Observations from a Hill

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...

Casting around for ideas for tonight's scribble I came across a YouTube  on a subject I've never really given much thought to, despite being aware of it: ternary logic, proposed in the early 20th Century by  Jan Łukasiewicz , pictured; the Polish logician and philosopher for whom the term 'Polish Logic Notation' was coined. Ternary logic, as the video explains, is founded on a base three counting system differing from binary logic in that it has a third state, rather than simply ones and zeroes, or logical true or false states. The third state is indeterminate, or 'unknown', and the logical states are given as [-1=>FALSE, 0=>UNKNOWN, 1=>TRUE]: the UNKNOWN being an undefined or NULL condition: a smoking gun, with no hard logical truth or falsity one way or the other. Weirdly, I've just walked into the sitting room and found Jane watching a documentary about the growing unease over the Lucy Letby conviction(s) for child murder, which was at a point w...

Another day, another memorial service. As more time passes, so do more friends, family and acquaintances in their turn. Today we attended the funeral of Jane's friend and ex-work colleague, Bronwen: a rather nice service to send her off, all in all, with remaining close family and friends in attendance. Bron had a good soul: friend and supporter of the underdog at all times, activist and, as her brother said in his oration, always a good socialist and union organiser; in fact, this was the first time I ever heard a brother describe his sister - in chapel at least - as comrade as well as confidante. Much catching up was done in the short after service drink at The Bull, Llangefni, and a few faces not seen for some considerable while were there to be reacquainted with...

We watched the last of the box set of Secret Army last night: the series was first aired in the the late 1970s, from 1977 to 1979, and was repeated on Freeview recently. The very last track on the set comprised a series of interviews with some of the cast filmed in the very early 2000's. The box set itself was published in 2018, some forty years after the original TV transmission, which itself was thirty-nine years after the events portrayed in it: a fictionalised portrayal of the resistance and [particularly] evasion lines in action in Belgium during the Second World War, that was later lampooned in the sitcom '''Allo, Allo'". What made me think on was the interleaving of all the different timelines between the real and the fictional. Dramatising events of the 1940s in the 1970s, and being watched by us in the 2020s, wrapped up in interviews from the turn of the century. The character of Natalie, for instance: nineteen years old at the start of the story in 19...

Another year passes and we find ourselves yet again at Holocaust Memorial Day; a time of global reflection on just how inhumane the human race can be, when it replaces people with ideas in its collective mind. Inhumanity is born of the abstractions of philosophy, religion and politics alike: a dark mirror to their intended obverse: the humanitarian and humanist reflected in the negative, both sides of that mirror justified by the common ground of those abstractions. But people are not abstractions, concepts or politically-expedient ideas. They are people: all one and the same. The irony is that the world of abstract ideals and concepts lies at the very root of that humanity: we think, conjure and invent these abstractions into being of our own volition. So, what separates the good thought from the bad? Where are the absolutes that should, by all account, obtain in the balancing of human relationships and society? What differences mark the good actor from the bad? Is it that our philoso...

According to a piece in today's i Newspaper, prepping for societal breakdown - aka the apocalypse - is going mainstream, almost middle-class, even. Interesting. What can we make of this shift from the traditionally outsider domain of the prepper to the cosy suburbs of Middle England? I'm not sure: it either speaks to an increasing unease with the way this acceleratingly-weird world is going, or to the rather more banal ethos of hipster 'cool'; a bit like food-faddism or ill-informed eco-tourism or whatever is the current mot du jour. The central point is that if the ordure hits the fan for real, how long would any of us actually last? Given that you might have stocked up sufficient canned and preserved foodstuffs - fresh ain't gonna cut it when the supply chains are closed - and fuel for cooking and heating, for a few weeks: months at best; what happens then? By the stage that your supplies are running out and your fuel is running dry, so will everyone else's: ...

So, the storm-troopers have been at it again in Minneapolis, killing yet another legitimate US citizen in the act of committing no crime whatsoever, save coming to the assistance of another US citizen being bullied into submission by those self-same 'officers of the law'. Two things that appal me, apart from the senseless, state-sanctioned killing itself: one is that I'm no longer surprised that this actually happening yet again within my lifetime and memory, and that such events are again becoming commonplace in a country where race-related lynchings used also to be frequent and tolerated by certain quarters of society as 'normal', also hidden beneath state and legal cloaks of denial and obfuscation. The second, and perhaps the most telling about the world we currently inhabit, is that even faced with incontrovertible video evidence to the contrary, the state and a large swathe of the internet leap instantly to the defence of the indefensible, denying the truth des...

It's time to call it in for Trump and the USA; I think that for pretty much everybody he's rambled one mindless ramble too far this time, as far as his characterisation of other nations involvement in Afghanistan goes, at least. It's either a measure of just how far we've travelled down the rabbit-hole of 'alternate facts' that the world's most powerful politician can utter such falsehoods, or an indicator that this incumbent of the highest office in the world is simply deranged, senile or frankly stoned out of his mind. His disassociation from reality seems almost complete now, but how long will it take before actuality finally catches up with him? The only positives to take away from his current outbursts of unreality and offence are that he is now subject to criticism from all sides save the ludicrous lickspittles he surrounds himself with. The pitchforks and tumbril await: when will his convenient idiots wake up and join the mob that surely will eventual...

The sublime irony of modern communications devices is that they hinder absolutely their intended, original purpose by their very nature and being. In providing a computing platform [for that is what they are these days] of a capability unimaginable even a decade ago: think orders of magnitude of power greater than the supercomputers of a less than a generation ago, they are harnessed to the service of providing access to gazillion-bytes-per-second trivia and fluff, and we have lost the actual point of the 'phone in the noise and chaff of modern 'life'. I know most people these days [at least those younger than forty] don't even attempt to use their mobile phones as actual telephones, except in extremis, but given the data transfer and interpolation capabilities of these devices, would it be too much to ask that these 'telephones' actually functioned adequately as 'telephones', so that one-to-one conversation might be had without random blanks and blackou...

I do so like it when a moment's inspiration provides an improvised lift to an otherwise mundane pot of food. Pictured, tonight's solo repast of reheated Goan Chicken Curry from last night. As I'm eating alone for a few days, the expedient use of a quick & easy curry kit [Anjam Anand's] is always a painless way to feed oneself for a couple of those days. As always, last night I found that the kit as it comes is lacking and somewhat too sweet, with cinnamon being too forward in the spicing. So tonight, I decided that I would try and balance the flavours with the addition of vinegar and chopped green chilli. Success! A tablespoon [dessert spoon in the UK] of cyder vinegar (the only light vinegar in the cupboard) and a single, chopped green finger chilli [Kenyan?], and the whole thing came to life. A couple of chapatti to scoop it up, and happy days. Afterwards, a pipe of Century Pirate and a mint chocolate, washed down with a nice glass of Primitivo, and bingo: the per...

Samuel Johnson had it right in 1776: '... There is nothing that has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn...'. A century or so later Frederick W. Hackwood wrote in his 1909 book, "Inns, Ales and Drinking Customs of Old England" , a rather splendid tome also on this [one of my favourite] subject; he says, and I quote: '... In England the public-house is as universal as the place of worship; and under healthy conditions is a natural and useful institution...' [ he was English after all and should be given some leeway for conflating all of the countries of this archipelago into his own, if only for leaving us this fine and useful book ]. Alas, how times have changed in these last two hundred and fifty years: the sentiments of both men, as well as those of us more modern types of a certain age, are now poorly served by the rag-tag remnants of what was once one of the crown jewels of these isles, the pub. And t...

I just wrote a post that in fact I realised I'd already written last year, which just goes to show that I should remove some of my reference book item tags from time to time, and also serves to highlight the difficulty sometimes of finding a topic to write about when not much else seems to have have happened since the last post. As I've pointed out previously, this blog is both a self-imposed rod for my own back and a marker of my own inevitable mortality. However, there we are, it's a thing and it's on-going for the time being, despite all else. So, where do I go hence this even-ing? A bowl of tobacco and another glass of wine, methinks, then back to the fray. Ah, there we are now: the tobacco just smoked is 'Dreams of Kadath', which is a plug tobacco comprised of Virginia, dark-fired Kentucky, Katerini, Burley and black Cavendish varieties: an interesting smoke to say the least. I've been working my way through some of these more outré blends, such as Blac...

I've been trying to write a poem about the death of our good friend Alan Moores ever since his demise, which is some considerable time ago now; and have scribbled various notes and jottings in the intervening years which kind of alluded to something or other, but none of it really amounted to much. In my usual evening search for something to scribble here, I discounted most of my usual themes: politics, philosophy, photography, coding and such, and decided on the following stanza as my post tonight: For Al. In the Fall of your time You faltered, as if frozen Against reality. Locked in, vision finally dimmed, and Outfaced by certainty, you faded; Fixed as Jaques-Louis’ Marat In breathless shout, alone. Four, now three We sat in silence.