Anxious of Ashstead

Dream time again. Possibly prompted by my muddle between left and right when directing a pleasant young black lady, whom I took to be an agency nurse on her first assignment to Epsom, from Station Approach to Epsom Hospital, an uncomplicated walk of around 15 minutes. Only two turnings to worry about. In the event, she told me not to worry about it and sailed off, quite happily, in the right direction.

I am on a train, heading north through Leatherhead, through Ashstead and Ewell West. The train is heading to London, but I am not sure whether I am going to Ashstead or Ewell West, having got hopelessly muddled between the two, Maybe I would do better to get off at Epsom and catch a taxi.

I have two of the small grey suitcases which I used to use quite a lot, starting in 1970 or so. Some bought new, some bought car booter. The once excellent, grey fibreglass suitcases which once used to be made & sold by Globetrotter. I think they now sell silly luxury goods out of a shop in the West End, Bond Street or somewhere like that. One small, usually used for papers, one slightly larger usually used for pyjamas, but on this occasion more or less empty. In the muddle about where to get off, I almost leave the larger one behind.

I get off at Ewell West, to find a station not much like the Ewell West I know, although it does have a station forecourt into which cars and taxis can pull. I associate now to Worcester Park, a station which I have only ever rarely got on or off at. But forecourt of this station presently empty. There is a group of us wanting taxis. One pulls in and I, rather unreasonably & rudely, claim priority. But I have no idea of what address to give the driver and he eventually gives up on me. Also rather rudely.

I retire to a place where I can get my papers out of the small suitcase, two rather scruffy sets of papers on short Treasury tags. There should be a couple of folds of A5 paper, each of which contained the name if not the address of the company which I am supposed to be visiting, probably to provide advice about something or other. (I used to work in a part of the civil service which provided free advice about IT to other parts of the service, civil and otherwise. Sometimes our advice was helpful. Sometimes we were just the warm up act for proper consultants, proper consultants to whom you paid lots of money and most of whom did not pay lots of tax). Can't find either of them.

I try to remember the name of either the company or the name of the road in which they have their offices. Various names seem to be on the tip of my tongue but nothing comes out. Except Dorking Road which I know is wrong. Dorking Road being the name of the road which does most of the trip between Epsom Station and Epsom Hospital. I associate now to the once thriving, now defunct, Bytes Computer Services outside Ewell West Station.

A lady from my section passes and asks if she can help. I bawl her out (in my quiet sort of way, never having been much into bawling in the private sector way), quite unfairly, for losing my papers. Exit lady, more or less in tears.

Still no progress.

Wake up.

Perusing the blog posts turned up by the search term 'anxious', it seems that I report dreams of this sort on a reasonably regular basis, with a good proportion being about running meetings or other events of that sort which are going wrong. Clearly a matter of some importance. I offer a sample at reference 1 below.

Thinking it about it now, I cannot remember an occasion on which I lost the address in quite this way. But I did turn up to meetings in far flung parts of the country, on the wrong day, on at least two occasions.

And perusing google, I find that Bytes Computer Services are alive and well, having simply moved from West Ewell to Leatheread. A company which I think started out, maybe in the eighties of the last  century, providing cabling and PCs for Surrey SMEs, at a time when a lot of such companies were just starting out into the world of IT. See reference 2.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/anxious-times.html.

Reference 2: http://www.bytes.co.uk/.

Big doughnuts

Pleased to read today that tokamaks - fusion power units in the shape of a torus or doughnut - seem to be coming of age, with an international project called ITER planning to generate maybe 3,000MW from one (or maybe two) by 2040, quite a respectable sized power station.

The catch is that by then the ITER project (see reference 1) will have been in the pipeline for around half a century and will have clocked up $40bn costs. No idea how the $40bn does on the buck-per-megawatt front, but at least it is generating serious amounts of electricity, so a big leap forward from the effort at Didcot.

The new news is that some bright young things at MIT think that they can do much better. See reference 2.

So maybe our children are going to have the power needed to drive their toasters in the mornings after all.

But what happened to a rather different sort of fusion called IFR which Monbiot thought was the business back in 2011? See reference 3. Hopefully Cameron and his crew are on the case, as I don't suppose that Corbie is.

PS: interested to see from wikipedia that most of the biggest power stations in the world are hydro, with the Three Gorges well in front. Nuclear well up there too, so we have not all followed the bizarre German example.

Reference 1: https://www.iter.org/. As well as power they also offer a nattily animated version of the illustration above on their machine tab.

Reference 2: http://www.kurzweilai.net/mit-designs-small-modular-efficient-fusion-power-plant/.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=monbiot+station.

Wisley 3

A rather striking plant we came across at the beginning of our visit. Rudbeckia maxima according to the ticket, a sort of aster.

Wisley 2

A recently flowered hosta of mathematical bent. And I thought that hostas flowered in the spring.

Wisley 1

On Tuesday to Wisley, about six weeks since our last visit (see reference 1), with our visit to the rather different Ventnor Botanic Garden in between (see reference 2).

Perhaps in tribute to the informal tone and the hydrangeas of this last, we closed this visit with visit to the hydrangeas in the woods out the back, behind the garden shop. Very nice they were too, with rather more oddities than were to be found at Ventnor, including a climbing hydrangea.

Rather more contrived was the coloured water in two of the ponds, one blue and one black. At first we thought that the colour was just that of the lining of the ponds but on closer inspection we decided that dye had been put in the water itself. Striking, but you need to have moving water, some kind of a water feature to make it work. All a bit too complicated for replication at home. Not to mention the complication of sourcing the non-toxic dyes.

Another oddity was a euphorbia in the cactus part of the big greenhouse. But wikipedia puts me right, it pointing out that there has been convergent evolution between the euphorbiae of South Africa and the cacti of South America, all mixed up in this display. Wikipedia also points out that one of the euphorbiae common in this country, E. lathyris, is commonly called spurge because of the spurgative effects of its seeds, taken orally. Our naval aunt used to call it the mole plant, a mystery now cleared up, having just read that it is believed to deter moles and gophers.

The big greenhouse also contained a small but very extravagant display of begonias, the sort of begonia that you grow for their leaves rather than their flowers, and a rather larger display of fuschias.

Outside the big greenhouse they had planted at least two sorts of meadows, the idea being that they were cut just once a year and then had to manage under their own steam. No water and no weeding. The meadows had been carefully seeded with exotics and were not like the water meadows you grow cows on at all, but they looked rather well just the same.

The Alice in Wonderland theme that we had noticed on the previous visit was very much in evidence. All rather tiresome to my mind and I was not at all convinced that the many small children around the place were very impressed either. But the mums liked it. And there were a great many of them, more I think than I have ever seen there before. Fortunately Wisley is a big place and one could easily get away from them when one had had enough.

Clearly the RHS management committee knew what it was up to when it acquired such a large plot of land on the southern outskirts of London. Although checking their site this morning the story seems to be that it is only 60 acres - while I would have guessed a lot more than that, say 600 acres, roughly a square mile. However, a quick peek at gmaps suggests that it is very roughly 500 by 500 yards, so the people at Wisley do indeed know their own size. Strange that my guess was so wrong.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/wisley-1.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/botanic-1.html.

Sokalism

I have been entertained this evening by the story of paper by a Professor Alan Sokal, a physicist from New York University. The paper was called  'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity' and was published in the 'Science Wars' issue of spring/summer 1996 of 'Social Text'.

The paper is characterised by the inclusion of lots of quotations, names, footnotes, references, fancy sounding language and - twaddle (see illustration and reference 1). It seems that the editors of Social Text were rather lazy and published the thing as submitted, perhaps overly keen to include a paper by a real scientist in their magnum opus.

Social Text was, it seems, a journal of importance at that time and has survived to be found at reference 2. And I had thought that Duke University was a respectable university, well known among pencil engineers, despite its location. See reference 3.

I have been wondering how much time the professor put into the production of this elaborate spoof. Did he write it all out himself or did he get one his students to do a cut and paste job from somewhere? Are all the references genuine? He might have thought that the editors were fair game, and he may well have been right, but it does seem to be rather a big production. Did he not have any real work to do?

But he did get the satisfaction of spawning a famous controversy, famous enough to get its own article in wikipedia (see reference 4). Not so famous as to have reached into the murky depths of this part of Epsom though, as I am fairly sure I have not come across him or his work before.

With thanks for the tip to Messrs. Hohwy and Frith.

Reference 1: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2_noafterword.pdf.

Reference 2: https://www.dukeupress.edu/social-text.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/a-disappointment.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair.

Chicken of the woods

Back in 2011 I clocked a fine specimen of benefightus spongiferus down Horton Lane (see reference 1). Its host was demolished in March of last year (see reference 2), but today I clocked what might be another, illustrated left, just before I turned in to Longmead Road, as I left West Ewell.

I did not notice it last time I was by, probably some time last week, so perhaps it has been brought on apace by the warm, humid weather.

Its identification is slightly complicated by something very similar having been identified as chicken of the woods by a mushroom expert co-opted by the Midsomer people for episode 2 of season 4. An identification confirmed by google and wikipedia, with this last offering laetiporus sulphureus as its proper or scientific name. They also point to fried chicken and boiled chicken variants.

However, my specimen was not found in the woods, rather by the side of Chessington Road, well known for the fine roses which are often to be seen at around 51.354709, -0.270772, just to the Chessington side of the Chesterfield Road exit, but not for its fine chickens. So I shall stick to benefightus spongiferus, or perhaps benefitus spongiferrous for the sake of variety.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=massif.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/habitat-destruction.html.