Hot roofs

I am pleased to be able to report that Epsom & Ewell Borough Council was, for the fourth year running, able to obtain a New Year's Day slot in the Surrey Police helicopter schedule, for a hot roof survey of the Stamford, Court and Town wards.

The survey took place between 0300 and 0400 this morning, involving 7 passes of the area and detecting 47 hot roofs, that is to say roof spaces containing arc-lighted cannabis nurseries. The helicopter was able to lower ultra-sound snooping devices down the chimneys of 38 of them and I understand that all these devices are now successfully reporting back to base on a regular basis.

Uniformed officers will be attending the other 9 roofs in due course.

Trolleys 203a and 203b

Trolleys 203a and 203b by the West Street footbridge over the Waterloo line. Captured and returned to a near empty trolley stack outside the Sainsbury's front door. Not something that happens very often, so clearly a bumper day for them.

While Wickes were giving three Christmas trees away. I think that had it been a half dozen, I would have gone and got the car. One could make something of a display with six Christmas trees on the front lawn.

And on the way to the footbridge there had been a tweet of two sparrows. A commonplace bird when I was young, but quite rare in our garden here at Epsom.

Home via the Screwfix bridge, passing yet another trolley, but I let it go against some future occasion. Cottage pie and white cabbage called.

Trolley 202

The pair to trolley 201, a Wilko trolley, somewhat bent. As if some rather heavy youth had stood on the front of the basket in order to climb over a wall or something of that sort. But it still worked, and even if Wilko did not want it in their stack, it was their responsibility to dispose of it responsibly, so it was returned and scored.

As it happened, the relevant stack at Wilko was empty, so I neither recovered an additional pound, which would have represented 100% profit on the morning's speculation nor checked whether bent, it still stacked.

I wondered about scoring the fake stone work as a fake, but the rules committee, consulted by text, ruled that I could not score both a fake and a trolley with the same snap. Fake stone work which has always rather irritated me; not because it is fake, but because the design does not work, it has not been faked properly. See, for example, the failure to continue the joins between the blocks of stones on the returns to the arch. Careless or sloppy detailing - from which one deduces that the builders of affordable flats are not prepared to shell out on proper architects: do enough to keep the heritage people and the council at bay, but no more.

Trolley 201

The new trolley season opened this morning with an M&S trolley which was captured in the passage between the High Street and Epsom Station.

It cost me a pound to secure its release from its neighbour bottom left, but I did recover the pound from the stack at M&S.

Jezebel

Following a festive viewing of reference 2, I have been taking a peek at reference 1, comparing and contrasting the two versions while warm, as is my custom, and have come across a reference to Jezebel in chapter XIII, about how the dogs would not eat her hands.

So curious, I thought I would turn her up.

Larousse told me that she was the creation of Elie, whom I thought might be Elijah. However, neither appears in the table of contents of my Bible, so I guessed Kings, which turned out to be correct, with Jezebel turning up in I Kings 21:23. But this was only Elijah making threats and I was unable to track down the place where he made them good.

So I was reduced to following the Wikipedia chain, and one of the references there took me to II Kings 9:30-35. Where I read that she was indeed thrown out of the window to be eaten by the dogs of the street, who left nothing but the skull, the feet and the palms of her hands. I associate to the jaws of foxes which can, it seems, crunch up the bones of animals much bigger than themselves, at least while they are fresh. Too hard once they dry out. But it is not explained why the dogs baulked at the palms, the question which had sparked the interest.

Back with Wikipedia, it seems that her crime was that, as a Phoenician princess, she had worship rights in the palace of her husband, rather as Catholic consorts had worship rights in the palaces of English kings, but she rather abused them by wholesale promotion of her faith and its priests. After losing a trial by miracles to our Lord on the top of Mount Carmel, things went badly wrong for her and there was much slaughter, including her own defenestration.

The things that people do in the name of their lords.

Reference 1: Crooked House - Agatha Christie - 1950. Chapter XIII in particular.

Reference 2: Crooked House - Gilles Paquet-Brenner, Julian Fellowes, Agatha Christie - 2017.

Christmas grotto

Last Friday to see the grotto at Chessington Garden Centre, it being much less after Christmas than the £15 or so you pay before Christmas. I am told that if you want a good slot you need to book, with booking opening about six months in advance. By the time we got there, there were certainly places to stack waiting children, but nobody in them.

The main entrance to the grotto proper, past all the displays of various kinds of Christmas goods, not yet dismantled, but some of them discounted.

The first tableau, mushroom themed.

I think that all the tableaux were themed for some story or other, although we did not always know which story. This one is the mad hatter's tea party.

No prizes for getting this one. Notice the large amount of material needed to provide the background drapery.

The stable.

This, I am advised, is a grinch. Getting near the exit.

Not altogether sure what would have happened here before Christmas, but it may have been to do with the collection of photographs taken at strategic points along the way.

A souvenir brochure, including games to amuse and slots to hold photographs. BH also acquired an empty, Christmas tree shaped tin for biscuits, but this was confiscated on exit on the grounds that the check-out staff were unable to price it.

All in all, a major undertaking, which grows from year to year as the stock of grotto-suitable stuff accumulates. We got the idea that it was the work of a group of enthusiasts, who got cracking in the middle of each year, rather like the groups that do floats for the west country carnivals. Or perhaps like the groups that put on amateur opera and amateur dramatics every year. Also that there was a charity angle. But with the garden centre contributing a good deal of power and space, if nothing else.

I elected to return on foot, leaving BH to get the vehicle home. So down Rushett Lane and into the estate in the grounds of what had been West Park Hospital. Most of the new houses were in fact flats made out of what were the old ward blocks, and to judge by the cars parked around outside, not particularly expensive flats. There were a few scraps of health left, around the edges, perhaps in what had been clinics, occupational therapy units and such like.

Note the quality of the brick work, including special bricks with special corners up the sides of the doorways. A relic of an era when we could afford to do things with a bit more style - if with rather less knowledge and a lot less technology - than we do now.

The posh end of things was mainly represented by clusters of rather grand semi detached residences, but even these did not have much in the way of gardens, although they did have garages. With these ones backing onto what had been staff houses in the olden days.

But the mature green space with plenty of trees is a definite plus. Something by way of a garden without having to do any gardening, which probably suits most people just fine. What they have not got is anything in the way of shops or community facilities, which it seems are impossible to make pay in these days of supermarkets and, more recently, online shopping. Horton retail maybe a kilometre up the road, Old Moat Garden Centre with coffee shop much nearer. A place which also provides some occupational therapy, some of the care in the community which we so badly need. Maybe one day I will find out what the old moat was, if anything.

But they do have allotments (first noticed at reference 2), and they have now erected a deer fence. A fence with a substantial lockable (but unlocked) gate and rather less substantial plastic netting making up the fence. One wonders how long it and its wooden posts will last. Less than five years I should think.

There were more allotments taken than I remembered from my last visit, but still well short of a full house. And my impression was that, with the fence, the actual area given over to allotments has rather shrunk. Perhaps in recognition that the enthusiasm of the residents of West Park (or whatever it is now called) for gardening, does not quite match that of the eco-warriors which got the gardens put there. Not a bad spot for an allotment though and I did, once again, think of the merits of taking one of them myself, but decided that it would take out too much quality time, very much a dwindling asset these days.

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2012/12/winter-wonder-land.html. While there have been various visits to Chessington Garden Centre in the generally vicinity of Christmas, this appears to have been the last occasion on which we actually visited the grotto.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/chamonix.html.

Reference 3: https://www.theoldmoatgardencentre.org.uk/.

Near solved

From time to time, for example at reference 1, I have noticed the interesting cars parked on the hard standing in front of a house in Lower Court Road. For example, Bentleys, Lamborghinis and lady-blue Range Rovers. We have been puzzling about why this should be.

We now have an important clue in the form of a van from Sandown Coachworks, which appears to be a high end body shop. The sort of people you would go to when you bend your Bentley. Rather grander looking that the sort of place that we would use to knock a dent out of our rather battered C-max.

So maybe trusted partners are allowed to take vehicles home, pending collection by their rightful owners. Or perhaps there is a steady stream of owners who don't like to mend and simply sell, leaving said body shop with mended cars to dispose of, or allowed home as above.

I am also pleased to be able to report that the company is 'Cyber Essentials Certified under the Government's National Cyber Security Centre Scheme as we take protection of customers data seriously'.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/10/platform.html.

Reference 2: https://www.sandowncoachworks.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.cyberaware.gov.uk/.

Reference 4: https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/. Note that registration for the CyberFirst girls competition is now open. Mind boggles. One of the boys is snapped above.

Left for dead

Helped along by one Christmas present (reference 2), I have now finished reading another (refence 3), thus completing the current swing through the Everest region.

With Seaborne Beck Weathers being the pathologist from Texas whose guided tour up Everest went badly wrong.

Despite his manifest irresponsibility in climbing dangerous mountains while responsible for a young family, Weathers does manage to come across as a likeable chap who has managed to weather a pretty bad spell. And the book is a useful complement to Krakauer's earlier account, despite his full coverage of the management of calls of nature in such places. I have noticed before that people from the US seem to rather into this sort of thing - while I prefer British reticence.

He also points up the rather odd fact that people who climb mountains often talk about the exhilarating purity of the high mountains - but often have get through a great deal of squalor to get there. And while it seems that Everest is a lot better than it was in this regard, the climbing camps there still sound as if they have a great deal in common with the traveller encampments which sometimes disfigure the green spaces here in Epsom.

Some interesting thoughts about will power in connection with the postal worker who died after summitting. Not in great shape and got himself to the top by will power - which was done when he got there, leaving him nothing to come down with, always rather more dangerous than going up. Also in connection with the need to keep active and keep lethargy at bay when the cold starts to get to you: all too easy to slip away into a fatal sleep. He also tells us that human digestion more or less grinds to a halt at this altitude, so the body is burning through about three pounds of muscle a day. Is that why people look so gaunt and grim after major operations? Water is another problem, as the dry air sucks out seven litres a day, and getting that amount back in when in a freezing blizzard can be a problem. If this is what it takes to keep depression at bay the healthy way, one might do better to pop some pills. For which see reference 5.

Krakauer had rather left me with the impression that the people who pay guiding companies to take them up mountains are not really climbers at all, just hill walkers with a lot of money. Which impression was clearly rather unfair. Weathers, in common with all the other clients on his tour, had done a great deal of climbing. He was a bit old and he was not in the first division with the Hastons (dead) and Messners (alive), but he had plenty of experience and a shot at Everest was a reasonable ambition from that point of view. He also disputes Krakauer's comments about his new boots: modern high altitude boots are just shells and do not need breaking in; they either fit or they don't. Still, his new boots did not fit, despite being identical to the their predecessors, so I think I vote with Krakauer!

His laser retouched eyes breaking down and leaving him more or less blind at high altitude, probably the immediate cause of his personal disaster, seems to have been bad luck. A break down which no-one had foreseen.

But it was the depression which really did for him. A depression which first struck him down when he was a student and which he only managed to keep at bay by climbing. With an effect on his family not unlike being an alcoholic: he was just not there for far too much of the time. It seems that real men in Texas don't talk to their wives about such matters and certainly don't go to a doctor. Perhaps, in part, because he was one himself. Would he be struck off or put under supervision if he came clean?

I was surprised to read that his wife was the first person to write and thank the Nepalese pilot who managed to snatch her husband off the top of the Khumbu Icefall, a place the helicopter involved was clearly not intended to be. He had rescued a lot of people in his time, but she was the first person to write and thank him in that way.

I close with a note for those Tories doing their best to bring US-style health care to this country: Weathers is a partner in a firm of pathologists which has the contract for some Dallas hospital. The very high cost of the US medical system has the benefit for him that he can afford a much fancier life style than I would have thought a hospital pathologist here in the UK could manage. Not least taking $50,000 (and more) trips to the mountains from time to time.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/everest.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/festal-cheese.html.

Reference 3: Left for Dead: My Journey Home from Everest - Beck Weathers with Stephen G. Michaud - 2000.

Reference 4: Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster - Jon Krakauer - 1997.

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/04/belgravia.html.

The Terence

We are often told that there are many different sorts of neurons, doing all sorts of different things; a regular menagerie of them. So I thought it was time to try my hand at making one up and I have named him Terence.

By some chemical means or another, Terence maintains an internal stack, which I number from the left S1, S2, … SN where N is some number between 5 and 10, numbers which have no particular significance, but which serve to set the scene. A stack element may be set or unset. Each stack element is associated with a chemical, probably some tricky organic chemical like 5-hydroxytryptamine, so we have the array C1, C2, … CN, and in order to maintain coherence, adjacent chemicals must be distinct. It may well be that no one chemical appears in the array more than once.

At any particular time, Terence’s state is some number between 0 and N. In the case that state is zero, none of the stack elements are set. In the case that state is M, where M is in the range [1..N-1], then all the stack elements in the range [1..M] are set and all the stack elements [M+1..N] are unset. In the case that M is N, then all the stack elements are set.

There is a decay counter which counts the number of milliseconds for which Terence has been in his current state. Some kind of neural clock.

If M is positive, in the absence of any external events, stack element M will decay to unset after some number of milliseconds, a number which might be a global constant or which might depend on M, and the decay counter is set back to zero. After some further number of milliseconds, stack element M-1 will decay to unset and so on, until the entire stack is unset and the state is zero.

We call all the neurons which connect presynaptically to Terence, his neighbours. The firing of these neighbours are our external events. The firing of some of these neighbours involves the release of one of the chemicals mentioned above into their synaptic gaps.

Firing

In the case that the state is N, and the chemical is CN, then Terence will fire again and the decay counter will be set back to zero.

In the case that the state is N-1, and the chemical is CN, then stack element N will be set, Terence will fire and the decay counter will be set to zero.

Other promotion

In the case that the state is M less than N-1 and the chemical is CM+1 (C(M+1) might have been less ambiguous, but is more tiresome to type), then stack element M+1 will be set, the state will be set to M+1 and the decay counter will be set to zero.

Maintenance

In the case that the state is M less than N and the chemical is CM, then the decay counter will be set back to zero.

Demotion

In the case that the state is M less than or equal to N and the chemical is CK for some K less than M, and the stack elements for [K+1.. M] are unset and the decay counter will be set to zero.

In this way, Terence’s firing is testimony to a certain, very particular firing history of his neighbours.

A variation would be to say that once the state is N, Terence is prepped or enabled and sufficient firing of non-chemical neighbours, will fire him. That is to say we add up the corresponding synaptic weights and if there are enough of them in unit time, then Terence fires, in the normal way of neural networks on computers, for which the jargon might be the integrate and fire of reference 1.

Note that for M less than N, it would be difficult to cheat by injecting chemical M into synaptic gaps from the outside. Given the rules for the stack, one would need to be unrealistically precise about the dose and the timing, and the neuron would be stuck at or below state M. But if M were equal to N and the chemical N only occurred in that top place in the stack, then flooding the gaps with chemical N would promote or amplify Terence’s firing in the case that he was more or less prepped otherwise.

Which also gives us a couple of simple mechanisms for inhibiting Terence, one endogenous, one exogenous.

Terence’s little sister

A variation would be to downgrade Terence’s stack to a set, a set to which a logical AND was applied. Each member of the set would be set and unset roughly along the lines suggested above, but with the only unsetting being down to decay. Little sister would be prepped when all the states were set and would carry on firing when poked until there was a long enough pause in the firing for one of the states to decay.

Conclusions

It would be easy to go on elaborating Terence and his family, to make the history and the firing even more particular. But a first job is to think about what on earth Terence might be for – or even his little sister, which would be easier. Easier still, how the function Terence implements might usefully be incorporated into a computer program of the ordinary sort.

And maybe I should try reading reference 1, heavy going though it might be.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_neuron_model.

Disposal

The general idea on books these days is one book in, one book out, although there is a bit of flexibility in the upstairs study. Books are allowed on the floor there.

So when Sacks on awakenings was sent downstairs, with the book and the film together needing near a couple of inches shelf space, something had to give. And the something selected was my 1947 printing of Bertrand Russell's history of western philosophy, a copy bought second hand some years after my fathers' copy had been retired. Russell was something of a hero to people like my parents, part of that wave of relatively ordinary people who were, for the first time, able to go to university. My father even went so far as to challenge the great man at a public lecture, possibly in the US, at which the great man was most amused to find that he had been challenged by a dentist. At least, that is what my memory tells me.

And the history is famous enough to get its own Wikipedia entry at reference 3, an entry which explains that it was mostly bad philosophy, but quite entertaining enough to become a best seller, best seller enough to secure the Russell finances for life. Over the years, I have maybe read about half of it.

Notwithstanding, it had not made this particular cut, and has now received honourable burial in the outdoor compost heap, behind the copper beech screen towards the bottom of the garden. Somehow, I don't like the idea of family treasures sculling around charity shops, even those without book plates or other identification. Illustrated above for the record: a reminder that even in those hard pressed years after the second world war, standards of book production were a lot higher than they are now.

The brown stuff hanging down below it is a new-to-me sort of packaging which contained one of my Christmas presents, a bottle of the 2016 Rolly Gassmann Gewürztraminer which I first came across on the expedition noticed at reference 1 and followed up with the performance noticed at reference 2. It will do nicely for New Year's Day lunch.

The packaging seems to be made of some sort of stiffened or coated brown paper, fluffed up with some kind of stamping or cutting, with a rather odd feel to it. But it serves very well as a sort of ecological bubble wrap. It has now been put away to do service, in due course, entertaining an infant.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/trolley-hunt-2.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/wine-hunt.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Western_Philosophy.

Building lesson

Building lesson No.1 at Tunbridge Wells: the mixing and uses of bonding.

In memory of the famous occasion when I went to a builders' merchants to buy plaster and caused much laughter by not having a clue about the difference between bonding and finish plaster. A not having a clue which persisted until I got around to trying to put some on a wall. Asking the telephone was not an option in those days.

The black bucket was used as the mould for the wet plaster, and for the subsequent collection of the coin of the realm. The idea was that the green bucket was for the debris, but I think that side of things was deferred, mañana, as they say.

Feet of self, top right. Nearly time to talk the people at Cotswold again.

Heritage glass

A handsome bit of brickwork at the corner of Endell Street and Betterton Street, in Covent Garden.

Wikipedia tells me that it was once the headquarters of a stained glass operation, Lavers, Barraud and Westlake, for the second half of the nineteenth century and the first couple of decades following. With Westlake only joining the firm after they had done the bricks. Part of the gothic revival. Was the big top window once a bit of stained glass, to show what they could do?

They probably came a little late to participate in Pugin's glass, described at reference 1. In any event, no mention of any of them in the index.

Reference 1: The stained glass of A.W.N Pugin - Stanley A. Shepherd - 2009.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=pugin.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/05/ramsgate-5.html. An important Pugin work in Ramsgate.

Group search key: gba.

Festal cheese

Bond

What turned out to be the last expedition to buy cheese in London before the festive season took place about ten days ago. Subsequent expeditions had been planned, but failed to materialise. A bright, cold day, with a cardboard box sleeper occupying a service door into the building above Epsom Station. On the platform, the advertisement snapped above told me that James Bond is not yet dead, despite having been around for well over half a century now. Not a bad run, but the whole thing seems terribly dated - all that glamour of wealth, secret services, boys' toys and girls, with the latter not quite amounting to one of the former - and I am reminded of the strange business of the dirty trade of spying being made to seem glamorous, a business commented on getting on for two hundred years ago in the book noticed at reference 1. One supposes that, having been published in May, the book went on to become the No.1 international best seller in the second half of the year, with the final twitch being puffed as a Christmas stocking filler for the good folk of Epsom.

Also on the platform, I learned that the train information must be driven by a sensor some way to the country side of the station, as my train was displayed as arrived some time before it actually pulled into view.

At Worcester Park, I noticed a house backing onto the embankment which had thought fit to dump its rubbish over its back fence. Not a thing I would care to do, let alone let the neighbours know that I was doing it. I wonder what sort of condition the house and garden are kept it? Are they like those travellers who lavish thousands on the decoration of and nick-nacks for the insides of their caravans, but are not in the least bothered by squalor outside the front doors?

No bikes on the ramp, despite it being some  hours after the morning rush hour, but there were some at Concert Hall Approach. There was also a cold wind, which I had not noticed up on the ramp. 10 minutes and 25 seconds to Drury Lane. The only incident being a youngish man on a bicycle with labels about 'pedal me' and 'oscar', with no road sense or manners at the Waterloo Bridge end of the Aldwych. Probably something to do with the people with the flashy web site at reference 3.

Bunga, bunga

The snap above being something in Drury Lane. Probably a bit expensive for us, so a quest for the New Year can be to track someone down who has been. See reference 4.

Cheese shop busy, with lots of Christmas staff running about. Lots of fancy cheese on the counter, but the supplies of Lincolnshire Poacher, while depleted, were holding up.

Map, top centre

Stanfords still at its old site in Long Acre, where I was able to buy a quite decent map of Everest. Big map on one side, little map on the other side, with all the various routes marked on it - with UK being Route No.1, naturally. And with some of the routes looking like seriously hard work. I was served by a chap, probably in his thirties, who looked as if he might well have been a climber himself - but he clearly hated having to earn a crust dishing out maps to armchair climbers like myself. It was as much as he could do to be civil, never mind helpful. Or was the trouble that he had seem me using by telephone inside his part of the shop? The German map I really liked the look of had been discontinued, and the one I actually got was from a consortium made up of the Boston Museum of Science, the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research and the National Geographic Survey (US flavour). Some time later I was shown Google Earth's version of Everest, which while not the same as a map, must have satisfied a lot of armchairs, so perhaps I should count myself lucky that maps still exist at all.

Checked out a couple of the bookshops still left in Charing Cross Road and managed a couple of quite nice purchases.

Quick ham sandwich on the smokers' bench, as noticed at reference 5. Bit of a puzzle how I managed two on the last occasion, as just one on this occasion left me fairly full. I also clocked a rather odd round bump on a young lady's forehead, maybe an inch and a half across. She did not look ill, so lets hope it was nothing too serious.

Next stop South Lambeth Road, which took me 24 minutes and 29 seconds, getting a bit close to the half hour limit. For the first time for a while I found a use for the twine I carry in my trusty brown bag, that is to say to hang a small carrier bag from Rococo Chocolate around my neck, rather than stuff it inside the brown bag. Much more satisfactory.

Took me a few more seconds to work out the route from Drury Lane than it should have done, but managed in the end, and managed without going the long way round Vauxhall Bridge Road, which had been the first thought.

Northern Ireland Office (in the margins of the Security Service) being refurbished. Fierce cold wind which made me puff a bit going across Lambeth Bridge. Was the sandwich sitting heavy? Serious police road block outside the block containing the Archer Duplex and plenty of people were getting stopped. Wrong side of the road to stop and ask them what it was all about. Pleased to have all the cycleway stuff to get me across the Vauxhall Cross junction, otherwise a touch hairy.

The large BT building, mainly clad in stainless steel and with lots of dishes out the back, had come down and been replaced by flats since my last visit.

And so, following the visit noticed at the previous post in this set, to the Estrela Bar for a spot of tapas, the record suggesting that it had been a couple of years since I last visited. See reference 6. Whitebait. Pork and broad beans, what might be called Portuguese country fare - not unlike the carne y papas one used to be able to get in the obscurer parts of Tenerife. Cross slice aubergine cooked with something cheesy on top. Very good. Vinho Verde entirely satisfactory, once we had got through to the waitress what it was that we wanted. I was not at all clear where she came from but it was probably not Portugal.

Changed at Earlsfield. I can't remember whether I made it down to the Half Way House, but I do remember noticing the horns of the crescent moon pointing towards Jupiter. Except that they weren't, they were pointing in a direction several degrees above Jupiter. Spherical geometry a bit hazy by that point, and I was unable to work out which direction the horns ought to point, given that everything concerned is pretty much on the elliptic.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/a-last-outing.html.

Reference 2: https://www.anthonyhorowitz.com/news/story/new-james-bond-novel-forever-and-a-day-31-may-2018.

Reference 3: https://pedalme.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://www.bungabunga.com/.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/11/ham-and-cheese.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/09/knights-in-armour.html.

Group search key: gba.

Awakenings

Bought in early November, a book which has been remarkably productive in terms of further reading, mostly in the form of former library books from the US, mostly in the pending tray. One cluster about biological time, the various ways in which it can be disrupted and the topology involved, with one Arthur T. Winfree at the centre of the cluster, and helped along by reference 9, turned up at around the same time for some quite different reason. Another, smaller cluster about Parkinson’s disease and its treatment more generally. Also of posts, with three and a half so far – the half being the twaddle of reference 4, at a further remove. Second cousin rather than first cousin, as it were.

To quote from reference 1: ‘… A book about [the late Oliver] Sacks’ use of a drug called L-dopa in the late 1960’s on a group of patients in a long-stay institution, mostly suffering from the long term [Parkinsonian] effects of a bout of a now obscure disease called encephalitis lethargica…’. Patients sometimes affectionately known as enkies. Parkinson’s disease was known to be mixed up with problems with the dopamine cycle and its precursor L-dopa (aka levadopa and not to be confused with its enantiomer, D-dopa), was introduced in the 1960’s with some success. Sacks thought he would try it on his group of enkies: not a shot in the dark, as it had been a success with regular Parkinson’s patients, but certainly something by way of an experiment. Could he help these abandoned people?

With Sacks being a writer with whom I get on, with my last read being the autobiographical ‘Uncle Tungsten’, which I found fascinating, sparking a ramble through the periodic table, culminating with my being presented with the jigsaw noticed at reference 6. Slightly shocked on checking, to find that I read about Tungsten six years ago and noticed at reference 5 – when I would have guessed one or two. Clearly something wrong with my internal clocks, to which I shall return in a moment.

The present book now finished and we have also done the film of the book (reference 7).

One of Sacks’ first books, clearly a great success at the time, and which I found a fascinating read - but marred to my mind by excessive use of medical terminology which this lay reader found tiresome. I was forever reaching over for my telephone to ask Cortana or skipping over and hoping it did not matter – not realising until it was a bit late that there was a glossary at the end – not that it would have made that much difference if I had.

The guts of the book is a series of vignettes about twenty of Sacks’ patients at Mount Carmel Hospital in what had been a leafy suburb of New York, mostly born in the first decade of the last century, whom Sacks came across in the mid to late 1960’s. A hospital with a made up name in a made up place, apparently based on his work in a charity hospital in the Bronx (which I don’t know but don’t think of as very leafy), whose anonymity I have been unable to penetrate. Quite possibly one of the many long stay mental institutions closed in the US, just as here in the UK (not least our own Epsom and Exe Vale clusters), in the closing decades of the twentieth century, with plenty of closures generally recorded at reference 8. I dare say if one lived in the Bronx one would know.

These vignettes occupy about half of the 400 pages and are bracketed by introductory material, introductory chapters, closing chapters, appendices, glossary, bibliography and index.

The central drama is two fold. First you have a group of patients, more or less moribund and largely inaccessible for years, miraculously woken up by this wonder drug called L-dopa. But after a while it all goes terribly wrong, with most of the patients suffering from frequent and unpredictable swings between a bad place and a good place, a strange variation on the presently fashionable bipolar disorder. Some of them settled down; some in a fairly good place, some in a more or less non-existent place. And some just died.

One of the vignettes concerns a patient known to us as Leonard L, admitted to hospital from post-graduate studies at Harvard when he was around 30. A severely challenged patient who could, nevertheless communicate with a letter board and along the way produced a 50,000 word autobiography – which does not appear to have reached the public domain. Initially spectacular results with L-dopa, then all kinds of problems. He gradually deteriorated, eventually gave up and died when he was around 60 in the late 1970’s. He was the patient portrayed by Robert de Niro in the film.

One of the interests for me in this book was the hope of finding out about the subjective experience of people who are locked-in in this kind of way. One is awake, one can hear what is going on, one can see – but one is more or less immobilised and more or less unable to communicate with others. One suggestion was that there was just a sort of, a sense of emptiness. A world in which nothing much seemed to be happening. There might have been more from the autobiography just mentioned, but this has resisted online attack and I dare say it is lodged in some university library, away from the prying eyes of the public at large.

The film makes something of the poem called ‘The Panther’, quoted by Leonard L and written by Rilke in 1902, in response to seeing a panther pacing a cage in a zoo in a park in Paris, nothing to do with personal experience of incarceration in an institution. But an evocative piece nonetheless. It also seems that Rilke, at one time, knew a chap called Ernst Toller, unlikely to be any relative of mine.

One of Sacks’ suggestions was that a lot of the Parkinson’s symptoms that these patients had were to do with time. That there was something wrong with one or more of the many internal clocks needed to keep us ticking over properly. Perhaps when the enkies froze, they were not actually frozen, they were just moving very slowly. Or perhaps the clock which went with sensory signals coming in from the feet had got out of time with the clock which went with the generation of motor commands to the feet – which could, for example, create the sensation of going uncomfortably downhill when actually going along a very flat corridor. Something wrong which could sometimes be put right, at least on a temporary basis, by a suitable rhythm being provided from the outside, perhaps the regular tiling of the floor, perhaps the right sort of music, perhaps the touch of someone at your elbow moving along with you. At other times, patients would respond to a physical imperative, like a ball coming at them, which, to everyone’s surprise, they would catch and return in an impressively normal way.

The film does a good, sugar coated job, concentrating mostly on the first half of the central drama. It does well at conveying the atmosphere of a long stay mental institution of that time. It highlights three important issues. First, being sure that it is right to meddle in this way. If I was going to do such a thing, I would want to know that I had the support of colleagues and relatives, if not the informed consent of the patient. I would not want to have to go it alone. Second, the expense. I don’t know whether this particular drug was expensive – as the film suggests – but a lot of modern drugs are, and the cost of drugs is a real issue in long term care decisions, whatever the Sun, the Daily Mail or Mr Corbyn might say on a bad day. Third, the relationship of carers with their chronically ill carees, a relationship which can be troubled and difficult, particularly with carers who are also relatives and who also really care.

PS: I ought to add that as of near twenty years ago, L-dopa remained central to the treatment of people with Parkinson’s disease, despite its various problems, that is to say unpleasant side effects. Some of the problems arise from the vagaries of its absorption by the small intestine and its short half life once in the body; keeping the stuff at the right level in the blood is difficult. Coincidentally, the broad beans of which I have made such a performance in past, are one of the better natural sources of the stuff. See references 11 and 12 – while I associate to the vagaries of warfarin, with which I am better acquainted.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-parable.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/heritage-science.html. 

Reference 3: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/awakenings-on-stage-and-screen.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/whats-in-name.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2012/11/science.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/11/jigsaw-9-series-3.html.

Reference 7: Awakenings – Robert de Niro, Robin Williams – 1991.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hospitals_in_the_Bronx.

Reference 9: The layout of iso-orientation domains in area 18 of cat visual cortex: optical imaging reveals a pinwheel-like organization - Bonhoeffer T, Grinvald A – 1993.

Reference 10: Awakenings – Oliver Sacks – 1973. Picador edition of 2012.

Reference 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-DOPA.

Reference 12: Levadopa: 30 years of progress - Tanya Simuni and Howard Hurtig – 2002. Chapter 32 in an early edition of a fat book for doctors edited by Factor and Weiner.

Reference 13: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Panther_%28poem%29. The source of the translations of ‘The Panther’.

Geek

I don't know which of my online activities prompted Google to put an advertisement for one of these in my in-box on Christmas Day. Did it see the word 'geek' in the profile but not find any proper electrical toys on my Christmas present list?

Reference 1: http://www.siglent.com/ENs/. A company which does not admit to being Chinese, but which does have a strong whiff of China about its website. No idea what sort of people they are targeting with their products. Home electrical nuts? The security boys?

Fake 50

A reprise of fake 29 (reference 1) at the Royal Wells Hotel at Tunbridge Wells. The place overlooking the hill down into town and having a large lion & unicorn flanked crest erected on the leads out front.

A very tasteful fake fire, with some kind of white stone surround, glass front, gravel base with logs on top. With the gas coming up in three or four places through the gravel giving a very fair imitation of a log fire. I imagine it is all very pretty when the lights go down.

There was also a small grand piano out in the reception area, a bit shabby and with the cover locked down with the sort of screw locks often used on sash windows, one each end of the keyboard. Rather crudely fitted, perhaps a Chubb 8013 Sash Window Bolt. So not so very grand after all.

I did not like to bother the reception for the key so that I could photograph the name of the maker, usually to be found underneath in antique gold lettering. So a no-score piano.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/03/fake-29.html.

Reference 2: https://www.royalwells.co.uk/.

Awakenings on stage and screen

A further, but still interim, post arising from the awakenings of references 1 and 2.

Sacks was clearly very taken with, fascinated by, all the stage and screen adaptations of his book. A fascination described in the appendix added to my edition of the book. He seems to have coped with having become a media person in his own right, to have managed to carry on being a doctor at the same time.

And he was pleased to find that his patients – known as the enkies for the encephalitis which had felled them – were up for it too. They seemed to like people taking an interest in them. And it looks as if, for a while at least, they got a lot of it. They were happy to participate in the documentary of 1974 at reference 9.

Eight years later in 1982, we have the play ‘A kind of Alaska’ by Pinter, with Sacks being very surprised at how well Harold Pinter, and his star Judi Dench, managed to portray the sort of thing he described in his vignettes, without ever having had any contact with the subject matter or the subjects beforehand. A play which put to rest his reservations about anyone making a play out of his book.

Then in 1987 there was a radio version of the book, with Sacks playing himself. Another successful adaptation, with his interactions with the actors playing the patients being another learning experience for Sacks. Presumably the radio concentrated on the awakening side of things – the waking up after having been sort of asleep for twenty or thirty years – rather than what came afterwards.

Later in the same year the work on the film of the book – reference 3 - got underway, with Sacks being very impressed by de Niro’s serious preparation for his role as a post-encephalitic patient. Method acting, big time. And Sacks was very impressed with the result – with de Niro managing to pull off the further trick of the patients with whom he spent time both liking him and what he was doing. Another learning experience being that while Sacks might have been technical consultant, he had to take a back seat and let the film people create their version of the story, the story seen through their eyes rather than through his. Different, but equally valid.

After which Sacks found it slightly odd being around Robin Williams who was clearly doing the same sort of job on him as de Niro had been doing on the patients, one of whom he was to be. That is to say, sucking in, sucking out of them, all he needed to know about them in order to project his version of one of them onto the silver screen. I think I would find it rather odd too.

Sacks was fascinated by watching an actor working his way into a role, learning how to be the person being portrayed, in this case learning to be a patient with a range of Parkinsonian symptoms, tics and mannerisms. He noticed that sometimes the actors had trouble turning off, that their role was leaking into their own lives. And he was tempted to ask de Niro if he could stick a recording cap on his head and take an EEG of him while he was acting out a very convincing oculogyric fit, to see what impact acting the thing had on the inner workings. Were they anything like the inner working of someone actually having such a fit? With such a fit involving the eyes becoming locked in a far up direction and the neck often being severely twisted. See reference 8 for a description of one.

I associated to Lawrence Oliver, who, when asked about method acting, said something to the effect that you could always try acting. But what did he bring, for example, to his portrayal of Richard III making smart remarks about horses on the field of Bosworth (Act V, Scene IV, line 7)? He knew that being a king was to turn out a performance, but what did he know about the grim realities of fifteen century battlefields? Was his actorly intuition about how humans behave enough? And how would he have managed with the enkies?

While Sacks seemed to feel that these method actors, with their mimetic skills, were able to learn and portray stuff about his patients which was new. They had an impressive ability to work their way into replicating all the strange physical behaviours of these patients. They had a new way of looking at them, different but equally valid to what Sacks himself, the neurological doctor, did.

One of the original patients, Lillian Tighe, gets to play herself in both the 1974 documentary and the 1991 film, and although she fell out of the latter on the cutting room floor she did earn a ‘special thanks’ at the end of the IMDB credits: an inspiration to everybody else concerned and she is snapped with Sacks above. At the very end of the book, on the last page before the glossary, she turns up on the set to do her scene with de Niro and puts her seal of approval on the proceedings. The film was going to be OK; OK in itself and OK with the enkies.

Footnotes

Sacks also found time to take in a performance of the play called ‘Wings’ (reference 6) about a lady recovering from a stroke, but did not find this terribly convincing (page 378, note 171).

I associate to Simenon’s story of waking up from a stroke, ‘Les Anneaux de Bicêtre’, not quite the same thing as between stroke and waking up, there is nothing, while Sacks’ patients have been awake, after a fashion. See reference 4.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-parable.html.

Reference 2: Awakenings - Oliver Sacks – 1973. Picador edition of 2012.

Reference 3: Awakenings – Robert de Niro, Robin Williams – 1991.

Reference 4: Les Anneaux de Bicêtre – Simenon – 1963. First noticed by me at reference 5 following.

Reference 5: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=Double+Georges.

Reference 6: Wings – Arthur Kopit – 1978. First noticed my me at reference 7 following.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/09/wings.html.

Reference 8: Delayed Onset of Oculogyric Crisis and Torticollis with Intramuscular Haloperidol - Stanford S Jhee, Victoria Zarotsky, Stephen M Mohaupt, Cynthia L Yones, and Steve J Sims - 2003. It seems these crises are reasonably common side effects of the use of certain psycho-active drugs.

Reference 9: Awakenings - Duncan Dallas for Yorkshire Television – 1974.

Reference 10: https://neurovision.org.uk/videos/awakenings-trailer/. Free trailer for reference 9. Seemingly available for streaming but not for buying.

Reference 11: https://www.oliversacks.com/. The site for the Oliver Sacks foundation. Whom I thank for use of their picture.

Proper light

Proper light does indeed make all the difference.

Flower shoot now properly visible, with the hood mentioned in the last post turning out to the sheath of the flower shoot proper.

Proper colour back too.

One result of all this being that I am acquiring some sympathy with the people who have to make sense of aerial photographs of weapons of mass destruction.

Group search key: tfd.

Christmas day

The camera on my telephone really struggling in the uncertain light of 0800 or so Christmas morning. The idea was to capture the fact that the flower shoot on the aloe is now starting to show its head above the parapet, is actually taller than the next door leaf. An idea which does not come off, with the shoot being more or less in the middle of the snap, as intended, but with very uncertain focus and a strange hood appearing above.

Looking more closely, I think the hood, what looks like a bud below and to the right and the dark vertical stripe below, together make up the growing flower shoot. With what looks like a parallelogram of shadow below and to the right actually being the next door leaf.

In this case, enlarging the full screen version on my laptop adds little. Perhaps in these lighting condition the resolution just isn't there.

Altogether a rather odd rendering of the scene. A salutary reminder of the ways colours move around through the many layers of processing involved here. Note the lightening of the green here, compared with that of the earlier snaps of the series.

Group search key: tfd.

Festive fare

We thought it proper to accompany our Christmas Eve viewing with the 2014 Gewürztraminer from Hugel noticed at reference 1. Or put another way, to upgrade from our economy class, everyday fare, the 2017 Sauvignon Blanc from Villa Maria. As sold in Wetherspoons and just one of the many wines that come from Marlborough in New Zealand. How many gallons to the acre do they manage?

Digressing at this point to Marlborough, I finally learn that it is a region in the north of south island, of about 5,000 square miles and 50,000 people. Lots of mountains, but with the Sauvignon Blanc coming from the flood plain of the Wairau River, to the west of the regional town of Blenheim, named for the famous victory of the famous general, unlike the TB, named for a famous horse which won a famous race at Epsom. See reference 2.

Back with Christmas Eve viewing, we selected the second half of an elderly Poirot and the first half of a dreary Vera. ITV3, naturally. Elderly Poirot both for it being one of the last Poirot stories to be adapted for television, with the core actors showing their age rather badly. I don't mind Maigret getting old through his twenty five volumes, but I do mind television versions of other detectives getting old; I like them to be timeless. Odd, but that seems to be the way it is. While Vera is known here as dreary Vera, as while well made, the series does seem to be dreary. Lots of dreary people, with all kinds of dreary problems, living in mostly dreary conditions on some far-up-north housing estate. No flashy, international jewel thieves pulling off engaging (if sometimes macabre) stunts in the very best hotels. Very southist of me, no doubt.

Television apart, we both liked, were both very taken with the Gewürztraminer, taken with a little chocolate. Worth buying again, should occasion arise.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/trolley-hunt-2.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim_(horse). From which I learn: 'Blenheim (1927–1958), also known as Blenheim II, was a British Thoroughbred race horse who won The Derby in 1930. As sire, he had a major influence on pedigrees around the world. Blenheim was highly tried, by European standards, as a two-year-old in 1929, winning four of his seven races. In the following season he was beaten in his first two races before recording an upset 18/1 win in the Derby. His racing career was ended by injury soon afterwards, and he was retired to stud, where he became an extremely successful and influential breeding stallion, both in Europe and North America'. So TB might well have been built in his glory days, say around 1930. One more thing to be check up on.

Reference 3: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=TB. For a selection of tales from and about TB, otherwise the Blenheim of Manor Green Road.

Reference 4: The Big Four - Agatha Christie - 1927. One of the early Poirot stories, told in the first person by Captain Hastings. A quick look at the text, suggests that ITV3 took considerable liberties with it in yesterday's adaptation, from 2013.

The daffodils are coming

Cleared the leaves from the new daffodil bed this morning, probably for the last time this year, as next year's daffodils are now coming through.

One of the two clumps of cyclamen which are getting established visible at the back. Seeded naturally from elsewhere in the garden.

Several seedlings of carex pendula visible, taking a while to get going.

Ants' nest bottom left is still there, behind the stalks, but there has not been a lot of action this year. I never have seen many ants, but there has, in the past, been plenty of evidence of their activity in the morning, with little piles of soil from their tunnels scattered about. Not so much this year.

All in all, I would have expected more grass in this bed, laid down seven years ago now and not disturbed since, beyond cutting the grass once or twice a year. As can be seen from the posts at reference 1, there was more grass in the past, but we now seem to have more moss than grass, although there is grass after the bulbs, early summer. Nor can I say that the daffodils are doing particularly well either; still there and still spreading, but a lot of them are coming up blind.

Whereas the meadow bed I had on the southern fence, on the other side of the garden, used to have rather better grass, despite being in more or less continuous shade. A mistake, as it has turned out, to have dug it over to give FIL a bit of garden, which he never took to, despite having been a keen gardener for all of his near fifty years at Exminster.

Seven of the box seedlings planted behind the palings survived out of the fourteen or so planted. The deal being that they had to manage without much attention from me. Hopefully they will get going before the palings finally give out.

Reference 1: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=new+daffodil+bed.

Ensembles and their description

Introduction

Figure 1

The purpose of this note is to introduce some concepts and definitions which we will use when we come to describe how a simple scene, for example the aeroplane in a clear blue sky snapped by dreamstime left (see reference 5), is mapped into LWS-N (see reference 4). In particular, how the brain adds value, over and above what a camera achieves. How it marks up the image to make it more useful, to enrichen the subjective experience, to make the image more like a diagram than a photograph.

A mapping process which is rather different from what, for example, is done by the Waymo computer when it drives around the town, a computer which does not aspire to consciousness, although knowledge of the former might well provide useful input to our knowledge of the latter. One difference, for example, being that the computer collects far more data than could possibly be fitted into consciousness - which has to reflect a radical process of pruning, selection and simplification.
With one the questions arising being why is consciousness so slow? For Waymo, see reference 10.

The two important definitions in what follows are those of ensembles of neurons and of their descriptions in words. We are not presently much concerned with how these things might come to be, in evolution, in development or otherwise; just with what they might be.

Note first, that a core proposition of LWS-N is that the cortical precursor of what we see, the subjective experience, has been reassembled into topical form, into something like the digital image produced by the camera in a mobile telephone, from all the bits and pieces into which the topical signal from the retina has been analysed in across the visual and higher areas of the brain.

Note second, that it seems very unlikely that the brain, if it does indeed include these features, would implement them in the way described. Its approach to things is statistical rather than algorithmic and is unlikely to come more than approximately to the algorithmic descriptions which follow.

Images

We use image to mean the sensory input from the eyes integrated over some short period of time, say a second or so. We do not mean the sensory input from the eyes generated in an instant, say a few milliseconds.

Figure 2

In what follows, we suppose that our images are of single objects set against blank or nondescript backgrounds, perhaps the sort of thing one gets in children’s books rather than photographs. The sort of images used to stimulate and teach pre-school infants. If one asks what the image is, there is no doubt about the right answer. It is an elephant, a red bus or a yellow flower. We might go so far as a foreground red bus against a background street view. We are not looking at complex images, such as, for example, Titian’s ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’ snapped above, which do not admit one or two word descriptions – other than their titles – which most of us, certainly pre-school infants, are unlikely to know.

We suppose the existence of some function which measures the distance between images. Such functions start with simple bit by bit comparisons across the two image frames and go on to allowing all kinds of image transformations and all kinds of interactions with the content, what the image is about. With the former including various more or less rigid transformations the foreground object, the latter including, for example, the unrolling of the trunk of an elephant.

Bearing in mind that the relationship between two images is far from one dimensional and that we can only capture one facet of that relationship in a single, real valued function, we suppose a middling sort of function which minimises the difference between the two images, subject only to permitted transformations – which  might be stretched to allow limited manipulations of the foreground object. But not the content sensitivity – which might have been stretched to include more complex manipulations, like the unrolling of the trunk already mentioned.

Ensembles

Our brain knows about things, in the beginning straightforward things like apples, lions, children and mountains, things which we come to describe by common nouns. We avoid getting philosophical about exactly what kind of things that brains know about by saying that the things that the brain knows about are expressed by, defined by ensembles of neurons, what we call light bulb neurons. An ensemble is a strongly connected set of possibly thousands of neurons, possibly being scattered over some small or large area of the cortex, but which, as a whole, reliably fire for the things they stand for, which fire reliably for the right sort of stimuli. We place no constraints on what sort of things or what sort of stimuli. A sample of things is given in the middle of reference 2. Some steps towards finding such neurons are described at reference 3.

We mean strongly connected in the graph theoretic sense. If E is an ensemble, A and B members of that ensemble, then it is likely that A and B are directly connected, that is to say that A stimulates B, B stimulates A or both. And if E is an ensemble, A and B members of that ensemble, then there is a short route in E by which A stimulates B.

We hope, in time, to be able to put some limits on the number of neurons in an ensemble. But for the moment, the best we can do is a lower limit in the hundreds.

If an ensemble E is active at time T then all its constituent neurons are firing. We expect to be able to make this more precise by saying that all its constituent neurons must have fired at least N times within the previous M milliseconds, with N and M positive integers, yet to be identified. Or perhaps something more probabilistic. We expect activations to endure for at least hundreds of milliseconds.

An elementary stimulus is some continuous segment of sensory input spanning some short period of time, typically less than a second or so. A stimulus is not confined to a single mode, say vision, but that said, many stimuli will be unimodal, often simple images, possibly moving, displayed on a computer screen. The length of an elementary stimulus is one.

A complex stimulus is the orderly presentation of a sequence of elementary stimuli. The length of a complex stimulus is the number of constituent elementary stimuli.

While there might well be dark matter in this universe, we are only presently interested in ensembles that we can know about. That is to say, if E is an ensemble, then there must be a stimulus, presentation of which reliably results in the activation of E. In the case of a complex stimulus, the brain is being prepped by the left hand part of the sequence, to the point that E is then reliably activated by the last member of the sequence. Put another way, the left hand part of the sequence is establishing context. Better still, there is an elementary stimulus which reliably activates E, regardless of the starting state of the brain.

We might add the qualification that we are talking here about a brain belonging to an healthy, adult human who is not under any particular stress. Perhaps in what is called the resting state.

Any one stimulus might activate a number of ensembles. But if E1 and E2 are distinct ensembles, then no neuron is a member of both E1 and E2. Furthermore, there is at least one stimulus which reliably activates E1 but not E2 or at least one stimulus which reliably activates E2 but not E1. Put another way, if E1 and E2 are distinct, they must exist and they must be distinguishable.

No ensemble is activated by more than a small number of the very large number of stimuli which are available. At any one time, all but a very few ensembles just sit there, inactive.

We might particularly value ensembles which can be fired up all by themselves, without a cloud of relatives getting in on the act.

The descriptions introduced below can be used as stimuli, as symbols in place of images drawn more or less directly from the world.

Ensembles are robust. They can lose lots of neurons and lots of internal connections before they cease to function.

We allow degrees of firing up, degrees of activation. There might be a thresholds: an ensemble either fires or not; but given that it does fire, we allow different degrees of firing up.

Inter alia, the ensemble functions as a junction box. If an inbound stimulus fires up an ensemble, that ensemble will usually go on to fire up all kinds of other stuff. So if we fire up ‘golden eagle’, the ensemble goes on to fire up stuff about golden eagles. With exactly which stuff usually depending on context. If, for example, one was a gamekeeper, one’s trigger finger might start twitching.

Given the expense of creating ensembles, and by analogy with databases on computers, there might also be something by way of a management information payoff, with their being a good peg on which to hang such stuff.

We need to remember, in the case of the ensemble being about internal stuff, that they are about that internal stuff, they are not the internal stuff itself. An important example is the idea of pain being different from the pain itself. Ensembles are symbolic, ensembles are signs, symbols of and signs for something other than themselves. Furthermore, while the flashing of the ensemble lights might remind us of the original stimulus, might result in replay of that original stimulus, usually we will know the difference. We might have a problem when the sign becomes merged with the stimulus.

Looking ahead, we see growth of ensembles, with ensembles acquiring more neurons as they acquire more importance in the scheme of things. We also see decay and we also see fission of ensembles; what was one ensemble becoming two or more. Ensembles might wax and wane like the moon, a few even with the moon. Some ensembles might start out, but never really make it before fading away again. Some ensembles may be temporary or transient, a variety of working memory. Some ensembles may grow from scratch, from nothing, in which case the idea of lower limit of size (introduced above) becomes a matter of convention more than of fact. In any event, a regular natural history of ensembles. Or in the jargon of data modellers ‘entity life histories’. See reference 9.

But the rest of this note is mainly about what else we can say about these ensembles.

Individuals and collectives

All ensembles are individuals in the sense that an ensemble is about something as a whole, not about the parts or members.

Figure 3

Nevertheless, some ensembles do symbolise individuals in something close to the ordinary sense of the word: Richard Cœur de Lion, this particular cabbage, this lump of cheese. Comparable to the proper noun.

Regarding which, the summary above is suggestive, but which should not be taken too seriously. The sample is very small and we know nothing about the way that entries were selected for this part of the dictionary. Perhaps there were quotas to fill. Certainly a bias towards the French and France, although we doubt whether that much affects this summary. The suggestion being that most ensembles are not going to correspond to a proper noun of this sort. Most people don’t have a clue what Ricci (Lorenzo) or Ricci (Mateo) (to take two examples from another part of Larousse) looked like, never mind what their distinguishing features were. And one bend in the River Thames probably looks much like another bend in the River Marne. Most people neither know nor can name these things: we have to be sparing with our proper names if they are to be useful.

The most important thing about some individual things is what they are made of: a lump of cheese, a pile of sand, a fall of snow. There might be an associated quantity – either a number or something vaguer – and many quantities have units, like metres or yards. For example, 500 grams of cheese or more than a pound of cheese. While such things will certainly have a role in working memory, we are not clear how that stretches to ensembles. Perhaps there would just be one ensemble for each material that we knew about, with the selection varying a good deal from person to person. Some people might be very interested in different kinds of snow, other people might be very interested in different kinds of cheese.

So, while in any one brain there will be ensembles corresponding to entries in a dictionary such a Larousse, there will be probably be more for individual things which are important to the host but which are not of general interest and which do not have a proper name. For example, a favourite tree with a large ball of mistletoe near the top, on the way to the newsagent.

And we expect that rather more, indeed most, ensembles will correspond to common nouns, things which are common enough to have attracted one or two word labels. For example, the ensemble for cabbage will lead to a jumble of information about cabbages the we have known. Allotment keepers and market gardeners might go so far as to have ensembles for different kinds of cabbage – Brussels sprouts reminding us of the need to let in two word forms of this sort.

These ensembles symbolise unbounded collections of things of the same kind: elephants, cheeses, cabbages and kings. The number of such things in such a collection may not be well defined and is certainly not known.

Other ensembles will symbolise bounded collections. Six railway locomotives. The eleven players in a certain football team at a certain time. The 513 houses on a housing estate. We can sometimes, but not necessarily, enumerate the members of a bounded collection. Note that these wholes are almost always greater than the sum of their constituent members; we can almost always find things to say things about the whole, which we cannot say of any of those constituents. For example, this is the greatest team in the world. We associate to the fact that much of the power of an infantry battalion, at least in the Duke of Wellington’s time, lay in the ability of its members to act as one, to act as a unit, not as a bunch of individuals.

Relations between ensembles

A collection is allowed to be a subset of another collection. For example, elephants are animals. A temporary ensemble might be established by the utterance ‘he had apples and pears in his basket’, in which case these particular apples and pears are subsets of the sets of apples and pears more generally.

A collection may be the union of some other collections and individuals. We gloss over the mathematically important distinction between an individual and the collection consisting of just that individual.

An individual is allowed to be a member of a collection. For example, this particular elephant is a member of the troupe of elephants run by this or that circus. The troupe trainer is likely to have ensembles for both troupe and the individual elephants.

These two relations are sometimes conflated into the isa relation, as in ‘the ant isa insect’. A conflation which means we do not fuss about whether we are talking about a member or a subset relation. The second of the pair is necessarily a collection, while the first might or might not be.
Sometimes what is an individual in one context might be a collection in another. So a football club has members, players and others, might be a member of the premier division and is affiliated to the Football Association. Perhaps we can handle this with the context established with stimuli, mentioned in the previous section. We know in which sense we are presently interested in this ensemble from the context.

One individual can be a part of another individual and one collection can be a part of another collection. For example, trees have trunks. In which case, each member of the collection ‘tree’ can be associated with a member of the collection ‘trunk’. The explosion of things like aeroplanes and power stations into parts – and even the humble zip fastener – possibly involving many layers of parts, is important in engineering and manufacturing applications on computers, probably less so in brains, which likely confine themselves to one or two layers at any one time, in any one frame of consciousness.

If A is a member of the collection B, then we might say that C takes the value A for the property B. Otherwise, B is a plausible property for something like C and the members of B are the values that property can take. Properties in the sense of reference 1.

All of this can get terribly complicated and no-one that we know of has come up with a simple framework of this kind which captures everything; that seems to be the rather messy preserve of natural language. All the same, knowing about these relations is an important ingredient of our knowledge of ourselves and of the world that we live, and the brain must have some way of having and using this knowledge. It is an important ingredient in the construction of what gets into LWS-N. But it is not an important ingredient in LWS-N; its work has been done by then and LWS-N just projects some of the output of that work into consciousness. These relations are not further considered in what follows.

Words

Words are things which can be said, heard or written. For present purposes words are certain, permitted sequences of characters. Characters are letters (for example: A, B, g), numerals (for example: 1, 2, 3), other (for example: @, ¾, &, -). With comma, round brackets and space being further examples of other characters. We do not go into the complications involved in relating the character ‘¾’ to a number, but readers interested in other kinds of complication might like to read the Wikipedia article on escape characters at reference 6.

A simple word will be one of: token (usually mainly letters), number (usually mainly numerals) or Boolean (either yes or no. Equivalently, true or false).

A word will be a simple word or a short, underscore separated sequence of simple words. Words do not contain internal spaces.

We allow upper, lower case letters and accented letters, but just treat them all as separate letters, disregarding the relations between them. But for the present we do not consider case or accent, or any of the other stuff which rightly vexes grammarians. We do not consider alphabets other than the English alphabet, phonetic relations between letters and groups of letters (for example, ‘draft’ and ‘draught’ sound the same), font or size. And finally, we do not consider relations between words – lexical (‘cat’ is like ‘cats’) or otherwise (‘flat’ is like ‘apartment’). All matters which are relevant, but beyond our present scope.

Expressions

An expression is a short, possibly empty, sequence of phrases, with an optional head.

A head, if present, is a word. In the present context, often a common noun, for example ‘cat’.

A phrase is a pair of phrase label and phrase value.

Expressions are often written as follows, with square brackets indicating optionality:

• [<head>][([<label>=]<value>…])
• power_station(coal location=Orford_Ness age=43(years) owner=BlackRock)

Either the first or the second part may be missing, but clearly at least one of them must be present. A single word, for example ‘cat’, is a small expression consisting of just a head. A single bracketed word, for example ‘(red)’ is another small expression, consisting of just a single phrase, standing for something which is red, but otherwise unspecified.

In the case that the second part is present, there may be one or more phrases.
Phrase labels are optional. For example, if the value is ‘red’ then it can be assumed, in the absence of an explicit label, that the implicit label is ‘colour’. The knowledge that red is a colour would be somewhere in the works.

Phrase values are mandatory and might be a word or some more complex expression.

Some examples of expressions are:

• cat
• cat(name=Frisky)
• Frisky(cat)
• cat(red)
• cat(colour=red)
• cat(colour=red legs=4)
• cat(colour=red legs=4 tail=no)
• shop(brand=Costa town=Epsom street=High_Street)
• (colour=brown legs=6 tail=yes)

In the second and third cases, we exemplify choice; both are valid descriptions of the same particular cat. In the penultimate case, we exemplify the power of expressions to identify things which do not have their own proper noun. Note the use of the underscore between ‘High’ and ‘Street’ to deal with this particular compound. In the last case, the expression describes something, but we have not yet decided what it is. In many contexts adding the head value ‘animal’ as in ‘animal(colour=brown legs=6 tail=yes)’ would have amounted to much the same thing.

Some phrases express properties of a thing of the kind denoted by the head, in the sense set out in reference 1.

The expressions we are presently interested in are neither particularly long nor particularly complicated, but the form is powerful and expressive and can be used to express stuff of more or less arbitrary complexity. Indeed, they are very similar in organisation to expression in the XML which powers much of the Internet.

We can define a isa relation between expressions, a relation which is lexical in the sense that it only depends on the words and their arrangement, with no necessary connection to the real world – although we would expect, on the whole, pretty good alignment; that is part of the point of having words and expressions. Roughly speaking, an expression E1 isa E2 if the expression E1 is bigger than the expression E2, if everything in E1 is to be found in an appropriate place in E2. So, for example, if a label is present in E1 then it must either be absent or matched in E2. So ‘cat(colour=red)’ isa ‘cat(red)’ but not ‘cat(colour=red)’ isa ‘cat(tail=red)’. Such a relation is simple and natural in conception, but can be made complicated and can be made to do a great deal of work.

We can define distance, or distance like functions, on pairs of expressions, functions which are also lexical, but which depend on spelling rather than structure. So ‘hake’ is like ‘hack’. The general idea is to try and map one string of letters onto another and the distance is the measure of the extent to which one fails. Alternatively, one tries to map the sound signal for one lot of words onto that for another, which tests for sounding the same rather than spelling the same. Which might or might not be more useful, depending on what exactly one is trying to do.

We might try to combine these two very different approaches in some way. We might require that if A, B and C are distinct expressions such that A isa B isa C, then the distance between A and C is greater than either of the distances between A and B or B and C but is less than their sum. We might require that if A, B and C are distinct expressions such A isa B but A is not a C, then the distance between A and B is less than the distance between A and C. With the catch here being that A might be a lot more like C than B.

In any event, the object is to end up with some function which measures the distance between two expressions. A companion to the function which measures the distance between two images with which we started.

Descriptions

Descriptions are short expressions which are applied to ensembles. Remembering that lots of ensembles will not have descriptions and lots of descriptions will not have ensembles – a point to which we will return below. Note that while a description does indeed describe an ensemble, for example by providing some key words, it is more like a title than a glowing description of a sun-lit, bubbling stream that a romantic writer would recognise.

If we know a common noun, and that common noun stands for an ordinary, visible, material object in the world – like a telephone box or an armadillo – then there will be an ensemble for that common noun. Or put the other way around, that common noun is a description for that ensemble. We could not know the word in any useful sense otherwise. These ensembles with their one word descriptions make a good start.

Both cat(red) and red(cat) are valid, slightly longer descriptions of ensembles. The first describes a cat or cats which are red. The second describes a red or reds which are appropriate to cats. The sort of reds that cats are. Some people will have ensembles for both descriptions. Others might have just one ensemble, perhaps better described by ‘(cat red)’, the jumble of stuff we remember about reds and cats that we have known.

We note some tension, between a description which is something like ‘Bacchus and Ariadne’, the title of the painting included above, the title by which it is known in the trade, and something which is more descriptive, something like ‘painting(medium=oils period=Italian_Renaissance subject=(Greek_myth pastoral) content=(people(many mainly(naked)) animals(few)))’. The former might do for a connoisseur while the latter might do for the rest of us. One can combine the two styles to make a rather long description, but that does not get away from the convention that just one common noun is at the front. Hopefully, the most important single bit of information about the thing in question, at the time in question.

There is clear attraction in there being a simple map from description to ensemble and we will suppose for the present that any one ensemble is associated with zero, one or more descriptions, while a description may be associated with at most one ensemble – while recognising that some other rules about this might turn out to work better. We might, for example, let in probability: it is 90% likely that this description should be about that ensemble.

The proposition is that in building the contents of consciousness, in building LWS-N, the brain mainly divides the world up into layer objects and parts corresponding pre-existing ensembles with pre-existing descriptions. And it labels those objects and parts in LWS-N, with a small number of those labels being in or near consciousness. So in the case of the aeroplane above, we might have the description aeroplane(engine=4 movement=fast) or aeroplane(type=jumbo movement=fast). The knowledge that healthy jumbo jets have four engines might be somewhere in the works – although we ourselves had to check.

Note that the set of descriptions in used is finite, say less than a few thousand of them, while the set of expressions is much larger, infinite in the case that we do not put any serious limit on length.

From description to stimulus

Keeping things simple, we say that the stimulus corresponding to a description, is no more than its display on a computer screen, more or less as shown here.

We suppose that descriptions are short enough that they can be absorbed from the screen in a second or so, so not involve much in the way of eye movement and do not involve any conscious thought for comprehension.

In this way, we could provide the stimulus easily enough. What is more difficult is finding the matching ensembles inside the brain and recording their behaviour. Scanning a brain and deciding that it is thinking about playing tennis rather than eating rice balls is not quite the same thing, although a step in the right direction. See reference 7 for such a step.

Getting from a description to a bit of natural language is another matter. As a first attempt one might just strip out the control structure, leaving just words and spaces. So ‘cat(colour=red tail=no)’ might be rendered as ‘cat colour red tail no’. And ‘house-boat(colour=(black white) length=12(metre))’ might be rendered as ‘house boat colour black white length 12 metre’. Which gets us some of the way. But something much more complicated would be needed for any worthwhile second attempt. Nevertheless, machinery which generates a bit of proper, natural language is clearly somewhere in the works.

From stimulus to ensemble

Figure 4

Upper left is a reminder that the main subject of this note is the closely interacting spaces of ensembles and descriptions. A close interaction which is well short of a nice and tidy, stable, one to one relationship. Then under that we sketch, suggest, four scenarios.

In the beginning, there were ensembles but no descriptions. From where we have moved to a position where many ensembles do have descriptions. Which often means that we can activate the ensemble by hearing, reading or saying the associated description. Or by flashing that description up for a second or so on a computer screen. The description is sufficient stimulus, in the sense of the section on ensembles above, to activate the right ensemble. Which amounts to a very useful bit of kit when it comes to sharing and building knowledge about the world, something that people without words and other animals, pretty much all of which are without words, are not very good at.

If an image of something that we know about is flashed on the screen, say an elephant, then some suitable ensemble E1 and its description D1 are activated. And if D2 is any other description such that D1 isa D2, then any ensemble E2 corresponding to D2 might well be activated, but not as much. We might add relations which go the other way, any other description such that D3 isa D1. This scenario is sketched lower left in the figure above – with the search there being shorthand for some probably quite complicated process. Simply minimising some distance function of the sort mentioned above by clambering over some search space is unlikely to be good enough; something involving both feed forward and feed back is likely to be required, something involving both top down and bottom up, is more likely. Perhaps even something which can understand that a dog with erect tail is still a dog, that a dog which is sitting down is still a dog, even if the host has not seen such a thing before. Such understanding may well involve something like analysis of the image into the sort of elements, layer objects and parts, envisaged for LWS-N. Remembering here that while the skill of human infants at tasks of this sort often impresses, the skills of human adults will vary a good deal.

Second from left, we sketch a good part of the point of descriptions. If the description of something that we know about is flashed on the screen, then the right ensemble gets activated. In a computer this might well be achieved with an index rather than a search, it is likely that the brain does better than a simple search – a much less challenging task than that presented in the first sketch, as the heavy lifting has already been done in coining the word.

Third from left, we start to get more complicated, with their not being an ensemble to match the description. So after searching through both ensembles and descriptions, the brain simply manufactures an appropriate image and then uses it to build an ensemble. Or it may not bother if the description is only of passing interest.

And then on the right we have the artist. We suppose he has seen lots of houses over the years, and lots of things that were pink, but never a pink house, despite their being common in the west country, in the Baltic and parts further north. But he would certainly make a good job of painting a picture of a pink house, entirely convincing to someone who knew pink houses well. We dare say that some people could make a good job of hallucinating a pink house to order, although we do not know any such person – and we note that most naturalistic painters prefer to sketch, if not paint, from life. The point is that in this case, the artist is generating a certain sort of object, a fictitious object on demand, rather than drawing what he sees or drawing on memory resources to supply real pink houses he has known. And to the extent that his painting has been important to him, at least for a while, his brain would have turned his painting into an ensemble. Perhaps an ensemble which gradually sinks back, with its connections, into the generality of houses.

Conclusions

We have speculated about the possibilities for ensembles and descriptions, notions which seem to us to have interesting possibilities, but which despite a simple start, seem to hide all kinds of complexities and complications. This despite sticking with just the one modality, sight. So work in progress.

We also need to give some thought about how the existence in a brain of such things might be tested and verified. No test, no existence.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2018/12/of-cabbages-and-kings-more.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/of-cabbages-and-kings.html.

Reference 3: Gnostic cells in the 21st century - Rodrigo Quian Quiroga – 2013.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/05/an-update-on-seeing-red-rectangles.html.

Reference 5: https://www.dreamstime.com/. A site which was new to us, but of which we are now non-paying members.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escape_character. There are further references at the end of this article for readers wanting more of the same.

Reference 7: Detecting awareness after severe brain injury - Davinia Fernández-Espejo and Adrian M. Owen – 2013.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/06/measuring-consciousness.html. An earlier use of reference 7.

Reference 9: Event Modelling:  Entity Life Histories – G. Watkins – 2003. http://www.cems.uwe.ac.uk/~gwatkins/isdp2/04-05/lec4-5elh.doc. Or ask Bing; plenty of other stuff out there.

Reference 10: https://waymo.com/. The Google self-driving car project – with a sophisticated website.

Group search key: srd.