Charles Arthur Profile picture
Journalist, speaker, moderator. Latest book: Social Warming, on social media's inherent, unavoidable effects. Was The Guardian’s Technology editor 2009-14
Oct 27, 2021 17 tweets 6 min read
New MacBook Pro still going on first charge. Hefty downslope (overnight) apparently due to throwing up a modal dialog when a scheduled backup failed. Back to (more) normal now. Screen hasn’t been lit, so this is not quite real-life use. Image …still going. Might make the 24 hours at this rate. Screen hasn’t been lit a lot of the time, but machine has been “on”. Image
Mar 13, 2020 8 tweets 2 min read
Humans are very bad at understanding exponential growth (eg: virus spread in populations). So here's an illustration I use in talks.

Here's Wembley Stadium. The watering system develops a fault: in minute 1 one drop of water is released; minute 2, two drops, min 3 eight drops 1/ Now, a drop of water has a volume of 0.07 cc, or 0.000007 cubic metres. Wembley Stadium has a volume of 1.1 MILLION cubic metres. The watering system doubles the number of drops output every minute.

How many hours before Wembley overflows? Or is it minutes? Have a guess. 2/
Dec 6, 2018 15 tweets 7 min read
I’ve written about the Huawei CFO arrest, and its implications. They’re big. Very, very big. (Let me thread a bit.) theguardian.com/technology/201… First, grateful to @CRTejada who pointed back to a key article he did in 2016 about the US sanctions on ZTE. As you surely know, ZTE broke US sanctions on selling telecoms kit to Iran during the Obama presidency. It said sorry. #huawei