Observations from a Hill

Interesting confluence of stuff today, which started with a conversation in the pub this afternoon about the ludicrous Space X program: Elon Musk's vanity/personal enrichment project, whose sole aim seems to be to commit the self-same errors that all of the great capitalist 'pioneers' of the last couple of hundred years or so repeated generation after generation from the start of the Industrial Revolution until the present day. They have all sought one thing over all other considerations, money; the pursuit of profit for personal gain, usually couched in the guise of vanguard exploration and the creation of some new Jerusalem, but always at someone else's expense, and most often the environment; in this case the pollution of near Earth orbit and the planet itself. On the way home from the boozer, there was a short piece on Radio Four, which mentioned that scientists are still getting valuable, light-touch exploratory scientific data from Voyager One, the Voyager program...

The rather jaundiced looking pasty pictured was tonight's supper for your humble narrator, and rather fine it was, too. I was rummaging around in the freezer cabinet of our little corner shop for inspiration for a quick bite - we are so fortunate to still have one of these places - and found a selection of Caribbean curry patties, including the above example. Originally developed from the Cornish pasty which arrived in the Caribbean islands with settlers from the UK, the patty took on a more Afro-Caribbean flavour with the addition of spices and chillis, whilst retaining the form of the traditional pasty. In the twentieth century, the curry patty was brought to England by settlers from the islands. It was a part of the food landscape of my growing up in The Green [blog posts passim], having eaten many of them late at night from the little Jamaican takeaway and gambling den on the Dudley Road, after a skinful and maybe a visit to the local shebeen [blog posts also passim] at the top...

We went down to Penmaenpool today, to take lunch with two of the three Johns from back in the earliest days of our living here in Gogledd Cymru [North Wales]. John One - Latham - is the friend from whom we bought our first house back in '82, in Gerlan, and John Two is my old schoolmate, John Gwilym Jones, who has lived in Majorca for almost as long as we have lived here. It's the first time Gwil Bach and I have met up since our late friend Johnny Kyte's sixtieth birthday in Birmingham, twelve years ago. Much time and more friends have passed in the interim, and the draught as my dad was always wont to put it, continues to grow stronger by the year. John mentioned a saying: 'Don't Let The Old Man In': en Español, ' No Dejes Entrar Al Viejo', also the title of a song by Toby Keith, covered by Willie Nelson et al. Nelson has been a frequent musical companion to us for over forty years now, and whose own compositions as well as his many covers have been the ...

Following on from last night's mention of the post-mid-terms market fall in AI - which was always going to happen sooner or later, it being in the nature of red-hot stocks threatening to go ape in the market to implode at some point on their inflationary curve - I have to caveat rather than cavil about the threat, real or imagined, that AI poses to the human race. AI, as it is not in the strictest sense of the word intelligent, has no sense of self or society, is in fact not sentient in any way humanly recognisable, is only a threat by proxy; the directors of that proxy being the human actors who deploy/employ the technology. The AI 'gold rush' of the last very few years has seen money following money with the aim of capitalising once again on a unicorn technology: in short, the mythologising of yet another evanescent tech beast in pursuit of wealth. As always - think tulips, ostrich feathers, pineapples dot-coms and sub-prime mortgages - these Ponzi schemes disguised as te...

Well: three things in the news this weekend that aren't about Russell Brand or Donald Trump: first off the bat in this weekend's Guardian, the revelation that Apple iPhones operate a company 'grey list' of 100,000 words and phrases that the device will not auto-predict and suggest when texting, or typing generally, which is hard-coded into the phone's operating system, forcing the user to manually peck out the offending words and phrases manually. This begs a fundamental question: which comes first, the thought or the action? Methinks simply slowing someones typing down is hardly likely to stem their thought processes and delay their actions by more than a few seconds: necessary? I think not. Secondly, what's with the current wave of empty bomb threats against airlines? This strikes me as simple economic terrorism, and would seem to me to be a far more effective method of disrupting the status quo than the deployment of any amount of lethal ordnance. But why now...

All languages have words that in a single lexical entity embody a whole philosophical idea untranslatable directly to other languages. Welsh, for instance has the word hiraeth to describe a whole raft of emotions that accompany separation from one's homeland. French has ennui to embody languor and listlessness born of a perceived existential loss of purpose. Then there is the wonderful German word  schadenfreude: the taking of pleasure at witnessing someone else's discomfort or misfortune. Not nice, one might argue, but sometimes one just can't help it. I think pretty much all right thinking people must currently be experiencing a profound schadenfreude over the recent castration of the Trump hegemony in the mid-terms: many thousands or millions of his erstwhile supporters are probably this weekend feeling a slight twinge of it at least. But in this weekend's FT, there is a piece of news that really spikes my schadenfreude. DeBeers Diamonds has it would seem, shot its...