Sunday, 31 January 2021

Huawei

Huawei are a company I notice from time to time, perhaps ten times in as many years, for the first time at reference 1.

A company which is presently very much in the news as we in the west remain unsure about whether to take advantage of what might appear to be very good value communications products, from telephones to the serious engineering required to enable telephones to talk to each other and to computers. Can we trust them not to abuse the trust that that involves? Would they be likely, if it came to a choice, to do what the Chinese government might suggest, rather than what we might like, for whatever reason? Do I care if they know everything about my movements in and around Epsom? Or if they borrow my health records for some reason or another?

Against which background, it seems very odd that they should manipulate the not terribly interesting Twitter and Facebook  accounts of some of their middle to top rank executives to suggest that far more people are reading them than is likely to be the case. Manipulating the like counts and stuff like that, if I have got the jargon right.

If they go in for crude attacks of this sort - pointless and ineffective though they might be - whatever else might they get up to?

Do decent, god-fearing Anglophone companies go in for the same sort of thing, while managing not to get caught at it?

PS: I notice mention of potion dispensers from Boots at the bottom of reference 1. Ten years on, I can say that they are an invaluable aid to dispensation. With a dispenser on the mantelpiece, just a couple of feet from where I climb in and out of bed, I very rarely make a mistake. Not quite the thing snapped above, but near enough.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2012/08/sacks.html.

Greenshaw

Last night we watched what we thought was the Julia McKenzie version of the Agatha short story 'Greenshaw's Folly'. With the 25 pages of the story expanded to 90 minutes (net, after deduction of advertisements) on the television. What we had thought was a case of Miss. Marple being intruded for commercial reasons into a story in which she had not actually appeared.

And rounded off the evening by reading the short story, which we happened to have. I was intrigued to find that while the core of the short story - the murder of an eccentric spinster living in a large house, with just three suspects, all with alibis - was retained in the adaptation, large dollops of story had been conjured up. And surprised to find that Miss. Marple and her novelist nephew actually did turn up; not an intrusion at all.

So in the adaptation, we had three murders, rather than one.

We had a grandfather who dabbled in chemistry and who used children from the local orphanage to test his efforts at a polo vaccine - presumably very much a live issue when the story was first written in the 1950's - with often untoward, not to say fatal results. We had a Father Brophy who now minded the orphanage, an alcoholic into petty theft to fund his habit.

The secretarial blonde acquired a violent husband, all too likely to search her out for another beating.

The eccentric spinster was shown as brewing up her own atropine from deadly nightshade to use as an eye salve. Later used to drug her in preparation for her murder.

We had a cute child, promoted to centre stage on television from footnote in the story as the son of the secretarial blonde. A cute child whom I believe I have seen in other adaptions of this sort. He must specialise.

While various bits of Agatha colour in the story got lost in the adaptation.

Sprigged print dresses. BH knows all about them, apparently light summer dresses printed with lots of sprigs, as in small leafy twigs.

'Paul and Virginie' in the library. A book which I own in the form of a miniature edition from 1892, complete with a selection of engravings. Probably much the same as a less miniature edition from the same year, now in Polesden Lacey. With Bing turning up both Polesden Lacey and the engraving above. A best selling story, a tragic romance, set in Mauritius, well known to a mental nurse from those parts whom I got to know in TB.

A horse-coper. Derogatory term for the handsome husband of the late sister of the eccentric spinster. But according to OED once current in the sense of someone who looked after horses. The father of a possible nephew of said spinster.

Various social class related asides were dropped, presumably not thought to be of interest to a modern audience. And the gay literary journalist who liked to have maids with white caps and streamers was morphed into a murder victim.

Eventually, with the help of IDMB (reference 2), I learn that the television adaptation that we saw was crafted from two short stories, 'Greenshaw's Folly' and 'The Thumb Mark of St. Peter', rather than just the one. Sadly, we don't have the second, so I can't check, but I imagine that it is the source for much of the apparently extraneous material noted above.

PS: a final digression being the fact that the eccentric spinster was played by Fiona Shaw, whom we remember as having seen a couple of times in a derelict music hall - Wilton's - in east London, in the course of her touring recitation of Eliot's 'The Wasteland'. Oddly enough, despite rarely reading poetry, even more rarely anything other than Shakespeare, I have recently taken to dipping in a 1932 copy of some of Eliot's poems. Strangely fascinating, despite not understanding much of what he is on about. A book which opens with 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'. While according to Bing, the touring recitation took place around 2010, well after the start of the first volume of this blog in 2006, but I can find no notice of it, the best I could do being an allusion to our visit to Wilton (very properly in Wilt-shire) to see the curious Italianate church there, a rather grander version of the one by the Thames at Kingston. All very odd.

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

Reference 2: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2166492/.

Reference 3: https://wiltons.org.uk/. No longer derelict, back up and running in a more regular fashion.

Saturday, 30 January 2021

Water, water everywhere

I noticed relaying some stones in our ponds' department a couple of weeks ago at reference 1 and they have been completely under water ever since. With excess water draining down the side of the path, onto the back patio behind the garage and from there to the drain which leads to the soakaway under the back lawn.

All in all, the wettest spell we have had for a very long time. Probably since I extended the path up to the brick compost heap at the very back of the garden, which last was waterlogged for the first few springs that we were here, back in the early 1990's. And the council slabs, laid on a modicum of sand, have done well. They have not moved and they are very rarely very wet - as they are just presently. And they have made the brick walks, which have proved convenient during lockdown, possible. See, for example, reference 2.

In fact, there are patches of standing water all over the back garden, including in the depressions in which I planted a couple of yew bushes - depressions which were intended to provide some protection against the long hot summers we have been having. Yew bushes which replaced the box bushes taken down by the caterpillars, with the remnants visible above Polly's new picnic table top right. Some carex pendula coming along top left. And the stump of the large yew bush I chopped down, perhaps ten years ago, to give the now dead box bushes a bit more space and light.

And to the right of the stump, celandines just starting to come up, visible if you click to enlarge. Not a very good show last year, perhaps we will do better this. They can look very well, a regular splash of yellow.

Jagged wire above to stop the foxes digging up the newly planted yew bushes. It could probably come down now, although it might be a bit of a deterrent generally. The three half inch steel stakes around the nearer bush probably inherited from my parents. They have lasted well.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/stones.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/series-3-episode-vii.html. I feel sure that there is something more recent, but I have not been able to put my hand on it. Yet.

Shanks

On my first visit to the butcher in Manor Green Road after the recent festivities, two events of interest. First, new floor mounted screens had been installed for our greater protection. Second, he had a couple of lamb shanks in the window, something we have eaten out occasionally - including, I think, the Oak Room in the hotel at Birling Gap, a hotel allowed to fall over the cliff and so close by the National Trust - but never bought. 

So bought these two shanks, and I insisted, against BH's better judgement, on their being roasted rather than pot-roasted, roasted on the grounds that leg of lamb was entirely roast-worthy, no need to render it down with pot-roasting. So roasted for an hour at 180°C and served as shown above, with a bottle of  the 'Mademoiselle' which has been noticed before, lurking at the top of the snap. 

The debris. Not for the crows on this occasion

Looked good and tasted well enough, but a little too savoury and chewy for my taste. When served as part of a gigot it does better by being cut with meat from further up the leg - so next time we will try pot-roast. Plus a spot of the entry-level Calvados from Majestic, which did not, on this occasion, have the cidery taste I have noticed and liked on a previous occasion. But it went down well enough for all that.

The dessert

For dessert, a confection involving cooking apples from Sainsbury's and blackberries from some hedge. Rather good it was too. Plus, for BH, a pot of the cold yellow custard which our elder granddaughter used to be fond of, in the days before the plague when she sometimes used to take lunch with us. A lunch which would always involve cottage pie, sometimes glossed as cotton pie.

Towards the end of these proceedings, a bill arrived from Thames Water, just visible in the snap above, announcing an upwards lurch in our direct debit. Were we into the swings back and forth which used to plague our gas bills for so many years? But this is a story which has already been told at reference 2.

From water to the Mishnah, last noticed at reference 3, on this occasion concentrating on the introduction. Which left me with the impression that it was more Muslim in tone than Christian. Which fits with what happened in the first millennium - but not so well with what we have got now. I also learned about the word 'homoioteleuton', a sort of rhyming known to Aristotle, with 'Heinz Beanz' being a modern example of sorts. Here for the common copyists' error of skipping everything between two words of similar appearance, a meaning for which I had to turn to the OED, where I was confused by its variant spelling 'homœoteleuton'. Copyists' errors which it seems are helpful in tracing the provenance of important texts. Something which I believe Muslims do not go in for in their sacred texts, despite the example set by both Christians and Jews.

From there, for some reason, to the navy and the likely goings on on-shore of BH's naval grandfather during his time on a gunboat on the Yangtze. From there to Union Street, which for some minutes I had placed in Portsmouth, rather than in Plymouth where it belongs. Last time we visited, a shadow of its former torrid self, rather like Rose Street in Edinburgh as far as that goes. While I remember the days when a long wheel-base, white Land Rover packed with Shore Patrol, booted if not suited, would be parked at one end, just in case anything kicked off.

PS 1: the pot-roast story from the BBC. With pot-roast appearing to rule the waves, as according to Bing all the celebrity chefs are at it.

PS 2: another case of National Trust greed being their takeover at the café at the Devil's Punchbowl, noticed at reference 1. While the snap far above was taken well before we knew the hotel, by which time it was getting rather close to the cliff edge. Time we paid another visit to the place, once a popular place of resort.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/09/new-labour-profligacy.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-lesson-in-water.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/boiled-beef.html.

Friday, 29 January 2021

Big tent

I was summoned by text a few days ago to make an appointment for a covid jab in the big tent up on Epsom Downs. Managed to copy the complicated URL supplied with the text on my mobile phone to Edge on my laptop and in short order made an appointment for today. Having found the bit of the instructions that said if you were special needs - in my case being apt to faint on contact with needles - to tell the people in the tent when you got there.

Up to the race course by car with BH as backup, I having thought it prudent not to walk and I am not sure that I would make it up the hill on a bicycle these days. Quite enough of a puff more than ten years ago when I last tried it, making it on that occasion all the way to the mound at Tattenham Corner.

The big tent actually turned out to be the main hall in the main grandstand, another place last visited more than ten years ago. One of the days when cheap racing was offered to local residents, a day when I remember getting some quite decent fish and chips for lunch. While for the Derby proper, we were nearly always out on the hill, with all the proper punters (and others).

A main hall all kitted out with receptionists, inoculation stations, inoculators, computers, chairs, support staff and signage. Not to mention supplies of vaccine, in little bottles rather than being ready syringed. And at around 1030 this morning it all seemed to be going very smoothly. 

Having declared my special need, I was handed over to an inoculator, I think in her day job a practise nurse at St. Stephen's in nearby Ashtead. It turned out that I was not the first special needs of the day, and yes they did have a bed that I could lie on in a cubicle. A young lady from St. John Ambulance was on hand, in support. There was also a doctor in the house, in case of very special need. And the inoculator certainly knew her stuff as I hardly felt the needle at all, and after a couple of minutes I thought it safe to stand. Nothing untoward at all. And so off to the holding area for the mandatory 15 minutes cooling off period before being allowed to leave.

All in all, a credit to our Health Service.

Back home, I thought it prudent to take things quietly for a bit and so turned up the book at reference 1, not looked at for many years. A book about the fur trade in what is now the north western quadrant of the US, say 1820-1840. The time of the mountain men who trapped and lived out in the Rockies, paddling down to civilisation with their hauls of furs from time to time. 

With there being an old map of the mountains printed inside the front cover and the page facing, from which I learned that the Chinook were a tribe, not a wind as I had thought, living on the land around Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River. Now just Vancouver, quite near what is now Portland, and nowhere near the foreign place up north. At some point morphing into the ubiquitous helicopter, last noticed at reference 6.

Properly inside, I first noticed that the book was dedicated to one Garrett Mattingly, a historian whom I came across more half a century ago as the author of an influential book about the Spanish Armada.

Then I learned that Provo, a city I had first come across in connection with the murderer who is the subject of the book at reference 3, was named for an eminence in this fur trade, one Etienne Provost, possibly a left-over from the days of the French in north America.

Then that the plains Indians, while speaking lots of different languages, used a sign language when meeting foreigners. Good enough for a spot of trading, dancing and socialising. Which unlikely story seems to be corroborated at reference 5.

Then that missionaries got the bit between their teeth at about this time, being very keen to bring the word of our Lord to the savages. Some of whom, it seems, were quite receptive. All of whom, it seems, were very keen on manufactured trade goods. Blankets, beads and mirrors. And iron, which it seems they could work well enough, but not make in the first place.

We shall see how far I get.

Reference 1: Across the wide Missouri - Bernard DeVoto - 1948. Illustrated with lots of paintings and sketches by Alfred Miller. Nicely produced by Eyre & Spottiswoode. Probably acquired at one of the book fairs they used to hold around here more than twenty years ago now.

Reference 2: https://thewalters.org/. The Baltimore home to much of the Miller oeuvre. The source of the reproduction above, first noticed in reference 1. A museum which seems to make images of lots of its stuff available for free download, albeit not of the same quality as that offered by the Getty museum of reference 4.

Reference 3: The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer - 1979.

Reference 4: https://www.getty.edu/museum/. They offer a 'Still Life with Apples' at more than 8,000 by 6,000 pixels. I think for free, for private usage, although I did not get quite that far.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plains_Indian_Sign_Language.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/06/stop-press.html.

Reference 7: The Defeat of the Spanish Armada - Garrett Mattingly - 1959. With my current copy, quickly - found in its proper place, being a quality edition from that same1959, from Jonathan Cape, printed on paper made by John Dickinson & Co. A second hand replacement for the (fat) Penguin edition of my childhood.

Thursday, 28 January 2021

Toys for the boys

This prompted by a piece in this morning's (Friday) FT about push and shove in the South China Sea.

First, at least the US has the sort of defence budget which can support toys of the sort snapped above. Which we do not, ambitions of our many admirals notwithstanding. I associate to the old yarn about us having more officers of flag rank than we had ships - even when you stretch to include things like offshore patrol boats in the count.

Second, one of the two sorts of planes used by the Chinese during the incident in question was made in Russia quite recently, while the other was a old Russian design made under license in China.

Third, the US has got rather used to being the only country in the world which can project power across the globe with carrier groups. The adjustment to being one of two might be tricky - with our experience of the same sort of thing, here in the UK, not being very encouraging.

Fourth, I was irritated by the use of the word 'genocide' to describe the way that the Chinese are treating their Uighur minority. Which is bad, but falls short of what I understand by genocide. An abuse of language, another example of the deteriorating standard of public debate.

PS: regarding the snap: 'the USS Theodore Roosevelt was leading a group of US Navy vessels in the area © REUTERS © FT'.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/white-elephants.html. Previous thoughts about aircraft carriers.

Puzzle resolution

I think I have now more or less resolved the follow-up puzzle in yesterday's post at reference 1. At odd moments today, I have been trying new search keys to try and locate the blog written by a server (I think what fast food places in the US call a waiter) who worked for the Red Lobster people. I felt sure that there was some trace in volume 1 of the present blog, that is to say reference 2.

I then got to thinking about other members of the Red Lobster family, and turned up the fact that at the time in question Red Lobster, an Orlando based operation, was once owned by Darden Restaurants. 

This produced reference 4, which gave me a date to work on.

Browsing the rest of March gave me reference 3, the car mentioned at reference 1. The fact that we may have a crayfish rather than a lobster is not really relevant. While reference 5 is perhaps the sanitised version of the blog which I used to read occasionally, ten years ago now. Turned up for me by a feature called 'next blog' or something like that, since vanished. I still miss it, it having been a good way to see what other, very different bloggers get up to.

PS: the snap above may be from the Malaysian end of the chain. Not quite what we would expect in the Isle of Wight, although they certainly do sell lobsters there.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/a-puzzle-for-wednesday.html.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/03/flash-cars.html.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/03/blogging-policies.html.

Reference 5: http://rlserver.blogspot.com/. How many UK operations run to a staff blogging facility like this? And right on the button too, with one post from around seven years ago managing to include an advertisement from Wickes for something very like the concrete mentioned at reference 7.

Reference 6: https://thebitchywaiter.com/. A less corporate version of the genre.

Reference 7: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/concrete.html

French violence

A rather depressing article in the latest number of the NYRB about the ongoing conflict between the radicalised & marginalised Moslems, mostly born in France, but mostly having north African if not Algerian roots, and the French civic values of postcolonial today. In particular, and I quote: ‘its more recent tradition of laïcité - the particularly French version of secularism that guarantees the right of all religions to exist, yet denies the right of religion to control public life. There are laws against hate speech and against insulting people for their religion, but the concept of blasphemy is not recognized, as it would mean that a religion was sanctioning speech’. A conflict which spreads, amongst other places, to the teaching of history and biology, with lots of teachers in schools with lots of Muslims on their rolls trading this recent tradition in for a quiet life. A conflict which has also stirred up anti-Semitism again, giving rise to curious links with National Rally, formerly the National Front.

All this resulted in some savage terrorist attacks, culminating in the particularly savage murder of a teacher in a school in the north western outskirts of Paris in the autumn of last year. Apart from anything else the charge of his insulting the prophet was quite unfair. With the whole sorry story being stirred up by what read like very unpleasant people - and with the actual murderer having had Chechen rather than north African roots and having only learned about the teacher he went on to murder in the media. Nothing to do with him personally.

That said, the behaviour of the satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’, the subject of the offending lesson on the proper limits of free speech, does seem to be gratuitously provocative – although in their defence it should be said that their attacks on Christian and Jewish figures are just as robust, not to say tasteless and tactless.

And then there was the long, sorry and very bloody history of the French in Algeria. A colonial outrage of the first order: a bloody and protracted conquest followed less than a century later by a bloody and protracted withdrawal, leaving Algeria to make a not very good job of cleaning up the resultant mess. And France to make not a very good job of taking in the many displaced Algerians, many of whom went on to do all the dirty work that proper Frenchmen don't want.

Not easy to see a way out of all this.

Maybe the French of today would be similarly shocked if they read of our doings in, for example, Kenya, at about the same time that they were getting badly embroiled in Algeria. See reference 2 for some notice.

PS: two factlets. First, we are told that around half the imams in France were trained in Turkey. Perhaps not the best place to learn about French values. Second, HyperCacher – literally 'Super Kosher' – is a chain of kosher supermarkets in France and Italy. A chain which appears to be without web site. Maybe they do Facebook.

Reference 1: A Rising Tide of Violence in France: The roots of radicalization in the country’s colonial past - Marc Weitzmann/NYRB - 2021.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/07/elkins-and-out.html

Wednesday, 27 January 2021

A puzzle for Wednesday


Most days I get an email advertisement from an outfit called the Texas Mesquite Grill, with the message for today being: 'The Wait is Over! Come enjoy some great Crawfish and Craft Beer.  $7.95 a pound comes with corn and potato'. I assumed that this was a chain belonging to the same family as a chain which I had actually used at some point. Alternatively, I used to see a blog written by a chap who worked for the Red Lobster chain, the people at reference 2. Perhaps they were in the same family and that was the link.

But this afternoon, I was moved to check and as far as I can make out the Texas Mequite Grill is a one restaurant operation a few miles north west out of Houston, just off the US 290 HOV at a place called Cypress. Snapped above in gmaps and to be found at reference 1. I did once go to Texas, but that was a very long time ago, well before Internet mailing lists were invented, so I don't think that was it. So it all remains a puzzle.

As do the Red Lobster people, of whom I can find no trace on my blog, despite Windows search claiming that the string 'redlobster' occurs in the archive for April 2014. The nearest I get is reference 3. This despite my being sure that I once reposted a snap of a similar red lobster sitting on top of a car, somewhere in the US, advertising same. Maybe it will turn up later.

PS 1: for once in a while Google services seem to be struggling a bit. At least, either the Google servers are struggling or the Epsom Broadband is. Either of which is a pretty rare event.

PS 2: but I do now know that HOV means a road or lane reserved for high occupancy vehicles. So perhaps car share is a bigger deal in the US than it is here.

Reference 1: https://texasmesquitegrill.com/.

Reference 2: https://www.redlobster.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-hunt-for-red-january.html.

Reference 4: https://www.ranker.com/list/the-top-seafood-restaurant-chains/restaurant-chains. Red Lobster gets the second spot here.

Reference 5: https://rlserver.blogspot.com/. Probably not the blog in question, which I had not thought was a company operation.

When Google (and others) meet politics

Some years ago, at the Wikimania gathering at the Barbican Centre, noticed at reference 3, I was struck how some contributors reported getting lots of online abuse, to the point where anonymity was essential. Online abuse arising from writing more or less factual entries in Wikipedia about controversial people or controversial events. Writing articles about the Battle of Waterloo might get a few people hot under the collar, but not usually the sort of people who write hate mail. Even less so the Battle of Thapsus, which took place a very long time ago. But writing about something which is both current and tricky, say Brexit, President Modi (the rather extreme Hindu in charge of India) or abortion does. It also becomes a political act of sorts, a political act which might draw the attention of whichever politicians who happen to be in power.

In which context I have been interested to read about the palace which has been built on the Black Sea, allegedly for the use of President Putin. A palace which is the subject of a helpful Wikipedia article (reference 1), help which includes an address (reference 2). A place which appears in satellite view in gmaps, from where the snap above was taken.

So it seems that there certainly is a large Italianate palace on the Black Sea, the sort of thing that Hollywood stars and moguls used to build for themselves. Or our own Premier League footballers. Which our Queen, sitting on her pile of old money, stolen long ago, might think rather flashy and vulgar.

Ownership of the palace is much more tricky. Probably just about as tricky as the web of shadowy companies big PLC's over here build to hide their affairs from the prying eyes of taxmen and regulators.

Which leaves for me the question of who uses this palace? How does anyone get any value out it?

Possibly the nearest beach

No point in owning such a place if you don't use it occasionally. And you can hardly use it by yourself; that would be a bit silly. You need glitzy parties, guests with lots of bling and lots of staff, indoor and outdoor. You need fawning courtiers: not too servile because that becomes tiresome, but courtiers who know their place just the same. You need supplies to be delivered and rubbish to be taken away. You might even want some insurance. And what about a spot of sea swimming? Or a drive around the bay in your equally flashy and vulgar yacht?

Dense leylandii hedging

All this amounts to quite a big footprint. Such a place can't exist in a vacuum and all the bars roundabout must know all about it. Perhaps if one was a Russian it would be interesting to try to walk the perimeter, presumably something a bit more serious than the park wall that country estates used to run to in this country. Chain link fences, topped with razor wire and cornered with watch towers? Death zone patrolled by packs of Dobermans? Miles and miles of dense leylandii hedging to stop people peeping in at the cavorting, aging oligarchs?

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putin's_Palace.

Reference 2: palace address: Gelendzhik Urban Okrug, Krasnodar Krai, Russia. 44.4198035°N 38.2052456°E.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/08/and-another-six.html.

Tuesday, 26 January 2021

A fishy story

I thought about Finnan haddocks last November, and thought about them again a couple of weeks ago. I failed to find the original of the picture that came with reference 1, but Google did turn up the one above from reference 2, rather nearer to the real thing.

One thought led to another and I found myself at the Fish Society, who offered a fine picture of a smoked haddock and offered to sell me two large ones for about £20 each, including postage. A bit strong but I thought we could give it a go.

Turned up on the advertised day, with the fish wrapped up in a slightly more serious version of the packaging used by the people at Neal's Yard Dairy. Plus a 'Beryl' cup from our large collection of such stuff, although not quite as large as it used to be. Utility crockery, once used in schools and hospitals across the land, it has served us well. No complicated patterns to tire of.

A little disappointed to find that our haddocks came trimmed, folded and frozen. In my innocence, I thought that the whole point of smoking fish was to preserve it, and that freezing should not be necessary. In any event, not much like either the picture on the supplier's web site or the snap above - at least not at this stage.

BH decided, quite rightly as it turned out, that one fish was enough for two. So one popped in the freezer and one thawed out against the next day. By which time it was looking much more like a fish, even if it had been trimmed - rather spoiling the appearance to my mind.

BH was elected chef for the day, and she elected to add a bit of milk to the mix. Cooked the fish, which weighed in at just over a pound, seen here turned out of the fish kettle, for around 10 minutes.

I didn't do a very neat job of taking the bone out, but my half looked well enough on the plate. Very good it was too, best smoked haddock that we have had for a while, prejudices about trimming and freezing notwithstanding. And the milk seemed to have drawn just about the right amount of salt, leaving a delicately flavoured haddock. And the half fish was plenty for one.

Wound up proceedings with a spot of rhubarb crumble. Rather an odd time for rhubarb and rather pink for my taste - I prefer the older, thicker and greener stalks - but it went down very well just the same.

The second haddock followed just about a week later. Same treatment and same result. Plus I did a better job on carving on this second occasion. Probably not another rhubarb crumble but neither BH nor I can presently call to mind what we did have.

So verdict, a bit pricey but very good. I expect we will have another go at some point. They also do smokies, which I rather like, snapped above. I suppose they will be trimmed and frozen too. A shame that the few times that I passed through Arbroath, on the way to important business in Aberdeen, were before I had heard of smokies. On the other hand, I did see the largest herring gull I have ever seen at the fish dock at Aberdeen. Possibly no longer there.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/fish-soup.html.

Reference 2: http://fishonfriday.org.uk/. A trade association rather than a shop. Founded by Fishmongers’ Company, one of the Great Twelve Livery Companies of London. No idea what livery companies have to do with the real world these days.

Reference 3: https://www.thefishsociety.co.uk/. This one is a shop, based in Guildford, although the haddock came from Grimsby.

Reference 4: https://theupperscale.co.uk/. Another shop, this one based in Billingsgate, which a correspondent tells me provides a similar service to the Fish Society. But, sadly, no Finnan haddocks.

A stake in the ground

Quite often, in the course of my search for Wellingtonia on my travels, largely documented by the search key given below, I am unsure whether some tree is a Wellingtonia or not.

A large, mature tree usually has a distinctive shape and one is pretty sure what it is. But smaller trees do not have that shape and one has to rely on the micro features of leaves rather than the macro features of shape.

The present post records some micro features of the two young Wellingtonia which have been planted down Longmead Road. Planted with labels affixed so their is no doubt about their identification. A cut-down version of the post at reference 1. As ever, click to enlarge!

The micro feature which we can latch onto being the distinctive organisation of terminal shoots into scales rather than needles, flat (say, Yew) or round (say, Scots Pine). 

Part of a young tree

With a bit of Longmead Road visible at the top.

Detail

Scales clearly visible, together with terminal cones coming along. I think cones are sexed but I don't know which sex these ones are. I also think that the length of these scaled terminal shoots is unusual: other trees might have scaled leaves, but not on shoots of this length.

A different shot

Maybe a different tree.

Detail with some branch and trunk

Not yet worked out how distinctive the appearance of branch and trunk is.

A close-up

Detail
Moving onto something between macro and micro.

Small tree against winter sky

Reasonably distinctive organisation of terminal shoots. The bright green thing, bottom centre, is the back view of a sign for the industrial estate to the left.

Detail

With some of the shoots having a very spiky appearance when viewed against the sky from the right angle. But not here, without clicking to enlarge.

PS 1: ran into trouble with picture placement again. Maybe pictures not separated by text are particularly prone to problems. About to try publish and edit to see if that clears it. Too early in the morning for HTML view.

PS 2: got into HTML after all. Looks right published, but wrong in the editor. All very irritating, to me at least. And probably something the Blogger engineers who maintain the two editing views - HTML view and WYSIWYG (or compose) view - struggle to get right. They know about the problem but don't have the time and space to put it right. Something which Wordperfect attempted and which Word (this last from Microsoft) abandoned. Seemingly triggered here by the lack of text between the the third and fourth pictures, counting up from the bottom.

PS 3: this post was prepared on a laptop, where the images, all derived from my telephone, looked pretty good. Much more fuzzy on the much larger desktop screen, something more than twice the area of the laptop screen. As are the raw (6.5Mb) pictures from the telephone. Has Microsoft optimised them in some way for a laptop sized screen? Is the desktop screen - an HP HOMI - showing its age? Or is it all in the mind?

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/identification-of-wellingtonia-closed.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG.

Group search key: wgc.

Sunday, 24 January 2021

Associations

A few weeks ago someone or something pointed me at the paper at reference 1a about cannabis & tobacco. A paper which has not leaked out into the wide world, as many do these days, but is available online at reference 1b. An outfit called Qeois which at first (and only) glance appears to offer some form of self publication for authors who do not have the patience to wait for proper publication. They are to be found at reference 5.

The paper reports on a study on cannabis & tobacco in the UK which may have been sponsored by the Society for the Study of Addiction (reference 3), whose house journal (Addiction) is looked after by Wiley (reference 4) from whom you can buy 48 hour online access to this paper for a modest $8 or the pdf for a rather less modest $49. Or, in the days before the plague struck, one could buy a day ticket from the library at UCL and read it there. Quite probably download the pdf too. I am reminded at reference 6 that, the one time that I did this, I paid £7 - which probably compares quite well with $8 once you have added in the HSBC foreign transaction charge.

Back with Qeois, I find that one can copy the online material and paste it into a Word document. Formatting of the resultant text not too bad, but the figures get a bit messed up - although, if one was aiming for a decent copy, one could always lift them as images using the Microsoft Snip & Sketch tool. However, for my modest level of interest, online was good enough.

Having learned that this study was mixed up with YouGov, for whom I regularly complete online surveys on brand awareness and other important matters, I pressed on. I learned that the YouGov panel in the UK included more than 1.5m people. Then that by methods not explained they got that down to about 13,000 people completing an online survey about themselves, their tobacco and cannabis habits. The lack of explanation irritated me as a former statistician, once working in the same building as what was then called the Government Social Survey, people who took a great deal of trouble about the selection of their samples. Who were very alive to all the biases that could creep into one's results if one was careless about such matters. To the need to be careful not to report a fact derived from a number of people which was too small to support it. Perhaps there was explanation but I failed to find it.

Methodological worries aside, the results seemed reasonably clear. Lots of people used tobacco, lots of people used cannabis and lots of people had mental disorders, presumably mostly fairly mild. And these three things were associated.

So something less than 15% of the population smoked tobacco. While getting on for a third of the population had used cannabis at some point and about 2% of the population said that they used it every day. Around half the people using both cannabis and tobacco (self) reported mental health issues of one sort or another, compared with about a fifth of the people who used neither. Lots more numbers in the paper itself.

The authors properly draw back from drawing any conclusions from these associations. But I would settle for substance use and mental health interaction. On the one hand, if one was a little fragile in the mental department, one would be more likely (in the olden days) to use alcohol and tobacco to manage the symptoms. On the other hand, excessive - or even moderate use - of same was likely to make those symptoms worse, even cause permanent damage, mental, physical or both. So given the usually poor state of mental health services, mainly a function of inadequate funding, the outlook was not that great.

PS 1: I learned a new bit of sub-culture jargon, something called a 'blunt'. Seemingly a dealer buys up cheap but reasonably fat cigars, perhaps something like a half corona, drills out the interiors and stuffs the resultant holes with chopped cannabis leaves and then sells them on as ready mades. Perhaps you can buy such things over the counter in places like Canada where cannabis is now more or less legal. Named, according to Wikipedia, for the Phillies Blunt, a cigar which comes in all kinds of odd flavours, apart from cannabis that is. A member of the family which used to be called Imperial Tobacco in the far off days when we were still proud of having an empire.

PS 2: for the avoidance of doubt, I should say that I favour decriminalisation of recreational drugs. Criminalisation has failed, just as prohibition failed in the US in the 1920's and 1930's - even though it lingers on to this day in the form of dry counties. Including, I believe, the county in which Jack Daniels whisky is made.

Reference 1a: Cannabis use and co-use in tobacco smokers and non-smokers: prevalence and associations with mental health in a nationally representative sample of adults in Great Britain, 2020 - Chandni Hindocha, Leonie Brose, Hannah Walsh, Hazel Cheeseman – 2020.

Reference 1b: https://www.qeios.com/read/2F4AQ1.

Reference 2: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/add.15381?af=R.

Reference 3: https://www.addiction-ssa.org/.

Reference 4: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/13600443.

Reference 5: https://www.qeios.com/teaser. 'We are unveiling new ways of creating and distributing knowledge. Through our paths, we have come to honour the creativeness of the individual. We have come to value the diverse judgment of the wider community above the narrow assessment of a bunch of authorities...'.

Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/09/a-day-at-library.html.

Snow!

A couple of days ago, as reported at reference 1, we were warned about snow which never really came. Then yesterday we were warned again, and after a sharp frost last night, this morning the snow really has come. So at around 10:00 it is snowing hard, certainly by the standards of north west Epsom. Quite a lot has settled on our two flats roofs already and it is starting to settle on the back lawn. Altogether a fine view of it from the study.

Spin around Jubilee Way stood down. Thinking, for the first time this year, of thick trousers - which I do not care to cycle in these days. Plus, if I make it outside, my flashy red snow jacket.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/stones-still-wet.html.

Saturday, 23 January 2021

More patisserie

Just a week since our last cheese scones, we were at it again today because my bread failed to rise fast enough for consumption at 1800, being rather fresh out of the oven at that point. So we leveraged the fact that the oven was already hot and popped the scones in. Scones being very quick and intended to be eaten more or less straight out of the oven.

The big difference was that on this occasion, the first time that I think such a thing has happened, at least for a very long time, was that they were cooked by BH. The difference arising from the fact that cheese scones regularly featured in my childhood teas, quite often made by me, BH's family was more cake orientated and did not make scones at all, cheese or otherwise. So BH is more a cake person.

Notwithstanding, she did very well. I don't think one could have told the difference from mine in a blind test. Just one left for grazing later on. But no Calvados on this occasion - this last perhaps not being a thing to make a habit of.

Furthermore, a quick peek at psmv3 reveals that, actually, BH made cheese scones in November 2016. Scarcely a very long time ago. Memory fails yet again.

Memory also claims that we have been given fresh cheese scones in tea shop just the once. Perhaps I will be able to track this rare event down a bit later.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/patisserie.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=cheese+scones.

A lesson in water

Yesterday, at reference 1, I declared open season on Thames Water, their having seem fit to near double my monthly water charge. Obviously something wrong with their meter, almost certainly the result of unfortunate interaction with the BT fibre people who had been digging in a watery part of the road.

A cover very like the one in the pavement out front

Then a bit later, I thought I would attempt to read the meter for myself. Which turned out to be down the bottom, say about a foot down, of a flooded white plastic cylinder. With a black plastic outer cover and a very messy, white polystyrene plug below that. Black plastic cover looked to me to be a long way off waterproof - so in wet weather one might expect the cylinder to be flooded the whole time, given our clay. Hole not deep enough to break through into the chalk.

A bit like the view down my hole

Fetch beaker to bale out most of the water. Remove the odd leaf. Fetch egg cup to bale out some more water. By which time the dial is just about above the water level. Remove a black plastic gadget I now think is used to turn the water off, on the Thames Water side of the meter. Put it aside.

So we now have something like the snap above, except there the plastic cylinder is not flooded and it is not the same model of meter. But the same sort of idea. A spinner in the middle which is stationary when no water is flowing into the house and which spins fast when you turn a tap on. Our spinner, was rather different and it was quite easy to count the revolutions, something close to 20 a minute. At this rate my version of the larger red dial was visibly moving although not revolving, the smaller red dial was not moving and the cubic metre counter certainly was not. A counter which I read, with some difficulty, as 4,214.8.

A bit more like the view down my hole

We did not have a ticket from Thames Water. But the black plastic gadget can be seen immediately to the right of the shut-off, running top right to bottom left. Click to enlarge.

In any event, our meter was quite difficult to read, even with the aid of a torch. Maybe I should have fetched down my monocular.

After a bit, I decided that there was nothing to be done in the hole and put it all back together again. Back to the bill from Thames Water, which said that the meter man who had visited a few days before had made it 4,237. But he had not bothered to bale the cylinder out and he had complained about it. The bill also said that we used around a cubic metre of water a day, with each metre costing of the order of £2.

Back to the Thames Water web site. Thames Water being one of the few people I am not registered online with, I attempted registration. Several times. But despite being armed with a shiny new account number, taken from the bill which had just arrived, I could not register and look at my account. See what the history was. Although I did find some talk of system upgrades.

Poked around to try and find out where to complain about a faulty meter. Got nowhere. Dark thoughts about what a rubbish web site it was. But eventually I arrived at the Thames Water Twitter account. It did not let me tweet but it did let me page down, where I stumbled across a tweet, complete with pictures, which explained that a slowly leaking valve in the cistern of a toilet could get through 200 litres a day and cost people on meters hundreds of pounds a year.

Now I knew that our downstairs cistern valve was leaking slightly, but had thought nothing of it. But now the penny dropped. The sums added up, with the slight leakage accounting for the £40 hike in our monthly charge. So the system works: by being on a meter, I actually keep an eye on things, and now know that I really do need to do something about this leak. Even if it has taken a while. Which added up across the Thames Water area must amount to a huge amount of wasted water. To which has to be added all the much larger leaks in their part of the system.

YouTube helpfully explains that if I go down to the plumbers' merchants in Blenheim Road I could get the necessary part for £20 and fit it in less than half an hour.

But then I remembered that I have a maintenance contract for such things from British Gas, so I might as well get something for the money I pay them. And maybe they will be able to fit a new syphon washer on the other cistern while they are at it - having fitted something cut out of a plastic bag last time, which does not work terribly well. Probably the wrong sort of plastic bag - stiff fertilizer bags being what is needed, not floppy shopping bags. As it happens, I have now got a supply of the necessary washers and will be able to give one to the man when he turns up next week. The booking an engineer part of the British Gas contract working very well.

Watch this space.

PS 1: annoying that I have fitted these syphon washers myself in the past, and it was easy enough - but I no longer remember how it is done. Much easier to let British Gas do it than bother my head about it, especially now that I can supply them with the necessary washers.

PS 2: rather late in the day, I remembered about advice from TB about not poking around in ground water, particularly near drains and sewers, with bare hands and arms. Which carried the risk of getting infected with some unpleasant, possibly fatal, rat borne disease. Asking Bing, probably Weil's disease, said to be rare and usually either very mild or treatable. Also known as leptospirosis. At least this particular ground water was not very near a drain and I would think the assembly as a whole was rat proof - if not water proof. But another space to watch.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/stones-still-wet.html

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

Friday, 22 January 2021

More Irish matters

I have been reminded today that the Irish are a good deal further ahead with assisted dying than we are, being maybe halfway through the process of legislative scrutiny. So they while they may be some way off making a law (which, according to some Irish wrinkle, would also be available to the people of Northern Ireland), they a good deal further ahead than we are.

Which reminds me in turn of two other matters on which they seem to manage better than us. First, a sensible, a fairer sharing of the costs of care homes between the people being cared for and the state. Second, getting to sensible rules about how far one is allowed to travel for leisure & family purposes very early on in the present crisis. Rules which we have still not got to.

All this despite the much greater number of expensively trained brains that we pay to think about these problems than they can afford. Just think of all those clones of Cummings beavering away in various places in Whitehall.

PS 1: and to think that it was not so long ago that it was OK in England to talk of Ireland as a place full of bogs, priests and drunks.

PS 2: on the other hand, not much movement on the decriminalisation of recreational drugs. On that one they seem to be stuck in the same place as us.

Reference 1: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.

Reference 2: https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/health-family/physician-assisted-dying-complex-issue-that-requires-open-and-honest-debate-1.4397648. Beware the advertisement which bursts, unasked, into sound. Maybe set something to mute before you click on the link.

Stones still wet

We were warned about snow shortly after reporting the wet stones at reference 1, a Thursday, and the snap above shows how the back garden looked on the Saturday morning following. A reasonably sharp frost, and the thinnest possible scattering of snow. Maybe up on the downs - Epsom Downs or North Downs that is - they got some real snow. But the new stones were still underwater, just visible as a yellow smudge.

There were some ups and downs in the days that followed, but there was enough rain to keep the stones covered the whole time, although the water level does now seem to have dropped and it may be that the stones have finally resurfaced. Hopefully not having moved since their levelling. Another half hour or so and I will get out there to take a closer look.

PS 1: following yesterday's newsflash about OneDrive I finally lost patience this morning and moved the snaps from the last week, from my telephone to my laptop, by hand. The snap above being one of them. I dare say inbound synchronisation will get started again at some point. In the meantime, one more prod in the direction of new telephone. 

PS 2: but nothing doing this morning as it is the turn of Thames Water to misbehave. They seem to think that our water consumption has increased by 50%, with a more than corresponding hike in our bill. While we think that there is something wrong with the meter again, probably a consequence of the fracking noticed at reference 3. I expect a fair chunk of today will be spent either peering down the hole at our water meter or sitting around with my telephone in my ear waiting to get through to an operator at the Thames Water call centre.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/wet-stones.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/newsflash.html.

Reference 3: psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/bt-action.html.

Thursday, 21 January 2021

Walking the plank

Something in the recent past pointed me in the direction of reference 1, an elderly essay in the ‘Journal of Sport History’, mainly concerning some lady athletes, mainly in the UK and the US, who went in for exhibitions of marathon walking, sometimes going on for days and nights. An occupation sometimes called walking the plank as it was sometimes conducted on more or less circular boardwalks laid for the purpose in places of entertainment, possibly music halls. Places where alcoholic drink was served and where men leered at women.

With my copy of this essay coming to me from JSTOR, the not-for-profit online library of reference 6. I have not been able to find out what the letters stand for.

While the essay is primarily about the athletic side of the rising women’s movement of the later nineteenth century, we also get to know something of two lady athletes in particular, Bertha Von Hillern and Madame Ada Anderson. The former was German and reasonably prim and proper, while the latter was from London and a touch more flamboyant. Both had to tread a fine line between promoting sensible exercise for ladies and making exhibitions of themselves, to hold off Sunday Observance and other people who thought that such exhibitions were the work of harlots or of the devil.

I was a bit disappointed that most of the article was sociological rather than sporting and I did not find out a great deal about how the sport was conducted. Did the ladies really walk non-stop for days on end or were periods of sleep allowed? What were the standards of foot-care? Wikipedia does rather better at reference 4. From where I associated to stories from the world of work of the difficulties people of faith have today when they suddenly decide to walk on pilgrimage from London to Canterbury. The spirit might be willing, but the flesh – the feet, ankles and knees – is certainly weak.

Nevertheless, it was a curious business. A fad which was strong, particularly in the US, for about twenty years, say 1870-1890. A fad which must have been fed by a huge, mainly urban, desire for entertainment. Entertainment at a time when there were no films and no television and when entertainment had to be taken to the people in the flesh rather than over the wires. Perhaps people who had only recently been uprooted from settled, rural life and who were at a bit of a loose end at the weekends. I recall reading something of the sort driving the growth of Freemasonry at roughly the same time. Perhaps also the craze up north in this country for growing giant leeks, relics of which are still to be found in the public houses there.

I also got to know about the smock races (reference 5 and print above) which came before and was reminded of the marathon dancing (references 2 and 3) which came after. Both of which appear to have been rather tawdry spectator sports.

And then, much more recently, we have the case of lady runners from Muslim countries, with Shaulis reporting that ‘according to Sports Illustrated, Algerian world champion 1,500-meter runner Hassiba Boulmerka was symbolized both as a hero and an antihero in her country’, it not being practical to be a world class lady runner while dressing in the way of the Prophet.

I also remembered, rather vaguely, my father talking of country wives in the fens skating for geese at Christmas, say in the early part of the 20th century, or something or that sort. Possibly his mother.

PS: one of this morning’s advertisements from Google suggests that I should go in for buying casks of whisky. As a speculation that is, rather than for consumption.

References

Reference 1: Pedestriennes: Newsworthy but Controversial Women in Sporting Entertainment - Dahn Shaulis – 1999.

Reference 2: https://www.messynessychic.com/2017/08/29/the-depraved-dance-marathons-of-the-1930s-you-didnt-know-about/.

Reference 3: https://www.historylink.org/File/5534

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Anderson. Much more helpful on the practical arrangements. With these marathons being a test of both strength and the ability to stand prolonged sleep deprivation.

Reference 5: https://wordwenches.typepad.com/word_wenches/2008/10/smock-races.html

Reference 6: https://www.jstor.org/.  

Newsflash

Microsoft's OneDrive is sulking again. No updates from my Microsoft telephone have reached my PC since Friday of last week, although updates are flowing in the other direction.

Do these sulks correspond to periods when Microsoft is busy with people working from home? Does the fact that my telephone is now out of Microsoft support mean that people with other kinds of telephone are getting preference? Or that some update to the OneDrive system has not been copied down to my telephone - this being part of what it means to be out of support?

Logging into the online copy of my OneDrive does not seem to help either, as the missing pictures have not made it there either. This despite my telephone regularly showing signs of synchronisation activity - that is to say a little spinning circle when you are in the 'Photos' part of its world, when you are in range of a hub, such as the BT hub sitting downstairs.

I last moaned about sulking in early December, at reference 1. But I last plugged my telephone into my laptop - this bypassing the missing OneDrive synchronisation on New Year's Day. So a three week respite from failure.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/through-glass-ceiling.html.

Wednesday, 20 January 2021

Layers of approximation

Figure 1

Introduction

What follows is intended to give a bit of background, a bit of motivation to our habit of using Excel-like arrays of pixels to describe the world. The Excel, that is, from the Microsoft stable; not the exhibition facility in the East End of London, presently a hospital.

Background which arises from an ongoing investigation into what a two-dimensional world is missing. On what can be done in three dimensions which does not really work in two – but which might be usefully approximated by allowing layers into this essentially two-dimensional world, after the way of LWS-R of reference 2 and computer packages like Drawbase of reference 4, last mentioned in the rather different post about layers at reference 8.

I am mindful here of the importance of vision to most vertebrates, in particular to humans. Evolution has invested a lot in vision, in many ways a sense of two dimensions. Our brains are geared to two dimensions. And I believe that it is relevant that the tightly folded cerebral cortex of humans is another two dimensional structure, a sheet just a few millimetres thick but 2,000 square centimetres in area, say a couple of square feet, taking the two hemispheres together.

On the other hand, while there is plenty of roughly two dimensional life about in the form of films of bacteria & algae, sheets & colonies of cells, and the layered stromatolites are an important part of the fossil record of early life – all the bigger plants and animals are organised in three dimensions.

I am also mindful of the layers often used to simplify the world a bit, to structure it into layers of organisation, of complexity. With some layers being more obvious, more natural and less arbitrary than others. In the case of reference 1, from the basic eukaryotic cell up. Physicists would, of course, like to start from somewhere else, as illustrated at Figure 1 above. A figure snipped from the paper by an eminent physicist at reference 6.

With these biological layers being, from the bottom: cell, tissue, organ, organ system (an association of different organs and other anatomical structures that perform a certain physiological process), organism, population (when similar organisms group together, they form the next level in the organization, a population), community (defined as the interactions of different populations with each other), ecosystem, biome (large, possibly continental, geographic area where various ecosystems exist and different organisms adapt to it), biosphere (the whole lot).

Ten for once, rather than the magic seven, which last number often crops up in stories of this sort. See, for example, reference 5.

A two dimensional world

Let us suppose that we have, that we are living in a two dimensional world, a world which is specified by a world function W1: R1 × R2 × R3 → S. Where R1 and R2 are the two dimensions of our world, with position in that world specified by two real numbers, that is to say positive or negative numbers, including zero, not necessarily, not usually whole numbers. And R3 is the time dimension, with time specified by another real number.

S is a state space, not necessarily finite. But it might be as small as the set made up of zero and one. In any event, S always includes a null value, denoted by φ. Used to describe a place in our world which is empty, where nothing is happening. Which might well be the same as the zero in the minimal case just mentioned.

Figure 2

Note that while W1 may be considered a two dimensional space, it is really more like a special kind of two dimensional surface in a three dimensional space, a bit like a map with the value in S standing in for height above sea level, possibly something like the above. Possibly something far less continuous. But at least not a closed surface, not anything like a sphere or a torus, let alone something more complicated.

There may be lots of rules about the values in S that W1 may take in two dimensional space at any particular time t. This being another way of saying that there is more than just noise, that there is plenty of structure, plenty of redundancy. That there are validation rules, perhaps, in the case that S is a segment of the real line, that the function W1 is continuous almost everywhere. That is to say there may be breaks in the function, but not too many of them. The point being that the data structure allows such a thing, but it is not permitted. There may be lots of rules about the values in S that W1 may take in two dimensional space at time t, given that we know what happened before that. Or put another way, how the system evolves given a starting point. 

Persistence is likely: that is to say that things, that structures identified in one moment in time are likely to be there in the next moment. Continuity of a sort.

We suppose such rules to exist, but we do not necessarily know what they are, although we might make guesses, and we leave aside the question, no doubt of interest to philosophers, of in exactly what sense such a function and the associated rules can be said to exist. How are they specified? Where do they come from? Are we in danger of allowing the deity?

Instead, we just suppose our world is bounded in the sense that there is a positive number B (‘B’ for bound, for boundary and for finite) such that for all x, y and t, |x| > B and |y| > B, then W1(x, y, z) = φ. There is nothing and nothing happens outside of some large square with side 2B. Going further, nothing much happens anywhere near the boundary of that square, although we do not specify exactly what we mean by anywhere near. But a soft boundary, rather than a hard boundary up against which things are rubbing and jostling, giving rise to boundary effects which we do not need here.

Figure 3

Example 1. An example of such a world might be a family of circles and ellipses drifting about in space and time, perhaps something like the figure above. Circles and ellipses with boundaries and interiors, after the way of simple objects in Microsoft’s Powerpoint. Such a circle might be described by equations of the form:

Figure 4

A digression on equations

Figure 3 shows the world W1 from above, as if it had been embedded in a three dimensional world, as it might appear to some all-knowing alien. A showing in what might be described as the declarative mode.

While Figure 4 represented a shift to the discursive mode, with a series of statements, essentially text, one after the other, which collectively describe the world. With text breaking down in turn to a series of symbols. With the difference between declarative and discursive being something that philosophers can get excited about. See, for example, the once popular book at reference 9.

Figure 5

A shift which is exemplified by the scalable vector graphics of reference 3, in which pictures, or at least diagrams, are reduced to a series of statements in the same XTML language as is used all over the Internet. With Figure 5 being taken from reference 3.

Statements which may have the advantages of precision and brevity, but which lack the appeal of the picture. From a picture, for example, it is clear when a line crosses a circle. This is not so clear from inspection of the corresponding equations, even though the crossing is implicit in them. Which is not really a problem, as most of us only see those equations when they have been converted, rendered back into a picture.

However, in order to develop equations we need a view of the world to work with; we are unlikely to conjure up equations from the void. We need to capture, to internalise that world somehow or another – using such tools as are available to us. We need something between Figure 3 and Figure 4. To which end we now move onto a geometry preserving approximation of W1.

Note that equations like those of Figure 4, conic equations in particular, do a good very job of approximating the movements of objects in free fall, say a planet in the solar system or a shell from a mortar. Situations where the ideal points, lines and curves of Euclid are a good description of the real world. 

Approximating our two dimensional world

We now want to approximate our two dimensional world at any point in time by an array of data on a computer. Or in a brain, for that matter. That is to say a square array of elements, W2, very much like an Excel worksheet, restricting our view to N rows and N columns, where N is some positive integer, that is to say positive whole number. On a modern desktop computer, N might easily be 10,000, giving us 100 million elements altogether. 

We call the elements pixels and each pixel can take one of 256 values, that is to say it can be represented by an eight bit byte. We call this set of values P. Once again, we have a null value, φ.

The meaning of the values that these pixels take depend on what we have in S and what of that we want to capture in W2. They might be 256 different colours, in the ordinary way of pixels. Or they might be the 256 numbers from zero to 255. We might choose, for all kinds of reasons, to classify our numbers to ten bands or bins, coded from one to ten,  and not to use the other 246 codes – which takes us back to something like Figure 2. Or we might restrict ourselves to just two values, zero and one. While in a post to come, we will be dividing pixels into two camps, line pixels and space pixels, a division which will take one of our eight bits.

Or looking ahead to using the objects of one layer to label those of another, or perhaps back to reference 8, the 265 codes might be used to code for some character set, the sort of thing you see when you fire up the Microsoft accessory called Character Map.

Leaving this last possibility aside, we start our map from W1 to W2 by dividing our large square into N2 equal voxels, not to be confused with the small cubes or bricks of space used by things like fMRI scanners. We then map these voxels onto our square array of pixels, with the value of each pixel being something to do with the values, possibly a large number of values, S takes over the corresponding voxel, an important and considerable simplification. We suppose a simple map for the moment, with a voxel on the square mapping onto the corresponding pixel in the array. A mapping in which distances between points on the square approximate to some constant times the distances between corresponding pixels on the array, these last defined conventionally in terms of the array coordinates. Note that we do not recognise points within a pixel in the way that we recognise points within a voxel.

We might also decide to update this array in time every so many milliseconds, say κ milliseconds. Perhaps 100 milliseconds, that is to say a tenth of a second.

In this way, the continuous, real world of W1, at least that part of the real world which is not null, has been reduced to the discrete, finite world of W2.

Once again, we have lots of rules about exactly how W2 can behave. Rules which in this case we know. We also have history, history of previous images and of how they turned out. 

An alternative arrangement would be to update pixels on a continuous basis, as the updates come in, although the seeming need to take snapshots for the purpose of analysis might mean that, despite appearances, we have not added much. In any event we put this possibility aside.

Our problem is to get from W1, for some point in time, to W2. To map W1 onto W2. W1 is a perfectly ordinary three dimensional Euclidean space. But we have said nothing about S, beyond it including a special value φ, which we have called the null value. There might be lots of rules and regulations - but we do not know, certainly not at the outset, what they are.

Nevertheless, we devise and then execute some process or experiment, possibly involving elaborate and expensive machinery, perhaps one of the scanners just mentioned, perhaps a radio telescope, which computes a raw value in P for every one of those voxels, a value which is mainly a function of the values in S taken by W1 over that voxel. We can’t presently say much about this process except that a voxel over which W1 is mostly φ is apt to deliver φ for the corresponding pixel. 

Note that in example 1 above, integrating W1 over a voxel, assuming W1 to be integrable, is likely to give zero, as W1 is zero almost everywhere. So, in this case, our process is something other than integration or averaging. Perhaps a simple maximum over the voxel would serve? 

Our process, in the interests of time, might also sample W1, with the sample being designed to given reasonable coverage of the pixels of W2 in reasonable time, that is to say something less than the κ milliseconds mentioned above. 

Figure 6

Which might give a result, for what is supposed to be a straight line, something like the figure above. Which will be familiar to users of Powerpoint, where lines often have this stepped appearance, particularly when close to the vertical or close to the horizontal. Even when one is looking at rather more pixels, perhaps the million – or 1,000 by 1,000 – of a computer screen. 

Figure 7

Worse still, a complex line, perhaps the pattern above right might be reduced to a rather untidy blob of pixels left, in the which the centre of the spiral is lost. Here, although not in Figure 6, one would probably do better by taking the average, rather than the maximum. Another approach would be to allow the scale of the W2 array to vary according to W1 circumstances – a solution we do not allow here. We require the map from W2 to W1 to be uniform across W2’s big square.

Having got our raw array, we then apply the rules and the history, in a possibly iterative process combining bottom up from W1 with top down from the rules and history of W2. Which last might include some simplifying equations. Which process might include some tidying up of the noise and error which has crept in. All this is wrapped up in some larger algorithm we call A.

Figure 8

At some point, algorithm A says enough, and delivers the array W2. Enough might be the update interval, κ milliseconds, introduced above. Clearly there are trade-offs here between short intervals and long intervals, with short intervals being up to date and long intervals being accurate. One might even allow κ to vary a bit, according to circumstances. From where I associate to the famous uncertainty principle, often glossed by saying that you can’t be accurate about both space and time. See reference 7.

All this being summarised in Figure 8 above; expressed as a shift from black to white.

Reference 7 also talks of the observer principle which says that you cannot observe something without changing it. And while the present observer might not change W1, the top down part of the process of building W2 is an observer effect of sorts. The expectations and desires of the observer have a sometimes important influence on what gets into W2. Or, as is often said in other contexts, it’s all in the eye of the beholder.

W2 is our model of the world W1. The present point of the whole process being that it is W2 that we have to work with. W2 is something we can get hold of, apply algorithms to, compute with. If we have a good process, the behaviour of W2 will be relevant to our own life and wellbeing, we will be able to predict the behaviour of W2 and we will be able to adjust our own behaviour accordingly. Note that to be relevant, W2 will need to include the self; we need to be in the world for that world to be relevant. So in figure 3 above, one of the circles or ellipses will be distinguished, will be that self.

While a rather different point of the process might be to try and compute, to try and reverse engineer W1 from W2. To try and deduce what the rules and regulations governing W1 might be.

Different again is the business of converting something like W2 into something more conceptual, sometimes called vectorisation – a process which is under the hood of the layer objects of the LWS-R of reference 2. A process which I had thought that Bing thought was French, going by the images offered for the search key ‘vectorisation’, but this turns out to be a confusion with the English spelling, more usually ‘vectorization’. See also the already mentioned reference 3.

Conclusions

Figure 9

Our model of the world, what we have in our brains, is at some remove from that world. It is, necessarily, a massive simplification, rather as the figure above is a massive simplification of a real cell – as can be readily verified by looking at a real one through a microscope. Much more messy.

But our model is what we can know and, hopefully, what we need to know to get along. 

References

Reference 1: https://www.bioexplorer.net/10-levels-biological-organization.html/. Ten levels or layers of biological organisation.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/an-updated-introduction-to-lws-r.html.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics. Something of a whiff of Powerpoint here. But was Microsoft driving the standard or was the standard driving Microsoft?

Reference 4: http://www.drawbase.com/

Reference 5: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-freudians-fight-back.html

Reference 6: More is different - Anderson, P. W. – 1972.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-ship-of-line.html

Reference 9: Philosophy in a new key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art - Langer, S. K. - 1942.

Group search key: sre.