This has to be one of the greatest ever London crane photos:
I encountered it on Twitter:
Routemaster bus being craned in to the Old Bank Of England pub on Fleet Street yesterday. To be used as a bar in the back garden when the pub reopens, I believe.
Thank you Lambeth Walker. Whom I am now following.
Yes, a shipping containing, right there in the middle of a major London traffic artery, at one of its busier junctions (the one with Warwick Way and Rochester Row):
Photoed by me today.
“Forefront” is the enterprise which placed this big metal box in the road. And it would seem to be Forefront which is now digging up just about every road I walk beside these days, what with most of my walking now being done within walking distance of my home. At their website I scrolled down to the bit where they boast, with photos, about all the traffic havoc they are now causing, and four of the six photos there are of the havoc they’ve been causing recently in Victoria Street, which is also a walk away from me but in the opposite direction.
Except that they are not now causing traffic havoc, because there is now so little traffic. Good times for the road-digging industry.
It’s all because of gas and lockdown.
In the background, of the photo above is the tower of Westminster Cathedral. which also featured in yesterday’s posting. This tower looks very good, I think. As does London, when viewed from the top of this tower.
In a recent posting here, I speculated that my next “camera” might also be my next mobile. Setting aside the question of whether I live long enough to be making any such decision, I think I probably blogged too soon. I did mention zoom, as something a mobile phone might not do well enough, and zoom might indeed be, for me, a deal breaker. Below are three images which illustrate what I mean.
Here is a photo I photoed, in the summer of 2016, from favourite-London-location-of-mine, now shut of course, the top of the Tate Modern Extension:
That photo being favourite genre of mine: Big Things (in this case Ancient Big Things) in alignment with each other. In descending order of recognisability, and going from nearest to furthest, those are Big Ben, the twin towers of Westminster Abbey, and the single but splendid tower of Westminster Cathedral. The little green tower in the foreground is on the top of County Hall.
But here is my camera pointing in the exact same direction, minus any zoom:
I know. You can’t really tell where that clock and those cathedrals even are. Well, the scene in the top photo is to be observed just to the right of the right hand lift shaft of those two lift shafts, and just to the left of the angular glass top of 240 Blackfriars.
If I tried getting the same view with my current mobile, that view would probably look – and here I’m quoting and expanding, so to speak, from the relevant bit of the photo above – more like this:
I love these sorts of alignments and juxtapositions. Often, as above, they can only be photoed with lots of zoom. Just getting closer to the Big Things in question would not be an option, because the alignment only happens if you are in the right high-up spot where you can see it from, and this may be a long way from the aligned Big Things. So, I have to have lots of zoom.
Mobiles achieve megazoom by actually having separate cameras for different amounts of zooming. Will this ever get as good as my present camera type camera? Maybe, but in the sort of time-frame I am looking at now I rather doubt it.
Once again, I am saying a big thank you to Rob Fisher, for doing his bit to make my life and libertarianising echo in eternity. (Commenters, what movie am I quoting there? I liked that phrase the moment I first heard it.)
If you go to the website that Rob is referring to, you will see that right near the top there is a slowly moving clutch of quotes that come from the publications in question. I think this is a good idea. My strong point is probably not essays, or even long explanations. When I attempt any of those, I generally make some mistakes, especially given that when I wrote a lot of this stuff I was, as now, my own editor. Books? forget it. No, my biggest strength is, or was, single sentences, or at the most small clutches of sentences.
I only just saw Rob’s posting, which went up yesterday, but today is my day here for animal stuff, so, is there an animal connection here? I only started really banging on about animals in an animal rights sort of way when scientists started creating semi-affordable artificial meat, which will mean that we humans can now stop being so mean to animals, which we now do by stuffing them full of food and then slicing them up and eating them. When we’re not just keeping them as pets and merely stuffing them full of food.
However, there is an animal link, at any rate as of now, in Rob’s very kind posting. Early manifestations of which included the subject of “Hippos”, in the bit just under the title where it says what the posting is about. “Opinions on liberty” gets a mention, but Rob would appear to have forgotten to scrub Hippos from the list, Hippos being what goes on a Samizdata posting by default if you forget to mention any subjects. Here, it is merely “uncategorized”. But Samizdata Supremo Perry de Havilland likes hippos, and knows how to make things like that happen.
If you have an argument with a hippo, about anything never mind about libertarianism, chances are you’ll lose, especially if it thinks you are in its way.
I have spent my day doing two important things.
First, and this only took a moment, I swallowed an Osimertinib pill. I take one of these pills every day. How hard is that? Harder than you might suppose, at my advanced age with its accompanying loss of short term memory. Several times during the last month or two, I have taken one of these pills, or not, and then moments later not known whether I had taken it, or not.
Hence this contraption, which my Senior Designated Friend gave me quite a while ago. This was when the pill problem was that there were lots of them, but none of them were that important:
I don’t need that, I said. Turns out I do. Now that the problem is just the one pill, but a vitally important one upon which my continuing ability to function now seems entirely to depend, I need to be sure that I have taken one, and only one, of these miraculous little things.
And the other thing I did today, which took pretty much the whole day and which also consumed most of yesterday, was to do that other thing that people who have received a death sentence from the medical profession do, besides take pills. I refer to the process known as “putting my affairs in order”.
The most impressive result of this process so far has been a load of rubbish:
I have been trying to sort my many accumulated bits of paper into more logical piles than they had been arranged in. Happily, the biggest such pile is that one in the above photo, which is the one I’ll be chucking into the recycling bins out in front of my front door, tomorrow.
So, a day spent (1) postponing my death, and (2) trying to make my death more organised.
By the way, I do recommend following the Osimertinib link above, and then feasting your eyes on the list of “Other drugs in the class protein kinase inhibitors”, on the right. It is quite a list, I think you will agree. If any of these are anywhere near as clever as the Osimertinib that I’m taking, then it’s an even more impressive list than it looks.
One of the things Patrick Crozier and I talked about in our latest Recorded Conversation is how the Royal Marsden Hospital is more mixed economy than pure NHS. It supplies services to the NHS, but is its own boss.
And surely the reason for this is that it possesses a vast flood of charitable money, as gratefully noted on the walls of the Piano Room, here:
Those are the biggest donors. (I did some notPhotoshopping there, to make the names less impossible to read.) And here:
Still big, but not so big.
My favourite, because I have a dirty mind, is the “Lady Garden” Foundation, top photo, bottom right. This sounds like something comedian Jimmy Carr would talk about.
I only watch a few of the videos that the Quotulator likes to put up at his excellent blog, but I just watched this one and enjoyed it greatly:
What I find so entertaining about this chunk of history is how this new way of selling and consuming books oscillated wildly between Very Low Art (“Penny Dreadfuls”) and Very High Art (classic (hence out of copyright) novels, Shakespeare, etc.). Low Art created the format. High Art discovered that it could use the format.
My Dad collected Penguins before and after WW2, and probably also during. I still have some of those. None of them were Penny Dreadfuls.
Also interesting was the claim that paperbacks are now thriving, better than ebooks are. My suspicion about that one: give it time.
The latest Patrick Crozier Brian Micklethwait “podcast” is up, although I prefer “recorded conversation”.
Our subject was … well, basically some thoughts that were provoked by my recent lung cancer diagnosis, and by Patrick’s recent experiences as a carer (see first comment from Patrick) of a dying mother.
But, we did a lot of tangenting, me especially. I think this was because the treatment I’ve been having has been so successful, for the time being anyway, that I was, when we recorded this, and still am, feeling rather cheerful, considering. Thank you Osimertinib, not least for giving me back my voice. We couldn’t have done it without the magic pills I’m taking.
Patrick’s notes, with lots of links to stuff we mentioned, give you some clues about all that tangenting.
I was interested in what Patrick said about grieving. It doesn’t come in stages, said he. It comes all at once.
I honestly don’t know why you should devote an hour and a half of your life to listening to this conversation, what with there being so much else to be attending to in the world these days. If this sounds like it will appeal to you, great, go ahead. But Patrick and I keep doing these recorded conversations because we seem to enjoy them. I certainly do, and I like that I can listen again and be sure what was said. Patrick and I are good friends. We enjoy having long and thoughtful conversations, and these tend to be more thoughtful if we know that others might be listening in. For me, this is the big and immediate benefit of sharing them with potential listeners, quite aside from the matter of how many people actually do listen.
For some reason, the one we did about the Falklands War seems to have attracted the most listeners, by our modest standards. Not sure why. Maybe it was Americans, with their own opinions about what happened, but wanting to experience it from a domestic Brit point of view. Or maybe just younger people, eager to learn about an interesting drama that, understandably, gets rather less attention than bigger wars, like Vietnam and WWs 1 and 2. Or maybe older people wanting to compare our recollections with theirs.
Ah happy days, of the sort I spend just wandering about in London, photoing whatever I see that seems amusing, in whatever seem like amusing ways:
But sadly, these photos were not photoed today or yesterday or some such very recent day. On no. They were photoed on March 3rd 2012, in other words just over nine years ago. Because of the cold and the effort (both of which I feel more now) and because of Lockdown (which can actually be ignored but I don’t like the ubiquitous propaganda and pressure I feel when I do that (also a function of getting old (oldies being more nervous of these sorts of vague atmospherics))), I am now doing very little of this kind of thing. I hoping that may change in the summer.
I was using a then very recently acquired camera, a Panasonic Lumix FZ150. My more recent cameras, an FZ200 and an FZ300, having been very similar to that one. Basically, around five or more years ago, they stopped improving such cameras, and threw all their money at the cameras in mobile phones. If they manage to beef up the zoom on those, I might very well make my next “camera” my next mobile, and forget about getting any sort of better “camera”. Just like millions of others.
This Bloomberg report is interesting:
Roadable aircraft have never been mass-produced, mainly because designing them requires a difficult balancing act. “You need to build something that’s safe both in the air and on the ground”, explains Terrafugia’s Colburn. “In the air, you want to minimize weight, and on land, you need to be crash-proof if you hit a brick wall. It’s a matter of threading the needle.”
In other words, flying cars are a nonsense. Calling them “roadable aircraft” won’t change that. What it is is a bunch of libertarians in New Hampshire, and they want the law to allow flying cars. But you can allow flying cars all you like. They’ll still be a nonsense. (See also this earlier posting here.)
Or maybe not. What if they are robot flying cars?
Regular human-driven cars, as the above quote suggests, have to be safe during crashes. But what if cars never crashed? Or crashed only as often as trains crash? Trains are built entirely to be light and cheap to move around. They don’t have elaborate and heavy metallic concertinas on the front, so that they can crash safely. No. They simply do not crash. Or so rarely that it would be silly to design them to crash “safely”.
Robot cars hold out the promise that they too, like trains now, will never crash.
And if that means that robot cars can be dramatically less massive, then maybe bolting foldable wings onto a robot car might make some sense.
But of course the real pay-off of the robot cars will be down here on the ground. Not having to have those crashable noses on the front of them will make a huge difference to the economics of robot cars, compared to the cars that trundle about now.
But, robot cars are a revolutionary step, in the sense that they will require a complete rearrangement of the current transport system, comparable to the turmoil unleashed by the original process of building our current road system.
That being why, or such in my understanding, the robot cars are now taking so long to arrive.