end up with something a lot like, well, reality.

London’s theatre-makers know this. At first, immersive entertainments such as Faust (2006) and The Masque of the Red Death (2007), pioneered by the theatre company Punchdrunk, looked like mere novelties. Now they are captivating bigger audiences than ever.

Traditional theatregoers may grow weary of running confused across gargantuan factories and warehouses, trying to find where the action is, but for gamers such bafflement is a way of life, and to play scenarios out in the real world is refreshing.

Until 27 September, London-based Secret Cinema offers a similar sort of immersion: inviting you to come battle the evil Empire through several meticulously realised sets as a warm-up to a screening of The Empire Strikes Back. It’s all played at a gentle, playful pace: something between a theatrical experience and a club night.

Right or wrong, VR promises to outdo these entertainments. It’s supposed to be better, more engaging than even the most carefully tailored reality. That’s a very big claim indeed.

More likely, VR may be able to present the world in a way that would otherwise be inaccessible to our unaugmented senses. The first tentative steps in this direction were apparent at this year’s Develop games conference in Brighton, where the Wellcome Trust and Epic Games announced the winner of their first Big Data Challenge. Launched in March, the competition asked whether game designers could help scientists to better visualise incomprehensibly large data sets.

Among the front runners was Hammerhead, a team taking on the enormous task of designing a decent genomics browser. They have barely changed in a decade. Once they held barely a dozen data fields, now they need hundreds since studying the behaviour of different genes under different conditions is a multidimensional nightmare. Martin Hemberg of the Sanger Institute, who set the challenge, explained: “Genomics is very data-intensive. Trying to integrate all this and make sense is a huge challenge. We need better visualisation tools.”

Hammerhead’s proposal promises something close to SF writer William Gibson’s original conception of cyberspace: a truly navigable and manipulable environment made of pure information. Not surprisingly, it will take more than the challenge’s modest $20,000 to realise such a vision.

Instead, the prize was handed to two London studios, Lumacode and Masters of Pie, who collaborated on a tool that is already proving itself as it takes the 14,500 family health records in the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, and spits them out in real time so researchers can follow their hunches. It even boasts privacy tools to facilitate the work of hundreds of researchers worldwide.

On current evidence, today’s VR is going to change everything by just a little bit. It will disconcert us in small ways. It will not give us everything we want. But reality doesn’t either, come to that. We can afford to be patient.