Observations from a Hill

It's intriguing how often I'll chuck away a possible thread for an idea of a topic for a post [cf. last night's scribble], and then find myself faced with the potential substance of that post the following day. In today's case, I read with interest a piece in today's Financial Times about Cortical Labs' early stage experiments in implementing 'biological intelligence', using lab-grown human brain cells living on silicon substrates from which their responses can be 'read' and via which they can be 'trained' [or at least 'nudged']. So far they have created a machine they have dubbed 'CL1', with 200,000 brain cells. The aim of this endeavour is to create computing devices of enormous power that, like the human brain, '...consume many orders of magnitude less energy than conventional electronics...'. If realisable in genuinely practical terms, this would leapfrog current developments in the field of quantum computing, ...

I was going to write something about consciousness and quantum superposition with reference to Roger Penrose's conjectures on the subject; but when these beauties came out of the oven, I thought nah! all that can wait. It's Sunday Roast time, after all. Chicken legs with garlic and roast Maris Piper potatoes, cooked in olive oil for an hour or so: ultimately served with steamed carrots and chicken gravy. Molto bene!

Oh, how woeful is the attention span of so many of us today. It's tragic how the dopamine rush of the AI-mediated instant gratification of social media and next-day delivered goods has severed us from the grit and shit of the actual realities of life. The knock on effects of this shift in human consciousness can be seen daily in the febrile arena of realpolitik and its ancillary bullshit. There is actually a reason for four and five year government terms, as oh-so-terribly-long as they might seem to those more used to 'reacting' in milliseconds to just about anything that crosses their event-awareness thresholds. The current trend is that Nigel Farage and his band of demented fuckwits are preparing the ground for government, and that the current one - Labour - could soon face an early General Election, leaving the path clear for them. Christ Almighty, we are four years away from the next national voting round and Labour still has a crushing majority that absolutely preclud...

Why am I largely unmoved by the Glastonbury Festival phenomenon? Everyone else seems to deify this event in almost religious terms. Have I ever been? No. Not from a lack of love for music in all its manifest variety, that's for sure. Have I ever been to a festival? Just the one: Pink Floyd in Hyde Park, 1970. Did I enjoy it? Yes, but what I rather less enjoyed was the presence about me of 120,000 other people, something I found claustrophobic and frankly annoying. I never thought about attending another like event after that day, as much as I enjoyed the music. I guess one of the reasons we left Birmingham for North Wales in 1980 was motivated by our growing unease among crowds: I was always more comfortable, both as a child and as a young adult, with the gentler pace of the countryside. Even as an adolescent I gravitated to the quieter parts of the city I grew up in, venturing into the crowds only at night to drink to the early hours. Do I miss the throng? Not a bit of it: my freq...

Amidst all the clatter and clarion that passes for the norm each morning, noon and night in the news cycle at present, all I want to do tonight is draw breath and let the clamour subside into the background noise of my tinnitus, and say fuck it all for a bit. I bumped into an old mate from work today, quite out of the blue, in the village. I haven't seen him since some time before I retired five years ago, and although he's still only in his early mid-fifties, he reckons on retiring well before he's sixty, as he's paying a third of his salary towards his pension every month, chwarae teg. I hope he get's to have a long and happy retirement on the back of his efforts. As to me, I've found/created a sweet spot in my latest incarnation that I could only have dreamed about [and often did] in my youth, where I can get on with being me: where Jane & I can get on with being us: where the boys are now making their own way and are happy in their travels through life. ...

I don't know if it's me, but the arithmetic in Eliot Wilson's article [yesterday's i Newspaper, UK] on Reform UK's recently-touted idea of '... a system of wealth transfer from rich to poor.' just doesn't seem to stack up. The mechanism that Farage's party of no-marks and flakes is proposing would attract non-domiciled wealthy individuals into a new, tax-lite environment here in the UK. As well as being exempt from UK taxation for a decade on their overseas earnings, they would avoid all inheritance tax, in return for buying into a scheme Reform have dubbed "The Britannia Card", for a one-off payment of £250,000 each, the proceeds of all earnings from this to be distributed among the lowest ten percent of UK earners at the end of each year. According to the article's [Reform's?] figures, this would net around 2.5 million workers between £600 and £1,000 each per year. This all sounds very grand and dashingly Robin Hood of Farage and ...

Back in the early 1980's, in a former life [I've had many], I worked at The Unemployed Workers' Advice Centre in Bangor: a short-lived but valuable resource created by Richard Grimes of the Newham Rights Centre, London and others, in Bangor, in 1982. I was there for a scant two years, but we managed to make a significant impact on what was then becoming a hostile environment for the underprivileged at the hands of Thatcher's state apparatus. We were trained in how the various convoluted 'benefits' of our social security system were supposed to work by the [still] estimable Child Poverty Action Group, which gave us both the tools and the cachet to argue our claimant-client cases and win, usually in short order, against the then Department for Health & Social Security: a short phone call from us pointing out the niceties of the legal obligations the authorities faced was usually enough to get a result for the client on the spot. Further afield in the human rig...

I was just reading an interview [ under the byline "Lunch With The FT", this weekend] with the computational linguist Emily Bender, who has been taking metaphorical chunks out of the AI gold rush's claims that it represents some sort of New Jerusalem [fans of the late, great Joe Don Baker will get that reference] in evolution, taking mankind out of itself and to the stars as immortals. Ahem . She wrote a paper in 2021 in which she described AI chatbots and image-creation tools as "stochastic parrots" [her neologism], the definition of which is, and I quote: '... a system for "haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms it has observed in it's vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning"...' Apparently this led to much umbrage in the AI community, motivating OpenAI's Sam Altman to tweet '... "i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u"......

  I just had to post a Sunday food piece today, as we've had the boys around for the first family Sunday Roast in ages. To celebrate the occasion, I slow-cooked a whole shoulder of lamb with garlic, rosemary & bay from the garden, white wine and anchovies, pictured centre. My usual olive-oil roast potatoes and purple-sprouting broccoli, and mint-sauce from our own garden mint, served with a reduced sauce of shallots, white wine, chicken stock, vegetable water and meat-pan juices. It took around six hours to do, and I enjoyed every minute of cooking it. I enjoyed the eating of it even more... Hwyl!

OK - I was prompted to write this note in the light of an ' interesting ' conversation I had the other day on the subject of conspiracy theories. In it was mentioned a blog called "The Daily Sceptic", which to be frank I was unaware of, but the notion that was floated that this might be some sort of source of 'truth', regarding climate change scepticism/denial, big pharma vaccine cons and the even more grandiose concepts of global elites cashing in on the gullibility of the masses prompted me to stick my toe into the shark-infested waters of paranoid public 'debate'. What I found was pretty much what I expected. However, on reading the first article I turned to: "Universities Are a Conspiracy Against the Public", allegedly by one James Alexander, later credited at the foot of the piece as '... a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey...' I discovered something less obvious but rather more insi...

  The population of this collective archipelago is famous for moidering on and on about the weather, finding it by far the easiest conversational opening gambit, and with no real surprise, given the insane variety thereof that we experience, pretty much on a second-by-second basis. However, hyperbole and convention notwithstanding, I'm moved to comment on the plethora of bollocks that passeth for meteorological descriptors today. Viz: the BBC Weather app stated that the temperature in Llanllechid this afternoon was 23C. On the wearisome 'Today in Your Area' we were treated to the frankly psychedelic "...feels like 26C",  going on to assert that the daytime temperature would be 16C, as it would be overnight. I can confirm that in this little corner of Rachub, the temperature at Fairview Heights reached 32C, confirmed by two independent thermometers and concurring with my lifetime's experience of weather. It has been basically as hot as Corfu today up here: it...

Pictured, the view from the broad saddle between Carnfadryn and Garn Bach, with Yr Eifl [known as The Rivals in English, even though it doesn't mean that] in the far distance, on our walk this morning. The plan was to get to the top of the smaller Garn Bach, but we landed up here with onward progress thwarted a little further on by a stock fence and a locked gate. Even by 09:30 when we reached the fence, it was already shaping up to be a very hot day, and so, rather than spend any time searching for a way through and up, we decided that turning around and heading back to the cars would be the wisest course of action under the circumstances. We did Carnfadryn last year on a similarly sunny but very cold day. Some more map research is needed before the next attempt, methinks...  

Pictured above, the striated rock of Porth Ceiriad, one of our favourite beaches down here in Pen Lleyn, and one which we collectively have been visiting for well over forty years as a family. However, Jane's history with this place goes back to her childhood. Most years we take a photograph of her, and her sister Carol sat on the rocks at the base of this cliff, echoing photographs taken in the fifties and sixties. I guess it qualifies as a kind of pilgrimage: an homage to life and continuity that spans lifetimes and geologic time alike. It's a lovely place, especially out of season, when it is always pretty quiet, and today we were treated to good weather and a stretch of briny strand populated by fewer than a couple of dozen people at most. Most pleasing to the soul. Bendigedig go iawn. Hwyl...

  We decided to drive over to see a site we've visited before, as we we're staying only a few miles distant, and Carol & Kev hadn't heard of or seen the place before. I discovered it back when I was working in the area eight years ago, and Jane, James & I revisited it that year together. This rather striking ruin is the Ynys-Y-Pandy slate-slab mill in the hills above Garndolbenmaen, Pen Lleyn. Built between 1856 and 1857, it was producing over 2,000 tons of slate per year by 1860, but within seven years, the output of decent quality material was down to a mere 25 tons, with the company going into liquidation in 1871. Pictured to the right is the retaining wall for the one of the tramways which brought the slate down from the Gorseddau quarry beyond for processing. I'll try and post in a bit more detail about the place at some point, but we're off down the pub shortly for a bite to eat and a pint. Talk later. Hwyl!

We revisited the tiny church of St. Maelrhys, near Porth Ysgo; the interior of which is pictured. The pews featured are Georgian in date, but the nave in which they sit dates to the 13th. Century, the oldest part of the church. The chancel was added some centuries later and the west end of the church with the now sole entrance, is Victorian. The original medieval doors to the north and south are long filled in. The pews in the picture illustrate the demarcation lines of the class structure of the time: land-owning family box pews with benches for estate workers: servants and labourers alike. All men equal before God, eh? Still, the place is a lovely building in its simplicity and in its setting. I wrote briefly about my first visit there a couple of years ago. Hwyl!  

Looking towards Ynys Enlli [on the left of the picture] when we got back from a Fathers' Day lunch [we didn't really need the excuse as the boys would have visited for the day and a meal out anyway], and a short walk with the dog over at Mynydd Rhiw. The gloom has cleared back from the sea and the sky is showing hints of the sunny days ahead that the weather forecast promises. We'll see as the week ahead progresses, eh? Ever the optimist, I contend it will be a corker, so there! Not sure whether we've any particular plans for tomorrow, but as usual I'll go with the flow anyway. Keep you posted... Hwyl!

  Down at Porth Neigwl, Pen Lleyn for a few days on one of our regular annual visits here [blog posts passim]. Pictured, the view towards Llanengan from the cottage, with the old lead mine chimney on the hill above the village, built circa 1878. Tomorrow the boys are coming down from Ynys Môn to meet us for lunch at The Sun Inn there. Posts this week will focus on the visit, as usual. Hwyl!

OK - two things, both flagged in The New Scientist this week: I'll take the second piece first. Apparently, the Moon is stocked with platinum and other precious metals to the approximate value of $1trn, and that it is therefore ripe for for exploitation from a commercial point of view. The second piece relates to the emission of ancient sequestered carbon from rivers. Apparently a gigatonne of carbon is being released annually from peat bogs and wetlands by the rivers they ultimately feed. This could, and probably is being accelerated by climate change and the actions of mankind [surprise?], alluding to our having disturbed these millennia-long carbon stores directly or indirectly, but definitely by our own hand. There are two thoughts on these reports going through my mind: one is that we have successfully demonstrated that we are incapable as species of respecting and working with our environment to its and our own long term benefit; choosing instead to value short term economic ...

Nineteen-ninety-five. Thirty years have since passed, and the technological seeds of the world in which we currently live were but nascent potential then, awaiting release into the wild. Five years previously, the Internet [it was capitalised in those days] was mostly just a military/academic/geek network with much connectivity but little structure. But one year into the Nineties, Tim Berners-Lee changed the whole ballgame by inventing the World Wide Web, whose nomenclature survives in vestigial form in the still-used 'web-page', although few younger than my now advanced age would ever refer to  even 'the Web' these days, so commoditised has the Gargantua that most now characterise as simply 'my internet', become. Similarly, our attitudes to, and usage of, digital photography have mutated from niche activity to quotidian normalcy over the period; to a point where now, there are no boundaries between human activity itself and the recording of it as merely normal;...

It's kind of appropriate that Groundhog day is currently showing on TV - yet again ;0) - this afternoon, as we've been over to Beaumaris for our usual weekly beer, soup and chips lunch over reading the daily papers for an hour or so, at The Bull Inn. I wrote last August how the change of ownership from being a family business to The Inn Collection Group had adversely affected the general standard of food, service and, to be frank even the beer itself. In fact, I ripped the beejeezus out of it, as I was righteously angry that such an ancient establishment [15th Century], of which we'd been patrons for forty-four years, could have descended so egregiously into the morass of the uncaring - on every level - corporate swamp. No staff training, local management or decent cellar practice [it is after all, first and foremost, a bloody inn ! The clue's in the name...] in evidence today: what was formerly a mildly-eccentrically-run family pub, went full Fawlty Towers today, with...

This afternoon has turned out to be a practically perfect early-Summer afternoon/evening: the temperature has improved to a sensible 18-20 Celsius and the wind has dropped to below a breeze. The sun is as powerful as one would expect in the second week of June, so due caution has to be taken, but welcome, nevertheless. Not much more to say, really, except that a week in Pen Lleyn beckons, and one hopes for more of the same meteorological stuff to obtain for our visit to our local Riviera! Nos da, folks... 

Twenty-five years ago, the American-Jamaican artist Shaggy released his single, "It Wasn't Me...", the lyrics of which concisely sum up the mentality of the current Masters of the World: the man-child writ large and ugly at the apex of the global body politic. Trump, Musk and any number of dictators, past and present: all men-children to a [ ahem ] man. OK, forty years ago in the UK, we had The Iron Lady, but, motivated by the political philosophies of male economists, ducked out of sight when caught in a blatant lie, much like the current male 'norms' that run the world today. Trump himself has a very long history of denying that he is a shyster: an auto-Ponzi-scamming crook living on the knife edge of debt and bankruptcy fuelled by the greed of others who want the cash fallout from his 'enterprises', almost all of which end in failure of some kind. To be honest, you'd be on safer grounds shorting his business' shares than investing any time or mo...

A rather lazy return to the old Sunday Supper post today, as I've got little else to say: roast chicken, roast potato wedges and steamed broccoli. All very lush, but without wishing to blow my own trumpet, the sauce! I did that very Elizabethan thing of draining my plate of it as if drinking from a cup. And why not? When something tastes that good, just get it down you. Normal service will be resumed tomorrow. Nos da!

Pictured, the replica Spanish Galleon currently moored off Caernarfon: a rather spectacular affair that belies the fact that it is, under the skin, a vessel built with modern materials clad in more traditional ones. At 500 tons, it lies at the smaller end of the galleon scale, but is an impressive vessel up close nevertheless. The Galeón Andalucía has literally sailed the Seven Seas on its travels, and after tomorrow, heads to Paris. Tomorrow is the last local opportunity to see and board her. Tickets are a paltry £12 for adults - ignore the comments of the grumps on their website's comments section: there's always someone! - and I think it a reasonable price to pay to keep a vessel like this afloat and working its magic, both for its crew, and those who simply go to gaze on its presence. Below, a view up at some of the rigging:

Dorothea Quarry, Nantlle, North Wales: disused since 1969, it has over the years found favour with divers, due its depth and the interesting topography beneath its surface. In recent years it has been run by North Wales Technical Divers, a branch of the British Sub-Aqua Club, under license from the landowner. These days, admission is restricted to divers qualified to carry out mixed-gas decompression dives [source: Divernet]. There was a spate of fatalities there in the eighties and nineties, and diving was 'banned' to little or no effect due to the popularity of the place in the diving fraternity. Divernet this week reported yet another fatality: a 60-year-old diver was killed on 31st May, with North Wales Police stating that the death is not being treated as suspicious. On reading this piece quoted in a local online news outlet, I Googled the Nantlle quarries and came up with some interesting stuff that could possibly be relevant. First off the bat was an article from The Dai...

'Oh, What a Tangled Web we Weave/When First we Practice to Deceive.' Walter Scott's words from "Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field" published in 1808 are as ever true today as at all times since he wrote them. Deception, sleight of hand and diversion are the stock in trade of politics. Farage has given up on his project of courting the reactionary vote of the shires and the English upper middle classes; as the political ground has shifted beneath the feet of both him and the Tory Party, as it has careened vastly to the right and scared their natural demographic toward more the moderate parties of the middle ground, including Labour, Liberal-Democrats and the Greens. Expediency, however, is Nigel Farage's middle name. His focus now is more populist, aiming at the disaffected working class and lower middle class voters who have frankly become pissed off with the establishment per se [egged on by socials, traditional media and sundry influencers] and are looking fo...

I'm not much given to paranoia as a glass-half-full optimist, but the current grumblings about the possibility of another less than local war seem to me to be a tad concerning. The UK government - according to sources - will be investing heavily in stockpiling military medical equipment and drugs specifically to counter the effects of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear warfare. Whilst preparing for stuff like that is probably a good idea anyway, why isn't it the norm? Given the instability that the Trump administration is fomenting with its [non] negotiations with Putin, and the obvious fact that Russia is, for whatever reason, intent on expansionism; things are starting to look a little dodgy. Whether that is sufficient to induce full-blown panic attacks about an imminent Third World [nuclear] War, I'm in some doubt. OK, Russia is intending to send some 10,000 troops into Transnistria, a pro-Russia separatist region of Moldova, which could in theory escalate th...

I pulled Calvin Tomkins' book "Ahead of The Game - Four Versions of The Avant-garde " out of the run today, as it sort of winked at me from the shelves. Written in 1962, it outlines the then current state of the avant-garde in the arts and music. It also was one of the touchstone volumes of my time as an art student in the 'seventies: one of those books we returned to time and again. The last of the four in this quartet of avant-gardistas is the American painter, Robert Rauschenberg, often erroneously lumped in with the Abstract Expressionists in much the same way that Van Gogh was lazily characterised as an Impressionist [he wasn't]. Robert Rauschenberg has always held a special place in my personal view of art history, and when I was vying for a place in art college - at Stourbridge School - I produced as, as part of my portfolio of work, at the interview, a miniaturised 'pastiche', a personal homage in portable form, of a Rauschenberg-styled painting. W...

I've been mostly engaged in driving activities today, taking Jane up to our customary halfway-ish rendezvous with Kev at Stretton to complete her onward journey into Lancashire for a family visit. In the process, I've pretty much disengaged myself from outside events and the news, so, alongside the fact that I've driven 170-odd miles at a decent lick in motorway traffic, my motivation for comment is a tad low this evening: in fact, I can't think of much that I want to say just now; so I'll leave you with the single stanza poem that arrived, fully-formed, in my head on awakening a couple of days ago, which thus far I've only shared with my mate Steve. I acknowledge the obvious stylistic link to Roger McGough in the bottom half of it: The Liverpool Poets have been a big influence on me since I was a teenager, and I guess that it just filtered through in the unguarded, semi-conscious moments between sleeping and waking. Anyhow, here it is, an old man's view mea...

It's curious how Noam Chomsky [as linguist, particularly, rather than as political theorist] keeps cropping up in my daily discourse with the world. I studied Transformational Grammar [blog posts passim] as a module in my postgraduate studies at Bangor University [then University College of North Wales], back in 1980/81. My first impressions of his ideas were positive: his notion of 'poverty of stimulus' regarding language acquisition seemed logical and almost beguiling. According to him, there was no way that children could acquire language in all its effectively infinite variety and permutation via mere imitation; that there had to be an innate 'deep structure' of syntactical intuition only resident in the human brain, in order to create the infinite utterances that natural language affords. His researches over the several decades before my student encounter with his theories were tellingly, in the early days at least, funded by the US Navy Department to develop m...