Observations from a Hill

  Back in the mid/late sixties, we had several [actual film] film showings at school in the assembly hall and the one that still sticks in my memory is the 'Ipcress File', starring Micheal Caine, based on the book by Len Deighton. At one point in the storyline, we get the obligatory seduction scene in which Caine's character, Harry Palmer cooks an omelette for Sue Lloyd's character, Jean. Until this point in cinematic history, seduction scenes generally revolved around alcohol, if anything: the question of a 'real bloke', especially a working class one, cooking food for the purpose - cooking decent food at all - was simply alien to most. However, Len Deighton was an accomplished cook himself, and taught Caine at some length to cook a decent French omelette for the purpose of the scene. The hands seen in close-up cracking two eggs simultaneously were Deighton's own, as Caine's level of dexterity wasn't up to it. Deighton for his part, produced several...

When I went to work for BT [British Telecom] in 2004, I was exposed for the first time in my life firstly to being employed by a corporate structure, as opposed to more human scale business or academia, and secondly to what would become the bane of my life for sixteen years: performance management. Although not a new branding of the concept, even then, its origins stretch back nearly a century-and-a-half to the concepts of work management dreamt up by one Frederick Winslow Taylor in the U.S. His approach was to essentially break down working practice - mostly in heavy industry - into discrete, time-managed units which could in theory be quantified in scientific terms, circumventing entrenched guild and unionised working practices where roles, conditions and time management devolved to the workers themselves under the traditions of their trades and crafts and the relations between the various skill groupings. In essence, his approach was to solidify the aspirations of profit motive of e...

I'm going to stick roughly to the theme of the last couple of posts here tonight, in that I was reading Carlo Rovelli's seminal 'Seven Brief Lessons on Physics' this lunchtime, over a couple of pints of local beer and a poke of chips, at the Bull in Biwmaris [Beaumaris]; specifically his second lesson, 'Quanta', which aims to enlighten the casual reader to the niceties of Quantum Theory/Mechanics in layman's language. As always, like all good teachers, he lays out the complex in terms that most of us can at least grasp, leaving the technical and mathematical underpinning to one side in order to give a clearer overview of frankly, apparently, mind-boggling concepts. On the question of the un-resolvability of the exact existence of electrons [Heisenberg's theory], or their position in space when their interactions reveal them to us, he has this to say: '... an electron is a set of jumps from one interaction to another. When nothing disturbs it, it is ...

I mentioned last night that digitised data is twice abstracted via both hardware and software, but I didn't expand on what I meant by that, so I thought I'd drop a brief note to go some way in explaining what I meant by it. Getting back to the written/printed page as the most successful archival method of human produced stuff yet invented: a page of text in whatever natural language is the perfect wysiwyg - 'what you see you get' - interface. It is a direct, orthographic, symbolic rendering of human language, unmediated by the medium that transmits it. It's longevity, and hence its long term viability and reliability as a data retrieval system, is only governed by the quality of the means of production [paper, ink, binding, etc.] and the stability of the long term storage conditions of the artefacts. No other significant factor comes into play, and as the layer of abstraction of the data is the direct analogue of its source, ie. natural language, and as written lang...

Talking yesterday in the pub with Joe about that development in data storage media currently being mooted, which utilises a 3D borosilicate glass [ Pyrex to you and me] structure and lasers to store data at a pretty prodigious density for a claimed 10,000 years. The development by Microsoft is pretty impressive in and of itself, technically, and the predicted lifespan of the storage medium is a thousand times that of today's solid state hard drives, but herein lies the rub. As I've written here before, we struggle now to retrieve data from digital media created less than fifty years ago; not because the media themselves have necessarily physically deteriorated beyond reading, but simply because the file storage formats, not only physically themselves but their data structures also are now obsolete; the disk drives largely all gone to landfill, and the file and disk formats they employed arcane to all but a few archivists, museums and data specialists. For most us at least,...

  Pictured, some of Jane's charity-shop acquisitions from today: three old singles, and all in pretty decent nick, considering their considerable age. On top is a record that is dear to my heart: it charted in the summer of 1970 and I first heard it on the radio when I was holidaying in Ross-On-Wye with my mate Jeff and his parents: we were fifteen at the time and still forging our identities, both personally and musically. I remember this track coming out of the tiny little transistor radio [Google it if the reference is too obscure for your age group] and thinking 'my God, this is utterly brilliant'; so unlike anything that Fleetwood Mac had released thus far, and I'd been a fan for some time at that point. What I didn't realise in my naivety - and to be fair not many spotted it coming - was that this was probably the final signal of Peter Green's mental deterioration that led soon after to him leaving the band and living for many years as a virtual hermit, we...

Pictured - I guess weirdly, if I'm honest - are my boots. On the left my current daily wear, and to their right, my originals. The astute observer will note that, apart from age and wear, they are identical. The original pair I bought ten, maybe fifteen years - more likely the latter, I really can't remember - ago. The new ones are just broken in and in constant use. They are German-made, and go by the brand name Waldläufer, or ranger; literally, a forest walker in English. To say they are superb is a bloody understatement: they are comfortable from the first wearing - when I said that the new ones were broken in, I really should have said christened by the outdoors - they are lighter than any boot this durable has a right to be, and wear like carpet slippers. Both pairs were bought from Dick's Discount Shoes on Anglesey; the originals costing around eighty quid, discounted from well over a hundred, but still not cheap.  Their replacements last year were a hundred and thirt...

Sodium Chloride, NaCl, the chloride of sodium: Common Salt. It is comprised of two highly reactive and dangerous substances: an alkali metal, sodium, and chlorine, a halogen whose vapour can kill or maim anyone inhaling it and used most violently in The First World War as a chemical weapon that left a lasting legacy long after the war ended, with the residual fear of its and other chemical substance's re-use in future conflicts carrying over into The Second World War in the form of universal gas protection measures for both combatants and civilians alike. In the form of their combined salt, however, these two fearsome elements are tamed for the good and this most abundant of materials - salt - is central to our lives and our very existence, providing essential body-chemistry-balancing chemicals that ensure that our bodies continue to function normally. I remember my uncle Edgar, who was a keen amateur chemist and experimenter coming one day into their parlour in the house in which ...

One place from my childhood still sticks fondly in my mind, sixty-odd years on: Snow Hill Railway Station in Birmingham: the Great Western Railway's hub in the Midlands, and a magnificent structure, to boot - pictured, the incredible glass-vaulted booking hall that fronted the place. Across the street, its facade reflected across Colmore Row, the entrance of the Great Western Arcade, a Victorian shopping arcade stretching from Colmore itself to Temple Row. Of course, over the years this architectural continuity has been been rather upset by progress, with the implied connection between station and arcade subsumed by years of messing around with Brum's inner-city road infrastructure; never to great end, but always serving the profit motive of the Midlands road transport lobby, aided and abetted in the sixties by Dr. Beeching's rather specious findings about railway efficiency [the roots of neoliberalism made flesh before we even knew it even existed?] When I was a kid, we us...

Just watched a fascinating little documentary about the Svans of Svaneti in Georgia, a mountain-dwelling folk of the Caucasus. At the time of the making of the documentary [2012], the lifestyle of the Svans was very much still rooted in its ancient history, with a primitive agriculture and a society very firmly based on common and collective values and mores. The incursion of modern life was obvious to see in the occasional satellite dish and a mobile phone mast at the centre of the village that was the subject of the documentary, as were the mostly modern clothes worn by all. Their society was [is] a strictly communal one based around those essential components for a rural, agrarian and isolated [snowed in for six months of the winter] community to survive: family and continual work, religion, pagan ritual, and alcohol. The Svans speak their own, unwritten language, but are all bilingual in Georgian, itself a language that bears no connection with any of the known language groupings ...

Rust, and I don't mean the programming language du jour, is an unending fascination of mine, representing as it does a wonderfully complex interaction between ferrous materials and oxygen itself. On the face of it, rust would seem to indicate irreversible decay and despoliation of otherwise solid and reliable material. On the other, it is simply the natural combinatorial action of a reaction between a metal and a reactive element, resulting in the formation of an oxide of that metal. The beauty of it however, is that the resultant oxide can be reduced and reversed chemically, as anyone who has studied basic chemistry at school will know. The oxidation of iron of course can lead to violent reactions as well as the gradual oxidation of itself into rust, however, given sufficient heat and fuel. Iron Oxide III or red iron oxide [rust without the water-based component, if you like] for instance, provides a very good source of oxygen to fuel a thermite reaction in a number of reactive me...

Consider this when next you stand at the shore's edge gazing out to sea, marvelling in the constancy of its ebb and flow. It was never always thus and will always be changing as time inches forward and Earth's geological clock ticks on. When the Moon was much closer to the Earth after it broke away from its mother ship, its gravitational pull was much greater than now, and each incoming tide would seem to us now as violent as a tsunami. As the moon gradually moves further from our planet, it is likewise prompted on its journey by the ocean tides on our planet that it - principally - initiated in the first place; each swell of our oceans a gentle push outwards and onto our moon, gently, subtly, nudging it further out into space, its progress more remotely aided by the weaker gravitational pull of more distant solar, planetary and stellar bodies: its progress outward and away from its original home and us, imperceivibly but measurably slow and insistent. Over vast time, the tides...

Whilst the bollock-brained and ailing Trump holds the reins - ha! - of the free world [spoiler alert: he don't; he's just enabled every crook, chancer and despoiler to take advantage of his naive belief in capitalism], the planet will suffer. Every climate-denying despot under the sun has now got free run of the park and is making as much hay as the sunshine will allow, until the whole lot bursts into flames. We live in perilous times, when powerful men - pretty much almost always men - choose only to think in terms of the lives left to them, and how they can further their own interests in what's left of their selfish existences.  There has to be a turning point - a pivot - in view, otherwise there truly is no hope for us. We're now firmly in la-la-land where nothing makes any sense at all and yet seems perversely logical through the fog of bullshit that surrounds everything we do. How we got to this point in history is a very large question indeed, but I do sometimes t...

I've just been down a very interesting if mind-boggling rabbit-hole, courtesy of the podcast ' The Rest is Science ',  which is co-presented by Professor Hannah Fry and Micheal Stevens ; talking about very large finite numbers . Discounting the various flavours of infinity that theoretically exist, albeit mostly conceptually, very large finite numbers are numbers that, given enough time, could actually be counted, but are in any remotely practical sense infinite to the human mind's conception. Even one of the 'smaller numbers they discussed during the podcast - Fifty-Two Factorial , or 52!, 1x2x3x4x5 ... x52 - is pretty much inconceivable to most people, even given that it 'only' represents the total number of possible orderings in a deck of cards: approximately 8.0658 x 10⁶⁷, or 8-ish followed by 67 zeroes. The method of mentally imaging the scale of this number that was used in the podcast by Stevens ran roughly along these lines: Set a timer to count dow...

Pictured, my latest book acquisition, which arrived this afternoon. Although, like most people, I have long known about the original Dewey Decimal System for the classification of written work: my school library was thus organised, as was the Spring Hill Public Lending Library in Birmingham, where I first got my love of books as a child. But until this last week, when I found a piece in the weekly paper ' New World '  titled ' The Man Who Invented The Internet Too Soon ', which introduced me to the subject of the above book: Paul Otlet . Otlet [1868-1944], who was a Belgian author, lawyer and peace activist with far-reaching ideas on information collation, cataloguing and retrieval; I was completely unaware of the man whose system now catalogues most of the world's books. In association with Henri La Fontaine [1854-1943], he extended Dewey's Classification, under licence, and to be in French only, as the basis of a proposed system of Universal Classification ...

Whilst I don't think Jean-Paul Sartre had kitchen utensils exactly in mind when writing the third volume to his "Roads to Freedom" trilogy, I think there is indeed 'soul' in a carefully tended piece of ironware in the kitchen. It wears all the food it has ever cooked  in its patina: the above pictured pan was rescued from a cowshed thirty years ago, and has since served me well over the years since. It is a small, eight or nine inch diameter pan of pressed mild steel of good quality, with a well-rivetted handle of like metal. A good quality piece of professional kitchen equipment that took me a good twenty years to season and bring up to its present state of grace. All that it requires after use is a good rinse and a wipe over with kitchen paper before hanging it back on its hook. Every time I clean this thing after use, I'm minded of a wonderful cast iron skillet that I used to own, which I bought back in the very early 1980s from Bangor market as one of a se...

I read a short essay today - a student piece, I imagine - by one Julius Zimmer of the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, submitted for a course on American photography, entitled "On The Change of Photography in The Age of Smartphone Cameras". It voices in part the now familiar idea - trope - even, that the ubiquity of the smartphone and its by now remarkable [by any standards] photographic capability and image storage capacity, is making the profession of photographer redundant. To a degree, one might argue that this was indeed the case: so few people require or even want their personal lives recording by a professional third party photographer these days as their and their friend's phones are always there, making the best of them via some very clever software. So yes, the jobbing (portrait) photographer as a species is indeed on the  endangered list; but as for true professional portrait photographic artists - those who not only command the highest prices but produce works...

I was reading with sardonic interest about Dominic Cummings 'comeback tour'. He reckons that he still has the key to unlock whatever the problem is with society as we currently know it. Really? I somehow doubt it based on what we've seen hitherto. The problem with being bright and a bit chippy about your background - lower middle class in Cumming's case - is that you can get a little beyond in your thinking, imagining that your wish list of objectives is, in fact, a plan. Of course, most often this is simply not the case. Most of us have had some scheme or other crushed into the sand, despite our absolute belief in its truth of purpose. And most of us will simply turn and face another pressing issue to solve, leaving our grand scheme for someone else to worrit over. We all go through an 'omnipotent' era in our lives - the 'invincible' years of youth. The mark of of a grown-up is recognising the limitations of one's capabilities and talents, and voici...

We've all heard of Photoshop , right? Even those who have never seen, let alone used the software recognise the name as the now common verbal usage of the name: to 'Photoshop' an image, meaning to edit and alter a digital photographic image to some end. Far fewer people would know just how long this raster image editing software - at first a standalone application, then a suite of software, now a full-blown subscription megalith of related media apps, available online, has been around. It's interesting to note, however, that its origins lie in the late 1980s , the brainchild of Thomas and John Knoll . Pictured are the two 1.44 MB floppy disks that contain the first version of Photoshop we ever owned, back in 1989/90. It is the LE edition and was probably bundled with a scanner of some kind. Significantly, the application software in its entirety comes on Disc One, with Disc Two holding all the support stuff: tutorial material, documentation and manuals and such. Th...

Further to last night's scribble, I'd just like to add in a few thoughts I've touched on in the past as a kind of superscript - can't call it a postscript as that implies some kind of finished article - to the vague meanderings that I put out here on a daily basis. Thinking on about all of these amazing notions and schemes about knowledge accumulation, management and retrieval still always brings me back to those seminal days at Apple in Cupertino, when geniuses - I don't use that term lightly - produced some of the most potentially transformative software of the twentieth century, pointing towards future developments that could, indeed should have transformed our interactions with the machines in our daily lives for the better; but which were either left to wither and die or were summarily axed from the corporate thinking of the company that spawned them in the first place. Three technologies always stand out in Apple's history for me, particularly as two of th...

Niklas Luhmann maintained that his Zettelkasten was his second brain. When it came to researching themes and topics for his numerous books and academic papers, its meta-system of links to discrete ideas and references, too numerous for him to hold in entirety in his own brain, formed a kind of physical, paper-based rather than neural network map of his generalised learning process, from which he could inform and enhance his current thinking. Melvil Dewey , in inventing his Decimal Classification system for cataloguing publications - the heart of most of the world's library catalogues, hinted at a method of cross-connection between discrete sources of knowledge to aid further knowledge generation and research. Otlet and La Fontaine extended this idea further and established the notion of data connectivity and correlation with the Universal Decimal Classification system , which took Dewey's concept from the simple cataloguing and indexing of documents - taxonomies of books, p...

The Peter Mandelson affair grinds on; the dark angel's fall from grace accelerating exponentially as he approaches terminal velocity toward the Ground Zero of his own making. The problem is that some of us could see he was a car crash waiting to happen back in the New Labour days. He must have a hefty dose of personal charisma in the flesh, so to speak, as he never came over as anything but an ineffectual political operator, either on screen or by deed itself to us here in reality-land. He struck me back then, a quarter of a century ago, as a bit of a no-mark, and that view hasn't changed since. The biggest sin in all of this affair, though,  is that he managed to schmooze his way back to a position of handsomely-paid influence under a newly-minted Labour government dedicated on paper to avoiding the mis-steps and sleaze of the outgoing Tory mess that preceded them. Starmer's decision to drag out this [old] New Labour fossil was obviously a disaster in the making from day o...

With the Nuclear Doomsday Clock currently standing at 85 seconds to midnight, the current New START treaty on limiting nuclear weapons proliferation runs out tomorrow, the 4th of February. Given the state of the world just at the moment and with two of the most out-of-touch-with-reality men in charge of half of it, gives cause for a modicum of concern, especially when both of these despots would rather not have had the treaty in place at all: Trump's take on the expiry? '..."a bad treaty...If it expires, it expires. We just negotiate a better treaty."...' As for the Russians, they wer never happy being restricted to 'just' the 1,550 warheads allowed under the treaty for each side [both hold far more than that, anyway], and effectively ducked out of the treaty under the cloak of the pandemic in 2020. What of the other nations still holding such weapons? Well, the US and Russia hold ninety-percent of the world's nuclear arsenal. Having said that, the oth...

What did the Romans of the turn of the common era know better than twentieth century structural engineers? Concrete of course. A couple of broadcasts on BBC Radio Four, and a Scientific American article of a couple of years ago prompted me to compare and contrast Roman concrete with the now infamous RAAC [Reinforced Aerated Autoclaved Concrete]. The latter of course is now falling apart without notice in 1960s and '70s built structures all over the UK and beyond, just fifty years into their lifespan. By contrast, Roman concrete dating back 2000 years is still standing and faring very well, thank you: think the Pantheon in Rome: still featuring the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Most people would think, 'well concrete is just concrete, right?', and yes the basic principles are the same, but the mix of materials and how they are prepared are various, and variously effective under various conditions, so to speak. Concrete is essentially a mix of aggregate and...

Another month rolls over on the calendar [Rabbits, White Rabbits] as the first of February slots into place, putting Christmas, New Year and the [psychologically] longest month of the year behind us once again. Can't say I'm particularly sorry to see January go: it's always financially punishing, having less income and much higher fuel bills than in the warmer months; but it's survivable with a bit of ducking and diving, robbing Peter to pay Paul, and other such clichéd aphorisms. Suffice it to say, that with luck and a following wind [there I go again], we can look forward to an upturn in fortunes as spring gets closer and the weather hopefully warms. A quick glance at the bookshelf above me yet again makes me think on: The Origin of Capitalism by Ellen Meiksins Wood stands out, and reminds me of a piece in today's Observer newspaper, which essentially argues that governments simply do not understand the hospitality industry, preferring to outsource what should oth...

Sitting here staring at a blank page - as I've mentioned before, trying to dredge up an idea even for the shortest of posts - sometimes seems an intractable, self-imposed and almost certainly unnecessary task: however, I've not broken the one-scribble-a-day-minimum rule in the nearly five years I've been penning this daily missive, no matter the circumstances. Anyhow, 2,244 posts - and days - later, tonight's blank mind was woken up when I glanced at the small bookshelf on my desk here in the study/dining room/office [delete as functionally and descriptively necessary], and noticed my very old and battered copy of Jerome K. Jerome's 'The Idle Thoughts of An Idle Fellow: A book for an Idle Holiday', which vectored my empty mind back to a discussion on BBC Radio Four's 'Saturday Live' this morning, with Dr. Joseph Jebelli. He was expounding on "the power of doing nothing". He argues, and I concur avidly with his thinking - as would the Je...