Bulgarians

Off to visit the Bulgarians at Tooting last week, and was pleased to find that they were still smiling and cheerful. Although there is now some doubt about whether they really are sisters, so perhaps they do not understand what I am saying as well as I thought. Plenty of people don't.

Started off with a Cortana test. A couple of girls, probably from the University of Creation, were talking about a fellow student who was concentrating on too many things at once. Which struck me as one of those locutions the meaning of which is perfectly clear while being, in some sense, nonsense - in this case that the fellow student was equally clearly failing to concentrate. Next thought that there was a word beginning with M which described such locutions, but which I could not bring to mind. So I asked Cortana, who failed, despite coming up with some quite good attempts, that is to say web sites which might have answered the question. Then oxymoron popped into mind of its own accord, with no initial M although to be fair to myself, there is a stressed syllable starting with one.

But consulting OED this morning, I am not so sure. There is a sense there that such a locution should be used knowingly, should be a deliberate rhetorical device. A sense which was entirely missing on this occasion. The locution was used quite thoughtlessly.

Followed up with a striking blue box lorry down Garrett Lane, with a two syllable Dutch flavoured name beginning with W on the side, with no further information. The sort of lorry that I have sometimes seen delivering flowers to flower shops. I didn't take a picture with my telephone, confident that I would remember the name OK, confidence which was entirely misplaced as a few minutes later the name had gone. So I try Cortana again, and once again she has a good go, but fails, coming up with several web sites which might have done the job but which didn't. There must be lots of people out there asking her about things which start with a nominated letter.

This morning I associate to Winhoek, but that seems to be a place in Nambia rather than a haulage company. Brain must have slipped its place in its list of W words, easily enough done on the assumption that it has a small group of neurons which fire for each word, with groups for nearby words being near each other in the brain. In which case firing of one group might easily set off the firing of another, possibly dominant group. So when will scanners be clever enough to map the way that the brain stores lists of words in its three dimensional space? Or is it, for these particular purposes, a two dimensional space? The notion of sheets of cells & neurons comes to mind. But it does seem, to me at least, very unlikely that it would do it linearly, or alphabetically, in the way of OED.

Went on to the debate of substance which concerned pianos. How much help could an electric piano, the sort of thing offered by Yamaha, give the pianist?

I thought that, as a matter of course, such a piano would be able to record and reproduce everything ever played on it. I also thought that it would be able to help in a more active way. It could work out what you were trying to play and bring up the standard a bit, while leaving you with the sense that you were still in control, still playing what you were hearing. Maybe you could even tell it that you were trying to play in the manner of X, where X was a pianist Yamaha might reasonably be supposed to know about and to have analysed for the present purpose. So your piano would know all about how pianist X played and tweak your playing in that direction. Alternatively, it might have a recording of X playing the exact same piece and knock out a sort of average between what you tell the keyboard and the recording. Better still, go and get one from YouTube on the fly.

Again, as a matter of course, it would be able to do the busking thing and add in other lines of music. For example, the violin line for a violin sonata.

Perhaps the man from the Yamaha IT department could be persuaded to come and give us a talk about what they offer and how they do it.

Wound up by scoring no aeroplanes at all at Earsfield. The first time such a thing has happened, although, as it has turned out, I scored no aeroplanes at all on Horton Clockwise (part) yesterday morning. There were aeroplanes about, but none on the flight path down to Heathrow. The place can't have been shut down or I would have heard about it by now, so what was going on? Taking their mid morning break for coffee?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/tooting-trivia.html.