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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.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Creature photos

A frog outside a supermarket in Brixton – a lion outside some flats off Sloane Square – a swan family at Alton in Hampshire – a sign at Battersea Park station – another swan at Walthamstow Wetlands – an octopus in a shop window – Boudicca’s horse – a book about WW2 I must remember to get on Amazon – the horses on top of the Hippodrome next to Leicester Square tube:

This posting started out with just the top of the Hippodrome, and then I thought, I’ll add some other carbon-based-organism-angled photos, of which there were a few more that I thought I’d include. But getting up to a convenient nine photos took longer than I expected. It turns out I don’t photo creatures as often I thought I did, and as interestingly as I thought I did.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

But are we any happier?

A tweet reminded me about this wonderful rant from Louis CK:

That’s the version of it, with dots inserted by him, that Steven Pinker quotes in his new book about the Enlightenment.

Pinker is concerned to explain why increasing affluence doesn’t seem to make everyone ecstatically happy. Deidre McCloskey, in her Bourgeois trilogy, is fond of talking about how the Great Enrichment has made regular people as of now nearly three thousand percent richer. So, why aren’t we three thousand percent happier? Because we don’t seem to be.

Lots of reasons. First, you are happy not according to your absolute level of affluence, but rather according to how affluent you get to be and how meaningful your life gets to be compared to what you were expecting, and compared to how well everyone else seems to be doing, because that tells you how well you could reasonably have expected to do yourself. You may well have been raised to expect quite a lot. Second, although technology hurtles along, for most this hurtling is both pleasing and rather unsettling, the less of the former and the more of the latter as time goes by. We don’t experience, in our one little life, how much better things like Twitter are than is looking after cows, out of doors, all year round, with not enough food or heating. What we experience, as we get older, is how confusing things like Twitter are, or alternatively, if we ignore something like Twitter, how demoralising it is that it has defeated us and denied us its benefits. Or how tedious air travel is, compared to what we’d hoped for rather than compared to a horse drawn wagon in a desert. Yes, I live three thousand percent better than that wretched cowherd three hundred years ago, and if a time machine took away my life and gave me his life, I’d be three thousand percent more miserable. But that’s not the same as me being three thousand percent happier than he was. Happier, yes, definitely. But not by that much.

It’s because we don’t feel that much happier that Louis CK has to rant, to remind us of how lucky we are. And that Steven Pinker has to write his book, to make the same point.

But what if progress continues to hurtle forwards? What if someone reads this posting, centuries from now, and he says: Good grief, those Twenty First Centurions were very easily satisfied. Five hours to get from New York to California?

It must have been hell.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Snow

Twitter is good at telling you about news, and today, the news has been: snow. I know. Who saw that coming??? Apart from the short-term weather forecasters, I mean.

Here are some snow pictures:

That would be a photo of the Shard. Would be because it is mostly a photo of snow, and the Shard is only just make-out-able behind the snow.

Here are two more conventional snow photos, where you can see buildings but very boring ones, the ones outside my kitchen window:

On the left, the snow descends. On the right, my neighbours make a bendy triangle of footmarks. I didn’t find those photos on Twitter, for I took them myself.

Without doubt my favourite snow-photo today was this:

Says @MisanthropeGirl: Satisfying. I agree.

But if we are talking about snow and cold, nothing since then has touched 1963. According to that story, in 1963 the sea froze.

Ah, 1963. Marlborough lost its entire hockey season that term, early in 1963. The frustrated school hockey captain was a famed future hockey international. I still regret that I never got to see him play.

It gets worse. That Christmas, the “house”, Littlefield, where I was a boarder at Marlborough College Marlborough Wilts, got burnt down, just before the “spring” term began. We lived in huts, like prisoners of war. The dormitory was another hut. I had a hot water bottle. When other Littlefieldsmen first saw this hot water bottle they sneered, but they were soon wanting to hire it from me, but I wasn’t having that. I needed it in my bed. And I distinctly remember, one morning, that this hot water bottle, in my bed, in the morning, had … frozen. I swear. There were icicles in it.

So, February 2018, I spit on your cold. Your cold could not even freeze my spit.