Ron McKay: Taking the heat, Thistle help, a lotta bottle, beating the bookies' algorithm and a new take on revenge porn

I know we’re obsessed about the weather but if it hadn’t been for one Scottish meteorologist the forecasts would now be in German. James Martin Stagg – born in Dalkeith, educated at Broughton High and Edinburgh University – was the top British military meteorologist and on June 4, 1944, he had a meeting which would change history.

On that day he met the supreme commander of the Allied Forces, Dwight Eisenhower, and argued that D-Day, due next day, had to be postponed. The problem for the Allies was that conditions had to be amendable for the warships, aircraft and landing craft, as well as a full moon for visibility and low tides to expose German underwater defences. There was only a three-day window.

Stagg had calculated a coming storm would wreck the invasion if it went ahead. He managed to convince Ike, D-Day was put back by 24 hours, Stagg was proved right, the storms did come in and then clear for June 6, and history was made.

Years later Ike was asked what the key to the success of D-Day was. “Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans.” Simply Stagg-ering.

Thistle do it

Lord Matthews, Hugh by name, Shug to his old pals in Kilmarnock, is a senior Scottish judge. He imposed a record life sentence of a minimum of 37 years on the World’s End murderer Angus Sinclair who died in March this year (so by my reckoning Sinclair would have been at least 120 before he was eligible for parole, had he survived) and 27 years for Aaron Campbell, Alesha MacPhail’s killer.

He’s also a bit of a football fan. He was at a conference in Nottingham a few days ago about how to deal with vulnerable witnesses giving evidence and he opened by name-checking five Scots football players who had succeeded there (under Brian Clough actually) including John Robertson and Archie Gemmill. There’s nothing like playing to a home crowd.

Not much else about the speech need detain us. The point was that suites are being set up in Scotland away from court where children and other vulnerable witnesses can give evidence remotely, free from fear, intimidation and men in curly wigs. But he did reveal the secure location where, presently, these vulnerable kids are taken to give their evidence by video link.

The Partick Thistle main stand at Firhill in Glasgow. No, honestly. However, I can’t confirm if they are given a pie and Bovril. Or a framed photograph of Blessed John Lambie.

Beat the bookies

How often do you get the opportunity of free money, trouncing an algorithm and beggaring the bookie all in one go? I know, since the last time BoJo spoke the truth. But it happened last week in the European under-21 football championship.

On Saturday, my son, who is a total whizz on matters of the leathern sphere, pointed out that after Italy’s result against Belgium both France and Romania could go into the semi-finals if – rather than compete to knock one another out – they simply didn’t lose. The result? Two days later the teams played out a 0-0 draw, there were no shots on goal and my holiday money was secured.

You can be assured, however, that there will be no investigation by the football authorities over match fixing. There’s a salutary lesson for fleeced bookmakers not to solely rely on digital aids. My boy is available to overrule the algorithm, for the suitable recompense, minus the usual agent’s fee of course.

Naked cheek

Revenge porn just took a disgusting, deeply problematical turn. If you are a spurned, sick boyfriend and seek to humiliate your ex you don’t actually need a compromising naked picture to post online. A cheap, $50 program called DeepNude allows you to do it.

The creator, hiding behind the moniker Alberto, wisely, has extended deep fakery and AI to swap clothes for naked breasts and trousers and skirts and trousers for nether genitals. According to him, it is based on something called pix2pix, an open-source algorithm developed by University of California, Berkeley, researchers in 2017.

Apparently it trains an algorithm, based on a huge dataset of images – in the case of DeepNude, more than 10,000 photos of nude women – to compete with itself (no I don’t know how!) in trying to improve what’s fed. This algorithm is similar to what self-driving cars use to imagine road scenarios, although you’d never get anyone not bound to the seat to travel in one.

It only works on women, this creep explains, because there are so many nude images online so it’s easy to harvest them, although he plans to introduce a male version. There’s no computing knowledge necessary. It takes less than a minute to create the naked image and although it does come with a stamp on it saying “Fake” anyone with even a basic knowledge of Photoshop, even me, could remove it in seconds. Alberto has the usual justification. “If I don’t do it, someone else will do it in a year.” There was similar defence at Nuremberg. There’s also the legal question. If you publish such an image, where the bits are probably not the victim’s, is it a crime? I certainly hope so.

And, as a quick update, it seems that Alberto’s confidence in his creation began to wane as the week went on and more people expressed disgust at the app. On Friday afternoon, it was taken offline ... never, I sincerely hope, to return.

Boris bus strategy

It was, apparently, the Tory election Machiavelli Lynton Crosby who came up with the Dead Cat Strategy. Here, one of his disciples, explains it.

“There is one thing that is absolutely certain about throwing a dead cat on the dining room table – and I don’t mean that people will be outraged, alarmed, disgusted. That is true, but irrelevant.

“The key point is that everyone will shout, ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’ In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

This was, of course, Boris Johnson in 2013. Update it to 2019, throw in cardboard boxes, buses and a kid’s painting set and there you have it.