Well, thank you for the opportunity to flog my own book. Um, sorry. I'll rephrase
that differently. Actually something that I was working on while I was here in
England two years ago was a book on Go, which was published shortly after I
returned. And most of the work, I would say almost entirely the entire part of the
work, was done by Alan Donovan, a colleague from Google. He's in New York now but he
in fact grew up in Salisbury. So Alan and I wrote this book on Go, which is in many
ways a very interesting, useful language. I would not call myself a Go expert at
all in spite of having worked on it in this sense. Alan is the true expert, but
worth doing. The other thing that I also did, in part because I was on sabbatical
for a year, was to update a book that I wrote maybe six seven years ago called
D is for Digital. It's a book for very non-technical people, people whose
interests and expertise is not in computing but in other things, but who would
like to understand how do these things work, how what does it mean to
write a program, what does it mean to use the web, how does the Internet work, what
kinds of risks are there to our privacy and security -- kinds of good things
like that. So I had written a book on that several you know at least five or
six, seven years ago like that. And it was getting a little dusty because things
change rapidly, and so I did a second edition of that. And the other thing I
had done, and probably because my colleague Dave Brailsford, the first book
self-published. He will I'm sure tell you that self publication is a recipe for
having things disappear without a trace. And so that the first edition did sort
of disappear without much trace. The second edition was published by
Princeton University Press, who also has an arrangement with Oxford University
Press, and so I'm hopeful that the book gets a lot more publicity. It's called
Understanding the Digital World, which is a much fancier title but okay. >> Sean: So that's
the updated version of D is for Digital. >> BWK: that's it. >> Sean: I'm actually intrigued to know because
we started Computerphile maybe four years ago. What has changed today? What sorts of things?
>> BWK: I think the most obvious one -- the first version was done I think in 2011. In 2013
Edward Snowden revealed something that people had suspected but not really
realized: just how extensively they are being spied on by various government
agencies like the NSA in the United States and GCHQ in England and
presumably similar ones everywhere in the world. And what Snowden did was to
make it crystal clear that there was an enormous amount of that stuff going on,
in spite of denials and in spite of legal restrictions in various countries
on how information could be collected and used. And so that was a big thing. I
think the other thing that sort of parallels it in some sense, another
change, is the continuing growth of commercial surveillance: how we are being
monitored continuously as we use the Internet and our phones and so on, by
companies like Google and Facebook and who knows who else. And the enormous
growth of the hidden advertising market there, the trackers that watch you when
you use your computers and when you use your phones. And then in some sense the
commercialization of criminal threats against you, that this is that people are
out to get your money and your identity in a way that was I think much less so.
It was more amateur six seven years ago than it is today. So all of these are
things that are I think substantially different, mostly in intensity. They're
much worse. Defenses are harder come by, although we do understand something
about that. So that was the bulk of the sorts of things that
changed in it. And then of course something was just trying to clean up
the places where I explained it poorly the first time around; let's see if we
could do better the second time around. You keep trying it until you get it
right. There are authors who claim that they write their stuff right the first
time and it never needs work. I don't think that applies to most people and
certainly does not apply to me. So even in the process of writing a book, you
work really really hard over and over and over
again on what you say. And then you get it out and you realize there's a
mistake, or you could have said that much better, or something has changed
underfoot, and so what you said is no longer accurate because the world has
changed around you. So you pile enough of those effects on in a field like
computing which is changing rapidly, and it means that books tend to date
relatively quickly. And so some parts -- you know binary numbers work the same
way today as they did when, I don't know, George Boole was at them. But the
explanations of those perhaps could be improved and the reasons why you should
care about them may have changed as well. So that's the genesis of the second
edition. >> Sean: When you come over here you don't fly, do you? I don't recall
the details of this but I'm interested what it's like spending days on the
ocean in this day and age, when you're so used to being connected. Can you tell me a little bit about that? >> BWK: Oh, yeah.
The genesis -- my wife does not like to fly at all and we are a stage where
fortunately we can take a relatively long period in the summer, so we have
three times now, we're in, you know, in the middle of the third time, have come to
England on the QM2, which fortunately sails from New York,
which is you know 50 miles from where we live and lands in Southampton, which is
perfectly fine. And so the trip takes seven days, and you're in the middle of
the Atlantic, and there isn't a lot to do out there, except the QM2 itself is a
very big floating -- not quite luxury but close to it -- hotel in some ways -- and they
try to entertain their guests, and they certainly feed their guests really well.
There's lots of good food continuously, and entertainment put on of
one sort or another, and they have a library and so on and so on. But the other
and really your question is: you're cut off from electronics and so on. And it
turns out to my surprise you're not, really. What they provide is satellite
internet. You have to pay for it but my wife and I have sailed enough now that
they give us a hundred and twenty minutes free over seven days. So you can
figure this is approximately twenty minutes a day of Internet
connectivity. And so I use that to check mail. And I've found that typically I only
use about half of it. I log in, check my mail in, you know, two three minutes,
maybe kill off one important thing if there is one, and then just turn it off
again. I don't miss it a bit. It works well for me because I don't use a fancy
mailer. I am using an old-fashioned text-only mailer, Alpine, and so the
fact that the latency is infinite doesn't matter. >> Sean: [laughter] >> BWK: Yes, right. So it turns out
that you can get along very nicely without connectivity for a week if you
have more or less arranged your affairs properly before you set off, and if you've
told people you know I'm not gonna respond to you. >> Sean: I'm guessing that you still work though, that you still work and it's just lack of connectivity. >> BWK: Yeah, right. You can still
do things. It's actually very nice for doing things like editing books or
something like that, where you have all the text on your own computer and
you can fiddle with it and then at the end, resync with the world when you
arrive. >> Sean: Fantastic. And what's next then, Brian? What's next for you? Will you stay in the UK for a while? >> BWK: Yeah, we'll be in the UK until the beginning
of August and then we go back on the QM2. So we're in staying in Lincoln at
this point, which is a town we hadn't spent enough time in in the past, and then
we're going off into Yorkshire for a while, and then into Northwest Wales, and
then down to Ilfracombe, and then down to Dartmouth, and back in Salisbury, and then
home. So kind of a week at a time. Oh, and there's an Oxford in there
somewhere as well, I forgot. >> Sean: So to us in the UK, that's quite a big journey but perhaps when you're from the States it feels not so far. >> BWK: In terms
of distances, distances in England are tiny; in terms of travel time, distances
in England are very long. It took me an hour and a half to get from Lincoln to
Nottingham this morning and I think the distance there is what, 30 or 40 miles?
So because the roads are narrower and there a lot of people on them. [Music] [Music]