September / October 2017 Diary

The outside of my house is shiny and spotless. It’s a mid-terrace, so we’re talking front and back. It took Primrose Decoration nine calendar days, with I suspect two men each day, to do the job. I had left that paint and the woodwork underneath, way too long. That was mid-October, and the Monday they started, I was recovering from food poisoning, so I spent the day over at my Mother’s house, and walked in and out of Kingston through the suburban fairy-land that is Teddington-by-the-Thames. After the decorators had finished, I took a Friday off to vacuum and clean the place from top to bottom.

The food poisoning knocked me for six for about three weeks. Sis had something similar, and the low point was both of us ordering the Suet Pudding at our annual visit to Rules. Usually we have game and relish it, but not this time. Comfort food. I was having a six-day weekend, and it wasn’t the best time off I’ve had. As always this year, the weather was dull and colder than the surrounding days. When I went back to work, the sun shone.

I'm hesitating now because I can't think of how to phrase what I keep thinking I need to say, or for that matter, if what I think I want to say is actually really about the issue.

My life is running in a nice little rut: sleep, commute, work, gym, home. I am less and less inclined to break out of it, not even to see the Alma-Tadema exhibition at the Leighton House, and I feel no great urge to see all the rest of the art shows in London, which is silly, because some of them would have had me queueing at the door five years ago. Now I’m like… meh. I don’t feel like I’m missing out, but I feel that I should feel like I’m missing out. Pretty meta, huh? Having put it like that, it’s obviously a silly feeling and I should let it go.

One nice thing I did in September was to get to the gym on Saturday morning and Sunday afternoon, then the NFL decided to block the A316 at Twickenham for two consecutive Sundays, I had the food poisoning, and now it’s cold and dark. So I’m doing Saturday morning, Monday and Wednesday afternoons.

Sis couldn’t make our September supper, so I had supper for one at Eneko, tried Jamon Jamon after a Sunday afternoon at the gym, and then Sis and I went to Rules. Not doing Caravan in Exmouth Market again: when it’s good it’s good, but when it’s merely okay, it’s over-priced. Something that can be said for a lot of mid-market places now.

I saw Logan Lucky and Blade Runner 2049 at the local Cineworld, and Daphne at the Curzon Bloomsbury. The autumn dance card was Hofesh Schecter and the Lyon Opera Ballet at Sadler’s Wells.

On DVD I saw The Night Of, Californication S6, Stand Lee’s Lucky Man S1, London and Robinson in Space, Vivre Sa Vie and Julietta, and Vinyl. Vinyl was watchable but given the talent, could have been so much better.

I finished reading Vaihinger's The Philosophy of As If, though I did flip the pages on a lot of the reviews of how other people's thinking did or didn't recognise the idea of fictions; also. Mackenzie Wark's Beneath the Pavement, The Beach (a title by the way that happens to make literal sense in the Netherlands); Antonio Garcia Martinez's Chaos Monkeys; Benjamin Lytal’s A Map of Tulsa; Dan Lyon’s Disrupted; Rob Brotherton’s Suspicious Minds; Hugh Aldersey-Williams’ Periodic Tales; Helen Czerski’s Storm In A Tea-Cup; Hans Fallada’s Tales From The Underworld; Dominique Loreau’s The Art of Simplicity; John Kuprenas’ 101 Things I Learned in Engineering School.

Of these Periodic Tales and Storm in a Tea-Cup are excellent popular science - you will learn new stuff from both. Tales From The Underworld may be the best single collection of short stories I’ve read. (Not the most arty and stylistic remarkable - that’s Hemingway or Ballard - but as stories.) Chaos Monkeys is an eye-opening look at Facebook, while Disrupted will make you even more sure that the current fad for Internet start-ups is an insider's game played by sharks.

The fake outrage over Harvey Weinstein and the roll-on to the House of Commons is the last straw for me and the Good-Think media. Frack them all, hypocrites with full-time jobs on three month’s notice who don’t tip their Uber driver, order in sushi from a piece-worker for Deliveroo, and then ask who is going to look after the children now the Eastern European nannies won’t come over to be paid a pittance? So I may be going on a media-exclusion diet for a while. (“The Guardian? (sniffs) I can ‘andle it”.) Time to start looking at my art books at breakfast again.

Really? This Is News?

I’ve missed both my regular blogging days. This is because I’m working on a couple of things that take up much of my write-the-blogs-on-the-train time.

The biggest story out there is “Middle Age Men Occasionally Make Passes At Girls Who Wear Glasses”. The men, who have committed the cardinal sin of Not Being Hot, are required to resign and emasculate themselves in the town square. For making clumsy and crude passes at women.

I’m expected to take newspapers who even print this nonsense seriously? The editors who put it on the front pages, and the op-ed writers who churn out misandrist garbage, are expecting me to treat them as serious adults?

This is attention-seeking, virtue-signalling revenge and internal politics.

While the world should not have persons of any gender seeking sexual favours in return for career advancement, it does, and while it does, the correct response to requests for such favours is "I'm sorry Mr Farnsbarns, but if that's what it takes, I'll carry on as a supply teacher."

Kevin Spacey was dropped on allegations, not a confession or a verdict of guilty. When people get dropped on allegations, it's because the other side have been waiting for an excuse to do it. Same remark about MP's. The brave women coming forward with tales about MPs are being used to facilitate some internal re-arrangements and sackings.

The commentators are a bunch of hooting monkeys, double-plus goodthinking hypocrites who know they are so far from even the margins of anything important, they have invented a parallel universe of specious issues (*) that gets its justification from click counts and readership figures. Even Private Eye are Remoaners, while Guido Fawkes has been White Knighting. And people wonder why I read Zero Hedge.

The goodthinkers feel have lost control of what they thought was their world, and most of all they have been revealed as as entitled, arrogant, smug and patronising. Of course they are making the most of any little scandal they can. It's a distraction.

At first I thought it was a moral panic.
In the 1980’s the Left lost it after Thatcher-Reagan. There was a moral panic then as well: Satanic Child Abuse and what’s now called False Memory Syndrome.

The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

(*) Real issues? Aside from anything to do with Brexit? Zero hours contracts; piece-workers (aka 'the gig economy'); house prices and rents; the lack of NHS preparation for replacing foreign nurses and doctors; the lack of jobs for school-leavers and even graduates; the ticking time-bomb of low wage inflation; the continuing polarisation of skills and knowledge; removing illegal immigrants and failed asylum-seekers; policing the UK's borders; the poor academic performance of young white males...

(This post was edited and improved 5/11/17.)

Most of my Box Sets

These I still have. I dumped a lot of others which I now can’t remember at all.

Game of Thrones S1-3
Black Sails S1
Braquo S1- 3
Southland S1+2
Penny Dreadful S1
Fringe S1
The Event
Scandal
The Shield S1-7
The West Wing S1-7
Blood Ties
Battlestar Galactica S1-5
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles S1+2
Dirt S1
True Detective S1+2
Nurse Jackie S1-3
Sons of Anarchy S1-7
The Closer S1-3
Lie To Me S1-3
Burn Notice S1-7
Nikita S1-4
Justified S1
Mad Men S1-4
Miami Vice S1
Inspector de Luca
Homicide: Life On The Streets S1-6
Boomtown S1
Dark Angel S1+2
The Wire S1-5
Tru Calling
Buffy the Vampire Slayer S1-3
Firefly
Dollhouse S1+2
Californication S1-6
Life S1+2
Elementary S1-4
The Prisoner
Generation Kill S1
K Street
Murder One S1+2
In Plain Sight S1-3
How to Make It In America S1
The Bureau S1
Follow The Money S1
Young Montalbano S1+2
The Newsroom S1-3
Angel S1-5
Inspector Nardone
Inspector Montalbano
The Returned S1
Fog and Crimes
Billions S1
Arne Dahl
Unit One S1
The Bridge S1+2

Cop shows. I like cop shows. And Joss Wheedon.

Six Weeks With Tidal

I’ve now had about six weeks using Tidal Premium, the 312kps streaming service. Given that the CD-quality hi-fi service needs around 5Mb/s streaming, I would not trust, given my recent experience, Talk-Talk not to throttle me back and then take four weeks to pretend they hadn’t done anything of the sort and re-set the service.

I thought I would use Tidal to listen to new music, and indeed, the very first time on, this was the first track I heard, from a playlist:

What I’d forgotten is that most new music, given how much I’ve heard in my life, is either awful crap not to my taste, or is a lot like music I’ve already heard before.

What I’m really doing is listening again to albums that I grew tired of or just left behind at some point: to my old record collections. One big surprise was how much I liked the Paul Simon album, which is now on my Wish List, along with Laura Nyro’s Smile. I had a Frank Sinatra binge one Saturday, and a Duke Ellington binge another weekend. I’m listening to Van Morrison’s Hard Nose The Highway now, and it’s as good as I remember it. I finally listened to the Eagle’s Hotel California album all the way through. Also some War Against Drugs, Snarky Puppy, Famous Blue Raincoat, some ABC, and Steely Dan. I’d forgotten how downright weird Katy Lied is.

This is a walk down memory lane. It will come to an end, and then I’ll have the whole classical and new music thing to address again.

Tidal's classical music coverage is weak, but now I think about it, classical music lovers will pay for the CD, and I can imagine that the Naxos and others of this world might not want to play. Then there's Classical Archives https://www.classicalarchives.com/, at $80 a year.

Now for the serious bit. The lack of the Complete Works of the SOS Band is criminal. I have no idea which record company is screwing around with their catalogue, but they should stop it, and release re-masters of all the albums. The SOS Band were the greatest single contribution that Jam And Lewis made to Western Culture, and that’s saying a lot, given the rest of their catalogue.

I’m not sure I’ve put the effort into getting the best out of the Tidal search engine: from a quick tour round some classical forums, the search engine is rated as rubbish, but they say the music is there if you can find it.

Would I recommend it? Sure. Why not? Is it better than the others? I don’t know. Right now I’m streaming Classical Archives Internet Radio which is making a darn fine job on my Mac Air of a Sonata for Two Pianos by Muzio Clementi - and if you don’t know Clementi’s work, you’re in for a treat. So I may be subscribing there for a while.

The Red-Light District

Walk across Waterloo or Hungerford bridges after dark and the London skyline is a riot of red "here is a large building or tall crane you might not want to fly into" lights. It's quite a sight.

A Hard Brexit's A-Gonna Happen

A brief return to Brexit. I was heartened by the Danish Finance Minister telling the EU to get on with it and stop bitching about the divorce payment. A couple of days later I woke up and realised it’s not going to work out like that. A day or so ago, Donald Tusk confirmed as much when he denied that the EU was working on plans for a hard Brexit.

The problem is the EU’s legal imperialism: that for special trading terms, a country must surrender its legal sovereignty to the ECJ and ECHR, and allow the four freedoms. The Swiss gave up when the EU insisted on that. The British will not back down on legal sovereignty either. So that’s that. No agreement on special trade conditions is possible.

As for the payment, that will have to be a number based on a bill of goods that can be sold to Parliament. My guess is that Parliament will recognise it has to pay for some of Junker’s wine cellar, but won’t want to think it’s paying for all of it. It’s just possible the EU could be sensible about that, but not likely. This is why the payment is linked in the British negotiation with special trade terms, so that the EU only get any money if they give up the legal imperialism. That’s why the EU want to settle the bill before they talk about trade and therefore their legal imperialism. You gotta think the politicians kinda got that at the start.

Far more important for the EU is that any agreement is not hi-jacked by EU members, many of whom - especially by Ireland and Liechtenstein - have a lot of previous form at that. Barnier thinks it will take six months to achieve ratification, which means he’s expecting a lot of internal horse-trading. There’s even a chance that the horse-trading will - how surprising - require a last-minute and unwelcome change to what was agreed in autumn 2018. The idea being that everyone will be so tired that they will agree to anything to get shot of the thing.

If I can see that coming, I’m fairly sure people who do this for a living have as well.

That’s why, on March 29, 2019, there’s not going to be an all-encompassing agreement that covers trade, immigration, the role of the European Courts, the four freedoms, and Junker’s wine bill. The UK will leave Europe, possibly without paying a cent on the day, and be free at last from the European Courts.

Which is the exact desired outcome both sides want. It allows the EU to maintain its doctrine of legal imperialism, and the UK to achieve legal sovereignty. It prevents the last-minute horse-trading that nobody, in the EU or the UK, wants. It removes the need to have 27 countries agree on everything from cheese import quotas to how many Romanian builders can work in the UK at any given time.

Now you know this is what everyone wants, do their actions make more sense? They aren’t trying to reach an agreement. They are trying not to reach an agreement in a polite and constructive manner. The autumn 2018 deadline will pass, March 2019 will loom closer, everyone will realise that more talking time won’t do it, and March 29th will come and go. Not so much with a bang, but a whimper. The French will impose a bunch of spiteful bans and inconveniences in their national interest; and the EU will impose tactically another bunch of equally irritating bans and inconveniences. (The UK will not impose any spiteful or petty bans, because that’s how they make the EU look like a bunch of petty twats in the eyes of the world.)

It’s then possible for both sides to agree on individual issues without compromising general principles. The UK will agree to pay for pensions, the EU will lift some of its petty bans. The UK will agree to pay slightly inflated prices for participation in Europol and other individual pan-European institutions, and other petty bans will be lifted. Everyone will agree that this is terribly un-European, and just the sort of thing those perfidious Brits do, but after all, business must go on. For cosmetic purposes, the EU and the UK will start trade talks, expected to last at least twenty years, to avoid using WTO terms. (By the way, Canada doesn’t seem to have suffered for the last twenty years without a special deal with the EU, so WTO can’t be all bad.)

2019 will feel a little chaotic. there will be ‘administrative agreements’ and ‘temporary arrangements’ to prevent the paperwork stopping trade, and a switch to WTO tariffs (instead of EU tariffs). The small but irritating number of welfare scroungers and Euro-beggars will return to Europe – but some will stay on to be the subject of populist shock headlines in five years’ time. There will be a short hiccough in the supply of young people from Southern Europe and builders from Eastern Europe, until the word goes round that the UK is still open for business – and who really wants UK citizenship? Some medium-sized companies who thought that Brexit would ‘work’ will have hard times, but the large firms will be fine. It will turn out that all that manufacturing in China means that we were already really trading under WTO rules anyway.

Within five years, everyone in the EU will be fed up of being run by the German Finance Ministry, the Poles will refuse to accept more immigrants, and the EU Army, aka the Deutches Heer, will escort the refugees over the Polish border. Oh yeah. The first time as tragedy, the second as comedy.

Monty Hall - Stick or Switch? It Depends How Often You Can Play

The Monty Hall problem is back in the news, or at least the weekend edition of the Financial Times, again, I think because Monty Hall died recently. Here’s the problem:

You’re on a quiz show with a host, Monty. There are three cabinets A, B and C. In one cabinet is a car, and in the other two a goat. You get to nominate a door, and then Monty will open one of the other doors and ask you if you want to change your choice. What you know is that Monty never opens the door with the car in it. Never. Should you change your choice?

The answer, given by Marylin vos Savant, is that you should, as in two-thirds of the cases, you will win the car. When she gave that answer, the wrath of a zillion statisticians and mathematicians descended on her. Here’s her argument: there are three options (in order A, B, C)

1. Car Goat Goat
2. Goat Car Goat
3. Goat Goat Car 

If you pick A, you lose by switching in option 1 and win in 2 and 3. Otherwise you win by switching in the other two options. Take the odds and switch. At least when you have the opportunity to play the game over and over.

What happens when you can only play once? Choose A and suppose that Monty opens door C to show a goat. Now you know there are only two options:

1. Car Goat Goat
2. Goat Car Goat

In this case, the odds are 50-50 for switching. Why? Because you don’t have third option of Goat-Goat-Car which would force Monty to open door B.

Play the game over and over, and switching will win more often. Play once, and it’s a flip of the coin, so you may as well switch, since the odds are the same. There’s a winning strategy for multiple plays, but not for a single play.

Damn that’s clever.

Statistics is not only hard, it also only applies when you can repeat the experiment.

What about all the other arguments, including one quoted on Wikipedia that says this;

By opening his door, Monty is saying to the contestant 'There are two doors you did not choose, and the probability that the prize is behind one of them is 2/3. I'll help you by using my knowledge of where the prize is to open one of those two doors to show you that it does not hide the prize. You can now take advantage of this additional information. Your choice of door A has a chance of 1 in 3 of being the winner. I have not changed that. But by eliminating door C, I have shown you that the probability that door B hides the prize is 2 in 3.’

Here’s the mistake: "the probability that the prize is behind one of them is ⅔” should read “the probability that the prize is behind one or other of them is ⅔”. No argument that tries to establish that switching always gives a 2:1 advantage can be right, because when you can only go once the odds are 50-50.

On a one-shot play, sticking is as good as switching.

And in the TV show, you only got one shot.