Who doesn't like seagulls and swans and geese and a nice clean, freshly-painted girder arch at the top of the frame, its colour contrasting with the grey water and mud, and the white birds?
Richmond Bridge - 31/1/2010 Canon PowerShot A590 IS
Thursday, 16 April 2020
Monday, 13 April 2020
Photographs I'm Printing (1)
Watch enough episodes of any photography channel and in one of them, the presenter will extol the virtues of printing your photographs. Large. At least A4. Modern colour printers and inks are pretty darn amazing these days, though the ink is as amazingly expensive as the printer itself is amazingly cheap.
For a while I nodded along, but was reluctant to take the plunge into printing. The cost of that ink though. Or of getting a digital file professionally printed. A couple of months ago, I replaced the dried-up cartridges (yes, yes, okay, the most expensive ink is the stuff you can't use)on my Canon MG7550 and started again. I'm going to post the ones I choose. Starting with...
The Bristol Channel from Exmoor - 29/8/2009 Canon Power Shot A590IS
It's about the horizontal layers of colour rather than a shot of heather and fields. I mean, there's the representational stuff, but what it's really about are the layers of grey in the sea and sky.
Thursday, 9 April 2020
Why We Have To Stay At Home (It's Not What You Think)
Want to know why your movements have been restricted, your business closed and your financial future rendered precarious?
25 words or less?
If someone had to design a virus specifically to embarrass the Health Services of developed nations, they would have designed SARS-Cov-2.
Interested in the details?
SARS-Cov-2 transmits, it is held, reasonably easily. It seems to breed in the throat, not the lungs, so it gets out easier. It is said to last on surfaces for up to three days. Carriers are held to be infectious for up to two weeks, compared with three days for a regular flu. The early studies suggest that half the people who get infected won’t notice and most of the rest of the people who get it will have moderate symptoms. SARS-Cov-2 seems to kill people with immune systems compromised by chronic conditions usually associated with older age. Those high death rates in Italy, Iran and Spain are partly telling us about the poor health of the elderly population in those countries. Overall this is a picture of a virus that really wants to spread, but not to kill. This isn’t the Spanish flu.
Now here’s the Big BUT: it’s looking like the small proportion who need hospitalisation will take 18 days (plus or minus) to die and 22 days (plus or minus) to recover to the point they can go home. Compared with three for a regular flu or pandemic virus. To deal with SARS-Cov-2, hospitals will need six times as many beds as they would need if the numbers are the same as any other flu-based pandemic.
No hospital has that many spare beds. Modern hospitals are highly focussed and productive, churning out specific treatments with a minimum of skilled medical staff and equipment. Such organisations are acutely sensitive to any deviation from their standard operating assumptions.
SARS-Cov-2 is just such a deviation. Faced with a virus that might fill their always-nearly-full hospitals in a week, the Health Bureaucrats panicked. Not only would their precious buildings be full, but the staff would get infected and have to go home for a couple of weeks. Good luck running a hospital with ten percent of your staff at home and no agency nurses and doctors available.
That’s why protect the NHS is in the slogan, before save lives. In such slips are the priorities made clear.
The Health Bureaucrats needed a way to keep their hospitals from getting over-crowded. The lockdown is to reduce the traffic accidents, sports injuries, drunken brawls, industrial accidents, and other causes of visits to the A&E. That keeps the beds clear for all those SARS-Cov-2 cases which aren’t going to appear anyway.
Never before in peacetime had the UK been locked down. This time they could make it seem plausible. The UK’s broadband internet network made it possible for the Government to believe that many people could be sent home to work without disrupting the economy. Once the Government had done that, an hysterical media fed shock-horror stories by activist academics would push through the rest of the shutdown. No high-speed broadband, and we would all still be at work, just as we were through the previous pandemics.
And that’s how we got here. Where are we going?
After Easter about a third of the UK’s smaller businesses will start to put more than three-quarters of their staff on furlough. By mid-May half those people will be short a week’s money while those who earn more than the median wage of £2,500 / month will get shorter faster. By the end of June, those businesses will start to go broke, and their ex-employees will go on some kind of unemployment benefit. Nobody can live on that. By July or so, without an announcement about an end date, even the largest companies will look at furloughing their staff. At that point we turn off the lights.
So the question is: how much of our future, will the politicians allow the Health Bureaucrats and media to sacrifice, to keep the hospitals clear and ready for a wave of people who never were going to come through the door?
I have no idea.
25 words or less?
If someone had to design a virus specifically to embarrass the Health Services of developed nations, they would have designed SARS-Cov-2.
Interested in the details?
SARS-Cov-2 transmits, it is held, reasonably easily. It seems to breed in the throat, not the lungs, so it gets out easier. It is said to last on surfaces for up to three days. Carriers are held to be infectious for up to two weeks, compared with three days for a regular flu. The early studies suggest that half the people who get infected won’t notice and most of the rest of the people who get it will have moderate symptoms. SARS-Cov-2 seems to kill people with immune systems compromised by chronic conditions usually associated with older age. Those high death rates in Italy, Iran and Spain are partly telling us about the poor health of the elderly population in those countries. Overall this is a picture of a virus that really wants to spread, but not to kill. This isn’t the Spanish flu.
Now here’s the Big BUT: it’s looking like the small proportion who need hospitalisation will take 18 days (plus or minus) to die and 22 days (plus or minus) to recover to the point they can go home. Compared with three for a regular flu or pandemic virus. To deal with SARS-Cov-2, hospitals will need six times as many beds as they would need if the numbers are the same as any other flu-based pandemic.
No hospital has that many spare beds. Modern hospitals are highly focussed and productive, churning out specific treatments with a minimum of skilled medical staff and equipment. Such organisations are acutely sensitive to any deviation from their standard operating assumptions.
SARS-Cov-2 is just such a deviation. Faced with a virus that might fill their always-nearly-full hospitals in a week, the Health Bureaucrats panicked. Not only would their precious buildings be full, but the staff would get infected and have to go home for a couple of weeks. Good luck running a hospital with ten percent of your staff at home and no agency nurses and doctors available.
That’s why protect the NHS is in the slogan, before save lives. In such slips are the priorities made clear.
The Health Bureaucrats needed a way to keep their hospitals from getting over-crowded. The lockdown is to reduce the traffic accidents, sports injuries, drunken brawls, industrial accidents, and other causes of visits to the A&E. That keeps the beds clear for all those SARS-Cov-2 cases which aren’t going to appear anyway.
Never before in peacetime had the UK been locked down. This time they could make it seem plausible. The UK’s broadband internet network made it possible for the Government to believe that many people could be sent home to work without disrupting the economy. Once the Government had done that, an hysterical media fed shock-horror stories by activist academics would push through the rest of the shutdown. No high-speed broadband, and we would all still be at work, just as we were through the previous pandemics.
And that’s how we got here. Where are we going?
After Easter about a third of the UK’s smaller businesses will start to put more than three-quarters of their staff on furlough. By mid-May half those people will be short a week’s money while those who earn more than the median wage of £2,500 / month will get shorter faster. By the end of June, those businesses will start to go broke, and their ex-employees will go on some kind of unemployment benefit. Nobody can live on that. By July or so, without an announcement about an end date, even the largest companies will look at furloughing their staff. At that point we turn off the lights.
So the question is: how much of our future, will the politicians allow the Health Bureaucrats and media to sacrifice, to keep the hospitals clear and ready for a wave of people who never were going to come through the door?
I have no idea.
Monday, 6 April 2020
The Surprise Hanging Paradox
I read a version of this paradox many years ago, thought it was nonsense, but couldn’t work out why. Recently I read a different version and understood why it was a silly paradox. Here’s the usual formulation:
A judge tells a condemned prisoner that he will be hanged at noon on one weekday in the following week but that the execution will be a surprise to the prisoner. He will not know the day of the hanging until the executioner knocks on his cell door at noon that day.The mistake is to pay any attention to all that pseudo-logic. You’ve been told that one day next week, you’re going to be hung. And that it will be a surprise.
Having reflected on his sentence, the prisoner draws the conclusion that he will escape from the hanging. His reasoning is in several parts. He begins by concluding that the "surprise hanging" can't be on Friday, as if he hasn't been hanged by Thursday, there is only one day left - and so it won't be a surprise if he's hanged on Friday. Since the judge's sentence stipulated that the hanging would be a surprise to him, he concludes it cannot occur on Friday.
He then reasons that the surprise hanging cannot be on Thursday either, because Friday has already been eliminated and if he hasn't been hanged by Wednesday noon, the hanging must occur on Thursday, making a Thursday hanging not a surprise either. By similar reasoning, he concludes that the hanging can also not occur on Wednesday, Tuesday or Monday. Joyfully he retires to his cell confident that the hanging will not occur at all. The next week, the executioner knocks on the prisoner's door at noon on Wednesday — which, despite all the above, was an utter surprise to him. Everything the judge said came true.
No it won’t.
You know it has to be one of the days next week, and at the moment you hear it you know each day has a 14% chance of being the day. As each day passes, the probability increases. That’s no basis for surprise. You can only be surprised if you think there is a 0% chance of it being the day.
On the day itself, your proper, downright cool reaction should be Wednesday, huh? Well, it had to be some day.
But what about all that nonsense-logic? The Judge’s ruling, is contradictory. Your hanging can't be a surprise if you know it's what awaits you. Real logic tells us that you can prove whatever you like from a contradictory statement. No wonder you can twist a bunch of noodle-logic to prove that you’re not going to be hung. The reason you can’t find anything wrong with the argument is that there isn’t anything wrong with the argument. The flaw is in the premises, and the argument distracts you from that.
Or you could say, it’s what happens when you treat a probabilistic concept like surprise as if it is a two-valued one. You can be a little surprised.
Thursday, 2 April 2020
The Long Goodbye / The Fabulous Baker Boys - Dave Grusin
Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye is one of the great films of the 1970’s. For many, many reasons, only one of which is the John Williams (he of Star Wars) soundtrack. It’s one tune played a dozen different ways. The soundtrack album never seemed to be available.
So here’s the best You Tube I’ve found.
That’s Dave Grusin on piano, who also played all Jeff Bridge's piano parts in that other shambling-cool movie, The Fabulous Baker Boys.
OK. If you’ve never seen it, here’s Grusin's tour de force from Baker Boys (it’s Michelle Pfeiffer singing).
So here’s the best You Tube I’ve found.
That’s Dave Grusin on piano, who also played all Jeff Bridge's piano parts in that other shambling-cool movie, The Fabulous Baker Boys.
OK. If you’ve never seen it, here’s Grusin's tour de force from Baker Boys (it’s Michelle Pfeiffer singing).
Monday, 30 March 2020
Streaming Music vs the CD Collection
CDs, I tell my younger colleagues, are what’s going to replace streaming music. Because that’s my idea of being funny.
I’ve been using Spotify a lot. It’s awful how much identikit music out there. Whether it’s modern pop or soul, or the pap I put on to fall asleep to, or the endless jazz playlists (The JazzUK one is a goodie though) that re-cycle the same tracks from the 1950’s and 60’s, or those playlists that promise one thing and descend into rap. Just how much rap is there in the world anyway?
Radio was and still is the ‘curated’ streaming medium. That’s what saves it from being a stream of new-age piano pieces with the same old major chords. The DJs and producers have to listen to it and don’t want to have to listen to bland twaddle.
A record collection has the same point is the same as a library or a film / DVD collection: it’s mine. Uniquely so. A friend has a vast number of DVDs, including lots of BBC series and classic British films. No such things (except the Smiley series) are to be found in my DVDs. We both have the French New Wave, and Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah. But I have Baise-Moi, Kids and Dogtown and Z-Boys which he would not allow in his house. We will pass over my collection of box sets featuring Eliza Dushku, and in my defence I can honestly say I only have S1 of BtVS (if I even have that).
I have a whole stack of Baroque music CDs, since discovering from reading a couple of histories of music that I like Baroque. And John Digweed. Also Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and obviously Bird and Robert Johnson. The CDs I buy are likely to be music that will stay with me. I’ve lost count of the music I have played out - that moment when suddenly you know exactly where the song is going all the time and it holds no more emotion for you. Unlike Flamenco Sketches which surprises every time.
Spotify has the functionality to build up a list of favourites, and tries to guess at what mine might be. It does as good a job as Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought that’ feature. I suppose I could spend a day adding every record and CD I can ever remember buying, but I don’t want to listen to a lot of them now. Anyway, once you list There Goes Concorde Again, aren’t you pretty much done?
Anyway, a list is not a collection, in the same way that a map is not the country. The point of a collection is that it is of things, and the thing-ness matters. Vinyl was more thing-y than CDs are way more thing-y than a Spotify playlist.
I miss 8Tracks. I used to discover music from those playlists. I’d be nodding along and suddenly look up and say what’s this because it had hooked me. This has yet to happen on a Spotify playlist. If anything I use Spotify to find things that I would not buy on CD, starting with Wagner operas. Which isn’t bad. There’s always been that music that falls between must-have-in-the-collection and can’t-remember-it-five-minutes-later. Caravan’s Nine Feet Underground is exactly that.
I’ve been using Spotify a lot. It’s awful how much identikit music out there. Whether it’s modern pop or soul, or the pap I put on to fall asleep to, or the endless jazz playlists (The JazzUK one is a goodie though) that re-cycle the same tracks from the 1950’s and 60’s, or those playlists that promise one thing and descend into rap. Just how much rap is there in the world anyway?
Radio was and still is the ‘curated’ streaming medium. That’s what saves it from being a stream of new-age piano pieces with the same old major chords. The DJs and producers have to listen to it and don’t want to have to listen to bland twaddle.
A record collection has the same point is the same as a library or a film / DVD collection: it’s mine. Uniquely so. A friend has a vast number of DVDs, including lots of BBC series and classic British films. No such things (except the Smiley series) are to be found in my DVDs. We both have the French New Wave, and Robert Altman, and Sam Peckinpah. But I have Baise-Moi, Kids and Dogtown and Z-Boys which he would not allow in his house. We will pass over my collection of box sets featuring Eliza Dushku, and in my defence I can honestly say I only have S1 of BtVS (if I even have that).
I have a whole stack of Baroque music CDs, since discovering from reading a couple of histories of music that I like Baroque. And John Digweed. Also Miles Davis and John Coltrane, and obviously Bird and Robert Johnson. The CDs I buy are likely to be music that will stay with me. I’ve lost count of the music I have played out - that moment when suddenly you know exactly where the song is going all the time and it holds no more emotion for you. Unlike Flamenco Sketches which surprises every time.
Spotify has the functionality to build up a list of favourites, and tries to guess at what mine might be. It does as good a job as Amazon’s ‘people who bought this also bought that’ feature. I suppose I could spend a day adding every record and CD I can ever remember buying, but I don’t want to listen to a lot of them now. Anyway, once you list There Goes Concorde Again, aren’t you pretty much done?
Anyway, a list is not a collection, in the same way that a map is not the country. The point of a collection is that it is of things, and the thing-ness matters. Vinyl was more thing-y than CDs are way more thing-y than a Spotify playlist.
I miss 8Tracks. I used to discover music from those playlists. I’d be nodding along and suddenly look up and say what’s this because it had hooked me. This has yet to happen on a Spotify playlist. If anything I use Spotify to find things that I would not buy on CD, starting with Wagner operas. Which isn’t bad. There’s always been that music that falls between must-have-in-the-collection and can’t-remember-it-five-minutes-later. Caravan’s Nine Feet Underground is exactly that.
Wednesday, 25 March 2020
Corona- Panic: Wise Words
I've been watching these guys on and off for a while now. Most of the time they make a decent amount of sense. This time, they make more sense than almost anyone else I've read.
Happy Lockdown!
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