La Croix Taillefer Pomerol

Now consumed the Pomerol reported on 19th September and very good it was too. Well worth the extra.

But I forgot that Waitrose are not very good at Comté and bought some of that to go with it. I should have known better and once again it was dry and sharp; not a patch on the stuff I more usually get from Borough Market. I think the trouble probably is that they do not sell nearly enough of it and that it does not keep well in the small lumps they do sell from. Luckily I fared rather better with the other cheese I bought at the same time, so we did have something to go with the Pomerol, despite the Waitrose web site explaining that it was just the ticket with roast lamb.

A quick computation this morning reveals that the wine came in at 3.3 pence for a gram while the cheese came in at 1.8 pence for a gram. Maybe the extra pence per gram explains all.

Hadrons

Following the read recorded at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=hadron off to the Royal Institution last week to hear more about hadrons from Pippa Wells, who, when she is not being a particle physicist, also plays the violin. According to a CERN website, she was part of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, played with Cambridge University’s Symphony and Chamber Orchestras throughout her university days and now plays with the Orchestre Symphonique Genevois. Interestingly, for someone with this background, her native accents still come through and there were none of the fruitcake accents which the producers of Lewis like to give university types at the other place.

But I get ahead of myself. Otherwise suitable watering holes in Albemarle Street being full of the after office crowd, we elected to try Browns, the Mayfair version of the Goring tried out a couple of years ago (see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=goring). The bar was crowded and cramped with a low ceiling, nothing like the bar at Langham's (see 18th September), served just the one brand of bottled beer (Chinese) and a surprisingly thin selection of wine, although the white wine that I picked out was perfectly decent. But the service was very smooth, they did very nice dressed green olives and they were much stronger, I think, on cocktails. Some entertainment to be had from the clientele with our being greeted by a large & floridly dressed lady with large fag hanging out of her mouth as she nipped out for a smoke and from an energetically necking couple in the corner of the bar. Very smartly dressed & turned out young woman and we did wonder what relationship she had with her partner. Was it of long standing?

Onto the lecture theatre at the Royal Institution, one of those old style lecture theatres with steeply tiered seats around  a large demonstrator's desk, complete with sink, in the well. Three large chairs had been set up facing the desk, with the middle one destined for HRH the Duke of Kent, who turned out to look a lot more like the presumably unrelated Duke of Edinburgh than I had expected. For a senior with less knowledge of physics than me (I assume), he did well to stay awake and look attentive, if not deeply interested. I was impressed; I could not do it for a living. The rest of the full house included some scientific eminences in penguin suits, more working scientists (some of whom might have fallen out of Lewis), some students, some children and some people off the street like ourselves, it being a public if not free lecture. There was a noticeable number of ladies in full war paint, some very attractive.

Pippa Wells talked for about an hour and took questions (at least two from children of precocious accents). She had good slides and was a good talker, making a good job of talking to a mixed audience, many of whom were not scientists at all and most of whom were not particle physicists. A good follow on to the Butterworth book.

She started off with the periodic table and moved onto a suggestively similar table of sub-atomic particles, a table which suddenly gave some meaning to the much bandied about term 'super symmetry'. She also made much of the business of taking lots - thousands if not millions - of pictures a second of the collision bit of the big ring. One got more sense of where all the femtobarns mentioned in the Butterworth post came from. There were also pictures and diagrams of bits of the big ring which I found helpful, Butterworth being picture lite. There were also graphs, with the elusive Higg's boson emerging as a not very large bump on a graph derived from some of the said femtobarns, from lots of collisions, collected up over months if not years. Not as if you could actually see, in any normal sense of the word, a trace of the boson flitting across one of the Wilson cloud chambers which were the latest thing to reach physics classrooms when I was little.

In the margins we took a peek at some of the other facilities, which included a small museum in the basement - lots of old style scientific instruments - and a café. All, it seems, open to the public. To be revisited at greater leisure.

Then, after taking refreshment in one of the now not so crowded watering holes, home via Earlsfield where I scored just the one aeroplane, passing the time between aeroplanes wondering how one would get over the chain link fence - some five or six feet high - if push came to shove. I settled for jamming some of the bits of masonry rubble lying around its base into the roughly square holes in the wire and then using them as footholds - but I did not get as far as experiment. Perhaps just as well.

At home, I got around to reading the Royal Institution leaflet I picked up at the door and their short courses look like something I could still cope with - so maybe something for next year. See http://www.rigb.org/education/short-courses.

Acton October

Lord Acton, best known for his observation about the corruption which flows from power, gets mentioned in the other place at the end of September 2007 and the end of October 2008. Clearly an autumnal thing, only spoilt by cropping up earlier this year, in July, in a worry about the market power of Amazon.

However, it is now autumn again, so OK to rise to the bait of Murdoch having a pop at Google in the EU competition courts. An amusing pop in that Murdoch, or at least his people, the people who run the Sun with its stables of phone hackers and topless models, has the sauce to bang on about media morality and about how Google spells the end for a decent & healthy press.

But the fact that the messenger is tainted does not necessarily mean that the message is not true. It is a worry that so much power is now concentrated in Google, despite the various good works that they do: the provision of free search, mail and mapping facilities to name three of the most well known, not to mention the blogging facilities into which I type now. It does seem likely that as time goes on, power will eventually corrupt, and Google will start to do things which are not so cuddly. Can they be trusted not to fiddle with their search rankings for some dark or profitable purpose? Which they might dress up as being for our own good really, just like governments and other do-gooders do when they make us do things that we do not want to do.

I remember back to my last days in the world of work when I spent some time in a plastic paddy bar in the Oxford Road in Reading, where the barman, who was actually Irish, spent some time explaining to me that it was quite wrong for such an important facility as internet search to be run from the private sector for profit. Such search had become just the sort of essential service which ought to be run by the state, of the people for the people. Which was all very well after a few pints of the dark stuff, but seemed a bit tricky in the light of morning. What state are we going to ask to do the job? Would the UN take it on?

Which is where I think I am still at. Not very comfortable, but with no idea what to do about it.

But then this morning I think back to the way in which we broke British Rail up when we privatised it. Maybe daft in that context, but maybe in this context the model should be that we allow Google Central to take the Network Rail role, to provide some central systems which are then leased out to various operators, some of which might be carved out of what is now Google, with these various operators being the people with whom we interact and who compete among themselves for our business, for our clicks.

Which is all very well again, but as things stand now, I do not want some such operator getting between me and Google, and I have gone to some lengths in the past to get rid of such people as have managed to load getting between software on my PC. I trust them a lot less than I trust Google.

So still no idea what to do about it, Maybe one of the clever chaps in the competition bit of the EU will come up with something after all! Earn the considerable bag of oats that he gets - EU pay and conditions being quite something.

PS: I seem to recall that they did something of the breaking up sort in the US to break up the Bell stranglehold on the telephone service there, but apart from it involving baby bells I don't remember how it all turned out.

West Lothian Question

Without giving it much thought, I had always thought the line that, given the degree of devolution the Scots have already, maybe it was not appropriate for their Westminster MPs to vote on English matters, this despite the fact such a change would make it much less likely that we English would get a Labour government and that we might be stuck with the boys from Bullingdon for a long time.

So interested to read a contrary view from one Vernon Bogdanor in last week's Guardian.

He points out that under any likely version of devolution, even with local tax raising powers for the Scots, the total amount of money available for them to spend on health, porridge or whatever else might take their fancy, will still, in some large part, be determined through the block grant mechanism, a mechanism which is plugged into all kinds of detailed decisions on spending in England. So not so clear that the Scots should not have a say in matters apparently English after all.

But then I get lost in the detail. Which of the taxes in the snip above from this year's budget report could sensibly be devolved?

One point survives, We spend a terrible lot of money organising & collecting tax - so it seems terrible wasteful to spend it all twice, once down here and once up there. Much worse than their running some sort of Bannockburn Airways out of national vanity.

PS: three cheers for the MS snipping tool. How ever did I ever manage without it for so long!

An early work (2)

And another, from his yet to be celebrated brother William. His name is discretely hidden under the upper green dinosaur.

An early work (1)

A personalised birthday card, otherwise an early work by Sir Henry Toller, RA etc.

A sufficiently important occasion for the deployment of one of our two trestles (see June & July 2011 in the other place).

Big tent

I mentioned the tent in Berkeley Square a few days ago (reference 1) and as it happened someone sent us a couple of tickets, so off to Green Park last week to sample the tent in the square.  Very smart tent inside, if a little warm, with lots of smartly turned out security, all people of colour.

I mention in passing that for the first time in many visits, I saw the point of the steel erection over the bus station at Vauxhall Cross. From a distance I had always thought it a bit gross, but from the middle of it, say gmaps 51.485938, -0.123745, and looking up, it looked rather good. Still not sure that it was worth the money, but it was good to get some value for once.

Back at the tent, the idea seemed to be to provide a west end showcase for provincial or suburban antique & fine art dealers, well above car boot standard, but not fancy enough to run to a west end showcase of their own. There was some stuff for hundreds of pounds, but most of the more striking items were going for thousands, say in the £5,000 to £15,000 range, with plenty above that if you wanted to splash out a bit. There was plenty of art porn with several entries from Sir William Russell Flint. But also plenty of odd items to catch our eye. A couple of gold thimbles, one with pearl trim one without. A walking stick from 1800 or so which doubled as a flute. Lenses from U-boat periscopes and other instruments of that sort (http://www.mcharpentier.com/). A cubic ceramic, maybe a six inch cube, decorated with a mainly red and black design trompe l'œil design of interlocking cubes, of a sort that I thought I recall seeing on the north corner of the ceiling of San Miniato, but cannot now confirm (see gmaps 43.759649, 11.264991). A striking painting of a head by Michal Lukasiewicz (http://www.storestreetgallery.com/) and illustrated above). Maybe four feet square, on canvas, gesso base followed by acrylic topping, according to the pretty minder. The minders that we spoke to all were very pleasant, clearly in wanting to make a sale mode.

All in all most entertaining, but we were left wondering who bought this sort of stuff. Like expensive cars, I cannot imagine chucking the sort of money needed at it, even if we had a lot more money to chuck around than we do. Most of the customers in the tent looked like reasonably well off, middling sort of people; the odd trophy wife but no footballers looking to stock up their new pad in Campden Hill.

From there to Wigmore Hall to hear the Tetzlaff Quartet for the first time. Mozart K421, Widmann String Quartet No. 3 and Schubert D887. Unusually the hall was only something over half full, but a half full which made up in enthusiasm what it lacked in numbers. And we got a better view than usual.

Mozart good, but they did not quite achieve the limpid serenity I expect from this sort of Mozart, granted more particularly from the violin sonatas. Widmann a bit of exuberant fun, with vocal effects and available on YouTube for the interested. Schubert as good as expected. But what with the tent and the concert we were quite tired by the finish.

But not so tired that we did not manage to pick up a couple of read-on-the-way-homes from the limited selection on offer at Wimbledon Station. Mine was a fat document from the Federal Conference Committee, the outfit which organises the Liberal Party Conference. Federal for the three mainland countries of our union, with the northern paddies not getting a look in. Inter alia, I read about things called specified associated organisations (SAOs) which are groups of party members that share, or support, a particular identity. Furthermore SAOs are approved by the Federal Executive and are entitled to submit motions to Conference. The section of the document on pastoral care and members code of conduct reminded me of the unseemly, recent row about senior party members touching up junior party members in bars, but, all in all, I was more reminded that the Liberals are good at looking after their grass roots.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/pied-piper.html

Scary stuff

Two rather scary articles in the latest number of the NYRB, one on baptists and one on corruption.

The baptists in question are those of the Southern  Baptist Convention (SBC, see http://www.sbc.net/) who read the world for Christ. The convention split away from the north in 1845 over the question of slavery and has remained apart every since.

The article says that there are three pillars of faith that matter in the SBC: first that the Bible contains nothing but the literal truth, second that men are in charge of women and third that whites are in charge of blacks (and other aliens like Latinos). Which third pillar, which the article might possibly be right about, sits oddly with the inclusion of a black pastor in one of the illustrations, but which sits more comfortably with the geographical coverage of the SBC, more or less that of the civil war confederacy. But there is plenty of overt activity to block equal rights for women, particularly that of the sort enshrined in the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment to the US constitution which appears to have had a long and chequered history. Lady pastors and abortions are certainly off the menu.

It seems that the SBC is very strong in Texas and is very keen on the sort of mega-churches which can pull in 20,000 and more on a Sunday. This is a church which is alive and well, unlike the palid, dressed up and incense flavoured relics we have here in the UK. See, for example, http://www.second.org/; more a football stadium than the sort of parish church which we used to go to, although  perhaps the Albert Hall comes nearer in tone, if nothing like big enough. Is it a coincidence that Texas also includes a lot of very rich white males? I wonder if the celebrity pastors pack guns when they preach, just in case Satan makes it into the stadium? Or do they delegate that sort of thing to their security details?

It is perhaps salutary to be reminded about these people at a time when Muslims are getting a lot of stick. With whom they probably share a real and deep concern for the decline of traditional values.

I shall report on the second scary article in due course.

PS: for the SBC version of the 39 articles see http://www.sbc.net/bfm2000/bfm2000.asp.

Anne's tart

Using the recipe thoughtfully included in the back of our copy of 'Anne of Green Gables', BH has now assembled a raspberry tart (also involving peaches) in our very own kitchen here at Epsom. A variation on a Bakewell tart.

Quite an exotic tart by our standards (or rather BH standards. I remember making a desert tart exactly once and it is long time since I made a meat pie).

Reference: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/gabular-anne.html.

Horton Clockwise

It has been a week for the Horton Clockwise, having managed three so far - the Horton Clockwise being the constitutional which takes me out of the house, down to Christchurch Road, past the church, down Horton Lane, through West Ewell and then home down Longmead Road. Of the various walks I take, I take this one far and away the most frequently, with the Horton Ant-Clockwise being quite unusual. On Wednesday I got to wondering why this might be when we have Epsom Common, not to mention other options, so near by.

Part of the answer is that I am put off the Common by the depredations and other antics of the Chain Saw Volunteers, forever chopping things down in the interests of some eco-fad or other. The latest being a drive to eradicate something called the Turkey Oak, a species of oak which has popped up all over the place, displacing our native oak, without living long enough to produce the large handsome trees we know and love. A drive I am rather ambivalent about, as I am about other drives to eradicate invasive but successful plant species. For some sufficient but probably not very good reason, much keener on getting rid of invasive, large animal species like grey squirrels, foxes and badgers. Maybe mink and coypu too, although one does not hear as much about them these days as one used to.

The Volunteers popped up in the free press the other day as the shipping container they use as a shed to keep their gear in, hidden away somewhere on the Common, was burgled and the burglars made off with, amongst other things, the small all-terrain pickup used to move their chain saws from one action to the next. And while I do not approve of burglary, my disapproval of burglary will not carry me so far as to contribute to the costs of the replacement. Perhaps they will be covered by some borough insurance or other.

Another part of the answer is that both Horton Lane and Longmead Road make pleasant walking with plenty of trees & hedges and wide verges. Horton Lane, for example, can look great in the spring when the hawthorn is out. And even in the soft, damp mornings we had earlier this week.

Another part is that I am clearly a creature of habit.

And then, half way around this Clockwise, I came across a brown slug, between two and three inches long, which moved me to think that the light rain earlier in the morning had brought them all out. But then, I did not pass another on the whole walk, only getting as far as one of those small snails with the black and white striped shell. Cernuella virgata? On return, I checked in the compost bin, where there are often lots of slugs to be found, to find none there either. Perhaps it is getting late in the season for them to be out and about? Perhaps I was late and the crows had taken more or less all those caught by the sunrise out in the open?

Impressed by the wealth of material on the web about snails, I associate to our ignorance about some related mollusca called solenogastres, worm shaped marine animals, bottom feeders on other, smaller and sessile, metazoans. Some of them grow to as much as 15cm long and coming across them by chance the other day in Lecointre & Le Guyader, I found it odd that there were these common, quite large animals knocking about the world, of which I had never heard and of which not all that much was known at all, with the last proper investigation of development having taken place back in the nineteenth century, a time when everyone and his dog, including here George Eliot's partner George Lewes, did natural history. I suppose we all do the internet now.

Reference 1: see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/round-and-about-in-epsom-2.html for the death of a Horton Lane turkey oak.

Reference 2: Lecointre & Le Guyader can be found in their original French at http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Secret squirrels

The advertisement left caught my eye in today's Guardian, and took some seconds to decode.

Question 1, who did they get to come up with the advertisement?

Question 2, how many people will respond? I remember a time back in the early eighties when mundane advertisements for low grade civil service jobs used to attract more replies than one could deal with and one was reduced to sending out postcard acknowledgements and then pulling the ones one was going to actually look at out of a hat. Crude but at least fair. I think now one does not even bother with a postcard, you just get to hear if you have been short listed. Don't call us, we'll call you.

I remember also that in those days people took references seriously, both the people who wrote them and the people that read them. And that one told one's boss that one was applying for jobs, with FIL telling us once that in his (mental health) world he would have expected to get advice from his manager about when and what to apply for, that was part of what managers did. I think we have moved on a bit now; much more every man for himself and sod the rest of them.

Och

A long time ago I did a spell as what is now called an intern at the statistical part of the European Commission (EC), long enough ago that I was overpaid and underworked, an arrangement which I think is reversed these days. And in the course of being underworked I came across the business of machine translation, something in which the EC took a great interest given its large spend on translators and interpreters and in which I have taken a nodding interest ever since.

My guess at the time was that in order to build a decent machine translation system you had to have a machine language sitting in the middle of it. So you translated the Albanian text (say) into the machine language and translated the machine text into English text. The idea was that you needed to understand what was being said in order to do a decent translation, the bonus was that you hugely reduced the number of things you had to deal with, from roughly k1 times N squared to k2 times N, where N is the number of languages and the k are constants. And that has been my position ever since. And N had grown quite a lot since, enough to make the N squared a bit of a problem.

However, the other day, while continuing to move through the odd but interesting singularity book by Kurzweil (see 10th and 4th September), I came across a chap called Franz Josef Och who, it seems, has built a very successful machine translator on entirely different lines, using statistics and computational sledge hammers rather than stilettos.

Och headed up Google machine translation operation for a while, but now pops up at http://www.humanlongevity.com/, an outfit which relates back to Kurzweil who is clearly fascinated by his prospect of imminent immortality.

Turning to Google, I now realise that they take machine translation very seriously, a lot more so than I had guessed by their pop up offers to translate things when one looks at foreign language web sites. They pointed me to a tutorial workbook on statistical machine translation by one Kevin Knight, written way back in April 1999 and which I have been trying to get to grips with.

Point one, this machine translation is bilateral, between one real language and another. No machine language sitting in the middle. All you need to translate, say, from French to English, is a large chunk of English text, possibly culled from the web in the course of search engine business, and a large chunk of parallel text in French and English.

Point two, the system is an application of the Bayes' theorem mentioned the other day. So the probability of this bit of English E being the proper translation of that bit of French F is expressed as the product of the probability of this bit of English P(E) times the probability of that bit of French being the translation of this bit of English P(F|E). It seems that this breaking down of the single problem P(E|F) into the other two problems  is the key to making it tractable, amenable to statistical sledgehammers.

Point three, the system appears to be the product of some kind of iteration, with the system getting better each time around. It learns.

Point four, there are some language twiddly bits which more obviously have to do with the structure of language. Things like word order and the short special words used to structure things. Words like 'may' and 'the' in English.

Point five, there are some mathematical twiddly bits to do with, for example, the manipulation of very small numbers, manipulation which defeats the bog standard arithmetic offered by Excel.

Not got very far with it all yet, but enough to see that maybe my original idea was wrong. You don't need a machine language sitting in the middle of it all - and maybe the brain doesn't either. It just doesn't work like that, whatever a logician might like to think.

I shall try to persevere.

Saatchi samples

I was struck by this sample sent me by the Saatchi Art Corporation this morning.

I was able to get this copy by using the recently discovered & excellent MS snipping tool on the more or less full screen offering from Saatchi. Alternatively I could stump up the $8,000 asked for the real thing by Art Venti.

Art Venti is from Los Angeles and has a respectable web presence, including http://www.artmichaelventi.com/, from where I take the following snippet: 'the original drawings are scanned, and available as excellent quality prints on 100% rag, canvas or aluminum. This latter produces a beautiful translucent surface. If printed on aluminum they are mounted on bars for hanging'. See also https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8152054/Artiststatement2012.doc.

Last of the summer wine

Yesterday saw the second and last picking of blackberries this season. The first, I think in August some time, was OK but the berries were small and did not come of the stalk very easily. Slow picking. Then forgot about them until yesterday afternoon when they were pretty much finished.

More or less nothing left on the western side of Horton Lane, some left of the eastern side. Small but ripe and I was able to get a couple of trays worth in under an hour. Baking trays being the way we freeze the things before bagging them up into portions for use during the winter.

Temper

On Saturday to the Wigmore to hear Pierre-Laurent Aimard play Book 1 of Bach's 'The Well-tempered Clavier', the first time that I have heard either this pianist or this work, not counting my ex-Tavistock Oxfam recording made by Svjatoslav Richter way back in 1970. A very proper sequel to the concert & caprices noticed at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/pied-piper.html.

Most of the time Bach eschewed the gymnastics favoured by some later composers, perhaps in part because the work was intended for students. But while I was very taken with, impressed with the performance as a whole, I had little sense of the structure of any particular prelude or fugue and no organised sense of the contrast between the major and minor keys, let alone that between an A key and a B key. So while the work was entirely accessible, maybe it does even more for someone who both plays the piano and understands the theory. Maybe the older chap in the back stalls with what looked like a fairly new score was one - not something one sees as often as I recall from my youth. One of those paper backed scores in A4 format which can be used to play from although the pages usually need to be held open and Aimard preferred loose sheets, one per prelude or fugue. Just pick up the one just played, put it on the growing pile aside and play the next one. The only catch being that on this occasion one went missing and he had to nip back stage to recover it. He recovered well from the interruption. How many of us would have noticed if he had just carried on, missing one out? Not me, for certain.

Aimard seemed to have such an abundance of nervous energy that he had to let it blow off in his face. That is to say his face, particularly his lower jaw, was working away throughout the performance. The piano, for once a Yamaha rather than the usual Steinway, sounded more like a harpiscord than is usual: was that a function of the music, the tuning of the piano or what? The programme notes said that the claviers of Bach's day would probably not have been tuned to modern equal temperament, but would this piano have been tuned back in time for this concert? The one time I asked at the Wigmore the answer was no (see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/back-to-wiggers.html). Coincidentally, I get an invitation this morning to go along to Yamaha to try out their pianos at Wardour Street. Would I like to book a private session in their historic piano hall with one of their chaps?

Audience mainly well behaved and not one phone went off. One chap who may well have been French kept his white cheesecutter hat on (it matched his jacket) during the concert and the smart young family next to me, who spoke French and may well also have been French, left at half time. I dare say they thought that their young son, very smartly dressed, would not have gone the distance. But there was one couple a couple of rows in front of me who were perhaps in the wrong place. The gent. had the long hair and beard of the seventies although he was perhaps in his late twenties and his lady was dressed rather elaborately, including a little hat and the sort of gloves that are half black netting and half black something else. She spent most of the concert whispering in his ear, paddling in his neck (see Hamlet, Act III, scene IV, line 185: 'or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers'), playing with the seams of her gloves and looking around at the rest of the audience. Or if she was really stuck, at the ceiling.

For a change, discovered the merits of the Cock & Lion (http://www.cockandlion.co.uk/pages/home.html) in the interval.

Entertained on the way home by a couple of Chinese couples. One of the ladies was pretty and slender, the other rather less so. But first lady had a fascinating way of talking to second lady, mainly by means of her eyebrows, supplemented by other facial moves. All terribly expressive and did not seem to need the addition of much in the way of words. Kept me entertained all the way to Vauxhall.

Stopped off at Earlsfield to see how its latest refurb. had gone (it doesn't seem very long since it was last done. Clearly making too much money out of us). Busy, but for my purposes marred by the removal of the clock, on which one used to be able to keep an eye on the time. As it was I was moved to leave rather quicker than I might have otherwise.

Reference 1: http://www.pierrelaurentaimard.com/.

Population

On 31st December I noticed an irritating but interesting book about population and other matters by one Danny Dorling. Irritating in large part because of his breezy but implausible expertise in all kinds of matters well outside the normal field of vision of a geographer, even one who is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography of the School of Geography and the Environment of the University of Oxford. Interesting in large part because of his claim that the the world's population would stabilise at below 10 billion, rather than some much larger number of the sort scouted around by rubbishy professional demographers, and that population was not at all the biggest problem that we face on earth.

So I was interested to see in the Guardian a couple of days ago that one Adrian E. Raftery, both paddy and professional demographer, has led a team which has decided that population will continue to grow steadily throughout the current century to reach 11 billion by the end of it, with the troubled Nigeria growing to humungous proportions. Good job that they have got some oil to help them feed them all.

Being so prompted to look back at Dorling this morning, it is easy to see why he was so irritating first time around. Right know all. And, as lawyers tell us in courtroom dramas on television, nothing so bad on the stand as an expert witness. You can always get one to back whatever story you want and they often seem to go around in circles, sometimes ever decreasing. Never give you a clear, clean answer to anything.

But I was interested to see that the Bayes word is prominent in Raftery's CV, to which I shall come back to in due course. It seems to be a lot more respectable these days than it was where I learned my probability.

And maybe Dorling could get a role as a prof. in a forthcoming episode of 'Lewis'. That apart, I think I shall now leave the question of population growth, or not, aside.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=dorling.

Reference 2: http://www.demographic-research.org/authors/1565.htm.

Accidental coppice

A bit of second growth at Painshill which caught my eye. Not exactly proper coppicing and one wonders how long it will survive, but the second growth on this sweet chestnut tree looks vigorous enough for the present.

Or is it third growth? First growth centre, second growth right and third growth left?

Camera never lies

The camera in my telephone, while very good at a lot of things, is not much good at things which are at any distance. For example, this shot of antique bridge (right) and cedar (left) taken from the gothic temple mentioned in the previous post.

Both bridge and cedar seem far smaller in the picture than they did when viewed with eyeball from the same spot. From which I deduce that the brain, in its wisdom, contrives to make distant objects of interest rather larger than the sizes of the corresponding images on the retinas would suggest. So while the camera might never lie, the brain clearly does. Which I suppose, in other connections, we knew already.

I note in passing that the detailing of the antique bridge - of quite recent origin, either by restoration or new build - had not been very well thought through. The fake stone finish of the face of the bridge had not been taken round the corner, under the arch, which made it look more fake than was pleasing. There is a very similar failing in the hole into the car park underneath the block of flats opposite the new car park at Epsom Station (see gmaps 51.333654, -0.269939 which irritates me every time I pass. Cheap or lazy architects are getting everywhere.

Kingfisher time

For the first time since January 2012, before the deluge as it were, we visited Painshill last week, that well known visitor attraction near the A3/M25 interchange which has escaped the clutches of both English Heritage and the National Trust. A cuddly independent!

Started off in their handsome vistor centre - that is to say, shop, toilets and café - to take tea and sweet scone from said café, a café which appeared to be being run by a pleasant Italian couple as a concession. Despite which the cakes were firmly English, hence the sweet scone, so I was reminded how sticky sweet scones are, certainly compared with the cheese scones that I make from time to time, although I grant that some of the variation may be due to the things being sold from the freezer rather than from the oven.

Off along the path between the lake and the Mole, with the Mole being rather lower than the lake. Clearly something contrived about the lake although it was natural enough for me to collect my seventh lifetime sighting of a kingfisher, this one all blue and brown as it whizzed from the bank of the lake to an island. We pushed onto the water wheel at the end of the path, a water wheel which serves to lift water from the Mole into the lake. A slight whiff of perpetual motion about this, as one wondered what proportion of the water in a river it would be possible to lift up in this way. One also wondered whether building and maintaining all this elaborate wood and steel work was actually a better eco-proposition than having a small electric motor drive a modern rotary pump (the cylinder of this up-and-down pump being visible to the left of the illustration).

And so back down the other side of the lake to inspect the giant cedar (no sitting duck on this occasion, see below), the gothic temple (rather an odd phrase, given that we did not do temples at the same time as we did gothic), the rape of the Sabine women and the cork oak. See http://www.ivorabrahams.com/the-giambologna-commission/ for an interesting account of the rape.

And so back to the café for lunch, a very reasonable and reasonably priced meat lasagne.

Home via a garden centre where we were amused at the check-out by one of the lady shop assistants checking out a large plant as she went off-shift. She explained that not only did she work the garden centre but she also worked her own garden and often fell for some new arrival at the centre. An ideal employee! Just like the building workers of old who were encouraged to spend their hard earned earnings in the pub run by their employer for their greater convenience. And if that failed, in the attached shop.

PS: for the previous visit to Painshill see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=painshill.

Water works

As a child I read Garratt Mattingley on the Spanish Armada, in the course of which he points up the snooty way in which the ambassadors from the Serene Republic (of Venice) used to report to their masters about the coarse & barbarous ways of the English. This being before Venice, with its grip on the trade with the east, was eclipsed by the new world.

More recently I have been told about how doing business with many former colonies - say of the Soviet Union or of the United Kingdom - is made very difficult by the rampant corruption in such places. But then they are far away, in the middle of Asia or Africa.

So rather taken aback this morning to read in the NYRB about corruption on a very grand scale in Venice, involving no less a personage than the Magistrato alle Acque, a personage who has existed since the times of said Serene Republic. All to do with backhanders, in hundreds of thousands if not millions of euros, to do with the construction of a giant flood protection scheme, a scheme which has attracted a lot of criticism from all kinds of people, not least water engineers who are not in the pocket of the construction outfit principally involved.

To think that Italy is a serious country, one of larger members of the European Community, a member of the eurozone. An advanced western country where they make splendid refrigerators and where this sort of thing is not supposed to happen. In the north of the country too, not in the benighted south, well known to be full of gangsters.

But then thoughts drifts back to the water engineering scandals of the US, not so long ago, which I came across by chance a few years ago, via one Marc Reisner (see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Marc+Reisner). People of the right might say that large public works of this sort are bound to attract corruption, like lamps attract moths. Leave it all to the private sector, untouched by this particular disease... While the best we can do here in the UK are the relatively minor & shabby dealings of the late John Poulson.

I wonder if the Netherlands, another country which was great in the 17th century and which also has water problems, have water flavoured scandals. Is the boss of the Rijkswaterstaat - the equivalent perhaps of the Magistrato alle Acqueas - as clean as they come? My guess is that he, or she, is.

And then I start to think about the difficulty of preserving large chunks of real estate which have outlived their purpose, which have perhaps lingered on long enough to become an expensive encumbrance. Long enough to have arrived in the world of heritage. We have enough problems with all our stately homes, so doing something about Venice must be a much tougher proposition.

Trolley 8

The feeblest recovery yet, this M&S trolley being picked up outside the nearby Wetherspoons.

Took the opportunity to take a look at the wine at M&S, where there seemed to be as much choice as at Waitrose, but which somehow did not appeal, not sure why. So back to Waitrose to do my stocking up.

Mainly white, but, following a mention in a recent episode of Morse, tried a Pomerol. If we like it, a quick scout around suggests that one can pay up to about £2,000 a bottle for the stuff, so 1st Division rather than Premier League, and Hedonism doesn't seem to carry much of the stuff at all, sporting a meagre choice of 3.

Got on well with the star shaped, new to me plastic bottle bag previously acquired by BH from Waitrose, the Sainsbury's equivalent having seemed a bit too feeble to trust with a full load, with the bottom panel looking very worn despite having been barely used. Fit for storage but not for transport. While the sixth compartment of the bottle bag proved very handy for the transport of the Evening Standard.

PS: looking at the picture now, not sure that the thing did not come from Waitrose. Right shape but wrong livery for M&S? Must take a closer look when I am next in town.

Pied Piper

To the Wigmore Monday lunchtime to hear Marc-André Hamelin (formerly of Montreal) do the four D935 impromtus from Schubert followed by a batch of Chopin flavoured studies from one Leopold Godowsky, whom Wikipedia informs me was a famous pianist from Lithuania who settled in the US in the 1880s. Hamelin, in seems, not heard by us since around May 2009 (see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=hamelin).

We started off the proceedings with wine & coffee in the bar at the Langham Hotel, the first time we have ever been inside the place. Plenty of pleasant flunkies and a quiet, high ceilinged bar with what looked like a good range of spirits. Refreshments, excluding spirits as it was a touch early, at about twice what we might otherwise paid at All Bar One, seemed good value.

Impromptus as good as ever while the studies while impressive, were what I called show-off music, mostly concerned to show-case the talent of the performer. Particularly impressive in that most of them were played with the left hand alone, thus demonstrating the gross enlargement of the left hand part of the brain of the better pianists. Proceedings only slightly disturbed by a middle aged male fidgeter to my immediate right, one phone going off (quietly) at the back of the hall somewhere and some odd high pitched feedback from either the microphones (this being a BBC live job) or someone's hearing aid.

Lunch at the Benugo's in the sky at Brown Hart Gardens, where we were amused by two very flashily dressed young men with trailers, that is to say small suitcases with two wheels and a long handle, the sort of thing just about allowed as carry-on on an aeroplane. We thought they might have escaped from London Fashion Week.

Back through Berkeley Square to be further amused by the erection of large tents there to house some antique fair. Why are we so keen on tents when I would have thought London had plenty of permanent venues capable of housing such an event? Why make such a mess of the square? Do tents offer a large, clean space not actually to be found in many central London hotels?

Closed the outing with the fortuitously appropriate purchase of a set of caprices by Paganini from the Tadworth Children's Home charity shop in Epsom. A chap of whom I had previously only heard of, but whom I now know to be to the violin what Godowsky is to the piano. Performed by another violinist-composer, this one of whom I had not previously heard of at all, one Desmond Bradley, from the Antipodes. The programme notes to the caprices explained that most of the power of the music resided in the tension between the music and the constraints of the instrument, something I commented on, albeit in the context of a different medium, at http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/the-bridge-of-san-luis-rey.html. So far, provided I do not attempt to do anything else at the same time, the caprices are good. But in the case of the piano studies performed at this concert, I think I was too little aware of the difficulty of what was being done for them to work, so for my money they would be better appreciated by someone who played the piano well enough to know.

Flora

The bottom half of the house is dominated by the smell of the splendid lilies illustrated. A pervasive smell so it is just as well that is a good smell.

But one needs to be careful not to touch the things as the pollen leaves a startling yellow stain on white shirts.

Botanic problem 4

An addendum to my various posts on this subject of 7th September.

This being the healed over scar of a branch removed some years ago from a small oak tree in the back garden. One of a number of horseshoe rather than circular shape. Something odd is clearly going on with the pipework at the top of the scar.

The man from Grand Rapids

Following on from the sorry business of the child with a brain tumour who absconded (see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=proton), I realised that I did not have a clue what JW's were, apart from being people who were apt to pester one on one's doorstep.

So off to Google and then, via Wikipedia to Amazon, where I lighted upon the splendid book illustrated left, written by a professor of systematic theology at the Calvin Theological Seminary, Grand Rapids, Michigan (see http://calvinseminary.edu/ or around gmaps 42.9298204,-85.5847972 where there seems to be quite a complex).

A book which started life in 1983 in Exeter as a paperback and was then bought for the Bradford Reference Library who had it converted to a hardback by the cunning insertion of thick grey cardboard into the paper covers. Plus a very loud notice inside the front cover, in red, prohibiting its removal from the library. From thence to me.

I now now that all four outfits, while claiming to be founded on both parts of our Bible, the old and new testaments, cannot really be considered to be part of the Christian community.  Each in their own way has added an additional volume to the corpus of revealed truth which takes precedence over the volumes which have gone before, the volumes which we know, love and have signed up for. All of them get into a terrible muddle about important things like the nature of the trinity (the sort of muddles which used to cause riots in Constantinople back in the early centuries of the Christian era) - and the author of this book, presumably a Calvinist, takes them very seriously to task. Fights them on their own ground.

All of them started out in the USA in the 19th century, seemingly from people with a Protestant, not to say Calvinist background. About the same time as we were having various evangelical & ecclesiastical revivals over here. But unlike over there, our revivals were more by way of the last wrigglings of something on the way out, the death throes, rather than any kind of a rebirth or renewal.

All of them hold to some very bizarre beliefs and it is hard to imagine how or why people would sign up to such stuff - say around 5 million of them, maybe half in the USA, taking the four cults together.

But the author is a sensible chap in other ways and understands that these cults do have something to offer which his own church, and others like it, do not. That they, for example, provide havens for certain kinds of needy or unstable people. So he provides practical guidance for those who seek to wean cultists back to the true faith, guidance which includes warning the lay off tricky theological disputes about such matters as the nature of Satan or the provision of ice cream in heaven. Leave that sort of thing to the professionals, although readers might care to see what Hašek has to say on the latter point (see, for example, p138 of the Heinmann English edition of 1973).

PS 1: I once knew a chap who made a point of inviting JW's in occasionally. He and and his wife would sit back with the vino while the JW's were invited to strut their stuff in the middle of the room, by way of an alternative to television. Whereas on the few occasions when I have had the chance, I just gave them the brush of.

PS 2: I remember the rather expensive looking Christian Science Reading Room in the Cambridge of my youth, although I don't remember ever getting a satisfactory explanation from my parents as to what it was all about. Perhaps like me until recently, they had written them off as cranks and not bothered to inquire further. But it does seem to have come down in the world as Google takes me to a rather scruffy blue shop at the wrong end of Regent Street (streetview 52.1998447,0.1267997), whereas the expensive looking shop I remember, all light brown oak paneling, was somewhere else, perhaps Sidney Street. According to my memory anyway. I shall have to make enquiries.

Hook Road

Having delivered the trolley of the last post back to its home, proceeded in an orderly fashion to Hook Road Arena for the Sunday car booter, having missed for some weeks now, for one reason or another. Not a particularly large one, with what seemed like a lot of sellers for the number of buyers, but the stock was better than average, with the haul illustrated coming in for £12.75.

Spread said to come from Peru. Bread made from rye by a Polish flavoured baker and not bad at all; a sort of wimpish version of pumpernickel. War & Peace a complicated war game, here from the Avalon Hill Game Company of Baltimore, MD and played with small cardboard markers on up to four rather handsome boards. Maybe a complicated version of the 'Risk' which we used to play in years gone by - but also more educational in that you would learn a lot about the Napoleonic wars from playing this game. Pile of childrens' history books in French, a foreign version of the sort of thing that I used to have as a child. Lots of colour pictures of men with large moustaches doing dreadful deeds with battle axes and such like; just the thing for small boys. The father was not too pleased that his daughter knocked them down to me from £1 each to £5 for the dozen (or more) but, to give him his due, he honoured the sale. Twin Peaks DVD bought from an interestingly diverse family in honour of the very important conference that I once attended in the Washington State hotel which is featured in the opening credits. A sample thimble (see below). The long red scarf was a snip at 75p - vastly less than the cost of all the wool which someone put into it. Worn, I imagine, for decoration more than warmth, despite all that wool.

Things that got away included a boxed set of the Morse novels (books that is, rather than DVDs), still more or less in their plastic. What looked like the dispersal of a large & long standing collection of thimbles, the owner of which would not give me his email address and I did not think to give him mine, despite carrying a supply. A large, nearly new. laminated teak chopping board at a fiver (I am sure I have seen such things in shops for ten times that, but maybe they are out of fashion as I cannot find the thing in question this morning), but rather heavy to carry and I decided that it would be too much, given what I had already taken on. A rather splendid set of brass cooking weights at £35. Maybe started off their working lives in a shop. Nice to have, but not at that price or anything near it.

PS 1: the Avalon Hill Game Company seems to have moved from the real world to the heritage world. All Google can turn up is lots of peoples offering their games for sale, not the Avalon people themselves.

PS 2: an unwelcome intruder called widevine was vetted on start up by Norton this morning. Then there was a subtle but imperfect change in the blogger user interface. Are these things related? Will it be off to the BT help desk later today?

Trolley 7

I am not sure whether this one should really count, having been retrieved from only just outside the perimeter of the Sainsbury's estate at Kiln Lane, from gmaps reference 51.339491, -0.257245. But I have, anyway.

I learn from this trolley that, first, the wheels can come off. Back right in this illustration. The vibration caused by wheeling off-piste can do the welding in. Or perhaps an axle. And, second, they do bother to mend them. There must be, somewhere in the system, a hospital for sick trolleys.

A hospital run by and for Sainsbury's or have they outsourced this particular function? Do they send them back to Warwick for attention there?

But what they do not do is keep stocks of all the parts of all the trolleys that have ever been, as this new wheel does not match the old. Although, to be fair, one would not have noticed if they did.

Also interesting to find this alley, tucked between the filling station exit and the back gardens of the houses adjoining the Kiln Road exit onto East Street. An alley which I must have passed many times, at least on the Epsom side of the exit, but have never taken proper note of before. A handy place for the residents to park, with parking presumably prohibited on East Street itself. Was there some unseemly wrangle with the Sainsbury's lawyers about rights of way and such when they were negotiating their purchase of the Kiln Lane site (once brick kilns and after that a place for the Civil Defence people to play at nuclear war)?

PS 1: civil defence was big when I was a child, when people worried about nuclear bombs in a way that they do not now, but it does not seem to exist any more. Just a shadow existence in outfits such as that advertised at http://britishcivildefencecorps.btck.co.uk/. And typing this, I vaguely remember a short period as a child, maybe early teens, when I was really worried about such things. Would we still be around tomorrow? This being not long after the missile crisis in Cuba.

PS 2: I did not know until today about the private understanding noted in Wikipedia: 'after a period of tense negotiations an agreement was reached between Kennedy and Khrushchev. Publicly, the Soviets would dismantle their offensive weapons in Cuba and return them to the Soviet Union, subject to United Nations verification, in exchange for a US public declaration and agreement never to invade Cuba without direct provocation. Secretly, the US also agreed that it would dismantle all US-built Jupiter MRBMs, which were deployed in Turkey and Italy against the Soviet Union but were not known to the public'. I had been vaguely aware of the existence of same, but it was more as a point of propaganda than of actual knowledge.

Trolley 6 (reprised)

Collected the next day, when inspection revealed that the trolley was made by the same Wanzl people who do the M&S trolleys but that the cunning plastic lacquer finished galvanising described in their web site was not proof against everything. For some reason there was some rust at the bottom of the shopping basket.

An odd place for the thing to get scraped, so perhaps a flaw in manufacturing?

And given that Wanzl do the trolleys for both Sainsbury's and M&S there might be a case for a referral to the Monopolies Commission, or whatever that august body is called these days. Or maybe some organ of the EC? Maybe a memo. to Alexander Italianer at Directorate General VI (COMP) (aka competition) is indicated?

Reference 1: http://www.wanzl.com/en_EN/.

Reference 2: http://ec.europa.eu/competition/index_en.html.

Trolley 6

A Sainsbury's trolley on Clay Hill Green, quite some way, more than a mile, from the Kiln Lane store from which it probably came.

Not convenient to deal with it then and there so parked it under a tree for collection later. This gave us space to speculate about how the thing came to be there, without reaching any satisfactory conclusion.

Graves

To London last week for a swift tour of various metropolitan treasures.

Pulled a Bullingdon at Vauxhall Cross and then across Vauxhall Bridge, from where one could view the inflatable and semi-submersible hippopotamus moored just upstream of the bridge, presumably part of the same art project which once gave us a herd of brightly coloured model elephants. All good fun and, as far as I am concerned, a great deal better than pickling bovine body parts for our inspection. Or even ovine body parts.

On to get rather lost at Victoria, where ripping out a block opposite the station has resulted in much confusion, at least for me. And which on this occasion resulted in my passing a stand at the Queen Mother Sports Centre, cycling round the ripped out block at Victoria, not to find a stand on the way, and then going back to the Sports Centre to park up. Walked back to Victoria to find that the second treasure, Baby Ben, seems to have had to make way for the same redevelopment. The site of many a rendez-vous in the past, so I hope that it gets reinstated in due course.

On to the third treasure at the top of the Duke of York steps, the grave of Ribbentrop's dog. A grave granted, it seems, by the bounty of the then Queen Mother in 1938. Which struck me as rather odd; a lapse of Royal Judgement, assuming, that is, that there ever was any. To which the riposte was that we might not like Ribbentrop, to the point of hanging him six years later, but there was no need to take it out on his dog, which still deserved decent burial.

I then start to wonder about who exactly does deserve decent burial. The burial places of most people vanish into oblivion after, say, fifty or a hundred years, which is fine and proper as far as I am concerned. But those of other people might get more permanent memorials, mausoleums even (see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/captain-mausoleum.html), although there are exceptions as I seem to recall that Atilla the Hun went to some considerable trouble and expense to make sure that his last resting place was unknown, unvisited and unviolated, to the extent of temporarily diverting a river while he was buried in its bed and then killing off all the chaps that did it so that they did not live to tell the tale. Maybe a yarn from 'Decline and Fall'?

One angle is that any human being should be buried decently, however awful they might have been in life. Another is that one does not want to bury bad people in such a way that their burial places could become shrines for the next generation of bad people. I guess the answer is that it all depends on the mood of the times.

And so onto the last treasure, Stanfords, not the quaint old-world place that it once used to be, but still the best place for maps in town. I still like maps in books - atlases - and maps on folded paper, maps which meet needs for me which are not met by maps on computers, despite the fine service offered by the likes of google maps. But I suppose I shall have to move  on one day as the likes of google maps have taken a great bite out of the demand for paper maps, which will eventually go into some downward, possibly terminal, spiral.

Pulled the second Bullingdon of the day from William IV Street and cycle from thence off to Waterloo Bridge. Picked up a leaflet from some JW's (http://www.jw.org/en/) at the station, of which more in due course. And so home.

PS: I find this morning that the Queen Mother in question was named for a small castle in Germany, now a restaurant, which may have contributed to the lapse. See http://www.burg-teck-alb.de/.

Trainers

Dedicated readers may recall that the trainer saga started for me with a false start around March 7th 2009 (reference 1). This was followed around February 9th 2010 (reference 2) by my actually buying a pair of trainers in Niketown, my very first and possibly very best pair of trainers. Very comfortable and slightly, but not too flashy. At this time BH was quite impervious to suggestions that maybe she might like trainers too.

But all good things come to an end, and after a while another pair was needed. And then another, by which time I had had enough of the noise and glitz of Niketown. After a bit of a wobble in JD Sports (the one that got bashed about a bit in the riots a few years ago), I settled on the Merrells with which I have been ever since, despite their only lasting about 6 months and despite what might mistake as a cuddly independent actually being a subsidiary of the Wolverine Corporation (see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=wolverine+cambridge).

The pair I am wearing now is starting to run out of puff after about 8 months, with the heel assemblies starting to fall apart (despite using a shoe horn) and with signs of tears around the front ends, signs which will soon morph into the things themselves, from reference to referent. So off to Kingston where they did not have the necessary 12s but where they did suggest that maybe something off was appropriate as 8 months was not very long and we were sent up to discuss the matter with the guru upstairs. We explained that we had bought the things in Piccadilly and that we did not have the receipt, to be told that the best thing to do was to take the corresponding credit card bill (which we had kept back at home) back to Piccadilly. Back home to turn the bill up, to find that actually we had bought the trainers in question from Kingston - which we might have known beforehand had I bothered to check here.

Then some days later, having been persuaded by the guru to join the Cotswold Customer Club (CCC, not to be confused with Carshalton Cricket Club of which I am not and never have been a member), I decided to buy the things online, for collection at Kingston - and to be disappointed to find that there was no discount available for CCC. But I was phoned up half an hour later by a pleasant young man from Kingston who explained that there had been a computer error and that the desired trainers were not going to be available in-store for collection at the appointed time, but that, at no extra charge, he would cast around the Cotswold empire and have them delivered to my door in a few days. And in due course, they turned up, from Brighton.

In the meantime, the idea having been maturing for near five years, BH had decided that perhaps she would have some trainers and that perhaps she would get them from the Kingston Cotswolds when I collected mine. But best laid plans collapsed, with the result that we actually visited the closing Blacks, as  mentioned on the 9th September.

So we have now arrived at a happy ending, with brand new, his and hers trainers, both from Morrells, both in the same brown boxes, as illustrated. For some reason or other, her trainers are both rather smaller and rather dearer than mine - £15 dearer than the £80 that mine seem to be held at.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=+the+poet+who+doubles.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=dose+of+Michelangelo.

PS: the in-post reference does not work quite as intended as the search terms find both this post and the target post, an infinite regression in the making. http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/a-two-part-invention.html works rather better but is slightly more fiddly to generate.

Invisible mend

Spotted the other day in Ewell village, accompanied by a chap who was clearly pleased with his work and was happy to tell me all about it.

We start with various cracks running up the building.

Rendering stripped off around the cracks, which turn out to caused by serious cracks in the underlying brickwork. Patching over with a bit of new rendering is not going to do the trick.

So he comes up with the following. Every third course, strip a horizontal stripe of rendering off the mortar line, across the crack. Strip out the mortar itself to a depth of about an inch. Firmly inject some brown plastic goo into the back of the resulting slot to a depth of about a third of an inch. Place special bar on top of the goo, the same sort of ribbed steel bar used for reinforcing concrete. Inject further brown goo on top of the bar, with the goo being  finished off at the face of the brickwork. Leave it to go off - with the brown goo setting to something extremely hard and cunningly designed not to pull away from the dry brickwork and mortar along the way. To bond good and proper at all points. I did not think to ask whether one wets the slot before putting in the goo - as one would if one was repointing with mortar.

In due course, patch the surface rendering. In due course, repaint the whole wall. And if one has done it right there is nothing of crack to be seen. And nothing will be seen for years to come. All done from a ladder with a little help from Bosch (see http://www.bosch-pt.co.in for the finest power tools in or from the sub-continent).

It all seemed rather clever. Also rather expensive, but a good deal cheaper than cutting out great chunks of brickwork, if not the whole wall.

PS: but did he check the foundations? Is the whole building moving about? Has it stopped moving about? If it has stopped moving about, why does one need such a serious mend? Visit to TB for a serious discussion clearly indicated.

Gabular Anne

A couple of weeks ago were prompted to chase up a bit of family history, that is to say some much loved stories from Canada, stories with the same sort of status there as Winnie-the-Pooh used to have here when I was a child. To wit, Anne of Green Gables. Being girlie books, not books that I ever read myself, but they were in the house.

Despite her fame, the web waves are ruled by Amazon. We opted for the 5-disc collector's edition of a Canadian television version offered by Sullivan Entertainment, which for some reason came in Dutch packaging. Fortunately, the original English soundtrack survived and the Dutch packaging, apart from the words, was very like an English packaging and we were able to play the things. So we got three films, which may have been episodic in origin, one corresponding to the original and most famous book, one drawn from a number of follow-on books and one made up by the film people. I think it is fair to say that, as one might expect, the first film was best and the last was still good but starting to struggle a bit, being reduced to a cloak and dagger sub-plot, a sure sign of a television series which is running out of puff. But one which has held its price quite well, with the collector's edition coming in at more than £20. The demand must still be there.

For a girlie story, I got on with it quite well; a fine bit of North American syrup which warmed the heart. Amongst other things, a Canadian version of our own Jane Austen adaptations. But like in those adaptations, it is hard to strike the right note with the film setting. The idea is that Anne was mostly raised on a small farm. The catch was that this small farm seemed to support a very genteel life style with no apparent effort. There was a lot of cooking but there were no dearths and no plagues. There didn't seem to be much in the way of farm labourers. There didn't seem to be much in the way of farm animals. Whereas I would have thought that small farms in Prince Edward Island would be like small farms in the rest of the world, then and now, unremitting hard work, often ending in disaster of one sort or another, at the very least falling into the hands of the money lenders. But perhaps I have missed the point: perhaps life was hard in turn of the century (1900 not 2000) rural Canada and people did not need to be told about that. They wanted a fairy story to cheer them up, a bit in the way that we went in for very jolly films during and after the second world war. Lots of song, dance and fluff and certainly none of the kitchen sink stuff to which we moved during the sixties, when the miseries and horrors of the war were safely behind us.

I dare say that the books are not quite the same, perhaps being a bit less sugary, a bit more realistic and bearing the same relation to the adaptations as the Jane Austen books do to theirs.

I note in passing that the stories appear to contain a lot of autobiographical material, to the extent of the heroine, Anne, becoming a writer of books drawn from her, that is to say both the heroine's and the author's, background in Prince Edward Island. Something one gets just a bit of in our own Agatha Christie, who is, for example, self indulgent to the extent of introducing slightly eccentric lady crime writers into some of her later books, all following the self-regarding tradition of the bard who was quite fond of introducing sub-plays into his super-plays.

We also got a Vintage paperback of the original book, helpfully packaged with a glossary, recipes and other collateral material. So having done the DVD's and BH being engaged with the book, I was moved to go back to the internet and persevered through Amazon to get a choice of three important web sites.

There is the place itself, commemorated for tourists at http://www.tourismpei.com/anne-of-green-gables.

There is the museum at http://www.annemuseum.com/. Not sure what standing this has in the Gabular world.

And then there is the author herself at http://www.lmmontgomery.ca/. which seems to be a much less commercial version of http://www.agathachristie.com/. The shrine proper.

Admonished?

I read fairly recently a short piece about how not to blog and I am fairly sure that it came with an advertisement for a guardian master class, but all I can find now is an advertisement for a masterclass in blogging for absolute beginners, this in itself not being a very good advertisement, to my mind anyway, for a high standard of usage of our language. See http://www.theguardian.com/guardian-masterclasses.

But I do remember that the piece told me not to do lots of things which I do all the time, in particular including all kinds of arcane and useless bits of knowledge which are only likely to be of any interest to me myself. A rather tiresome form of showing-off as far as everybody else is concerned. I must try and run the piece to ground, but in the meantime I am very impressed by the amount of interest there must be out there in learning about all aspects of creative writing. I am not alone! Maybe I will go in for adult education yet!

A two part dream

A dream this morning during which I had the strong sense of having had it before, perhaps earlier the same night or perhaps the night before. A dream reverting to my gap year, perhaps also picking up yesterday's reference to Spanish.

I was a very junior concrete technician out in the jungle. Very green and steamy. Far enough out that the rule of law and order was a long way away. A large construction project, by virtue of my presence involving concrete, although there was no wet concrete in the dream, which took place inside the sprawling project accommodation sheds, brown wooden affairs, overgrown and dilapidated garden sheds, which also included the concrete laboratory, or at least what passed for one in the jungle.

The workforce was Spanish and it seemed to be expected that the small number of English concrete technicians would provide their supervision, despite their more or less complete absence of Spanish. No engineers, either Spanish or English to be seem. A fairly rough & rowdy workforce and the cramped & slummy dormitory style accommodation included plenty of wives and other women. Catching rats & mice both for the pot and for pleasure seemed to be an important part of the life.

Being rather young, I found all this rather intimidating. But I also wanted to do my duty and was very concerned that nobody seemed to be bothering about making test cubes out of the concrete, the concrete being poured that is, not the concrete that was left over. A vague sense that we had the moulds (see http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/new-patio-phases-ia-and-ib.html or ask Mr. Google about concrete test cubes, to whom I am grateful for the illustration). Not good enough just to do the humble slump test.

But there was no proving tank - it being the custom to store the maturing cubes under water, this adding a significant 25% or something to their final compressive strength - and no crusher. The fresh cubes would have to be shipped back to base somehow, and the best that I could do would be to label them in such a way that a cube could be tracked back to the bit of the construction of which it was a sample. I think one used special wax crayons for the purpose. Something which I once famously failed to do for a cube taken from a very unsatisfactory batch of concrete used to stick together two successive, pre-cast segments of, I think, the Royal Oak to Westbourne Park section of Westway. See gmaps 51.520487, -0.195270. Possibly a mix known as B¾, B for it being weaker than an A mix and ¾ for the maximum size of aggregate. D1½ being the rubbishy stuff used for the huge pile caps around the top of deep piles.

It was all very difficult and the workforce seemed to be much more interested in rats and women than in cubes, despite all our attempts at (outdoor) briefing sessions before kick-off in the morning. A strong sense that it was all out of control and that there little that us Brits could do about it.

PS 1: I now find that one can also do the referencing trick for Google maps. Click here. Maybe there is life yet!

PS 2: Facebook has just seen fit to remind me that I failed to observe the world suicide prevention day yesterday. See http://www.iasp.info/wspd/, where I find that I have missed the opportunity to to download e-cards or postcards in any or all of over 50 languages.

Very slow on the uptake

I include a lot of soft references to prior posts, for example 'see 18th March 2008 in the other place', and have often thought how much better it would be if I included hard references, without troubling myself to look into the matter.

Yesterday afternoon, in St. James's Park as it happens, it suddenly dawned on me that maybe I could do this, at least for this place, where one can display one post at a time. So: see http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/los-amigos.html.

Other place not so bright. One can do http://www.pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/2008_03_01_archive.html and one can do the rather clumsy http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Broadband+failure+on+Friday+afternoon. But not quite the same thing. Maybe one day there will be another eureka moment, although against that it has taken a very long time for this one. Perhaps I should try the rose garden in Regent's Park.

Three novelties

That is to say, three things which I did not know before.

First, I read in the Guardian that the domestic staff in the better New York hotels are properly organised and have got themselves proper wages. So what are they doing wrong here?

Second, genetic algorithms. I have come across this phrase from time to time, to be impressed but not informed. But this morning I read in Kurzweil that a genetic algorithm is one which contains lots of parameters. One runs the algorithm lots of times, varying the parameters slightly each time and selecting for the parameter sets that work. After a while you get to find out which parameter set does your business, without having had the bother of exploration yourself. You have also missed out on the experience and the knowledge, but that might be less important than getting a quick result. The idea of the name being that the parameter set is comparable to the set of genes carried by an individual. The idea perhaps now coming of age, with computers being cheap enough for the amount of processing involved to be affordable.

It sounds rather like the sort of thing that the Treasury used to do with its economic model, although perhaps not on the industrial scale envisaged by Kurzweil. It also sounds like the sort of thing that might help my own endeavours, with my own algorithm running to more than a thousand parameters, so perhaps I should make time for it. The sort of thing one might dish out to a research assistant if one had one.

Third, vowels. Yesterday I read in Hurwell (on which more in due course) that vowels can be considered as occupying a continuous space, rather in the way of colours. That choosing the set of vowels that any particular language uses is rather like choosing the set of colours that one is going to talk about. Some cultures are very hot on shades of white and grey and other cultures are very hot on shades of blue and green. All rather arbitrary, but the idea is to come up with a reasonable number of vowels which are both distinguishable and pronouncable, which are decently scattered around the vowel space, with one needing a decent number of vowels in order to be able to generate a decent number of words, something which is needed by any self-respecting language. Hurwell's point is that there are lots of ways to do this, and the thousands of languages knocking around the world exhibit a wide range of solutions. There is, to be fair, a fair amount of overlap, but there are a lot of differences too.

English, it seems, has lots of vowels. Or perhaps I should say vowel sounds - Hurwell does not just score the five we all learn about at school.