Why is this top picture boring?
While this one is pretty good?
It's something more than just the greater detail of the greenery. It's something about the geometry of it as well. But I can't explain what.
Answers please in the comments
Thursday, 15 November 2018
Monday, 12 November 2018
October 2018 Review
I used up one of my many outstanding week’s leave, and did various bits of clearing up messes in the house, had a health check from the Gym’s GP, and settled into my new Wednesday evening routine with my commitment at the Soho meeting.
Wait. What was that again? Health check? You know, like blood panels, testosterone, body fat, medical once-over involving being poked and prodded, blood pressure and pulse, all that good stuff. It’s one of those things one should get if one has the money or the insurance coverage, and I wanted to be sure that there were no major changes in my body chemistry that might account for my recent feelings of blah. Turns out there isn’t, but I did get a whole bunch of blood test strips just to make sure that the reading I got that morning was anomalous.
(OK, since you ask, I have a pulse oximeter, a blood-sugar reader, and an electrical blood pressure reader. Any time I use them, I’m so damn healthy it’s not true.)
For no reason I could think of, I stopped taking the magnesium, vitamin D and multi-vitamins. I didn’t even think about it. The magnesium returned within the week. You don’t want to know the details. And since the days are getting shorter, I put the vitamin D back in. Because superstition. Haven’t noticed not taking the mutli-vitamins.
I read Brian Sewell’s Outsider II, the second volume of his autobiography; Terence Popp’s The Warrior’s Way and the Soldier’s Soul; Peter Robb’s A Death In Brazil; Media Lens’ Propaganda Blitz; tried Schonberg’s Harmonielehre and gave up; Virginie Despentes’ Pretty Things; finished William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, and also the Burkholder / Grout / Palisca History of Western Music.
My sight-reading has always been a little flakey, and one exercise I did with the History of Music was to read all the notes aloud in the examples they gave. It was hard work at the start - I had a real slippery spot with D-E-F at the bottom of the stave for a good few hundred pages - but it was worth it. Treble Clef only, of course. I’m not a Real Musician. (Real Musicians can sight read through all the changes of clef at the end of the prelude of Bach’s sixth cello suite, the one for a five-string cello.)
I saw Automatic at Sea, Cotton Pickin’ Chickenpickers, Landscape In The Mist, The Rover, all via MUBI, and all of S8 of House.
Sis and I had supper in Hammer and Tongs on Farringdon Road, which was pretty good, better than the frankly ordinary supper we had at the end of the month (timing) at Rules.
When I went back after the break, I went straight back to having a working-from-home Friday. The five-day-a-week commute thing was okay, but it makes the weekends feel very short and man-I-am-tired-at-the-end-of-it. (You have not heard the last of this.)
Wait. What was that again? Health check? You know, like blood panels, testosterone, body fat, medical once-over involving being poked and prodded, blood pressure and pulse, all that good stuff. It’s one of those things one should get if one has the money or the insurance coverage, and I wanted to be sure that there were no major changes in my body chemistry that might account for my recent feelings of blah. Turns out there isn’t, but I did get a whole bunch of blood test strips just to make sure that the reading I got that morning was anomalous.
(OK, since you ask, I have a pulse oximeter, a blood-sugar reader, and an electrical blood pressure reader. Any time I use them, I’m so damn healthy it’s not true.)
For no reason I could think of, I stopped taking the magnesium, vitamin D and multi-vitamins. I didn’t even think about it. The magnesium returned within the week. You don’t want to know the details. And since the days are getting shorter, I put the vitamin D back in. Because superstition. Haven’t noticed not taking the mutli-vitamins.
I read Brian Sewell’s Outsider II, the second volume of his autobiography; Terence Popp’s The Warrior’s Way and the Soldier’s Soul; Peter Robb’s A Death In Brazil; Media Lens’ Propaganda Blitz; tried Schonberg’s Harmonielehre and gave up; Virginie Despentes’ Pretty Things; finished William Cobbett’s Rural Rides, and also the Burkholder / Grout / Palisca History of Western Music.
(1,000+ pages of serious reading - with musical notation)
My sight-reading has always been a little flakey, and one exercise I did with the History of Music was to read all the notes aloud in the examples they gave. It was hard work at the start - I had a real slippery spot with D-E-F at the bottom of the stave for a good few hundred pages - but it was worth it. Treble Clef only, of course. I’m not a Real Musician. (Real Musicians can sight read through all the changes of clef at the end of the prelude of Bach’s sixth cello suite, the one for a five-string cello.)
I saw Automatic at Sea, Cotton Pickin’ Chickenpickers, Landscape In The Mist, The Rover, all via MUBI, and all of S8 of House.
Sis and I had supper in Hammer and Tongs on Farringdon Road, which was pretty good, better than the frankly ordinary supper we had at the end of the month (timing) at Rules.
When I went back after the break, I went straight back to having a working-from-home Friday. The five-day-a-week commute thing was okay, but it makes the weekends feel very short and man-I-am-tired-at-the-end-of-it. (You have not heard the last of this.)
Monday, 5 November 2018
Freedom of Internet Speech
No sooner does someone get banned from Twitter, You Tube, or Facebook, than their Bros are out talking about Freedom of Speech.
The political right of Freedom of Speech is the State’s promise not to punish anyone for expressing any opinion, no matter how wrong or offensive. All rights come with obligations, and for Freedom of Speech there are three. First, no inflammatory speech intended to lead to violence and uprising soon after the talking stops. Second, opinions must be expressed with an acceptable vocabulary - freedom of speech does not mean freedom of cussing. Third, restriction which amount to no treason. I can live with this as long as the definition of treason is very, very narrow, and does not amount to “offends or upsets some civil servant working for the security services”.
However, just because the State won’t prosecute you, doesn’t mean you might not get sacked from work for being nasty about your co-workers in public. The State promises to keep its nose out of your blog, it does not promise to keep your daughter’s classmates' parents’ noses out of your blog.
There’s an often-quoted sentiment to the effect that if you aren’t prepared to let other people say things you think are wrong or even despicable, then you don’t believe in freedom of speech. This is not about the political right, but about people’s social behaviour. The State can be generous with its freedom of speech because it knows your son’s classmates’ and their parents are a bunch of bigots who will put you out of your business, house, health and sanity if you step one millimetre off the straight and narrow of whichever Fundamentalist Christian / Muslim / California Left-Wing Billionaire / LBGQTHS orthodoxy you are supposed to be keeping to.
Social control is achieved with sheer brute force, in business by sacking, de-monetisation, vicious PR campaigns, and personally by exclusion, lies, threats and the threat of violence. That’s how society has always worked and we have the Social Media companies to thank for making it so clear. All conformity is enforced by the threat of violence: the State writes laws to make its use of violence acceptable, and your employers, family, acquaintances, co-workers and neighbours use moral posturing and self-rightousness to cover up their shaming, guilt-tripping, false allegations, lies, threats, and retaliations.
Should content creators expect the management of You Tube to behave any better than the people who used accusations of witch-craft to manipulate the rest of the village? No. Does that mean the management of You Tube should get away with it? No. Does it mean the management of You Tube will get away with it? Yes. Until they commit the cardinal sin of Losing Money and Losing the Audience.
However, virtuous bullshit is the best response to mendacious bullshit. So the Bros should be out yelling about Freedom of Speech. What they mean is social freedom, not legal or political freedom, but don’t let’s confuse the issue.
However. Be careful what you wish for. Break up the current monopolies and replace them with smaller companies staffed by middle-of-the-road managers overseen by equally middle-of-the-road government regulators, and in a few years the whole place will look like a 1950’s teenager’s magazine. We may be still be able to listen to Sandman and Terence Popp, but the algorithms that suggest one when you visit the other will have gone.
You see, SJW’s only care about their issues. If you’re off their radar, you’re copacetic, and a lot of people never get onto their radar. The middle-of-the-road types care about everything and it’s their job to generate ‘policies’ and ‘guidelines’ to remove or hide anything that they don’t want their daughter to see, or their husbands to hear.
So enjoy the Wild West of the Internet while it’s still with us.
The political right of Freedom of Speech is the State’s promise not to punish anyone for expressing any opinion, no matter how wrong or offensive. All rights come with obligations, and for Freedom of Speech there are three. First, no inflammatory speech intended to lead to violence and uprising soon after the talking stops. Second, opinions must be expressed with an acceptable vocabulary - freedom of speech does not mean freedom of cussing. Third, restriction which amount to no treason. I can live with this as long as the definition of treason is very, very narrow, and does not amount to “offends or upsets some civil servant working for the security services”.
However, just because the State won’t prosecute you, doesn’t mean you might not get sacked from work for being nasty about your co-workers in public. The State promises to keep its nose out of your blog, it does not promise to keep your daughter’s classmates' parents’ noses out of your blog.
There’s an often-quoted sentiment to the effect that if you aren’t prepared to let other people say things you think are wrong or even despicable, then you don’t believe in freedom of speech. This is not about the political right, but about people’s social behaviour. The State can be generous with its freedom of speech because it knows your son’s classmates’ and their parents are a bunch of bigots who will put you out of your business, house, health and sanity if you step one millimetre off the straight and narrow of whichever Fundamentalist Christian / Muslim / California Left-Wing Billionaire / LBGQTHS orthodoxy you are supposed to be keeping to.
Social control is achieved with sheer brute force, in business by sacking, de-monetisation, vicious PR campaigns, and personally by exclusion, lies, threats and the threat of violence. That’s how society has always worked and we have the Social Media companies to thank for making it so clear. All conformity is enforced by the threat of violence: the State writes laws to make its use of violence acceptable, and your employers, family, acquaintances, co-workers and neighbours use moral posturing and self-rightousness to cover up their shaming, guilt-tripping, false allegations, lies, threats, and retaliations.
Should content creators expect the management of You Tube to behave any better than the people who used accusations of witch-craft to manipulate the rest of the village? No. Does that mean the management of You Tube should get away with it? No. Does it mean the management of You Tube will get away with it? Yes. Until they commit the cardinal sin of Losing Money and Losing the Audience.
However, virtuous bullshit is the best response to mendacious bullshit. So the Bros should be out yelling about Freedom of Speech. What they mean is social freedom, not legal or political freedom, but don’t let’s confuse the issue.
However. Be careful what you wish for. Break up the current monopolies and replace them with smaller companies staffed by middle-of-the-road managers overseen by equally middle-of-the-road government regulators, and in a few years the whole place will look like a 1950’s teenager’s magazine. We may be still be able to listen to Sandman and Terence Popp, but the algorithms that suggest one when you visit the other will have gone.
You see, SJW’s only care about their issues. If you’re off their radar, you’re copacetic, and a lot of people never get onto their radar. The middle-of-the-road types care about everything and it’s their job to generate ‘policies’ and ‘guidelines’ to remove or hide anything that they don’t want their daughter to see, or their husbands to hear.
So enjoy the Wild West of the Internet while it’s still with us.
Thursday, 1 November 2018
Building on Bishopsgate
Four buildings - large ones, way large than the Gherkin or Tower 42 - under construction along Bishopsgate. What do the developers know about next year that we don't? Or what do they know about the ageing of the existing office stock in London?
Monday, 29 October 2018
How Are Things at Work? I'm So Glad You Asked
Recently I entered the late-twentieth century at work: I was gifted a Tableau licence. Tableau is a data visualisation tool, basically a slick pivot-table and pivot chart program: the graphics are sharp and there’s a wider range of calculations available than Excel offers. And it doesn’t re-format graphs every time you change the underlying pivot table - Excel users will understand how valuable that is. It’s fast and organises a heap of charts way better than scattering them around on a worksheet. It’s a wonderful tool for analysts who do what I do.
At the moment my supervisor is a mid-level manager, rather than the ‘Head of’ I’m used to reporting to. She has chronic but low-level insecurity about her continued employment, so she thinks she needs to look as if she’s doing lots of things and taking lots of initiatives. In vain would I tell her that as a Head Office staff officer, she’s as secure as a) her ability to be seen to be bringing in business, or b) her ability to handle crap for her supervisor. Busy doing stuff is a nice-to-have in the good times, a point she doesn’t understand, but her predecessor did.
And somehow Tableau wound up on her busy-doing-stuff list. Which is exactly where it doesn’t belong. Because in and of itself, it reaps not, neither does it sow. It’s a better basket for carrying the corn, or perhaps, a better pair of sandles for walking over the field.
In the part of the business where I work, they are interested in two things: a) meeting their numbers; b) handling the crap that gets sent down from above. When we’re below budget, everything is judged by one criteria alone: will it get the business back on track? (You may think that everyone is business thinks like that, but in service departments, they don’t, and in analytical and strategy departments they never think of these things.)
This leads to extreme blinkers: if it doesn’t help the managers get done what they need to get done to look good against their targets, they simply aren’t interested. Dealing with the alternative reality of the company’s monumental bureaucracy takes up all their brain space, and they have nothing left for the real world. Consequently they have no interest in background knowledge, context and the broader view.
And then along comes my supervisor, asking for the benefits of using a souped-up pivot table, where ‘benefits’ means ‘something that people would think is useful, when they don’t give a crap about anything except making excuses for last week’s sales, improving next week’s sales, and progressing their projects’.
Um. No. Not going to happen. The only benefit to them is that it makes ‘more compelling’ Powerpoints they send back up the line when the high-ups asksilly strategic questions. Which, since that ‘compelling’ makes it look like we all know what the heck we’re talking about, is a helpful contribution to everyone’s job-retention. But of course, this is the one benefit that cannot be said aloud.
So my supervisor is looking to me to provide reasons that don’t exist for something that shouldn’t be discussed at that level anyway. (Tableau isn’t that expensive. If I wanted £100,000 for some of the fancy SAS visualisation tools, sure, I’d want a case as well.) Does that sound like something I can do? Or she should be doing?
That’s one reason I feel uneasy. I’ve got a supervisor who can’t read the politics very well. Still, she goes into bat for me at appraisal time, so I have to keep her happy.
The other is the thought of having to deal with the bureaucracy, with the incomprehensible online forms, sequences of web pages, questions that are written in a secret code that looks like English but really isn’t, and that require far too much background reading to deal with. And which end by sending my request for approval to a chain of people I’ve never heard of. Nobody understands this stuff, because there’s nothing to understand: it’s a series of ritual incantations: chant the right words in the right sequence and you get what you want. Get anything out of place and nothing happens, or you get refused and have to chant it all over again. And when I give up and have some priest talk me through it, it always turns out that the system wasn’t really designed to cope with the type of request I’m making.
If I’m not looking at data about customers and processes, I don’t feel like I’m doing the job I’m supposed to do. The bureaucracy can eat up all the time I give and ask for more. That’s not what I want to do.
At the moment my supervisor is a mid-level manager, rather than the ‘Head of’ I’m used to reporting to. She has chronic but low-level insecurity about her continued employment, so she thinks she needs to look as if she’s doing lots of things and taking lots of initiatives. In vain would I tell her that as a Head Office staff officer, she’s as secure as a) her ability to be seen to be bringing in business, or b) her ability to handle crap for her supervisor. Busy doing stuff is a nice-to-have in the good times, a point she doesn’t understand, but her predecessor did.
And somehow Tableau wound up on her busy-doing-stuff list. Which is exactly where it doesn’t belong. Because in and of itself, it reaps not, neither does it sow. It’s a better basket for carrying the corn, or perhaps, a better pair of sandles for walking over the field.
In the part of the business where I work, they are interested in two things: a) meeting their numbers; b) handling the crap that gets sent down from above. When we’re below budget, everything is judged by one criteria alone: will it get the business back on track? (You may think that everyone is business thinks like that, but in service departments, they don’t, and in analytical and strategy departments they never think of these things.)
This leads to extreme blinkers: if it doesn’t help the managers get done what they need to get done to look good against their targets, they simply aren’t interested. Dealing with the alternative reality of the company’s monumental bureaucracy takes up all their brain space, and they have nothing left for the real world. Consequently they have no interest in background knowledge, context and the broader view.
And then along comes my supervisor, asking for the benefits of using a souped-up pivot table, where ‘benefits’ means ‘something that people would think is useful, when they don’t give a crap about anything except making excuses for last week’s sales, improving next week’s sales, and progressing their projects’.
Um. No. Not going to happen. The only benefit to them is that it makes ‘more compelling’ Powerpoints they send back up the line when the high-ups ask
So my supervisor is looking to me to provide reasons that don’t exist for something that shouldn’t be discussed at that level anyway. (Tableau isn’t that expensive. If I wanted £100,000 for some of the fancy SAS visualisation tools, sure, I’d want a case as well.) Does that sound like something I can do? Or she should be doing?
That’s one reason I feel uneasy. I’ve got a supervisor who can’t read the politics very well. Still, she goes into bat for me at appraisal time, so I have to keep her happy.
The other is the thought of having to deal with the bureaucracy, with the incomprehensible online forms, sequences of web pages, questions that are written in a secret code that looks like English but really isn’t, and that require far too much background reading to deal with. And which end by sending my request for approval to a chain of people I’ve never heard of. Nobody understands this stuff, because there’s nothing to understand: it’s a series of ritual incantations: chant the right words in the right sequence and you get what you want. Get anything out of place and nothing happens, or you get refused and have to chant it all over again. And when I give up and have some priest talk me through it, it always turns out that the system wasn’t really designed to cope with the type of request I’m making.
If I’m not looking at data about customers and processes, I don’t feel like I’m doing the job I’m supposed to do. The bureaucracy can eat up all the time I give and ask for more. That’s not what I want to do.
Monday, 22 October 2018
Reception(s) 07:30
I suspect this sight can only be seen in one building in London.
It's not that I haven't been starting posts, it's that I can't get those posts to end in a sensible manner. I can't even list the subjects I start and then don't finish, because when I'm half-way through, either it doesn't seem that important anymore or I realise I'm on the wrong track. So there's going to be a bunch of photographs to keep ticking over until I find something worth writing about again.
Monday, 15 October 2018
Random Thoughts - Part One
I read Jocko Wilnick’s Discipline is Freedom before the hot weather set in. He’s the Extreme Ownership guy with various TED talks and interviews, during which he suggests we all wake up at 04:30. Because, why wouldn’t you?
It was just one step of gung-ho too much for me. I know the hurt-your-legs-train-your-arms routine. I do it myself from time to time. But not all the time and anyway, he must have at least 50% more testosterone than me.
After a while at the self-improvement game, I have reached a state I can maintain that is challenging but leaves me able to deal with the day job and the household routine. If I don’t get out as much as I would like, that’s a consequence of where I chose to live in 1987, not of doing bench-presses in a gym in Soho.
Being an ‘older man’ also means that my health and fitness targets are about maintenance rather than improvement. If you’re under fifty-five and have not had a serious medical event, you should be looking to improve: mo’ weight, mo’ reps. Over fifty-five, and there will be a day when you realise that maintenance is demanding enough.
Reach this steady state and the excitement, the sense of purpose, goes. A daily and weekly routine, that ten years ago would have been a serious challenge, is now exactly that: a routine. It’s not ho-hum, but it’s not a thrill that I made it to the end of another week.
What do we do self-improvement for? As if the answer is: to be more attractive to women, or to get a promotion at work. We do self-improvement because our lives had become a mess and we looked, ate and felt like shit. Then we get to a decent condition and we realise: it’s one thing to get here, and another to stay here. It’s as much work to stay in shape as it is to get in shape.
As if the question is: now I’m in shape, what am I in shape for? The answer is: so you don’t get out of shape again. And that takes work. Everything around you and your own bodily self conspires to drag you back into the mire of out-of-shape. Being in shape is a goal in itself. It’s like making money: we have to keep on doing it.
The steady state gets to be a different kind of comfort zone. Waking up and going through they day after a decent amount of sleep, knowing that another decent night’s sleep awaits is a pleasant feeling. Going out at 19:30 to something that won’t finish until 21:30 and that I won’t get home until 22:45 and so will miss a cycle of sleep and wake up groggy the next morning...? That grogginess starts to be, not exactly unappealing, but inconvenient.
It’s been a while since I saw something at Sadlers Wells, or an early evening movie in the West End. Or since I’ve been to one of the major museums or galleries. I feel I should be doing those things. Perhaps on some kind of rotation. The truth is, when I leave the gym, either at the end of the day or on a Saturday morning, I don’t have that what-does-the-rest-of-the-day-hold bounce.
Maybe there’s a role for the gang-ho, JFDI, losers-make-excuses-winners-make-things happen, attitude in doing regular going-out stuff. After all, my ‘objective’ for the recent few and next few weeks amounts to re-establishing a routine that worked well a couple of years ago and I let slip. It’s not much, but it’s enough.
Drag your ass to the Tate Modern - what else are you doing today?
Doesn’t quite sound right.
Being an ‘older man’ also means that my health and fitness targets are about maintenance rather than improvement. If you’re under fifty-five and have not had a serious medical event, you should be looking to improve: mo’ weight, mo’ reps. Over fifty-five, and there will be a day when you realise that maintenance is demanding enough.
Reach this steady state and the excitement, the sense of purpose, goes. A daily and weekly routine, that ten years ago would have been a serious challenge, is now exactly that: a routine. It’s not ho-hum, but it’s not a thrill that I made it to the end of another week.
What do we do self-improvement for? As if the answer is: to be more attractive to women, or to get a promotion at work. We do self-improvement because our lives had become a mess and we looked, ate and felt like shit. Then we get to a decent condition and we realise: it’s one thing to get here, and another to stay here. It’s as much work to stay in shape as it is to get in shape.
As if the question is: now I’m in shape, what am I in shape for? The answer is: so you don’t get out of shape again. And that takes work. Everything around you and your own bodily self conspires to drag you back into the mire of out-of-shape. Being in shape is a goal in itself. It’s like making money: we have to keep on doing it.
The steady state gets to be a different kind of comfort zone. Waking up and going through they day after a decent amount of sleep, knowing that another decent night’s sleep awaits is a pleasant feeling. Going out at 19:30 to something that won’t finish until 21:30 and that I won’t get home until 22:45 and so will miss a cycle of sleep and wake up groggy the next morning...? That grogginess starts to be, not exactly unappealing, but inconvenient.
It’s been a while since I saw something at Sadlers Wells, or an early evening movie in the West End. Or since I’ve been to one of the major museums or galleries. I feel I should be doing those things. Perhaps on some kind of rotation. The truth is, when I leave the gym, either at the end of the day or on a Saturday morning, I don’t have that what-does-the-rest-of-the-day-hold bounce.
Maybe there’s a role for the gang-ho, JFDI, losers-make-excuses-winners-make-things happen, attitude in doing regular going-out stuff. After all, my ‘objective’ for the recent few and next few weeks amounts to re-establishing a routine that worked well a couple of years ago and I let slip. It’s not much, but it’s enough.
Drag your ass to the Tate Modern - what else are you doing today?
Doesn’t quite sound right.
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