Had occasion yesterday to take a late breakfast in town, so off to 'Los Amigos' in East Street (http://www.losamigoscafeepsom.com/), an excellent establishment, but one which searching suggests I have not visited since 20th May last year.
Bacon sandwich well up to expectations. White bread unusual in that it seemed to have been thickly sliced by a machine while also seeming to be proper bread, the sort of bloomer that one might get from the baker at Cheam, who does, as it happens, have a slicer. Proper English bread served by proper (and friendly) continentals.
Which this morning, combined with Kurzweil on the kindle, 'The Singularity is Near', led onto futurological thoughts. I am on warfarin, a cheap and effective medicine, but one which works in mysterious ways and needs to be regularly monitored. It is likely that some of the mystery is to do with diet and that some warfarin wobbles could be explained by dietary wobbles.
So suppose we take a leaf out to the Kurzweil book and wire ourselves up so that detailed data about our diets are automatically uploaded to some central diet database. Far more voluminous and far more accurate than keeping diaries on paper, with the camera never lying about our substance consumption. One then plugs the warfarin readings into the database and the statistics will pop out the answer; the idea being that with lots of data from lots of people it will be easy to make the necessary connections, the same line of thought as that which led the public health people to analyse the incidence of disease by occupation at a population level, something which we have been doing for some time now. So, go easy on the peanuts, or whatever the wobble turns out to have been caused by.
Next thought is that if one has the (probably nano) technology to do that, one probably has the technology to take and upload the warfarin readings while one is at it and the central database will be able to adjust your medication in real time without your needing to bother about it at all. All you will get is some soothing voice, somewhere inside in your head, suggesting that you go easy on the peanuts every time that you are detected in the act of gazing at a packet of salted peanuts at the back of the bar in the boozer.
And do not laugh. I believe that the technology to do a good part of this last detection has been around for some time and has been deployed in clubs for some dubious purpose or other.
PS: but would you trust them to get inside you in this way?
Thursday, 4 September 2014
Fairy stories
My first fairy story is adapted from the Guardian.
Once upon a time it was thought that it would be a jolly good idea to sell the British Rail to private operators. They would make a much better job than the tossers who were doing it before - and if they made a bit while they were at it, so much the better. And so it was. The railway network was broken into lots of different bits (apparently because John Major was nostalgic about outfits like the 'Great Western Railways' of his youth) and off they went.
After a while, the outfit running the railway network - the tracks, the signals and all that kind of stuff - got into a bit of a pickle and that bit was quietly taken back into the public sector. But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it provides a handy vehicle for the discrete subsidy of all the companies which actually run the trains on the network, a subsidy in the form of bargain basement charges.
In parallel with that change, a lot of those operating companies were taken over by state railway companies from elsewhere in Europe, companies who were delighted with the profits they could make here as these could be used to subsidize the fares on their trains back home. So the good old British taxpayer winds up paying for all those foreigners to go on excursions to the seaside. Worse still, we are chucking our public money at someone else's public sector. For heaven's sake, have we not yet learned that public bad, private good?
No idea how true this is, but it makes a good story for an old lefty.
My second fairy story is my own.
The City of London is home to a very large financial services industry, in which we take great pride and about half of which does useful things like providing insurance services and banking services. We really do need all this kind of stuff. But the other half is charging fat commissions on flogging off great chunks of this green and pleasant land to another lot of foreigners, a flogging off which, inter alia, means that we can balance our balance of payments books. They don't much bother about the fact that one day the golden goose is going to peg out, that there will be nothing left to flog. Lots of nice eggs in the meantime and the rest of us can jolly well look after ourselves. Nothing to do with them.
Whereas I bother about how long the present state of affairs, with us running a stonking great deficit in the trade of goods and services can last, living beyond our means in a way which ought to have the grocer's daughter turning in her grave. Bothered to the extent of turning up the publication known as the 'Pink Book', the authoritative guide to our balance of payments from ONS. The good news is that I was able to find and download this book in a few minutes. In a few hours someone at the ONS had answered my email about getting longer runs of data than the twenty five years or so which appeared in this book. What happened in the bad old days of the Labour Government in the sixties when balance of payments was the great big deal it has never been since?
But then things start to get difficult. It seems that one needs to be an expert, or at least quite knowledgeable, to make proper use of this sort of data, whereas I got nicely tangled up in all the various bits and bobs which go to make up our balance of payments. So tangled up that I dare not offer a chart by way of illustration, even though it seems reasonably clear that the current account deficit is presently both huge and volatile.
PS: part of the tangle being my complete failure to get Excel to display a nice chart from two of the data columns from ONS, with the first column being the year and the second being a value. The best I could do was a scatter plot which looked very tatty. And I had thought, at least, that I could do Excel.
Once upon a time it was thought that it would be a jolly good idea to sell the British Rail to private operators. They would make a much better job than the tossers who were doing it before - and if they made a bit while they were at it, so much the better. And so it was. The railway network was broken into lots of different bits (apparently because John Major was nostalgic about outfits like the 'Great Western Railways' of his youth) and off they went.
After a while, the outfit running the railway network - the tracks, the signals and all that kind of stuff - got into a bit of a pickle and that bit was quietly taken back into the public sector. But this turned out to be a blessing in disguise as it provides a handy vehicle for the discrete subsidy of all the companies which actually run the trains on the network, a subsidy in the form of bargain basement charges.
In parallel with that change, a lot of those operating companies were taken over by state railway companies from elsewhere in Europe, companies who were delighted with the profits they could make here as these could be used to subsidize the fares on their trains back home. So the good old British taxpayer winds up paying for all those foreigners to go on excursions to the seaside. Worse still, we are chucking our public money at someone else's public sector. For heaven's sake, have we not yet learned that public bad, private good?
No idea how true this is, but it makes a good story for an old lefty.
My second fairy story is my own.
The City of London is home to a very large financial services industry, in which we take great pride and about half of which does useful things like providing insurance services and banking services. We really do need all this kind of stuff. But the other half is charging fat commissions on flogging off great chunks of this green and pleasant land to another lot of foreigners, a flogging off which, inter alia, means that we can balance our balance of payments books. They don't much bother about the fact that one day the golden goose is going to peg out, that there will be nothing left to flog. Lots of nice eggs in the meantime and the rest of us can jolly well look after ourselves. Nothing to do with them.
Whereas I bother about how long the present state of affairs, with us running a stonking great deficit in the trade of goods and services can last, living beyond our means in a way which ought to have the grocer's daughter turning in her grave. Bothered to the extent of turning up the publication known as the 'Pink Book', the authoritative guide to our balance of payments from ONS. The good news is that I was able to find and download this book in a few minutes. In a few hours someone at the ONS had answered my email about getting longer runs of data than the twenty five years or so which appeared in this book. What happened in the bad old days of the Labour Government in the sixties when balance of payments was the great big deal it has never been since?
But then things start to get difficult. It seems that one needs to be an expert, or at least quite knowledgeable, to make proper use of this sort of data, whereas I got nicely tangled up in all the various bits and bobs which go to make up our balance of payments. So tangled up that I dare not offer a chart by way of illustration, even though it seems reasonably clear that the current account deficit is presently both huge and volatile.
PS: part of the tangle being my complete failure to get Excel to display a nice chart from two of the data columns from ONS, with the first column being the year and the second being a value. The best I could do was a scatter plot which looked very tatty. And I had thought, at least, that I could do Excel.
Wednesday, 3 September 2014
Above the grove
Butser Hill
From the car park we go to check the kiosk, tastefully built after the fashion of an iron age round house, to find it firmly shut. No toilets, no snacks and not even a cup of tea - although there was a portaloo. Presumably the place has fallen victim to local authority cuts, despite being a major attraction, with one of the groups attracted on this day being what looked like a large family group from southern India, a group which seemed far keener on flaunting a range of expensive gadgets than admiring the natural beauties of the place. They also, thoughtfully, thought to share their music with the rest of us.
Various humps in the grass which reminded us of the rather larger humps in Bushey Park. Maybe these humps were down to ants too.
We then headed north to inspect the scarp which was all present and correct, although it seems that the wind was not as the one paraglider we encountered was off to some other part of the hill. I remember we were there once when the paragliders seemed to be able to just step off the front of the scarp slope and sail away into the sky.
Having savoured the clean, clear air (which seemed quite different from that on Box Hill, the explanation presumably being that Box Hill at 172m is a good bit lower than Butser Hill at 270m), we then bore off to the west to inspect the deep dry valley running north then west from the top of the hill, the dry valley hosting the clump of beech trees illustrated (google maps 50.980650, -0.990584) and which one imagines is an evening trysting place for all kinds of activities. One can imagine long hairs having had a good time there back in the seventies with their incense and other substances. We descended for a closer inspection than had been possible back in 2009.
Back up the other side without too much huffing and puffing, catching various hawks on the way, of various sizes but with wings with pointed rather than rounded ends. No idea what they were. And then at the top a small herd of paragliders and one chap flying a radio controlled glider, a silent variety of model aeroplane of which I heartily approve.
Picnic'd looking out the other way, out over the Isle of Wight, although without a map I was a little puzzled by how low Culver Down looked compared to Shanklin Down, but checking the map today I find the former to be a mere 104m to the latter's 235m. (Not a sort of checking that google maps is much cop at: the combination of street map with aerial photography is no substitute for a proper map, at least not for these purposes).
There was also some squeaking which I thought might have been kites over the woods below us, being quite different from the mewing of buzzards, but we did not see anything of either sort.
Then down (by car) to the Butser Ancient Farm (http://www.butserancientfarm.co.uk/), a place which BH has been trying to visit for thirty years or more, in which time we learned that the place has moved twice. Not really a farm, more a farm yard and there was no way that one could make an agricultural living out of the place. No serious ground for crops and no woods to supply the large amount of wood they were getting through to make their fences and buildings. And certainly no marsh for the reeds for their thatch, or even for the rush hat that an enterprising lady in iron age togs managed to sell to BH. No fixed price but she judged the depth of our pockets very nicely. They also offered an interesting demonstration of a rather basic sort of weaving.
All quite interesting, with the small (new build) Roman Villa giving one a rather different take than the large (old build) Roman Villa at Brading, over on the island. It made a lot of difference having walls and a roof, rather than being not much more than foundations and floors.
And so home. Maybe an hour each way, about the same that Kew Gardens, the other candidate for the day's outing, would have been.
Tuesday, 2 September 2014
Altruism
A great deal of academic ink has been spent on the question of whether there is a gene for altruism. On whether, why or how altruism might be favoured by Darwinian natural selection.
One part of this debate was Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene', a book which has been on my shelves for many years. I may have read it once, but the general line of which, as far as I can recall, was that it was every gene for itself.
Then yesterday the debate pops up in Hurford (see 15th August and http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~jim/), during which, inter alia, I was much struck by the notion that the totems and clans which Claude Lévi-Strauss writes so much about are as much a device to help the spread of cooperation and altruism out from the nuclear family group as anything else. Hurford also points up what it obvious once he has said it, that humans got where they are now because they cooperate with each other and that they can cooperate with each other to the extent that they do because they have language. Cooperation amongst other large animals, by comparison, is very limited in the wild, rarely going beyond a parent helping a partner or a child, other than in the context of social animals hunting down other animals for food.
And all this cooperation is now a matter of culture rather than a matter of genes. Genes might have been necessary back in the beginning, say 100,000 years ago, to get it all started, but they are not necessary now. We can even cope with a modest amount of gene-driven cheating, a modest number of selfish genes, with cultural pressures keeping the lid on.
All of which combines, for me, to make the debate about genetic altruism uninteresting. Humans are successful, in some large part because they are altruistic and because they have language, and I am not much bothered about the minutiae of the genetic and evolutionary processes which got this started. Nor am I convinced that the gene is the right level at which to study such matters and I remain a specist.
PS: I don't recall coming across the point of totems in Claude Lévi-Strauss, other than as a device to keep inbreeding down. Although I grant that this is quite important too.
One part of this debate was Dawkins' 'The Selfish Gene', a book which has been on my shelves for many years. I may have read it once, but the general line of which, as far as I can recall, was that it was every gene for itself.
Then yesterday the debate pops up in Hurford (see 15th August and http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~jim/), during which, inter alia, I was much struck by the notion that the totems and clans which Claude Lévi-Strauss writes so much about are as much a device to help the spread of cooperation and altruism out from the nuclear family group as anything else. Hurford also points up what it obvious once he has said it, that humans got where they are now because they cooperate with each other and that they can cooperate with each other to the extent that they do because they have language. Cooperation amongst other large animals, by comparison, is very limited in the wild, rarely going beyond a parent helping a partner or a child, other than in the context of social animals hunting down other animals for food.
And all this cooperation is now a matter of culture rather than a matter of genes. Genes might have been necessary back in the beginning, say 100,000 years ago, to get it all started, but they are not necessary now. We can even cope with a modest amount of gene-driven cheating, a modest number of selfish genes, with cultural pressures keeping the lid on.
All of which combines, for me, to make the debate about genetic altruism uninteresting. Humans are successful, in some large part because they are altruistic and because they have language, and I am not much bothered about the minutiae of the genetic and evolutionary processes which got this started. Nor am I convinced that the gene is the right level at which to study such matters and I remain a specist.
PS: I don't recall coming across the point of totems in Claude Lévi-Strauss, other than as a device to keep inbreeding down. Although I grant that this is quite important too.
John Williams
Following the post of 19th August, I have now finished the three volume set of novels by John Williams, which came nicely packaged as three matching paperbacks from Vintage via Amazon. And matching sizes with all three being just about 300 pages.
Easy and interesting reads all, making up the well known part of the Williams oeuvre. There was also a first novel and two books of poems, which last presumably accounts for the space given to poems, poetry and poets in Augustus.
Butcher's Crossing (1960). A tale of buffalo hunters in Kansas and Colorado in the 1870's. A tale of what turned out to be the pointless slaughter of thousands of buffaloes - which all seemed rather awful until I remembered how many animals we kill every day for meat now, albeit with the killing hidden away in rural factories. Also a coming-of-age story of the boy from Massachusetts who wanted to see the wild west.
Stoner (1965). A tale of a low-born university teacher in Missouri. A teacher who stopped in the one place from before the first world war until after the second. A decent teacher of English literature stuck in a bad marriage and with a department head who loathed him. A English teacher who seemed to know a lot about Latin, which may be a link to the next novel. Or was it more a displaced boast of the author to make up for the fancy education which did not get himself? One also wonders what his family and colleagues made of this one; it would be understandable if his wife was not too thrilled.
Augustus (1972). An epistolary novel about the Emperor Augustus.
For me, most of the interest lay in the settings rather than the people, but I was irritated by a sense of sloppy detailing. Important bits of both of the first two novels did not ring true, in the first case failures of fact, the second failures of behaviour. Failures of fact, like the difficulty of feeding oxen and horses through the winter in snow covered high pasture without stores of hay or grain. Failure of behaviour, like the childish behaviour of a highly educated and popular department head. Writers of costume dramas are supposed to get the details of the costume right and writers about their own milieux, in this case a mid-western university, are supposed to get that right too. Oddly, I did not get this sense in the last of the three. Perhaps it is all so long ago that one does not have a strong sense of what should be to be affronted - but I am now reading it again to see. Certainly all the funny names are much easier to follow second time around.
Easy and interesting reads all, making up the well known part of the Williams oeuvre. There was also a first novel and two books of poems, which last presumably accounts for the space given to poems, poetry and poets in Augustus.
Butcher's Crossing (1960). A tale of buffalo hunters in Kansas and Colorado in the 1870's. A tale of what turned out to be the pointless slaughter of thousands of buffaloes - which all seemed rather awful until I remembered how many animals we kill every day for meat now, albeit with the killing hidden away in rural factories. Also a coming-of-age story of the boy from Massachusetts who wanted to see the wild west.
Stoner (1965). A tale of a low-born university teacher in Missouri. A teacher who stopped in the one place from before the first world war until after the second. A decent teacher of English literature stuck in a bad marriage and with a department head who loathed him. A English teacher who seemed to know a lot about Latin, which may be a link to the next novel. Or was it more a displaced boast of the author to make up for the fancy education which did not get himself? One also wonders what his family and colleagues made of this one; it would be understandable if his wife was not too thrilled.
Augustus (1972). An epistolary novel about the Emperor Augustus.
For me, most of the interest lay in the settings rather than the people, but I was irritated by a sense of sloppy detailing. Important bits of both of the first two novels did not ring true, in the first case failures of fact, the second failures of behaviour. Failures of fact, like the difficulty of feeding oxen and horses through the winter in snow covered high pasture without stores of hay or grain. Failure of behaviour, like the childish behaviour of a highly educated and popular department head. Writers of costume dramas are supposed to get the details of the costume right and writers about their own milieux, in this case a mid-western university, are supposed to get that right too. Oddly, I did not get this sense in the last of the three. Perhaps it is all so long ago that one does not have a strong sense of what should be to be affronted - but I am now reading it again to see. Certainly all the funny names are much easier to follow second time around.
Monday, 1 September 2014
Chasing the proton
I do not know whether chasing the proton on behalf of a very sick child is a good idea and it may well be that it is not appropriate for the hard-pressed taxpayer to pay, but to be pursuing extradition of the parents from Spain when their child is tucked up in hospital there seems dreadfully heavy handed. What on earth is going on? Is there no room for a bit of compassion & common sense? Has the DT got it all wrong again?
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