Observations from a Hill

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.

Following on from last night's post and my encomia to Richard Feynman and Captain Beefheart of the ninth inst., my newly bought copy of 'Feynman's Lost Lecture' [pictured] arrived yesterday in the post from World of Books. A paperback edition in decent nick for a measly three or four quid, and I only had to wait a few days for it, in the end. Although the transcript of the lecture was never actually 'lost' as such, the diagrams that he used to illustrate his proof were photographed from his blackboards as usual, but those photographs were lost to history for some reason. However, his pencilled notes, including his sketches of his diagrammatic representations turned up years later in his personal papers, allowing the substance of the lecture and his proof to be reconstructed in the 1990s. His motivation for this particular exposition was to present a proof of the motions of the planets around the sun in as simple terms as possible: the lecture was delivered to fr...

Founded in 1990, in Providence, Rhode Island, the Company of Science and Art [CoSA], before becoming synonymous with software such as After Effects and being sequentially absorbed first by the Aldus Corporation and subsequently by the industry titan Adobe Systems, produced [ahem] one of the most radical if short-lived pieces of software ever to hit the graphics and video realm. PACo Producer was possibly the most stupidly powerful piece of software ever to cross my path. The complete installation, including full documentation, came on a single 1.44Mb compact floppy disk [if you're under fifty or so, you'll have to Google around it]; and yet the little beast had the power, given time, to turn a bunch of full screen frames into a full-blown 30fps video, back in the days when the most on offer from any computer manufacturer outside of the very specialised and heinously expensive likes of Sun, Silicon Graphics and Avid workstations was a postage stamp image running at sub-prime fra...

I was watching an interesting piece on YouTube the other day about bare metal coding without an Operating System , which took me back to the 1990s and a couple of old Mac applications from the era. Both had an influence on ideas of mine when we were engaged in developing software for the use of film producers in finding appropriate North Wales locations for their productions. A couple of the inspirations for my 'discovering', or rather, misappropriating the easiest solution to the problem, were two pieces of Mac-based software produced in the early 1990s, both of which saw good good service with me throughout the decade. The game 'Maelstrom', by Ambrosia Software, written by Andrew Welch, was a firm favourite of mine throughout the decade, as I'd been a bit of an addict of the arcade game upon which it was based: Atari's 'Asteroids' from 1979. The original game was hard-coded in logic chips and was very much of its era: simple line and point rendered o...

Earlier today we visited the boys over on Ynys Môn, and one of the topics of conversation was AI, a subject difficult to avoid these days. But I put forward my thoughts that after the speculative market bubble bursts - as it inevitably will - the perceived existential threat that a lot of people imagine to be posed by the technology will simply evaporate, and AI per se will simply slot into our global toolbox of technologies to be used in the pursuit of our quite mundane needs and requirements. Every disruptive and apparently revolutionary technology in its day appears as a threat to the societal status quo, provoking often violent reaction to its implementation. This scenario is true of any radical technological innovation: at first disbelief, then astonishment, followed by a gold-rush to exploit it for all its worth in the markets. This is where the kick-back starts; where the disquiet at the potential for negative societal impact begins. Outrage against the machine on both moral and...

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare

OK - to go some way to explain last night's apparently psychotic improvisation - I offer the following. I was riffing on the theme of a couple of significant anniversaries this year: the 100th. of Quantum Mechanics, and the 25th. of the death of Douglas Adams. There are two Douglas's that feature in the improvisation [it was made up as I wrote it] and a third which deserves a mention on a personal level. The thread of the thing was composed on the fly in the manner of a Round Britain Quiz puzzle, using the kind of cryptic allusion common to crossword setters the world over. Pictured above, some of the references laid out in Scrabble tiles. The full list is larger than this, but I'll leave it to you to work out the rest: it's all internally consistent, and follows some manner of logic which I can see clearly; which is to say I wouldn't have bothered with it otherwise. Douglas Adams famously wrote 'The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy' "Trilogy...

I was hoping someone might have spotted the allusion in the title of last night's scribble: I deliberately didn't pose the the question directly, as it might have broken the superposition between statement and inquiry and led immediately to a stable state and the answer, or rather even the question itself. What is the strange loop that links Bach, a sofa in a state of infinitely variable fixity with a staircase, and early personal computers? Which piper played the tune that oversaw my three-day thesis-writing binge in 1978, via the medium of my old valve radio set? Where is the leopard indeed? And what do Nina & Frederik have to do with it? [clue: nothing immediately apparent, that's for sure]. I'd hazard that Q might have had some input, had Bond been involved, albeit at a rather macro level at the scale in question, but c[?] almost certainly would have a massive [inertial] impact here. Effecting a cause is always problematic in a space which doesn't yet exist ...

I've just been watching a YouTube - yes, I know - about getting about as close as is possible to bare-metal programming as it's possible to get without descending to the depths of what is now ancient history in computing terms: namely the early-mid 1970s. This example was essentially demonstrating that it is possible to produce "useful" programs without the presence of a high-level operating system and programming languages, at BIOS [basic input output system] level, using assembly language to address the hardware directly. Obviously the degree of sophistication at which you can work at this low level of abstraction is pretty primitive by even the standards of twenty or thirty years ago, but useful stuff can nevertheless be achieved, even if the example in question was a version of an 8-bit arcade game of the 1980s. Having had some personal experience of programming at such a low level myself [blog posts passim], back in 1979/80, a lot of what was demonstrated in thi...

I've scribbled very recently - and many times before - about the need for systems redundancy to provide resilience for the unforeseen. I should really take heed of my own advice once in a while, and being wise after the event really isn't good enough. I was about to pen today's little note when this bloody old MacBook decided the internet didn't exist any more. WiFi? Fine and connected, thank you very much: router working OK? Affirmative once again, confirmed by my iPhone, the TV and my Linux-powered MacBook Air. So, I tried the tack of booting up the old bugger into its Linux partition on the second drive. Still no joy: so I just turned the damned thing off, swore loudly at it and vowed to sling the thing into the garden at the earliest opportunity and let the moss turn it into a feature. Somehow, this veiled threat had some cosmic effect whilst I was firing up the Linux machine to check all else was well, and when I'd calmed down and revisited the old thing, all h...

There are some things which seem insanely simple on the surface and other stuff which appears beyond the ken of normal human beings. I'm minded tonight of two people: Richard Feynman and Captain Beefheart, both late of this parish we call life, God rest their genius souls; the hope being that on some Astral plane, they will be discussing metaphysics over red wine and bongos. On the one hand you have Richard Feynman, noble laureate in physics, and on the other, Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart: in my humble opinion, geniuses both, but for such very different reasons. Physics, in my experience, was taught in the form of a series of abstract rules - a bit like our mathematics at school, too - rather than with any given insight as to how or why the rules actually existed. Abstraction in a vacuum is not especially helpful in learning any subject in my estimation, history being possibly the most heinous case of mis-education one can imagine, it usually being purveyed as a series of d...

I've mentioned - probably numerous times - that I have a connection with Stourbridge: that Black Country town which is now in the greater West midlands conurbation. Stourbridge was where I went to study Fine Art at Westfield College, and from where I got my degree in 1978. My association with the town had started a few years earlier, as we used to go drinking there, partaking of some of the most iconic of Black Country brews; in particular the Batham's bitter at the The Royal Exchange in the town, which was in itself notable in that the Exchange was the only Batham's pub that served that glorious pale nectar with a head - all other Batham's outlets sold it Bass-flat. For some reason, it was a [ very ] local tradition which was accepted by all those of us in the know, without question or demurral. And very fine it was too. One name that crops up frequently in the town's history is that of Foley. There is a Foley Arms at the top of town, and a few miles down the road ...

It's funny how the oddest connections rear their heads when trying to come up with these nightly scribbles. I was just watching a Rick Beato YouTube interview with Joscho Stephan, the guitarist who currently inhabits the world of Gypsy Swing, or Manouche and carries the torch for the genre, alongside other greats such as Birelli Lagrene; the style of jazz guitar that was made internationally famous by the late, very great, Django Reinhardt. In a post from a couple of years ago , I mentioned a trip to France back in 1983 with John and Sandra, not long after they got together as a couple. We travelled down to their place near Aberystwyth on the train, and the following day the four of us drove across to Ramsgate for the ferry to France. From the moment we left Wales, to the moment we fetched up at the little Gîte we'd booked in the tiny hamlet of Saint-Jean le Vieux, and all the way back again, the soundtrack to the journey was dominated by Django, also mentioned in this other  ...

Picked up on a piece in yesterday's i Paper about Ernest Marples, the transport minister under the Conservative government headed by Sir Alec Douglas-Home,  having served as a minister in the previous Tory government under the leadership of Harold Macmillan. An example - exemplar, even - of what my friend David so pointedly characterised 'working-class Tories', as in "... do you understand fookin' working-class  Tories, Kelvin? Do you? ..."; then as now, I fucking don't.  Marples was the eyes, ears and mouthpiece of the road transport lobby, despite his often reformist and reforming policies regarding roads and traffic law, many of which were sound then and remain so to this day. Nevertheless, the combined effects of his influence and infrastructural ideology, along with Doctor Beeching's proposed - and accepted - 'reforms' to the British rail network, led to the effective destruction of any serious alternative to the hegemony of the road tran...

It's at times of the season such as this when awareness of the fragility of modern life becomes particularly acute. We've at least got more than one way of heating ourselves, should the electricity grid fail, as it has tonight in north-west Anglesey: the whole of that quadrant having gone down for some reason; we have a wood-stove that will keep us warm in any case, should it happen here, too. But then, our wood supply is getting shorter, and the top of the hill here is still pretty treacherous after a couple of days of snow: it's not desperate, and I've still got some timber left to cut in the garden, and we do have our excellent little corner shop for supplies five minutes walk away; but you never know, do you? Makes me think of the lack of redundancy in so many many modern systems these days, the most obvious in the time of electrical outages being communications: now the hard telephone dial-tone has almost completely been done away with, none of us have that simple ...

  All night it fell, and when full inches seven It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness, The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven; And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare. Robert Bridges 1844-1930

OK - digressions on time aside, I can feel yet another battle with an energy company coming on. We had a monumental campaign against our previous electricity supplier [we don't have gas, which simplifies matters] over a period of a couple of years or so regarding over-charging and illegal back-billing. We won, despite the ombudsman's eventual ineffectuality: they were found to be demonstrably in breach of practice, energy regulations and basically, the law; and we settled for a line in the sand on the billing and a token payment in lieu of compensation for the ludicrous amount of effort we'd expended in proving we were right and they were wrong. I should have charged consultancy rates for the two us and sued for the inevitable non-payment thereof. However, as I said, a fresh conflict is brewing over our frankly gargantuan monthly electricity bills: £300 +, when there's only two of us old folk living here, anyone? I have never fully accepted the ludicrous sums that this ...

Another year's turn and already the New Year is now just This Year. The future passes and the past accumulates. The arbitrariness of the New Year's celebrations themselves mirrors those of sundry religious festivals - including Christmas itself - despite its less spiritual nature and history: what marks the start of a New Year? Depends where you are of course, but logically the year's turn occurs at the Winter Solstice, already long gone by the time we link hands, sing in Scots' dialect and fall over drunk 'till morning comes [other modes of celebration are of course available]. It also depends on your global location as to how significant this time of the year is: the experience of the annual changeover is very different in Northern Europe, where most of these traditions come from, than it is in say sub-Saharan Africa or Polynesia. But continuing the theme of the last two day's posts, it seems fitting to close out this rhetorically threefold digression with a r...

Pictured, a Coles - actually an original STC - 4038 ribbon microphone [blog posts passim], designed by the BBC in 1953, and which has featured and still does feature in innumerable recording sessions and live music performance over the years and to this very day, over seventy years on. This particular example is a very low serial numbered version, so I would guess is at least as old as I am, which is not young [ahem!].  These things have a storied history, having been used in countless BBC radio broadcasts for both voice and music: in the old days, orchestral concerts were broadcast live from single examples of these microphones slung by wire over the orchestra pit at many venues throughout the UK and beyond. I still remember the one flying solo above the stage at Birmingham Town Hall back in the 1970s, probably out of use even then. These venerable devices are still prized amongst recording engineers across the industry today for their transparency and transient response and their...