A miscellany for Friday

That is to say various bits of trivia.

First, following notice at reference 1, I have now completed the 2021 Census for this household, a process which, for the two of us, took about half an hour. I thought that whoever built the application had done well. There were no hitches, either technical or statistical - where by this last I mean that all the questions were properly supported and one knew their answers. No pondering about exactly what they meant.

On going into gmail to check that the confirmatory email from the census people had indeed arrived, I found that Google thought it was worth telling me about gadgets that I could buy for the measurement of pH values. Can't think what I might have done to put this idea into their head.

Then there was a repeat of the business of reference 2, with most of the mail in my promotions tab seeming to vanish. On this occasion recovered by logging out and logging back in again. Trust takes another knock. From where I associate to our fat leader and his loose talk about breaking laws and agreements: each time he does it, other peoples' trust in him is knocked, and it will eventually dawn on him that it is much each to destroy trust than it is to build it up again.

Second, a correspondent told me that he has now put an app on his telephone which tells him what music he is listening to. I think that this means that he can be listening to music on some far flung channel on the radio - perhaps from somewhere in Australia - and wondering what on earth it is. And now, he can just fire up his app on his telephone, hold the telephone to the loudspeaker on his radio and job done. Clearly the technology noticed at references 3 and 4 is coming on.

The only problem was that I thought that I had last thought about this much more recently than in 2017, so it took me longer than it might otherwise to turn those thoughts up. Older memory does it again.

Third, I read over breakfast in Wednesday's Guardian (they have to do a week these days), that Baluchistan is in the market for something called a reverse osmosis desalination plant which will be able to pump 5 million gallons of drinking water a day out of the sea. We are referred to reference 5 and I now know that this particular part of Pakistan, on the border with Iran and just across the water from Oman, was sold by the Sultan of Oman to Pakistan in 1958. Now being developed, with the help of the Chinese, as a major port. The land behind is more or less desert, far from the rivers flowing down from the Himalayas, and so in need of this sort of electricity guzzling technology. Technology which seems to be deployed all over the world, not just in the Persian Gulf.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/03/the-census-is-coming.html. 

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/03/worried-of-epsom.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/11/music-identification.html.

Reference 4: An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm - Avery Li-Chun Wang – 2003. Available at http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf.

Reference 5a: http://www.bppra.gob.pk/tender_detail.php?do===AZtxGbkNzd00karhXT31TP. 

Reference 5b: http://www.bppra.gob.pk.