Swinging the mattock

Getting on for a couple of years ago I took the stump snap above, in the course of clearing up after the ravages of the box tree caterpillar, last noticed at reference 2. Although the real point of the snap was to show the empty space where the box trees had been, before two young yew bushes were planted to replace them.

The stump left, as it happens, was the stump of another yew, taken down many years previously to give the then neighbouring box trees a bit more light. I kicked it from time to time, but hitherto it had always seemed pretty solid. However, yesterday, in the course of walking my bricks, I thought that it wasn't. So out with the demolition mattock and about twenty swings later the stump was out. Swelling out to a bit of a ball just below ground level, but seemingly without a serious tap root in the way of some trees - this despite probably being a natural seedling rather than some nursery raised confection.

With the mattock at the bottom of the snap above (from Bing out of eBay) being very much the sort of thing in question. But the point of interest is how twenty serious swings of such a thing does not seem to involve a lot of movement, but leaves one puffing a bit, as if one had just climbed up a reasonably serious hill. One must be using a lot more muscles than one realises.

And in my case anyway, the days are long gone when I could swing such a thing for hours at a time. Twenty swings is about my limit.

PS: pleased that I was able to recover the snap above, from archive, in about five minutes. System works!

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/08/caterpillar-control-episode-2.html. The clearing up.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/posh-cabbage-patch.html. The last notice.

Over here

Pulled up this morning by learning that the sort of thing noticed at reference 1 happens over here as well; it's not just the inhabitants of the deep interior of the US. That is to say, I read in the FT that 'Edwin Poots has already attracted controversy. He is a creationist who has led four different Northern Ireland ministries, including health, where his decision in 2011 to uphold a ban on gay men donating blood was described by a court as “infected by apparent bias”'.

The chap who is going to lead NI to a happy and prosperous future?

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/hagfish.html.

Reference 2: http://politicalfun.blogspot.com/2010/06/understanding-creationism.html. With thanks for the use of the cartoon above.

Reference 3: http://politicalfun.blogspot.com/2021/. The US gun laws are today's subject.

Posh cabbage patch

Back to Hampton Court Palace gardens last week, the first time for around six months, the last visit looking to have been noticed at reference 1. The prompt for the visit was a tulip festival.

Quite surprised to find the car park - the one in the Palace rather than the one at the station across the river - was more or less full. Fortunately it is a big place, so distances maintained for much of the visit, with only the Privy Garden area being a bit crowded. 

First stop the vegetable garden, where things were in much better shape than I remembered from last time, with lots of planting going on. The large flower clusters on the gooseberry right caught my eye, as I didn't remember flower clusters like these from my days of growing gooseberries. Cabbage plants under nets beyond, and some tulips beyond that. 

On a bit of south facing wall we had an apricot tree which seemed to have a good set considering the rather mixed weather we have been having - including quite a lot of frost.

Pleased to see that they were still doing broad beans, even if some plantings were doing rather better than others. While I wondered, not for the first time, why broad beans were so expensive to buy in shops, considering how easy they are to grow. Expensive to pick? Bulky? Don't travel well?

All in all, a very addition to the various attractions on offer at the Palace.

Through the rose garden where there seemed to have been a lot of cutting back of the old-fashioned rose bushes. But echiums all present and correct, with a row of them standing about six feet high against a wall.

Through the Wilderness where there was plenty of blossom, although the spring bulbs were coming to an end. And we did find a bad infestation of mistletoe. It might not be killing the tree, but it can't be doing it much good.

Into the east garden where we wandered along to the north wall to take our picnic on one of the benches there. The bread for which was noticed at reference 1. But plenty of sun and only a few other people. A very pleasant place to sit. With the view snapped above.

Plus we had a low flying Chinook, looking very new, heading north.

A lot of the trees in the avenue had mistletoe in them, and I think if I was head gardener, I would think seriously about cutting it out of them. More than enough of the stuff around without messing up the avenue trees.

We couldn't get into what used to be called the Apprentices' Garden, snapped above, but we did mark down what appeared to be a Wellingtonia for scoring on another occasion, when we can get a bit nearer. Heron to the right.

Quite a lot of beds with massed tulips, looking well. And I was confused for at least thirty seconds by some beds with ornamental onions, mistaking the waxing flower heads of onions for the waning flower heads of tulips.

Some tiresome wicker art in some of the beds, fortunately not too much. The sort of thing which can be a bit of a pain at Wisley.

Privy Gardens, sunken gardens and orangery mini garden all looking well, with a scatter of interesting tulips, some quite small, rather than the massed ranks out in the east garden. Including some in proper tulip stands, perhaps borrowed from inside. A junior version of the sort of thing included towards the end of reference 3.

Plus some model action in one of the sunken gardens. Couple of models and a whole team of assistants, camera men and all the rest of it. Sadly we passed during a break in the proceedings, so we didn't get the full monty. Although one of them did pose quite nicely while one of the assistants kneeling at her feet changed her shoes for her.

An excellent visit. The place continues to earn its annual subscription.

PS: they might been infested with mistletoe, but they seem to be doing OK on the box tree caterpillars, the ones that took down my twenty five year old box bushes. Plenty of healthy looking box, for example in the cabbage patch, as can be seen in the snap at the top.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/time-for-white.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/09/return-to-court.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/sunday-lunch.html.

Group search key: wgc.

Concrete frustration

On the Jubilee Way run this morning, somewhere on the Ewell by-pass, I was passed by a serious tanker lorry containing concrete additive. A white lorry which I thought said CONTAIN and BUILD CENTRE. Not having come across additives being used or distributed in such large quantities, I thought I would check, drawing a more or less complete blank, with both Bing and Google declining to provide a list of proprietary names of such additives, just articles about concrete additives in general.

But one of them turned up reference 1, suppliers of large additive tanks for ready mix concrete suppliers like the people at reference 2, who, as it happens, talk about admixtures as well as concrete, producing millions of litres a year of the stuff. The tank in question being the black tank right of centre, rather than the grey hopper, probably cement. So I have confirmed that these additives are produced and used in large quantities. And I now know what a 'bund' is. 

PS: registration plate No.34 is proving as elusive as No.26 before it, although I did manage a No.36 yesterday and a No.31 today.

Reference 1: https://enduramaxx.co.uk/news/admixture-admix-tanks-for-concrete-batching/.

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

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/no26-provisional.html.

Transitive fish with people

A report on some work in progress, with the starting point being asking whether fish are sentient beings, are conscious beings. At least, it is work still in progress here in Epsom, although it may well have been brought to a satisfactory conclusion elsewhere.

We are not concerned here with what might follow from establishing that fish were conscious. What might follow, for example, for fish on their passage through a factory farm, on their way to our tables. Whether, for example, we need to clean up our act.

Binary relations

Let S be a set. Then a binary relation is a function which maps ordered pairs of members of S onto true and false. That is to say for any ordered pair, say (A, B), we can say whether that pair is true or false under our relation. Note that we do not allow unknown or not applicable, both categories which are important in real world surveys; just true or false. You can read all about these relations at reference 5.

If S is a set of people then an example of a binary relation would be ‘being an older full sibling of’. Then (A, B) is true if and only if it is true that A and B have the same two parents and A is older than B. We might also say that (A, A) is always false and that (A, B) is false when A and B have the same two parents but were born at the same time. Or perhaps within an hour of each other, this last to avoid splitting hairs.

Binary relations can have various properties. So it may be the case that if we have (A, B) then we always have (B, A) – which is clearly not the case in the example just given. It may be the case that we always have (A, B) or (B, A) – but not both – which is clearly not the case for the relation ‘is an ancestor of’, at least not for sensible sets of people. The property of present interest is transitivity, which says that if we have (A, B) and (B, C) then we always have (A, C). As it happens, both the examples just given do have this property.

An example of a relation which does not have this property is the ‘like’ relation among people. It does not follow from the facts that A likes B and B likes C that A likes C. This being an important source of plots for the writers of romances for the ladies’ market. One’s food and drink preferences might not have this property either.

Experiments

Suppose we have a set containing 5 objects, A, B, C, D and E. Perhaps biscuits with distinctive colours and shapes.

Suppose we have trained our subject to know that (A, B), (B, C), (C, D) and (D, E) are all true. Our subject shows his knowledge by, for example, picking A when you present him with the unordered pair {A, B}. A is in some sense the winner. A test which does not need to involve language.

Note that we are saying here that if we present an unordered pair {A, B}, then either (A, B) or (B, A) will be true. We do not allow neither – which would happen, being technical, if our relation was drawn from a partial order rather than a total order.

Then, what would our subject make of (A, E) or (B, D)?

The first pair is supposed to be easy because A wins in the only relation in which it appears (that is to say, (A, B)) and E loses in the only relation in which it appears (that is to say, (D, E)). So A winning in (A, E) is a good bet.

But this argument does not run with (B, D) as both B and D appear in both winning and losing situations. So maybe our subject has to guess or otherwise hypothesise that our relation is transitive, that in some sense it can be said that A > B > C > D > E.

This experiment can readily be generalised to a set with 6 objects.

Experiments of this sort can be done with intelligent animals and with very young humans as well as with adult humans. 

Evidence

Reference 1 argues for the possibility of consciousness in fishes, a possibility which seems to have a fair number of advocates, with the lady mentioned at reference 6 possibly being one such. One of the lines of the present argument is that fishes can be shown to exhibit transitive inference.

Reference 2 argues for transitive inference working better when human subjects are consciously aware of the relation being tested being transitive. Note that the subjects are not told about transitivity: they have to work it out for themselves – which some of the won’t manage, thus giving us the necessary two conditions.

Reference 3 reports on work on transitive inference with monkeys, work which is concerned with the role of the monkey version of the hippocampus (known to be heavily involved in relevant kinds of memory) in same. The story here being, very roughly speaking, that monkeys whose hippocampus has been destroyed can no longer do transitive inference.

While reference 4 suggests that consciousness of transitivity does not bear on the success or otherwise of transitive reasoning in humans. Reference 2 being a rebuttal of reference 4 in this regard.

More on binary relations

A different way to look at binary relations is in the form of a directed graph, as above. Where we have it that (B, D) is true in the case that there is an arrow from B to D, which there is not in this case. 

Presented in this way, it looks less rather than more likely that a relation would be transitive. It is natural enough to travel from G to B via D and there is no need for a direct route, no need for by-passes.

And even less likely that for any pair, say A and F, that there will always be an arrow from A to F or one from F to A.

 And then, if presented with evidence for the scenario at the top, what then? The facts that C is next in line after B and that D is next in line after C do not imply that D is next in line after B. Then how can we be sure that we don’t have something like the scenario bottom left, in the way of the phases of the moon, something which one might have thought was quite important in the past, at the time that our brains were still evolving. What would make us go for the scenario bottom right, where each member of our set is, in effect, assigned a number, perhaps height, weight or temperature. With the understanding that it is OK to rank members of the set according to those numbers, complete with transitivity. So D is heavier than A.

Where have we got to?

It is being suggested that in order to get (B, D) right, our human subject needs to have worked out that the evidence presented suggests A > B > C > D > E, which permits inference about all the combinations, in particular (A, E) and (B, D). Furthermore, that if asked, our subject will be able to explain this, at least after a fashion, to the experimenter. Does this amount to being conscious of this transitivity, at the time of deciding what to do about (B, D)?

To me, all this seems a bit unlikely. We can do all kinds of clever stuff in the unconscious, particularly with practise. Why should transitivity be such a problem? Why should understanding transitivity be a touchstone for consciousness?

I worry about sample sizes in these experiments, usually small, say of the order of 10-20 subjects.

I also worry about repeatability. Why do references 2 and 4 come up with different results? Then one cannot do the same experiment twice with the same subjects because they will have learned all the answers. And what happens if one’s subjects are mathematicians who know all about binary relations anyway?

So, work in progress indeed.

References

Reference 1: Consciousness in teleosts: There is something it feels like to be a fish - Michael L. Woodruff – 2017. 

Reference 2: Declarative memory, awareness, and transitive inference – Smith, C. and Squire, L. R. – 2005.

Reference 3: Entorhinal cortex lesions disrupt the relational organization of memory in monkeys – Buckmaster CA, Eichenbaum H, Amaral DG, Suzuki WA, Rapp PR – 2004.

Reference 4: Relational learning with and without awareness: transitive inference using nonverbal stimuli in humans - Greene AJ, Spellman BA, Dusek JA, Eichenbaum HB, Levy WB - 2001. 

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

Reference 6: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/06/uyuz.html.

Dish domes

Having course to sit in what used to be the general purpose concourse and waiting area at Epsom Hospital the other day, it struck me that in the middle of the last century, there must have been an architect - or an architects' practise - in the area who was keen on shallow concrete domes.

So you had this one at the hospital. The newish Catholic church, Our Lady of Lourdes, along Hampton Court Way, where we once attended a concert given by the Ripieno Choir (reference 1). The newish Anglican church on Howell Hill, where I once passed a full on funeral for a policeman who was killed on duty (reference 2). And then the large dome at Bourne Hall, not as visible as it might be, given the way that the ground floor has been broken up. 

Not a feature which one sees in modern buildings. Show-off atriums in monster office blocks in the City yes, domes no. In part, I suppose, because domes need to have access to the sky to work properly, which is rather greedy of space.

While the hospital also sported a marble floor, a poor relation of that to be found at Buckfast Abbey, last visited last October and noticed at reference 3. Perhaps the architect in question was a church man, trained up on churches and church work.

PS 1: something of a frost this morning. So what with very variable temperatures and the recent lack of rain, gardeners must be having a bad time of it.

PS 2: while on the up side, we can look forward to Mr. Johnson and his (soon to be?) wife, after their retirement from politics, going in for the sort of celebrity refurbishment programmes you can watch in the small hours on obscure channels on television, when you can't sleep for one reason or another. I think it might be just the right niche for them. Or next best, join the team at 'House Doctor'.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/06/lourdes.html.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/06/addictions.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/buckfast.html.

Biosecurity in the UK

In the course of reading reference 1, already noticed in passing, I find out on page 130 about a serious lapse of biosecurity at about the time that Blair was passing the baton to Brown in 2007. So it is not just failed states which don’t get this sort of thing quite right. And then we have the Australian accident already noticed at reference 7. But at least in this state, I can read three authoritative reports about the lapse, available at references 2, 3 and 8. From which I extract the following timeline:

20010219. The much more serious outbreak of foot and mouth disease in 2001, starting with an abattoir in Essex. Noting in passing the common use of the euphemistic ‘abattoir’ (from the French) in place of ‘slaughterhouse’.

20070802. IP1 (Infected Premises No.1). Outbreak of foot and mouth at a farm near Pirbright.

20070806. IP2. Outbreak at another farm near Pirbright.

20070809. Decision not to vaccinate.

20070907. Spratt report (reference 2). Probable source of the outbreak identified as a leak from a badly maintained & secured effluent pipe at the Institute for Animal Health at Pirbright. 

20070907. Final report from HSE (reference 8). Pictures of the offending pipe are to be found at the end.

20070908. Chief Veterinary Officer declares the outbreak over. With hindsight, a bit too quick off the mark.

20070911. IP3. Outbreak at another farm near Pirbright.

20070915. IP4. Outbreak at another farm near Pirbright.

20070917. IP5. Outbreak at another farm near Pirbright…

20070930. IP8. The eight and last outbreak.

20071119. Another leak of viral flavoured effluent at Pirbright. Contained on site.

20080222. Outbreak finally declared over and all restrictions lifted.

This was a small outbreak with a small number of premises and animals affected. Nevertheless, as it progressed there were tensions between public health and commercial interests – particularly those in faraway livestock areas like Scotland and Cornwall. Commercial interests which are important too and which not should not just be pushed aside.

A commercial vaccine factory, then run by a company called Merial, and a public animal health laboratory, then called the Institute for Animal Health, were co-located at Pirbright, quite possibly once a collection of army barrack huts. Both did important and necessary work with live foot and mouth viruses. But given the quite different nature of their operations, this sharing and blurring of responsibilities was not appropriate. Furthermore the funds for some aspects of biosecurity were stinted – in particular for the drains.

The reports make it very clear that biosecurity is a complicated and expensive business. You need seriously skilled people to do the work in the first place – and seriously skilled people to have oversight. Ticking a few boxes on a form on a clipboard does not meet the case. From where I associate to the practise during my time in government, when you had relatively junior people doing just that sort of thing when checking up on large, complicated and important computer projects. A product of the cost-saving myth that process is a substitute for knowledge – when really it is only an aid, albeit a very useful one. I believe the large accountancy firms subscribe to this same myth when conducting their fat-fee-generating audits.

You need fiercely pedantic chief biosecurity officers, with direct access to chief executives, a bit like service managers of large computer facilities, heads of security of important buildings or internal audit people in many large organisations. People who are going to stick to the rules and protocols, come what may. Real traffic wardens. Something which our fat leader would not be much good at, preferring management by bluster and boost.

Furthermore, Ord suggests that biosecurity at places like the Pirbright laboratory should be upgraded to something more like the security afforded to places doing work for the nuclear industry, or, indeed, in the industry. But if the snap above from Street View is indeed their front door, it does not look as if we are quite there yet. And I might add that once happening to drive near the back of the Drax power station, quite a big power station in the scheme of things, I could not see any security at all, although I dare say there was a chain link fence.

But a more serious problem may be in the open nature of science. The tools needed to engineer viruses are getting cheaper all the time and the information needed by the engineers is pretty freely available on the Internet. Building a razor wire fence is a lot easier than striking the right balance between open and closed science. We need open science to develop the vaccines and to manufacture them at scale. We need closed science to keep the bad guys out.

It might well be that a lawyer (that is to say Starmer) would be more likely to get all this right than a journalist, let alone a columnist (that is to say Johnson).

References 

Reference 1: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity – Toby Ord – 2021.

Reference 2a: Independent review of the safety of UK facilities handling foot-and-mouth disease virus – Spratt, B. G. – 2007. 

Reference 2b: http://www.b-safe.ch/downloads/spratt_final.pdf. 

Reference 3a: Foot and mouth disease 2007: A review and lessons learned – Anderson, L. – 2008. See Annex I for a (partial) list of similar escapes.

Reference 3b:  https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/250363/0312.pdf.

Reference 4: https://www.pirbright.ac.uk/. The successors to the Institute for Animal Health. With a glimpse of old asbestos to the right?

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boehringer_Ingelheim_Animal_Health. The successors to the Merial people.

Reference 6: https://www.army.mod.uk/who-we-are/our-schools-and-colleges/atc-pirbright/. Two or three miles northwest of the viral people.

Reference 7: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-cautionary-tale.html. 

Reference 8a: Final report on potential breaches of biosecurity at the Pirbright site 2007 - Health and Safety Executive – 2007.

Reference 8b: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/07_09_07finalreporthsefandm.pdf. The location of this copy of report being a reminder why governments are apt to get cross with the BBC. It was at the top of the Bing list. The five page summary at the front is accessible and starts:

‘Following the outbreak of foot and mouth disease (FMD) in Surrey on 3 August, the government asked the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) to lead an investigation into biosecurity issues at the Pirbright facility – a site occupied by the Institute of Animal Health (IAH) and also by two private companies called Merial Animal Health Ltd (Merial) and Stabilitech Ltd (Stabilitech). The Department of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) had established that the virus strain causing FMD in the first infected herd of cattle at a farm in Normandy, Surrey was O1 BFS67 (also known as 01 BFS1860 and hereafter referred to as O1 BFS). This is a laboratory strain not naturally found in the environment and was one upon which work was being carried out by all three occupants of the Pirbright site ahead of the first outbreak. HSE’s job was to lead a team to investigate…’.

Donbas

Having noticed the Azeris, the Armenians and their troubles a few times recently, today it is the turn of the Ukrainians. With the map on the left showing how mixed up the country on the right is. Full blooded Ukrainians, Russian speaking Ukrainians and Russians - plus a whole raft of oddments, particularly in the south west.

I believe the area in contention is the Donbas to the east, not so long ago fairly empty, now the home to once important coal, iron and steel industries. Lots of pollution, smoke stacks and decay. Industries which once sucked in lots of labour from the country, particularly Russian speaking country. And still important in the Ukrainian scheme of things.

I was interested to learn that one of their industrial pioneers was a Welsh entrepreneur, something of an expert in the armour plate used on ships and forts in the second half of the nineteenth century, one John Hughes, for whom Donetsk was once named, Donetsk being one of the larger cities in the disputed Donbas.

His house, albeit ruined, can still be seen there. Google Street View not permitted, but Satellite View finds it at 47°58'19.0"N 37°48'51.0"E, as snapped above, and Wikipedia has it at reference 4. Perhaps the heritage people are not permitted in the area either.

The Don Cossocks, for whom 'And Quiet Flows the Don', noticed a couple of times at reference 5, is something of an elegy, lived just to the east, with the Don flowing into the sea middle right. My memory is that at the time of the first world war there was a fair amount of pushing and shoving between the Ukrainians and the Cossacks, apt to get into serious fights at markets, mills and such like. Just as in Švejk, from just about the same time, there is a fair amount of pushing and shoving between the Czechs and the Hungarians. Hitting an officer when drunk was almost a capital offence, but since the officer in question was a Hungarian artillery officer, perhaps the matter could be dropped. The offender being from a proper, Czech line regiment, known, as it happens, for its parrot-green facings, and so as the 'Parrots'.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/theres-trouble-with-them-thar-beets.html.

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

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

Reference 4: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%94%D0%BE%D0%BC_%D0%AE%D0%B7%D0%BE%D0%B2.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=Sholokhov.

Week seven

Florets on the way now. Still no sign of any second inflorescence.

While on the right, the sunflowers are starting to pull apart, with the largest one a good deal larger than the smallest. Vegetarian slug pellets have arrested the damage to two of the seedlings, although it is taking them a while to recover.

While in the kitchen, the toy bucket presently has five seedlings, so we still have some spares.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/week-six.html.

Group search key: tfe.

Hagfish

Prompted to look up the eyes of hagfish by an infelicitous phrase about same in Wikipedia, I have just come across 'Answers in Genesis' and one Dr. Elizabeth Mitchell. A fully paid up medical doctor who does not believe in evolution, but who does believe in both the Bible (possibly the version at reference 3) and Jesus Christ. See also references 1 and 2.

Which in turn prompted me to wonder whether, if I lived in the Bible Belt in the US, I would invalidate my medical insurance if I declined to be treated by such a person, on the grounds that she could not possibly be a proper doctor? Qualifications and experience notwithstanding.

From where I associate to once reading that the blood people in the US are very robust on this point. If you want blood, you cannot fuss about where or from whom the blood came, which is all very proper. But what about fussing about your doctor?

Reference 1: https://answersingenesis.org/bios/elizabeth-mitchell/.

Reference 2: https://answersingenesis.org/aquatic-animals/fish/discovery-hagfish-eyes-debunks-claim-about-eye-evolution/.

Reference 3: http://nlt.to/.

Too whom it may concern

How long will  it be before our fat leader appoints one of his chums to do the job properly? Or not, as the case may be: best not to trust chums further than you can chuck 'em.

And regarding previous thoughts on this matter at reference 1, I add that we only have twice as many people as cars, and we manage to keep track of these last without strain. 60 million people is not the engineering challenge now that it was forty years when I was closer to such things.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/registers-of-people.html.

A celebration

We broke the 600 barrier at Scrabble yesterday afternoon, with my score standing at 345, BH at 269, exclusive of the small penalty of 2 against me on account of BH going out when I was still holding a hard to place 'U'. With 614 being comfortably past the post. Rather  better than on the last occasion - which was less than three weeks ago, so perhaps, with our near daily exercise, we are getting better. For example, our knowledge of short words involving high scoring letters is getting much better than it was, well tuned to the arbitrating first edition of OED.

We celebrated with cheese scones, the first batch of which is snapped above. BH, as the loser, was appointed scone cook for the occasion. Both batches knocked back in the one sitting, but without the spot of Calvados this time around.

PS: as can be seen from the snap above, the temperature in our fan oven is not as even as the advertisements for such things would have you believe, snapping against the light from the right notwithstanding. But not a problem; they all went down OK with just a touch of butter.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/clarissa.html.

A cautionary tale

This prompted by a review of reference 1 (report on which will follow in due course) in a recent number of the NYRB.

It seems that something called the rabbit calicivirus disease turned up in Europe in the early 1980’s and went on to kill several hundred million rabbits in China and elsewhere in very short order. I learn from reference 2 that it is properly called rabbit haemorrhagic disease or RHD, is very infectious and usually fatal within a few hours. Something similar affects hares.

It is now more or less endemic across the world, although Mexico managed to eradicate it and the US has it well under control – their native rabbits being much less susceptible than the imported European variety.

Contrariwise, in Australia and New Zealand, where rabbits are regarded as pests, they thought about deliberate introduction. The virus then escaped from an island experiment and went on to kill millions of rabbits in Australia in a few weeks. New Zealand decided against but got it anyway.

The good news is, first, that domestic and farmed rabbits can be immunised, various technical difficulties around this particular virus notwithstanding. And second, that there are now resistant strains of rabbits, and many wild populations are recovering. The bad news is that rabbits and virus are co-evolving, with the rabbits (in effect) trying to protect themselves and the viruses working out how to get through the new defences. Work in progress.

The worse news is that this sort of thing is going to happen from time to time, sometimes to humans, who can't restock as fast as rabbits, as we now know all too well.

PS 1: the snap, a catalogue of all the things that go wrong, is taken from reference 2.

PS 2: I learn from reference 1 that the fossil record suggests that the European rabbit originated in the Iberian Peninsula during the middle Pleistocene, say a million years ago or so. While I learned from the review in the NYRB that a million years or so is the average life span for a species of mammal.

References

Reference 1: The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity – Toby Ord – 2021.

Reference 2: Rabbit haemorrhagic disease (RHD) and rabbit haemorrhagic disease virus (RHDV): a review – Joana Abrantes, Wessel van der Loo, Jacques Le Pendu and Pedro J Esteves – 2012. There are accessible bits, but most of this paper is not accessible, being directed at virologists.

Reference 3: https://www.msdvetmanual.com/exotic-and-laboratory-animals/rabbits/viral-diseases-of-rabbits. The headlines.

On mental images

This being prompted by a perusal of the paper at reference 1 about mental imagery. This perusal prompting in turn a look at various other material, including the papers at references 2 and 3.

It seems that the idea of there being an image store in the brain is well established. Or at least something which functions as an image store, which can, at times, bring more or less vivid images into mind without needing input from the eyes. The image materials store in the sketch above. We note in passing the related phenomenon where the brain might jump to conclusions about input from the eyes, and overlay the new input from the eyes with old input from the store. As, for example, when one mistakes a bit of crumpled paper on the grass for a bird. But here the main interest is in the brain generating an image by itself, using just old input.

With this image store being different from the store of language orientated information about the world. The knowledge that cats usually have four legs and that the Congo is the name of a very long river in equatorial Africa. 

It is relatively easy to test when someone has lost the perceptual ability to name an object in front of them. This being the work usually done by the object identification box, top right. It is not so easy to test the strength of someone’s representational ability, their image generation capability, that is to say the combined efforts of the image generation and projection boxes. How do you test the strength of something which is subjective by definition? Then can the image be there without there being any subjective experience of same? When the projection of that otherwise satisfactory and sufficient image from working memory into consciousness has come unstuck?

The arrow from image generation to working memory is thinner than that from front end processing to working memory. This is intended to suggest that the latter is dominant. Input from the eyes tends to block input from memory, from storage - which is why we often shut our eyes when trying to imagine something. Note the ‘image’ root of the word ‘imagine’.

Lots of work has been done of all of this. First, there are questionnaires, designed to elicit information about the strength of the experience of internally generated images. There are a number of well known and widely used questionnaires of this sort, one of which, the VVIQ, is described at reference 4. One might worry that such questionnaires are terribly subjective and so unreliable – but they do seem to work.

Second, there are experiments with volunteers, experiments with experimental tasks designed to test different parts of the image processing complex. Reference 3 includes a lot of such tasks. One might, for example, be asked to take a capital letter apart and reassemble it to make something else: a visual version of mental arithmetic. Or to match an object seen from one angle with the same object seen from a different angle.

Over the years, all kinds of tricky tasks have been devised to test this image processing complex, with reference 3 listing nearly thirty of them. 

Third, one can look at the brain with scanners while various parts of the image processing complex are busy.

The upshot seems to be that there is a group of people who have an imagery deficit. People who can see stuff in the outside world well enough, but who have no subjective experience of internally generated images. Some such people are born, some are made, usually by their heads being damaged in some way. They have what is called aphantasia and they are called aphantasics.

Additional support for the concept of aphantasia is provided at reference 5, which offers a cunning test for same based on binocular rivalry, a test which uses the fact that the outcome of a binocular contest can be prejudiced by both real images and imagined images. Giving us a test for the strength of mental imagery which draws on clocks and binary choices rather than descriptions and five point Likert scales. Binocular rivalry more generally is described at reference 6.

Is aphantasia a problem? Reference 2 describes a man who reported losing all his mental imagery, that is to say he had become an aphantasic, which he was sorry about, but who performed OK on all the standard tests. The mental images must still have been there and his brain must have found a work-around.

Other people perform badly on perception, perhaps failing to recognise common objects by sight, but are able to recognise them by touch and are able to produce sketches of them. That is to say, representation seems OK. Reference 3 describes one such case.

Part of the interest here is using these differences to infer something about the architecture of the image processing complex. To infer something about its various modules, the idea of a module being that it has its task, which it can get on with independently, without needing to get all mixed up with other modules. Hence modularity, as sketched above. With the strength and effectiveness of these various modules varying from person to person, in much the same way as height or hair colour. Or from time to time, in the way of weight or blood pressure.

Another part of the interest here is trying to work out what this mental imaging capability is for. Is having subjective experience of these internally generated images needed in order to have that capability?

In which connection, the present paper, that is to say reference 1, seems to have found something. Aphantasics are not as frightened by scary stories without pictures as normals. It seems that their relative inability to generate scary pictures from scary stories dampens down their emotional response to them. While they are scared in the normal way if such pictures are added in. While normals get scared without needing actual pictures.

All very curious. All too tempting to follow in the footsteps of lots of other people and spend quality time on these matters!

PS: I have not been able to find either an ICD or a DSM code for aphantasia. Perhaps it is not yet respectable enough. Perhaps means that it is not yet claimable against a US medical insurance policy.

References

Reference 1: The critical role of mental imagery in human emotion: insights from fear-based imagery and aphantasia - Marcus Wicken, Rebecca Keogh, Joel Pearson – 2021. 

Reference 2: Loss of imagery phenomenology with intact visuo-spatial task performance: a case of 'blind imagination' – Zeman, A. Z., Della Sala, S., Torrens, L. A., Gountouna, V. E., McGonigle, D. J., & Logie, R. H. – 2010. 

Reference 3: Intact mental imagery and impaired visual perception: Dissociable processes in a patient with visual agnosia – Behrmann, M., Moscovitch, M., & Winocur, G. – 1994. 

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vividness_of_Visual_Imagery_Questionnaire. 

Reference 5: The blind mind: No sensory visual imagery in aphantasia – Keogh, R., & Pearson, J. – 2018.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binocular_rivalry. 

Hades

A bit worried this morning to have received what appears to be an invitation by email to pay a bill for £500 or so from a Canadian aggregate company, that is to say a company which presumably digs sand, gravel and rock out of the ground, cleans it up and sells it on as building material. All this taking place in Nelson in British Columbia., a little to the east of Vancouver. A company with a web site (reference 1) which is headed up with the arty snap of a loader, included above. A fairly ordinary loader, very much the sort of thing that used to be park outside the house in which we used to rent an upstairs flat, with the driver occupying the back bedroom and making weekly use of the bath in the cupboard in our kitchen. Noticed at reference 2.

But why are they sending me a bill? Has someone infiltrated their computer so that they can spoof a bill? Why me - it being most unlikely that I have shopped with these people - despite Canadian connections and an interest in concrete?

I have not opened the attachments but I have sent Hadean a query using their contact form. We will see if anyone bothers to reply.

Reference 1: https://hadean.ca/.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/04/waking-news.html.

Zero

I bought the book at reference 1 as a result of reading the review of reference 2 at reference 3. With reference 3 explaining that while the late Stephen Hawking, one of Isaac Newton’s successors as Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, was indeed a notable astronomer, his fame rather outstripped his astronomy. I settled for reference 1, a best selling book about zero, an earlier book from the same author, one Charles Seife.

On this account, mathematics had, in the first instance, three drivers. First, the need to count things for the purposes of gifts, tribute and taxation. Second, the need to survey the rich alluvial lands around large rivers, for example the Indus, the Nile and the Euphrates; the need to be clear about exactly who has what rights over exactly what land. And third, the needs of astronomy and astrology. Including here, for example, the need to compute the date of Easter using a combination of the solar and lunar dates. Practical drivers in the sense that these were all things that the people in charge wanted to be able to do.

We start with the mystics of the ancient world getting into a lather about whether zero would reduce the world to its primeval void, through the middle ages and Renaissance, through the great leaps forward of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and wind up with the mystics of our world who dress their ponderings about intergalactic travel up in quantum clothes. Say fifty short pages to each of these four sections. Plus some rather poor quality diagrams and illustrations. Perhaps the hardback version would have been better in that regard, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

A rather chatty and informal style, which grates, certainly at first; perhaps rather too like my own style for comfort. A lot of ancient, middle and early modern ground is covered in very few words; a seemingly careless glossing of a complicated story, a lot of which did not seem very relevant to the matter in hand. I was moved to check one bit, the suggestion on page 98 that Jansenism in France was mainly about opposition to the Jesuits – to find that if you are going to give them just the one sentence, bashing the Jesuits is not really good enough. Perhaps such stuff would have been better omitted. Wikipedia tells me that Seife is qualified in mathematics – if not in the history of the western world – and things got better as we got into the serious mathematics of the west from the seventeenth century.

But he did offer one interesting new-to-me thought, to the effect that England and France exhausted themselves in the Seven Years War in the middle of the eighteenth century, spending far more than they could comfortably afford, money which had then to be raised from taxation. Resulting on the one hand in the American Revolution and on the other in the French Revolution a few years after that. With the added irony of the French monarchy spending another big dollop of money on helping the American revolutionaries win.

We are told how we started with counting, using positive integers. Then gradually we got used to the idea of negative numbers and rational numbers. But still gagging a bit on zero and infinity. Calculus came in the seventeenth century, after which we learned about limits of infinite sequences and started to get a grip on both zero and infinity. Along the way, we invented the square root of minus one – that is to say an imaginary number. Then, starting in the twentieth century, both zero and infinity started causing trouble again in the very small world of quantum mechanics and in the very large world of relativity. With the whole lot coming together at the Big Bang of our birth and at the Black Hole of goodness knows what.

We are implicitly reminded that while, until the Renaissance, the west rather lagged behind the east in these matters, the west (here including Russia, east and central Europe) dominated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with a regular explosion of mathematical knowledge.

A sample of a few of the things that I liked or which otherwise struck me follows.

The Pythagoreans were fascinated by regular pentagons, by the way that they could be nested and by their exhibition of the golden ratio. Google knows all about it. While I wondered what interesting properties might be found in a regular heptagon – an odd number of sides being a necessary condition for this nesting. 

The Mayans used base twenty for some of their numbers, and sometimes – that is to say quite rarely – represented them from a gallery of twenty rather grotesque heads in profile. Read all about it at references 4 and 5.

The modern way of writing numbers as the sum of powers of a base – in our case usually 10 (in the world) but often 2 (in computers) – came from the columns of an eastern abacus. So ‘two, gap, gap, six’ was not the same as ‘two, gap, six’ at all and needed to be distinguished using some marker for gap. That is to say, zero.

The vanishing point of perspective was invented in the fifteenth century. Another manifestation of the pairing of zero with the infinite.

I was intrigued by Riemann’s projection of the complex plane onto the surface of a sphere sitting on the origin – with the top of the sphere being the point – just the one point – of infinity. A sphere which I never met when young, despite doing both projective geometry and complex analysis. Must have skated very lightly over both of them. In fact, my only contact with Riemann was a complicated version of tennis played in Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’.

In sum, despite its defects, a pleasant reminder of some of the mathematics that I once knew, plus various bits of mathematics that I never knew. But then, as I have to keep reminding myself, one can’t do everything, one can’t even dabble in much of it. There is just far too much of it. 

I shall pass on the new book about Hawking.

PS 1: the National Archives, the source of the snap above, tells me that the Exchequer’s rather unusual name was derived from the chequered cloth on which the confrontational audit process took place between the powerful Barons of the upper Exchequer and the hapless accountants summoned before them, who were regularly interrogated about the state of their accounts. More sophisticated accountants from parts east used the abacus. This particular Exchequer is an Irish one.

PS 2: the Reverend Henry Lucas, for whom the famous Lucasian chair is named, was an English clergyman and politician who was buried in buried in 1663 in the Temple Church, this last being here noticed for its musical evenings.

References

Reference 1: Zero – Charles Seife – 2009. 

Reference 2: Hawking Hawking: The Selling of a Scientific Celebrity – Charles Seife – 2021. 

Reference 3: Eclipsed by Fame - James Gleick/NYRB - 2021.

Reference 4: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Introduction_to_the_Study_of_the_Maya_Hieroglyphs/Chapter_4. 

Reference 5: Maya Numbers and Maya Calendar – Mark Pitts – 2009.

Cooperation in space

I was sorry to read in this morning's FT that the 20 year old collaboration between the US and Russia on the International Space Station is coming to an end. A collaboration which showed that the US and Russia could still work together on big international projects; which taught both them and us that working together was greater than the sum of the parts. Rocky relations in other spheres of interest notwithstanding.

Perhaps the collaboration is coming to a natural end. The space station is old, perhaps getting near the end of its operational life. A new generation of US rockets is coming on-stream, reducing if not eliminating the US dependence on Russian rockets to move people and stuff about. And China has become a space power: so given the politics, not a big surprise that the Russians should be pivoting east.

But it is still a pity. Perhaps when the dust starts to settle a bit, we will learn to collaborate in a similar way on the viral front. Something of more immediate consequence than learning how to grow radishes on the moon.

PS: interesting to see that reference 1 was organised in much the same way as it might have been over here. Easy enough to navigate, even while declining Microsoft's offer of translation.

Reference 1: https://www.roscosmos.ru/. The Russian end of the collaboration.

Reference 2: https://www.nasa.gov/crew-2. The US end of the collaboration.

Talking rubbish

Another fantasy, on rather different lines to the one at reference 1. Plus, I believe there is some truth in this one.

By way of reference 1 – on which more in due course – I have been pondering about the fact that we spend a lot of time thinking or saying things which are not true. Not necessarily lying, rather giving air time to stuff which is unproven or even untrue, perhaps in the course of reading stories, thinking about how to respond to something or other or just speculating about matters about which we know little. In the course of which, by way of example, thinking about whether Sally was a safe cracker would put the expression ‘Sally is a safe cracker’ into circulation.

One way or another, it seems likely that the brain stores a whole lot of data both about language (meta-data) and in language (data), say English for most people born in the UK. 

So it stores a whole lot of data in the form of language. Which, simplifying, might be thought of as a sequence of expressions, each one with a number between zero and one attached, expressing the likelihood that the expression in question is true.

Then we have generation rules, which allow us to generate valid new expressions from old data. Most of which would not be very likely to be true at all. So, something like ‘the purple sheep flew up into the prussian sunset’ might be fine as far as the generation rules are concerned, but is unlikely to be true.

Then we have rules of inference, which allow us to generate promising new expressions from old data. Much more likely to be true, at least if the premises are true, which will not always be the case. The brain might well be interested in what the consequences would be if Sally were a safe cracker, well before it had any knowledge on this last point.

This generation whirs away the whole time, using prompts derived from attention, probably qualified by mood at the time. Possibly by the chemical ambience at the time. If Sally and safe cracking pop into consciousness at roughly the same time, or are otherwise attended to at about the same time, then the generator will see what it can make of them.

Then we have validation rules, which allow us to compute the likelihood that these new expressions are true. Often this likelihood will be zero and the expression will be repressed or supressed, if not deleted.

Most of this goes on in the unconscious, and never sees the light of day – unless, perhaps, you go in for a spot of psycho-analysis – but from time to time an expression is projected into consciousness, when it can be given some quality time. Mulled over, developed or discarded. Or given a very low likelihood.

Sometimes the stuff projected into consciousness will be unwanted, perhaps frightening. The subject may feel a loss of agency, with unwanted thoughts arriving unbidden, not amenable to conscious control.

Expressions might also be projected into the outside world in the form of speech, tweets or even old-fashioned writing. With input from this outside world about those projections coming back in either through the double arrow up into consciousness in the sketch above, or, more subtly, through the bent arrow to the left, directly into the subconscious. This might happen, for example, when you pick up non-verbal cues from your interlocutors.

Sometimes these generated expressions are corralled in a what-if or otherwise pretend world, where they are not threatening or misleading. A world which might be conscious and which might be shared with interlocutors in the real outside world. Maybe the workings of the brain are organised into more or less mutually exclusive compartments, with the interaction between compartments being very restricted. 

The sort of sharing that will take place when children play at let’s pretend, play which can be complicated and involve all kinds of unlikely props. And in the case of adults, a sharing which might well produce useful input, which might well save one thinking about whatever it is for oneself. I can imagine time-poor senior managers regarding this as a good use of their time: chuck lots of stuff down to the chaps, any old how, and see what comes back. But this only works if the compartment can be extended into the relevant part of the outside world. Where our interlocutors understand that we are not talking for real, that we are just exploring possibilities and improbalities.

And sometimes we want to explore rubbish. We might know, or at least suspect, that something is rubbish without being terribly clear why. So we want to explore that why, and sharing with others might be an efficient way to do that.

Pushback

While talking rubbish in public is often a good way to test one’s knowledge, to test the future and to improve one’s knowledge of the world, there are factors which push back the other way.

Most people, particularly young male adults, are very status conscious. They do not like being caught out in public. They like to seem omniscient, at least in their chosen arena. This makes some people careful what they say, other people very protective of what they had said. They will never admit to having made a mistake, still less to having lied for some reason or another, despite it being clear to everybody else that they have.

I associate to the related difficulty of allowing nonsense to go unchecked at meetings because you are anxious about being made to look silly by challenging something you don’t fully understand yourself. Which some deal with by introducing their challenge by something pre-emptive like ‘I’m going to ask a silly question now. I should know the answer but I don’t. So why exactly is it that we have to use this very expensive metallic paint to paint all those bricks blue?’.

But one has to have a care. If one is chairing a meeting, that meeting will soon get out of hand if a lot of time is spent on these silly questions, on challenging everything. Which is why, in some contexts, there are rules about how long you have to wait before you are allowed to raise again a matter previously resolved against you. And you have to stick to the agenda.

Conclusions

So, for the most part anyway, not rubbish at all. Generating rubbish is an inevitable by-product of thought, just part of the process. The trick is appropriate containment.

PS 1: a rather different, literature-theoretic take on untruths is to be found at the previously mentioned reference 3. Why do we spend so much time on people who have been invented?

PS 2: later on I remembered about the talking horses in Gulliver's travels who were rather puzzled by humans using language to tell lies. Our own copy appears to have been culled, but Project Gutenberg got me to the right place, at the beginning of Part IV, Chapter IV, fast enough: 'My master heard me with great appearances of uneasiness in his countenance; because doubting, or not believing, are so little known in this country, that the inhabitants cannot tell how to behave themselves under such circumstances. And I remember, in frequent discourses with my master concerning the nature of manhood in other parts of the world, having occasion to talk of lying and false representation, it was with much difficulty that he comprehended what I meant, although he had otherwise a most acute judgment. For he argued thus: “that the use of speech was to make us understand one another, and to receive information of facts; now, if any one said the thing which was not, these ends were defeated, because I cannot properly be said to understand him; and I am so far from receiving information, that he leaves me worse than in ignorance; for I am led to believe a thing black, when it is white, and short, when it is long.” And these were all the notions he had concerning that faculty of lying, so perfectly well understood, and so universally practised, among human creatures'. 

PS 3: I first came across purple sheep, many years ago now, when reading a book by the Yorick Wilks of reference 6. Both book and author then vanished from sight, which seems odd now as it was rather a good book.

References

Reference 1: Pretense and representation: The origins of 'Theory of Mind' – Alan Leslie   – 1987.

Reference 2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/a-fantasy.html. 

Reference 3: Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? – Blakey Vermeule – 2010.

Reference 4: Gulliver's Travels – Jonathon Swift – 1726.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-tale-in-tub-concluded.html. The last outing for Swift.

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yorick_Wilks.

Hmmm

In the context of moaning yesterday afternoon about adverts from the people from whom I usually buy cheese popping up all over the place, mentioning another cheese supplier who probably would not be so into e-commerce (reference 1), resulted in an email advertisement from them this morning.

Clicking on the link provided delivered an address with suffix 'utm_campaign=emailmarketing_116252672180&utm_medium=email&utm_source=shopify_email'. Whereupon Google loses no time telling me that urchin tracking modules (UTM) are one of the ways to track performance from any digital marketing campaign ... a simple code that can be attached to any URL to generate Google Analytics data for digital campaigns. Presumably the '116252672180' bit is a Google/Shopify identifier for the cheese company in question.

While Shopify appears from reference 2 to be, inter alia, a Canadian e-commerce platform. The about bit at the bottom of the page tells me that [for a fee] 'Shopify powers over 1,700,000 businesses worldwide: the all-in-one commerce platform to start, run, and grow a business'. So quite big enough to do the necessary to plug all their customers into Google, Facebook, Uncle Tom Cobblers and all.

Hmmm.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/time-for-white.html.

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

Peaky

Having reported (re-reported to rhyme with re-tweet?) a trough about a month ago, maybe we are peaking again, thankfully at a lower level than that in February, albeit quite a lot higher than the first peak, about this time last year.

China invisible. UK nearly invisible. US looking better than it has for more than a year. Rest of Europe holding steady. Other parts of the world, particularly Latin America and India looking bad. Let's hope big pharma - an industry we used to love to knock for its tricky pricing and excess profits - can crank up production of vaccines. 

PS 1: with a lot of big pharma being in India and China these days. Along with most of the iron and steel.

PS 2: graphic lifted from a free bit of the Financial Times. Where it is updated weekly.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/03/troughed.html.

Time for white

The time for white bread has come around again, so batch 608 was baked yesterday without the usual Canadian stone ground from Waitrose. Just 3lbs 8oz of Alto white from Ponders End, that is to say something over 5lbs of dough.

A bright warm day which one might have thought would have speeded things up, but actually the first rise, mainly due to my forgetting about it, ran to a record five hours without coming to grief, that is to say without wet dough dripping down all over our airing cupboard. Furthermore, in the past, a long first rise has meant a very sticky second knead, but not on this occasion. Plus the dough seemed to have more structure than usual. Would the twists and turns of the dough be recorded in the baked bread, in the way of a large white bloomer from a proper baker? Second rise long, but not record breaking at something over two and a half hours. Finished loaves looked rather good: a good size, a good colour and with no bubbles or volcanoes.

As we were by then running late, the first loaf was started before it had completely cooled down. Looked good, felt good, even smelt slightly of yeast. But still a little bland, so some was taken with butter, some with cheese, this last being in particularly good condition.

Sadly, the twists and turns did not survive into the cooked crumb. Nicely risen and light, but no spirals or anything else visible.

Still good with cheese the following morning. But not particularly successful with hard boiled eggs with today's picnic at Hampton Court, the first such for months. I shall try a fried egg sandwich in the morning.

While yesterday evening we celebrated with a bottle of 2017 Menetou Salon, last noticed at the end of last year at reference 2. Very good it was too. Must put it on my list for my next order.

PS: the people from Neal's Yard Dairy sell very good cheese, but they have quite abruptly been pushed into advertising slots all over the place. I am getting to see them several times a day. How do I tell them that this irritates more than it attracts, more than it burns the brand into my brain? That it might encourage consumption of more Comté from the people next door, probably not a big enough operation to bother with Google or Microsoft?

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/festival-of-white.html. The last occasion for white bread.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/from-kimmeridge.html. Possibly the last occasion for Menetou-salon. The wine with the wax.

After the deluge

A bit of outside mixing last weekend, the first for a while. But the weather was on our side and all went well. The snap above being taken after we had broken up for the day. With the big decision being, did we clear up then or the day after? After a drop of tea we settled for then.

The beams from Travis Perkins had done good service. With the ramp in the foreground built on a couple of sturdy chairs which floated in family possession in the course of the dissolution of what had been the Exe Vale group of mental hospitals. More bounce in it than you might think. The rope was taken from the reel acquired in the course of an expedition to the Banker & Barrowboy at London Bridge and noticed at reference 1. Still going strong after nearly five years use.

The balancing beam behind held up by cross pieces made from some sturdy sheets of fibre board sourced at the end of last year from a skip a few doors up. The same stuff as went into the contraption noticed at reference 2. With my drop of tea, in an IKEA mug sourced from a car boot sale at Hook Road Arena. A stall manned by a couple of students breaking up their flat at the end of the course. Who had the grace to be amused when I explained that the more such mugs I had, the less often I had to do any washing up. With their contribution taking the total to three, now, sadly, back down to one again.

Mugs which have a matt rather than a gloss interior finish - with the former working much better with morning tea than the latter. No idea why. Oral habit? With a down side being that the matt finish picks up tea stains (from our hard water) far more easily than the gloss.

Temporary fence around the pondlets just visible left. Suggestive rather than impenetrable, but it served.

Behind the balancing beam, some rather more conventional equipment. Behind that, one of our trestle tables, big enough for socially distanced eating. With the remains of the wine from Pfaffenheim, as noticed at reference 3, just about visible. Hopefully reinforcements will be arriving from Guildford shortly.

Trestle tables now getting on for ten years old, as noticed at reference 4 and 5. Not used that often, but on the right occasion, very handy.

Reference 1: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/07/rope-1.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/12/a-contraption.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/03/pfaffenheim.html.

Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/07/diy.html.

Reference 5: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/06/diy.html.

BVLOS

Interested to read in today's FT about the drone industry being opened up for the testing of flying drone missions which are beyond the visual line of sight of the flier. Which I take to mean that rather than having to stand at the perimeter fence of an airfield in order to fly one's drone over the airfield, we might, in the not too distant future, be able to do the same thing from some comfortable office (or perhaps bunker), pretty much anywhere in the world. With the company at reference 1 being very much in the frame for this sort of thing.

Now I can see that using drones to inspect some large and expensive bit of infrastructure, quite possibly not very accessible in the ordinary way of things, might be very attractive. Perhaps, for example, to check the state of the paint on the first Forth Bridge without actually having to go to the bother at looking at it for real. 

But I don't know what Sees.ai propose to do at the large building site above, snapped from their website. Is the idea for the various foremen to use drones to check up on their chaps, without having to leave the comfort of the tea hut?

And then we have all the people like BH, who was infuriated a few years ago by a drone from an estate agent coming over our house while she was taking a snooze in our back garden. What about if someone a couple of houses up the road elects to start getting all their medicines delivered by drone? How can you tell that it is delivering medicines rather than, for example, taking the temperature of your roof, this last being a well tried way of detecting roof gardens? Or checking up that you have not lopped or otherwise damaged a listed tree? Where will it all end?

Plus I worry about our doing away with more and more jobs. Is it really so clever to be getting rid of lots of delivery jobs at a time when I believe it is going to be increasingly hard to offer satisfactory employment to everybody? And what about all those rock climbers who leverage their heads for heights doing rope work on big buildings? We only have to look at the various trouble spots around the world to see what happens when you have too many underemployed young men - young men who, generally speaking, are not keen on becoming care workers. Picking Brussels sprouts on freezing cold fens maybe, washing the demented, no.

A worry that first surfaced near me perhaps 55 years ago, in the context of automating much of what had been skilled engineering work, for example the operation of complicated machine tools up north. And I am sorry to say that I paid little attention to the chap who raised this one. While my mother worried about the hollowing out of the working class of her youth by the provision of opportunities for all, by making a lot of the people who might otherwise have become warehouse managers or foreman bricklayers into accountants. A slightly awkward point, but a point nonetheless. A point famously addressed, after a fashion, at reference 2.

Reference 1: https://www.sees.ai/.

Reference 2: Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - 1932.

Week six

Steaming ahead now, with the flower buds starting to separate out. Even if I have yet to work out how best to take its picture in the morning light. Is the answer simply to wait until the afternoon, when the sun has gone off this east facing window?

Sunflowers right coming along, with much variation of size and vigor and not without incident. Since the last report at reference 2, the seedling of the near-death experience has expired, with its main root rotted or eaten through about half an inch below the surface. Replaced with one of the seedlings popping up in the kitchen windowsill bucket - and just to be on the safe side, in a clean pot and with new compost. The half dozen or so extra seedlings reported last time have now been snipped off. A second mushroom has been removed. And I am now wondering what to do about the two seedlings which appear to be being eaten. A small slug coming up at night? Slug pellets?

And to deal with growing towards the sun, their table is being rotated 90° clockwise first thing each morning. Which I hope will straighten them out.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/week-five.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/04/potting-on.html.

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