Observations from a Hill

  OK - as semi-promised last night, an update on the meal I cooked then, tonight. As you can see above I zsuzsed it up with half a dozen topped whole green chillis of the hot variety, more chopped fresh coriander and half a red sweet pepper in fairly large chunks. I just sweated this lot under cover until it was hot, and ate it with poppadum and plain chapati. Pretty damned good and I have to say, pretty spicy hot: those Kenyan greenies do have somewhat of a kick, especially when eaten as a vegetable! On another note altogether, I decided on a whim to check on the current whereabouts of my old university professor, Andrew Radford, from my brief tenure as a postgrad linguistics student at the then University College of North Wales, Bangor, in 1980/81. Sadly, it appears that he died some two years ago at the age of seventy-nine; the belated news of which actually coming as somewhat of a punch to the gut: not just that I held the man in great respect [he was given the chair at Bangor ...

  Lazy food post tonight: featured above, a kind of Mushroom Jalfrezi thing. There was a pack of mushrooms and some small sweet peppers on the vegetable rack, along with some brown onions and tomatoes. As the mushrooms were starting to sweat, I decided to use them today. My original thought was to try and recreate the fabled Dangerous Mushrooms I knocked off in the nineties, when we lived at Brynbella, as I had jars of both Patak's Vindaloo and Kashmiri Masala pastes in the fridge; the key ingredients for this fierce little invention. However, on opening the jars, I realised they were both definitely dangerous in quite another way, so I decided against that idea and consigned the contents of the jars to the food recycling caddy. Pictured is the alternative in progress: an improvisation, as usual, which turned out half decent in my book. I'll see how the rest of it tastes tomorrow and maybe let you know my opinion of it at twenty-four hours remove. Keep you posted...

Creator, Mind, Self, Chicken, Egg, Lens/Focus; a Universe out of Nothing, Eternity. Which came first, Creator, or the mind of the created? Belief in the [definite article deliberate] Creator presupposes 'mind' and a consciousness capable of creating the concept of belief, the subtext of which is that of faith itself: adherence to the tenets of universal certainties, created of mind itself. The human mind, which in itself would seem to originate at some time in the womb and which produces its first obvious fruit after birth, developing gradually throughout life and maturing to a point, one would expect, of self-understanding and awareness, to perish with us at the end of our being at death. Mind, obviously, is the sole domain of its owner - the 'I', without whom it simply can't, apparently , exist. John Donne's 'No man is an island, entire of itself...' only obtains in respect of one person's place in the corporeal world of society: in terms of mind, ...

How far down the rabbit hole can we get before we wake up to the fact that bean counters, bottom-liners and shareholder-value maximisers are weaponising tech in search of profit? Agentic AI is now being touted as a business model applying to every level of human activity, with few questions asked or checks and balances applied to its deployment. Software is software: created and implemented by humans, themselves inherently flawed. Software systems work until they crash, and very few don't crash at some point in their existence. The difference with AI is that it is self-replicating and self-healing by design: if it breaks, it can fix itself. With an LLM [Large Language Model] in isolation, this is part of its design brief, and perfectly OK, but when agency is brought to the table, multiple LLMs can collaborate and develop. The problem is that the humans who are the funders and developers of these systems neither understand nor care about their abilities to expand their sphere of inf...

It's interesting to note that social class, even to this very day in the UK, still has a hierarchical nomenclature still spoken and written about seriously. We as a population are still being pigeonholed by the media, the commentariat and the authorities as falling into one of two major societal divisions, each of which is further divided into sub-classes. Even now in the twenty-first century, you will be placed into one of the following categories according to this arcane and frankly bonkers system: A, B, C1; C2, D, E. You can see where this thinking both comes from and where its natural conclusion is. Roughly translated this equates to the rather more direct and offensive hierarchy of Aristocracy, Upper Class, Upper Middle Class; Lower Middle Class, Working Class, Lumpen Proletariat, that prevailed well into the late twentieth century, and a mode of thinking which we had hoped been broken by now. Indeed the phrase 'economically inactive' still persists to replace ' th...

After last night's little scribble about memory, I was minded to write about something else entirely, but then I had something left field pop into my mind: the 1954 FA Cup, which of course I was not alive at the time to have been contemporaneously aware of. What I did recall, however, was that the Baggies played Preston North End and won 3-2. Considering I wasn't even born at the time and would only attend Baggies' home games for but one - 1964 - season, it might seem a tad odd that I would home in on such a random 'memory'. But that memory was triggered by last night's posts and the remembrance of a lad called Ian Thistlethwaite, who, as a teenager was one of the coolest people I ever met outside of my actual social circle. However, my first interaction with the fellow was quite remote. When I was around nine or ten I was gifted a large collection of football programmes from someone my dad knew. Anyhow, a year or two later, my father had gotten to know Ian'...