Category: Technology

Big Things combined differently

I was in John Lewis in Oxford Street a few days ago, and despite being encumbered with two huge new pillows in a vast bag, I managed to photo this photo:

The inevitably artificial light was unhelpful and I couldn’t get far enough away to capture it all properly, because well, I just couldn’t. There was stuff behind me, stopping me. But nevertheless, there it is. It is made of wire, attached to the wall with those little plastic thingies with a single nail.

Here, purely for context rather than artistic impression, is a close-up of the plugs at the bottom of this Thing, showing the manner of this Thing’s construction:

I rather think that the idea was that the parts of this Thing made of one big wire circuit, the black wire rather than the grey wire, would be able to light up. But although that plug is in the on position, no light is manifesting itself. Ah well.

I collect graphical representations of London of this peculiar sort, often just by saving the graphic, but also by photoing (scroll down a bit there) such things. Here (scroll down again) is a three dimensional version of the same strange thing.

The strange thing being how the individual Big Things of London are always, in these graphics, or models, or (sometimes) faked photos, combined in new, inaccurate and often rather creative ways. It’s like they’re chess pieces. Hey, I wonder how Big Ben would look if it was right behind Tower Bridge! Hey, what can we see differently by looking at it through The Wheel? Let’s put the BT Tower right next to the Shard! The Tower of London next to Battersea Power Station!

I know London well, but other cities far less well. Is this a particularly London thing, or do all cities do this, in their graphic representations of themselves? I sense that London is rare in having just so many of these rare and rather quirky Things, highly individual and highly recognisable, that just beg to be played around with. But maybe lots of other big cities do the same, with all the individual and quirky Things they’ve got.

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.

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.

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.

Mayfair Tanning & Waxing

You see weird things in London. Well, I do:

For years and years, this sort of car decorating was impossible. Now: everywhere. But not usually as artfully as in the above.

Photoed by me, in Oxford Street, three years ago today.

When you type in the website on that midget car, you discover that this enterprise now calls itself Mayfair Aesthetics & Beauty. Which is not so weird. Which would be why they changed it.

Upside down pylon

A pylon is just a pylon, but if the pylon is upside down, it must be art, because what else could it be? Also, the bloke who turned it upside down gets the credit for this, rather than the people who made the pylon. Them’s the rules.

My photo of this pylon, which is in the vicinity of the Dome, photoed earlier this month:

More dramatic photos of this upside down pylon here, and here.

My photo is of particular interest to me because I photoed it with my new mobile phone, rather than with my regular camera, which for various boring reasons had run out of SD card space.

A mural on the South Bank – the context and The Photo

Yes, this is one of those the-context-and-The-Photo postings. The point is The Photo, and the photos that precede The Photo are merely there to explain a bit about where we are.

So, context:

And now, The Photo:

What made me want to post this was the effect of a regular painting not on a smooth surface but on a rough surface. To show that rough surface, I had to get close. But then, all context is lost, so see also: context.

Photoed by me on the South Bank, on August 15th 2015. So, exactly five years ago today.

Now I’m going to try to find out who did this mural. Google, google. Best I can do: grems. Is that Graham Prentice, who took the photos? Maybe. Don’t know.

E-scooters in Oxford Street and buying a Dyson fan in the only place I could have bought one

Today I went shopping in Oxford Street. I was photoing cranes and roof clutter and scaffolding and suchlike, when an e-scooter wizzed by, so I was able to photo that instead, and when I got home, I discovered there was another e-scooter in my photo:

Because I was swinging my camera from left to right, the invisible face would have been in focus but was invisible, but the visible face was out of focus, so it all turned out rather well.

As did the shopping. I was at the Dyson Shop in Oxford Street to try to purchase a Dyson God machine, one of those ones shaped like the a giant version of the end of a needle where the hole is. You sit in front of these magic devices, twice a day, morning and evening, chanting rhythmically, and if you do everything right, you get turned into a perfect person who will live for ever. They sell it as a machine which spits out cold or hot purified air to order, but I know better. Because London is in the grip of a heatwave, I assumed that these devices, which all you Muggles think are just devices to stay cool with, would all have been sold and I’d have to wait a month, minimum, until London is cold again. Which I was willing to do, because immortality is something that I for one am prepared to be patient about.

But no. No, I realise I’m not going to be immortal and it’s just a hot/cold fan. That was just to add some comedy to this blog. But no again, they hadn’t run out of these fans in the Dyson Shop. Everywhere else in the world had run out, on and off line, but not this one shop, the Dyson Shop, which had been hoarding them for itself to sell. So I was in the one place on earth where I could have a good retail experience. How cool is that? Comfortably cool, if all goes according to plan.

These Dyson fans were selling like hot cakes. I saw three grey-haired geezers just like me taking theirs out of the shop while I was waiting for mine. Hot cake shops, meanwhile, were presumably not doing nearly such good business.

Next, I will open it and try to get it to work. Wish me luck.