Trolley 386

Another M&S food hall trolley captured in the Ashmore passage. Returned to the food hall which was busy with people buying their ready meals, while the clothes department beyond was very quiet.

It being a foodies' market day, I was able to buy some cheese - some 18 month old Comté, which claimed to come from the Borough Market people of reference 1, thus staving off the impending cheese crisis, as I shall not be able to get there myself until the end of the coming week. But I was surprised at how much the colour of the cut faces varied with the time since cut - with the old cuts looking quite yellow and the new cuts quite white. We shall see what this particular lump of this usually reliable brand of Comté - Charles Arnaud - tastes like shortly. Stuff which reference 2 suggests that we have been eating off and on for at least four years.

The young man running the stall might have been a student topping up his grant and he was not that good at the Neal's Yard style wrapping, but he did have a neat way of cutting the foil like wrapping, with a single clean stroke with the tip of his knife against what I think was one of those ceramic chopping boards.

Onto extinction rebellion who were holding what looked like dance in the space outside Metrobank. I would have put something in a bucket had there been one, but I couldn't see anything of that sort from the wrong side of the road and didn't bother to cross. Didn't look like the sort of people who ought to be on terrorist watch lists to me.

Next past the front entrance of the Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane, where, once again, no regular trolleys in the main stack. But I suppose Sunday morning is the peak time of the week for them and the poor old trolley jockeys just can't keep up.

And so into Blenheim Road where it looks as if another caravan has taken up residence, halfway between the tip and Screwfix. The sort of caravan that regular people would use for touring, but this one had a very residential look about it. We will see how long it takes to move them on.

Plenty of water in the stream down Longmead Road and plenty in that running down the bottom of our road, so there must have been plenty of rain in the night, not that we noticed at the time.

Reference 1: http://www.thefrenchcomte.co.uk/.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/03/wrapping-up.html.

Even in Epsom

A laminated sheet, once thumbtacked to a fence somewhere, recovered today from behind the fence at the footbridge over the railway at the bottom of West Street.

The assault being on a path which I often use myself and which seems innocuous enough in daylight, flanked on one side as it is by perfectly respectable housing, nearly all of it of the built for owner occupiers variety. But we do have the originally council housing to the west of Longmead Road, not that far from the other side of the footbridge.

One supposes that the perpetrator had substance or mental health issues - not that that is of much comfort to the victim.

We don't have to do everything

I had been vaguely aware of Scholarpedia, but yesterday, for some reason, I was moved to take a closer look, through reference 1.

It turns out to be built using the same software as Wikipedia, on some of the same principles, but in a rather more conventional, controlled manner, with more organised ownership of articles and review of articles. A sort of bridge between the free and easy – albeit very successful – world of Wikipedia and the straight-laced, hierarchic and regular world of academic publishing. I have no idea yet about how busy Scholarpedia is, but it is organised into nineteen encyclopaedias, as listed at reference 3. A rather eclectic mixture, with a lot of applied mathematics, computation and physics – but also some life science – in particular, that clustered around brains. One encyclopedia on a social science topic – play – and the one of present interest is about touch, and it is to be found at reference 4.

So far, I have looked at the introduction at reference 5, with a little dipping elsewhere, which has prompted the thoughts which follow. I should also say that I found the material offered very helpful.

Quite small animals are touch sensitive, with a variety of touch sensors in their skin, in their integument. But things get more interesting with animals with neurons and nervous systems.

Fish have their lateral line systems which can detect the small changes in water pressure caused by other animals, be they predator or prey, and other obstacles.

While lots of animals have what I might call sensory hairs. Hairs which detect movement in air or water and hairs which detect contact with something. Some of them do vibrations as well as deflections. In the jargon, first order levers and all of them include something at their base for detecting deflection, often according to direction. Sometimes these hairs are on the surface of the body or of the limbs proper, perhaps between the plates of animals with external skeletons and sometimes they are mounted on limb-like structures known as antennae. A lot of mammals have arrays of whiskers arranged around their snouts or muzzles, usually a very important part of how they interact with the world.

Spiders it seems are particularly well endowed with these sensory hairs. Some of which detect contact, some of which detect currents of air – and some of which additionally (and curiously) do smell. There is a massive literature about them, as a few moments with Bing or Google will demonstrate.

What struck me about all this was the huge amount of sensory information coming in. And without worrying here about whether spiders are conscious or not – how much of this information is going to make it to consciousness? How is a one-size-fits-all, visually orientated structure like LWS-N – for which see references 6 and 7 – going to cope with all this?

The answer that I came to was that consciousness was very much a summary, just the highlights or the main points. Lots of stuff is just not there at all. There is lots of stuff going on in the viscera of humans which does make it to the brain but which does not make it to consciousness at all. And even looking at the primary senses of sight and sound, senses of great importance in the life of most mammals, a great deal, most even, of the information collected by the eyes and the ears does not make it to consciousness.

Some of this selectivity might be described as qualitative: this or that sort of information is not sent to consciousness at all. While some of it might be described as quantitative: this sort of information is used to inform consciousness, but what makes it to consciousness is very much a summary. So when looking like a stone covered flat roof, like that illustrated above, the eyes are collecting lots of information about individual stones – but very little of that information makes it to consciousness unless or until one attends to a particular stone or small group of stones. The fact that the roof is covered with grey stone chippings may well have figured in some Bayesian prior involved in the construction of the subjective visual image, but whether that fact itself makes it to consciousness is another matter. One might say something of the same sort about the blades of grass in a field or on a lawn.

Or if we are conscious of something vibrating, we might be conscious of the speed of vibration or its regularity, we might be conscious in a transient way of the individual strokes or strikes of the vibration – but these last are very quickly lost as individuals. We could say nothing about them afterwards. Something of the same sort happens when one watches the sleepers underneath the rails of the railway line next to the one is travelling on, even though it may well be that individual sleepers are, in theory, recoverable from the light signals reaching the retinas. Too much detail expressed in time rather than in space.

Speculating further, I thought about a cat watching a mouse. The cat is probably conscious of looking at a mouse, or at least at a promising prey animal. It knows that it might be a good idea to line itself up so that it is facing the mouse and to pay attention to it, to point in language of hunting dogs. And at some point, it might pounce or make a grab for the mouse. Now in order to do this, the brain needs to know how far away the mouse is. My speculation is that the cat is not conscious of this knowledge: it is enough for the cat to pay attention to the mouse and let the brain go about its business. A cat probably does not have the conscious concepts of distance or direction at all.

And I think that much the same is true of humans. A carpenter needs to pay attention to the chisel and to the piece of wood being cut, but while knowledge of angles and distances is necessary for successful tapping of the mallet, there is no need for that knowledge to be conscious, although one might worry consciously about such things when learning. And this is going to be true of lots of motor tasks which need to be learned – and once they have been learned, conscious knowledge is as likely to hinder as to help.

Another analogy here might be the process by which an important person, perhaps one of Her Majesty’s Secretaries of State, is briefed by his (considerable and clever) staff about something important, but about which he has no prior knowledge. A huge amount of information gets poured into the top of the funnel, but what comes out of the other end has to fit onto the back of a postcard. Given all the pressures on their time – if not their intellects – Secretaries of State cannot cope with any more than this.

Conclusions

All in all, a useful reminder that consciousness is a very selective business. The brain just projects into consciousness what is needed there, in a neat and tidy form – whatever that may be – and leaves everything else out. And if consciousness in this particular sort of brain is not structured to cope with this particular sort of information, tough.

References

Reference 1: http://scholarpedia.org/article/Main_Page.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholarpedia. Scholarpedia according to Wikipedia.

Reference 3: http://scholarpedia.org/article/Scholarpedia:Topics.

Reference 4: http://scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia:Touch.

Reference 5: http://scholarpedia.org/article/The_World_of_Touch.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/an-introduction-to-lws-n.html. A little out of date, but hopefully it will serve here.

Reference 7: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-further-update-on-seeing-red.html. Inter alia, a list of the other material which has been posted. Also a little out of date.

Trolley 385

Captured by the footbridge over the railway at the bottom of West Street. I almost left it for another day, but thinking that supplies back at the store were a bit low returned it.

To find the regular trolley stack empty, a first. And no grateful lady to take this one.

Went back through the newly discovered cut through the Farriers Road estate, where I noticed a couple of stashes of trolleys, presumably from Sainsbury's. But they are on private land, they will probably be returned - or at least reused - on the next shop, so I think I will leave them alone.

Nearer home, picked up a fifth brick, with the fourth having been noticed at reference 1. Most, if not all, of those that remain in the skip are broken, and I am not yet reducing to collecting broken bricks. Maybe they will be knocking out another chunk of brick work.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/fourth-brick.html.

Trolley 384

Captured in Stones Road, on the way to the Screwfix underpass.

For those who check such things, the house back left has been redecorated since the Google Street View people took their pictures in 2014.

Returned to the main stacks outside the Sainsbury's Kiln Lane store, where the regular trolleys were down to half a dozen or so. Clearly the trolley jockeys were unable to keep up on this busy Saturday morning. Plus BH thinks that less people are doing big weekly shops these days, so the demand for large trolleys is down and that for regular trolleys is up. Whatever the case, the large trolley stack is usually pretty full.

With this regular trolley passed onto another grateful lady. After which I gathered up a couple of very jolly carrier bags, fairly durable, originating from the people at reference 1. From which we can deduce that some of the people who use the Kiln Lane store go on foreign holidays - something that we have not done on a regular basis for a very long time, and in any case, not since we went to Ottawa at the end of 2014. We don't even run to two passports between us any more.

Reference 1: https://www.servigroup.com/es/.

Trolley 383

Three M&S food hall trolleys, captured in the Ashmore passage. Returned to the stacks at the Ashley Centre entrance, where one of them was taken gratefully in charge by an older lady who thereby avoided having to have to do with handle locks, clearly a technology with which she was not comfortable.

Aachen Barbarossaleuchter revisted

At the end of reference 1, I signalled having another read of 'Germania' by Simon Winder. This has now been done and I have ground to a halt at page 133, from a total of 441. His chatty style, more suitable for a bar room than a book, eventually got me down. I also suspected him of being rather careless with the truth: there is just too much stuff there to have been properly checked. Furthermore, flip remarks about complicated stories rarely do them justice: good for a laugh in said bar room and that is about it. So given his professional background in book publishing, I am reminded of the old adage that you should not look at the private accounts of an accountant, if you want to see how it should be done. Or expect doctors and nurses to make model patients: not for nothing did they used to be put in isolation wards - in the olden days, when we had the spare beds for that sort of thing.

But a page about the Aachen Barbarossaleuchter, last noticed by me at reference 2, caught my eye. Winder rather dismisses this giant candelabra as a bit of rich man display by one Barbarossa, some hundreds of years after Charlemagne's chapel at Aachen was built, the sort of thing that a Trump or a Saudi prince might go in for in our own times. He also tells us that it was so heavy that it caused the original frescos to peel off the inside of the dome, to be eventually replaced by 19th century fakes. But no pictures: as I noted in my original notice, it is the sort of book that needs the Thames & Hudson picture book treatment, more like that of the subject of reference 1. Maybe Thames & Hudson found it all rather irritating too, and could not face the tedious labour of editing it into something better.

While turning back to the Wikipedia entry, I learn that the chain from which the candelabra is suspended from the apex of the dome, high above, has been cunningly tapered so that it does not look tapered from below. I believe the sculptors of large figures which are to be viewed from below go in for tricks of the same sort.

And following up a lead there, I arrive at references 3, 4 and 5. I have not yet been able to extract reference 5 from the Courtauld Institute, but reference 3 is open access and includes a substantial section on the candelabra, taking it properly seriously, the opening paragraphs of which are snapped above.

Perhaps I will get around to reading it before we next visit the replica in Buckfast Abbey.

PS: I have a memory of having come across Winder in his capacity as something for Penguin Books, for being grateful that he had propelled something interesting into the light of day. But I cannot now find the something in question.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/history-by-enumeration.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/aachen-barbarossaleuchter.html.

Reference 3: Celica Iherusalem Carolina: Imperial Eschatology and Light Apocalypticism in the Palatine Chapel at Aachen - Nicoletta Isar - 2009. For Isar see reference 6.

Reference 4: http://hierotopy.ru/contents/NewJerusalems_14_Isar_PalatineChapel_2009_EngRus.pdf. Open access version of reference 3.

Reference 5: The iconographic programme of the Barbarossa Candelabrum in the Palatine Chapel at Aachen : a re-interpretation - Hanna Wimmer - 2005. To be found in the 2005 number of 'Immediations', the research journal of the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Reference 6: https://kunstogkulturvidenskab.ku.dk/ansatte/?pure=da/persons/97771. Where we learn that Isar is a Danish academic. Furthermore: 'Nicoletta Isar is Associate Professor at the Institute of Art History, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at Copenhagen University. She studied Classical Archaeology, Byzantine Studies and Comparative Religions at the Sorbonne Paris IV (1990-1996), from where she holds a doctorate (docteur ès lettres) (1996) ... Her main research project is "Chorography (Chôra, Chóros): A performative paradigm of creation and imagination", a comparative and interdisciplinary project. Chorography takes as a point of departure Plato’s chôra from Timaeus, and expands the field of analysis of sacred space from antiquity and Byzantium to contemporary performances...'.