Brian Micklethwait

A temporary RCM corridor – the inside and the outside

I visit the Royal College of Music quite a lot these days, thanks to GodDaughter2 studying there. There were those Bach Cantatas. Last Thursday there was a recital of songs by Women Composers, in which GD2 performed. And this evening, there was the RCMIOS (RCM International Opera School) production of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. All excellent.

It doesn’t feel right taking lots of photos while in the place, but here was a snap that I both liked and didn’t feel bad about taking:

They’re hardly going to call that snooping, are they?

The RCM is a truly bizarre agglomeration of buildings. The corridors joining this bit of it to that bit of it are labyrinthine. I never know where I am, if only because I am usually following GD2 around the place, rather than finding my own way around.

Here is another snap I reckoned it okay to take, of some building work in progress:

The fact that both of these snaps feature things which are only temporary is what makes me think them not to be breaches of etiquette. I don’t know if that’s truly right, but it feels right to me.

However, the point of these two photos is, as I later (like: one hour ago) realised, that they are both photos of the same things. The first photo is the corridor from the inside, and the second photo, in addition to all that grubbing about in the earth at the bottom, also features the same corridor from the outside. The outside of a corridor is not normally something you get to see, is it?

The reason I found myself inside that corridor is that it is the temporary way of getting from the main part of the Royal College to the college bar and canteen. I took the above photo on my way from that bar and canteen to the main entrance of the College. I was on my own at the time.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Wartime Encryption for Pigeons

As a Blackadder fan, I have long known about the use of pigeons during World War 1, to send messages. Pigeons like the one in this photo:

Twitter caption:

War Pigeons were very effectively deployed in the First World War. For instance, they carried messages, like the one being attached to a pigeon by Austro-Hungarian soldiers on the Isonzo Front, which can be seen in this picture.

Quite so. But what made me decide to post the above photo here was this exchange, in the comments.

“Liagson”:

Were they normally encrypted?

Wayne Meyer:

They used WEP. Wartime Encryption for Pigeons. It was a very early wireless standard.

Blog and learn. Not only did I just discover that pigeon messages were – of course, they’d have to have been – encrypted. I also learned that you can link directly to individual Twitter comments.

And what better way could there to learn about the activities of birds than via Twitter?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A talk by me to Libertarian Home

I gave a talk to Libertarian Home early in 2015, entitled What is the Libertarian Movement for?, and it is now up at the Libertarian Home website. A more accurate title for what I ended up saying would be more like: What the libertarian movement is and how to be part of it. It is more about how to do libertarianism than about why to do it, although that is implied.

What I said hasn’t dated in the time since then, and this was one of the better speaking performances I’ve done, I think. Certainly better than the most recent talk I gave, at Christian Michel’s on the subject of causation, about which, it turned out, I had very little more to say than this. Memo to self: now that the cold snap has ended, get a haircut. I have reached the age when I need to keep my hair short, the way it was in this video. The tramp look makes me look too much like a tramp.

My thanks to Jordan Lee for supplying a written summary of what I said.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Another crowd scene

Yes, here’s another crowd scene, photoed later on the same expedition as I took that earlier crowd scene. (But don’t follow that link. Quicker just to scroll down.)

We are now at Tate Modern. I’m there to get to the top of the extension tower and to photo London. But I pause briefly, to photo this scene:

And later, I chance upon this forgotten photo, and stop, and look, impressed.

I could expand upon the idea that Tate Modern is amusing for lots of people to be in, regardless of the “art” which is the supposed purpose of the building. For many, me included, this “art” is of no consequence. The place is what matters.

Although. Presumably someone thinks that those bits of metal in the foreground of the photo are art.

But I think I am thinking of something else, with this photo, and with that earlier one. What do I like about crowd scenes? In interesting places? Interestingly lit? With colourful backgrounds? I don’t know.

I think it may be the agreeable sight of people who are all recognisably human, and all doing things that humans do, just as cows do what cows do or birds do what birds do. But, they each do these things in their own ways. They are not on parade. I like roof clutter for this sort of reason. A crowd is, you might say, a clutter of people. There are no rules about exactly how they must walk or stand or sit or sprawl. There are merely places where many people find it agreeable or necessary or convenient to be doing such things, but each in their own particular way and particular shape.

But, not sure yet.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

South Kensington roof clutter

Yes, some truly exceptional roof clutter, photoed by me today, just as it was starting to get dark. The buildings all so polite and proper looking, but then on the roof, they go mental:

There is even a bridge in there. That aerial with its big long arms is bizarre. Was with others so had no time to check out what all this stuff was on the roof of.

My thanks to the tree, at the front, for not having stupid leaves all over it, and thus not blocking out this wondrous view.

I find myself in the South Kensington are quite a lot these days, because that’s where I often go to see and hear GodDaughter2 and her RCM pals performing. This time it was two Bach Cantatas. Very good, especially the absurdly young and talented tenor soloist. A first year undergrad, apparently.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Blurring the face of the Big Prawn

In other face recognition news, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Big Prawn is having its face blurred out of photos on Google Maps.

The problem Google faced was that recognisable people with recognisable faces were showing up on Google Maps, owing to the accident of where they happened to be when the Google Maps photos happened to be taken. So, they introduced a face recognition programme with a difference. Every time a face was recognised to be a face, that face was blurred into unrecognisability in the final Google Maps photos.

And this also got done to the Big Prawn.

The Big Prawn is a giant sculpture, presumably an advert for a place where you can eat regular sized prawns. No, not according to Wikipedia. It’s just a big prawn.

In Australia, it would seem that Big Thing means something different to what I mean by this phrase.

A cow also got its face blurred over.

Confining Cats and Other Creatures postings to Friday is becoming difficult. These days, as on this day, I often don’t bother.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Crowd and crowd shadows

I don’t often photo crowds. This is because crowds are, typically, full of computer-recognisable faces. But, this crowd, photoed by me last October, wasn’t:

Well, maybe a computer might make something of the two people right at the bottom, but the rest, surely not.

I came upon this yesterday. while looking for Other Creatures. We’re looking upstream from the south end of the upstream Hungerford footbridge. The big metal stuff is the railway bridge in between those pedestrian bridges. To the left and behind, the Royal Festival Hall. Look ahead but up, through and above the railway bridge, and you see the Wheel.