Bloomberg tells us of a run on Kellog's Frosted Flakes, with speculators, short-sellers and other vultures already hovering. So BH has been dispatched to Sainsbury's at Kiln Lane to stock up. Or if the wave of action has already washed up East Street, to Costcutter in Manor Green Road. An outfit which has track record in keeping up its stocks of important commodities that the bigger stores sometimes struggle with.
Continuing my read of the biography at reference 2, last noticed at reference 1, I digressed to the Biobank, a large and important statistical resource of which I had not previously heard. A sample of around 500,000 people which comes with all kinds of demographic and health data. Stuff like alcohol and tobacco usage. And rolling forward from the time of sampling, there is linkage to vital events, to cancer events and to other data. A lot of which seems to come from the people at reference 5. Some of 190 odd data items involved are listed in the snap above, around two thirds of which appear to be to do with spells in hospitals.
The sample was created between 2006 and 2010 by inviting all nine million or so people of middle years living within 25 miles of one of the 22 assessment centres scattered across the UK. The assessment centres were mostly large cities like Bristol, Leeds and Edinburgh, so the 500,000 who accepted the invitation would have been mostly people living in towns or cities, although I have yet to find any analysis of the urban-rural divide - perhaps not thought important for the purposes of this work. Or perhaps too expensive - given all the travel time - to deal with.
I have not yet found a general reader summary of the operation, neither of the taking of the sample nor of the data available for sample members. No soft box models of the sort favoured when I used to know about databases, the sort of thing turned up by Bing above.
But I have found the paper at reference 4 which compared the Biobank sample with the population at large, where the story seems to be that the sample is not bad, but women, people who are older, people who are better off and people who have healthy lifestyles are overrepresented. Something which in the trade is known as the healthy volunteer bias. Notwithstanding, if your are looking for exposure-disorder linkages in general, we have a good resource here.
From there I hopped to NHS Digital, of references 5 and 6, but to get a handle on what they do, Wikipedia seemed to do a better job at reference 7 than the official web sites. It also revealed that Mr. Hancock thought that something called NHSX of reference 8 was needed to keep an eye on them, just to be on the safe side. Perhaps all self respecting organisations these days make sure that they have someone on board who is Wikipedia literate and who can discretely look after their Wikipedia entry for them.
I should have gone there for Biobank, easy enough to find after you jump over the article about biobanks in general. See reference 9.
Amazing what the odd digression turns up.
PS 1: one is reminded of how politicians and bureaucrats never tire of reorganisations, that well known patent remedy for tired organisations. Must be easy money for all those management consultants out there.
PS 2: once again impressed by the ease with which I can import data like that snapped at the beginning of this post, supplied as comma delimited text, into Microsoft's Excel. A very modest bit of formatting needed, mainly column widths, and I am up and running.
PS 3: checking my inbox later this morning, I find that I have actually been in touch with NHS Digital, thinking that they might be able to help me with a letter from some other part of the NHS empire about changing my communications preferences which I could not get to work as my smart phone was not smart enough to process QR codes. Wrong, as NHS Digital was not into that sort of digital at all. But, to be fair, their contact centre, did reply to this effect within a day or so. Unlike some contact centres which one deals with...
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/ten-years-ago.html.
Reference 2: What does Jeremy think – Suzanne Heywood – 2021.
Reference 3: https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/.
Reference 4: Comparison of Sociodemographic and Health-Related Characteristics of UK Biobank Participants With Those of the General Population – Anna Fry, Thomas J Littlejohns, Cathie Sudlow, Nicola Doherty, Ligia Adamska, Tim Sprosen, Rory Collins, Naomi E Allen – 2017. Open access.
Reference 5: https://digital.nhs.uk/.
Reference 6: Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC) Annual Report and Accounts 2019-20 - Presented to Parliament pursuant to Schedule 18, paragraph 12(2)(a) of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 - Ordered by the House of Commons to be printed on 16 July 2020. The Health and Social Care Information Centre is an executive non-departmental public body created by statute, also known as NHS Digital. An outfit which I had not previously heard of and which appears to spend of the order of £500m a year.
Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHS_Digital.
Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NHSX.
Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_Biobank.
I have been hearing and reading a lot about SPAC's in the last few weeks. Otherwise, special purpose acquisition companies. The hot ticket in the world of high finance. Or low finance, depending on your point of view.
The idea seems to go as follows. I am some private finance operation, private so that I have only very modest obligations to explain what I get up to to the tax man or anyone else.
I create one of these SPAC's and get it listed on the stock exchange. As a private finance operation I know all about how to do that. The purpose of the SPAC is to suck the money in from the punters blind and then, at some point, to identify some undervalued, usually private asset, and to use the money to buy it. I put in my management team, expert at puffing companies back into life, or that failing, sucking all their money out of them. Assuming the asset floats, the SPAC and the asset become one, thus making what was a private asset into a public asset and the original punters (otherwise backers) can either run with their new toy or cash out. I suck lots of money out in the form of fees, expenses, commissions and so and so forth - and to the extent that I have put my own money into the game, I might win on that too. While if it all goes pear shaped, the damage is contained within the SPAC. Don't need to reach into my piggy bank.
The key point is that the punters are pouring their money into my SPAC blind. They have no idea what asset I might eventually buy, although they might know that I specialised in this or that area. Possibly asset stripping. They are hoping that they will get rich quick by buying into some undervalued asset that no-one else has spotted.
While for the original owners of the undervalued asset, this is a way for them to cash out. Sold to them as a better deal than they might get otherwise.
All seems very dodgy to me. Low finance, definitely. Gives capitalism a bad name.
PS: it seems that our fat leader is being told to loosen up the rules, such as they are, which apply to such operations because otherwise Wall Street will get all the action - and that would never do.
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_acquisition_company.
Pork came round again last Sunday, seemingly having had its last outing towards the end of last November. Plausible, I suppose, given that we run to four or five different kinds of roast and we don't do roasts every Sunday. And very rarely on any other day.
I was given the choice of rolled shoulder or rolled leg and I settled for shoulder - although when I turned up the butcher was rolling up what looked like a large piece of meat for a shoulder, maybe a couple of feet long and getting of for a foot wide. Didn't like to poke around in these viral times.
Whatever it was, it weighed in at 4lbs 14.5oz, half a pound more than the last one, so salted and into the oven at 160°C at 1015 for 1330, rather than at 1030. While I went off around Jubilee Way.
To return to roast pork, mashed potato, crinkly cabbage and carrot. Apple sauce and such like for those that like such, which I don't. Never quite connected with the attraction of cold stewed apple for hot roast pork. But plenty do, so it must be me. Taken with a spot of the 1040 last taken with the boiled beef taken just about a month previously and noticed at reference 2. With one lesson from this last being that there is plenty of decent wine around in the £20-40 range, which is where we tend to be for Sunday roast purposes. £10-20 for every day purposes. Furthermore, the Sunday range rarely delivers a dud. So the relationship with Pyrene at reference 3 can be deemed a success. Mitigation for the present inaccessibility of Terroirs, one of their other customers - and maybe later in the year we will allow ourselves a visit to the shop itself, rather than to click and deliver.
Crackling good, but left to BH given that having lost one pre-molar to crackling many years ago, I am now rather careful with the few pre-molars and molars that I still have downstairs.
Followed by blackberry and apple crumble for dessert. With the apples, cunningly sliced but entire, sandwiched between the blackberries and the crumble. Very good. Possibly wound down with a spot of Calvados.
A little later on, a modest 8 bricks carried and then onto Scrabble. Which I won by a reasonable margin, despite some ups and downs.
The pork did well cold for Monday and Tuesday. Goes rather further cold than hot, not least because it can be sliced rather thinner. With a different sort of pork - white pudding - for Wednesday.
PS: we were amused to notice that our bottle was number 1,325 of 3,334. From which we deduce that they made around 3,000 litres of the stuff in this particular year, that is to say 2017. And I think that somewhere else on the bottle it talks of its being aged in 600 litre containers, so just 5 of those would do the business. Between ten and fifteen of our fifty gallon drums, or a fair amount of cellar space. Something to be checked, should we ever happen to visit.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/lenquete-porcine.html.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/boiled-beef.html.
Reference 3: http://lescaves.co.uk/lescaves-home.
Returned to the housing estate which was St. Ebba's, the home to Wellingtonia 25, last week to see what else we could pick up. With BH on this occasion, as she remembered the early days of this estate, when she as an officer of the Residents' Association used to take an interest in planning applications and show houses.
Given that this tree was wider for its height than is usual, I took a closer shot, from which the zoom above is taken. Characteristic scale leaves clearly visible if you click to enlarge.
Then, wanting to be sure where exactly this tree was, I tried to find it on gmaps, which took a good deal many more minutes than I care to mention. Tricky things aerial photographs. But I got there in end, on the appropriately named Redwood Drive, with our tree being more or less in the middle of the snap above. With the red spot for the people at reference 2. Don't know what you have to do to earn such a spot - or indeed to get rid of it when you have a career change to poodle hair care, or whatever.
Got slightly confused about the direction of the eastern tail of Hook Road Arena, from which I often used to exit after car booters.
But got there in the end, coming across this specimen, large if a little sparse, set on a low mound in middle of what might be an overflow pond. One of at least two on the cluster estate as a whole - which reminded me of talk from TB about the tricky drainage up here, on what used to be farm land, with water tending to hang about on top of the clay. Eastern tail of arena visible beyond.
Odd that I have never noticed it before, as I must have passed that way often enough. Even before I took up counting them, it was still a striking tree.
The scene at the Epileptic Colony at the start of the twentieth century, with thanks to the Scottish National Library. The buildings marked here, or at least most of them, appear to be alive and well on gmaps today. While to the south east, between the colony and Epsom proper, one had the Epsom sewage farm.
A few days later, that is to say over breakfast today, we discussed marking all the Wellingtonia, young and old, on a large map, perhaps printed on the flashy new printer to be found at Ai Printers, down on the High Street. Conducting a census if you will. Something which might do for a geography project at the nearby Blenheim High, but might otherwise keep a couple of pensioners busy for a few days. Maybe such a project would bring on my satellite view reading skills, presently poor.
PS: Ai Printers have not been open that long and their shop appears to contain a lot of expensive equipment. It is good to have a print shop in town again and they served me well enough on the couple of occasions that I used them. Let's hope their ambitions have not been damaged beyond repair by the shutdown.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/wellingtonia-25.html.
Reference 2: http://informed-intelligence.com/.
Reference 3: https://aiprinters.co.uk/about-us/. Would I manage to buy a suitable pdf from the people in Scotland, suitable for these people here in Epsom to print for me? What about Ordnance Survey for a more up to date map?
Group search key: wgc.
I am presently reading a biography of the late Jeremy Heywood of reference 1, to which I shall return in due course. In the meantime, I notice a publication event from the early days of the Cameron administration, something more than ten years ago, that is to say the security strategy of reference 2.
I find that, in the language of the securocrats, we have four tier 1 threats, of which the third is various hazards - which might once have been called Acts of God - including that of pandemic. The strategy goes on, in the section snipped above, to put the possible number of deaths in the range 50,000 to 750,000.
This strategy was published in the first months of Cameron's coalition at a time when making large cuts to public spending were occupying the foreground. Indeed, one of the drivers for this strategy might well have been the need for the sort of up to date assessment of threats to the nation which would facilitate large but surgical cuts to the defence budget.
Large cuts notwithstanding, the response appears to have been the setting up of Cabinet committees and sub-committees to carry the work forward. Work which was maintained during the Cameron and May administrations, but which has fallen away under Johnson, not least because of the Brexit drain on central resources. The sub-committee which concerned itself with these particular hazards was stood down. No trace of it at the Cabinet Office website, but Wikipedia has a longer memory at reference 4: '... the Threats, Hazards, Resilience and Contingencies Subcommittee was a subcommittee of the National Security Council with the terms of references to consider issues relating to terrorism and other security threats, hazards, resilience and intelligence policy and the performance and resources of the security and intelligence agencies; and report as necessary to the National Security Council...'.
With, one imagines, the result that planning and preparation for a pandemic was largely stood down. Perhaps down to some obscure, about-to-retire civil servant working away in the depths of the Department of Health. No-one much was thinking about the facilities and supplies that would be needed if there was a pandemic, much less actually making such facilities ready and stockpiling supplies. No-one was pulling together a statistical modelling group to keep the relevant models and the data needed to drive them ticking over. No-one was thinking about the bureaucracy that would be needed in the event of a pandemic. While I dare say the Department of Health itself was being cut down to size after the spending binge of the Blair and Brown administrations - a spending binge of which I might say I am a grateful beneficiary. Not the right background against which to be carving out money to build and mothball fever hospitals, just in case.
While one imagines now, after the first horse has bolted, that planning and preparation for the next will be resumed. How long will it take before we sink back into complacency?
Reference 1: What does Jeremy think – Suzanne Heywood – 2021.
Reference 2a: A Strong Britain in an Age of Uncertainty: National Security Strategy – Cm 7953 – October 2010.
Reference 2b: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/61936/national-security-strategy.pdf.
Reference 3: https://www.gov.uk/government/groups/national-security-council. An apparatus which was probably trying to ape the nomenclature and arrangements for this sort of thing made in the US.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Council_(United_Kingdom).
Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/twitter.html. An earlier contribution to the debate.
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/more-patisserie.html.
It being Sainsbury's day today meant that it was also a Guardian day. Where there is a piece about how there are more than 500,000 people living in London who are each worth more than $30m. It also claims that about one third of London's children, say 800,000 of them, are living in poverty. Suggesting to me that if 500,000 rich people were to stump up $1m each, which they could clearly well afford, that would be, after legal and other expenses, say $500,000 for each of the children in poverty. Which ought to sort things out.
In no particular order...
Is there something wrong with my arithmetic? $500,000 million or $500 billion is maybe a fifth of what the UK makes in a year. Which seems rather a lot. Is this just the difference between wealth and income? Are there really half a million of these people? Who are they? Where do they live? Has the decimal point slipped?
Assuming that the arithmetic is OK, I start to wonder how you would identify the children. How do you explain to the families just above the poverty line that they don't collect, while the pretty similar families next door do collect?
Then how can you be sure that the money will be spent properly? Not blown away on horses, booze or worse. Perhaps, as a precautionary measure, the money should be put into trust funds and doled out at so much a year.
Why not just freeload on all that computing machinery they have built to run Universal Credit. Why not just chuck the $500 billion into the kitty for London and let the machinery do what it is designed to do? That is to say, give money to people who, for one reason or another, need a bit of money, need a bit of help.
What about just doubling Child Benefit for all residents of London instead? Thinking here of what used, at least, to be a universal benefit involving a minimum of pack drill. Which wives could get paid out at the Post Office, away from the eyes and paws of improvident husbands.
But I'm not sure that any of this would fly. All money going into government just goes into one large kitty which is then doled out by the Treasury. Machinery not designed for passing money straight through to special groups of people. Designed to be fair and reasonable, with all people being equal at the Treasury bar. Even, for the moment at least, people from Scotland.
Maybe there are some London flavoured charities which could attend to distribution? Maybe the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has a London office?
All of which leads me to Option 1. We pay the people at the Treasury to be good at doling out the money. Why not just jack up the taxes, get some more money in and start to pay some more money out? Hopefully some of those children in poverty in London would get a slice of the cake.
With Option 2 being to get some of the clever policy people at the centre of government, people like Mr. Cummings, to work up a proper scheme to apply the $500 billion to the children in poverty in London.
PS: maybe I will get around to checking the claim that one third of London children are indeed in poverty. It sounds like a very high proportion; a disgrace if true. And the claim that half a million people in London are far too rich. A different sort of disgrace.
Reference 1: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/.
Reference 2: https://www.knightfrank.com/wealthreport. Possibly the source of the half million rich people. But I clearly don't have the right sort of handshake to get me past all the glossy photographs.
Last week saw what looks to have been the second oxtail of the season, the last having been towards the end of November, noticed at reference 1. On which occasion we had opted for lunch time, which even with an early start meant a slow cooking time of something under eight hours, which in the event I thought not quite long enough.
With the present event being prompted by spotting several packets of oxtail on display at the Manor Green Road butcher, where I had popped in for a spot of white pudding and to order some pork. So I took one packet, as I recall around £15, so not a cheap dish as it did us just the one meal. But worth every penny as it turned out.
The snap above being the scene just before 06:00. Oxtail resting on four crisp, middle sized onions, coarsely chopped. Plus something less than half a pint of water. Covered and into the oven at 100°C. Looked in but left it alone until 14:00 when there was no action. Looked again at 15:45 at which point I drained off the fat and sprinkled four quite large mushrooms on top. Not very fresh, so stalks removed and chopped, caps peeled, cut into quarters.
Served at 17:00 with mashed potato, mashed swede and a fair imitation of sprouting broccoli. At least more like sprouting broccoli than calabrese. BH explained that some care was needed when peeling the sweded, care to make sure that all the fibrous outer layers had been removed, otherwise, even when cooked, the swede would not mash. Edible but not good.
Served with what seems to have been our last bottle of Pierre Précieuse. Which is a pity as the people at Guildford seem to have run out. Have to wait for the next harvest or something. Query out with them.
The verdict was that the extra cooking time was the way forward, despite my worrying about possible overcooking at 16:00. Soft and succulent, but still a roast meat rather than a boiled meat - this last having been the way we cooked oxtail for a long time - until, in fact, I learned about roast in a South American styled eatery in what had been the Wheatsheaf in South Lambeth Road in Vauxhall. A fine pub in its day: old fashioned and quiet, but did not make enough money to suit the people who took over from the long serving brothers who had had the place most of the time that I knew it, but who had retired to the seaside.
Mushrooms very successful, an excellent addition to the blend. Will add them again, should they be available on the day. While the onions added a little something to the mashed potato.
Rhubarb from Sainsbury's and a few brick dates from Cullompton for dessert, passing up on grapes on this occasion.
Debris handed over to the council for recycling, it being a bit much for the crows and not wanting to encourage the foxes.
Wound up the day with the first sighting of the moon for a while. A waxing crescent to the west, maybe 35° above the horizon, high enough to be quite awkward to see from the study window. Far too late to be venturing outside.
PS: Bing tells me that the proper term for a waning crescent, a phrase in common enough parlance, is an old moon. But as long as waning crescents are in common parlance, adding the 'waxing' to crescent, despite the irritating tautology is appropriate.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/oxtail.html.
Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2009/04/to-chrome-or-not-to-chrome.html. What appears to be the first outing in these pages for the Wheatsheaf.
I lost by two points on terminal penalties yesterday, so keen to retrieve matters today, and I am pleased to say that I won by around 20, on a low combined score, despite taking a hit of 20 from my 'Q' when BH went out with a blank.
Victory slightly marred by my making a good score with 'formol' on a triple word, which I did not check beforehand (which is not really allowed) and which BH allowed, believing my story that it was some kind of chemical, possibly to do with disinfection.
But checking up later, I find that the word is not in OED, although it is known to Bing as both the Spanish for formaldehyde and the English for a 5% solution of formaldehyde in water. Not to be confused with formalin which is a 40% solution of same. So not an unreasonable attempt on my part, but I would have failed on challenge, given that OED rules for these purposes.
PS: I may have thought disinfectant by association from lysol, invented in the late nineteenth century, a quite different product which crops up in the Å vejk of reference 1. There used to spray sacks of rice and such like.
Reference 1: The Good Soldier Švejk: the fateful adventures of the good soldier Švejk during the world war - Jaroslav Hašek - 1921/3.
I was impressed by the green area in which this one was set, complete with a swing hanging off one of the trees, giving it an almost village green ambience. Perhaps in the summer there will be a bit more of that, with picnics and other activities. The houses visible left in the snap above looked quite smart too.
A three pronged Wellingtonia, just a few yards behind the first, so no additional score. With the three prongs being unusual, with nearly all of these trees being single trunked.
Made my way around to the northern part of the new estate to find a candidate Wellingtonia behind a long, low building, once part of the hospital, and probably even now something to do with mental health. But I couldn't find a way around the back to get a proper look, so not scored for the moment. It might, after all, have been a bushy Scots pine, rather than a rather scrawny Wellingtonia. And I couldn't get any closer this afternoon in Street View, with it declining to move across to St. Ebba's Way, which runs parallel and to the left of Parkview Way snapped above. With the tree in question being a little to the left and above the white van. To be checked on another occasion.
Came across this juvenile on the way out, at least I am fairly sure it is a juvenile. Not as healthy as the pair which have been planted down Longmead Road, but good that there is someone in the trees department planting for the future.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/wellingtonia-24.html.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/wellingtonia-1.html.
Group search key: wgc.
Today sees a headline which goes 'US passes ‘unimaginable’ milestone of 500,000 Covid-19 deaths', a rather smaller number pro-rata than our own, given that they have getting on for five times as many people. One day, I hope to see some explanation of our position in the chart above. We may now be seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but we do deserve to be told why the tunnel was so long and expensive. So long and expensive that it turns the overrunning Crossrail tunnels into rounding errors.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/11/footing-bill.html.
Reference 2: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality. The source of the graphic. We haven't done too well on the left hand tab either, although Mexico is in the lead there.
Google and Facebook are getting into trouble for recycling news stories without paying for them. While Microsoft is playing it very virtuous, saying that news is important and that news publishers need to be paid. They have joined up with a raft of big European publishers to promote action in this area. Against a background of the rather rubbishy Microsoft News feed that pops up every time I turn Edge on - the browser I use on my laptop. A news feed which, certainly of late, has been offering lots of scantily clad females. Or at least promise of same: actually clicking on them might be disappointing.
I also find that Google are now offering a news feed of their own at reference 1, with a sample snapped above. Functionally, not that unlike the Financial Times offering, with categories down the left hand side, search at the top and search results occupying the body of the screen right. A snippet plus a link to the story proper.
We shall see whether I get into the habit of using it. Added to my Edge favourites on my laptop to be going on with.
Reference 1: https://news.google.com/.
On the third day, we thought to make was was left of the gigot of the previous post, that is to say reference 1, into a cotton pie, in honour of the name given it by our elder granddaughter. So fetch down the Spong No.1 from the roof and off we go.
Usual drill, minced meat, onion and carrot. Two ounces of red lentils by way of thickening. No flour. And not a salt, pepper, stock cube or anything else of that sort in sight. Maybe half a pint of water. Simmered gently for an hour or so, after which I hand over to BH for the finishing touches the following day.
All very satisfactory and we probably did three quarters of it at the first shift. With the result that the excess mince that she had kept back as the pie dish was full enough, went to make a second, smaller pie which, together with the left overs from the pie snapped above, did us for a fourth day. All quite economical really.
Plus there was the savoury bit from the end which escaped the mincer to be snacked one tea time. Not the same as the savoury bit from the end which used to cause squabbles with and among my siblings when I was a child, which I think must have come from further to the left of the animal's leg, as snapped above.
Bing offers all kinds of pictures of sheep's legs, both skeletal and meaty, but the left hand end above is much more like what we had when I was young, possibly a half leg taken from the thin end of this whole leg - eating big being rather frowned on in my family, possibly a relic of wartime & rationing frugality.
Allowing for the fact that sheep only have one lower leg bone, the tibia, with our fibula having been lost somewhere along the way, maybe what we had a few days ago was cut a couple of inches short of the heel end of the tibia, while what I used to have when young was cut more or less on the heel, as shown above. With the secondary bit below being heel operating tendon rather than bone. Maybe what would be the Achilles tendon in a human.
Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-gigot-for-valentine.html.
It was convenient to have a frozen leg of New Zealand lamb from Sainsbury's on St. Valentine's day, rather than the shoulder of English lamb from Manor Green Road which we have been having recently.
Plus some chocolates, on this occasion from Leonidas rather than Fortnum's. Confused by being directed to somewhere called Chocolate Express and from there to the St. Helier in the Channel Islands, in fact to the middle of the large covered market snapped from Street View above. Which somehow we had managed to miss on our one visit to St. Helier, which was odd as St. Helier is not a very big town.
It seems a very long time ago when I was still working at the bottom of Whitehall and occasionally used to buy chocolates from the Leonidas shop in Victoria Street - now removed to nearby Broadway. A time when there were at least two respectable cigar shops in the same street. One run by a couple of brothers, Ugandan Asians, who drove in each morning from somewhere in the wilds of East London. They once told me that they did quite a brisk business anonymising Cuban cigars by removing their bands and sending them under plain brown covers to the US where they were and are not allowed. The US can be spiteful. I was too discrete to ask what they put on the customs declarations.
Quite a cold morning, so I put on my hard-core red sno-jacket from Animal for my spin around Jubilee Way, the first time I have been so wrapped up. And I did not overheat either.
For a change, celery with the brown rice and crinkly cabbage, rather than our more usual carrot with parsnip. The drill being to cut the celery sticks into about three inch lengths, coarsely chop a couple of onions and then gently cook them in a little oil and butter. Maybe a little juice from the meat. Very good it was too.
The lamb was entirely eatable, but I had forgotten that frozen can be a bit chewy compared with fresh and should have been cooked more slowly - as, indeed, BH had first suggested. I remembered that the naval aunt, who used a lot of frozen lamb used to add some white tenderising powder to the mix, a trick she may have learned when they were stationed out in Singapore, that is to say before we learned the error of our imperial ways.
Bing is keener on tenderising hammers than tenderising powders, but paging down, I got to the Amazon offer above. I think the idea is to rub the stuff into the surface of the meat, maybe helping it along by jabbing a knife in here and there.
Taken with a spot of Waitrose Pomerol, a brand we have had several times before and have found satisfactory. This time I noticed that it was 14.5% rather than the wine usual 13% - which, having noticed, made a difference. See reference 2 for an earlier purchase of same, albeit the 2016 vintage rather than the 2018 vintage on this day.
The lamb which is snapped above at the end of the first shift, was followed by the ceremony of putting the left over bits of fat out for the crows and magpies. With their not playing the game at all on this occasion. The fat went, but not while we were looking out for them. Usually they are on the case within a couple of minutes or so. Must have very good eyes, at least when they are hungry.
Next stage, some apple and blackberry. Apples from Sainsbury's, blackberries from some hedge hereabouts. BH tells me that supplies are holding up well. But will they hold our until this year's are ready, which was the case last year? See references 3 and 4.
Last stage, crack into the chocolates. Chocolates which came in a fancy red box, which must have accounted for a fair proportion of the purchase price. But we did not mind as we thought the presentation very good. We rather liked the way the chocolates were not all crammed together, in the way of many of the chocolate shops in London, where the assistants are keen to maximise the weight sold, their being sold by weight.
The chocolates lasted into the third day. I had one - possibly involving pineapple - which I was not that keen on, but the overall verdict was that the more conservative style suited us better than Fortnum's who were more into following the latest flavour fads.
Took in a nocturne before Scrabble, finding it easy enough - on this occasion anyway - to follow the score. Which I like to do occasionally as it makes one hear things which one otherwise misses. On the other hand, not being that good at it, it takes a lot of brain power away from musical appreciation proper.
I wondered where I got my score from, edited by Paderewski and published in Warsaw. Seems a bit grand for a Hook Road Arena car booter. Reference 5 says that I have had them for more than five years, but more than that I cannot say.
I lost the Scrabble which followed, by 259 to 246 points, exclusive of any penalty points there may have been. Perhaps I took a spot more Calvados to smooth over my irritation.
PS 1: the rapidly changing weather had tricked the buds on the pussy willow over the fence at the bottom of the garden into Spring action, with the wind knocking this twig into our garden. But I don't think that the buds ever matured.
PS 2: the crows did much better with the scraps from the cold cut of the day following. Into action more or less instantly.
PS 3: further puzzle about remove and resection. So we say that someone or something was removed, perhaps somewhere, without regard to the iterative sense of the 're' prefix. While the iterative sense is not present at all in the case of resection, mostly used in a surgical context.
Reference 1: https://leonidasbelgianchocolate.co.uk/.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/date-fail.html.
Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/fifth-and-last-blackberries.html.
Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/first-blackberries.html.
Reference 5: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/12/by-appointment.html.
Reference 6: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/a-moan-for-st-valentine.html. Will we ever make it to Rome to touch the box which contains the skull of the man himself?
I read in yesterday's FT that 'John Magufuli, Tanzania’s president ... has declared Covid-19 vaccines dangerous and unnecessary. A devout Catholic, he has said God would protect his nation from the disease'. It seems that not all Tanzanians take the same line and some of them even wear masks.
Tanzania is a middle size country of around 60m people, so much the same as ourselves. They also have a National Bureau of Statistics with what looks like a semi-detached outpost in the island of Zanzibar, possibly more sophisticated in such matters than the mainland. But I have failed to find any statistics about deaths by cause, the nearest I could get being the US CDC in Atlanta which tells me that the ten most common causes of death are, starting at the top, neonatal disorders, lower respiratory infections, HIV/AIDS, ischemic heart disease, congenital defects, malaria, diarrheal diseases, stroke, and tenth, diabetes - of which just five might appear on a similar list for the UK. I have not been able to find any numbers, so no idea what proportion of the total this accounts for, a total which is presumably of the order of half as much again as us, say 750,000 a year.
There seems to be a news blackout on coronavirus infections and deaths, with the last, very low figures, coming from early last year.
Perhaps, given the common causes of death listed above, the president thinks he has got more important things to worry about.
Which, given that Africans seems to have weathered the coronavirus storm rather better than us up north, may be the case, but there is clearly a worry that without a change in policy, such a place will become a long term breeding ground and reservoir for unwanted viruses. Perhaps the answer will be that we have to pay the president to get going on this one. I dare say there are plenty of worthy things to spend any such money on - perhaps even some more statisticians. Or perhaps some more registrars so that they can get their registers of births, deaths and marriages into better shape than they are at present.
PS 1: the snap above, lifted from the same number of the FT comes with the following caption: 'A choir sings in a Dar es Salaam church without Covid-19 precautions. Tanzania’s president John Magufuli has said God will protect the country from the disease and encouraged people to attend places of worship © AFP/Getty'.
PS 2: Dar es Salaam is on the mainland, more or less opposite the island of Zanzibar, the former capital of Tanzania. Population of the order of 5 million. An Arabic name meaning haven of peace.
Reference 2: https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/countries/tanzania/pdf/Tanzania_Factsheet-h.pdf.
Reference 3: https://www.nbs.go.tz/index.php/en/. The National Bureau of Statistics.
Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/tanzania.html. Some days later, I come across this previous outing for Tanzania. Can't get even essential secretarial support these days - but at least this older post overlaps rather than contradicts.
Prompted by a piece in the FT (reference 1) about a diversity problem at Google, an HR rather than a technical problem, I looked up Timnit Gebru on Wikipedia, from where I got to the open access paper (plus supporting information) at reference 2.
An open access paper which is all about estimating demographic variables about income, education, race and voting (among others) from car ownership data.
The car ownership data is obtained by deep analysis of 50 million Google Street View images taken from across the US. Demographic variables are taken from the American Community Survey (ACS), for which see reference 3. You train the computer on a sample of areas using both car and demographic data, and then use the trained computer to predict the demographic variables from the car data for the other areas.
Note that the numbers involved mean that efficiency is an issue, even for Google.
Along the way, they whittle the 15,000 or so different types of car on the road in the US to around 2,500. At which level of detail the computer gets the make from the image right about a third of the time. To help the computer along with the demography that follows, they add in some car meta-data, not least price.
Along the way, they deploy a program which can ‘unwarp’ the Street View images, which I think amounts to flattening the spherical projection used by the wide-angle Street View cameras. Thus removing one source of classification confusion.
It turns out that the computer does quite a good job on some of the demographic variables, for example voting, and can produce more timely predictions for smaller areas than the ACS can manage. So deep mining of the Street View archive is perhaps a cost effective supplement to the ACS.
An example of the sort of thing that Google can afford to do in the margins which an academic institution would struggle with, not least because of difficulties with access to both the Street View data and suitable programs for handling same.
Reference 1: Google fires top AI ethicist: Removal of Margaret Mitchell comes after departure of Timnit Gebru amid debate over diversity at tech group - Richard Waters/FT - 2020. 20th February 2021.
Reference 2: Using deep learning and Google Street View to estimate the demographic makeup of neighborhoods across the United States - Timnit Gebru, Jonathan Krause, Yilun Wang, Duyun Chen, Jia Deng, Erez Lieberman Aiden, and Li Fei-Fei – 2017.
Reference 3: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/programs-surveys/acs/about/ACS_Information_Guide.pdf. The American Community Survey (ACS) is a large, annual household survey filling the gap left by the decennial census retreating to a short form.
We woke up this Saturday morning to wonder how the egg meaning as in 'to egg someone on to do something' came to be. One could construct stories around the sort of eggs that we eat but were any of them true?
Consultation of OED revealed that we had two different words of northern European extraction, sounding much the same but meaning something quite different, with both this meaning of egg and the bird meaning of egg being current in this country in the 13th century. Perhaps a case of phonetic convergence, but my knowledge of north European phonetics is not up to making a judgement on such a matter.
But I have found out that egging someone on does not fly in French. You cannot 'oeuf quelqu'un à faire quelque chose'. You have to pousser or inciter. Further evidence of the northern European origin of the meaning.
PS: snap of a substantial ostrich egg breakfast from the trending Lambeth eatery at reference 1. Presently closed. The breakfast looks rather good, although I am not sure that I could manage it without help these days. Perhaps buy it as a breakfast to share, with extra knife and fork. Extra bread too.
Reference 1: http://florentinerestaurant.co.uk/.
This being final notice of a book about great powers – powers like the Spain or the UK – first rising then falling, first noticed at reference 2 in January and then at reference 3 much more recently. One the lessons of the book being that great powers have never been great for ever. They rise, then things change – and they fall.
The author, Paul Kennedy, is a Geordie who started out at the University of Newcastle in the mid 1960’s, went through various academic hoops in this country before winding up at Yale in 1983. He is still on the books there. This book appeared in 1988, before the break up of the Soviet Union, before German reunification and before the rise of China – none of which were predicted in the book. Bad timing!
My copy of the book is a fat paperback, worn enough to have been read at some point, but in perfectly serviceable condition. Near 700 pages of text plus near 200 pages of apparatus – this last notes, bibliography and index. A sprinkling of maps. Rather more tables. No glossy pictures. £3.99 from eBay plus £1.99 for a version on Kindle from Amazon. Cloud Reader has its points.
A book in three parts, with their relative size presumably reflecting the author’s interests and specialities – rather than the number of years involved.
First, to 1815: the pre-industrial world, mapped in the snap above. Mainly Europe, and including less than ten pages on China and the Muslim world. Japan and to a lesser extent China get more coverage later on. The Ottomans get in on account of their long struggle with the European powers. 180 pages.
Second, 1816-1942: the era of the industrial powers: Europe, Russia, Japan and the US. The UK has its day at the top of the heap – and then loses it. 270 pages.
Third, 1943 to 1988 plus a peek at the future. The bipolar world, dominated by the US and the Soviet Union. The US has its day at the top – and then starts to lose it to a multi-polar world which it cannot dominate in quite the same way. 350 pages.
There are a lot of small statistical tables. I have made no attempt to follow up any of the end notes or otherwise check these tables – but I do worry. Tables of this sort of simplicity about things which are happening now are hard enough – and tables of this sort about things which mostly happened a long time ago are very difficult indeed.
Kennedy tells a generally good story, sometimes pulling off a summary of a complicated situation – say the between wars period in Europe – which both compels and convinces.
Another lesson being that, generally speaking anyway, the combatants with the biggest economies and the most money tend to win in the long run. You might win a battle on the cheap, but you are unlikely to win the war. While Hitler was able to hold out as long as he did in part because of his relatively peaceful annexation of productive resources in Europe, for example in Belgium, France, Austria and Czechoslovakia.
And another being that countries have a choice: they can spend on consumption now, on armaments now or on investment for the future. And getting the choice right is not always easy.
Over-reach seems to be common. A country acquires all kinds of commitments when it on the way up, from which it finds it hard to withdraw when it is on the way down – in relative if not absolute terms.
But while he notes our difficulties in the UK in winding down from being a great power, I worry about how the US will wind down from the pre-eminence it enjoyed in the second half of the twentieth century. Three big countries all wanting to be in a position where they can take on all comers – in the case of the US with its 15 carrier task forces – is not a very good place to be. A US with lots of resources, lots of fuel & food and comfortably isolated geographically. No-one is likely to invade them – so why all the carriers?
Ultimately, all rather pessimistic in tone. A view of history as a bunch of powers forever jostling for position, sometimes by military means. Kennedy is dismissive of the Austrian attempt to build a multi-national state and gives little space to the likes of the United Nations, WHO or WTO.
Miscellanea
Russia has always spent a great deal on armaments – at the expense of consumption – so pre-revolution Russia was just as keen on heavy industry and arms as Stalin. Russia has always had authoritarian governments, and despite size, often something far too close to rule by one man. Long periods of more or less bloody unrest. Climate limited – certainly by comparison with the farm belt in the US. Economy not reaching its potential. And more continuity with the past in that pre-revolution Russia was just as paranoid about war on two fronts as the current regime. With lots of divisions stationed out east.
I have often wondered about why there is an Alaskan panhandle, running half way down what ought to be the coast of British Columbia, that is to say Canada. It seems that this stretch was a rich hunting ground for hunters and trappers and very much part of Russian Alaska, before the Canadians got there. Very much part of what was sold to the US by the Russians in the middle of the nineteenth century, in preference to the UK, then an enemy. There was a dispute between the US and Canada about the boundary, but the existence of the panhandle was not in dispute, just how thick it should be.
I was reminded of the huge casualties of the American Civil War, well over half a million in total, with the winners losing rather more than the losers. But the winners had vastly more resources than the losers – and were never going to lose unless they just gave up.
I was reminded that our king blocked Catholic emancipation at the beginning of the nineteenth century. A tradition which continued with Tories blocking Home Rule until their hand was forced after the first world war.
In the first world war, in their early rush to the west, the Germans grabbed all the high ground. If they had stuck to defence of those positions, rather than bleeding away in attacks on Verdun and then provoking the US, they might have been alright.
The US was the big winner in both world wars, making a huge amount of money out of the likes of the UK, which last more or less bankrupted itself. So by the end of the second, we really had run out of puff.
Kennedy is something of a booster for the Japan of the 1980’s – while not giving much space to China.
There is a remark near the end of the book about fading great powers being like all those old men who try to keep up with the young men. And always fail. I have been warned!
Conclusions
A good, if rather stodgy, read. Plus a touch dated.
References
Reference 1: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500-2000 – Paul Kennedy – 1987.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/01/another-graphic.html.
Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/russian-demography.html.
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| Artist's impression of last time around |
I was struck this morning by the news that NASA have succeeding in landing a rover, about the size of a small car, on the surface of Mars - a planet which varies between 50 million kilometres and 400 million kilometres away from us. With this landing operation not being that different from this artist's impression of the sky crane last time around. With the rover cunningly unfolding itself, presumably on the way down, so that it lands on its wheels. Science really does work.
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| Full size mock up of this time around |
So the transformers which were all the thing when our children were young, perhaps thirty years ago now, were not completely preposterous.
PS: some of the other images turned up by Bing are credited to Getty Images and one Patrick T. Fallon. With the latter having no less than 18,836 images on the former. Clearly a busy chap. Images which you can either scrape off your screen - quite good enough for my purposes - or you can pay maybe £350 for a proper copy with a proper number of megabytes.
Reference 1: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/.
Reference 2: https://www.gettyimages.in/photos/patrick-t.-fallon?phrase=patrick%20t.%20fallon&sort=best.
Time to moan about Microsoft's OneDrive again as this morning, the camera roll on my laptop runs in a rather patchy fashion all the way to the morning of Friday 12th February, that is to say more or less exactly a week ago - since when camera roll on my Microsoft telephone has collected near 150 happy snaps, including, to be fair, lots of duplicates as I always take lots of snaps of the same thing.
Not quite the cuddly arrangement suggested by the advertising snap above.
To all of which I suppose the Microsoft answer would be that my £400 or so telephone is out of support, so tough. Get over it.
Perhaps when we are allowed to go shopping again, I really will move on and buy a new telephone. Not so clever for all those people for whom (say) £500 is a more serious sum than it is here. Whereas for me, the issue is all the time and bother involved in the change.
PS: I suspect support problems, that is to say the software on my telephone getting left behind by the software everywhere else, are compounded by Microsoft muscling in on the home working market, and their servers being far to busy with new business to worry about this little bit of old business. A disease I recognise from our (privatised) utilities who often offer far better deals to new customers than to old customers who can't be bothered to change suppliers or make a fuss.
A nuthatch turned up again on the bird feeder this afternoon at 16:57. Seemingly the first sighting since early December, noticed at reference 1.
This on a cool, mixed day when the feeder has been busy, with plenty of visits from great tits and robins. Plus signs of what could be nesting in our southern hedge.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/good-news-and-bad-news.html.
It is now four years since the police shot dead a man who was probably a career criminal in the course of what they euphemistically call a hard stop. And there has been no change at the IOPC website since I last looked in the middle of last year - no change in fact for three years.
Perhaps our leader-in-waiting, Mr. Starmer, as a legally trained person, should ask one of his team to find out how many cases of this sort there are sitting on the IOPC books. Perhaps tabulate them by how long they have been sitting there. But from where I sit, justice is a long way from being seen to be done.
I did try writing to the commissioner for the relevant area, which resulted in nothing more than soporific noises. Perhaps I should give my mind to who else I might write to. Letter to the Guardian?
PS: Friday afternoon: I now find that there has been an update today. The report on this incident has been completed, has been shared with interested parties, but has not yet been published. Some other material has been published, which I am looking into. See reference 2.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/06/complacent.html.
Reference 2: https://policeconduct.gov.uk/news/investigation-update-fatal-police-shooting-yassar-yaqub.
Having good reason to be on foot in Epsom yesterday morning, we took the opportunity to capture what I think is the first trolley since October last year. Captured outside the Enterprise (mainly) car rental place in West Street and returned to the front entrance of M&S in the market square, presently exit only. There were two or three M&S staff lurking inside and I am pleased to be able to report that the trolley was gathered up within a few minutes, presumably for disinfection prior to return to the trolley stand at the other end of the store.
Headed down the High Street (towards East Street that is) so that BH could procure me a fine new face mask to match hers, while I admired 'Prestige Butchers' which has popped up recently next door, that is say not far from Rymans. A butcher specialising in South American meat and appearing to carry a good bit of interesting looking beef in glass fronted chiller cupboards. One wonders how they will do, given the demise of most of our own butchers over the past fifty years. Plus there is what I think is a Brazilian butcher not that far away in Pound Lane. Plus, while I might be interested in the beef, I do feel some loyalty to the butcher in Manor Green Road who has served me well over the past few years. Only so much custom to go round.
Almost invisible on the Internet, so no idea what else they do apart from this new shop in Epsom. Fitting it out must have cost a bit, which might have been hard for a start-up.
Moved on to the far end of the High Street, where we were able to check out the water works outside our strip club and opposite the Rifleman, both presently closed. Water works which were first noticed over a year ago now at reference 2 and which we suspect to involve doing something to a collapsed main drain. Whatever it is, there is a substantial operation in progress now, and has been for some weeks.
While down the passage leading back to Waterloo Road, we had a large and interesting mobile crane, of a pattern I had not seen before, possibly formatted as a luffing tower crane.
With City Lifting of reference 3 not being a company I had come across before either. From which I learn that we might have a 'Spierings Mobile Tower Crane'.
Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/trolley-420.html.
Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/01/waterworks.html.
Reference 3: https://citylifting.co.uk/.
Reference 4: https://citylifting.co.uk/mobile-tower/. 'These revolutionary machines – ready to work in just 15 minutes – are ideal for city working where space is often a controlling factor in crane selection. They combine the features of a telescopic crane with those of a conventional tower crane in one machine and in many situations they can achieve a greater radius and lifting duty than that of a standard telescopic crane with the additional bonus of providing a quicker and more cost effective solution to a lifting operation'. Comes in at least eight varieties. Presumably thousands of pounds a day.
Reference 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=5LZCSkY5Rbw. For noisy video of same.
