Month: August 2020

Beethoven String Trios concert on video

Having been at the Wigmore Hall for the concert, right when Lockdown was getting serious, I note with pleasure that I can now watch and listen to the complete Beethoven String Trios, at the Wigmore Hall website.

Neither with orchestral music nor with solo instrumental music does actually seeing it add much, or not for me. But when it comes to chamber music, I find that seeing the musicians communicating the musical meaning of what they’re playing to each other, either by me being there or me watching it on video, can make a big difference.

Robot car thoughts

I get emails from Google telling me what the internet has been saying about robot cars, and the most recent such email concerned a Forbes piece, entitled Full Self-Driving Cars Are Still A Long Way Off – Here’s Why. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a robot car believer in the long run, and a robot car sceptic in the short run. People who tell you that robot cars are just about to multiply all over our big cities are hyping – in plain English, lying. But robot cars will eventually happen, and when they do finally get into their stride they’ll change the world. But, I say again, in the short run, it ain’t happening any time soon.

I had another listen to this recorded conversation that Patrick Crozier and I had about transport, in November 2018. Half an hour into this, the fact that Google itself was making noises about how robot cars were now really really going to happen really really soon, just after Christmas, blah blah, was mentioned, and I expressed scepticism. I have now been proved right. Robot cars are still promised, Real Soon Now, and are still not with us in a big way. (The way that e-scooters are already with us in a small way.)

About fifty minutes into that recorded conversation with Patrick, I mention a libertarian headbanger pamphlet I wrote in the 1990s about transport. When I wrote that, I assumed that the system as a whole would be the clever bit, and the vehicles would merely take their orders from this system. I later thought that the way robot cars then started to be developed was proving me wrong. Now, I suspect that the system as a whole will have to be organised differently from the way roads are organised now, and that the system as a whole will end up being highly intelligent, just as I said way back in the last century. More like railways now than the roads now. The reason robot cars are taking so long actually to arrive is that it is being realised that in order for them even to arrive in the first place, the environment they operate in will have to be reorganised in their favour. And once that happens, it will make sense to have lots more central control.

I also had clever things to say about how robot cars would maybe look more like the most expensive sort of Ferraris than regular cars. But that was by-the-by. The point of such whimsy was merely to emphasise that actually, we don’t now know what robot vehicles will end up looking like and behaving like, any more than they knew in the 1890s how cars would end up looking.

Cardboard face

It’s a common experience. I’m making absolutely no claim to originality here. We humans regularly see faces where we know, even as we see these faces, that there are no real faces to be seen. Yet, we see them:

That is one of the bits of cardboard I photoed for that earlier cardboard-v-polystyrene packaging posting. It looks happy.

Closely related to seeing faces where there are none, is the way that humans see human-like expressions in the faces of animals, and react accordingly. An animal may be just standing there, looking cute. But what that animal may well be thinking is: Could I beat this creature in front of me if we had a fight? And if I could, what would his flesh taste like? We all know this. Yet, our brains overrule our minds.

I hesitated quite a while before showing my latest clutch of Oscar photos, this morning. My reason being that by showing such photos I am proclaiming myself to be rather soft in the head, in the sort of way I have just described. I don’t think that Oscar was contemplating attacking me and trying to eat me. If we had a straight up fight, I’d win, and both he and I know this. But Oscar may well have been thinking: When is this idiot going to feed me? Yet still, I find myself liking Oscar. All because he has evolved to behave in such a way as to make my brain think him a combination of a nice, warm-hearted, generous person and a comfort blanket. I can’t help myself.

Related: I regret the apparent fading out of Idiot Toys, where there was a whole section devoted to gadgets with faces.

Goats in Llandudno

When the humans stay indoors, the goats are emboldened:

My favourite (photo 15 (and their favourite because they also put it at the top)) of these lockdown photos.

See also, a raccoon in Central Park (photo 2), with Big New York Things in the background.

And: fallow deer in East London (photo 7). I hope they aren’t playing a ball game.

Woodcat and Oscar

Am I becoming a cat lady in my old age? Probably. Although it may be more that, as I get older, I become less bothered about pretending not to be a cat lady, having always been one.

That’s Oscar, and a wooden cat, photoed just as I was about to leave GodDaughter2’s family in the South of France last January, and head for Carcassonne airport and back to London. I was all packed up and read to go, and waiting. So I filled the time photoing the two cats in question.

The reason I show so many photos of this photo-session is that if I merely showed you one of the last two, of Oscar next to Woodcat, you’d be assuming that Oscar was there, and I put Woodcat next to him. But, the above chronologically displayed photos show that I was photoing Woodcat, who remained immobile throughout, and then Oscar joined in. Rather obligingly, I think.

Lots of cardboard – no polystyrene

On the left here, my newly acquired Dyson Graven Image …:

… and on the right, a look, in particular, at the packaging it came in.

I note with interest the complete absence of expanded polystyrene. All the packaging was done with cardboard, often manipulated into extraordinarily elaborate shapes.

Why would this be? I tried googling for an answer, and got lots of stuff about how to buy cardboard packaging, but found nothing about why polystyrene is now out of favour. Are there new regulations, caused by the anti-plastic obsession? (The Pacific Ocean with its fifty miles across patch of floating plastic waste, blah blah, etc. etc..) Is it just that a right-on company like Dyson chooses to bow to such notions?

Or, are their real economic reasons to prefer cardboard for a job like this? Have they, for instance, recently managed to contrive machines which can automatically, and hence cheaply, create elaborate cardboard packaging like this, the way they couldn’t only a few years ago? Has polystyrene become more expensive, for some reason? Has cardboard itself got cheaper? Does cardboard mean that the packaging doesn’t have to be quite so big, thus cutting warehouse costs?

Anyone? Comments are very welcome, as they always are, but especially, in this case, if they in any way answer my questions.

Remembering a happy birthday choral music experience

I’m now concocting a posting based on some photos I took in the South of France while visiting GodDaughter2’s family. This visit was in January of this year (which now feels like about five years ago), and I was accordingly looking for whatever other postings I had done about that expedition, so as to link back rather than repeat myself.

And, while looking for such postings, I also encountered this posting which I posted thenabouts, which also concerned GodDaughter2.

This was not a perfect piece of writing, but it was an adequate piece of writing (given that I was hungover when I wrote it), which described a perfect experience (at the party that caused the hangover). Accordingly I now give it a qualified recommendation and declare it to be worth a re-read, or, just as likely, a read in the first place. (Reader numbers here are now rising, and some people reading this blog now were not reading it then.)

Particularly recommended to those who enjoy good choral singing and who consequently find bad choral singing particularly painful to listen to.

Two videos I enjoyed

Both of them quite short, and both of them reached via favourite bloggers.

First, one of David Thompson’s clutch of oddities linked to last Friday. (There’ll presumably be more such tomorrow.) This particular oddity was about Who invented toast? As Matt Ridley (whose book about innovation I’ve been reading recently) would have predicted, lots of people. Toasting took a long time to catch on, as did the toaster. Key step towards it: mechanically sliced bread. Both had early drawbacks as well as advantages and were consequently slow to catch on.

And at 6k, watch a video about Iceland, and the matter of whether the Arctic Circle happens and will continue to happen in Iceland. The Arctic Circle moves, apparently. Whether the arctic circle happens and will continue to happen in Iceland depends on whether a very small island to the north of the main island of Iceland is still above water. My favourite bit in this video went something like this: “The only way to find out was to charter an airplane. So, I chartered an airplane.”

“War” in the category list below because Iceland and Britain had one about cod.

Drone photos in the outer suburbs

And by outer suburbs, I mean the outer suburbs of London. Just the other side of the green belt:

I came across these on the Facebook page of a friend (Facebook friend and friend for real). I didn’t think I knew anyone possessing a drone, with a camera, which he has been using to take aerial photos of the non-countryside, near London, but it turns out I do. I really like these photos, especially the one of the midget reservoir.

I am blogger-friends with 6k, who displays the occasional drone photo. But that’s in Africa. Africa is like another continent.

If I tell you that it’s the River Thames in those photos, that narrows it down quite a lot, but not too much, I trust. That approximate location aside, I am of course being deliberately vague about telling you anything more about my near-London friend than that he’s my friend, and that I thank him for permission (just in case you were wondering) to reproduce some of his recent set of drone-photos here. The vagueness is because who knows what sort of trouble I might get him into, maybe with some non-friendly neighbour, if I was not so vague? I agree, it’s most unlikely that anyone will give a damn about me “publishing” these photos, but what if they do?

I wouldn’t dream of attempting anything like this inside the green belt. But if my friend wants to drop by and give it a go …

I would absolutely love to accompany him and his drone on a photo-expedition, just to see for myself exactly how obtrusive and obvious it all is, or not as the case may be. Just for starters, how noisy are these things? Does everyone in the vicinity of a drone which is doing its thing know it’s there? Can they then look for it, and see it? Or are drones like my friend’s one too small to see from any distance?

Someone sent me an email plugging this drone guide, a while back. I’ve not read it. Maybe I should.

Quota photo of a sign about Croydon Spaceport

Whatever that is.

Busy day ahead. That to-do list (see previous posting) is already demanding that I go off and do various things, which leaves little time for blogging now.

So, quota photo time, and it’s very strange:

I already like the building, but I tried internet searching about this Croydon Spaceport stuff, and am not much the wiser. Basically, I can’t tell how serious they’re being. Are they promoting Croydon, which is a place I’ve always loved? Or space exploration, which I also strongly favour? Either way I’m for it, but am still a bit baffled.

No time to do much linking now, but may add some links later.

LATER: I am none the wiser.