Ron Moves On

My, My, Miss Raspberry Pi

2012-01-03T02:23:00.000-08:00

In the odd (increasingly rare) moment of idleness, I will watch a bit of Flog It!, the programme where hopefuls bring stuff from their attics for valuation and potential sale. In the auction sections the MC often speaks darkly of 'the collectors', a mystical bunch, quite possibly from Pratchett's dungeon dimensions, who capriciously pay huge sums at auction for unlikely artefacts, though the beasts rarely appear at the auctions that are televised.

It is now clear to me that there are geek collectors, that is to say collectors who are geeks, not collectors who collect geeks :-)

Now it's not often these days that I am anywhere near the forefront of trendy geekery, but skimming the various tech news streams that I do, I had recently come across the Raspberry Pi project. The Raspebrry Pi Foundation is a registered charity that aims to produce small, cheap computers on credit card sized boards, primarily for education. In fact they are well along the path of offering two models, A and B, at prices of around £20 and £30 respectively.

General availablilty at these prices is now looking like being the end of this month but they recently got the first ten pre-production boards back to make sure everything works. Give or take the odd minor kluge, it did. So, now they are selling these boards on eBay to raise money for their charitable aims.

Enter the geek collectors.

At the last check I made, a few minutes ago, board #10 had been bidded up to £1900. And there's still 4 days of auction to go! I was amazed when I first saw the auction (at a mere £1350 back then). The other boards are trickling on to eBay, 2 a day apparently, and the later ones are walking up the price scale in an approximately binary manner - #9 is at about £900, #8 at about £450 etc. The geek collector is a wonder to behold. Of course, it's a good way to contribute to the charity, and it will obviously set some folk at the top of their geek college hierarchy, so good luck to them all. If you are a closet geek collector, get on the case now!

I, though, will wait for the £30 version.

Meanwhile, a Happy New Year to both my readers ;-)

Holiday reading

2011-09-19T13:00:00.000-07:00

No leviathon has been seen on Lake Maggiori since at least Noah's great fludde, yet I felt drawn to take Melville's Moby Dick as my holiday reading to Locarno. I have owned a copy for many, many years, ever since a fine radio dramatisation on Radio 4 long ago. Of course, it has remained unread until now. Spurred on by reading it, I now have the corresponding and delightfully named .mobi file for my Kindle simulator running on my Windows simulator under Linux.

As they say, they don't write books like that these days - quite literally. It is splendidly didactic and Victorian in its flowery style. Just as the story hots up, off we go on a survey of the types of whale one encounters in the wide oceans, most educational! The rich style of writing, the wide vocabulary, are at odds with more modern American usage - a young American who worked for me once was amazed at the complex reply he got to an enquiry for directions - in his view, in America, he'd have got "just keep goin', you're doin' fine" not the rich pickings of 'bear left, beyond the rise, past the bakery' and so on and on.

My Penguin Classics Moby Dick includes copious notes by some academic or other purporting to enrich the reading experience. Hmm, I'm not convinced, the story stands well by itself.

Of course I know full well how the Delphic predictions of Fedallah will work out, and it's not quite as he thinks. The Greenland whale balancing the head of the Sperm whale will, in a sense, ensure the ship does not capsize. Fedallah himself will indeed suffer the same fate as Ahab, and will go before him. But it reduces the interest not a bit, knowing these answers. That's the wonder of books, you can know the story and they are still exciting.

Now I have just got to find the time to finish it off so I can visualise once more the final tumultuous battle between mad Ahab and and his fishy nemesis. Oh, and then see if I can find those old tapes ...

A journey

2011-08-07T00:19:00.000-07:00

To Brighton - to meet for the first time a distant, distant relative.

Didcot - served my ticket by a friendly agent from whom I have bought tickets there for at least 15 years. Some things roll on unchanging. Competent service, a gratis custom-printed schedule, a smile and off I go.

Old habits die hard: I catch a delayed train I should already have missed for the first stage to Reading. Might as well stock up on railway brownie points!

Reading - the loos seem to have been refurbished; a man was killed in them a few years back. I grab a coffee and pick a seat on the Gatwick cross-country service. The coach soon fills with luggage in the aisles; it obviously never crossed the minds of the planners that folk travelling on the Gatwick service would usually have quite a lot of luggage compared to the average rail traveller :-(

The Gatwick train is fun: all sorts of people to watch, all manner of deep Southern places to pass through - North Camp, for example, who has ever heard of it? The landscape is an improvement over the flat central lowlands of Oxfordshire, with rolling hills, wooded escarpments, tiny outposts of habitation. It's the longest leg of the journey, an hour and a quarter, so plenty of time for the mind to wander.

Gatwick - Chaotic, full of people in the wrong clothes, just back from warmer places. There are no loos on the station, would you believe it? "You can go through to the airport". "Hmm, no, you haven't really got time before your train, sorry, it will have to be on the train". There is no loo on the train! Hey ho.

It's more colourful down here. The folk opposite are off to the Brighton Races - it's Ladies' Day. Apparently the best-dressed ladies are invariably transvestites and the bloke opposite thinks it's outrageous that they are not allowed to win the corresponding prize. That's Brighton, and all the better for it!

Brighton, at last, and early. Cunning train surfing has cropped half an hour off the scheduled journey time. What a place. The glad, the mad, the bad & the sad, all jumbled together; perhaps some ordinary eccentrics too. A vibrant place, though for me it's a place to visit not to live.

The rellie: now 90 and an artist all his life. A fine character, wonderful to meet him. He is my father's cousin, though they never met. Hours pass together, yet we are so different. And then return at last, way off my planned schedule. Back to Gatwick. On to Reading. Finally to Didcot. Same game - surf the trains, beat the schedule. Another half hour saved. A great day overall.

Puzzle du jour

2011-06-01T05:06:00.001-07:00

We've been bitten by these cyclogram puzzles, a bit of fun over a cup of coffee or an indolent lunch. Our broadsheet offers one, but it's not as good as the one in the local paper, the Oxford Mail. First, the Mail's puzzle has 10 letters whereas the broadsheet's has only 9 and secondly, the Mail is surely using some clever Oxford academic to set their puzzles - they are full of more arcane words than the broadsheet's.

It's interesting to reflect on how we learn to do a new puzzle. After all, we surely know no more words now than when we first started doing the puzzles, but we can almost always exceed the ''Excellent' number now whereas we couldn't reach it at first.

Also, it's a type of puzzle which I feel sheds a bit of light on chess brains (I don't have one!). How would a computer solve the cyclogram? Easy-peasy; compute all permutations of letters to get all word-candidates of 4 letters and above, then filter the lot through a dictionary. Do we do that? Nothing like. We see patterns, we recognise certain endings, startings and middles; we just suddenly 'see' big words like forefather or enigma. In extremis, I have computed all permutations of the full 10 letters when I just can't seem to find the big word. It's an 80Mbyte file, and paging through the first few pages I suddenly see the answer even though it's not on the page - it's the patterns once more.

I guess a Grand Master sees chess in just the same way. He or she somehow sees the big picture of the game. Sure, there is more detail to work out en route, but it's not the way computers attack such problems.

This particular puzzle had us struggling. We scraped our way to Very Good. We really could not find the big word. You've guessed, I'm sure - the circumferential P should have been an E, it was a misprint.

Royal April

2011-04-27T03:19:00.000-07:00

It's not just this year. Every year, April is the month when the first Jersey Royal potatoes become available. Now I'm no foodie and I've only ever had the vaguest capabilities to discriminate between Maris Piper and King Edwards, but the smooth buttery taste of Jersey Royals is second to none. Perhaps I notice it more now that I largely eschew most things dairy but without doubt my heart leaps when the shelves of our supermarket bear once again this regal offering.

Scrub them, steam them and eat them. What could be simpler? What could be nicer?

Explicitation considered artless

2011-04-22T04:29:00.000-07:00

Picasso put his finger on it. "Art is a lie that tells the truth". Sometimes the truth tells the truth too, but there is then a reduced likelihood that it's art.

It's the videos at the gym again, I'm afraid. I watched a performance by a good-willed set of X-Factor refugees of David Bowie's 'Heroes' in aid of the Help for Heroes charity. When we ask our armed forces to act in our name on behalf of mad politicians, the least we can do is to look after those men and women damaged by the action, so I cannot grumble at the charitable performance.

I just wish they hadn't picked 'Heroes', though; I remember it the first time around, indeed I have it on vinyl and, back then, it was a lie that told a truth. To me at least, it was about completely ordinary, un-heroic people who nonetheless could or would find a way - great or small - to be heroes, "... if just for one day". That's a light that touches many people in many different ways, it's one that holds out hope to those who feel they can never be heroic. Thus speaks art.

Our armed forces, perhaps particularly the army these days, asks its people to be heroes day in, day out, not just for one day. Neat though it must have seemed to have a song title with 'heroes' in it, the performance takes the art out of the song and makes it a cliche. Maybe the end justifies the means in this case, but a little bit of magic has been lost.

Script-fu fightin'

2011-03-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Projects are different to maintenance. Why do corporate and sole-trader IT consultants continue to earn big bucks on client projects? It's simple: clients have built up staff comfortable in the 'business as usual' world of cosy & gentle maintenance but if the client needs a major change, a big project, they had better get in folk who know how to do that (or at least claim to). Just such real-politik kept me in happy employment for many a year. It's like this on the internet but, on the internet, it's maintenance that's the problem. It isn't anyone's job. Script-fu brought this home to me.

Script-fu is the scripting language 'under the hood' in the GIMP image processing software. GIMP, if you don't know, is a GNU open source application (= free) that does the sort of image processing things that Photoshop does. Like so many things from the *NIX world, that graphical user interface is just a mask on a command line processor, and all the better for it! Better yet, Scipt-fu is a variant of the programming language Scheme, itself a variant of Lisp, my favourite esoteric programming language.

So, with around 200 photos that all needed the same processing to make them the right shape and resolution for our local print shop, Script-fu just had to be the answer.

Easy, then, just look up on the web a script that does the job. Not so easy, actually. A large proportion of the scripts on the web were rushed into electronic print when the first Script-fu capability appeared. But then time passed, and new versions appeared, and eventually a whole new variant of Scheme was introduced. So here I sit with my modern GIMP version 2.6 and none of the scripts I found would even run. There has been little 'business as usual' maintenance going on. The GNU culture encourages the creative development of projects, but no one has managed to invent creative maintenance!

There is material on the new variant of Script-fu - after all, that was a real project for someone - but it's back to basics for learning about it: find the language reference manual, find where that hasn't been followed, try a few things.

And so, it all works a treat. Of course, it probably took me as long to get it working as it would have to have processed each image by hand. But, then, 32 more images popped up this morning and they were processed in under a minute, and there's tomorrow and the next day and the next day. Plus, I have learned something and if I have finally come to know what I enjoy in life it's learning stuff, so the effort was an absolute bargain.

It takes longer to teach a man to fish than to give him a fish to cook, but he'll thank you for the rest of his days.

We bought an effin' shovel

2011-01-20T04:38:00.000-08:00

A few weeks ago, drinking tea chez Teapot, the Professor introduced us to the snow map, a mash up website using twitter feeds to show snow conditions over the UK. This is the first good use of Twitter I have come across. Of course its coverage is patchy as you need to have people tweeting appropriately where the snow is and mostly tweeters live in the South East, an area not usually famed for its skiing.

Browsing the site a few days later, one particular tweet caught my eye. It linked to a site named along the lines of 'buy an effing shovel', whose concept fires the imagination. To get over the vulgarity, think of a cheery Bob Geldoff asking for money for Band Aid - "give us your effin' money". The website's premise is that though you need a snow shovel right now, there will be none in the shops. Tough. But next year, you will make the same mistake. So, sign up on the site and they will send you an email next June to remind you to buy that shovel before the bad weather sets in.

Well, I didn't sign up, but the idea so rings in the mind that when we passed a new stack of snow shovels in Nottcutts, cunningly positioned en route to the tills, we bought one with not a speck of snow in sight. No doubt it's not the best, nor the cheapest, nor the best value, nor anything else special, but it is now in our possession and if all it does is ensure that we never see snow in Oxfordshire again, it will be money well spent!

By the way, not even Nottcutts has bird boxes or feeders for jackdaws (average weight 8ozs, energy needs 400kJ per day), but that's another story.

Little brown birdies (LBBs)

2011-01-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

We joke that the sparrows will eat us out of house and home and it certainly seemed plausible when we had to fill the seed hopper twice today. It set me wondering just how many we are feeding. Of course the trouble with sparrows is that they look all the same - well, to put it more carefully, all the males look alike and all the females and juveniles look alike, though each set is easy to separate from the other - so it's rather hard to count them. We may all have that romantic feeling that these are just our very own local sparrows, but maybe it ain't the case.

My first guess went along these lines: the slab of nuts we are putting out would make a good nut roast for my dinner (ok, maybe with a different selection of nuts!), so maybe it's worth around six or seven hundred kcals. That's around about a third of what I need in a day. Now my hunch is that a sparrow weighs around an ounce. If a sparrow's needs go simply as its mass relative to mine, and given you could get something like 2200 sparrows out of my mass, we could be feeding 700 of them! This warrants a closer look.

Well, my hunch on sparrow weight was pretty good. It turns out to be around 30gm on average, according to www.garden-birds.co.uk. But a small bird's energy consumption is a bit higher than mine, weight for weight, in part because they have to keep themselves warm, in part because they live a fairly frenetic life. According to D Goldstein in Amer. Zool, 28:829-844 and in particular applying the graph on p841, a 30gm bird might be expected to consume around 110kJ daily.

I weighed the seeds: 200gm per filling. The energy content of seeds can be found in various healthy eating sites (e.g. here) and seems by consensus to be about 200 kcals/ounce. There are 4.2kJ in one kcal, so off we go with the calculator: the seeds are worth 200 (the grams) divided by 28 (grams per ounce) times 200 (kcals per ounce) times 4.2 kiloJoules, i.e. 6000kJ (and a far more than adequate nut roast for me!).

If each little bird needs 110kJ per day, it looks like we are feeding 6000/110 = 54 (and a half) birds with each top-up of the hopper. Far fewer than my first guess of 700, but still a good number.

I hope so. The last thing I'd want is that the 10 local birds get obese from the ready source of supplies.

There are estimated to be 3.6 million breeding pairs of sparrows in the UK (garden-birds site again). Suppose 2 million of these craftily choose to live in the balmy south of the UK, and suppose there are maybe 10 million breeding pairs of humans (with statutory 2.0 children) in the same area, then each pair of sparrows can live in hope of supplies from 5 households and our 27 pairs (= 54 birds) have a range of 135 households. I'm sure I don't have to go out by a radius of 7 neighbours ( pi times R squared = 135) before I find someone else feeding the birds, so it looks like we can between us feed the house sparrows and some of the other birds too :-)

Back to Bonsai

2010-12-23T02:34:00.000-08:00

I'm not one to get excited about application software, I spent too long in the industry to think other than all products are rubbish it's just that some are less so than others. But when I find a really useful application and it's backed by great product support, it's a bit of an exception and worthy of note.

Bonsai is a low-cost package for everyday project planning. It can be as simple as a task list, or it can have projects with tasks and subtasks with expected dates and actual dates and all the rest. I just find it useful. Or, at least, I did, then I didn't, now I do once more. How come?

I originally bought Bonsai nearly 3 years ago, as the day job faded and leisure beckoned. It worked with my Palm Tungsten and my Windows XP desktop, synchronising my little plans and updates across the two. Alas, then my Tungsten died. Such beasts are no more, instead ever more fancy telephones give the illusion of filling that particular bill. Hey ho, a shame, but I still had Bonsai on the desktop and my various little projects were all processed through it.

Then XP eXPired and I moved over to SuSe Linux. Farewell, sweet Bonsai! More recently, now better versed in the arcaneries of linux and wine, I thought I'd try it on SuSe. All went well until we reached the registration screen. I hunted around and eventually find the cryptic code that my $30 or so had bought nearly 3 years ago. I entered it into the registration screen and ... alas, it really needed a Palm to synchronise with first, and that of course is long gone. After a couple of minutes failing to spoof a synchronisation, I thought I'd check out the Natara website.

Well, I'm a version behind the times, not a good start, but then, on their support forum, there was a poor soul in just my situation - dead Palm, new PC - no problems, was the reply, send us some info and we'll swap you a new key. Wow, worth a try! And the great plus of the US being 6-10 hours behind GMT is that there, in this morning's inbox, is the new key from the excellent support staff at Natara.

Download the last update for Bonsai Version 4, get wine to update the current installation, pop in the new registration key and, voila, a working Bonsai once more, Hoorah!

So, in this miserabilist world, let's hear it for Natara and Bonsai. A neat little product, doing a useful job, good value and with good support. Thanks, guys :-)

R-R-R-Runaway

2010-12-17T03:17:00.000-08:00

For many people, the piped music and television in the gym is a bit of a pain. They bring their own ipods or they read a book or magazine whilst treading the grinding mill. But I rather like the brief taste of popular television and popular music. Only here do I see the leaden Adrian Chiles and whats-her-name on the dire breakfast show. Only here do I see the desperation with which Sky Sports scrapes the barrel of football from minor leagues in faraway places to ensure continuous sports coverage.

And then there are the pop videos. Like everyone harking back to a probably non-existent golden age, by and large they seem to me to reveal rubbish pop music compared to that of the 60s and 70s. The videos are dominated by the obsessions of producers rather than the talent of the performers. The performers mostly come from the X-Factor school of a pretty face and a decent voice (for the genre) and are completely malleable to the demands of the production team. They are no doubt discarded in a few months when another one comes along.

Now and then there are exceptions; the Ting Tings jumped out at me as performer talent not production talent, alas rare indeed. But the imagination of the production guys is great. The big thing this Christmas seems to be to dig out old, old tracks (out of copyright, perchance?), with old film clips and then cut these into a modern video presentation. Suddenly, all sorts of oldies seemed to pouring from the screen, Buddy Holly, the Human League, the Beatles for heaven's sake, all set in a mix of cut-back oldie clip and modern video.

Somehow, the one that caught my imagination was Del Shannon with Runaway. He was never one of my favourites but, even 40+ years later, such was my ability to absorb the pop of the era in my youth that I still instantly recalled all the words. Horrifying waste of brain cells really.

And with that thought, a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year to my readers :-)

The last fruitfly

2010-11-23T09:28:00.000-08:00

We have finally seen off the last fruit fly. Many a time and oft have we deemed the tiny creature flying around our kitchen, lounge or even bathroom to be the last one and we have run it to ground, sucking it mercilessly into our humane and wonderful fly-hoover, then releasing it into the ever cooler night, probably not its destination of choice. But always there has been another, where never. No more.

It has been a bad year for fruit flies and the reason is obvious. After the 2009 problems with rattus norvegica, we demolished the old compost heap and only got it back in action this year. It is now a plastic fortress with a fine-mesh base and a tightly fitting lid. It might not deter a squirrel, but friend rattus is definitely excluded and neither sight nor sound of him have we encountered.

However, as they say! The new compost heap is a fabulous breeding ground for fruit flies. After all, fruit detritus constitutes half of its contents so there's plenty to eat. The trouble is that they eat, buzz, mate and fly in that constricted space, all in the dark, for most of the day and in that second or two when the lid is removed for the next batch of waste from the kitchen they must manically head as one for that fleeting light. We think they had got quite talented at hitching a lift back into the kitchen where, as autumn developed, it was warm, much larger than a compost heap and still intermittently a source of food. We, conversely, got quite good at minimising the time the lid was off, though still that persistent last one would somehow find his way into the house.

I guess it will be the same again next year; it's probably still better than norvegica.

Hold on, what was that I glimpsed out of the corner of my eye? Could it have been the ghost of the last fruit fly?

In the century of the fruitbat

2010-11-18T10:00:00.000-08:00

Over the decades of the twentieth century we, the imperial nations, have surely landed on our dominions products with names that are funny, rude or just downright inappropriate. The tide is turning. Now, if you want high-tech materials, they will come from the far east, most probably the People's Republic of China, and they in turn will be naming things in ways that seem not quite right to us. It's only fair.

I rather like this:
It's the label on a reel of very fine solder that I bought recently, and it somehow tickles me that an item labelled 'classical mechanic' is needed to solder minute devices that we can only understand through the power of quantum mechanics, that wonderful theory that, in so many ways, superseded classical mechanics.

A beautiful game

2010-09-17T03:47:00.000-07:00

The church of St John the Baptist at Mogno by the architect Mario Botta.

For our stay in Locarno I chose as holiday reading books suited to the interstices in a canvas of hill and valley walks, bus rides, boat trips and hotel life.

Terry Pratchett fits the bill because one can read a handful of pages covering half a dozen changes of scene and small adventures all in a spare ten minutes, and with hundreds of pages yet to come. His reflections on life, the universe and Ankh Morpork soak in on the bus rides.

In a different part of the spectrum lies the first two Dirac memorial lectures, by Steven Weinberg and Richard P Feynman. Here, ten minutes study barely takes one through a short paragraph, and each such leaves plenty to think about on the proverbial bus journey.

Pratchett (Unseen Academicals) starts several major streams of storytelling but majors, alas, on a footballing theme. The so-called 'beautiful game' leaves me cold and even in Pratchett's capable hands, I glaze over in the last quarter of the book, dominated as it is by the big match involving the eponymous team.

Though I have regularly fallen under Pratchett's spell, I had never before fallen under that of Feynman even though his lectures were much lauded when I was an undergraduate and I have read many of his popular books since. In his memorial lecture, though, he succeeds in revealing, to me at least, the beauty of the result that to reconcile quantum mechanics with special relativity, there must necessarily exist anti-particles. Had they not been found experimentally we would have known there was a serious problem with at least one of our major theories.

Of course, anti-particles were found long ago - first the positron, after Dirac's prediction, then the rest, theory and experiment in harmony. This surely is the real beautiful game.

Lashing and frapping ...

2010-07-04T12:40:00.000-07:00

As a child, one surely learns thousands of new words every year but this boon is denied to us as adults and it is rare that a new word enters our lexicon. Oh happy day then that I learn the new word 'frapping' and, yea, gain intimate knowledge of its semantics.

It all began with a redcurrant bush. We bought the bush last year and the birds ate the few redcurrants it produced in that first season. This year we resolved to do better especially as it was clear the little plant was going to produce a more respectable output.

We resolved to construct a fruit cage of some sort. Hmm, there's lots of bamboo in the garage, it just needs tying together. Doh, how does one do that? The Dorling Kindersley Handbook of Knots came to the rescue with its Square Lashing. And the lashings are stabilised and tightened with the frappings!

On a sunny afternoon, I lashed and I frapped and I frapped and I lashed and eventually there came forth a mighty frame:

Lashing and frapping, we lay waste our powers, as Wordsworth didn't quite say.

Of course such a lightweight frame was predicated on a lightweight cover material, such as that we had draped over the bush in the picture. But then we decided we didn't like this material, it seemed a hazard for birds, so a day or two later we bought a couple of hula hoops from Toys 'R Us, combined them with clematis netting and tree-ties and in a tenth of the lapping and frapping time, the practical solution was born:

The redcurrants were nice :-)

Endgame

2010-06-09T12:52:00.001-07:00

I guess you were right, when we talked in the heat,
There's no room for the weak, no room for the weak.
Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, 1979

The weak one: perhaps the last of the brood, certainly very small, a poor flyer.

Mother led the weak one to the modest pastures of our lawn. There, it sat and waited. It fluttered no more than a foot at a time, barely leaving the ground, now and then attaining the bottom stems of a large flower or small bush. So passed an evening, uneventfully.

Again, the next morning. Sitting. Fluttering. A little food from mother. Sitting. Fluttering.

Then, a long shadow.

Crow, never before a visitor to our garden, flies down and lands near the weak one. Crow, so large compared to the weak one, looking down quizzically at the innocent. Crow bends down and, with his large beak, picks up the weak one by a wing, but drops him, then picks him up again and is away.

Es muss sein. Crow, too, has young to feed. There is no malevolence. Blue tits are designed to fly quickly, daringly, acrobatically. They have no scheme for remedial support of the weak. Only we are saddened.

The world ticks along on its proper course.

They fly the nest

2010-06-04T07:12:00.001-07:00

(Click to enlarge filmstrip)

Frame 1:
For long enough, we thought the blue tits had abandoned our nest-box but then they started to return regularly, clutching in their beaks miscellaneous caterpillars and other small insects and it started to look like they had quietly laid and hatched some eggs. The nearby washing line provided a useful staging post for what seemed to be one of the birds. I designated him the male; the 'female' simply always flew straight into the box.

Frame 2:
For the last couple of weeks they have engaged in a Herculean effort bringing food to the box. They had invariably started by 7am each morning and were still at it up until 8pm or later. Finally we started to see little faces appearing at the nest-box entrance (just visible being fed in this picture) and as, now and then, we saw two little faces of nestlings elbowing each other to gain supremacy at the hole, we concluded there must be two nestlings. This, apparently, is not unusual in domestic gardens though they often have larger numbers in the wild.

Frame 3:
Today, the eager nestling was all but falling out of the box in its attempts to explore the outside world. And then, just a little later, it was out and fluttering inexpertly towards the ground. Not a great flight, but it was able to land safely on the garden path. To our astonishment, it was followed over the next half hour by another four siblings - no wonder a lot of caterpillars had been needed!

Frame 4 (twice the scale of the other three):
The corner of the garden was occupied by puzzled nestlings, spread over a small area. This was the pioneer, who then half hopped, half flew to regroup with the others who had achieved a slightly greater range in their first flights. The parents kept flying to the nest-box to check they were all out - I doubt a blue tit can count to five but it can surely tell if there is anyone left in the nest.

Now, they are all gone. Perhaps the little ones have holed up in the dense borders of our garden while they practise flying. We see what are probably the parents from time to time. The nest-box is deserted, they will not return. The nest-box did its bit in keeping the blue tit population rolling, now it is up to luck and the innate wit of the parents and fledglings. Bon chance, little birds, bon chance.

Simulacra

2010-06-01T06:26:00.000-07:00

Baudrillard (1929-2007) held (or, perhaps, simulated that he held) that we were now in the third age of simulacra, dominated by simulation. In his argot, signs (or symbols) bear no relation to reality anymore, they are simply simulations of reality. This is good for the nostalgia business since the death of reality and its replacement by simulation makes sensible our looking back on reality. I don't know about you, but this all sure baffles me, and yet ...

We spent a few days down in Sidmouth. The sun shone - astonishing and most welcome. In our local peregrinations, we came across a most interesting little diversion. Now it is not uncommon to find botanic gardens in the UK which have a small railway, perhaps narrow gauge or, more likely, large scale model to entertain the paying visitors by trundling them around the gardens. At Beer, near Sidmouth, we find the inverse - a model railway company open to the public which has attached a set of botanic gardens. Peco, at Beer, make model railways great and small, plus all the associated paraphernalia for tracks, landscape and so on. Naturally enough, they wish to showcase their capabilities and have an exhibition of the sorts of things their enthusiasts can achieve by the expenditure of time and effort. More interestingly to us, the associated gardens are quite spacious with a string of five small, embedded show gardens, exquisitely executed and beautifully maintained. In turn, the gardens have - yes - a model railway for visitor trundling. These railways often take you to parts of the gardens you can't otherwise readily reach, so are worth the ride.

Slowly but surely, as we rode the little train, we started to feel that we had become a part of a simulation, part of a railway model. There was just something about the layout, beautifully arranged as it was, that spoke of model railway. Normally in gardens, it seems that le patron had a vision in his mind of some industrial or commercial setting which guided his railway design. We suppose that although this model was far bigger than anything Peco normally sell, yet they had brought to bear the precepts they would use for any of their model layouts where often a key criterion is to get the most railway-ness from the least space.

After the ride, reality seemed to return: the hardness of the paving, the scent of the rose. We kept our eyes on the signs, they seemed real enough.

flip

2010-05-06T10:51:00.000-07:00

The flip side of the mad rush to get projects completed in time for that next contest is a metaphorical collapse the day after the contest, at least in all things to do with radio. The map (courtesy of the RSGB Contests website) shows my results from this month's 2m contest, modest for sure but part of a slowly improving trend. Oh. and of course, I failed to finish either technical project aimed at this month's improvement :-(

So I have just read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (who, alas, would be descibed in radio jargon as a 'silent key'). It's immensely readable but reminds me why, at a certain level, I hate this sort of popular fiction. It's my susceptibility, gullibility if you like, to be drawn in to the characters and events so that the author pulls my emotional strings at will. What's the point of me caring if A survives or B gets revenge - it's all pre-ordained, I just haven't read that bit yet. The story doesn't have to have a happy ending, justice need not be served, it's all a fiction.

Hey ho, back to the arcane & obscure, and to the technical, until next some hiatus stirs me to pick up a popular book!

Boxing clever

2010-04-16T09:04:00.000-07:00

Kinds of Mind is surely the most readable of the philosopher Daniel Dennett's books. It takes the position that most animals have brains fundamentally different to ours, that they live perpetually 'in the present' with no concepts of past and future or of planning. I don't know that I can wholly agree with him. In our period with the delightful Pusskin it was quite clear that he had a long term plan to ensconce himself on the couch in the big warm house that he had never known nor could he even see. He called upon his long distant memories of previous domestication and mentally mapped that experience into an action plan for his new surroundings. He succeeded.

Birds, though, seem closer to Dennett's model. Local pigeons have correlated activity by the sparrows at the seed feeder with the appearance of seeds on the grass beneath it, but they don't seem to have any understanding or awareness of how this comes to pass, just a Pavlovian response to sparrows at the feeder. They sit on the fence until sparrows settle on the feeder, then down they come and, sure enough, there is tucker aplenty.

Blue tits too seem to fit Dennett's model. We put the box up on the garage wall and soon enough we had prospecting blue tits and great tits. The blue tits completed the contract first and moved in. They seem now, in mid-April, to have accumulated the material for a nest and they have customised the box entrance to their specific requirements, pecking away to make the entrance smoother, perhaps registering their occupancy for other birds to see. Beautiful as they are, it's all rather robotic. One flies down to help rid our lawn of moss, pecks away and accumulates some, yawns and drops it all, but flies back to the nest with its nothing anyway. Mysterious. They and the other small birds know there is regularly a supply of seeds in the feeder, but have no idea it has anything to do with us and fly away in fright as we approach with fresh supplies. And so it goes robotically but beautifully on.

We watch nervously each day and relax when first we sight the birds at the box. Apparently, only around 50% of nests deliver fresh little blue tits to the world. We await developments with interest.

The Thrill of the Chase

2010-04-07T09:12:00.000-07:00

Weary inside, now our heart's lost forever
Can't replace the fear, or the thrill of the chase

Decades, Joy Division

It is said that war promotes technological advance. It's a poor excuse for a war. Certainly, though, a deadline or other similar challenge sharpens the mind wonderfully.

Last year was fluid mechanics; this year's geeky comfortry is amateur radio. Radio has been an interest for decades but the current focus comes from joining the local amateur radio club, HARS. The club is keen on contesting and the relevant contests crop up monthly. For the unitiated, the aim of most amateur radio contests is simply to contact as many other participating hams as possible in a set period of time and on a specific frequency band. Dialogue is little beyond 'you are 5 and 9, serial number 015, from [Maidenhead] locator IO91IP' though it is often actually a warmer human experience than that might suggest.

The 2m [144MHz band] contests take place on the first Tuesday of each month. Between contests my ideas for improving my technical set-up, with the aim of increasing the number and distance of contacts, proceed at a leisurely pace, but then there is a mad dash to finish things off as the contest approaches. April's contest took place last night so yesterday afternoon was a blur of activity to finish off the preamplifier in the picture. The mode of construction is what is known in the hobby as 'homebrew' and elsewhere is acknowledged as 'cobbled together'. Actually, it is a prototype that worked well enough that it was suitable for serious use, so the board is hand-etched with a glass scriber and the box is crafted from an old biscuit tin. The connectors are of two types [though only a connoisseur could tell from the picture] because I only had one of each in the spares box. That's the idea of the hobby, at least in my interpretation. The behaviour of the circuit as built matches very closely its computer simulation. That's another facet of my version of the hobby.

But did it work? Yes, it did. The differences such devices make is often quite small, but a couple of more distant contacts were noticeably easier to 'read' with the preamplifier switched in compared to it being switched out. It's an old adage in radio circles that if you can't hear them, you can't work them, so hearing them better is a good step. Chasing that last distant contact, who for technical reasons will in one go increase your points by 25%, provides the thrill of the chase in this game.

Of course, next you need a bit more power to work those distant stations more easily - but that's the project, amongst others, for next month. It illustrates how there is always some technical driver forcing a steady escalation in effort.

I'm learning stuff, I'm using up electronic stuff I accumulated over the decades. Different, yes, to fluid mechanics, but there is so much to explore and so little time!

Get along

2010-03-17T06:39:00.000-07:00

You can take the boy out of computer programming but you can't take computer programming out of the boy! An item caught my eye in one of the myriad streams of RSS feeds I browse, and led me on a nostalgic trail.

Slashdot pointed out this article about software bloat. Whether or not this has been discussed as far back as Noah, I care not. I ran my eyes down the blog item until eventually, C-sore, my eyes glazed over with lib this and linux that. Lick chops and basta.

But my eyes were drawn back to the screen shots. Linux terminal prompts often include the hostname for the machine they are logged on to. The hostname was "kid charlemagne". To those of us of a certain age and disposition (DISP=OLD for the old lag readers), this immediately and unreservedly summons the image of a 1976 Steely Dan song with just that title. The song buzzes around my head as I write.

Over in wikipedia, it has a page all of its own. It was always obvious it was a druggy song but, for me, it always rolled around my head in, in the wiki-man 's words, its 'oblique and allusive' persona, as a testament to the outsider, the barely tolerated. Interesting though to see a more explicit explanation of its story as a chronicle of that late '60s, early '70s era.

Who can resist these lyrics:

Clean this mess up else we'll all end up in jail
Those test tubes and the scale
Just get it all out of here
Is there gas in the car?
Yes, there's gas in the car
I think the people down the hall know who you are

Today it might be the guys running illicit country proxy servers or music sharing sites or, more likely, scamming and phishing sites :-(

Musical illiterate that I am, I had never realised that it has "a famous and notoriously difficult jazz-inflected electric guitar solo ", but I've dug The Royal Scam out of the vinyl stack room, as you can see here, and I'll just have to scrape off the tracks and hear them again!

Up the hill from the lake

2010-02-28T06:15:00.000-08:00

The 15th century Franciscan church of Santuario della Madonna del Sasso sits high on the hillside overlooking Lake Locarno. It can be reached by a steep uphill walk from the hotel where we have stayed the few times we have visited Locarno.

I am never comfortable inside such churches: the motivations of my tourist curiosity seem at odds with those of the local faithful. But churches of that era spill out into the surrounding area so that one can absorb much of their mood without encroaching on the devout. To start with, an alternative route to the church takes one past the 14 stations of the cross. Well, I say 14 simply because wikipedia tells me so; counting them as one struggles up or races down is as indeterminate as counting the Rollright Stones here in Oxfordshire, but it's certainly a number like that. The church also has several tableau in adjacent matching ochre buildings and, for me, the best of these is the Last Supper shown below.

These terracotta figures, reputedly from the early 17th century, are so striking, naturally so three-dimensional, that I am left in awe of the impact they must have had on their audiences over the last 400 years. The discursive, the thoughtful, the intimate, the distracted, so many poses for 13 at a table. Even the semi-circular layout and the harsh contrasty light flooding in from the window on the right add verisimilitude to the whole scene. For much of this time, perhaps even today, many of its viewers would presumably be able to identify the individual disciples where I, more ignorant, can't get beyond Christ alone. Where is doubting Thomas, where is Judas?

Who can doubt that this, the other tableau, and the stations of the cross must have kept the biblical stories fresh in the minds of the faithful and, I think, whilst successfully avoiding the snare of encouraging worship of the icons themselves. These figures are art, they are not holy, but their art does tell a holy story.

Of course, a robust grille protects this ancient art and it is the deceit of the camera and computer that overcomes this. The image is formed from two photographs using a camera with a 28mm equiv lens poked through the grille. The photos are stitched together with Autostitch. Thus the sublime is represented by the arcane.

Writing this reminds me to check the Boosey & Hawkes website. Once more, I am disappointed; they have still not released Harrison Birtwistle's wonderful piece, The Last Supper. I have seen it performed in Oxford and I have a promotional sampler CD with snippets of the piece, but still no full CD. Will I ever hear it again?

Mulatto, albino

2010-02-16T07:04:00.001-08:00

Themes come along like buses. Except that they don't really, since the themes I detect comprise elements that are long since written or performed, so it's just that I come across them all at once. Thus it is with those 'outsider' terms mulatto and albino.

A tortuous route takes me to the first instance. The Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain came to Didcot earlier this year - and we missed them. Didcot's new Arts Centre looks pretty good and here's hoping it attracts some more off-the-wall performances. But the Uke's had a decent session on Radio Three and we caught that. They are one of those very British and rather (fully) eccentric groups of really quite capable musicians who have found an odd formula (the ukulele) that audiences somehow love. They have plenty of presence on the web, including some good Youtube videos. We were particularly taken with this one, a performance of Nirvarna's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Now we had somehow missed this iconic song when it was first released (*irony*) and of course, there on Youtube, there is a video of the original by Nirvarna led by Kurt Cobain, the troubled rocker who died so young. Listen carefully and you find his little band of teenage rebels comprises a mulatto, an albino, a mosquito and his libido - outsiders one and all (though I am worried about the mosquito!).

The first pair crop up again in The Book of Chameleons. This was a 'feeling lucky' freebie purchase in a 3-for-2 or 4-for-3 offer at Blackwells in Oxford; I liked the look of the cover and I'm somehow attracted to faintly metaphysical books written by foreign authors and available to me only in translation. As the author acknowledged a debt to Borges, it felt like a winner and indeed so it proved to be. Though the authorial voice manifests itself as a chameleon, the main human character is an albino who invents new identities for paying clients - who, perhaps, become chameleons. The main man, in turn, had been fostered by a good man of books and bookselling who was, yes, a mulatto. The book has an operatic flavour with lovers separated and both good and bad ending up dead, but it is far from a cheerless tale (though you won't like it if your star sign is the Scorpion!) The outsiderness of the book's main human characters is clear.

Different places, different media, same underlying idea. Perhaps that art needs an outsider is the binding principle.

Tin Tin Loaf

2010-01-29T08:29:00.000-08:00

I have commented in the past on the dress sense of the young ladies who tell us the weather on TV (WWGW). Of course, I am not equipped to look as fine as they do. Nor am I equipped (any longer) to emulate so many of the young-ish men who present on TV who have all independently chosen to have their hair styled after that famous Belgian, Tin Tin.

Today's loaf brought this to mind.

By and large, I make the bread chez nous. Well, I fill the Panasonic with the bread constituents and it makes the bread, and very well it does so, I may say. Excellent local flour is available from a mill in Wantage which, in turn, gets its grain from local farmers - all of whom are listed on the back of the pack. But this craggy loaf gets by on Waitrose flour and some oat flakes and it is these oat flakes which, I think, make for very variable rising behaviour. It seems hard for the yeast to push up the oaty surface in a uniform manner, but it does give the loaf a nice ararchic look :-)

The oat loaf tastes pretty good. It's good with soup when fresh and it toasts a treat for brekky. Get on and eat it as, perhaps like all home made loaves, it goes stale fairly quickly but on the up side you do know precisely what is in it which matters to some of us.

The recipe I use is dead simple and follows this sequence:

1.25 teaspoons of bread machine dried yeast direct into your machine (in that little plastic pseudo-spoon that comes with your breadmaker).

1 teaspoon of salt into your weighing bowl (not the machine!).

0.5 tablespoons of sugar (I use light demerara) into your weighing bowl.

1 tablespoon of dried milk into your weighing bowl.

9 ounces (250gms) of strong white flour (I prefer Waitrose Leckford Estate to their white-ordinaire) into the weighing bowl (careful with its zero!).

Plop the contents of the weighing bowl into your bread mixer.

3 ounces (85gms) of strong wholemeal flour (Waitrose ordinaire) into your now empty weighing bowl.

2 ounces (60gms) of whole rolled oats (Jordons) into your weighing bowl.

Plop the contents of the weighing bowl into your bread mixer. Scrape a little hollow for the oil.

10gms of grapeseed oil (or your preferred fat) into a little dish on your scales and then into the mixer.

305ml water into the mixer, or maybe 300, or maybe 310 - experiment!

From reading the back of the pack on an M&S oat loaf, I tried fancy stuff with honey instead of sugar, but I couldn't taste the difference and it's a lot easier to get a standard quantity of sugar into the mix than of runny-honey.

Maybe we can start a fashion on eBay for craggy loaf tops that look like Montana or wherever - it happened with funny-shaped Bran Flakes, after all; ones that looked like Texas, ones that looked like Australia. Then again, perhaps we should just enjoy the loaf.

BSoD

2010-01-23T08:03:00.000-08:00

XP on my ageing Sony Vaio is dead. Vivat Viao!

Let us call it "Day 1". On Day 1 I got a mysterious blue screen of death: it came, went & re-booted before I could even read it. Hmm, I thought, something afoot. Perhaps look into it tomorrow.

On Day 2: BSOD, the whole BSoD, nothing but the BSoD, more or less immediately. By the miracle of digital photography, I managed to photograph it before it disappeared and it grumbled about an interrupt problem - remove new hardware it suggested. Alas, no new hardware.

I swapped the two memory cards around, eliminating each in turn, in case one of those was flaky - no change.

I decided to take the hard disk out to preserve my stuff & in case the disk was at fault - this is not an easy task on a Sony, but I found a good video on YouTube - it ran for 13minutes - and it involves removing 19 screws! I put another disk in & tried reinstalling from the original disks - all went well until XP started to re-install itself, then BSoD.

Hmm, not the memory, not the hard disk - oh dear. I had a perverse idea - found the nearest set of SuSE Linux disks - 9.odd - and installed those. It worked well enough, though it was too old a version for some of the drivers needed for a 1280x800 screen, and there was no audio or wireless. Hmm.

Sent for the latest SuSE 11.2 disk & installed that - aah, perfection! It's what I'm running as I write this - and it works beautifully - knows all about the screen, the audio & wireless. It's fast & feels like a real operating system, not clunky like earlier versions.

My mate Wal reckons that Unixes hit the memory management subsystem much less than badly written Windows operating systems and based on his own practical experience this is where he thinks the problem will lie. Perhaps the Vaio's days are numbered, but for now it romps in resurgent youth guided by this sweet Linux operating system. Of course, Open Office gives me access to all the old Word and Excel files and, using the Linux Wine capability, I can even run Outlook well enough to check the data I had previously stored in it.

Feels like I can put off the evil day when I have to consider buying a new laptop running Windows 7 ;-)

Follow the van ...

2010-01-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

After 26 years service, our trusty BT landline phone has developed an intermittent fault.

For reasons lost in the mists of time, we still foolishly rented this fine archaic bit of kit from BT and when we rang them (on another phone!) to discuss the problem, they were amazed and even tittered politely to see we still had had a working Vanguard. Well, it's nice to cheer up some poor soul in a call centre. Mind you, it must be a lonely and quiet job, given the difficulty I had getting past the "press 4, press 3, abandon hope" of the IVR system.

We declined BT's kind offer to replace the phone with us continuing to rent and went off to the shops. Well, landlines in the home are not big business unless you want more microprocessing than put man on the moon, so we picked the model one up from the dungeon level and thought no more about it. Until we came to use it, at least. Alas, the audio quality has that added woolly sock characteristic so often found in station tannoys, and this is not just amnesiac nostalgia. The person you call thinks you are talking through a sock; they in turn sound like they are talking through a sock. Rubbish! The Vanguard might intermittently fail, but it also intermittently works and on such occasions reveals its superior audio. And its superior ring tone - one you can hear throughout the house, so unlike its successor :-(

One must conclude that whilst the technical fripperies have increased no end, essentially because the control chips these phones include just plain come with lots of spare capacity that might as well be used for such trivia, the expenditure on the audio transducers has been reduced below the point where decent quality can be provided. We seek a better option ....

When a cold wind blows ...

2010-01-01T09:15:00.000-08:00

When the cold wind blows from Scandinavia and Siberia, the weather here takes a serious downturn. But the winds that bring the cold and snow also blow redwings our way, which is delightful. Whenever the weather turns really cold - as has happened here in Oxfordshire quite frequently in recent winters - I look out from the kitchen window to the red-berried cotoneaster in next door's near-border and, more often than not, there will be a delicately rouged redwing. It is thought they may be starting to nest in the wilder parts of the north, though mostly they just pop over in the winter for the relatively warmer weather we can offer.

This winter we have seen upto 5 redwings simultaneously and one of them at least has taken to wandering around seeking out food at the far end of our garden, where it mixes with up to half a dozen blackbirds at certain times of day. The species largely ignore each other except that the small and delicate thrush (for such is a redwing) takes care to keep out of the way of the more excitable lumbering blackbirds when they take umbrage with others of their own type.

In past years I have never seen a redwing on the ground and their visits have seemed all too fleeting, but this year they have been here a while already and their relaxed behaviour on the ground encouraged me to get the camera & fancy lenses out to try to snap my own. This is the best from camera #1. Later, with this film completed, I moved to camera #2 and to more tree-based shots, which may prove to be better results, but then they won't be developed for a while yet.

We miss the legions of starlings we used to get long ago, they were such a sociable, garrulous bunch and we would often get a dozen or more marauding over the lawn; alas, no more. But the redwing is a definite addition to company (a phrase from Beckett's Company - hear it here).

Farewell to Saab?

2009-12-20T05:01:00.000-08:00

I've enjoyed driving Saabs for 18 years now, starting with the 900i shown in the picture, so it is a small sadness to see that the marque looks like disappearing or, maybe worse, reappearing merely as a badge on some junk offering with charisma bypass. The current 9-5 should be good for another 100,000 miles - about the same as my own expectations - so it's not that I'm likely to be the white knight who buys that one extra car that tips the balance and saves them. In fact, if I had the spare cash and some extra parking, it is more likely I'd go for a nice old 900 from before the period of GM ownership. These still go for remarkable secondhand prices, far more than GM 900/9-3s 10 years younger - check this Used Cars link. For real enthusiasts, Hagstrom often offer yet older 99 & 95s (no dash!) and even primordial 92 models.

I make no claim that Saabs are better/nicer than lots of other cars, you just either love them or you don't, seems as simple as that. The one time Kate rode in the back of the 900 she thought we were being followed by a jump jet, it was so noisy, and indeed the 900 was firstly a driver's car, secondly a driver's car and thirdly a rear hatch storage area car, never a passenger's car. The 900 went to Glyndebourne though, and served well with its flat hatch area acting as a dining table for the mandatory d-j'ed repast before the performance.

Of subsequent Saabs, the 9000LPT in Cayenne was our favourite colour, though the current Cosmic Blue 9-5 goes around corners better and chugs along in crawling traffic with fewer grumbles. Alas, it lacks the heated seats that the original 900 offered!

Of course, the greatest competitiveness is against Volvo, the other vehicle range originally out of Sweden. Sigrid, a Swedish friend, summed it up thus: in a Volvo, you know you are really in a lorry; in a Saab you know you are really in an aeroplane. I couldn't possibly comment ;-)

Blood on your saddle

2009-12-17T10:06:00.000-08:00

It wasn't an Idiot Wind but a sheet of black ice. I've been cycling to the gym whenever it wasn't raining for most of this year - in principle, I am a fair-weather cyclist! This morning, the ice on the windscreen of the car looked tough to remove but the air wasn't too uncomfortably cold, so I thought I'd cycle one more time. All was well until I was very close to the gym. A slight lean to the left to negotiate the bend to the cycle parking and, boom, I was gliding face first along the ground which had a perfect glistening sheet of ice covering it. Expletives (deleted)! Glad I was wearing a cycle helmet!

Here's the gym.

Picked myself up, skated gently over to the cycle stands and, remarkably, tidily switched my fancy LED lights off, removed them from the bike and locked the bike to the stand. Then, into reception, where they capably started cleaning me up. Damage seemed fairly limited - seriously bruised and scraped knee, which took the brunt, sweet triangle of scrapes on my face which had been the landing geometry. Lip a bit the worse for wear, but teeth and limbs intact. Blood left on cycle stand, bike, lights, jacket - a little goes a long way.

The gym staff thought I should pop along to the local Minor Injuries Unit to just check all was well, so Kate came to pick up me & the bike (always a bit of a squeeze into our saloon) and a couple of hours later, when they were open, we popped along. The nurse cleaned me up a bit, dressed the knee and suggested the usual 'take it easy for a couple of days'. She did say the knee would swell up before it got better. And it sure has :-(

So far, Ive needed more paracetamol than after my heart surgery, and my leg has become seriously ineffective, scuppering a couple of social meetings over the next few days. A few hours after the event, after lunch, my normally low blood pressure drooped even further and I briefly passed out, but recovered quickly. Dunno how sleeping is going to work this evening, but no doubt there will be a way. Feel bad feeling sorry for myself when I see those limbless soldiers back from the Afghan badlands.

Krautrock

2009-12-12T10:54:00.000-08:00

Ich bin ein krautrocker, as the man didn't quite say.

I had never realised, but a recent educational programme on BBC4 (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nf10k) informed me that as part of the rebirth of Germany after WW2 and in strong reaction to what had happened in that era, progressive young Germans were producing radical new music in stark contrast to the more sacharine offerings approved by Herr Goebels. In the bliss and ignorance of the victors, WW2 was history to me and I had just thought these were cool dudes and I had been buying their stuff simply because I liked it, it was just part of the mid 1970s. It's likely I was introduced to the style by the inimitable John Peel's radio sessions.

Well, when you have watched a few manic old guys reminiscing, still grooving and still playing their synthesisers, there's only one thing to do - dig into that dusty pile of old LPs (12in diameter plastic disks with music encoded in a spiral groove on each side, for younger readers) and see what we have got from that era, 30 years ago. The answer? One Klaus Schultze and four Tangerine Dream, as it happens.

The record deck is no longer a feature of our lounge or audio system. hasn't been for a long time. So playing the disks is a bit trickier. It's easier to connect the deck to a little standalone RIAA-compensated preamp I made and into the sound card of Dirac, the dual boot Linux/Windows machine. Gramofile happily sucks the data off the disk into .wav files. Blow them onto CD and, lo, we have a medium suitable for the modern world. Well, they won't feature on our current most-played list, but they were interesting to hear again, for sure. To me, it sounded very much like ambient music; to them it was no doubt angst-ridden. Plenty of room for debate on the intention of the artist compared to the perception of the audience!

Our mental images of that scene are a dimly-remembered concert we went to - was it Kraftwerk, or was it Tangerine Dream? The audience loved the performance. The performers sat in front of their equipment, backs to us, barely ever moving except to flick a switch or load a tape. How peculiar it looks today, but then so does a Ford Anglia and there was nothing much wrong with one of those at the time.

I feel a tad uncomfortable with the possibly derogatory term 'kraut',but some of the bands use it themselves (see http://www.krautrock.com/) and I note a report recently that the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) said the term "Kraut" was "a light-hearted reference to a national stereotype unlikely to cause serious or widespread offence". I hope they are correct; I mean no offence.

Online catalogues and the naming problem

2009-10-28T04:49:00.000-07:00

Wittgenstein was big on names. Like, really big. The best cheap quote I can find (with 2 minutes of Google searching) is from his book "Philosophical Investigations" and goes like this:

31. (continued)
We may say: only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name.

In places, this has been turned around. I recall Alan Bennett reading one of his stories on the radio. He had taken his ageing mother,she in mental decline, to a countryside view. She looked out on the sheep in the fields. He writes 'Mam said:"I know what they are but I can't remember what they are called", thus confounding Wittgenstein', so here he takes the view that you can only know the significance of something if you know its name, perhaps not quite what Wittgenstein was saying.

My naming problem is this: in the ancient days of versatile shops on your High Street, you could walk in clutching some miserable failed element of your this, that or the other, and say to the overall-coated chap behind the counter "Have you got a new one of these?" and never a name for the item need cross your lips or permeate your brain.

It doesn't work like that online :-(

I want some of these (we all have our peculiar sides):

It's metal, about 15mm in each interesting dimension and with maybe 3mm holes.

I forget where I got the originals and I haven't come up with a good name for searching for them online that doesn't return brackets strong enough to hold the funnel onto the Titanic deck.

So here's my tip for the next generation of search engine: we've all got webcams, so how about a search engine that will upload a quick pic of my item (and a nickel, dime or yardstick, for scale) and then tell me where I can buy some more?

That would be more useful than all those rubbishy comparison websites!

Sheep i’th’ Dale

2009-08-05T05:43:00.001-07:00

With that wonderful simultaneity generally banished by Einstein, we rounded the corner, I flicked the indicator on for the right turn beyond and we saw the large flock of sheep being herded into the road we were about to drive up ourselves. Hey ho, we are on holiday in the Yorkshire Dales and quite happy to trail behind the flock - how far can they be going on the public road? Quite a way, as it turned out, but it was still quite fun apart from never quite being able to let the clutch out fully even in first gear.

“Herd sheep and lead goats”, so they say, and our flock was being herded by a man and a dog. The man rode a general purpose powered farm vehicle and clung close to the left hand side edge of the road, not to let the slowly growing queue of motorists pass, no hope of that with perhaps 70 or 80 wildly careering sheep ahead of him, but rather to stop the cunning little ovines slipping past him and back whence they came. The dog managed the other side of the road, nosing jittery sheep out of gateways and any other field accesses they might aim for rather than where they were intended to go. Clearly, no one had explained the process to the sheep and they thought that each and every gateway they came to was their intended destination, and it was the job of man and dog to press them forward.

Behind me, there was a pretty large queue of cars. In the optimistic way that eager drivers often do, the guy behind me poked his nose out to see if he could overtake me and get through. Quite funny, watching an Audi’s ‘face’ sink when it better understood the situation. We had the good hand – the guys coming the other way had to stop dead and have 80 sheep roll past their cars – and we crawled on at a good walking pace. Then, the final stretch, realised first by the sheep. They may look like big balls of wool on spindly legs, but in the last stretch, a couple of sheep legged it over the wall with surprising grace and ease and disappeared into the nice grassy pasture beyond. There was short period of consternation. Dog followed them, to no avail. Man stopped and peered over the wall but quickly realised that the remaining hoard had now lost direction and were looking like chaos in woolly shirts. Man and dog resumed, but suddenly a whole bunch of them were over the wall. Not such a problem this time, the rest went into the same field via the gate.

Presumably the whole arithmetic of sheep farming is somewhat approximate: 80 plus or minus 5 sheep were moved from pasture A to pasture B. I don’t think any sheep actually dived out of the adjoining fields to join the party, but Tommaso Dorigo has a neat little discussion of an analogous situation.

Trainee blackbird

2009-06-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

The compost heap goes from bad to worse. It has become a housing estate for small rodents. We like to think of them as biggish mice but, really, they are probably Roddy’s offspring. They are really quite sweet, little pink paws, smooth scurrying action, lightning fast. Anyway, we have started tidying up the compost heap, removing the large amount of compost the rodents have excavated for us, and with plans to demolish & rebuild the heap in rodent-proof fashion.

Meanwhile, this baby blackbird, from a nest in one of our euonymus, has been allowed out into the garden by its parents.

Baby blackbirds usually look so forlorn, but this one is cheery enough. It flies really quite well, but they hang around in one spot for so long they must generally suffer terrible attrition.

He hasn’t got the hang of looking for his own food yet, though the compost heap, where he is sitting in this picture, is usually a good source of worms. Perhaps less so at the moment with the major reconstruction the rodents have made, but it will be so again in the future when normal composting is restored.

All the feeding work seems to be done by the male parent. We’ve seen no sign of the female – perhaps she’s off on her hols after the hard work of producing and bringing up the sprog. He seems attentive enough and raises a furious alarm if any danger threatens.

The baby has yet to learn about cats, sparrow hawks & grumpy jackdaws but so far he’s looking well. But it’s nail-biting stuff, watching a baby blackbird grow up!

Roddy makes a pile

2009-05-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

You could view it as morphic resonance. The previous evening we had watched Ratatouille on DVD, with its hero Remy, the skilled and creative chef. Then we saw Roddy, looking for all the world the gastronomic connoisseur, sifting through the detritus of fruit and veg on our compost heap, as cool as cool could be. We still had Pusskin at the time, but the old boy wasn’t up to chasing a rat he couldn’t see! Roddy slipped off with the odd bit of orange and lettuce, obviously putting together a neat little salad for his mates. It is said that there is a rat for every one of us on this sceptered isle, so it’s no great surprise to see one. Of course, he is Rattus Norvegica, the brown rat, not Rattus Rattus, the black rat. The good news is he doesn’t carry bubonic plague (that’s the job of the black rat), though you wouldn’t want him to join you for dinner.

Time passed and we didn’t see him again. Then, succumbing to the zeitgeist, we thought we’d make a tiny veggie plot, a neat little raised bed to grow some diverse salad stuff. Now the thing with compost heaps is you know they have composted some great stuff down at the bottom of the pile (thank you, worms), but it’s a nightmare to ever get it out. We thought we’d have a go for our new bed.

Our heap turned out to have three distinct macroscopic layers. The top third is the recent stuff you can still recognise, in the process of digestion by a million zillion tiny worms. The next layer has been colonised by some of the local plants who have realised this is a rich resource – it’s a matted bed of live roots. Finally, the bottom third is lovely rich compost. So we excavated a hole in the bottom third of our heap, with the second layer holding up the top layer. Quick as a flash, when our backs were turned, Roddy moved in, excavating a pile more compost in the process! Why live in a burrow underground when you can live above ground and below a food shop? The picture shows him sampling a veggie stalk of some sort that he has just heaved off the compost heap. He’s quite a big chap, or maybe lass.

Now, by and large, I view him as a squirrel without a bushy tail. But I wouldn’t invite a squirrel (well, except Squirrel) to lunch, nor a hedgehog, so he is in good company. And I don’t really want him in my compost heap and, in reality, it will soon collapse in on the hole I made by natural processes involving gravity and rain, so it’s a dumb site anyway. The real problem is that he might be a she, and they breed like, errm, rabbits! So, now the compost heap is an isolation ward – no new food prep offshoots, lots of water, some miserable indigestible grass cuttings. I think Roddy might be getting the hint. I’ll bet Pusskin kept them under control when this was part of his feral patch before he went blind.

Typewriter tales (click for bigger image)

2009-04-29T07:46:00.001-07:00

WWGW

2009-04-16T09:14:00.001-07:00

What Would Grayson Wear?

Fashion has not been a big issue on any of my blogs – I’m a bloke, what would you expect? Also, I tend to judge folk by what they do rather than how they look and, for instance, nothing pleases me more than useful contributions to science, art or literature regardless of gender, race, religion or dress sense.

But then there are weather forecasts. Weather forecasts on the telly in the UK are presented by boys & girls with genuine training and skills in meteorology. Long may it be so. It’s not always clear, though, that they always have a natural talent for looking good on that medium. For the blokes, the scope is small. They all wear suits (well, on the BBC) so the only things they can get wrong are choices of suit material, shirt or tie. From time to time, there is the odd horror. As ever, women can look presentable in a wider range of formats than the bloke-in-suit model, but this itself presents its own dangers. Hence my suggested guideline – What Would Grayson Wear?

Grayson Perry is an artist – the first potter to win the Turner Prize. He makes delightful vases carrying images of death, debauchery & related sources of distress. He also happens to be a transvestite and has an alter-ego, Claire, who often graces his public appearances. Together with his wife and daughter, he collected his Turner Prize dressed as Claire. His choice in dress is as eccentric as you might expect, the sort of stuff you see on tiny girls: big sleeves, wide skirts, bright and lurid colours. There’s stacks on the web for you to peruse.

The point is: anyone who is going to appear before the great unwashed public should ask themselves, when they are looking in their wardrobes getting dressed for the event, What Would Grayson Wear? When they can answer that question, they have successfully identified what THEY should NOT wear! This heuristic is commended to the blokes as well as the girls!

One has a new book

2009-02-23T10:48:00.000-08:00

Got an email from the printer – the books are printed and our set is on its way in the post. Yippee!

The proof copy of Lawn Green to Gold was just fine, and Madge had the opportunity to present it to the Princess Royal, who accepted it most graciously. Now we have copies we can sell to the world, with a page where the world can buy it: http://www.fast-print.net/view.php?book=322

Rarely have I encountered such a smooth project. IT was never like this. Mal and Madge have done so many things and have wonderful memories, plus a commendable tolerance for my duly written versions of their tales. Mal remembers the broad thrust of their stories, which Madge claims not to remember, but she corrects the details of any story once she has it back in her mind. It’s a great combination. And they are both wonderful, positive people.

Mal has already talked about the book on local radio and there is a nice piece in colour in their local paper, the Witney Gazette http://tinyurl.com/cshfpb. As the profits from the book will all be given to the Guide Dogs Association, they have already been actively promoting it, and the British Blind Bowling Association has also expressed an interest. More locally, Madge is going to do a signing session in Carterton, where they live.

I look on, bemused. This had been Mal’s dream for maybe 10 years. Bad fortune threw us together but good fortune has come out of it. Very Panglossian! For me, it’s been great fun. Mal had all the bones of the story, and there was much more in their heads, but all very much in an oral tradition with some of that oral material for the early chapters comprising Welsh pit names. Google was a big help in getting this all written down coherently and reasonably accurately. Hooray for all the people who have put their memories of the Welsh valleys on the web. I have no doubt that errors remain in the book, but hopefully not too many.

Would I do another one? No, better leave it to professionals like our friend Jan. It was a great one-off experience but I’ll turn now to the various other madcap projects keeping me amused in my retirement.

Pusskin moves on

2009-02-11T06:36:00.000-08:00

It’s been time to say farewell to Pusskin, our foster-cat. He was, and is, a delightful cat and he has moved on to a new permanent home in Oxford with Emma, Matt and their cat. Having another cat for company all the time should make sure Pusskin never gets bored. Emma says that their cat has noticed that if he sneaks up on Pusskin it startles him, and he’s started to make a chirruping noise as he approaches. That’s one problem we never had to solve – no human can creep up unnoticed on a cat, even a blind cat.

We’re getting used to being just the two of us again. We get the conservatory back and there are no litter trays to empty – good. But there’s no Pusskin playing with his catnip mice, or keeling over asking to be stroked, or climbing aboard our knees in the evenings, or lying on the sofa snoring gently – which is not so good.

We’ve been sorting through all our photos of him (don’t ask how many) and they remind us how quickly he changed from being nervous about coming into the house at all into a proper indoorsy cat, spending his evenings seeing if he could stretch out far enough to occupy an entire sofa (he could!).

He must have many tales to tell of his 8½ lives so far, and it’s a pity he couldn’t tell us some of them.

We started off complete cat-novices and we certainly learnt a lot in our time with Pusskin. Mostly we learnt that things worked very smoothly once we’d figured out how Pusskin would like them to be organised. We guess that he learnt a lot from us too, about how to train a new set of humans. We were putty in his little white paws, and Emma and Matt don’t stand a chance!

Awaiting the proof

2009-02-07T09:47:00.000-08:00

Last April, Mal phoned.

Mal was one of the other inmates on the first stage of my cardiac journey (see http://cardiacjourney.blogspot.com/2006_08_01_archive.html and scroll down to the entry headed Sunday, August 20, Results day). We stayed in touch after that first encounter. He got steadily better and I went off for surgery and got over that.

I have been collecting notes, dates and cuttings over the years, he said, and I want to write a biography of my wife, Madge. Do you know anyone who could help? He told me much later that he had noticed me scribbling away while I was in the hospital ward, for the blog, and it had added manure to the already fertile germ of an idea in his crafty head.

By chance, I had recently received from my chum Peter his own self-published book on the nature of everything, and printing isn’t a wholly foreign area to me - I have done software product manuals in my time - so I could see what was involved in the mechanics of book production on a small scale. I also have a friend who does such things for a living. Hmm, I said, let me talk to my friend to see what she recommends.

Jan pointed out that even when a subject has a heap of material; it usually needs a good editor to sort it out. But beyond that, it sounded all very practical and she could recommend a number of suitable printing companies in addition to the one Peter used. I had just retired and I thought that perhaps I could do the job and that it might be rather interesting, so I got back to Mal and said, let’s start.

That’s why there’s not been much blogging these past nine months!

I now await the proof copy from the printer. It shouldn’t bring any surprises as I supplied a ready-to-go pdf version as master, but we shall see. Mal meanwhile is telling all and sundry that it will soon be available, so we’ll see if he can flog a few. The photo shows Verity, Madge’s guide dog. As all profits will go to the Guide Dogs Association, the more Mal can sell, the merrier!

Best fun for 20p

2009-01-14T02:43:00.000-08:00

I put these old electronics mags on eBay under two classifications so it was 2 x 10p. They date back as far as 1970 and have sat in the loft, untouched, for 25 years. We had a go a while back at selling individual volumes but postage gets high and there were no takers. They sank back into obscurity in the loft, albeit in a nicely enveloping plastic box instead of the earlier dank cardboard one.

The periodic urge to clear junk from the loft seems to strike more frequently these days and my eye lit upon the unloved volumes. (Well, actually, they are sort of well-loved volumes – they include the first Linsley-Hood preamps and Class A power amps I built, which powered the hifi for many years, but, hey, that doesn’t sound as good in print!)

One last go, we thought, or it’s the tip.

After the first ten footfalls on the item, we got our first watcher. Whoopee! Some hope, at least. We guessed at that stage we needed ten watchers before we’d get a bid, and it looked like we needed ten visitors for each watcher. And so it has developed. 20 visitors, the 2nd watcher, 30 or so and the 3rd and so on up to the grand event today where we exceeded 100 visitors, reached 10 watchers and GOT A BID!

Now, at least, we know the great volumes will go off to another home, at least for a while, and it will be on someone else’s shoulders to make the decision to bin them. Perhaps other watchers will be flushed out in a bidding war, but I doubt it. You see these things on eBay all the time, unsold, though you don’t often see the chance of 10 volumes for 99p. We fear that someone’s wife or girlfriend is not going to be best pleased, though, when a large box of Wireless Worlds appear.

For 20p, you couldn’t have anywhere near as much fun as this has been!

Love Minus Zero/No Limit

2008-12-10T03:08:00.000-08:00

She knows there’s no success like failure

And that failure’s no success at all

Bob Dylan

The statistics exam results are out. It’s usually a mistake to over-interpret Bob Dylan’s lyrics, but maybe these lines are obvious enough. That failure is no success at all is pretty clear. But perhaps many of us know that the bitter taste of failure is never matched by the sweet taste of success. Success is almost always qualified.

So it is that I have passed my statistics exam. I got the highest grade. But I also get advised of the actual scores, so I sit wondering where I dropped the points I did.

The exam model is slightly arcane. There are four sections to the exam, each carrying 30 points worth of questions. No more than 25 points will be carried forward to the final score from any one section but that means you can drop 5 points from each section and still get 100%, which I didn’t. There are numbers games to be played here. Only certain limited combinations of scores from each of the sections are possible to explain the final score I achieved. At one limit, I could have got 25,24,24,24 which would say I dropped 6 points in each of three sections and five or fewer in the last. At the other extreme, it could have been 25,25,25,22 in which case I blew it all on one section.

I shall never know. I get a grade per section summary, but all possible combinations of my scores are the same on that classification, and I get a statistical (appropriate!) summary of what all 335 of us did, amusing and showing that 35% of us got the top grade, but the OU does not provide any more detailed breakdown. It’s more that I’d like to know if I had any misconceptions or where I was careless with the sums than anything else.

Of course, for the 7% of students who failed, I am seeking a decadent luxury.

Next year, it is going to be the fluid mechanics course (despite Nigel’s warning). It’s time to get on understanding the universe!

Race!

2008-10-09T11:00:00.000-07:00

A few weeks back (piccie taken on slide film!), the Tour of Britain came our way. It perhaps lacks the glamour of Le Tour de France, but at least it passed through only a few miles away. The competitors pass through very quickly, as you might expect, so just as much as the race itself, the organisation around the race is part of the floorshow and takes much longer.

A small group of us formed on the corner facing this little chicane of British road making. There were local folk, old folk, lunchtime folk, cycling folk, a good mix. We had all got our estimate of the arrival time of the race pack off the web, none of us the wiser than any other. Time passed. A policeman on a motorbike roared up, from the direction of the on-comers. “Five minutes”, he yelled to us, “and they are in two groups”. We will see he had a mathematical view of ‘group’.

Long minutes passed. It is often suggested that Samuel Beckett got the title of his great play Waiting for Godot from a time he was watching a bicycle race in Paris and overheard people in front of him saying they were waiting for Godot, the oldest bicyclist in the race. No Godot in this race!

Then, in fairly rapid succession, another police bike roared up and, as though playing tag, the first one roared off, to his next station, and the cycle repeated several times – new police bike, old one moves on, still no sign of bicycles. At last the last police bike – the one who stationed himself so that traffic could no longer get through from the crossroads, the one who with gestures clear and agitated stopped those who thought they really had to be able get through.

At last, the first group. That is to say, a solitary rider, Ian Stannard riding for Team Great Britain, who had boldly taken the lead and was pressing on alone on this stage, though followed closely by his team cars each with multiple bikes on its roof. Needless to say, we the watchers weren’t certain that this one brave soul constituted a group in the policeman’s assessment, though it did. A short pause, then the peleton poured through, at first apparently a disordered mass of cyclists, but then clearer in its colour-coded team substructure and organisation. Followed of course by loads of team cars stacked high with replacement bikes; Audis for the posh teams, Vauxhalls (GM) for the rest.

And it was gone. In a flash, the floorshow was over, and after a mere dozen frames of film. We all breathed again, muttered to each other in a friendly way, united by the race, and then went our separate ways, much cheered by the spectacle. Long live the Tour of Britain!

Dun-swottin’

2008-10-08T09:22:00.001-07:00

It has been exam day. Three hours scribbling away in my increasingly incomprehensible script. It has been a long time since I took an exam, in fact 17 years and that was to get an amateur radio licence. For serious exams, I have to go back many decades.

I have just finished an Open University (OU) course in statistics. It’s a subject I have only ever known a little about and I felt it was time to improve my ability to understand when medicos and politicos were peddling hogwash. Started last February, four elaborate continuous assessment exercises delivered pretty successfully but now, the final hurdle, a real exam in a real exam hall on a sunny morning at one of the lesser outposts of the University of Oxford.

By and large, the continuous assessment exercises have got as close as any training does to assessing understanding but, of course, the problem the distance-learning OU has is that your clever granny could be steering you neatly through all those questions. How to tell if you have learnt anything? Answer: the exam. No depth of understanding needed here, as it happens, but a prodigious amount of effort and copious numbers of sums on a calculator to give a challenge in breadth not depth.

To all intents and purposes, for my course at least, it’s also an open book exam in that you are allowed to take into the exam the handbook of all important formulae that is provided by the course; you are also allowed to annotate it. In the radical period of my youth, my university followed an open book policy, so I know well how to know where the relevant formulae are in the handbook so I can access them quickly. Those old skills flooded back. In fact, I was generally pleased with how I paced my preparation – don’t overdo it, time yourself well for the exam, don’t do too many sample papers. Yep, I couldn’t have hit that paper better yesterday or tomorrow, today was the peak. Time alone will tell if that assessment is fair!

Compared to a real university, the OU is a bit unsociable. I knew none of the other people taking the same exam; we spoke not a word one to another before or after. None of that ‘dissecting the paper’ afterwards like you do as an undergrad and an inordinate wait before the results appear – not until December.

Still, nothing further to be done now, except to browse through the other courses to see if one catches my eye for next year. Hmm, I like the look of that one on fluid dynamics – another subject of which I know roughly diddly squat.

Lost in the translation

2008-09-18T09:56:00.000-07:00

The only time I watch morning TV is at the gym, early in the morning – they have a load of satellite channels on a string of suspended sets, but no sound, just the subtitles.

It is clear that sub-titling has become largely automated these days, and it is a major distraction from the tedium of peddling or tread-milling or whatever trying to fathom what on earth the presenter said that has come out the wacky way it has.

On the news this morning, a bad-news piece about a poor girl killed eating poisonous mushrooms. For some reason, the automated subtitle program conjured the wonderful concept: the death-cat mushroom.

It seems to be a difficult and hazardous job to distinguish lovely edible fungi from nasty deadly ones, but you might think it would be easy enough to distinguish the death-cat type.

It’s the whiskers that give it away.

The eye of the peacock

2008-09-17T11:00:00.000-07:00

I looked into the gentle eye of a peacock. We sat, in isolation, in our local arboretum (see http://ronmoveson.blogspot.com/2007/12/fly-agaric.html ), soaking in the late offer of summer provided by the wondrous British weather after dull and damp weeks of high summer.

Many peacocks strut around this wood, descendents of the ones originally owned when the house here was grand. This one headed purposefully in our direction, hoping for a snack no doubt (alas, we had consumed it all before the peacock appeared).

We watched him in awe. No impressive fan at this time of year, just a solitary long tail feather stuck out the back, but the colour, the iridescence, the plume on his head, the complexity! Such a big body with such a small head; a prominent beak, horny and dinosaur-like.

And those relatively large, soft brown eyes, looking at me looking at him. No hope, no fear, no aggression, just gentle staring and questioning. And in due course, with no result, the time-honoured scratch of the head familiar in cats, hedgehogs, maybe every other animal. Then the urge to preen, just like a cat, its flexible neck able to access the most distant and deepest parts of its anatomy. It sat in the sunshine, probing and preening itself, oblivious to me poking around in a rucksack to get the camera out, confident as we walked around it taking pictures. Then, gently, it drifted away and we too, after sitting there far longer than we expected, drifted comfortably back to the car and headed home.

Introducing Henry

2008-09-08T10:41:00.000-07:00

Here’s a poor picture of Henry, the local hedgehog, taken in fading light. For some good pictures of hedgehogs in general, try http://www.hedgehogs.org/

We think Henry lives under the shed, where there is lots of space and where it is maybe cosy enough to hibernate in the winter. We did introduce a hedgehog house many years ago, and put it under the shelter of a then-small mock orange. The mock orange is now 20 years mature and we couldn’t get under it to check the hedgehog house if we wished to.

Henry is possibly not of right mind. He scuttles around in full view long before it is truly even dusk. He is largely oblivious of us or of Pusskin until he is really quite close, but the poor cat worries him once Henry spots it. I think he worries Pusskin, too. A blind cat can get quite close to a curled up, defensive hedgehog before he realises what a spiky creature he is about to encounter. Such encounters may explain Pusskin’s habit of jumping back sharply if his whiskers brush something unexpected, like the bristles of the doormat. We have had to finely tune the blockages we have added to the gates in the garden to prevent Pusskin getting out but so that Henry can still negotiate them, to explore his larger territory. We see him outside so we know it is working ok.

When Henry scuttles around the garden, he does so on surprisingly long legs and with a bit of a rolling gait. It is possible he has lost a foot in his travels, but it’s tricky to get close enough to be sure. Later on, he can often be heard shuffling noisily around the borders, seeking out those handy worms and leather jackets.

Musing through the Museum

2008-08-21T13:09:00.000-07:00

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History is a wonderfully old-fashioned museum in a fabulous neo-Gothic setting – very appropriate.

We went to look at the fossils and dinosaur skeletons. We watched this small herd going by for quite a while, they were very quiet.

The museum was fairly busy. Although there are no undergraduates around at the moment, Oxford teems with tourists and the more intrepid amongst them had solved the puzzle of finding the Museum of Natural History, hidden away as it is from the main centre. There were quite a few children, too, the nicer and more studious sort in the main, usually with grandma or grandpa. Sometimes the grand’ was the more interested; sometimes it was little Jimmie or Janie.

By comparison with some of the similar places I visited in my Aus-blog (http://expot.blogspot.com/) the Oxford museum is very old-fashioned. No food, no loos as far as I can see, huge vaulting roof like a railway station; but I like it here just as I liked them there. To each his own.

We had a chat with this fellow but really didn’t have a language in common. I don’t think he was local, though several colleagues of similar mien had been found just up the road. He in turn thought we were just everyday tourists speaking some garbled tongue, not realising we had been around here for a few decades. Still, he bade us goodbye when we left, hoping we would be back soon and we, delighted with the place which we haven’t visited for some years, are confident we will be.

We wandered up the road to an area of Oxford we haven’t frequented in many years and had an excellent lunch in Brown’s. In term time, it itself is a museum of natural history and the exotic species to watch are the students and their visiting parents. Out of term, it’s pleasant nonetheless, with mummies and grannies treating the kids, and a few post-grads. It warmed my heart to hear the table behind discussing eigenvalues and eigenvectors.

Pusskin’s ant

2008-08-13T07:12:00.000-07:00

When Pusskin wants a bit of attention, he will meow in a certain way and arch his head up for you to stroke. Do this correctly and he will quickly subside into a pool of fuzzy moggy on the floor so you can tickle his tummy, stroke his chin and other such self-indulgent entertainments. When eventually he has had enough, he will start licking himself, as a cat does, and you can leave him reclining on the carpet or wherever. In the house, you will usually soon observe a furtive ant heading away radially from the great P. We have not worked out if it is the same ant each time (they all look the same to us, ignorant as we are), one that has perhaps colonised Pusskin and, like a sloth in a tree, climbs off from time to time for ablutions, but then climbs back on, in the ant’s case before the cat wanders off somewhere else. Or is it a fifth column of ants, coming in on the Trojan cat one at a time with purpose to take over the house? They have had us surrounded for years, grinding away at the foundations under the paving stones, colonies front and back of the house that somehow synchronise the wave of flying ants these creature spawn each year.

What prompts an ant to climb aboard the cat when he sleeps out in the garden? Why doesn’t he leap off for dear life when the monster from Brobdingnag takes to its feet? How can he leave a pheromone trail for the rest of his heap when he is transported à la chat? Does he climb aboard again, in which case how does he know when it’s a good time to jump off, or does he try to find home from inside the house? Can he possibly succeed, or must he end up prey to one of the many spiders that lurk in the darker corners (and some of the not so dark, until we expel them periodically) and, for that matter, would the spiders even want these formic fiends?

Life is full of mysteries, and I kinda guess this one will never rise to the top of the investigative pile. No thesis will be forthcoming on “The sociology and three-way synergy between the common or garden ant, the domesticated feline and human habitation”. Do you know what it’s all about?

As you always were

2008-08-09T12:11:00.000-07:00

I am never lonely when I am alone. That fizzing brain between my ears keeps me amused, keeps chewing things over, imagining new things to do, places to be, things to say, stuff to check, books to read, ideas to grapple with; it is never quiet. I am lonely when the noise of other people who do not seem to be my sort of people drowns out my own imagination without replacing it with the enjoyable spark of ideas of their own.

How do we get to know one another? Those little gambits that work so well with your friends fall on stone ears; no doubt, too, their little gambits on yours. One knows that someone finds this person in front of you interesting (perhaps only their mother!), but you can’t quite see it and they can’t see it in you. And I know I am no great judge of who will prove to be interesting. Quite a number of people whose company I have come to enjoy started off in that instant ‘not for me’ camp and then, somewhere along the line, I realised they are great folk. It is probably only a similar number where some sort of instant recognition of kinship flowers. In the middle, the broad church of increasing familiarity, shared interests, common experience and outlook leading to enjoying each other’s company.

I sit in a rare tutorial, wanting to understand stuff, not wanting to appear too much of a smart-alec, though curious about the other people in the tutorial, some of whom I have met before just once, some never. But the shared subject somehow binds us not at all; no one else seems curious about their fellow participants; people shuffle off quickly when it’s finished, with barely a nod to even the tutor. I flop into the car, depressed, and head glumly home, still carrying in my mind the fizz-stopping noise (or silence) of the people no longer there. Not yet alone. But there’s no stopping the fizz for long, so by the time I am home, I am alone and no longer lonely.

And how better in the end labour lost and silence.
And you as you always were.

Alone.

Company, Samuel Beckett

Tragic tale

2008-07-23T10:52:00.000-07:00

Pusskin sat on the carpet.

There was a loud bang from the conservatory.
A juvenile blackbird had flown full-tilt into the window and now lay gasping in the flower border.

“Keep the cat in, keep the cat in”, they cried.
We must save the life of the little bird by giving it a chance to recover!
(Even a blind cat, though with good hearing, is a hunting machine).

We amused the cat.

The blackbird started to recover.

The collared dove wandered freely in the garden, unhindered by the cat.

The war pigeon swooped down and imperiously took the dove.

The blackbird recovered and flew off.

Pusskin resumed station in the garden.

Good intentions - poor result.

The end.

Newsflash from ‘kin

2008-06-24T08:41:00.000-07:00

They jumped me again! Bundled me in a box and set off I know not where. They’d fed me brekkie this time, not like the last time, so it came as a bit of a surprise. I put up a pretty good fight, but there were two of them.

Still, we ended up with one of those nice vet ladies, and all she did was take my blood pressure and listen to my fine (and furry) chest. Good news, she said, blood pressure halved over last time, down from 300 to 150. Maybe that’s what those white crunchy bits do that I detect in my morning repast? And from my blood tests last time, my thyroid measurement was ok and my kidneys are fine, so no one knows quite why my blood pressure was so high – no average cat, me!

Anyway, it was all over quite quickly and before you know it I was back at the ranch, being fussed over and – best – fed!

Don’t think I have to go back for 6 months, but I must admit it’s hard to remember that sort of timeframe so I suppose it will all come as a big surprise to me again in December.
I have spent the rest of the day unwinding after the trauma and only now do I feel able to write about the experience. Adieu.

Pusskin writes …..

2008-06-17T10:51:00.000-07:00

I seem to be settling in at my new home. I don’t seem to be able to see anything, but my hearing and sense of smell are both more acute than I can remember. It seems I am safe from traffic and unhelpful humans as the morning rush of cars and the weekend roll-home of drunks is somehow muted, as if on the other side of a fence. This is quite reassuring.
As far as I can tell, the home humans offer a reliable source of food. It’s even getting better. At first it was biscuits – fine if you are starving, but sooooo dry. Then sticky food, clearly supermarket own-brand – reasonable quality and so-so. Then they tried what I think was Whiskas Villages – very acceptable. More recently, they perhaps picked the wrong set off the shelf, but it was certainly Chateau Felix du Pape so I let them know that this was the business; more of this, please! They seem to lace the morning tucker with some chemical thing and I eat some of it to humour them, leaving as much as I decently can.

Some days, I take a real run at eating as I don’t seem to have put any weight on recently and though I can disguise this with my fine furry coat, it would be nice to be a bit bigger. But of course my good manners soon set in and I have a diet day.

Finding water has become a bit of a challenge as it is generally quiet (except when it’s falling out of the sky!) and doesn’t smell much. Fortunately, with a bit of careful triangulation, I can usually find a nice smelly dish of water out in the wilds of the garden, often with a bit of bird dung on it or in it, maybe even the odd frog (not recommended cuisine!). A new water hazard has appeared near my little house, but it lacks these reassuring smells. Nevertheless, I will drink from it in extremis.

The home humans seem to mean well, though I think they lack experience with noble creatures like me. I generally reward them with a bit of licking and by letting them stroke my cheeks. If that seems to be calming them down, I might roll over on my back and let them stroke my rather handsome white tummy. I believe that it’s good for their blood pressure. I think they have bought me a couple of tinkling baubles as toys; I’m not sure that I ‘do’ toys at my age, but I might indulge them a little later, if their behaviour is exemplary.

That’s enough – time for a little snooze!

Pusskin takes a trip

2008-06-10T10:27:00.000-07:00

We jumped him early this morning, without even the dignity of brekky (his, that is). Yes, Pusskin has gone to the vet. In a carefully timed two man operation, Kate picked him up and popped him in the base of Kerry's catmobile and I popped the lid on (avec beaucoup douceur) and wrestled the little plastic latches into stability. Oh, the scrabble to get out, the pitiful wailing, but he settled on the 5 minute walk around to the vet and was soon on the investigation table with up to four pairs of hands holding him gently and stroking him. He found it in himself to purr a little.

First fact: he is a 'he', though a neutered one, so he has known the ways of mankind in the past.

Second fact: he is essentially blind and unlikely to see again, though the fine and sympathetic vet thought his condition unusual.

He was in there for the day, for a more senior vet who specialises in eye stuff to have a look, and for blood tests and the usual MOT type processing (annual service, for international readers).

More, when we pick him up from the vet this afternoon!

It turns out he has astronomic blood pressure, and this has done for his eyes, though he is otherwise of sound body and paw. But the good news is that he doesn’t need to have either eye removed. He does need to take tablets for his blood pressure for the rest of his days (join the club around here!) but is otherwise fine.

He wasn’t greatly impressed at being back in the catmobile for the trip home, but he seemed pleased to be back, quickly looked out for a bit of grub for his troubles, which we gladly provided, and he has been bouncing around in a hyperactive way ever since, checking out all the facilities from the new plant pot saucer water supply to the roll-on-your-back and get your tummy tickled service. He seems to have verified satisfactorily that they all function as expected.

We have to take him back to the vet in a couple of weeks to check out his dosage; that should be fun – he’ll know what’s coming next time!

Pusskin settles

2008-06-05T11:09:00.000-07:00

Puss has taken to his outdoor refuge, or hutch if you prefer. This confirms our friend Kerry’s view that he looks an “outdoorsy” sort of cat. We looked at a few kennels and the like in pet shops (though there are none really for cats which are expected to be indoor creatures), but the amazing and alarming instructables website (http://www.instructables.com/) gave us some ideas for building our own, so that is what we did.

It’s made out of weatherproof ply on 3x1.5cm framing. The bottom sits on sleepers made from a fence post. The walls are screwed together and drop on to the base where they are held by art. The roof sits over the whole shebang.

We planned to put roofing felt on – and we will soon – but the hutch was needed before we had time to do so. We also plan to put some latches to hold the roof on more strongly than gravity (the weakest of the forces in the universe) can manage in the windy corner of our garden that it occupies. We use two bricks for the time being.

Puss was encouraged to feel it was home by the catnip at the door, the old towel as carpet on which he had already sat elsewhere and a sprig of catnip tossed into the back of his den-to-be. Being a smart animal, as soon as it rained he found it and as we have had rather a depressingly large amount of rain ever since, he has spent quite a lot of time in there, even opting to return to it on wet days when we have fed him in the conservatory.

We put a big notice in the window of one of the town’s newsagents to see if we could find his owner, plus we wrapped a few smaller ones around lampposts in the vicinity. We have had one response from a young couple who came clutching their poster from a couple of months ago when their cat disappeared. Alas, Puss is not theirs though, from the picture, he is surely related to the fine cat they had lost.

So, Puss is still with us. He gets depressed on wet days; he gets over-excited when there are visitors; we can tell he’d love to wander further afield, but he really isn’t safe to do so. He understands taking it easy, though, which is nice. A day or two more and he will perhaps trust us enough to get him to the vet.

Money, money, money

2008-06-04T10:55:00.000-07:00

We have had a number of money plants (aka jade plant, crassula ovata) over the years but I have never seen one flower.

This one has sat in the conservatory for a couple of years growing steadily but not, until this year, flowering.

By fluctuation, we had rather left the conservatory unoccupied through the winter months and although the heater in there is set to avoid frost, nonetheless, it got pretty chilly at times. This must have spurred Madame Jade into reproductive action.

First, myriad tiny buds, then a really quite enormous number of flowers just like this only about one half the size on the screen. They look great, and while at a distance they look nondescript tiny white flowers, close up, they have a lovely pink tinge and exquisite detail, some of which is captured here.

Time passes and now they are all finished (this shot was on slide film, so from a little while ago) but they leave me with a rosy glow of memory, plus the pictures of course, and wondering if we shall see them again next year. Another of the small delights of life!

And ‘Rogue’ became ‘Pusskin’

2008-05-24T13:40:00.001-07:00

I mentioned Rogue the cat a post or two back. He seems to have adopted us now.

His only demands are four square meals a day, possibly interleaved with a snack or two of biscuits, and unmitigated attention and stroking alternate days or so. Another day or two and we’ll have a cat basket from a friend and we’ll risk compromising the safe haven he has found in our back garden by taking him to the vet. We took the picture in and the vet wasn’t hopeful. He can still detect light and shade, we think, but otherwise his vision is very poor.

‘Pusskin’ might sound a tad fey, but it has good sibilance and the click of the ‘k’ which help him locate us largely by sound. His hearing is so sharp he can hear a blackbird fly by and you would swear he was following it with his eyes, but really it’s with his ears. His fur is gorgeous and when he unwinds he loves to be stroked and will roll over and lie on his back. It’s the least one can do for a noble creature.

We have just spent three afternoons building him an outdoor refuge. He’s not used to the inside of a house and prefers to sleep on the table on the patio, but the good weather isn’t set to last, so we hope he can get the hang of the refuge. It has a nice pot of catnip outside the doorway and he definitely likes the catnip!

Maybe he’ll be our guest for a while; maybe he won’t do that well. We’ll try to do our best for him.

Be prepared

2008-05-04T11:15:00.001-07:00

Mightier than the sword

2008-05-02T09:26:00.000-07:00

In my first real job, I worked for a Defence company in its microwave systems group. I was a raw and somewhat exotic graduate for that world and luckily found myself first under the wing of a gentle and erudite engineer by the name of Laurie Hopkins. Laurie taught me useful engineering skills and, more than that, an approach to engineering majoring on analysis, design and thinking. I even bought my first car from him, an old Triumph 2000, a lumbering ton of metal with a splendid straight-six engine, and I had always thought I’d start with a Mini!

Laurie must be getting on a bit now, if not worse, but one of the funny things I remember about him was that he slightly disliked his surname, thinking it sounded rather like that of a butler, as in “Hopkins, serve the cheese board now, please”. A butler he was not, a fine creative engineer and a gentleman he really was.

Parker, on the other hand, is the epitome of a butler. Well, at least as far as puppets go, that is. Parker, of course, is Lady Penelope’s man-Friday in the cult puppet series Thunderbirds. It is perhaps a disappointing sign of the creative times that there are signs of revival of Thunderbirds, as well as those other cult series, The Prisoner and Blake’s Seven.

But, to my Parker. Parker is also a pen company, and long, long ago, as students, we bought a couple for the simple reason that we used pen and ink to scribble lecture notes. Fountain pen ink flows so much more freely that biro inks that was a lot less tiring to use a fountain pen for note taking. Much bigger chance of unsightly splodges, too, of course, but nothing is without its down side. Perhaps at times of longeur, I would fiddle excessively with the cap and its clip and in time I snapped the clip. But the pen wrote on, and I have continued to use it, on and off, for the intervening 40 years.

Perhaps 15 years ago, as I used the pen in some professional capacity or other, my colleague the estimable Mr Birchenough picked it up and said, with a certain respect, “Are you aware that this is a Parker 51?” I was not, but I remembered the fact in case it came in handy later

From time to time, I have tried to get the clip replaced but without success. But, hang on, in the modern world we have mastered the ‘long tail’ of demand – go check eBay! Actually, this is no ‘long tail’. This is a thriving industry and it raises the spectre that there are, indeed, two sorts of people. In this case the two sorts are those who want a pen to use and those who wish to collect a pen, keeping it in pristine condition. A similar division is visible with old cameras. I have a few cameras that are old. I like to use them from time to time. Other people collect old cameras but never use them. As a magpie hoarder of all sorts of junk, I can’t personally imagine ever wanting to hoard stuff for the sake of it, but each to his own. Trouble is, when all you want is a part for a working pen that just happens to be 40 years old, prices are inflated by people who want to collect vintage pens!

I watched a few auctions – there’s around one finishing each day – decided what I was willing to pay and then waited for one to come along, sound of clip, that somehow wasn’t so attractive to other folk. It is pictured with this post. As a pen, it maybe needs a service though it writes well enough; as a source of parts for my pen, it works a treat!

Of course, the fruit of the tree of knowledge is dangerous indeed. I learnt from the many specialist pen sites that the Parker 51 had 24 variants of pen clip in its time. And indeed, I will be grafting on one of the wrong sort, a heinous crime. Can I live with the wrong clip? Yes. Or, maybe not! Perhaps I’ll just use it as a working pen and solve the snapped clip problem some other time.

Old Rogue Fades?

2008-04-17T03:48:00.000-07:00

Last year, Rogue featured in the blog (http://ronmoveson.blogspot.com/2007/06/rogue.html) but recently he has not been looking too good.

He (for the sake of argument), who never craved human contact, was whimpering in the shrubs of our front garden a few weeks back, though none of us could quite understand what he wanted. For the last few days, maybe longer, he seems hardly to have left our plot; the front garden in the mornings when the Sun is that side, the back in the afternoons, where there are also better cat facilities like the floor height water baths intended for birds. He is looking slower and there is something wrong with his vision. One eye looks suspect from as close as he allows us, and he bumps into things as if his near vision is very poor. He can follow you with his eyes when you walk by, but struggles to find the water bowl. We feel sad for him. We have started putting a bit of cat food out, which he wolfs down, so we suspect he can't find his way home any more and hasn't eaten for a while. That's the least we can do for the old fella. If he comes to trust us a bit better maybe we can check for a collar under that wild fur, or otherwise help him out.

Is he near the end? We hope not. Come, Rogue, remember the words of Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Like a dog with a stick

2008-04-06T03:40:00.000-07:00

Is there any dog that can resist the thrown stick? Perhaps it even constitutes a test for dogginess: there’s a four-legged creature by your side, you pick up a stick & throw it. If the creature chases the stick, it’s a dog, otherwise it’s something else (probably a cat, looking on in a bemused and superior fashion!)

Walking through the dusty lanes of a drought-stricken Andalusia some years back, we passed through a quiet street of sleepy houses and acquired, uninvited, a canine companion. The usual scrawny, street-wise creature you find in those parts, no trouble, but persistent in tracking us at a respectful distance. How far can these creatures stray from their home bases without getting lost, we wondered? He kept coming along. A couple of miles on, we neared the town where we were staying and began to worry he would still be with us in the hotel. As we neared the end of a dusty track, I noticed some fruits or such likes, round, ball-like. The primeval thought emerged in my mind. I picked one up and repeated the under-arm bowling action a few times for the dog to see. It was terrible to see the uncertainty in its eyes – I'm a street-dog, I wouldn’t fall for that one, oh, but it is so intrinsic to my spirit to chase a stick or a ball. A few more dummy arm movements, then I unleashed the fruit and it went bowling down the lane. The dog hesitated for a split second. Then it was off, chasing it for all it was worth. We legged it in the opposite direction and around a corner.

So, I bought an electronics mag – no, that’s not the stick – and lazing in the conservatory on a sunny afternoon (yes, the taxman had taken all my dough), I lit upon the sudoku at the back of the mag. To be more precise, the hexadoku, the 4x4 version that, appropriately, you fill with hex digits. Nearly the stick. I started filling it in, but I’m slow and careless at these things and it quickly became boring. But then, the stick. Long ago I wrote a program, in Lisp, for solving 3x3 sudokus. How hard could it be to extend it to hexadoku? A stick to chase! This will take far longer than solving the hexadoku, but I won’t fall asleep doing it, it’s much more fun, and hey, who can resist a stick?

For the cognoscenti, perhaps half of my Lisp sudoku solver is generic and recursive enough to work for any size. It’s the other half that needs a bit of work. I’m on the case; soon I’ll be able to solve hundreds of them, though I never will. That’s the thing with sticks; chasing them is essentially useless, just irresistible. Of course, as it’s Lisp, it will run like, errm, a dog. (Actually, not too bad, 23 seconds at a full 100% cpu for the puzzle of interest!)

I hold that many, perhaps most, of the traits exhibited by humans can be found in animals – that’s where we accumulated them from, surely. Perhaps the dog gave us dogged stick chasing!

On Safari

2008-04-03T07:15:00.001-07:00

Apple has played a neat trick on Microsoft by releasing their Safari web browser for Microsoft operating systems (well, certainly for XP). One of those throwaway prompts popped up on my XP machine yesterday inviting me to download terabytes of stuff to update iTunes and also offering Safari. I felt obliged to take the iTunes update (though I use a quite different site for music downloads!) but I ignored the Safari offer.

But when the terabytes had had their way with my machine, I was deviously offered Safari again, and I succumbed. After all, I run IE7 on this machine and it’s the usual MS rubbish. It freezes, it’s slow, it’s no better than IE6 but no doubt has a bigger footprint. Remember the dinosaurs, I say; big meant extinction!
Safari installed smoothly enough and was a little slow on first load but then, wonder of wonders, it indeed loads pages faster than IE7at least. And it looks just like it does on the iMac and by that, I don’t mean it’s a Windows app with an inset Apple style. No, it takes over the whole window and firmly stamps it ‘Apple’. The screen image gives the idea – just the same on Mac and Wintel boxes!

I’ll stick with it awhile though no doubt MS will do something to make IE inescapable again before long.

Spring View from Exercise Bike

2008-03-14T10:42:00.000-07:00

As the days lengthen, the views from my morning efforts on the exercise bike have improved greatly.

Early in the morning, the empty suburbs glow with the rising Sun. The quince glistens with frost, but presents such a vivid flash of colour nonetheless and the acer griseum is golden, the barest of buds just starting to appear.

I can just see the gutter of the conservatory, and scurrying along it, exploring intently, a male blackbird in fine fettle.

From the television antenna on the house top left, the collared doves are showing off to each other, roaring vertically upwards and gliding gracefully back to the rooftop.

By the end of my exercise, the first local kids are heading towards school (impressively enough, with another 20-25 minutes walk ahead of them) and more cars are leaving the estate for work, the world is waking up to another day.

Time for brekkie!

Visions of Johanna

2008-03-10T05:05:00.000-07:00

We face the worst storms of this winter, and we seem to have blessed them with a name, Johanna. The first wave hit last night, but mostly in the west and coastal regions where high seasonal tides add to the watery misery. The next wave should hit us tonight. Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet!

Here in the UK mid-lands, we had a reasonable downpour and highish winds last night, but daylight has brought mixed but seasonal weather for the time of year with sun and showers. Our Meteorological Office has been downright cautious since that time years ago when they laughingly asserted that no hurricane was going to hit us, but a mini-one did! Of course, this now means there is a mighty game of double bluff going on between the Met guys and the world whereby we hear what they say and now assume it won’t be quite that bad and they hype up the prospects to make us take care. One side or the other is often surprised!

Still, it’s a good day to stay by the (metaphorical) fireside reading, fiddling with electronic circuits, a little blogging, all the fun of the fair.

The Met Office’s image here is an infrared image taken from a geostationary satellite this morning. I have played in the past with capturing visible light and infrared satellite pictures off the lower orbiting NOAA satellites, but with so much stuff on the web, it’s not really worth the effort so the crossed dipole antenna I put up is mostly a perch for the local LBBs (little brown birds) and starlings. Every cloud, as they say, in apposite manner here.

Everybody must get stoned

2008-03-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

Well, they'll stone ya when you're trying to be so good,
They'll stone ya just a-like they said they would.
They'll stone ya when you're tryin' to go home.
Then they'll stone ya when you're there all alone.
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.

Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, Bob Dylan

Though Stonehenge is awesome, these days you can get much closer to the more subtle megalithic monument at Avebury. In fact, you can get completely stoned i.e. touch them, move among them freely, wonder at the labour put in by some poor sods around 2800BC (or BCE for the PC). ‘Course, we trendy moderners are impressed and respectful, but more pragmatic and needy people in the intervening centuries ran off with quite a few of the stones to make houses and the likes, so today we must put up with a fair number of concrete markers where once there were 20 ton stones.

It’s a popular place, with its share of new-age hopefuls. It has an associated National Trust shop and, best of all, a super idiosyncratic restaurant that usually has on offer a vegetarian hot lunch and a Vegan hot lunch as well as sandwiches & snacks. Although I am not of a meat-avoiding persuasion, the food here is really good, an able second to the first of the stones and justification for a visit even in the rain.

The main rings of stones are certainly interesting enough, and one kinda thinks that maybe those ancient folk held ceremonies in the middle of the circles, or some other such focused group activity. But as you wander further afield, there is the fine avenue, winding out in to the countryside, with its pair-wise stones. What was this for? No doubt academics have pondered long and hard, but speculation is more fun - perhaps cart races, or egg and spoon races? Who knows, not us, and there’s not much use mapping our modern standards and expectations onto them.

From the avenue, we can see mysterious Silbury Hill. Alas, it has scaffolding and work huts on its top – even ancient monuments need the builders in now and then. No point going over there, then, so we follow another signpost to a named target. Somehow we miss whatever it was and walk much further than expected, gaining an impressive view from the nearby Ridgeway. The number of visitors falls off as some rapid power law function of the distance from the car park, so this little bit further away, the site feels ancient, we feel alone.

I like Avebury. I hope the need for its preservation doesn’t take it the way of Stonehenge, fenced off, inaccessible. But there are a lot of us treading the paths, wearing them down, so many more of us than when the stones were laid down.

Give us this day …

2008-02-14T09:11:00.000-08:00

The small market towns of England (and, from what little I know, of Wales and Scotland) are often a delight. They exhibit an eclectic mix of ancient and modern with their higgledy piggledy streets and back-lanes, their often 13th century churches, their non-chain stores and their invariable intimacy with brooks, streams and small rivers. Our own Abingdon has many of these features, but it is going through a period of planning blight, with its poor traffic system and a diminishing range of little shops, the product of unimaginative councillors and governors, so we trolled 15 miles (25km) to Witney.

Witney, in the constituency of the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, is a bit bigger than Abingdon and somehow better arranged around its little river compared to Abingdon’s subservience to the mighty Thames. It has more and varied shops, including a couple for the window shopping bloke: a nice traditional camera shop and a car sales place specializing in old and often magnificent sports cars. Alas, Oselli was a bit over-run with MGBs this trip; nothing wrong with them, of course, but a few more TRs would have cheered my specific heart.

Abingdon is probably better endowed with real restaurants, though you would never starve in Witney, but Witney seems to major in teashops and we popped in to Huffkins, a teashop recommended by our friends Jan and Chris. This is a fine traditional English sort of place. Abingdon has an accurately named Le Patisserie, reflecting the respectably wide European presence in the town arising from the multi-national projects going on at local laboratories, but Huffkins is inalienably English, it’s a bread and cake café, plain and simple, and done very well. We had tea and cake. Well, Kate had a carrot cake and I had the air cake, that’s like the air guitar so favoured by us old geezers.

Whilst I stood at the till, poised to pay, I noticed a whole shelf dedicated to different types of bread flour. Now, one of the little daily-ish tasks I have taken on as I spend more time at home is the bread making. We have had a bread-making machine for quite a while, so there is no hard labour, and the advantage of making your own is that you know what is in it. So, no preservatives, not much sugar, grape oil instead of butter, that sort of stuff. But variety is the spice of life and I cycle through a bunch of recipes using a variety of plain, malted and rye flours (Oh, plus a good line in spelt, very fashionable but needs a bit more yeast).

What did I spy before me, though?
Apple and cinnamon flour, that’s what! How could I resist? I had had some nice cinnamon toast on a couple of perambulations in Australia and I had hankered after a cinnamon bread for some time; here was the answer. As good fortune would have it, only a day or so later we were blessed with the delivery of our first ever apple and cinnamon flour loaf. I had read the recipe on the flour packet, I had read the closest approximation in the bread-maker book, I munged the two disparate recipes together and, lo, it worked, and beautifully so.

First, of course, the kitchen was suffused with the smell of a&c, as the loaf baked. We would eat the first slices next morning, with a spot of quince jam for dressing, and it was really rather ace (apple & cinnamon excellent, that is). Better still, the morning after that, we toasted some and fell into raptures over the brekky table; toasted is for sure its forté. Of course there are limitations - it is not suitable for sardines on toast, for example, but the temptation of afternoon tea and toast might not be resisted for too much longer :-).

The moral of this story is that earthly delights abound and can be found in unexpected places. Stay aware!

Tribute to Dr Derek Greenwood

2008-01-31T08:49:00.000-08:00

www.ilfing away, Kate found mention of the recent death of the man who was, de facto though not officially, my PhD supervisor, more than 30 years ago. I am saddened. Though he reached 77, still I would have wished him sail on into his nineties. The photograph still present on the University web site is the man I knew: thoughtful, calm, precise and with a bone-dry sense of humour coupled to a twinkle in the eye. This man tried to steer my raw ability to calculate into a deeper understanding of physics, an ambition I work on to this day though having made little of it. Ah, the jumble of old memories, missed opportunities.

He had done some brilliant work when he was younger than when I knew him and thought his best was over, but he will surely have inspired subsequently dozens of young theorists and he was joint author of a couple of erudite and illuminating physics texts which I pick up every year and learn a little more from. When I knew him, he couldn’t envisage his gentle University life lasting, but of course he was there until he retired and rightly so.

Some of his precision remains instilled in me though I am very different. But, here was a man I can say for sure influenced my way of thinking, in some part made me whatever it is I am.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,--

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

from Ulysses by Tennyson

Numbers game

2008-01-25T07:24:00.000-08:00

Dull, dim and damp, a short winter’s day in the modest central plains of England is not the most conducive to open-air exercise. Instead, I have settled on a regime of getting on my trusty, rusty, ancient exercise bike first thing, after a quick shave, four mornings a week to supplement the one gym session I do, and thus giving the five prescribed periods of aerobic exercise. It’s never a drag, getting on the bike, as I really believe I feel better for the effort (and, academically, evidence suggests it is a good thing for one’s health long term), but still, my mind quickly wanders.

The positioning of the bike is not auspicious. I can see the drawn curtains, as it is still dark; a couple of hand-crafted low-voltage power supplies I built a while ago and for which new destinies, conceived whilst using the bike, beckon; a half finished radio project which I am determined to finish this year, as in each of the last seven; that’s about it. So, my mind wanders, and it wanders arithmetically. I suppose there will be folk who peddle away and simply watch the elapsed time (the only display still working on my bike) increment steadily 1, 2, 3 , …. 30. I am, alas, not one such.

Instead, I have worked through a range of elaborate arithmetic schemes. For a while, I favoured the continuous mental calculation of the difference between the time cycled and the time remaining. This is a poor metric for the first 15 minutes as it is negative and discouraging, but one is full of energy and none too sweaty in that period and in the second half, it clocks up at a rate of two minutes per minute cycled, so it’s very cheering. It palled after a while.

Then, for a time, I heartened to the twelfths, 2.5 minute chunks so much more interesting than the tick tick of every minute. Because twelve is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, there are also many delightful congruences when you find you are at six twelfths, or two quarters or three sixths, or one half, all at once. Yes, the twelfths kept me amused for quite a while.
Currently, it’s a couple of gentle sequences that amuse me. On the rise to the halfway point, one over the sequence of integers is quite attractive. At one sixth, you are 5 minutes in (and that’s my warm up time). One fifth comes quite soon after, but the gap grows to one fourth. It’s then a whole twelfth (tee hee) to one third (10 mins in) and a big void of un-achievement through to one half at fifteen minutes.

Coming down the other side, I move on to an apparently different sequence, (n-1)/n. It starts with one over two, naturally enough. It’s a bit of a haul to two thirds, but starts getting easier as three quarters looms. Four fifths is another 90 seconds of pedalling and five sixths a mere minute further. If I need a real distraction from cycling, I’ll work on the more challenging mental arithmetic of six sevenths – a tricky one – and seven eighths, not so bad but hardly resonant. Eight ninths is tricky, but nine tenths, at 27 minutes, is warm and welcoming. It becomes a bit of a rush after that as it generally takes me longer to work out ten elevenths that it takes to pass it. Eleven twelfths is easy and familiar but, as they come thick and fast, there’s not much hope of calculating twelve thirteenths in time. No, fifteenths are the next real hope and then you might as well jump straight to twenty nine thirtieths. At fifty nine sixtieths, there is only 30 seconds to go, and then, pop, I’m done. It’s a good demonstration that (n-1)/n tends to unity eventually, thus confounding Zeno who argued that the hare could never catch the tortoise because it had to get half way there, then halfway further etc etc, never quite catching it.

Of course, really, since (n-1)/n is precisely 1-(1/n), the down sequence is just the same as the up sequence in reverse order, perhaps that’s its beauty.
To adapt the words of Ivor Cutler, there’s nothing like a mathematical education!

The idea of … love

2008-01-18T02:30:00.000-08:00

My eyes were first opened to the idea of ‘the idea of’ by Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Second Mrs Kong. This review summarises the plot succinctly. As is common in opera, it all ends in tears, with Anubis as the Death of Kong summoning him back to the underworld, claiming that the idea of him is dead and bringing to a close his romance with Pearl (from Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring). But we know it isn’t.

Scroll forward to today and ‘the idea of’ enters my mind again because one of my chums has sent me (and 90 other of her Facebook friends) some lines from the Lebanese-American poet and writer Kahlil Gibran. He marshals words beautifully, but then that was his vocation of course.

He speaks of love and sadness. But what is this love of which the poet and the whimsical & dreamy girl (so unlike my chum) dream? Is it the hair-tugging love of young colts and fillies? Is it the love of physical and mental attraction? Is it the love of mature couples nurturing their child? The love of familiar and comfortable pairs? The proud love of decades of togetherness? Perhaps the love of memory when love has gone?

All and none of these I would say, but essentially the idea of love, how it could be in some drifting and heavenly world where people were ethereal, time was endless and a day’s work looking into someone’s eyes was time well spent. An abstract love matched with an abstract sadness, not the sordid practicalities of our everyday world. And it touches us, surely, this ‘idea of’; it’s like a Platonic solid, idealized, the perfect circle, no glitches, no arcs where you couldn’t hold the compass straight, no straight line with that small bump where you pencilled around your thumb that was holding the ruler.

So, I say to my chum: thank you, for pointing me in another direction to think and reflect about. More commonly we swap amusements about mathematics but nothing demands that we limit ourselves thus.

Black Cat

2008-01-13T02:27:00.000-08:00

Lucifer Sam

Lucifer Sam Siam cat
Always sitting by your side
Always by your side
That cat's something I can't explain
Jennifer Gentle you're a witch
You're the left side
He's the right side oh no
That cat's something I can't explain

Lucifer go to sea
Be a hip cat
Be a ship's cat
Somewhere anywhere
That cat's something I can't explain

Night prowling sifting sand
Padding around on the ground
He'll be found
When you're around
That cat's something I can't explain

Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Pink Floyd
Written by Syd Barrett

There aren’t too many of these authentic advertising plates around anymore, rich, enamelled paint on a metal support, screwed to a fence or whatever with a permanence long gone in modern day advertising and promoting prices obviously not expected to change for decades. Sam here is screwed to the over-rails bridge at a preserved railway line, can’t remember which one, along with similar style ads for Sunlight Soap, soap branded in line with Lord Lever’s (later Unilever) Port Sunlight worker’s garden village where the works was situated.

I don’t think you can get the Black Cat cigarettes any more, though they seem to have hung around for quite a time according to the inimitable wikipedia. My pal Google tells me I could buy a modern sign just like this, though, made in the USA so maybe these are pinned up in homes throughout that fine land. You can get Sunlight Soap in a simulacrum of the original packaging from the Port Sunlight Heritage Shop or its website if you don’t fancy a visit.

Click on the image to get a bigger version; there is a startling precision to every hair on Sam’s coat and he is blacker than any cat I have had the good fortune to stroke (yes, even blacker than the grossly mis-named “Tiger” of Mount legend). The eyes do have a hint of Lucifer about them, though, so Syd’s song came to mind. Don’t forget, smoking can damage your health though cats don’t for most people.

Anniversary

2008-01-12T02:43:00.000-08:00

Cardiac Journey is, of course, yesterday’s blog, but today it is one year to the day since I had my bypass op.

I am pleased to see it. The last two years have been, as they say, very interesting!

T Ceremony

2008-01-07T09:50:00.000-08:00

I make most of the cups of tea around here; it’s a tradition. I make green tea in the green teapot, so it’s a green-tea pot and a green teapot.
Naturally, the Darjeeling is made in the brown teapot, which is thus a brown-tea pot. Black tea is made arbitrarily in either teapot, as the mood takes me; we don’t drink it that often.

I wouldn’t like you to think I was obsessive, so things go awry after that. Peppermint tea gets made in the brown teapot, whereas you might expect the green, and so does Rooibos, although you might expect that, but that’s because these both come from teabags and the brown teapot is that little bit bigger than the green and so accommodates the displacement of the teabag more successfully. If there are guests, we might need to press the blue teapot into service, no matter what the type of tea; it’s bigger than the other two put together!

Of course, the hybrid T is a rose family, nothing to do with a warm drink. We grow only two roses in our garden, the elsewhere-mentioned Zepherin Drouhin and a solitary hybrid T, a Silver Anniversary. This is fiercely spiky and has struggled along in non-ideal conditions for quite a few years generally producing one or two delightful blooms each year.

The magic-T, on the other hand, is nothing to do with water and leaves (or bags or roses); instead, it is a clever configuration of passive components involving coupled transformers or microwave striplines to create two signal outputs from one input with the minimum loss (well, in theory). This chap explains the details; you will need a cup of tea to help you through it, though.

Hearts of Oak

2008-01-01T02:03:00.000-08:00

I prowled the arboretum a while back looking for an acorn to photograph, but soon realized that they were over and done with, earlier than I thought. But it’s an old wood and I was surrounded by oak trees, worn and tired though they were at this end of season, and I looked at them afresh. How I love those crinkly leaves and the fine, upstanding tree that an oak forms.

I suppose there is some dim recollection, from schooldays, of the significance of the oak to this sea-faring nation, but even without that, the peculiar leaves make the oak a tree apart from the run of the mill trees. And, of course, so do the missing acorns.

Look at this bunch of leaves; blighted, nibbled, the cares of 2007 etched in them. Soon they will fall, may already have fallen, but next year new leaves, new growth, new acorns, a fresh start.

Here’s to us all shaking off the slings and arrows of the past year and making a fresh start. I wish a Happy & Fulfilling New Year to my faithful readers!

The Librarian

2007-12-29T08:19:00.001-08:00

Gaze upon the Librarian, his red glassy eye, his fine orange coat, his black flowing backdrop, his memento mori.

He wasn’t always the Librarian. Originally, he was but a mere Hamley’s toy orangutan, but then we discovered Terry Pratchett’s books, in which the Librarian at the magicians’ university had suffered a transformation to an orangutan courtesy of an aberrant spell, and rather liked it that way.

In my mind, he is certainly as orange as you see here, and perhaps once he was, but he has been with us for some decades now and after I had tweaked his portrait to look ‘right’, I looked at the original and found him to be much duller, much less orange, not so vivid. But the idea of the Librarian is all of those bright things, so this is a portrait of the idea of the Librarian, then!

He keeps the time not for some dark, philosophical reason. No, he keeps the time because, electrical as it is and with few moving parts, yet the damned clock ticks. Sit it on a wooden surface and the sounding board thus provided makes it tick exceedingly loudly. Rest it instead in the gentle arms of the Librarian and barely a sound wave emerges and we sleep peacefully.

Fly Agaric

2007-12-27T02:24:00.000-08:00

This posting had to sit around a while, until I had some slide film developed for the pictures – more on that anon.

A few miles away, there is a small arboretum on the fringe of the picturesque village of Nuneham Courtney (villages are one of Oxfordshire's strong points). Nuneham comprises a street of pretty worker's cottages dating from when estate owners thought it cute to prettify their estates with such developments and before they became too venal or impecunious so to do. The estate itself was shaped by Capability Brown, if that is your kind of thing.

The Harcourt Arboretum is also part of that original estate and now belongs to Oxford University. It is a pleasant and spacious contrast to the University's Botanic Gardens. Access by foot or bike is free, but they charge for car parking. It's well worth a couple of quid, particularly in November. Look up and you will see towering trees, many oaks in particular. Look on the horizontal and you will see colourful acers, rich in red and yellow fading leaves.

But we happened to look down, not a direction famous for its trees, I'll admit, and the reward was indeed not arboreal, but fungal – the dangerous fly ageric, one of our more poisonous species. Like so many such things, it is beautiful and alluring. There were just a couple of them, skulking away in the shade and we tried to not draw attention to them while we photographed them as the arboretum is a popular haunt for mothers with their small children. The web tells me that eating it is only likely to kill folk with heart problems, unlike a couple of the other species that will kill anyone over a period of a few painful days. Anyway, Agaric's warning colours are enough to keep any sensible adult away, but what a striking surprise in the undergrowth!

Shopper+, Shopper-

2007-12-23T10:01:00.000-08:00

(Note: Persevere – this is actually about Christmas shopping, so it’s a seasonal piece)

In elementary quantum mechanics, particles such as photons, electrons and atoms interact with one another, but nothing is ever created or destroyed. There will be the same number of photons etc after a quantum interaction as there were before it. In more advanced quantum mechanics, this has to be rectified and we move to an operator representation that includes creation and destruction operators. These ideas of creation and destruction are manifest in Feynman diagrams, which are graphical ways of examining the behaviour of quantum particle and interactions. Feynman worked out that the probability of, say, a photon propagating from A to B is made up of contributions from the whole set of possible paths. The basic path is easy; the photon wiggles directly from A to B, like this:

A more complex path would include the creation and destruction of an electron-positron pair. These would simply bubble into existence for a very short time then merge back to the continuing photon because they are each other’s anti-particle. You would draw this like so:

To include all the possible paths, and taking it to an extreme, there is one path in which a London bus and a London anti-bus are created for a very short time before colliding in a puff of photon. Maybe we could represent this thus:

We speak of the creator operator, Bus+, which creates the objects at the left hand side of the loop, then the virtual buses drive a short distance, then the destructor operators Bus- take them out of existence and turn them back into propagating photon.

Though it’s not obvious from the diagrams, these more complex paths are of ever smaller probability and make a very small contribution to the probability of the photon getting from A to B. For the bus, the probability is likely to be so small that such an event won’t occur at any place or any time in the whole universe, from its big bang origins to its possibly super-dim ending.

I raise this topic because I have noticed that at this time of year, there are many more cars on the roads and shoppers in the streets. Now for someone of the Muslim faith who has the great good fortune to live in Mecca, it is no surprise at the time of the Hajj to find many new people on the streets. The faithful have flooded in on Jumbo jets from all around the world and will, their duties complete, disappear in like manner. But no such obvious explanation can account for the cars and shoppers hereabouts, all of which will be gone in January. I must conclude that the shoppers are created by the action of a creator operator shopper+, to be removed by the destructor operator shopper- in due course. They are quantum fluctuations, somehow associated with Christmas.

Beware! Somewhere, there are anti-shoppers who will destroy you if they shake your hand!

I can see no other explanation, though it is puzzling because the probability should be so small.

Don’t cry for me, Adelante

2007-12-21T09:18:00.000-08:00

As I waited for a fast service to London, I watched two full Adelante trains, coupled together, all carriages in darkness, disappear into the gloom of a December morning.

The Adelante burst on the scene already a legend. A gleaming 21st century train in glittering livery, with comfy seats and a fast, modern service to offer. The best that modern engineering could bring to bear, and a replacement for the ageing 125 diesels (I clocked 124mph on one of these on my GPS a little while ago). Not that the Adelante was going to compromise on speed. Its journey time to London barely differed from that of the old 125s, and with the delays that beset all modes of transport in modern overcrowded Britain, it made no difference to journey times at all. So, better in most respects, with no cost to journey time.

But the first snag was that an Adelante only had 5 carriages whereas the old 125s had 8, so commuter time became more of a nightmare, the chance of standing all the way to town was greatly increased and the urge to hang around a bit longer in the hope that the next service would be one of those nice old 125s still in service increased travel time. Not so good, unless you did get a seat. Then there started to be reports and then personal experience of Adelantes that just wouldn’t go. Oh, there was a driver, that person whose absence always used to explain why trains didn’t go, but it turns out that the Adelante was much more computer controlled than driver con trolled, and sometimes the computer couldn’t be bothered. We commuters would mutter to one another in our restrained English way about Microsoft and blue screens of death but whether Bill and his cohorts had anything to do with it or not, sometimes, the computer, he say no.

We persevered, the rail operators persevered, but then word slipped out that, well, a few of those old 125s, they could be nicely refurbished with more efficient engines, better seating, redecorated carriages and, you know, they could just be a viable addition to services. The first few appeared on the tracks. A full eight carriages, somewhat more seats squeezed in, in the style of cheap airlines, but reliable. Hoorah! Slowly but surely, more of these refurbs are back on the line, and I haven’t been on an Adelante for a long time. In fact, I haven’t even seen one for quite a while until this small forlorn formation. What will become of them? I don’t know. Will they be a footnote in commuter transport history? I’m sure the railway geeks know the answers but in this I am just Joe Public and I know nothing. They did look forlorn, though.

Footnote: And as fate would have it, I travelled on an Adelante on the short journey from London back to the Slough office. Comfortable seats, if a little stiff, as I recalled, but relegated to a back route at a slack time when 5 coaches is more than enough. My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Off one's trolley

2007-12-14T07:45:00.000-08:00

We have a bit of trouble with trolleys around here.

Perhaps it's the pubs' 24 hour opening; perhaps, given they are Tesco trolleys, they get employee discounts and can buy booze in the supermarket very cheaply. Whatever it is, the grey light of a winter morning finds them lying asleep, drunk, in the gutter. Or worse, after going for a midnight skinny dip, they lie, wheels akimbo, incapable, in the River Ock, grimly hanging on to one another to avoid drowning. I have heard it said, though I have never witnessed the act, that the trolleys inveigle local lads to push them around in their drunken state, but only in the dead of night.

This one was probably intent on defacing the postbox with trolley-graffiti or, had it stumbled a tad further, it might have kicked in the side of the telecoms box beyond with its tough rubber wheels. Instead, it managed neither, falling face first in a stupor into the hedge. I didn’t bother to wake it.

No hair of the dog for these rogue trolleys, come the next day. No, instead, handlers from their employer roam the streets, corralling and roping them together and then throwing them with no light hand in to the paddy-wagon (view this term as archaic rather than non-PC; whatever its origin, we still talk of children getting into a paddy when they throw a tantrum, and of a 'bit of a paddy' meaning a good punch-up). I expect they get a good hosing down once they are back at base before being forced back into harness for another day.

Who can blame them, with such a restricted life, if they get a bit ratted once in a while? To this day innumerate and illiterate, trolleys certainly haven’t benefited from the ever-improving standards of our state schools. Will drunkenness lead to worse and will they soon be filling our already overflowing prisons? Just what is our government doing for these poor creatures?

So, so, Moore-ish

2007-12-13T09:36:00.000-08:00

An expotition! An expotition to Kew. Now, why go to a botanic garden in the middle of winter? Because it has a large selection of Henry Moore’s sculptures installed, that’s why. And we manage to pick the one decently sunny day in weeks :-)

Kew is about 60 miles (100km) from home and the main part of the drive is along the evil M4 motorway. Locally, they seem to have discarded the handy signs that point you down the mysterious lane leading to the car park, but a distant memory keeps us on track, even though it’s a while since we were last here.

When I were a lad, and by tradition through previous decades, entrance to Kew cost 1 penny, but the fee has gone up more than a thousand-fold over the years and you have to pay to park. But it is certainly a great and leisured place so close to central London and there was no shortage of visitors.

The Moore sculptures were dotted throughout the gardens and entrance came with a map of where they were. The logistics of moving these huge creations from their various homes around the country must have required enormous effort and coordination (so why do we make such a meal of software development?) and I can’t imagine what they weigh, but they seemed to fit so naturally in the extensive Kew grounds. We set off to see them all, cunningly planning a lunch break in their elegant Orangery café-restaurant.

Moore’s work includes complex 3-D abstracts and strangely shaped but evocative people, perhaps most often women, in bronze and other monumental materials. You can see the world’s photographs of the exhibition and get an idea of the pieces on display in this specific group on Flickr. Photography is a poor medium for such solid objects, though; you can’t walk around a photo, can’t put your arm through a hole in the planar representation of some toroidal abstract, can’t feel on the screen or in print the solidity of that bronze or stone.

I settle on a detail, a hand on a reclining figure. As I look at it, I don’t know that one would often see a person resting their hand on its fingertips like this, we surely more often use the flat of a palm when reclining as here, hand resting in hip, but I don’t care, I still find it moving. Perhaps it denotes a tension in the subject that the expressionless metallic face cannot show. I picture the artist creating it, a detail a small part of a much bigger piece but surely as important to him, and to us, as any other facet.

Aol awol (a rant)

2007-12-10T13:29:00.000-08:00

Broadband disappeared. That is to say, it was there on Thursday, but absent on Friday. These things happen from time to time and there is a standard diagnostic procedure chez nous. First switch the router off, wait & switch it back on. Power up a PC connected to it by cable. Test. Nothing. Next, wander up and down the stairs, unplugging and plugging affirmatively for each of the several sockets and branching points that bring that precious BT line to the router via all the usual filters. Switch off, wait, switch on etc: Nothing. Repeat at irregular times throughout the day – always nothing. Assume problem at ISP end – surely can’t be so for long.

Still nothing by mid-afternoon, so drastic measures are called for – ring the AOL Help line. Snag, I don’t know what its number is, I’d find it online normally but there is a little problem there … Ring a mate likely to be near an internet connection & get number. The first attempt ends in a disconnected tone after half a dozen “for foot bone connected to ankle bone, key 3”, “for ankle bone connected to leg bone, key 2”, etc. Deep breath, cup of tea, try again. I just know this is gonna end up in some remote call centre.

And so it does, with a pleasant lad who asks the standard question “have you changed anything?” (No, I haven’t) and then guides me through a whole bunch of changes to my router settings. Alas, he is doing it all from a prompting computer-based problem analysis tree and he doesn’t really have the authority or even perhaps the knowledge to hold a rational conversation – like: “what has AOL changed its end so I have to make all these router changes?”. When we are done, I try again to connect to broadband. Nothing. He goes through the diagnostic tree again, ending in desperation with the suggestion I swap the cable around the other way (these are bog standard CAT5 cables, for heaven’s sake!). I do something like this, fully knowing it can’t be the problem, we re-test, nothing. After a dull pause, the line goes dead. It must be pretty soul destroying doing remote diagnostics this way, though my concern about this is tempered by my continuing lack of broadband.

So, on Thursday, there is no broadband :-(

On Friday, I switch it all on and, pop, it all works again. Isn’t the deterministic behaviour of computers marvellous? When I look around on the web, I find that over a year ago, AOL announced it was moving from a protocol called PPPoA to another called PPPoE for its broadband connections. My router was originally set up for PPPoA, so they must have continued to support this protocol for quite some time, perhaps up to Thursday? Amongst the changes the support guy had me make was indeed to change this protocol to PPPoE. Now, couldn’t there have been an easier way to explain to long-term users that they needed to make a simple change to their router settings?

Still, fingers crossed, all is working fine – amazing how disenfranchised one feels without the internet at one’s fingertips!

Chase that beam

2007-12-08T09:07:00.000-08:00

Someone mentioned a book or a website replete with anomalous or curious ideas. One of them ran along these lines: you are in a car traveling at the speed of light; what happens when you switch your headlights on?

Well, let's start with a bit of precision. No car could travel at quite the speed of light. Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity tells us, and is amply supported by experiment, that no ordinary object can reach the speed of light without becoming infinitively massive. As it got nearer and nearer to the speed of light (called c these days in the trade), more and more energy would be needed to achieve the next boost of speed and it is ultimately impossible. No problem, we might with a big effort get the old Bullnose of the picture up to 0.9c, that's good enough to explore the anomaly. We'll need to pick some big empty stretch of the Universe and take our time over it though. We will need somewhere with a bit more space than even the salt flats in Utah!

So, even at 0.9c, it feels that anomalies might arise when we switch on the lights. But actually Relativity assures us that, to anyone making the measurement, the light from the headlamps heads off at the self-same value of c as we might measure from here back on Earth. How can this be, how can it be so counter-intuitive? Well, Relativity is based on a simple premise: the speed of light in a vacuum is fixed (and what we call c). From this, mathematics already well-established when Einstein put it all together offers us these results, and experiment – usually in particle accelerators, to be fair – supports them.

It's not intuitive, but then evolution has not equipped us for speeds much above a few hundred miles per hour (and this only for test pilots and five year olds in the park), so why should we have valid intuition in this exotic regime?

Over the centuries, mankind has tried to work out just what the constants of life really are. First, we thought the stars rotated around an Earth fixed at the centre. Wrong. Newton suggested there were frames fixed in the Universe, inertial frames, and that science in one such frame could not be distinguished from science in another such frame moving at constant speed relative to the first. Newton's model works perfectly for 'low' speeds and serves us well for all everyday movement and is even good for satellites launched into the cosmos. But, wrong.

Alas, none of these early attempts is actually correct; it's that peculiar old speed of light that is the actual fixed element in our Universe and as much as anything it becomes apparent when you demand that electromagnetic phenomena behave the same in laboratories moving at a fixed relative speed to one another. Blame all that on Maxwell.

So, the beam of light streams off into the dark and distant night of outer space at the normal speed of light to the driver and also at the self-same speed to us as remote observers. There is no anomaly, it is all underpinned by sound mathematics, and we can sleep safely in our beds dreaming of hyper-fast Bullnose Morrises.

Nudiflorum

2007-11-30T10:43:00.000-08:00

It is winter and only Jasmine nudiflorum brightens the dull days. The camera makes me look at it so much more closely than I have before: its strange bare branches, not a leaf in sight; its exquisite buttercup yellow flowers, bold and cheering. Such is my ignorance that I imagined the petals bolted on to the central hub, like the over-pan steamer devices we have with their folding metal petals. Instead, they emerge smoothly from the centre.

It is perhaps easier than with most things to see how evolution might have nudged this flower in to its late (or early, depending on your perspective) flowering. Slowly, the flower and some insect or set of insects profited from the lack of competition yet could bear the increasing frosts. Day by day, over generations, its flowering got later and later (or earlier and earlier) until, on some balance, it was more productive to stick to a November flowering. Perhaps any earlier and the subsequent seeds don't thrive, or there are no birds to eat and propagate them. As climate changes, so no doubt will the jasmine.

It's a bit harder to envisage the small dinosaurs jumping in to the air until one day they first fly. Perhaps their leathery skins were tickled by the strange feathery stuff they had started to acquire for no obvious reason (though, hey, the girls seemed to like it!). Perhaps we are talking such long, geological, timescales that it is really beyond the vision of Man. But I guess that is just how it was, I see no better theory.

Lies and art

2007-11-28T07:38:00.000-08:00

Abingdon has a number of churches, as you might expect for a market town with a charter dating back 450 years. I don't think we have ever ventured in any of them, I'm uncomfortable gawking where other folk worship, but they look pretty from the outside.

St Helens is our most local and has gargoyles and gateways with the best of them. This gate faces the River Thames and leads in to the quiet grounds of the Alms houses associated with the church. As we walked past the river late one afternoon this autumn, the low light of the Sun illuminated the red ironwork and its attached spiders' webs more strikingly than this picture conveys. It was very serene.

And the picture lies in other ways. I made it vertical. I reduced the brightness on the washed-out front faces of the gate posts to show a little detail. I added fill flash to illuminate the dark wooden 'windows' of the Alms Houses' access. All in the computer, of course. No camera could see this image like you see it here; none has the dynamic range, neither film nor digital. But had you been there, you would have seen all this, your eye would have roamed from the ironwork to the posts, from the posts to the windows, and your eye would have adapted to the light levels more cleverly than any camera.

So, I show you what you would have seen, but not what I recorded. Picasso is alleged to have said “Art is a lie that tells a truth”; good gracious, have I come near art? Quick, pass me a spanner.

The plate at the bottom of the left-hand gatepost records a flood from long ago. I'd guess last summer's floods reached about the same mark. Unless the plate maker lied, of course.

Me and my shadow

2007-11-26T01:08:00.000-08:00

A shadow forms when a body interrupts light, we all know that. The rock acts as a screen, the Sun provides the light, bingo, a flattened image of the object! We apply the rules of geometric optics: light travels in straight lines.

In fact, light travels where it is easiest so to do and in the everyday world that maps pretty well on to 'straight lines'. But the alpine or, more significantly, the Sun slightly distorts space because of its mass and light actually glides along the smooth contours of that distorted space, the path of least resistance. So, when light passes the alpine, or the Sun, it is bent not because the light is attracted gravitationally to the object, but because the mass of the object has distorted space in its vicinity.

There have been three candidate theories for explaining how the light bends around massive objects such as the alpine. First, there is Newton's theory. Second, Einstein's theory of Special Relativity and, finally, Einstein's theory of General Relativity. Surprisingly, each gives a different answer, so we can see which best fits our actual universe by a rather simple experiment (though it's one you will struggle to try at home).

In Newton's theory, the best we can do is a pseudo-gravitational theory. Although photons of light are strictly massless (so they can travel at the speed of light within the Special Theory of Relativity), they can be ascribed an equivalent mass for the purposes of gravitational interaction based on an analogy with electrostatic potentials. With a bit of fiddly maths, we can work out the classical 'orbit' of this photon mass about the solar mass, a hyperbola rather than the ellipse of a planet, and work out the ultimate deflection. It is about 0.875 seconds of arc (small: there are 60 seconds to the minute, 60 minutes to the degree).

In Special Relativity, light is uncompromising. It travels in straight lines and that is that. It's part of the whole framework that the speed of light (in a vacuum) is constant no matter the uniform speed you are moving relative to it. Space is resolutely Cartesian, light follows the shortest paths – straight lines. This leads to a space-time formulation of events in the universe that works very well for nuclear particles in space and in man-made accelerators. But from this same mathematics comes the mandate for straight lines. So, in passing the Sun, or the alpine, special relativity says that light is deflected not one little bit, truly zilch.

In General Relativity, mass distorts space, it bends space slightly, a depression in a vast rubber sheet because the Sun bears down on it. Like the water caught by the cone of the plughole, light swirls around a little because of the 'bent' space and is deflected. This mechanism is totally different to that in Newton's theory and the expected deflection is about 1.75 seconds of arc, twice the Newtonian value.

To measure the effect, pick a day when the Sun will experience a total eclipse by the Moon. Before that day, identify candidate stars which you would expect by straight line optics to lie just behind the Sun at the time of the eclipse. Preferably, find several of these at different distances behind the Sun's eclipsed rim-to-be, bearing in mind that the Sun and Moon move through the star field so you will have, in general, at least a few minutes worth of sky to consider. Come the eclipse, train your well-protected telescope on the Sun. Which, if any, of the candidate stars can you actually see? Sir Arthur Eddington did just this for the eclipse of 1919 and was able to verify the predictions of General Relativity. Eddington didn't lack a sense of humour, though. When asked by a journalist whether it was true that he was one of only three people who understood General Relativity, he replied '”Who is the third?”

Of course, the great challenge of the past 30 years has been to go the next step and reconcile general relativity, with its many experimental validations, with quantum mechanics, with its incredibly precise validations. Don't hold your breath.

The Visitor

2007-08-27T11:14:00.000-07:00

This good ol' boy (or girl) appeared in the kitchen a few days ago. He's about 3 inches toe to diametric toe, or 8 cms in the new coins. As house spiders go around here, he's pretty big (which probably makes him a Tegenaria gigantea and quite possibly a 'she' as the females are generally larger than the males) and must have had a long and successful life. He didn't move much while we watched him, didn't flinch when the light went on or off.

The next day, though, he had moved through to the lounge and sat, wholly still, on the vertical wall. Over a 24 hour period he merely crossed a pair of legs and, naturally enough, we weren't around to see that exciting maneouvre.

Finally, we found him in the middle of the kitchen floor. Not a naturally tenable position for even a large spider, and the last thing we wished to do was stand on him, though perhaps tripping over him was more the threat. We scooped him up in a suitably large plastic dish and ferried him out to a safe shrub. The last time I had ferried such a beast out of the house, I had placed him on the patio and before my eyes a bird swooped down and ate him, so we tried a bit harder this time.

He wasn't agile, he didn't rush about. Perhaps he was old. Perhaps this huge body was the last of a long series of ever larger bodies he had grown out of and sloughed off. Had he come into the 'cave' to end his days? Was this a Ulysses, home after 10 years and with no one recognising his eminence? Or an Oedipus, blinded and cast out for the crimes of his youth? Or just an old spider, resting somewhere warm and dry? Hoping – or fearing – that another round of spider existence was about to begin in an even bigger body?

Mystery Object

2007-08-25T10:43:00.000-07:00

How many of my readers will know what this is? Perhaps Dr Jones, if he is still reading, though he and I did not use this primitive technology as far as I recall in those happy days working together at Harwell. I think, rather, that it dates back to an earlier generation of computers that I used at University a little and in my first job rather more directly. It is a reel of 'band-aids' for computer 8-hole paper tape, a means to repair tapes you have clumsily ripped, or to help splice together the computer's offerings that ran out of one tape and needed another to complete your greedy task.

My main memories of such things are linked to the fine little minicomputer we used for graphics when I was a budding electronics engineer at Plessey's Applied Research Lab, my first gainful permanent employment. This was a Honeywell DDP-516, something I am amazed to find I remember, and to power it up, first you toggled some mysterious bit codes, a dozen or so, into a set of toggle switches; this loaded an important artifact called the boot tape, and this in turn loaded a bigger paper tape holding the full operating system with support for its wonderful graph plotter.

We had performed simulations of microwave circuits on an ICL1906S (similar to the notations used with cars, the 'S' here denotes the sporty, mathematical oriented version of the 1900 series computers). We wished to visualise these results on big sheets of paper in those happy days when there were no windowed interfaces to computers, just teletypes and command lines.

Taming the plotter often had its amusements. Authors then, as so often still, were not always quite as clear in describing how you did things as they might have been. In particular, it was uncommonly tricky to work out if the conversion factors you had to apply were from logical size to physical size or vice versa. Thus, in the early days, you would sprint along to the plotter to find it writing your x-axis title in ginormous characters. It amuses me to this day.

Paper tape as a medium had its problems too. We would direct it to pour out into large dustbins dedicated to the purpose and had then to wind it up by hand into neat reels. Once, I went to lunch while the tape was punched out and came back to find that the cleaner had emptied the dustbin with the other rubbish. I took the manual tape winder out to the rubbish heap and carefully wound the tape all back on to a neat but slightly smelly reel. Calculations took a long time in those days, you couldn't let that output go to waste!

I found the band-aids sitting in a much-used drawer, yet they must date back 30 years. It is possible I hoard such things :-(

Plum perfect

2007-08-04T11:24:00.000-07:00

At the risk of over-exhibiting my Britishness, I must record that our Victoria Plum tree has delivered its earliest plums ever, and they taste delicious!

The plum tree is old now, and fruiting is easily discouraged by late frosts but for every year when we feel its time has come, the next it produces a bumper crop. Last year was such a crop. The next year, it knows it can dawdle along with a modest offering though there will be plenty for quite a few deserts to come.

Without doubt, the tree has personality. It is bent and care-worn, it looks frail. But a few years back, it saw off a young pretender. It had had a poor year and we thought it was done for, so we bought a new, similarly grafted specimen and carefully and thoroughly bedded it in within sight of the old plum-Ent. The youngster took off apace. It flowered vigorously in the Spring. Plums formed in profusion and they grew and grew. Now, we are not the most diligent of gardeners and we didn't think much of it, but as the old tree worked towards a steady but modest crop, the youngster threw all it had into fruiting. And then died from the effort. Too late, we realised that such a young tree needed care and nourishment beyond the normal needs of its mature elder. Too late we watered and fed it; we could not save the poor thing. The old plum-Ent looked on smugly, and has gone on performing, now well, now modestly, for half a dozen years more to date. Its future looks secure.

Beware, all ye young pretenders; the old dogs have tricks up their sleeves yet!

Little by little, step by step

2007-07-29T07:16:00.000-07:00

The River Thames is going back down towards its normal levels. This sequence shows some steps at The Quay in Abingdon (click on it to enlarge). Early in the week, the Thames was high; then it crept up a little further and stuck there for a couple of days. Finally, towards the end of the week, it has started to recede. It has gone down about 1 metre and still has a good way to go, as the sunken steps in the last picture suggest. There was the threat of heavy rains last night, but they did not come to pass and no significant further rain is predicted for the coming week.

We start to put the house back to normal, first by making the front door accessible; we have been climbing in and out over our ad-hoc flood barrier. We retrieve some pieces of furniture from their lofty perches on the dining table. Fortunately, there is not the same urgency to restore order that had us scrabbling around earlier in the week to try to secure everything. No doubt many things will get lost in the wondrous shuffle of moving everything about.

Our MP is an active sort of fellow and will be asking questions (or, if he were Pooh Bear, “Questions”). The world will probably only remember that the Thames flooded once more; in fact, the Thames barely topped its banks into other than established flood plain; I doubt anyone was flooded by the Thames. The real source was its local tributary, the Ock, which is a much less managed river than the Thames. At least it looks like our politician understands this.

Around 600 properties were flooded to some lesser or greater degree but fortunately we escaped scot-free. We'll squirrel away a more accessible kit of our ad-hoc parts for flood defence and look in to what else can be had once the furore has quietened down.

Artificial Stupidity

2007-07-29T07:14:00.000-07:00

Friday 27th July

I flit from door to door of the packed train, trying to spot a space I might fit in. Although this is the first cheap fast train out of town, it's not usually this busy. I adopt the 'taxi driver in Rome' stratagem: see a space half my size and dive in to it; as in Rome, it morphs in to a full sized space under the influence of repulsive forces that prevent bodies getting too close together. We are sardines :-(

It gets worse then better. There is a muffled announcement to the effect that this
train, scheduled for my stop amongst others, will not be stopping there or at two following stops. Customers for those destinations should get off and await an announcement. Many folk get off; I do not as I have travelled this route over many years and when there are problems, the best approach is to get nearer to home. It is then either easier to solve the problem of getting home because the distance thereto is shorter or, in the half hour it takes to get to the preceding stop, the problem will be solved and one can just carry on as normal. Both of these turn out to be true. Kate volunteers to collect me from Reading, the first stop and preceding my normal station, and by the time we get to Reading, the problem is indeed solved and the train goes on its normal way.

The upside of folk getting off is that we can all at least breath, though we still fill the whole train, all passageways, all doorways, seats long since.

Slowly, my attention turns to the automatic door separating us from the seating area. A fellow traveller sits on the floor, over the floor pad that triggers the door opening. Nobody programmed the door to handle this, for it, stressful situation. It clicks and clunks for a few minutes at a time. Then, it opens in its ponderous way. Nobody steps from the one floor pad to the one though the door because nobody can move. Deep in its artificial stupidity, the door reflects on this and decides eventually to close the door anyway. Damn it, there's pressure on the pad; better think about that. And so it goes for 30 minutes.

If ever anyone tries to convince you that one day intelligent machines will rule the world, think about that door. The door, of course, was manifestly designed; its behaviour is completely inflexible. I reflect that we humans are extremely flexible.

(With acknowledgement to RPLJ for the title)

Or the waters lapping

2007-07-21T20:54:00.000-07:00

But they couldn't stop Jack, or the waters lapping
And they couldn't prevent Jack from feeling happy
Happy Jack, The Who

It's 4am and we have been watching the outpourings from the River Ock creeping slowly up our road and towards our house. Neighbors 100m further in to the estate have gardens submerged below perhaps 15cms of water and over a period of the last 3 hours, la deluge has crept 50m nearer to us. Lots of our neighbours are standing in the street watching the water's progress and we have spoken to many people we have never spoken to before. It's that ol' Dunkirk spirit.
It's the time when you discover the slight inclines and the tiny hollows of your surroundings. The nearest main road is closed because it has a substantial local hollow and from where we took its photo, we could see water pouring at a goodly rate from the direction of our dear local Ock.

We have moved our floor height goods to table tops, shifted various things upstairs, sipped mugs of cocoa; now we wait to see if the water reaches us. Rumour (one of the nymphs in Metamorphoses) suggests that the water will peak at 2pm later today, or was it at 3am this very morning. That's how it is with rumour.

Fly by tube

2007-07-20T03:52:00.000-07:00

Life on the London Underground means human life, by and large. If you were to stand on, say, Oxford Circus station at a time when there were not too many people about and when there happened to be a good gap between tube trains, you might have the good fortune to see, in that deep station where natural light never features and is, indeed, some miles away, a small brown mouse or two scurrying from under the power rails in search of detritus from the major living population in that domain.

I have seen these pitiful creatures on and off over a period of 20 years, so there must by now have been many generations of mice and so, perhaps, they are selected for being bright enough to avoid the power rail and you might expect that their eyes are losing sensitivity to light as fast as their skins are increasing sensitivity to electrical field.

I imagine the tube lines and tunnels also harbour populations of flies, and of spiders deep in the dark snaring those flies, and so on, but generally these life forms make little impact on the traveller.

So, it was with some interest that I travelled today on a tube not too crowded to host a small, innocuous, fly, the sort that neither moves too fast, nor makes much of a buzzing noise. I formed a plan to observe its behaviour as the train accelerated, sprinted along and decelerated, though I was only partially successful in this (so it was like most plans).

Galileo, long ago, understood that if you observed a fly buzzing hither and thither deep in the bowels of a ship cruising at a constant speed you would not be able to see any difference in behaviour over the same fly buzzing around with ship at rest. The moving ship – or tube train – and the solid earth form simple Newtonian reference frames moving at a constant velocity one to the other. All mechanical behaviour, including every fly buzzing about, is identical in the two frames; you cannot work out that one frame moves relative to the other by any observation such as watching the fly. So it was with my fly in my tube train. When we were scooting along, the creature darted lazily hither and thither, no direction preferred, no alignment with the direction of motion of the train, unperturbed.

The phases of acceleration and deceleration, however, should be more interesting because now we are looking at frames accelerating one to the other and Newton’s inertial frames have little to say about this situation. The acceleration of the train is equivalent to applying a force to the frame of the fly compared to when it had been static. The fly should be left behind somewhat as the train accelerates just as we are, as passengers, when those electric motors pull for all they are worth. Conversely, during deceleration, the fly should be propelled forward as it continues on its Newtonian path whilst the train starts to linger behind and just as you the passenger are pressed against the forward bulkheads as you approach a station.

Alas, for these start/stop phases, even over seven stops, I never once managed to sight the fly so I wonder if in each case it could feel the ‘force’ and so chose to land until that force disappeared. I will look out for another subject for this experiment.

2007-07-09T10:49:00.000-07:00

Sherlock Holmes and the mysterious electricity conundrum

“Holmes, Holmes, there is a world crisis from pollution and excess energy usage, and the government is telling us that everything will be fine if we swap our old tungsten light bulbs for new-fangled, hi-tech, low energy ones. It beggars belief, but what are we to do?”.

“Elementary, dear Watson. First, we must find the total electricity we use. We might concern ourselves with the question of the fraction of our total energy expenditure that this constitutes. Then we must find where it goes in detail. Finally we can look to contain that use, use less electricity and save the world. Your 'new fangled' bulbs may well have a role to play. Though this has the feel of a two-pipe problem, I shall make a start. Excuse me, I must lock myself away for a few days with some tools, my violin and a little laudanum”.

After a few days, Holmes called a carriage and slipped off to the local Maplin store (Dick Smith or Radio Shack, for foreign readers). The large Maplin plastic bag disguised his purchases and Watson could not imagine what the great sleuth might be doing, though of course this was often the case.

When the bangs and yells, interspersed with the strains of Bach's ciaccona in D minor, finally ceased, Holmes emerged wan and blinking into the daylight, clutching a strange contraption in one hand and an evil claw in the other.

“Good God, Holmes, what evil device have you created there, and the claw, like no crab I have ever seen”.

Holmes smiled at his dear friend. Raising his left hand, he declared: “We shall use this to intercept the current to our various lamps and devices. See, Watson, the wires are cunningly broken out and the red one carries the live current where it cannot be shielded by the return current. No secrets will be hidden from us!”. Then he turned to the claw in his right hand. He turned the device lovingly and with his index finger flexed a trigger that activated the claw. “This, Watson, is one of Mr Maplin's finest clamp ammeters. You recall the law identified by Mr Ohm, I am sure, whereby volts are simply amps times the resistance. And Mr Watt's contribution, that power, that precursor to energy, is simply amps consumed times volts applied. With these contraptions, we can measure the amps consumed and we know the volts applied, government decree mandates it to within tight limits. We will have access to the precise power consumed by anything we care to think about! We will track down to the last millijoule where our energy is being expended. We may expect a few surprises yet”.

Over the next few days, Watson found himself directed to crawl about on the floor and under the furniture, plugging equipment through Holmes' device whilst squinting sideways to read the mysterious numbers from the alarming claw. He came face to face with many a denizen with many legs and sticky detritus, but Holmes spurred him on and took to himself the onerous task of writing down the numbers read out by Watson. Each evening he would retire early with his pipe to analyse and manipulate those numbers into powers and energies. Watson found it baffling.

But soon, Holmes could tell Watson things that astounded him. “That printer, Watson, that you dutifully switch off each night so that we are not distracted by its winking green LED. Before you switch it off, it consumes 20 milliamps. After you switch it off, it consumes 20 milliamps! Do you see their dastardly plot – we have been fooled into thinking that where no green LED winks, no power is consumed. Not so! Oh, certainly, even over the course of a day it is only 120 watt-hours but that is equivalent to leaving a light bulb on for an hour or more quite unnecessarily. No wonder the planet is suffering. And several more of our everyday appliances behave similarly; I believe we waste up to 500 watt-hours on these delusions.”

He warmed to his theme, and went on. “Even devices we value consume more power than we might think. Take the router that brings the irrepressible Google here to 221b Baker Street. It takes 180 milliamps. Applying Mr Watt's formula, that is nearly 45 watts. When we leave it on all day, so that our whims for accessing the internet may be swiftly satisfied, we waste another 500 watt hours! We must tread more carefully, if we are to save the planet. I won't go on, but I have here a complete audit of our electricity usage, and changes will be needed for us to do our bit in this energy battle”.

“But what about the light bulbs, Holmes?” muttered Dr Watson at last.

“Ah yes, the light bulbs. Will we save the world by swapping high-tech and peculiar shaped light machines, ones that use cunning switching technology with its potential for interference, ones containing that pernicious substance mercury, for our low-tech thermionic tungsten bulbs? Well, where the light must shine for long hours, where it matters not that the new-fangled bulbs take some time to warm up to full brightness, there we can use them with advantage, but we have other fish, and bigger, to fry before we come away with a clean conscience”.

Holmes visibly relaxed. “We are on top of it, Watson, we shall make our contribution. But now, the violin and another pipe, methinks, to prepare ourselves for whatever next challenges our intellect!”

Flaw Plan

2007-07-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

I'm by no means committed to pictures of flawless flowers. Nature supplies ones it quickly adds flaws to, what with rain and wind and insects and natural detritus. This is what I am happy to photograph. It's not 'a shame' that water droplets have 'marred' the perfect Niobe flower, or seeds spoilt the daisy, it's just plain natural and it steals not a jot of our awe or appreciation of its beauty when we stand in the garden or view the roadside. Why should a picture be unrepresentatively perfect? Who dictates that the picture has to be better than reality. Whose foolish dream am I stamping on with my flawed picture? 'Course, I'll still move that leaf out of the way and clear up the sweet wrappers, so I'm probably woefully inconsistent.

Every year I marvel at these large wild daisies which grow on neglected ground near my mainline railway station.

But how can I convince you they are larger than average? Do they have more petals than small ones? Is there some implicit rhythm to them that marks them out as large in a photograph? I don't know, so maybe it's just 'trust me, they are about a foot tall or more with heads up to an inch or more across'.

Rogue

2007-06-24T07:07:00.000-07:00

This rogue has slept on our back lawn for around 4 hours this morning. We think he popped home – wherever that is – for a breakfast snack in the middle. Our back garden is part of his (or her) territory, though we have had to shoo him away often enough to protect our local birds that we have unfortunately never become close friends and we have never shaken hands. Little does he realise how we would become putty in his paws were he to risk a closer approach!

At one point, we had reduced the gap below our fence to the smallest size we believed a hedgehog could get through to restrict the cat's access. Inside that furry hulk, though, a slim moggy remains and he was undeterred.

We think of him as a rogue because the other week he had a good go at getting the chicken we had set out for dinner, and while we were watering the garden just around the corner! The unsatisfactory outcome was that we couldn't be sure he hadn't pawed the chicken, so we didn't eat it, but he didn't get away with any useful amount of it, so he didn't either! I'd rather he had been a little more successful really.

I don't know how old he is but he still takes a bit of interest in chasing birds and perhaps the odd frog that reaches our garden from the River Ock. He certainly likes to patrol the area around and under the garden shed in a heightened state of awareness.

Box 3 Spool 5

2007-06-23T05:21:00.000-07:00

The other evening, we had the good fortune courtesy of one of the BBC's Freeview digital channels to see televised a performance of Samuel Beckett's play, Krapp's Last Tape. The performance was one staged last year in London with the great author Harold Pinter as the protagonist and only performer, Krapp. Pinter acknowledges a debt to Beckett for his clarity of speaking, his addressing of aging and death.

Each year since youth, Krapp has recorded an annual reflection on reel-to-reel tape. I suppose today he'd post it on the web as a podcast. Instead the tapes are carefully labelled, boxed and stored in tin boxes. We see him in his 69th year listening to his recording of 30 years earlier, box 3 spool 5, and recording what we must infer will be his last tape. He looks over his shoulder now and then, at the approaching darkness. On the old tape, Krapp reflects on listening to a yet earlier tape; that 39 year old Krapp rejects the crassness of the earlier self; this 69 year old Krapp, in turn, rejects the crassness of 30 years ago. In each tape, though, we hear the same bombastic Krapp, the same hopes and fears, the inevitability of it all. The now Krapp records a little, sinks into reflection and perhaps despair, the lights fade, we are done.

Of course, there is more to it than this. Beckett is often seen as the great pessimist, but sparks of light illuminate even as glum a tale as Krapp's. In the original, there are two highlights. One is Krapp rolling the work 'spool' around his mouth: 'spooooool'; he delights in the word in a touching and uplifting way. Second, there is a little joke about his obsession with bananas, and tales in the books about Beckett of the theatre caretaker who got incensed that some inconsiderate patron was tipping banana skins into the orchestra pit. In this performance, because Pinter was still recovering from serious illness, he performed in a wheelchair, which made the banana joke a bit tricky so they dropped it. Pinter still relishes 'spool' though, so not all is black.

Pinter's worn face plays a major part in the success of his performance, he is completely convincing. I have seen a version with Patrick Magee as Krapp, on television, and David Warrilow live. All three were well worth seeing. There's a review of the Pinter version here, with a good, representative picture of Pinter performing.

Beckett seems to present a moat of depression and gloom that many people can't cross. But beyond it is a humanity, a perception, a sense of the ridiculous that can help us all. Give it a go!

Even Blogger nods

2007-06-17T07:43:00.001-07:00

Argh, there's a post lost in limbo! I can see it, it's http://ronmoveson.blogger.com/2007/06/biped.html but it doesn't seem to have made it properly to the main page :-(

I'll re-post when I have a moment.

Gosh - must have flushed a buffer - I posted this and both immediately appeared. Job done!

Biped

2007-06-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

A picture is worth a thousand words, but the picture I'd like to show here is copyright and all I put in to blogging is time, not money! It's in the 'This Week' section of the current New Scientist magazine and shows an orang-utan walking comfortably on two legs and with a baby utan perched over its shoulders, legs around the parent's neck, and holding its hands. You'd see a dozen examples amongst humans on any beach or in any park. The surprise is that the utan's behavior illuminates the realisation that bipedalism evolved really quite early in the history of apes and while they were still in the trees, but it has since died out in many species. So, in being bipeds, we aren't the top of the tree, we're a revival of an old habit.

This picture from wikipedia hints at the utan's bipedal versatility.

I have started thinking recently that we should not be surprised that other animals use tools (crows), communicate with purpose (chimpanzees), walk on two legs (apes). Where on earth would we have gained those traits if they hadn't developed in one of our evolutionary antecedents first? We tend to look at this the wrong way around – we see these traits as suggesting the other species are more similar to us than they are; perhaps instead they are at the end of the line for their particular skill and you need the synthesis of ape and big brain to get further. That's no reason for other than the greatest respect for these fellow living creatures we share the world with, of course.

'Biped' also conjures for me the great dance piece by Merce Cunningham. We saw this at The Barbican in London some years ago. Cunningham, then nearly 80, had mastered the synthesis of modern dance and computer representation of the dance and merged these facets stunningly. See http://www.openendedgroup.com/artworks/biped/biped.htm. It seems wholly unlikely I shall ever see this performed again, alas, as such things don't come around for decades.

Non-scalable boiler architecture

2007-06-07T13:50:00.000-07:00

I have read that the biplane could have been developed much further had WWII not precipitated the move to single wing aircraft. The Pitts Specials one sees at air displays perhaps lends credence to this idea. The other fine example everyone quotes is the Betamax vs VHS video standards war, where the apparently technically superior Betamax lost out to the better marketed VHS.

But much earlier than either of these face offs we had the challenge by horizontal boilered engines to vertical boilered ones on railways. It happens that I am rather enchanted by these little industrial steam engines made by the former de Winton company, doomed as they were to be replaced by conventional horizontally boilered engines. Here is a photo, probably from the late 1940s or 50s, of Pendyffryn, still in operation at that time at the Pen-yr-Orsedd slate quarry. The original in our possession came from Kate's late Uncle who died a couple of years back age 99. It is printed on Ilford paper, and looks like a copy or a reprint, probably of an original from one of his close engineering friends. I always prefer these old engine photos when there is a driver or other contemporary figure in view and although this is not of the best of its kind, it still better conjures the era than if no one was in sight. Pendyffryn is a bit of a Jonny-come-lately; it was built in 1894.

The only restored and working original de Winton is Chaloner, manufactured in 1877, 130 years ago, and now based at the Leighton Buzzard Railway. There is a modern full size and working reproduction too, though not at L Buzzard. Chaloner only steams from time to time and it won't pull much of a load - part of the reason it lost out to the little Hunslets – so here it is stacked up with another of the their restorations, ready to haul some excited kiddies and daddies along their couple of miles of track.

The fire is under the footplate, so the driver has to stand carefully to one side. The water lives in what looks like a cabin trunk at the front end. These old industrial engines don't need much room for coal as they never travelled very far, merely shunting up and down slate galleries and the like. Alas, in the evolutionary race amongst steam engines, it was soon out-performed by such stalwarts as the Hunslets and, really, where can you go with a vertical boiler? Certainly not much longer and only a little broader, so little hope of challenging the extra power the new-fangled and more modern horizontal boilers could achieve.

Thus technology moves on yet leaves charming reminders of earlier attempts.

Niobe

2007-05-27T10:24:00.000-07:00

I just adore our Niobe clematis.

Its large flowers draw me in to their core, their deep, rich colour somehow redolent
of heat and leisure and idleness. And the contrast of their leaves, though they too quickly succumb to longeur and fade and yellow, as though they just can't be bothered to hang around for too long. When the sun shines, I can stare at Niobe for minutes on end:

“(he) set out to take thought. To this end for want of a stone on which to sit like Walther and cross his legs the best he could do was stop dead and stand stock still which after a moments hesitation he did and of course sink his head as one deep in meditation which after another moment of hesitation he did also. But soon weary of vainly delving in those remains he moved on through the long hoar grass resigned to not knowing where he was or how he got there or where he was going or how we was going to get back to whence he knew not how he came.” (Stirrings Still, Samuel Beckett, text here).

Apparently, Niobe is a Polish variant, first 'developed' in 1975, a member of the Jackmanii family. I learn that Niobe in Greek mythology, a mortal woman, made the bad mistake of dissing Leto, the daughter of Titans. Titans preceded and were overthrown by the more familiar mythological gods such as Zeus, the ones who lived on Mt Olympus. Niobe's pride in her seven sons and seven daughters was, as you might expect, shattered when Leto's 'mere' 2 children killed them all, or perhaps most of them, with poisoned arrows. Niobe was ultimately turned to stone. As far as I know, Niobe the clematis provides no serious poison to apply to your arrow heads.

Introduction

2007-05-18T13:51:00.000-07:00

First, there was the jolly experience in Australia, Gentle Travels, then the gloomier journey up to and through heart surgery, Cardiac Journey. As I seem to have survived both these periods it is time to move on to other topics of interest to me (that's what blogs all seem to be, after all) but for which I hope some of you might share or even gain an interest.

Welcome to Ron's new blog.