Views From Maryon Park

 Well, the same view, but cropped.

The top one is like one of those Victorian landscapes with a title such as "View from a hill in south London". The middle one is "my zoom lens wasn't long enough to get those darn trees out of the frame". The bottom one is "How much would it really cost the Council to trim a few trees once a year so everyone could enjoy a panoramic view of London"?

Land of The Grey and Pink: Nine Feet Underground

Of course I first heard this in music history class. I did not first hear it on a portable LP player at university. Good heavens no. It's a long insrumental piece, one of a kind in the band's work. I don't go much for the twee Canterbury Sound songs, but this is a knock-out.



The Canterbury Sound band you may have heard of is the Soft Machine. These guys all knew each other and played together on occasion. It shows.

The Sound of Heaven - Canto Gregoriano

Sometime in 1995 I read that some raves were sending the crowds home to the sound of Gregorian Chant. I wasn't a raver, so I had no idea if it was true, but I went to a small record shop in a nearby high street and asked if they had the album. On cassette. They did. I played it and immediately understood why this was good music to chill everyone out at the end of a long night of dancing to loud music.

Hymn singing assumes you can read. Not many people could read in 800AD, and Church services were conducted in Latin. That is not as daft as it sounds. Latin was the official language of the Roman Empire, and when that fell, the Catholic Church carried on, using Latin. Many ordinary people would have had some basic spoken business and religious Latin. They would have understood the words.

Gregorian chant is one tune sung by many voices. The choir sings a chord that moves up and down with the tune, but does not change within itself. The harmony does not change. Churches echo, so the notes change slowly, and the tune moves to nearby notes, not jumping around as tunes will much later. The tunes are also long and curving incorporating a number of phrases, far more than a modern song. The words often disappear into the echoes and the voices. All very different from the songs that the congregation would have sung at home or in pubs, and deliberately different: religion and its feelings are one thing, ordinary life is another. Gregorian chant was and is the sound of heaven.

(You can read about Gregorian chant in Wikipedia, and that article lists some fearsomely learned studies of the music.)

Why did this collection of songs take off - it went triple platinum - when so many others do not? It's the sound of the monks of the Monastère de Santo Domingo de Silos. A reviewer said: "the ensemble is not always perfect, but if these are not professional singers, they are, and they sound like, truly professional monks." It's the sincerity we respond to.

 

Settle in and enjoy.

So why do I play it? Because it is terrific background when I want to feel calm, maybe to focus on what I'm writing, or do something that is best done without a mind wanting to jump to something else. It removes distractions and is not itself distracting.

And sometimes because I want to chill out.

Hazy London

 

The 14th February this year was a wonderful day. The air was full of a haze at a distance, but bright, clear and sparkling immediately around one. I took a couple of shots over central London, but they didn't have the clarity I like in long-range photos. Better eyes than mine insisted that this one was a keeper. So here it is.

Artificial Intelligence and Aluminium Tennis Racquets: Same Opportunity, Different Sport

The PR flacks for ChatGPT probably deserve a bonus.

They have managed to convince a lot of people that anyone who currently has a desk job will be out of work by the end of the year.

ChatGPT and anything like it dips into the existing corpus of pictures / words / facts / academic papers / novels / poems / political speeches / whatever and produces something to your specifications from that corpus.

In response to "Produce a Theory of Everything that does not look like String Theory or Quantum Gravity" it will fail. Unless it tires pulling a Sokal Hoax on us. Likewise "Prove or refute the Collatz Conjecture" will draw a blank, though an icon of a blowing fuse might be appreciated.

"Paint a picture in a style nobody has seen yet" is logically impossible for it to do, since it has to draw on existing pictures. "Write a novel in the style of no previous writer about a subject nobody has written about before" would be equally impossible. A Real Person could attempt both, even if they failed through lack of checking for uniqueness - the point is that a Real Person could produce a painting or a novel that they had never seen or read before, but for ChatGPT it is a logical impossibility.(*)

Anyway, that isn't the point.

The point is that AI is just another tool. Like all new tools it will split a given community into those who can make it work to their advantage and those who can't get on with it. This was also true about spreadsheets, the metal tennis racquet, oil paint, sous vide and a thousand other new techniques and gadgets. AI in medicine would be a tremendous support tool, especially to older doctors who start to forget things or don't keep up (yes, I know Dreyfus used doctors as examples of Experts who could not be reproduced by AI, but after many years I've come to the conclusion that he wouldn't say those things now. He was writing in a medically-simpler age.)

How much of a difference is there between a writer turning out novels within a genre and an AI turning out a novel within a genre? The genre fans want the genre content, not the writer's unique personality (even if the genre is the writer, as in Chandler or Simenon).

There is probably an audience who would appreciate AI-generated genre novels, and one that won't. Publishers will produce both.

For decades, the British television has been producing TV that looks as if it was written to a set of rules and conventions that feel fake to me.

As for AI-Fake paintings, what else would you call a Thomas Kincaid? Or a Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst or Takashi Murakami? Just because these are Human Beings, doesn't mean to say they aren't using AI techniques, or perhaps, that those are the techniques that can be incorporated into AI.

Which actually helps to make a point I'm exploring in a long essay on the Philosophy of Mathematics, that technique rather than specific content is where originality really lies.



(*) This may be debatable, depending on how one thinks of the difference between "originality" and "variations", and at what point a "variation" becomes a "novelty" becomes "original". Those concepts are related but also have differences.

Parliament Hill Viewpoint Viewers

I bought an adapter to put the Zuiko lenses from my analogue Olympus onto the Fuji. The lens I wanted to try was the Zuiko 35-105 zoom. The X-E4 made didn't know the f-stop and seemed to default to the minimum ISO in the range of the setting (160 in this case), and then made reasonable decisions about shutter speed. (The sensor knows how much light it's getting even if it doesn't know the f-stop, so it may have some default speeds against various amounts of light.)

I took a few shots just to get the feel of the camera with a heavy lens on it, and to see if the results were even reasonable. This one came out well, and the others suggested that I needed to put more work into focussing. Getting the shutter speed "right" will be about treating the first shot as a test, and making adjustments using the manual dial

 

Guitar-Induced Shoulder Ache

There is nothing like having a clenched muscle in my right shoulder to make me feel like resigning quietly from all forms of human interaction and activity. It’s a permanent reminder that something is wrong, that I haven’t fixed, as well as that I did something dumb, that I don’t know what it was.

Yes, I’ve had a massage. The poor girl had to take a break from digging her elbows in to the concrete slab that is my back if I leave it too long.

No, the massage didn’t make it go away. It was only a couple of days later I realised what had brought it on.

I’ve been playing the guitar standing up. With a strap. And I’ve been tightening a muscle in my right shoulder to stabilise my right arm, which is the one attached to the plectrum. That’s what suddenly went clench at the weekend. It’s a sod to get to, and was just one of many tight muscles that the masseuse was dealing with.

There are reasons for standing up and playing an electric guitar, mostly to do with access to the frets above the twelfth. When sitting down, the body blocks the left arm from reaching the higher-octave frets comfortably.

The trick is to learn how to hold one’s right arm without clenching any muscles, and also to get the right hang height and angle for the guitar.

The angle matters. The more towards the vertical the fretboard, the greater the difference in distance from the bridge one picks the strings: the 6th E string will be twangier than the 1st E string.

It also affects the angle at which the left arm and wrist need to be to make barre chords.

And you thought this was simple. You know, pick up my guitar and play.