Sir Anish Kapoor On Political Art

So I quote from Anish Kapoor's editorial in the January 2022 Art Newspaper:

There is no question that the arts and an education in the arts is deeply connected to human rights, to Black Lives Matter and equal opportunity, for all...and then of course the tragedy of global warming and the 80 million refugees in our world today.

(For those who are blissfully ignorant of the Artworld, Sir Anish Kapoor is a sculptor and painter, and as Establishment a figure as could be, with honorary degrees and prizes out the wazoo.)

So I have a question. Why isn't art deeply connected to the problems of unemployment and under-employment in the UK? Or to the horrendous social problems caused by the trade in cocaine and heroin? Or to the health issues of pharmaceutical companies replacing perfectly adequate generic drugs with new, patented and therefore expensive, drugs that are not actually any more effective? Why is it not connected to the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries? Or to the issues of free speech raised by the ownership of broadcast media and publishing by a handful of multi-nationals? Why isn't art connected to the problems of dysfunctional nutrition across the world?

Or any of a thousand other issues?

Because those are the wrong kind of issues.

The "right kind of issue" meets two criteria:

First, it must offend as few people in the Artworld as possible. Buyers, curators, civil servants in the Department of Culture, journalists, gallery owners, and other assorted gate-keepers.

Second, it must create paid employment and funding amongst the "right kind of people". Arts graduates. Bureaucrats. Activists. NGOs. Artists. Documentary film-makers. And lawyers. Especially lawyers.

"Human rights" allows one to pick and choose from a wide range of genuine abuses. The Uighyrs in China are perfect: it is pro-Muslim, which pleases the Arab buyers in the Artworld, and is anti-CCP, which pleases everyone else in the world outside the CCP itself.

"Global Warming" is even better, since assigning a tragedy to "climate change" means we don't have to think about a practical solution (Rising water levels? How about building sea and river walls? Oh. Excuse me for being the engineer.) but can kick it down the road to be solved when we solve the "real problem".

"Refugees" provides lots of work for lawyers and NGOs. All the expense borne by the taxpayer. None of the inconvenience borne by the Right People inside their gated communities. It allows the Right People to identify the Wrong People, since illegal immigration is a touchstone issue.

By contrast, sorting out the drug problem means giving money to the Police, Border Forces, and other such Wrong People. So does dealing with the problems of persistent unemployment, though it's a different set of Wrong People who benefit.

Follow the money.

The Anthropic Principle (Again)

Apparently Ed Witten has abandoned all rational thought about the fundamentals of the Universe and embraced a version of gasp! the Anthropic Principle. At least that's how Peter Woit sees it.

The Anthropic Principle is an answer to the question why are the fundamental laws of physics, and the values of electron mass, charge and the other fundamental constants, so nicely tuned to make it possible for human life to appear?.

The Anthropic Principle says, very crudely, that if they weren't, we wouldn't be here. To stop that being a tautology, it is taken to mean that the values of the physical constants are not compulsory. There are many values the fundamental constants could take, and most of them lead to a Universe that would be hostile to human life. We might be able to show more, which is that a Universe that started off with one or more fundamental constants that were very different would somehow never really get started: it might never cool down enough to become transparent, or it might fly apart because the force of gravity was too weak... there are all sorts of reasons. This would show is that if the Universe was stable at all, it would have to be life-friendly.

The Non-Anthropists want the Laws of Physics to be such that only Universes fit for human life can and must form. and only those Universes.

There are seventeen or so fundamental parameters in the Standard Model, and none can be derived from any of the others. The Non-Anthropists are claiming there is a set of as yet unknown Laws of Nature / Fields / Particles, without any arbitrary numerical parameters, that in turn determine the fundamental parameters of the Standard Model. After decades of work by some of the smartest people ever to walk the planet, we are nowhere near such a theory.

Suppose we did find such a set of fundamental-constant-determining laws. Would this answer the Non-Anthropists' question?

It might. But some ten-year-old would perk up and ask: why those laws? Why not others? .

The infinite regress of ten-year old's questions.

So there has to be a point at which we say "ENOUGH" about explanation, even in physics. I can safely say that any phenomenon that requires 10,000 engineers, a 13 TeV, 27-km accelerator, plus hundreds of hours of statistical analysis to find, will not be used by any medical equipment manufacturer. Or anyone else. For all practical purposes, the Dirac equation and its associated particles are "ENOUGH".

This is really the Non-Anthropists's problem. They want mo' research: to abandon smashing ever-higher energy beams of hadrons and finding no "new physics" year after year would be some kind of abandonment of the Human Project. Like not subsidising contemporary composers whose music is read more than it is performed. (Apparently actually performing one's work is passe. The Kool Kids pass around their latest compositions as MIDI files by e-mail.)

Hope springs eternal in the Non-Anthropists' breast. Next year someone may discover the Missing Laws / Fields / Particles.

I'm not saying they aren't there to be found. I don't know.

I am saying that, if we did find them, it would not help us reduce our carbon emissions, or whatever Liberal causes Non-Anthropists espouse. It would not cure cancer, or create a universal vaccine.

I guess I'm saying we know ENOUGH fundamental physics to work on all the other problems we need to solve.

Free Music Streaming - Some Thoughts

British people of a certain age have an instinctive belief that music, documentaries, news and entertainment should be free and of good quality. This is because the BBC spoiled at least two or three generations by providing a lot of good music without advertising and without a subscription charge. The TV license is for broadcast television, there is still no charge for listening to the radio.

The BBC has to be navigated carefully, because you might fall into some Metropolitan Goodthink, and it takes a good few washes to get those stains out. As for the commercial stations, I can't stand advertisements, so commercial radio is a no-go. It didn't used to be, but it is now.

The full-bore streaming providers (Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, Amazon Music, You Tube Music, Apple Music and some Swedish outfit) all charge. We're not looking at them right now. What can we get for free?

All the following have Apps and a website.

Radio Player provides access to a lot of UK radio stations, but not so many from outside the UK. If the stations use ads, you will get the ads.

Accuradio is a weird one. It has a wide range of channels, does have ads, and will lock you out if you listen for too long! The streaming rate is positively 1990's at 32kps (not a misprint).

There is TheClassicalStation(.org) which is conventional radio station based (or at least its phones are) in North Carolina. You get what they are broadcasting at the time, just like Radio 3.

Mixcloud (https://www.mixcloud.com/) has a wide selection of mixes and podcasts from DJs and programme makers. It's heavily oriented to dance / jazz / soul and similar, as the 'Mix' bit suggests. There are recognisable names using it, and the quality is generally good. If you don't like what you hear, just choose another mix. I am currently in the middle of a Mixcloud phase.

Bandcamp allows artists to upload music or podcasts, which can be listened to free, and if you like what you hear, you can support the artist by buying the track or CD. I have purchased one piece from Bandcamp (Headnodic & Raashan Ahmad's Low Fidelity, High Quality (Vol.2)). I got a think you e-mail and he got a darn sight more than he would from Spotify or a record label.

Soundcloud provides the same functionality as Bandcamp, though has more podcasts. "All podcasts are on Soundcloud" - except Joe Rogan. You can buy direct from the artist via Soundcloud.

Music Passion (aka Classical.com) looks like a classical music version of Bandcamp / Soundcloud, and has a $1/month subscription. (That's nearly free.)

Idagio is a classical streaming service which is free-with-ads, or ad-free and CD-quality with subscription. It looks a little mainstream to me: you're not going to be troubled by Boulex or Pendercki.

DanzWaves is an app with three radio streams: Chilltrax, Radio Danz, and Predanz. Chilltrax is what it suggests; Radio Danz has House and Dance music; Predanz has dance tracks from the 1990s and 2000s.

None of these will provide a guaranteed stream of listenable classical music at any time of the day or night. Not even Radio Three does that - the closest it gets is the Through The Night programme.

Which is a dodge I hadn't thought of. Go to https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live:bbc_radio_three and scroll down for the Highlights. Night Tracks will provide you with perfectly acceptable music that lasts an hour or so.

If you want classical music, it may be all you need.

SAGE = Red Army Faction

Bear with me here.

Right at the start of this nonsense, I said that the March 2020 lockdown felt like a war.

I never examined that any further, partly because I couldn't hear any bombs, and nobody was dying in the streets.

But it doesn't feel like a war.

It feels like a terrorist campaign.

Terrorists aim to create an atmosphere of paranoia.

The Government must be made to suspect every innocent citizen of carrying a deadly virus bomb.

Innocent citizens must feel imposed upon by the Government's security measures.

Innocent citizens must look at each other as if they might be a threat.

Governments and corporations set up elaborate security theatre: X-Ray machines at airports; masks and social distancing.

A class of suspect people is created: Marxists, right-wing activists, asymptomatic carriers.

Special committees are convened to assess risks.

Government agencies get arbitrary powers to impose restrictions and searches.

Terrorists attack and scare the people...

The Great Toilet Roll shortage was a PR stunt that worked too well, and caused panic buying.

Pro-Virus propaganda was put out because we weren't scared enough.

Social distancing made us treat each other like disease-ridden curs.

Carefully-staged videos showing the Police bullying members of the public appeared on You Tube.

Restrictions on our behaviour were intentionally confusing and pointless, to make us feel insecure.

Working from home made the Virus seem deadly.

... but terrorists leave the infrastructure alone.

Middle-class civil servants had to work from home, but working-class Amazon drivers could still deliver things. And all those "essential jobs".

That's why I never felt right about any of the Government's actions around the Virus.

It's too much like what happens when a bunch of terrorists gets too active.

Governments over-react beyond all reason.

Flabby-faced men, and hatchet-faced women, in grey suits, with establishment jobs.

Can they be terrorists? So close to retirement and without guns and bombs?

But who needs guns and bombs when you have the Government to do your dirty work?

Walk. Duck. Quack.

This Goes On Until At Least 2025. There's Always Another Virus

In January this year, I suggested we should plan for this nonsense to be going on for another four years. Until 2025. I had a moment's hope after July 19th, as the Government switched policy from looking at cases to looking at deaths. Maybe we would get through Christmas without restrictions and suggestions that we all might like to stay home. Maybe Boris wanted to be the only leader of a Top Ten economy whose people had Christmas at all.

And then along came Omicron, and the PR turned on a sixpence. Suddenly cases mattered. Boris imposed mask wearing in shops and trains. It wasn't so much the condition, but that he felt he could do it. One of two things will happen: Omicron will be declared harmless, the restrictions removed and a Happy Christmas to all; or the restrictions will be tightened and a work-from-home advice given. There will be almost no enforcement of this, but it will be enough to p**s everyone off. As a result, the wary people will plan for another lockdown, and another two terms of home-schooling.

Break out that "I Am Exempt" badge. I've been using mine and have had zero problems. Shop assistants smile, they don't frown.

I am pretty sure that the Government cannot afford another lockdown, or even to close "non-essential shops" and restrict hospitality activity. The next one will be a LINO (lockdown in name only) that restricts our social lives, but is enforced by exactly nobody (except the twats and bullies, and there are always those).

But I am now confident that this is not going to go away in Summer 2022.

WW2 might have ended in 1945, but rationing remained until 1954. Bomb sites were common in the 1960s. It wasn't until the 1980s that The War faded from our social memory.

Economically, this is as expensive as a conventional old-school world war.

This stuff is going on until at least summer 2025. There's always another virus.

Travel restrictions, masking, working-from-home, cut-back-on-socialising-in-Winter, tests, Red Lists, quarantine hotels, and inoculation drives. Threats of passports this and certificates that. Closing shops, opening shops. Years of bulls**t PR gaslighting and of special interest groups advancing their causes in the chaos.

It will be a few years before we believe that restrictions will not suddenly be re-imposed.

Our lives will feel worn-out and shabby.

Like the world does after the snow turns to dirty slush.

Mac Pro 14" vs Mac Air 13.3" - Overthinking the Choice

I thought I'd call it "overthinking" before you did.

My trusty Mac Air has been with me for nearly six years. Intel i5, 4GB RAM, 256 SDD. I mostly use it for writing and media consumption, so it's vastly over-powered for my "use case" (as it used to be called).

But one day, it's going to pack up.

And I want to do other things. Like record some of the music I play on guitar and piano. Which means running Garageband and maybe some plug-ins. I'm not sure about making YT videos, or even why I might do it. Also photography, if I have good enough photographs to do things with. The current Air can handle that, except at industrial levels of production, which I'm not going to reach.

But the Intel Airs are no more. Only the M1 machines. Which are:

The minimum 256x8, 8-7-16 cores (CPU-GPU-Neural) Air for £999.
Trade up to 512x8 and it's £1,199.
Add another graphics core to 8-8-16 and it's £1,249.
Add another 8GB RAM and it's £1,449 / £1,399.

The basic Mac Pro is 512x16 and 8-14-16 cores for £1,899. It comes with Magsafe ("it's not a Mac if it's not Magsafe"), an HDMI port and a SDXC card reader (which my Mac Air has and I have NEVER used). Add adapters for all that to the cost of the Air, and it's another £45.

Whichever, I'm going to need USB A -> C adapters for my external CD drive, and Lightning to USB C adapters for my other iDevices. This is not going to be horribly expensive.

I think 512GB SSD is needed for the extra things I want to do. Plug-ins gobble up space. So £1,199 is the baseline.

The extra £700 to the Mac Pro gets me: a slightly bigger, but undeniably better screen; 8GB more RAM, 6 more video cores, plus better speakers, microphone array, and Face Time camera. Also the Mac Pro has fans, and the Air doesn't. Would I really use any of that?

Don't forget that the real upgrade is from my 4GB Intel i5 Air to an 8GB M1 chip. That's the WOW factor right there. The reviewers of the M1 Air said its video editing was easily fast enough unless you were doing really big files in 4K. If I ever do anything, it will be smaller and in 1080p. So I'm covered.

If I ever do need that extra processing power, I will probably buy an iMac. Heaven knows what I'll be doing though.

Is there any improvement in performance in going to 16GB of RAM? The reviewers say there isn't, except at insane loads I would never reach, because the M1 chip accesses the SSD so fast it's almost RAM. Other voices suggest 'future-proofing' with 16GB. Well, when I got my Intel Air, I wondered about getting 8GB because future-proofing, but 4GB has turned out to be just fine - especially when I dumped out Evernote and Dropbox, which had bloated beyond all reasonableness. Both Apple and Microsoft are paying more attention to making their operating systems use less RAM and work faster. Apple even more so. So I'm taking it that 8GB in the new Air will be as future-proof as well.

So is the luxury stuff (speakers, screen, microphones and iSight camera) and the additional ports worth £700?

Nah. The guy (*) did say that if you don't know that you need a Mac Pro, then you don't. And I've convinced myself the baseline Air will have all the oomph my modest needs will need.

Baseline Air with 512GB plus a Magsafe adapter, and the USB A -> C converters for my heritage USB A and Lightning gear.

OMG did I just reach a conclusion?



(*) You know, the guy whose YT video you watched and thought was good, but now you can't remember who it was. He makes a lot of videos.

Lightbulbs and the Poynting Vector (Veristasium)

Electro-magnetism (E&M) is genuinely weird. Most people never find this out, because most people never go into electrical engineering or a physics PhD (where you really have to grapple with it).

Most people think of electricity as volts, amps and watts. Maybe ohms. We don't use ohms in a household context.

The initiated talk about capacitance, reactance, inductance, resistance and conductance. They talk about "transmission lines", "skin effects", and "antennas". The rest of us need to be electrical engineers before all that makes sense. (Oh. Wait. I almost was one.)

Here's a way in: metals like copper are often called good "conductors of electricity", as if electricity is something that passes through the metal. Instead, think of metals as good receivers of electromagnetic radiation. Wires do not in some sense channel or concentrate the electromagnetic fields, or act as pipes for electrons to flow along, they respond to the electromagnetic fields. Indeed, everything responds to electromagnetic fields. Mostly not much.

Wires respond by creating their own little electromagnetic field around them. Most materials (because "everything is a capacitor") respond by retaining tiny, tiny amounts of charge which they then eventually let go of. Air does this. So does polyester, which is why it crackles when you take it off.

Mr Veritasium set up a circuit with a battery, a switch, a light opposite the switch and some very long wires connecting everything. The idea was that the wires would be so long it would take a noticeable amount of time for the electricity to "flow" along the wires and power the light.

Except the light comes on instantly.

His explanation uses a thing called the Poynting vector. Do not use those words near physicists, as they may call your bluff.

Electromagnetic waves have an electric field (E) and a magnetic field (B) that are always in phase and at right angles to each other, and to the direction of travel of the wave. (This is why there have to be at least three physical dimensions, or we couldn't have Radio Three.) Since electromagnetic waves carry energy, it makes sense that there should be an energy vector corresponding to the wave in the direction of travel. Poynting proved that this vector (*) S = E x B, where 'x' is the vector cross-product, and I've left out a constant of proportionality. It's the E times B bit that is the achievement, not the direction (cross product), because we got that already from the physics.

So Mr Veritasium said, the electric field is pointing this way (points along wire) and the magnetic field is pointing that way (points upwards) so the S vector must be (pointing at the light bulb). Presto! The energy gets to the light more or less instantly.

Which convinced absolutely nobody, because they piled in to discuss this using anything but Poynting vectors. Transmission lines and displacement currents was a favourite, because, well, engineers. Nobody was doubting the Poynting explanation, because physics > engineering, but because they were engineers, they wanted to explain it in terms of something more familiar and material.

Complete the well-known phrase or saying: cart, horse.

Poynting's insight was that the materials in which the wave moves (e.g. air, wires) do not facilitate the power transmission, rather they modify the electro-magnetic waves, and hence the power transmission. The transmission-line / displacement current explanations are consequences of the transmission of power in the direction of the Poynting vector, not explanations. When modelling a specific setup, the B vector (which is for free space) is replaced by the H vector, which takes into account the effect on the B vector of the materials involved.

What happens is this: when the switch is closed, a voltage pulse starts to travel round the circuit. This creates a magnetic field B through the Maxwell equation (with J = 0) for B

$\nabla \times B = \mu_0 \epsilon_0 \frac{\partial E}{\partial t}$

which creates a Poynting vector S. Behind that pulse comes the first lap of a current J that will be circulating once the circuit is in a steady state. That sustains the B field by the Maxwell equation (with $ \frac{\partial E}{\partial t} = 0$) for B

$\nabla \times B = \mu_0 J$

which sustains the Poynting vector S. (The E field is sustained by the battery voltage). That S field carries the energy that excites the molecules in the wire in the bulb and creates the light. Because the wire in the bulb is a good receiver of electromagnetic radiation.

Not a transmission line in sight.

It's worth noting that if the bulb was put, say 300,000,000 metres away from the switch on the opposite side of a loop, then it would take 1 second for the bulb to light, but that would still be faster than the roughly 1.6 seconds it would take for the voltage / current wave-front to reach it.

This is, of course, handwaving. More precise calculations would take account of the dielectric air between the wires to calculate H and also factor in the displacement currents, but the principle remains the same. That would start to sound like engineering. But the engineering is there to help perform the calculation, not to help understand what's happening.



(*) Strictly E, B and S are not vectors, which are 1-forms, but flux densities, which are 2-forms. This is the only time in your life you will ever read that.

Philosophy of Mathematics - Number Theory

Off in another part of my thoughts, which have been on hold for a while, I have been trying to work out some ideas on the philosophy of mathematics.

I have two theses. One is about the relationship of abstract mathematical ideas to various types of measurement or geometric properties. If you want to know how the various derivatives on curved spaces arise from the simple issues of co-ordinate changes, it's all there. The other is a methodological thesis, that the purpose of mathematics is to provide tools and techniques to solve problems that arise from modelling physical and other processes, and to understand the scope and limits of those techniques. Creating and solving the equations of the mathematical models is what's usually called "applied mathematics", while understanding the scope and limits of the techniques is a lot of what's called "pure mathematics".

And then there's Number Theory. Which is about numbers. Not mathematical models.

You know that Langlands thing that all the Kool Kids are working on?

Yep. Number theory. Finite field number theory at that. Geometric Langlands is even more abstruse.

It takes genius-level insight and technique to understand the more recent developments in Langlands. That's the point: if the specialists can barely follow it, how is it going to be any use to some poor post-grad working on differential geometry at the University of Ennui-sur-Blase?

The social purpose of mathematicians is to teach other people - physicists, statisticians, epidemiologists, computer scientists and programmers for example - how to use the problem-solving techniques mathematics offers. What mathematicians do in their spare time is their business: they need a decent laptop, a whiteboard and some paper and pens: math is cheap compared to fundamental physics.

The Langlands guys can do what they want in their spare time. But it's a rabbit-hole. Maybe it's a big, well-lit rabbit-hole with all the health and safety gear and plenty of mechanical digging tools, but it's still a rabbit-hole. Unlike some of the rabbit-holes mathematicians have buried themselves into (functional analysis, for instance), Langlands is not going to produce anything useful to regular working stiffs (for instance, functional analysis produced the theory of weak solutions to differential equations, which is very useful). I feel confident saying that because Langlands is about structures the rest of mathematics just doesn't use.

(Rabbit-holes are as opposed to specialisms, which are very specific subjects that have useful applications in the real world or other parts of maths with real world applications. Like research in PDEs.)

Maybe "rabbit-hole" should be a term of art in methodology. It's a line of research that has no obvious application to any existing problems or in other branches of maths. The scientific version would be a research programme that was making theoretical progress but no empirical progress (was not making new predictions). A rabbit-hole may branch up to the surface every now and then, as applications to problems in other branches of maths are found, but generally once dug, the researchers dig away happily underground.

In this case I would be saying that Number Theory was a mathematician's pastime, and that other very abstruse, or very off-beat, programmes, are for all the sophistication, esoterica for the aficionados. Which doesn't sound too dramatic.

November 2021 Diary Update

I have "missed" a number of posts this month. I've also missed a number of trips to the gym, and there were whole days when I barely left the house except after dark to have my daily walk.

I stopped going to the gym because I had a problem with my right hip which had reached see-the-osteopath serious. Osteo's don't like it when you come in after a weights session with tight and hard muscles. They can't do those odd manoeuvres to put your spine back in alignment easily or sometimes at all. I've got one more visit left and it should be clear. When I go back to the gym it won't be to do heavy-ish weights as I have been doing. My days of ego-lifting are now well past, and really stopped early in 2019. I'm going to be all about the health-lifting, which is nowhere near as much fun.

The days I barely left the house were about a) the lack of motivation that sweeps over me at the sight of a dull grey sky, b) the fact that 10,000 steps in a day now wipes me out when in 2019 I could do that standing on my head, c) a lack of connection with London and all other places. This is all about me pulling myself together and just f***ing doing it and various other deeply sensitive maxims. There's a thing called "commute hardening" that we never notice because we commute all the time, but all those months working from home have left me and many others "commute soft", and unable to handle the amount of walking and effort needed for a commute. (That's going to be a real issue when getting all those cosseted bankers and civil servants out of their homes and back into their over-crowded open-plan offices.) So I'm working on building up the ability to handle a 10k-step day without feeling exhausted halfway through. Nothing I can do about my reaction to grey skies, except stop being a cissy.

I've missed the posts because I've been caught up in various decisions and other things, none of which I could formulate coherent thoughts about. (Which has never stopped me in the past.)

I am not going to put a curtain against my front wall, as I suggested I might in a previous post about Room Treatment for Small Rooms. Nor am I going to buy some absorbing panels from Ginger White (not actually a lot more expensive than some curtains). I came this close to both.

I decided that a) having 10kg of absorbing panels on my front wall right above all my kit would be disastrous if any screws came loose (you don't know my walls), b) I couldn't man-handle something that size and weight on my own, c) what happened if it didn't work enough, or was more absorbent than I could live with? As for the curtains, it would look odd, but because you should leave space between curtains and the wall, the curtains would be tucked in behind the Kallax units and it would all look silly.

I finally got up the nerve to bust out the drill, measured up, drilled three holes (two into brick, one into plaster - I do not live in a precision-built house) put in Rawlplugs and screws, and hung three of my collages. Perspex has to be as reflective as plaster, so I'm not expecting acoustic improvements, but at least I'm not staring at a blank white wall anymore.

Because for a domestic listening room, sonic treatment screams you can take this too far, you know.

And I've been reading as well. You have no idea how fascinating the theory of antennas is. I started my life as an electrical engineering student, and while I get electric circuits, I've never really grokked electromagnetism in all its weirdness. Antennas are exactly that. And that was just one of the subjects I read.

So there will be the usual gratuitous back-filling, and I will carry on. The self-imposed restriction on writing about "current affairs" (as we used to call it) does remove an easy source of posts, but it also stops me wasting time on nonsense, or at least writing about it.

Living Right Takes Character, Not Purpose

You know what I hear far too much?

That our collective problem is a lack of meaning / purpose / connection with others / (enter something else that post-modern Capitalism doesn't encourage here).

If only we didn't do b*******t jobs for ungrateful bosses, and we had supportive connections with our neighbours and family, didn't eat meat or burn carbon, saved a species every week, planted a tree every day... then we would feel fulfilled and happy and not do sad things like binge eat / drink / watch TV series / play computer games / (enter things you wish other people would stop doing here)

Hah!

It takes real character to accept that your life is insignificant, and yet still behave as if you are a worthwhile human being.

Go to work, exercise, eat right, not drink too much, keep yourself and your digs clean and neat, see your friends and relatives, save for the future, and keep yourself entertained and interested in something.

Live right, even if you don't know why.

Allez en avant, et la foi vous viendra, as D'Alembert is supposed to have said.

Second-Best Housekeeping Productivity Hack

(The best is to pay for a cleaner. Everyone living in a shared flat or house should do that.)

Get a robot vacuum cleaner.

Really.

Vacuuming is a chore. Not everyone feels that way, but normal people do.

How good were these robo-vac things?

I watched the You Tube review videos, and decided that the base-level Eufy 11S Max would suit my needs just fine, as well as being far more affordable than the ones that use GPS tracking to learn about your house so they know what to do in the master bedroom next time. You can YT the review videos using the name.

Prep the room: get all the wires off the ground, and I put small items of furniture on couch / bed. (I went round and used wire ties to lift a lot of wires off the floor. Which of course I should have done anyway.)

There are two basic modes:

a) you put the cleaner in a room, set it off, close the door and get on with something else somewhere else

b) you let it do the vacuuming, and go round with the damp cloth wiping down surfaces and skirting boards

Admit it, did you wipe down the skirting boards when you vacuumed? Thought so.

That's the productivity bit: you can do something else while it does the chore.

It can sense when it's on carpet and turns the vacuuming up a notch, and it can sense it's about to run out of landing, stop and turnaround. It doesn't fall downstairs.

Don't be control-freaky, it wanders about and eventually covers everywhere it can reach. You do have to get into the corners, but you probably missed those when vacuuming and had to do them specially. It has an 'edges' mode where it will go round the walls.

Empty the tray at the end of each session.

Admire your new cleaner digs.

(No. I'm not being paid. Buy a Robo-Vac if you want.)

In Praise of A Well-Chosen Indulgence

I've been watching how-to-record-your-music videos recently and ran across the wonderfully over-the-top Spectre Sound Studios. In this one he talks briefly about debt and how it should be avoided. Turns out he owns his house, studio, and car. How? Because, in his words, he bought what he needed, not what he wanted.

Spectre Sound was saying: don't spend £1,000 on the fancy gear when £200 will get you something that will do the job well enough that the audience won't notice the difference.

Most companies do this. Most companies buy the least-cost, lowest spec-for-what-they-think-is-needed kit. Sometimes they get away with it, and sometimes they lose thousands of hours a week from laptops that take ten minutes to boot up and shut down, and are unusable for an hour when doing weekly updates (ask me how I know). The company doesn't care that their staff feel that they aren't worth decent kit. That's what economic-value-optimisation makes us feel like. Not important enough for the Good Stuff.

In order, there's

a) doing without

b) buying the least-cost, lowest-spec

c) buying nice so you don't buy twice

d) indulgence (buying something that's a little better than "nice" because it makes you feel warm and fuzzy)

e) wasting money buying specs or stuff you are never going to use. 

For example, bread:

a) is not buying any bread because, well, who needs bread? you're not going to die if you don't have it b) is Tesco White Sliced c) is a sourdough from a supermarket d) is a loaf from Paul or some other such brand e) is any loaf from Whole Foods or an "artisan" baker with their own shop in Notting Hill or Greenwich

The base-line for judging indulgence or waste is not "go without". Nor is it Tesco White Sliced, which barely qualifies as bread. The baseline is the cheapest "buy nice" option. It's deviation either way from "Buy Nice" that needs to be justified. We should justify buying low-quality-and-cheap as well as higher-quality-and-more-expensive.

Buying what you want, without wasting money, just makes you feel like, in the words of the ad, you're worth it.

(Now you ask, I buy whatever shampoo is on sale, but not the diluted cheap own-brand stuff.)

This is why I have always had the suspicion that people who buy what they want rather than what they need are a little more fun and little richer and softer in texture. (Assuming they aren't being stupid with the "wants".) By adopting a very narrow definition of "need" - as in "you're not going to die if you don't go on holiday / only drink tap water / never eat chocolate" - one can lead a very miserable life.

Until April 2020, my indulgence was membership at a fancy gym in Soho: there are gyms that cost more, but most cost less. A lot less. But I enjoyed and appreciated it. I joined my local The Gym in April this year. I don't dislike it, but I don't feel a little thrill walking through the door either. It's functional, and that's it. The local fancy gym charges not far short of what I was paying for my previous gym and is over-priced for what it provides. "Need" rules in this case.

I may be missing a well-chosen indulgence.

Holland Park Japanese Garden

 

One fine sunny day in early November, Sis and I wandered round Holland Park. I hadn't been to Holland Park since one of the summer evening concerts back maybe in the Oughties. It's still there and it's much as I remembered it. I hadn't visited the Japanese garden before and was glad we did.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part Three

Welcome to the "small rooms" owners' club.

Once again, pro sound treatment methods (bass traps, reflectors, absorbers and soundproofing) are essential for studios and can be useful for "larger rooms". No-one is saying otherwise.

But one-metre deep bass traps are not feasible in a small room. Nor is six-inch absorption padding all round the walls. Isn't the room small enough already? Nor are serious soundproofing measures, which also require thick lumps of absorbent materials. And have you noticed that the rooms in treatment videos belong to people who don't read, have no art or decoration, and store their CD's and records in another room? No wonder they need absorbers and diffusers. Real rooms have bookcases, shelving, pictures on the wall, and other stuff. Some of that helps. What else can we do?

If you are following the user manual for your speakers, you will be sitting about two-three metres from them. No matter what size your room is. Or what the speakers are. (Have you seen how close people sit to those Wilson towers?)

Contrary to some commentators' sniffy remarks, thick pile carpets and loose hanging curtains a distance from the wall do work: see this table of absorption coefficients. Curtains and carpets are pretty much third for absorption after foams and fibres, and then people.

Am I sure I'm not rationalising my unwillingness to spring for a dozen GiK acoustics panels for £700 or so, plus all that drilling and hanging? Well, that's why I write things like this: to make sure I've got my facts in a row. And I think I have.

There wouldn't be home hi-fi if the first thing you were told by your dealer was "we couldn't sell you any of this with a clear conscience until you've had your listening room re-built by an expert, otherwise you'll just come back and complain it sounds terrible". It has to be pretty good out of the box in nearly all circumstances.

We small-roomers are left with the simple things, which are more about the overall sound of the room than specific flaws.

Rugs for wooden floors

Curtains to the full width of the room so that the corners as well as the windows are covered

Shelves with books, record collections, even storage (as long as it's not a wall of boxes), for dispersion and absorption. Just don't line everything up neatly or you'll lose the dispersive effect

Symmetry: equal spacing between left and right speakers to their near walls, same distance from the front wall, both at ear height; books or records (aka 'damping') to the right wall means books or records ('damping') to the left wall in the same place.

All that work for that conclusion? Hey, I saved a lot of money on those acoustic panels.

So I'm upgrading the carpets and doing something about the (long story) curtains on the windows. The front wall is going to be a curtain with folds hanging from a tension bar. That will do for now. In time I may change the furniture around and get some more natural damping.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part Two

Room treatment is mostly about room modes and reflections. (Sound-proofing is taken to be out-of-scope since it needs building work.)

Room modes first. These are sound waves that bounce back and forth between the walls, or floor and ceiling, because the wavelengths fit the dimensions just right. This is where boomy bass comes from.

Small rooms are held to be a lost cause because they have many, many of these resonating frequencies. That may be true, but there's a VERY important qualification: those room modes only matter if any of them correspond to one of the 88 frequencies used in the music you are most likely listening to.

Yep. There are zillions of frequencies that could be used to make music, but almost all Western Music is made with 88 of them. Here's a list. You will notice the only ones that are whole numbers are the A's from 55Hz upwards. All the rest are given to five (5) decimal places, in a scheme called twelve-tone equal temperament (which is a music theory rabbit-hole all its own). Western musical instruments are mass-produced to reproduce those notes. The chances of your room having a resonant frequency corresponding to some random note like F# above low-C (say) are approximately zero.

And if you do, all you have to do is move the speakers either back or forward a couple of centimetres (front-to-back resonance), or closer or further apart a couple of centimetres (side-to-side resonance), and it will disappear. (This is called positional equalisation.) It will not to be replaced by one on another note because a) the difference in wavelengths between any of the 88 notes is more than a couple of centimetres, and b) the resonance is between the speaker and the back or side walls, not between the front and back walls, which would be a room resonance, and your speaker is not mounted in the walls. (And even if it was, the point remains the same!)

If you have a floor-firing subwoofer, you can't fix a room mode like that, because the way the sound waves come from the subwoofer mean the resonance will be from floor-to-ceiling. Should a piece of music contain a hefty belt of 73.4 Hz D or 36.7 Hz D, both of which will pass into my subwoofer, I get a resonance. However, only five-string double-basses and instruments with names starting 'octocontra' ever get down to 36.7 Hz, leaving me with exactly one note that can trigger that resonance, and that's still way down low even for a string-bass. And no, very few pieces of music are written to include octocontra-anythings, and most orchestras would either not perform them, or use the programme or sleeve notes to apologise for the missing instrument. The lower you cross over to your subwoofer, the fewer possibilities for resonance you have.

How about all those reflections? According to the Master Handbook of Acoustics

Our hearing mechanism integrates spatially separated sounds over short intervals, and under certain conditions tends to perceive them as coming from one location.... in an auditorium, the ear and brain have the ability to gather all reflections arriving within about 35ms after the direct sound, and combine...them to give the impression that the entire sound field is coming from the direction of the original source, even though reflections from other directions are involved...This is called the Precedence Effect, Hass effect, or law of the first wavefront.

In more familiar terms, the ear has a buffer about 35ms deep. At the speed of sound that's 12m. I am two metres from my speakers. Any sound along a path strictly less than 14 metres from speaker to ear will have its sound combined with the direct sound from the speakers. That's all the first reflections in my room. So in a "small room", first reflections do not appear as separate sound sources. Instead, those reflections give the sound a sense of spaciousness which is greater as the power of the reflections increases. Reflections have to be quite loud before they are perceived as echoes. (In my "small room", the first reflections are travelling something like 3m to reach me, so they are 4/9 (inverse square law) as powerful as the direct sound, which leads to a drop of 3dB in volume and whatever absorption I get at the wall. Every little helps.)

Reflections good - sometimes. Too many and too loud, and the sound image will lose sharpness or you will get echoes. Too few and too quiet and the sound will feel muffled and dull. The trick is to get the sound quality you like.

Those with "small rooms", read on.

Room Treatment For "Small Rooms" - Part One

Steve Gutenberg says we should try room treatments. John Darko has those GiK boards all over the place. I'm starting to feel I'm not responding to the memo.

Except...

Acoustic treatment for studios is a real thing: studios need all the soundproofing their owner can afford, and a lot of plain old echo-deadening in the recording space. Performers don't like heavily damped studio acoustics, which is why some of them prefer to plug into the board and hear each other over headphones. Then they can perform together in a room that looks as if it was designed for humans.

Audio design for a concert-hall is a real thing. Soundproofing from outside noise, getting a decent quality of sound in all the seats, tuning it to be lively or dry, depending on the taste of the resident orchestra, or the kind of music that it will be played in it, all this is serious stuff. Consult someone with an acoustics degree. Something similar might be said for the listening rooms of millionaires, who can afford to have chunks of their houses re-built or re-furbished.

I can't, and I assume you can't either. I have a rectangular room that's 14L x 10w x 7.7H in feet, just over 1,000 cu ft. In the trade this is called a small room. The Master Handbook of Acoustics(*) dismisses any room of less that 1,500 cu ft as a lost cause. Others define "small" as anything smaller than a classroom.

Watch a few room treatment You Tube videos and you will wonder how on earth you are able to hear anything, let alone identify it as Miles Davis' Sketches of Spain. What with diffusion, room modes, reflections off the floor, the ceiling, the side walls, the back corners, runaway bass that needs to be trapped... it's a wonder you can hear the tuba.

Except...

Once the speakers and listening position are set up right...

...and you've got some carpet on that varnished pine floor...

...and you've accepted, like me, the inevitability of hauling the couch from the back of the room so that my head was the third point of a (nearly) equilateral triangle with the speakers (**)

...you can indeed hear the tuba. And everything else. And no obvious echoes or reflections.

How does this happen?

Read on.

(*) That's what it's called, and you get 10,000 Audiophile Points for reading it.

(**) Which is where speaker manufacturers say to sit. If you don't do this, and put your speakers at different heights and distances from the walls, and have books below them, then the orchestra may well wind up in the upper-right-hand corner of your room. So a friend told me, anyway.

Cold Re-Boot

I got a cold just over a week ago. Didn't have the runny nose or coughs, did have shortness of breath when climbing stairs and that feeling that walking to the corner shop might be a mission I would not come back from. It lasts about three-four days. It wasn't the supercold. It wasn't the Virus. It would have been worse if I'd been commuting and waking up at 05:15 in the incubation period.

So I went into the Big Smoke after that, the only things on my to-do list being a haircut at George The Barber and a suntan at the Covent Garden Tanning Shop. I've been going to both since the early 2000's. I had lunch in Balans, and I've been eating there since the early-2000's as well. I damn near fell asleep on the train into Waterloo, and didn't quite wake up for the rest of the day. After lunch I went to Green Park, where I sat and dozed a little for a while, and then headed back to Waterloo. At some point when I was underground the rain tipped down.

I spent a short while in Fopp, looking for some box sets to watch. (I know, I should be streaming from Amazon Prime.) During this, I realised that I'm simply not attracted to today's cultural products, in part because the SJW infestation and remember-our-audience-is-mostly-female slant in a lot of the stuff made in the last, oh, eight years or so? Maybe ten? It could be that this stuff will look in twenty years' time as horribly dated as Starsky and Hutch does now: "ah yes the SJW years" the historians will say "most of it is unwatchable propaganda now". It could be that this is the way it's going to be for a long time.

So what do I do? I become that guy who re-watches his DVD collection and listens to his CDs over and over? Also, I go back over the period I like and see what I missed: there's probably a reason why Heathers is still on sale now. Some of that stuff is too specifically freighted with memories and emotions: I would have to be very careful about watching Four Weddings and a Funeral or Truly, Madly, Deeply again, whereas I can put on Dogtown and Z-Boys almost any time.

My reading is all over the place and always has been. Who knows, I may even try to see if it's true that In Search of Lost Time is a book to re-read rather than read the first time. (So many of its fans say that.)

I've made some resolutions:

No more doomscrolling, at least before about lunch.

I'm going to use slightly lighter weights in the gym. What I'm doing now is leaving me tired for the rest of the day and much of the following day.

Diet. Yes. I should definitely do something about that. I may do a whole over-thinking post on it.

Read more maths - I should line up more maths blogs and visit the arXiv more often. I'm not talking about You Tube gee-whiz maths, but research-level stuff. I will not rest until I can explain in simple language what is an Adele (no, not the singer) ring.

Re-read (re-gaze-at) my art books. Lord knows I have enough.

Use the bus to get to the station. Why I haven't done this before. I'm not sure, maybe because I've always walked to the station. But with the Bus Checker app I be sure that they haven't cancelled the one I need.

So life goes on.

Editorial Policy

I've always regarded the posts on this blog as a way of working out my thoughts on whatever junk is wandering through my head at the time. Dogma, ideology and a fixed programme isn't my thing. Today's idea is tomorrow's history. Some things have remained the same throughout my life, but a lot changes, and not just the music I listen to, the pictures I look at and the novels and textbooks I read. I am never going to read much about chemistry, nor sociology, nor economics, and Greys' Anatomy will be forever a closed book to me (the book, sadly I saw about one series of the TV show).

Every now and then I will get caught in a rabbit-hole, which happened recently (see previous post). I made the mistake of re-reading about the Situationists, a group of philosophers / artists / intellectuals, whose reputation has always been a mystery to me. Those rabbit-holes can take up a lot of time and produce nothing especially conclusive or enlightening.

So I'm not so sure I want to have any old random junk going round my head anymore. When I was working it was more or less unavoidable, as work was one giant junk-heap in itself.

Some of the stuff I've written is not junk. Anything on music, some of the recovery-related things are the diary entries they are, but there is other stuff I wouldn't want to repeat.

At this point a lot of bloggers will announce they are going on holiday. I don't want to do that. Blogs never come back from holidays.

Writing a blog post about something has its own value. I can be a lot more unconsidered in a hand-written journal than a blog that strangers might read. Scribbling down my immediate thoughts and feelings can let them out, never to return, but not always, and I might go on thinking and feeling roughly the same about whatever-it-was. Whereas working up something suitable for third-party consumption forces me to review what I'm thinking, recognise the cliches, the contradictions, the obviously silly stuff and generally produce something that seems reasonable. That does change the way I think. That's the value.

But a trip down a rabbit-hole generally does not have a lot of value, which is why we call it a 'rabbit-hole'.

I'm going to try to hold myself back from the rabbit-holes - looking back, I haven't done too badly this year.

I'm also going to avoid reading the news, especially first thing in the morning. It's just doomscrolling ("the act of spending an excessive amount of screen time devoted to the absorption of negative news") and it is doing me no good.

I'll let you know how that works out.

Woke Is A Career, Not A Principle

Woke is not a moral movement of any kind. It isn't even a cockamamie religion.

Religious commandments come in three parts: one that defines its practices of worship and the believer's relationship with the God(s) of the religion; another that sets out how to behave like a decent member of society; and the third that creates shibboleths (a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important) to distinguish the Faithful from the kuffers. Bacon. Circumcision. Beards (or not). Eating beef. Leavened bread. Drinking alchohol. Wearing only plain clothes. These are usually found in the commentaries.

Obedience must be despite, not because: obedience to a rule means nothing, after all, if there's a beneficial reason for you do whatever it is, whether it is a rule or not. Shibboleths are great obedience-tests.

The best shibboleth is trivial and arbitrary. It's exactly because there is no reason for it (What did pigs ever do to anybody? What is so gosh-darn important about your wife wearing a scarf over her head?) that following it becomes a sign that one is Going Along to Get Along.

After a while, the shibboleths supersede the Commandments. Not killing someone who steals your sheep is tough: it's easier not to eat pork. Gesture becomes more important than substance. Exceptions are made for good earners who are prepared to put on the social show. A man may beat his wife and steal from his neighbour, but as long as he keeps his beard long, and kicks back to the Bishops, he will be considered a Good Man. It's shallow, but a lot of societies function with it.

A lot of people understand 'Woke' as just such a coherent, if fanatical, collection of shibboleths. Sexism, Trans Rights, Climate Change... that kind of stuff. These are, you guessed, useful idiots. That includes every journalist who writes as if 'Woke' is a coherent moral movement or trend.

It isn't.

Each of the Woke shibboleths has single-issue activist organisation(s) pushing it. Each of those has their financiers, for whatever reason they have, and their leaders and chief ideologues. Some of those people have conducted successful entryist campaigns in what were once respected institutions (the BBC, the Met Office, the National Trust, amongst others) and turned them into organisations campaigning for the chosen ideological ends.

Take #MeToo. Between its transformation into a high-profile movement in late 2017, and a New York Times article about a year later, around two hundred mostly older men had lost their jobs, and around one hundred of them had been replaced by women. That was not a consequence, it was the purpose.

The preferred targets are older, preferably with waning reputations. Who are in the way and vulnerable. Who may no longer be profitable and whose business partners want to dump them. Who can be sacrificed to protect the others. Who may have been a**holes, and can finally be dumped to everyone's great relief.

Woke is not about righting wrongs. It's not about social justice.

It's the instigators of a cancel-campaign demonstrating their activist moxie, a calling-card, a CV bullet-point, for a salaried job with an activist organisation.

It's a tactic for getting jobs in, or getting people sacked from, a group of professions: politicians, academics, media folk, pundits, authors, actors, photographers, artists, activists.

Why these professions? Because serious businesses have a lot of filters in hiring, and generally do a lot to protect their productive people from whatever is the latest parasitic nonsense. Also, the kinds of people who go in for this year's nonsense avoid jobs where they will have to do some useful work involving actual skills. This is why Wokesters don't fight for representation in sewage maintenance, bus driving, North Sea oil rigging, or even computer programming. Too dull, and too easy to see if someone actually knows anything and is contributing.

Next time you see Woke outrage, remember it's about getting someone into or out of a job.

Judge an idea by the company that keeps it: Woke sucks.

Situationism: Why?

I made the mistake of re-reading a book about the Situationists recently (The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International by McKenzie Wark). I'm going to explain why I did this so you don't have to.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, psycho-geography, derives, detournaments and potlachs. A lot of their best jokes wound up as graffiti on Parisian walls in 1968.

I still didn't get it. What were they complaining about, exactly? What we used to call consumer society back in the 1960's? The Invisible Committee complain as much, forty years later, about self-improvement and (what amounts to) the ubiquity of the media conglomerates. What is it with French intellectuals and pop culture?

Something about pop-culture in the 1960's made Guy Debord think something new was happening? Organisations were starting to understand how to manipulate the news media. There was more advertising and it was more eye-catching. Even though the Beatles reminded us that money can't buy me love, the Sunday supplements were telling us that some nice new furniture would sure make life more comfortable and stylish. Pop-culture might have been trivial or merely amusing in the past, but now, Debord seemed to be suggesting, it was being used to was alienate ordinary people from each other and from a sense of community and commonality. For the nefarious purpose of making Capitalists richer.

Seems to call for a revolution of some sort. For French intellectuals at the time, that could only mean a political revolution. Wait. Didn't the Russians try that? And it didn't really work out too well. The Chinese weren't doing so well either, for all the hero-worship of Mao Tse-Tung. Political revolution without an accompanying social revolution had proved to be meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Political revolution was no longer possible, but without it, all other forms of 'revolution' are mere changes of fashion. Quite the corner to paint oneself into.

Nevertheless they felt that one has a duty to do something to protest, undermine, and generally not be so damn gung-ho about Capitalism and all its works. Hence the celebration by some French intellectuals of la perruque (otherwise known as 'skiving' in English), of minor acts of sabotage, of not going along with the system, petty thefts of time (visiting the dentist in work hours without 'making up the time') and other resources (searching for personal purchases on the company internet). The Invisible Committee, descendants of the Situationists, suggest communes that survive on a mixture of Welfare fraud, self-sufficiency, and part-time jobs. Even they admit that won't last long, but they don't suggest the next step. And it amounts to saying "find like-minded people", which is the last resort of the desperate.

These are petty acts, literally petite: 'small, insignificant'. The difference won't appear to the third place of decimals in the annual accounts of Groupe Casino (owners of Monoprix and others) or Amazon. That pettiness is the reason I just don't get the Situationists and their descendants. Haven't people been doing this since the first Egyptian to hide round the back of a pile of pyramid bricks?

Situationism and its descendants, Invisible or not, seem to have been taken up by people who don't find their current life entirely satisfying, but don't find it dis-satisfying enough to do anything about it. They do not want to engage in, say, Trade Union activism to improve their working conditions. Many of them have jobs that pay reasonably well but are mere bureaucratic roles (university lecturer, for instance), and they want to believe they are not just drones. They engage in la perruque, pay tradesmen in cash, insult everyone else's job (by calling it BS), and maybe even pay cash instead of card. This proves to them that they are resisting. For what that's worth.

Probably not the supporters Debord and the others were looking for, but in the end, a theory is judged by how it really-exists, by the company it keeps.

Showing Up

It's a show business term, meaning to arrive on time no matter what mood you're in, how much sleep you didn't get last night, or how sick you're feeling. Showing up is what you do when you have no enthusiasm for anything, don't want to be doing whatever it is, and couldn't give a flying damn if whatever it is never gets done. Showing up is when you do stuff despite yourself. It's when you grind through your tasks and routines even though you really want to stay home because you have run out of energy, and you have no interest in anything except maybe sleep and junk food.

Eventually that mood passes, through no action of your own, and all that Showing Up means you do not have to spend the next four weeks getting back to where you were before the slump set in.

What nobody tells you is that every time you Show Up, it takes a little bit more from your capacity to feel joy and spontaneity. Show Up too often and life starts to turn grey as an August sky in England: you will not know why you are doing anything, because nothing gives you pleasure any more. You can tell people who have Showed Up too often: they never stay a minute longer than they need to, because they are not getting any pleasure from being there or anywhere else. They prefer being on their own, doing nothing that needs to be done.

People who no longer have a real reason for getting out of bed, but work a job, exercise, eat right, get regular sleep, keep themselves alert and clean: these are the maestros of Showing Up. It's what anyone who does not want to become a pathetic mess of a victim does: sober drunks and clean addicts; divorced men whose children are alienated from them; men who are never going to have a girlfriend. It's what people who almost made the Olympic team do for the rest of their lives. It's what husbands and wives in dead marriages do because their religion won't let them divorce or they can't live on their own. It's what kids who were dropped from the band do, when the band gets its first hit. It's what the children of emotionally absent parents do, unless they turn to drugs and booze and promiscuity.

Normal people do not do this. Normal people react to a hard knock by putting on weight, drinking more, turning into couch potatoes, eating badly, sleeping erratically, turning up at work unshaved now and again, having bad days right in the middle of the office, and taking up with unsuitable partners. Normal people can let themselves go, get Type II diabetes, get overweight and flabby, or lose weight and look like they might snap in the wind. Normal people do not Show Up. They expect to be taken as they are, because what else should they do?

Showing Up is not a virtue. It's a necessity. The alternative is unwashed clothes, flab, and Type II diabetes.

Some people treat it as a productivity trick, the way some people treat not drinking as a productivity trick. Not drinking when you don't have a problem with booze is harmless. Showing Up when you don't want to be there is not harmless. It's what strips you of the capacity for joy and pleasure.

I spent at least a decade of my life Showing Up, and it was way too long.

Now I have to figure out how one lives without Showing Up.

On Being Lazy

Lazy is unwilling to do work or use energy.

Engineers use the word to describe part of a system that doesn't do anything unless it has to.

Lazy people don't avoid doing things. (That's indolence.)

They avoid making a big fuss and bother about getting whatever it is done.

Lazy people tell the truth. Then they don't have to remember what they said.

Lazy people tidy the house up once and then put stuff back where they got it from.

Lazy people have a routine. Then they don't have to think about what to do.

Lazy people have simple wardrobes. Then they don't have to think about what to wear.

Lazy people cook simple, healthy food. Because it takes three minutes to make an omelette, and thirty minutes to leave a chicken breast in the oven.

Lazy people work for a living. Have you any idea how hard criminals graft?

It's how you do the work, not the work you do, that makes you lazy.

Lazy people use the right tools for the job. It's easier that way.

Lazy people start a new job by working hard to understand and master it. Then they can do it all in the morning and kick back the rest of the day.

Napoleon said he preferred clever lazy Generals: they would get what he wanted done with the minimum of fuss. What did he do with the stupid, energetic ones? Those he had shot.

Lazy people do things that need doing, not things that some busybody thinks should be done.

Lazy people have time to do the things they want to do, because they are not busy doing make-work.

"Busy" does not mean "useful". It means "occupied with a task" or "having too much to do" or just "fussy".

Lazy people work smart, not hard.

And never do today what could be done tomorrow if there's something else you'd rather be doing today.

Because, when someone else describes you as "lazy", what they mean is you're not doing what they want you to be doing, when they want you to do it.

The boss gets to call you lazy, because he's paying.

No-one else does, because they aren't.

If This Is "Vintage Wolfe" What Does That Make Me?

 Browsing the fiction department in Foyles the other week, I found this...

Um. I read this when it first came out.

It's now "Vintage".

That wasn't supposed to happen.

And yet, it did.

Two Shots of Regent's Park

 

Sis and I took a stroll from Primrose Hill through Regent's Park the other Saturday. The view from Primrose Hill needs more than an iPhone to do it justice, but the view over the Regent's Canal and the playing fields are okay. I had no idea there was so much space given over to football pitches, and it looked like every third amateur football team was out that Saturday. And why not?

The Drums Are In The Middle

Where are the drums in your audiophile soundstage?

They're in the middle.

Which is odd, because in the studio, the drummer is usually in an isolation booth. A very isolation booth. Nowhere near the middle of anything.

In the mix, the drums are always in the middle.

Those are the rules.

Because at a live gig, the drums are always in the middle. (Even in an orchestra.)

Here's your starter for ten. All those speakers on and around that big stage. Stereo or mono?

Nope. Those speakers are mono. Maybe different frequencies from different parts of the speaker cabinet, but all the speaker units are relaying the same thing on both sides. (Unless they want a sound effect.)

Live concert speakers have to be mono, or most of the audience would get a horrible sound experience. Like sitting behind the horns at an orchestral concert.

The soundstage on a CD is not an attempt to present what was in the studio (there's no studio for EDM, for one thing).

It's an attempt to create a kind-of-live experience.

So now you're going to mix the first CD from a new band. There's a limited budget for mixing time. What do you do?

Make all the channels equal, both sides.

Just like it would be at the gig.

Then throw in enough differences to spread the sound between the speakers. Maybe shift the guitar slightly to the right, the bass to the left, the keyboards to the right of the guitar, but keep the sax solo in the middle. Because that's what would happen at the gig. Maybe someone wants the chorus voices to be well to the left and the synth to the right.

Yep that sounds good. Next track.

A bunch of the CDs I have must have been made like that.



And a lot were not.



(YMMV via You Tube and your hi-fi.)

Modern abstract music depends on sound design for its effect. Orchestras have a bias to the right where the horns, cellos and basses are. EDM is designed to swirl around between the speakers. Though the voice is usually in the middle, because that's where we expect the singer to be on stage.

But the results all have one thing in common.

The drums are always in the middle.

How To Avoid an Understaffed NHS and Logistics Industry Next Time

The next time there's a pandemic, or some other major incident, we cannot have a crucial proportion of the nurses, lorry drivers and other such key people upping and going home, never to return.

It's obvious we can't leave it to employers to be sensible about this. For the last couple of decades, at least, the NHS has preferred to use agencies to strip entire graduating classes out of third-world countries, instead of training UK-resident and rooted people. No adults in charge of recruitment and training there then.

The UK's time in the EU let UK employers get away with egregious recruitment and training policies. The last industry that messed-up that badly was banking, and that is now regulated to within an inch of its capacity for mis-behaviour.

Same thing has to happen with employment.

Bear with me for a moment.

The Employment Regulator would, on an industry-by-industry basis, review the roles and tasks within each industry, and separate them into essential and non-essential. A proportion of those roles judged 'essential' would have to be staffed by UK resident and rooted people, and the employer would need to demonstrate that they had training schemes in place to maintain that proportion. That proportion is the Essential Role Threshold (ERT). Expect it to be around 95%+ of the roles.

Non-essential roles can be staffed by anyone.

What's an essential role? One which is required to ensure the proper functioning of the society and economy. Lorry drivers. Nurses. Doctors. Firemen. Paramedics. Train and bus drivers. The guys who clean sewers. Telecoms engineers. Supermarket workers. Farmers. Policemen. Judges and other Court officials. Electricity, gas and water maintenance guys. Air traffic controllers. Pilots and aircrew. Plumbers. Builders of all trades. Armed Forces, MI5/6 and GCHQ (for which the ERT is 100%).

What's a non-essential role? Anything to do with marketing, sales, accounting, media, entertainment, fashion, cosmetics, restaurants, sports, and general management. Nurses and doctors are essential, but NHS bureaucrats are not. Neither are HMRC staff, journalists, lawyers, local and central government workers and any other bureaucrat.

It will get subtle. I'd say the people who run the BACS and other banking payment systems are essential, but the people who run the management information systems are not.

Anyone can do a non-essential job. Important to understand that point.

A company with essential roles would need to meet the ERT for those roles. Only legal UK residents with roots here would count towards a company's meeting its quota. The company can hire who it likes to do what roles it likes, but a multi-lingual renting bachelor who speaks three languages and has a readily transferrable skill doesn't count towards the 95%. Neither does anyone with dual (or more) nationalities or foreign partners. Or who has a property for personal use outside the UK. Outsourcing not allowed for essential roles. Onshore only. (Details to be clarified.)

Companies with over a certain number people in essential roles would need a training scheme in place for those roles. The NHS has to have training. A small firm of plumbers does not. People could do the training on spec and pay for it themselves, as lorry drivers do now, or companies could pay for someone to train, in a refund-or-work arrangement.

For these purposes "employing" includes "using subcontractors", so Pimlico Plumbers, which does not employ plumbers, would need to demonstrate that it has training scheme in place to replace its subcontractors as they leave. Swiping other people's staff does not count. (Details to be clarified on this one. Courier companies have the same problem.)

An organisation looking to make staff cuts would not be allowed to cut essential workers unless it could demonstrate that it had cut all the non-essential workers that it could.

Companies that could not reach the Essential Role Threshold within, say, five years of the Act coming into force, would be required to close down that part of their business.

The whole thing is monitored by the Employment Regulator.

The effect would be to restrict employment in essential roles to legal UK residents. People from other countries would still be able to work in market research, banking, advertising, women's fashion, non-food retail, manicure and personal care, restaurants, and a scad of other industries and roles.

It's a thought.

"Trait Conscientiousness"

I've been listening to Jordan B Peterson telling us that the people who do well in work have decent IQs and are high in "trait conscientiousness". 

I was working at the time, so I nodded along as it fitted my experience.

But not me.

Which I have noticed since retiring.

Conscientious people are supposed to miss working. So much that they go volunteer, or do something part-time. Or fall apart if they can't.

Not going to happen to me.

It's not that I don't give a toss about details. I do when it matters.

I didn't get my meaning from my employment. I called it my "day job" for heaven's sake.

I don't miss it one bit.

I'm not sure where I do get "meaning".

If I get any, and more to the point...

If I need any.

There are things I like to do.

There are things I need to do, such as regular exercise, and the usual slew of household and personal maintenance.

None of them are the kinds of things that conscientious people call "meaning" or "purpose".

Maybe I'm more chilled than I think I am.

Or to say the same thing another way: I am (very) low in "trait conscientiousness".

Pretentious Art Commentaries (More)

I don't usually link to someone else's work, but in this case, it's just so apposite to the recent Tate Modern post about BS commentaries accompanying art. It's a post by the legendary Dave Trott (okay, legendary if you know the UK advertising business) and it's about the same subject, but from a participant's point of view.

It's here.

Calling Bullshit - Bergstrom and West

I read Bergstrom and West's book Calling Bullshit recently. It's the latest in a long line of books about how various people attempt to confuse, mislead, mis-direct and otherwise bullshit us for their own nefarious ends. The line started with Darrell Huff's immortal How To Lie With Statistics and Bergstrom and West do a good job of updating it. They still believe in p-scores, but at least they describe p-hacking well enough that you likely won't trust p-scores again.

My inner analytic philosopher feels they fold too much into the idea of BS. Lying, deception, manipulation, gas-lighting, mis-direction, and numerous others, are distinct types of mis-communication, and we lose some insight by treating them all as aspects of one underlying thing.

Harry Frankfurt wrote his famous little book On Bullshit because he felt that bullshit was something new. He realised that all the hitherto forms of mis-communication were attempts to conceal the truth, and were deliberate, insofar as the liar knew they were telling a lie. The BS-merchant does not care whether what they say is true or false. They don't even care if it makes sense. Nor do they care whether you know the truth already. Their concern is to block the communication channels with their noise. This was what Frankfurt wanted to highlight: that our BS-filled media consists mostly of noise intended to keep other noise out, and that process corrupts the media, since it becomes concerned only with whose noise they transmit.

Recently a doctor in America claimed that it was within the scope of her Hippocratic Oath not to treat people who would not get vaccinated. Her claim that the Hippocratic oath is very science-based and that the "science" said being unvaccinated was a threat... this is not bullshit. It is either deeply cynical or deeply deranged, and it needs to be treated as such. The deliberate attempts to create an atmosphere of fear in Spring 2020 by almost every Government's PR agencies, were not bullshit. It was propaganda intended to dupe the citizenry, and that is not on the same moral plane as a PR campaign for soap.

However responsible and measured what Bergstrom and West say is, you and I don't have the time, and we don't have the resources of a pair of academics, to fact-find, investigate and provide evidence for our claim that today's report about, say and, a hot topic in the UK at the time of writing, how it is essential that the Government allow Eastern European truck drivers into the country to fill the alleged 100,000 shortfall in the number of drivers.

This example is special pleading with a helping of BS on the side. The BS is a) the estimate of the shortfall, and b) that it can only be filled by Eastern Europeans. How do I know these things? Am I an expert on the Logistics industry in the UK? No, and I don't need to be. I am familiar, as anyone over the age of forty is, with the attitudes and behaviour of the people who run the UK's larger businesses. They don't want to train anyone, they don't want to have to pay a market-clearing wage, and they don't want permanent employees. They have shown these behaviours for decades. So of course they want to import ready-made drivers who will work for less for all sorts of reasons.

Those are the kind of rules-of-thumb that ordinary people need. Here are some more of mine.

Any subject with the word 'Science' in its title, most likely isn't, and nor are any of its claims. Hence, any research about the benefits or faults of lifestyle-choices can be ignored. (Bacon is bad for you, red wine is good for you, you only have to walk three times a week...)

Anyone who says 'The Science is In' does not understand how science works. Newtonian physics was "in" right up to the day in 1905 when it wasn't.

Projections, forecasts, models and other forms of computerised number-generation are mostly hokum. The Met Office has been trying to forecast the weather since before I was born, and it's still mostly wrong.

If the cui who bono's from saying it, says it, nobody should be surprised. Hence, you can ignore all those reports from charities, NGOs or professional bodies showing that whatever it is they are trying to stop has got worse and they need more money.

Never trust any process that generates revenue as long as it doesn't solve the problem.

Real experts know how little they really know, and how inadequate that is. As a result they will never work for or advise a) Governments, b) big business, c) International NGOs. Those "experts" being quoted in the Press? Mostly they aren't.

Insiders are not going to explain what really goes on to outsiders, and most journalists, academics, civil servants, politicians and regulators are outsiders, so none of them have a clue.

Governments listen to the advisors whose advice backs up the desired policy. When the desired policy changes, so do the advisors.

Scientists and experts have very, very narrow fields of expertise. Once they start talking outside that, say, about public policy, they are likely as ignorant as you or me.

Percentages and other comparisons are meaningless without context. That context is carefully with-held in the publication and press release.

Watch for odd phrases and metaphors, as well as stock phrases, cliches, suddenly fashionable phrases, dog-whistles and other oddities of language.

The graphics are probably there to create an impression, not provide information. Best not look at all.

Anything that sounds too good or too bad to be true, probably is. (Props to Bergstrom and West for that one.)

Faced with profit claims by a company, check how much tax they are paying. If they aren't, the Inland Revenue doesn't think they are making a profit. (Props to Terry Smith for that one.)

If a Government knows something is Bad, it bans, restricts or protects against it tout de suite. Or it makes you take precautions, like wearing seatbelts. If all it does is fine or tax you for doing it, then the Government knows it is actually pretty harmless.

Never trust anyone whose advice will result in job losses and inconvenience for other people.

Only believe it after it has been officially denied.

The majority of press articles are advertising or PR of one form or another. Journalists do not leave the office now. They work with what comes to them - it wasn't a journalist who found the Panama Papers, or the Great MPs Expenses Scandal. Journalists re-cycle press releases, official announcements, and the Press Agencies.

The media does not care about content. It cares about clicks. The purpose of the media, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the others, is to provide user / reader / viewer attention to advertisers. The "content" is there to draw in that attention, whether or not the content is true. So almost everything in the media is BS (that is, its truth or falsity is irrelevant to the editors). It was always a bit thus, but it is now almost all thus.

Finally, if you want to see a melt-down, ask Karl Popper's Question: "under what circumstances would you give up that belief / policy / law / judgement / theory / hypothesis?".

What do you do if someone pulls some egregious BS, gaslighting, manipulation or other such on you?

Friends don't BS friends. So whoever it is, they aren't a friend. Which means you act politely, change the subject, remember a pressing appointment, and otherwise leave. They won't miss you and you won't miss them. Fellow employees, however, BS each other all the time, but a lot of that is work, and you have to BS them back. It's expected. What you do when faced with a snowflake, I'm not sure, but the current consensus is: unplug your laptop and run to a safe space.

Why Some People Are Not Going Back To The Office

It seems that Civil Servants and the staff of retail banks, insurance companies and other large office-based employers are not rushing back to their offices.

The usually-cited reason they should is this, from a letter to the Daily Telegraph:

For the employee, interpersonal contact in the office promotes problem-solving, communication and the generation of ideas. It reduces isolation.

To which I say: BS. Or rather: that may be true in some places, but I haven't worked in any of them for the last twenty years.

Isolation is what you feel:

when you cannot talk, write, or even use a facial expression, without first estimating its reception by the audience

when you are surrounded by people who feel they can police what you say and how you say it

when there are corporate policies encouraging certain styles of communication, and penalties for failing to go along

when the decisions affecting you and your work are made by people you never meet for reasons that have nothing to do with any of your concerns

when you are in the middle of an over-crowded open-plan office, and for days on end, everyone you need to talk to is on a conference call, in a meeting, or just doesn't have any time to help you problem-solve and generate ideas

when the people you need help and replies from, can reject your request because they "don't have the resources"

when you cannot get a budget for the things you need to do your job

when you cannot get the support for the things you need to do your job

when you are the only person in your team using the skills you use and have the knowledge you have

This was the daily life of most of those Civil Servants and other Big Office workers in 2019

Why? How? 

A lot of employers spent much of the years between 2000-2019 making their offices less and less pleasant places by spending less and less on the buildings.

Where once there was a seat for everyone, now there is a seat for just over half of them.

Where once everyone had their own place, now nobody does.

Where once Directors and other Big Beasts had their own offices, safely away from us Little People, now they are scattered around the floor and we Little People can't relax, communicate and be creative, in case we're doing it in the wrong way.

Where once you sat with your team, now total strangers can perch amongst you for a day. They never introduce themselves and avoid eye contact, so nobody talks all day because it might be someone from HR, Audit, or some other internal policing group.

The quality of HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) got worse and worse, because the requirements are based on building size, not occupancy.

The offices smelled of food from 11:30 to 14:30 every day.

Don't even ask about the toilets.

This too was the daily life of those Civil Servants and other Big Office workers in 2019.

The horrible quality of office life in 2019 was the main reason people packed up their laptops and went home so willingly in March 2020.

Nobody is talking about this.

If "working in offices" was so beneficial, nobody would need to make people do it. But they do, so it isn't.

Fear of Music: Why We Like Rothko But Not Stockhausen

I read David Stubbs' Fear of Music and Mars by 1980 recently. The second is a history of electronic music in the West, focussing heavily on the bands of the 1970's - 1990's. The first is an attempt to understand why Basquiat sells for millions, but David Bailey is pretty much broke. (You know who Derek Bailey is, right? See, that's his point.)

 

(Why you don't know who Derek Bailey is)

Stubbs love of this kind of music, from Edgar Varese to Sonic Youth, is sincere and deeply woven into his youth. He knows whereof he speaks.

So do I. I have a special section in my CD collection, where I keep Ligeti, Xenakis, Boulez, John Cage, Penderecki, Edgar Varese, Stockhausen, Luciano Berio and even Sally Beamish. Anyone interested in music should know some of this stuff, and my dutiful listening was well before streaming. (You should stream it. Most of these people are dead, have academic jobs or quite enough money.) The only recording made by Mirror/Dash is in my Quboz favourites. I commend Olivier Assayes' film Noise to you: I was rooted to the sofa. As an undergraduate I went to the only performance at my university by Derek Bailey. I have heard Iskra 1903 on late-night Radio Three programs. In the right circumstances, I do like a bit of noise guitar. Those circumstances are not frequent, but Stubbs' book has made me think I should devote a little more time to the genre over the next few months.

 

(Stockhausen's Kontakte: I found it so you don't have to.)

A little bit of theory.

There are two broad business orientations: producer, and, consumer. The producer makes something, tries to sell it, and then blames the public when they don't buy it, or tries to get a Government grant to subsidise his operation. The consumer finds out what he can provide that the customer wants, checks that the customer is willing to pay an economic price, and provides it. Producers tend to think they are mis-understood and the audience doesn't want to put in the work to appreciate their challenging work. Consumers tend to follow the money and can have a wilting effect on high culture.

Old-school publishing houses used to do both: they had an imprint for books that the public would buy but were not what anyone would call fine literature, and the money from that subsidised the low but prestigious sales of the fine literature. The publisher had social cachet from supporting well-connected authors, paid for by books the public wanted to read. It worked fine until the conglomerates came along, and dumped the fine literature imprints, because why lose money?

The Romantic conception of the artist is pure producer. The artist has their vision, is driven to produce what they have to produce, and it's the public's task to understand it, like it, and buy it. Otherwise the Romantic artist either starves to death, or gets embittered or cynical while living off a private income.

What is striking about the development of noise / electronic music up to about 1970 is just how much of it was supported by universities, Ministries of Culture, and State broadcasters. Everyone from Stockhausen to Delia Derbyshire was paid for by the taxpayer. After that, it seems to have moved into the private sector, with the invention of the Mood Synthesiser and its successors, until a simple Mac Air has ten times the music-making capabilities of the entire European avant-garde scene in (say) 1960, and with a friendly user-interface. State subsidies is very producer.

Stubbs is a producer. He likes weird noisy music and can't understand why the rest of us don't. He thinks it's our fault - after all, we can take Jackson Pollock, so why won't we listen to Edgar Varese? Why does Warhol sell and Xenakis doesn't?

 

(Ameriques by Edgar Varese. David Stubbs loves it.)

For one thing, the comparison is off. The pictorial analogue of a lot of the music he is taking about, is not Rothko or Pollock, but an especially impasto'd de Kooning at his misogynist peak, or a raw meat paintings by Chaim Soutine. Not what anyone wants to look at just before lunch in the restaurant at the Tate Modern. Or afterwards.

(Xenakis is more like this)

For another, the expectation is off. Avant-garde music is not the only art-form with small audiences. Go to a fringe theatre in London (when this nonsense is over). (I have been in one where there were more people in the audience than on the stage.) Morvern Callar, one of the best films of 2002, had a total first-run audience of about two thousand people in the whole UK. Unless they are an established name, a poet is lucky to sell fifty copies. So are some novelists. Many papers in science and mathematics are comprehensible to perhaps ten people in the world. All those people beavering away in Head Offices producing powerpoints, are doing so for audiences of less than twenty.

Small audiences are the norm. Large audiences need an explanation.

The avant-garde music scene is nowhere near as socially sexy as the avant-garde art scene was and the pop / contemporary art scene is now. The rich gather and network at Christies and Sotheby's, not at the Wigmore Hall. The reason is very simple: they can buy art, but they can't buy music.(*) The era of the court composer is over - blame the repeal of the Corn Laws.

The arts are not an examination that the audience has to pass. With some exceptions. If you don't like the music of J S Bach, you can say so and not listen to it. If you say that it is bad music, well, you would just be wrong. Audiences show their dislike of Luciano Berio by staying away. If they say it is bad music, well, they would be wrong about that. If they said it was wilfully harsh, discordant, and lacked a decent groove, could anyone disagree?

And then there's the whole attitude thing. Here's Evan Parker, a legend of the British avant garde music scene.



You can't dance to it. You can't **** to it. You can't study to it. You can't play along with it.

On the other hand, here's Kim Gordon, who has been doing this stuff for literally decades.



You can't dance to it. You can't **** to it. You can't study to it. You can't play along with it. But I couldn't stop watching and listening.

In an earlier post, I said that, amongst other things, art had to be self-sufficient. A piece had to stand on its own. Another thing art has to do is fascinate, a verb that descends from 'bewitching'. It has to reward our attention and focus, to let us sink in to it. Maybe we sink in meditatively, as before a painting in the National Gallery, or we give ourselves up to it, as with a favourite dance track.

A lot of avant garde music is intentionally off-putting and detached. It doesn't let us in, but keeps on slapping us about with sudden noises and shocks. Most people don't respond to that: I don't. Perhaps David Stubbs does. But he is in a minority.

And that's the answer to his question.

(*) The exception, and it's the only one, is the one copy of a Wu Tang Klan album Once Upon A Time In Shaolin. Its history is worth reading.