RRR

Right, rise, right still works for the waning moon this morning. That is to say, the moon is a little to the right of the sun rising in the east, with its horns pointing right, that is to say west. And it is visibly more waned than it was yesterday morning.

On the other hand, it is still dark and what was one moon is now three. There is a strong echo of the real moon to the left and a weak echo to the left of that, making a total of three. It works with the monocular with both right and left eyes, so is maybe an artefact of the sky rather than of me. A phenomenon which Schubert and Muller clearly knew all about when they penned their song 'Die Nebensonnen'.

Merry Wives

Last week to the Northern Broadsides version of 'The Merry Wives of  Windsor' at the Rose, Kingston. A play that I have never seem, or even read before. Which meant that a little revision was needed from the hitherto unread - and not completely cut - copy from the Methuen Arden Shakespeare. Essentially put together in 1904 but touched up in 1932.

Of an age when readers were expected to be able to cope with long sentences, long paragraphs and little in the way of headings, boxed inserts or illustrations. So a near 80 page introductory essay, followed by over 200 pages of text, many of which had extensive footnotes. Some of these dealt with the extensive specialist vocabulary of Elizabethan hunters - and the rather less extensive specialist vocabulary of Elizabethan laundresses. I learned, for example, that low cast hunters used small hawks to hover over hedges, trapping blackbirds, thrushes and suchlike within, and so allowing the ladies of the party to pick them off with small cross-bows. Not the sort of thing that the RSPB would encourage these days. Not even very sporting.

It was also explained that while most of the canon was built around kings and nobles doing their stuff for the entertainment of the middling classes, this play was built around the middling classes aping their betters for the entertainment of the kings and nobles. Who could be rather grandly amused by the pretentions so exhibited.

As is our custom, took a quick look at the Hogsmill before the show, to find, unusually, very few fish. But there was a great swarm of midges hovering above the water instead. Had the Poles had the fish for their Easter feasts?

Northern Broadsides, led and directed by one Barrie Rutter, come to the Rose reasonably often and they did not disappoint on this occasion, turning in an entirely serviceable production of a not very good play. The Arden excuse being that it had been knocked out to order in a great hurry. I suspect that in this production the play had been quite heavily cut, which was probably just as well, with more weight being given to appearance and body language than to the words. The odd reference to places up north had been popped in, a concession to the generally northern tone of the Broadsides' tour. The two wives could have done with being a touch more tarty and a touch less homely. Rather a jolly dance at the end. See references 1 and 2 for the previous occasions of record. Perhaps there were more, before the record started, back in 2006.

With the one member of the cast from Whitstable being supported by a family claque of four, sitting to our immediate right.

It was a bit wet when we came out and we decided against eating in Kingston, thinking to go to the 'Shy Horse', a lot nearer home, instead. But the traffic was a bit grim - perhaps the Easter rush was getting under way - it being late Thursday afternoon - and we pulled into the Unique Fish & Grill at Chessington North instead, illustrated above. Which was quiet when we arrived, but people arrived while we ate our fish and chips - not brilliant but not bad, chips quite good - and we made a good meal. Cheerful service.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=northern+broadsides.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=northern+broadsides.

Muddle continues

Or further lunar observations, following those at reference 1.

This morning, at around dawn, we had an approximately half moon quite high in the southern sky, more or less visible through the haze from an upstairs window. To the right of the as yet absent sun and with the horns pointing to the right.

For the record, I have included here a snip from reference 2, which appears, this morning at least, to agree with what I can see in the southern sky. So right and right and sun rise for waning, left and left and sun set for waxing.

Which agrees with what is now at reference 1. For once, for I do not like to amend the record once recorded, I have today edited reference 1, from 'right and left and sun set' to 'left and left and sun set', which last is what appears on the original note on my telephone. The muddle must have been perpetuated with a transcription error.

PS: note the puff for search quality on top of the snip. A dynamic puff as it is not always the same one. I think that these puffs are the result of my giving my email address to some people called couchbase (reference 3). Who are somehow wired into the moongiant people.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/razumovsky.html.

Reference 2: http://www.moongiant.com/phase/today/.

Reference 3: http://www.couchbase.com/.

Memory recovery

Last night we watched the second and third parts of the Hickson rendition of 'A Murder is Announced', a story we have watched several times before, in at least two different versions.

An entirely watchable bit of television drama, which being thirty years old did not have to work quite so hard to recreate a semblance of old-style village life. And being spread over three episodes, it seemed content to spread itself out over the original story, without feeling the need to work in quite so much extra material as would be the case if it were done now, contrariwise, within a much smaller compass. And it was fun to see the likes of Sergeant Lewis in a former life, as it happens in another role as somebody's sergeant.

However, the point of the post is the way that one recovered the story as one went through the two or three hours of it. We started out remembering about the announcement of the murder in the local paper, but that was about it. We then started remembering faces and roles, but without having any idea how they fitted into the story. Next up was the villain. So we knew that Miss. Blacklock was the villain, but without having any idea as to how or why. Then towards the end, we knew that it was something to do with her chunky pearl necklace, but ditto.

For some reason, I remembered fairly early on that both Miss. Murgatroyd and Miss. Bunner were going to be murdered, but did not manage to recover their details until rather later. So the bits and pieces of the jigsaw were gradually recovered, all to be slotted neatly into place by the end, when Miss. Marple did the summing up.

I wonder now how the process of remembering the story relates to the process of writing it in the first place and I suspect that there might well be quite a good correlation between the order of recovery of elements of the story and the order of their arriving in the mind of its creator. But I don't suppose we shall ever know. Is any writer of crime stories going to be prepared to lay out the secrets of their craft in the way that would be necessary? Could such a writer be bothered?

Another bit of memory recovery concerns Axel Munthe, a gentleman first stirred up back in May 2009, just about seven years ago now. And about all I could remember about him first off, that is to say the day before yesterday, was that he wrote a best-selling book about a house in the Mediterranean, perhaps Capri. My mother had had a copy of it, a fat & tatty orange book with the title in big black letters on the spine, now long lost. While we still have a copy of the book about the book by the Jangfeldt mentioned at reference 2.

This all cropped up because the Saturday DT included a place called Southside House on Wimbledon Common in its list of 20 must-visit chunks of built heritage, and somewhere along the line we picked up the trail of Munthe, correctly thinking that it must be the Capri one. It turns out that the house was once owned by his rather badly treated English wife Hilda, whom I had not remembered the existence of at all. But I did now remember that Munthe had a long standing but rather odd relationship with a lady member of the Swedish royal family.

I suppose that if I were to read Jangfeldt again, great chunks of stuff would start coming back from the back rooms and attics of my memory. Whether or not I shall bother remains to be seen.

The house looks quite interesting, but I am presently put off by it appearing to be a guided tour only place - guided tours of stately homes being something that I do not like at all. I remember being rather put out by having to do Blenheim Palace that way, although I can find no record of that visit.

PS: a little later, while kneading what turned into the 355th batch of bread, I turned over the thought from Miss. Marple about, if one gets seriously old, how all the people with whom one had past in common gradually died off and one got left with people who were, perhaps, kind & pleasant enough, but with whom one had little in common. It was no longer important whether one had liked these other people, or had spent quality time with them. What was important was that they were a link to a shared past, the loss of which seemed to matter. The sharing was an assertion of one's own past existence which one was loath to lose. Or is it all down to temperament and state of health? So long as you have a future, sharing the past is not very important?

Reference 1: for the murder see http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087756/.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Munthe.

Reference 3: http://southsidehouse.com/.

Saloon bar wisdom

Back to Garratt Lane last week to check up on the house noticed at reference 1, the one with a skim of bricks on the front.

But before I got there, I discovered that it was much easier to buy classy birthday cards in Earlsfield than it was in Epsom, although I learned afterwards that my mistake might have been not to go to Waitrose - a shop I had not thought of in connection with greetings cards. But that sourced at Earlsfield was very splendid and, instead of getting a little essay about the Alzheimer's Society on the back, which I think is a bit out of place, we got a statement about how this very splendid card had been designed, printed, foiled and embossed in England. So there. Nicola Sturgeon eat your heart out.

Rather nearer Tooting, I found the house with the brick skim again, illustrated above. Downstairs pillars still looking odd. The odd bit of white polystyrene poking out if you look carefully. The odd bit of untidy cutting in around windows and such like. Don't care for the pattern used for the bricks to the left. Not sure about the masonry above the ground floor windows and don't care for the white mastic at all. All in all, not the way I would go about smartening up the front of my house.

Getting down to saloon bar wisdom, the first topic was the wealth or not of Mr. Trump, a likely candidate for the presidency of the US of A in the upcoming election. The allegation was that it was all smoke and mirrors and that while the man was wealthy by the standards of the saloon bar, or at least the saloon bar in question, he was not seriously rich. I reserved my position and subsequent interrogation of google results in yes and no. That is to say, exactly how rich the man is is indeed lost in smoke and mirrors, in part, no doubt, to avoid paying tax, something that only little people do in the US. But I think I am satisfied that he does have hundreds of millions to call on, which is rich enough for me.

The second topic was the hobby of flying virtual aeroplanes from the comfort of one's own home. All you need is a few screens, a fancy keyboard, a reasonably serious PC and the software which emulates the cockpit of the aeroplane of your choice - in this case perhaps a Beechcraft (see reference 2) or something like that - and wherever it is you want to fly it. The interest does not lie in shooting missiles and dropping bombs, rather in being able to fly the aeroplane in question in the place of your choice, whatever the computer might throw at you in the way of weather.

For people who don't have the patience or skills needed to do that, a softer option is to do virtual paint jobs for other peoples' virtual aeroplanes. Which led onto an interesting discussion about exactly how one would go about this. The technology seemed to be to do two dimensional patches in something like Photoshop and then stick them onto the three dimensional virtual aeroplane, with a certain amount of fiddling about needed around the tricky bits, like the wheels. Which struck me as a bit tacky. Then quite by chance, a few days later, I came across a package called Lightwave which was probably quite up for doing something of the sort - but it would all depend on what, if any, standard had been used in putting together the description of the external appearance of the aeroplane. Further enquiries needed. In the meantime interested readers can explore reference 3, remembering to have their credit card handy.

The day closed with my learning about a new must buy brand, never before heard of by me, called Superdry. See reference 4 - another site which expects you to have your credit card handy.

PS: I wonder now why the Scottish leader is named for a sort of Russian fish. Does she come from a family of unrepentant, old-school lefties?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/larousse.html.

Reference 2: http://beechcraft.txtav.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.lightwave3d.com/.

Reference 4: http://www.superdry.com/?gclid=CM3dj63k5ssCFUSVGwodACkLtQ&gclsrc=aw.ds.

St. John's 3

A reminder of the dreadful losses of the first world war, with six families here losing two members and one family losing three.

Perhaps no wonder that we took a while to warm to the idea of fighting another one.

PS: not very impressed by the wisdom of Solomon reproduced above. Small comfort indeed - at least it would so be to me.

Group search key: sja.

St. John's 2

Looking vaguely west, rather than east. Notice the dormer in the nave roof, quite unusual in my experience, but they do pop up a bit in Surrey. They have them, I think, in the main church at Leatherhead. This, however, is Kent - but perhaps Tunbridge Wells, with its non-stop trains to the city, is, on that account, an honorary member of Surrey.

Group search key: sja.

St. John's 1

After some years visiting the town, we finally made it into St. John's at Tunbridge Wells the other day.

Looks like a Victorian new build, no sign of graves in the churchyard, never mind about old ones. Certainly not the now all important Dr. Bayes, resident in Tunbridge Wells in life but in Bunhill Fields in death. See reference 2 and nearby posts.

They have done quite a good job with bolting community space onto the side of it - almost as good as our own St. Barnabas here in Epsom.

Big, handsome space inside, with nicely arranged chairs instead of lines of pews. All very modern with lots of audio visual and what looked like a substantial band. Perhaps into what some people call happy-clappy. Pity about the screen hanging down in front of the east window but I suppose one has to move with the times. Stained glass, such as it was, rather ordinary.

It looked like a church with some life about it, so they must still fear the Lord in Tunbridge Wells.

Reference 1: http://www.stjohnstw.org/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/bayes-2.html.

Group search key: sja.

Carlson Monument 2

Ventral view of the snapped tree near the Carlson Monument, mentioned in the post before last.

Monument unscathed middle right. Often decorated with large and unsightly red poppies, made out of some kind of corrugated plastic so that they last forever. The falling tree did catch one of them, just visible below and to the right of the monument.

Group search key: tda

Carlson Monument 1

Dorsal view of the snapped tree near the Carlson Monument, mentioned in the previous post.

Notice the tendency of the telephone to make bright near whites into something much more yellow.

Group search key: tda.

Horton clockwise

Following the precedent set back in the Autumn of 2013 at reference 1, I thought to walk the Horton Clockwise this morning to see what damage had been done in last night's wind. Not exactly a storm here, but I gather that there was serious wind over Tennyson Down on the Isle of Wight. Not that there are many trees up there and I don't suppose the great stone monument to the great man came to any grief. See gmaps 50.6667787,-1.5426103.

At the start point, in our own back garden, quite a lot of twigs down, large and small, nearly all a long time dead and very light for their size. Three ponds merged into one. Smaller dustbins gone walkabout, and as I write the fox-proof food waste bin is still missing, despite being numbered.

Half a dozen panel fences damaged on the circuit. Three with panels down and three with posts broken and bent but still upright.

One possible tree down in the margins of the Common, but I did not think to check the stump for freshness, so I am not sure whether it actually came down last night, although I am fairly sure it was up a few days ago.

One tree, that above, certainly down at the junction of Horton Lane and Christchurch Road. Not dead before the storm, but not very well.

The next tree down nearly took the Carlson Monument with it, but missed and ended up in the hedge rather than across the road.

Little damage that I could see at the Horton Golf Club.

Hook Road Arena rather waterlogged and so the Grand Bank Holiday car boot sale had been cancelled. A sale which has been grand indeed in previous years. Police patrol car parked in the entrance to the arena for some reason, possibly funfair, possibly tea-break related.

The funfair did not look very damaged. A few torn posters, a few portaloos down and some deflated inflatables. But they may have been deflated at close yesterday, just to be on the safe side. Large puddle in the middle of the enclosure. Not clear whether they would be opening later today - I imagine that they had certainly planned to.

Few twigs down in Longmead Road, some large. Stream high but well short of bursting its banks. There was a dustcart down, but that was probably not storm related. There was also a full-on recovery vehicle from Dynes in attendance and one of the chaps there thought it OK to wriggle under the dustcart while it was tipped up a bit with the hydraulic tow-bar at the back end of the recovery vehicle. Don't think that I would have cared to chance it.

And with Dynes coming from Crayford, quite near the Dartford Crossing, one might have thought that the council could have bought recovery from somewhere a bit nearer, but maybe this lot have the contract for the southeastern quadrant of the M25 and have their vehicles working the whole stretch - making them a better proposition than one might otherwise have thought.

PS: another snippet from Maigret being that the French for funfair is 'fête foraine', literally foreigners' fair. With their proper word for foreigner being stranger. Or, as Bart Simpson is alleged to have once said, no good using a cow on television as a cow. If you want an animal to look like a cow on the screen, you need a horse. Littré has a more learned take on the whole business.

Reference 1: http://www.psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/balanced-score-card.html.

Reference 2: http://dynesautoservices.co.uk/.

Group search key: tda

Dead tree

A tree which came down, some years ago now, in the vicinity of gmaps 51.341581, -0.285910, that is to say in the green space between what used to be the Manor and the Horton hospitals.

I was pleased at the time that the council thought it OK just to let it lie, slightly off the path, which it has done. With the result attached. I was rather impressed by the luxurious growth of moss.

I am sure that I noticed it at the time, and the relevant post may be that at reference 1, just about six years ago. I must take a more careful look at the trunk next time I am there.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=natural+causes+waterlogged.

Holy Grail

When I was a young teenager, busily denying the existence of the deity to all comers, the artificial creation of life was an important milestone on the road to getting rid of said deity. Something which was important to many people through the course of the 20th century and something which got off to a number of false, if interesting & informative, starts.

And now it seems, at the beginning of the 21st century, we are actually getting there - albeit in a rather messy way, not the sort of thing that was envisaged those years ago at all. Not at all like brewing up a dinosaur, rather in the way that one might make a cake, and hatching him (or her) out of a large bottle.

Skimming the paper at reference 1, the idea seems to be to start with the smallest known bacteria, the mycoplasma, generally parasitic on vertebrates (which is why they can be so small) and sometimes causing trouble. These mycoplasma have of the order of 1,000 thousand base pairs - with, by way of comparison, a human having maybe 3 million, depending on what exactly you count as counting.

You then work on this, sorting out the wheat from the chaff, getting it down to around 500 thousand base pairs, roughly 500 genes - the smallest possible life, rather than artificial life, being the main target of this work.

You then manufacture genetic material according to that recipe and inject it into a cell rather larger than that of the original mycoplasma and where it will grow & reproduce rather better. Growing into the collections of small spherical objects illustrated in their paper. While what I choose to show here is their considerable success in working out what the remaining genes are for.

There is talk of actually making the genetic material from scratch, rather than working on stuff borrowed from a real bacteria. But that apart, I think what they are doing is on the margins; near enough artificial creation but not quite. Not quite enough to satisfy the teenage part of me - but, nevertheless, quite an achievement.

Reference 1: 'Design and synthesis of a minimal bacterial genome' by Clyde A. Hutchison and others, from the 25th March 2016 issue of the Science magazine.

Horological confusion

Woke up this morning to the sound of the central heating clicking in, very audible as bleeding the radiators was a touch overdue. A central heating which clicks in at 0630 at this time of year, so I assumed that that was the time, only sometime later noticing that the kitchen clock was an hour slow. It turning out, that for the first time in living memory, we had failed to register that it was clock changing time the evening before. And furthermore, Cortana, despite her bossiness in other matters, had not seen fit to remind us. Not even, checking this morning, to the point of putting a note in the calendar, in the way that Filofax used to.

But not such a big deal as it used to be, as it is only the three or four clocks and watches which need attending too. Everything else looks after itself. The exception being the car which, despite having what must be extensive on-board computation, does not manage summer time. A former pain, as it took me a long time to learn how to change its clock. Perhaps if we had not got a bottom of the range Ford things would have been different.

Went on, prompted once again by Maigret, to the mysteries of the word 'fraise', a word which is hopelessly muddled up in my mind with 'framboise'. I suppose the similar meanings, word starts ('fr') and word ends ('ise') are too much for it.

Knock off the terminal 'e' and you get both the word for cold and the word for expenses. No sign yet of what connects these two rather different meanings,

And then the French, associating in a rather imaginative way from the shape and surface texture of a strawberry, get the white lacy collars favoured by both men and women in the 17th century (but do not stray into thinking that it is the same as our 'frieze', which comes from somewhere else altogether). A countersinking bit for a drill. A dentist's drill more generally. Milling machines and their cutting heads more generally. The intestinal caul of a lamb or a calf. Presumably something which they buy from butchers and so know about.

From where I branch off to caul in the OED and find all kinds of meanings, nothing to do with strawberries (or babies). Including, for example, spiders' webs, cabbages, cabbage stalks and sheep folds. A very versatile word indeed, or at least it has been.

PS: furthermore, I am pleased to have now arrived at, rather late in life, what might be a basic distinction between a milling machine and a lathe, both widely used to shape metal objects by rotary action. In a milling machine it is the cutting head which rotates, whereas in a lathe it is the piece to be shaped which rotates.

Evidence

The custom is to snap trolleys where they are found, but I thought I ought to add this one as evidence that trolley 41 was indeed taken for a ride on a train.

Umbrella, ex Hook Road car boot sale, as it was threatening to rain when I set off. Note the now traditional blue rope tie - with my having used such ties for perhaps 15 years now - with the original reason why having been lost in the mists of time.

Group search key: tya.

Trolley 41

Continuing the trend of around one a month, this trolley nearly a month after that noticed at reference 1.

The first M&S trolley for a while and probably the one which was furthest from its home, just outside Ewell West railway station. The framework looked to me as if it had been outside for some time, but I did not think that detracted in any way from M&S's duty to take it back.

It was also getting on a bit and I decided against pushing it back to Epsom, catching the train instead, perhaps a 10 minute wait. Journey uneventful apart from the ticket machine at the station being very slow and delivering a different ticket, albeit printed on the same blank, to the one which one would get from Epsom Station. Perhaps a Southwest Trains machine rather than a Southern machine?

Getting the trolley on and off the train not a problem, but I decided against taking the thing down the stairs at Epsom, using the lift provided instead.

No-one at M&S objected to the slightly scruffy state of the trolley.

So a first; the first time that I have taken a shopping trolley on a train. Perhaps the next venture would be to take one down to Bognor for the day, using it for one's picnic and beach gear. How many people would comment? Or would they all look the other way and pretend that you were not there?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/trolley-40.html

Group search key: tya

Colour schemes

Yesterday I came across this slightly stressed flyer for the funfair noticed at reference 1. Having seen the contraption noticed there in action from the road the other day, I can now say that the sitting on part of it expands as shown below 'freak out' left. I am quite sure that I would freak out, but who knows what younger people will make of it. It would have been quite fun to take a walk around the fair when it was going full swing, say early evening on Easter Monday, but we are not going to pay £7.99 and I don't suppose they do special non-riding tickets for pensioners.

The style of both the flyer and the matching posters struck me as being peculiarly funfair and circus; I can't think of any other people who do posters in quite these startling tones of red, blue & yellow and all I can come up with today is Lichtenstein and Spiderman. Boxing and wrestling posters used to be quite gaudy but not, I think, in quite in this way - not that one comes across them that often these days.

The management decision was that the telephone would do a better job than the HP scanner, this last coming more or less free with the PC and having been excellent value, but it does not capture strong colour very well. The downside was that despite some effort, I could not get the image decently oblong, hence the triangular edges.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/the-skys-limit.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/lichtenstein-take-2.html.

Reference 3: http://www.johndavisfunfairs.co.uk/funpark.html. Respectable enough to run to a web site! I couldn't find it on the flyer, but google, as ever, obliges. There is presumably some relationship between this John Davis and the Billy Davis who runs what looks like a very similar operation.

Last Dorking

That is to say, last Sunday to the last of this year's string quartet concerts at the Dorking Halls with the Heath Quartet. First two referenced below.

As is now usual, we were in the Martineau Hall, which, according to the web site '... is ideal for a smaller business conference or staff training day. It can seat up to 176 delegates theatre style or can be arranged to create a more intimate function room for corporate dining or staff training'. It certainly does well enough for the quartets, for which the Grand Hall is a bit big. On this day, full of the Surrey Youth Orchestra, complete with friends, relatives and the odd harp. I associated to the time we came across a Dad outside a church somewhere near Exmoor who had three of them, one for each of his three daughters. He told us that it was rather an expensive business - not least because of the large car needed to move the things about.

Presumably a Mr. Martineau was a councillor or something at the time the Halls were built. The smallest hall is the Masonic Hall, presumably at least once used for masonic meetings, although my understanding of such things is that they would not want the theatre layout presently usual there. And what about all the church-pastiche furnishings that they seem to like?

For this last concert, the second violin was wearing the same moderately flashy dress as last time, but the three gents. were properly suited and booted, which they had not been. In the interval I wondered whether the cellist owned the little stage which he sat on - maybe four feet by two feet by one foot high - to get his head about level with those of his standing colleagues. A bit big to cart about, but could you rely on a venue having such a thing?

The concert consisted of Mozart's Adagio & Fugue, K.546. Very good. Bartók's string quartet No.5. Notable for its unusual palindromic structure and also very good. Then after the interval the third and last of Tchaikovsky's string quartets, Op.30, puffed for the funeral march of the third movement. Which was indeed very moving, but, to my mind, threw the quartet as a whole a bit out of balance. Furthermore, I thought that the march would not work at home: apart from sounding a bit silly in the privacy of my study, the equipment there could not cope with the dynamic range.

Coming away from this our first hearing of the Tchaikovsky's string quartets, I think the consensus in the car was that we were glad to have heard them, would happily hear them again, but would not go out of our way so to do. The fringe of the repertoire is where they belong.

Now because of reading the book which told me something of Buddhism noticed at reference 3, I have been working a bit on how I attend to things, things which might be either inside or outside of the head. On this occasion, the heightened attention resulted in hearing more of the music than is usual with me, but it was also more of a jumble and the four parts of the quartet sounded much more competitive than usual. Comparable in a way to what you get if you sit too close, with too much extraneous detail - like the sound of the bow scraping on the string, rather than the sound of the string itself - and with the sound not having been blended into a more manageable whole. We shall see how this side of things develops.

Unfortunately, I forget to check the cows on Box Hill on the way home. So I will probably never be sure now whether they were small cows or black sheep. See reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/heath-2.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/heath-quartet.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/buddha-rules.html.

Maigret & Larousse

The new Larousse noticed at reference 1 is doing fairly well so far.

Testing with the word 'lavallière', I found nothing in Littré, but found a sort of floppy bow tie in Larousse, named for one Mlle. de La Vallière, aka Louise de La Vallière, née Françoise Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, the first serious mistress of Louis XIV. The French wikipedia entry for her confirms that she did indeed give her name to a cravat, subsequently becoming popular again in the 19th century.

Then we had 'rigolo'. Again, I found nothing in Littré, but found the word in Larousse. As it happened, my guess from the context was more or less right. Roughly amusing or funny, but I don't either word quite catches the flavour of the French.

And last night, watching Gambon do Maigret, we had 'rillettes', something from the luncheon menu of a pavement café, a something which I heard as 'riettes' or 'rietze', so I was not able to track it down until I had recovered the correct spelling from Volume XXIII of the newish-to-me collected edition noticed at reference 2. I have not investigated how the last story in volume 23 came to be the first episode of the Gambon rendering. Presumably the television people had some Maigret buff do the business for them, but he and his thinking are yet to be disinterred. For some reason I assume a he rather than a she, although plenty of ladies like detective novels; perhaps it takes a man to make a fetish or an obsession of them.

So one dictionary has rillettes to be potted meat, which I think is a way of describing a meaty version of the fish paste mentioned the other day. See reference 3. Another talks of finely chopped goose or pork cooked in fat of some kind.  While Littré just talks of pork - while going on to talk of  'rillons' which seems to be what is left when you have tried the fat out of pork or goose. So on this occasion we could have really done with a little picture in Larousse - in absence of which, I guessed some kind of meatball or meatburger, served as a starter.

All of which finally reminded me of 'La Cuisine Familiale' (noticed at reference 4), which showed my guess to have been quite wrong, as it comes down firmly in favour of a pork based paste served in little stoneware pots. But be warned: the recipe talks of a kilo of pork belly, quite a lot of other stuff and five hours cooking time. The French version of our own potted shrimps, once served in the restaurant cars of the trains running between Liverpool Street and Norwich.

PS: I was sorry to read that Louis XIV, having kept La Vallière on for five years or so, moved onto to a new model, and then, rather than letting her, that is to say La Vallière, retire quietly, treated her rather badly, nastily even. To the point of having her special shoe, designed to mitigate the effects of her having one leg slightly shorter than the other, confiscated. The fact that she had been a bit difficult about being dropped - after bearing him a number of children - is no excuse. I had thought better of him. Perhaps just one more example of Acton's law about absolute power corrupting absolutely after all.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/larousse.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/simenon-2.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/razumovsky.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/truffes.html.

Lunch box

A traditional lunch box on show at the Konaki restaurant of the previous post.

The interior is, we were told, partitioned. One compartment for pasty, one for crumble and one for custard. Or the Greek equivalent.

Knife and fork suggests an urban lunch box to me, rather than a rural one. Google unhelpful, so maybe a return visit is indicated.

Mausolos

Off for a return visit to Captain Mausoleum of Bodrum last week. The last visit being noticed at reference 1.

Off to what was nearly a bad start by rushing up the stairs to platform 4 at Epsom, just to miss a train to Waterloo. But then discovering that rather than a travelcard and a receipt, I was clutching two receipts - the receipts being in the same orange and yellow format as the tickets. Rush back down the stairs to recover the travelcard from the the hatch of the ticket machine, this particular ticket machine delivering tickets vertically right up against the left hand side of the hatch, rather than horizontally in the middle for easier extraction. All of which rather amused the young lady who was by then trying her luck with the machine.

And then, having recently been puzzled to learn that Germans made up the third largest community of foreigners in this country (after Poles and Paddies), while I only rarely came across them, found four or five young Germans next to me in the train. Noisy, but decent and cheerful. A Southern train to Victoria which was definitely a ten coacher as one of the in-train announcements told me so.

And so, via Warren Street, into the museum.

A quick look at a new-to-me jade gallery, where I was struck by the handsome jade discs. some more than six inches in diameter and half an inch thick, nicely polished and with a neat hole drilled in the middle. Clearly luxury goods, widely used as grave goods, along with tall, very thin pots. Hard to see what else any of it might have been useful for, apart from flaunting one's wealth and power.

Passed some shaped tablets with very small and very neat cuneiform writing on them - writing which must have been hard to execute in poor light without spectacles. It also struck me that the tablets came close to being printing blocks, from where I associated to cylinder seals which I think were so used. A sort of early version of the printing from wood blocks which we came to in Europe a couple of thousand years or so later.

Arrived at Room 21, the home of the relics from the first ever mausoleum, that for King Mausolos and his wife, Queen Artemisia. I was reminded that the two large statues of the pair (or at least possibly of the pair) were quite crudely executed, the main point of interest being their size. They must have been awkward things to get into position without breaking them. But oddly, the folds of cloth at the Queen's feet, snapped above, were quite carefully executed.

On the way out to lunch, struck by the numbers of shops and restaurants, clearly the way places of this sort are going, having lost most of their funding to austerity and much of their founding purpose to the internet.

Lunch at Coptic Street in a new-to-me Greek restaurant called Konaki, a restaurant which was quiet without being empty (it was around 1500 by this point) and which had a very pleasant dining area. Good service.

I was warned off the Retsina but I persisted with 500ml of what turned out to be an entirely respectable white wine. At which point the waiter explained that while it was all the same stuff, in the way that Chablis is all the same stuff, like Chablis you do get good brands and not so good brands. He liked to think of this one as one of the good brands.

Humous and flat bread to start. Followed by some sort of kebab and a variety of pasta which I now know to be called orzo. Served up on this occasion with a bit of cheese to flavour it, working rather well - so well that I have now bought some of the stuff from M&S, with which to have a go at home. Rounded off with Greek coffee and brandy, having not had either for some years. A long time since we used to live near Green Lanes and eat Greek & Greek Cypriot on a regular basis.

PS: I find this morning that there seems to be some kind of tie up between Google Culture and the British Museum (among many other illustrious institutions) regarding the display of pictures of things. But a tie up which has left me rather confused about where to find things. Maybe something to sort out after a good lunch - from where I associate to how one used, in the world of work, to keep back a supply of suitable jobs against such a time.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/captain-mausoleum.html.

Reference 2: http://www.konaki.co.uk/.

Fostering

A snip from the Waterloo platform at Epsom station. A snip which tells me that fostering can be seriously hard work - or they would not be offering more than £40,000 a year to do it. The poster doesn't say what the deal about consumables is, but at a guess the £40,000 includes some but not all of them. Maybe food is in but laptops are out. Maybe £10,000 a year altogether, so £30,000 a year, £600 a week for your effort; a full-time, living wage.

A wage I would think you would earn with a foster child - or person - with problems, perhaps at the edge of fosterability. Next stop some kind of residential care. Not a line of work that I think I would be any good at.

Perhaps in some future version of my telephone, I will be able to tell Cortana to take out the reflections. I don't suppose it would ever get the separation of the two signals right every time, but it ought to be able to cope with this particular snap.

PS: would the current version of Photoshop be able to do such a thing? Is layers part of the answer?

Reference 1: https://www.kingston.gov.uk/fostering.

Where angels fear to tread

Yesterday's Guardian gave half a page yesterday to the teenager who will be serving 20 years in jail for running down a policeman with a stolen pickup while full of cannabis. It was not his first offence involving stolen vehicles.

From where I moved to the professional criminals who got, say, five years in jail for a crime involving months of careful planning and a great deal of money. With my thought being that while the second crime did not involve people getting hurt, let alone killed, it did involve a good deal more malice aforethought. These were professional criminals were going about what to them was their ordinary business, with no thought at all for the damage they might do to the lives of their victims. They were evil in a way that the teenager was not. So I think that the large difference between the two sentences is too much, is not right.

Other considerations include the likelihood that the teenager came from a bad background - the Guardian gives no clues on that point - and that he will probably emerge from prison worse than when he went in - if not completely broken. Not to mention the huge expense of keeping him there all that time.

Google did not offer any more complete record of the hearing at Liverpool, beyond turning up an unhelpful reminder about a computer system with which I was once acquainted at reference 1. Justice being seen to be done does not seem to extend to people who have the time to read a hearing transcript but not the time to attend the hearing itself - even in this age of the government computer. Perhaps a lawyer would know where to look.

Reference 1: http://xhibit.justice.gov.uk/xhibit/liverpool.htm.

Razumovsky

Last week to the Wigmore Hall to hear a new to us group, the Razumovsky Ensemble, an Ensemble who distinguish themselves in the same way as the Endellion Quartet in choosing to do their own programme, rather than making do with the house special.

With a programme which continues to work, along with the Heath Quartet at Dorking, on our very slender knowledge of the Tchaikovsky chamber oeuvre.

The day had been fine so we thought to take our sandwiches at the right time, somewhere in the vicinity of the Hall, rather than at the wrong time, at home, before we left. As it happened it was cold by the time it was the right time, but, by way of compensation, the chairs and tables in John Prince's Street, outside the BHS cafeteria were back in place again, so we were able to take our open fish paste sandwiches in relative comfort. Fish paste because it had suddenly come into mind the week previous, so we had been stocked up. One of those things like pork pies which one does once in a while. All of which reminded us of the foodie nonsense which says that fish paste in small jars is common while fish paté bought loose from rather larger tubs in Waitrose is OK - food fashions sometimes being as silly as the clothing sort. I then thought that a suburban dinner party might be livened up by lining up a battery of mixed fish paste jars down the middle of the table and giving people bread sticks to dip into them with. But then, somebody might spoil the fun by banging on about the lack of oral hygiene in such a proceeding.

And on into a nearly full Wigmore Hall, for what turned out to be three rather dense pieces, all rather good in rather different ways. The Mozart Duo, K423. I did not know at all. The Mozart Quintet, K515, I knew slightly - only discovering that it was not the Schubert C Major Quintet I thought we were getting on the day before. The brain must have seen the string quintet bit of the advertisement and had filled in the composer space with Schubert without bothering to check - this despite the fact that I have the Mozart Quintets on vinyl too. On the day, but not during revision, I was struck by echoes of the Beethoven 18.4 Quartet which I once used to know quite well.

The sextet was a very grand and exuberant affair and I was surprised how much extra noise one got for the extra viola and cello. This piece gave me echoes of the Brahms Op.25 Piano Quartet; probably the exuberance.

Experience only slightly marred by an older lady a couple of rows in front who spent most of the concert reading the programme, with her head popping at regular intervals to see what was going on on the stage.

Just made our connections on the way home, so no halfway house at Earlsfield. On the other hand there was a new moon, to the left of the set sun, with horns pointing left. But I only knew it was a new moon by checking. Despite all my efforts to get a grip on the business of the horns, it does not stick in the mind from one sighting to the next. See reference 2 - posted, as it happens, the day after hearing the Schubert Quintet mentioned above.

Unfortunately, all the stuff so carefully set down there does not seem to agree with the current sighting. This sighting was waxing horns left, whereas that allegation was waxing horns right. Maybe I got into a muddle with clockwise and anticlockwise, but I can't be bothered to straighten it all out this morning. The lesson being that I am still as accident & blunder prone as I was in my youth - a pronality which did for me as a serious chess player. At least with computer programmes, you can gradually squeeze all the blunders out, and once out, they stay out.

Reference 1: http://www.razumovsky.org.uk/.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/experiment-2.html.

The sky's the limit

One of the first rides to be erected for the fun fair mentioned in the last post.

We need to pay the fair a visit when it is up and running, as the mode of operation of the ride was not completely clear to me. I think the not very big motor at the top must get the thing going in the way of a pendulum, cunningly timing its contribution to gradually increase the amplitude of the swing, eventually getting it to go up and over.

I don't see how such a motor would be able to sweep the chairs up to the top, by brute force, in one go. In any event, the torques on the motor's rotor must be enormous. Clearly something one would want to take advice from W. S. Atkins on - or perhaps the people who specified the rotor for the London Eye - although the stresses involved there are not quite the same. Who knows?

One hopes also that someone has run a slide rule over the spacing of the legs. Are they far enough apart to contain the forces at work when the chairs are swinging at speed? Is square the right format, given that the forces are clearly much greater in one direction than the other?

In any event, we do need to see the thing in operation. Might even take a gander at the herding youth by lamplight while we are at it.

Outreach

This morning's Horton Clockwise started off with finding a bit of outdoor art on Stamford Green, the result of an outreach programme, a collaboration between the Borough Council and the University of Creation up the road. Public art being one of the few functions left to local authorities.

This particular work was the work of one Suzana Herculano-Houzel, originally from Columbia, but now studying for a MPhil at the University. Inter alia, I was very struck by the very strong contrasts she had achieved between her whites and her blacks, contrasts which really brought the whole composition to life.

Moving on from creation to destruction, at the exit from what used to be the West Park Hospital, we had what looked like a bunch of junior volunteers, observing from a safe distance the activities of some senior volunteers, that is to say chain saw operatives, at work. I understand that within the volunteer community the junior volunteers are known as pad-saws. See reference 1 for some of the many notices of senior activities.

Then at the other end of Horton Lane, we had the Easter fun fair coming together. Said by a poster to be Europe's No.1 travelling fun fair. More fun fair was arriving as I went past, leading to the thought that maybe the Easter fair was the occasion for the visit noticed at reference 2: perhaps there will be sulky races on the arena on Easter Monday. Also to the thought that markets and fairs were the occasion of very early central government activity in the commercial life of the nation - not least because of all the opportunities for raising revenue, at a time when most of the (medieval) economy was cash poor.

Then at Pound Lane, a skip finally delivered the length of rafter I had been looking for to repair the compost bin with. I did not like to take without asking and luckily a chap turned up who understood enough English to assure me that I was welcome to whatever timber I could carry away from the skip. So I did. More on the repairs in due course.

PS: in case you were wondering, sulky is a perfectly respectable word, nothing to do with Romanis. It is present and correct in OED, with the first recorded use from the mid eighteenth century. So named, we are told, as the sulky only has room for one. By extension, a one person bathing machine. Not sure where the one bit comes from, certainly not from the French, as while Micro Robert recognises the word, it also claims that it is English.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=14th+west+horton.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/visitor.html.

Pothole

Just in case one thought that cycle traps were a GLC and Surrey affair, I snapped this pothole-in-waiting in a suburb of a wealthy Kent town.

There was no stick to hand to probe the depth, but given the signs of cracking around the edges, maybe the road in question will wake up one fine morning, after a good wet night, to find that the pothole-in-waiting has become a full size cycle trap.

Trauma

A small black cat with a long fluffy tail started visiting our back garden a month or so ago, joining the two or three other cats which were already so visiting. We think that it is quite a young cat, being prone to chasing all kinds of things and to jumping up in the air for no apparent reason at all. One sees it tearing up or down the garden on a regular basis. On a couple of occasions it has got itself onto our extension roof - then spending some minutes wondering how to get down, before diving head-first into the leylandii.

Today, however, it suffered trauma by the fox, as on this occasion it tore down the garden towards the house, hotly pursued by a rather larger fox. Luckily, it must have got away, as we saw it a bit later, although not from close enough to be sure that its tail was still as long as it had been.

So a rather feeble cat, as our understanding is that most cats will see off most foxes - and quite a few dogs - the story in the TB being that both foxes and dogs are very wary of a cat's claws, quite handy for tearing gashes in bellies left unprotected when leaping to the attack.

Next problem, why was the fox chasing the cat? Was it a mother fox concerned for its young? Young which are not, however, in our garden, so that seems a bit unlikely. Was the cat trying to muscle in on what the fox saw as its hunting grounds? I imagine that there is some overlap of diet, although I am not aware of cats eating the slugs and worms which I believe to be a significant part of a fox's diet. It seems unlikely that a fox would try to eat a cat, unless the fox was very hungry and the cat was moribund or very young. Do foxes, like dogs, just like chasing things? The chasing was just an energetic game, at least from the fox's point of view?

Visitor

A visitor to Chertsey Lane on the Manor Park estate. His minders with, I think, three caravans, two chickens and one sulky have taken up residence  just outside the second phase of the redevelopment of the hospital accommodation now known as Cuddington Glade. See gmaps  51.336411, -0.287723.

Quite a good looking animal.

PS: a middle aged chap whom I took to be one of the minders, was waiting at the nearby bus stop. In the course of telling him the time, I learned that he was part of the joined-up world to the extent of owning a mobile phone. So the phone people must know something about them, even if the tax people don't. Something which extends to location, movement and activity, even if not to real name and address. Perhaps we ought to insist on mobile phones taking voice prints from their users - for the exclusive use of the relevant authorities, naturally.

Larousse

It being some time since I had visited the Oxfam shop in Tooting, off to Earlsfield a week or so ago to put that right.

Then down Garratt Lane on a bright clear afternoon, to find an interesting bit of renovation. That is to say a double fronted, two storey town house which was being given a new front - half an inch of polystyrene insulation board finished off with a thin layer - not much thicker than a thick coat of bonding - of facing bricks, presumably made especially for this sort of job. Which was being done neatly enough, but which left the newly skinned masonry pillars to the bay windows looking rather odd. You can't make them an inch fatter all round without disturbing appearances. At which I must remember to take another look on my next visit, by which time it should all be finished.

Not yet clear how the two new layers were attached to what was there before.

Got to the Oxfam shop to find various offerings of interest, and I settled for three inches of petit Larousse illustré from 1986, for £2.50, to add to my petit Littré, my Harrap and at least one other. With the Larousse being a sort of hybrid between a dictionary and an encyclopedia, with small pictures for the words which respond to that sort of treatment. The acid test were hêtre and chêne, words which I am always getting muddled up and with which Littré is very little help.

Now I have the idea that it is better for me, when reading the likes of Maigret, to use the Littré, a French-French dictionary with something of the OED about it, than to use Harrap which does French-English, but which is apt to give one one word translations of French words, translations which are not always helpful in the case of obscure words with several meanings, perhaps not mapping very conveniently onto English words. While the catch with Littré is that one can end up chasing hares around in circles, rather than getting the translation needed. So the other morning, for example, I looked up tisser to be told that it was all to do with chains being mixed up with trames with a bobbin. Perhaps it was a bit early in the morning, but I could not make head nor tail of this and was reduced to getting Harrap to tell me that tisser was to weave. At least I now know all about warps (up and down), wefts (back and forth) and woofs, and that warp is a very old word, originally meaning to throw - perhaps that is where the Star Trek usage comes from. I suppose it is only to be expected that very old words are used to describe this very old technology.

I also know that there is a French word prescription which is about the bit of law which says that if you have been sitting on something for a long time, no-one can come and take it off you. Also that there is another bit of French law which says that no crime has been committed if a son defrauds his own father.

At which point Larousse scored a bull's eye by including little pictures of the leaves of hêtres and chênes, instantly clearing away the muddle while preserving the letter of the law that one should not, if one can possibly help it, use Harrap. Sold to the man in a duffel coat. I shall report on how well it catches on here in Epsom in due course.

All this was followed up with a discussion about how being in the trade, or going to a lot of theatre, affected one's appreciation of same. My position being that too much knowledge may not be improving. Rather than experiencing whatever it was the playwright was trying to put across, the too experienced theatre goer could all too easily get sidetracked by carping about this or that detail of the production. About how actress X was not a patch on actress Y back in 1949 and completely fluffed her very important silence in the third scene. Not quite the same thing, but I also remember my older brother telling me once that he did not bother much any more with actually listening to his favourite music because he had it all in his head.

Despite it having been a clear afternoon, the sky did not seem terribly clear on the way back through Earlsfield, although I did get a confirmed sighting of Jupiter and two possible sighting of aeroplanes, one low and one high.

Following which I was rather irritated by a headline in somebody else's Evening Standard about the huge burden older mothers were putting on the health service. Checking their web site this morning, the article underneath the headline appears to have been about how expensive it was to care for older mothers and their children, mothers too old to be eligible for fertility treatment here in the UK and who had gone abroad to get it instead: 'a top doctor today sounded an alert over the “huge stress” placed on the NHS by older women having babies'. Top doctor pictured above. Now I am not so keen on this sort of thing either, so I can only suppose that the irritation was a combination of drink taken and the mismatch of the size of the headline with the size of problem. It is not as if the numbers involved are very large.

Evening closed with my first ever sighting of a customer in Doddle, the parcel collection point which has been set up outside Epsom Station. Hitherto without customers whenever I have passed. Maybe it will catch on, but someone must be investing a good bit of money in it in the meantime.

The egg timer's tale: episode 1

We consider the humble egg timer, previously mentioned at the posts pulled up by reference 3, inter alia.

The important property of an egg timer from a day-to-day point of view is that it keeps time. That the time it takes for the sand to flow from the top bulb, through the throat, to the bottom bulb is reliable. Put another way, if you time a large number of eggs, the observed times will exhibit a normal distribution with a mean very close to three minutes and with a very small standard deviation. Your boiled egg will be just right nearly all the time.

Given that the dynamics of the large number of grains of sand in an egg timer are complicated, I suspect this simple but important property to be some consequence of the law of large numbers, a law which asserts that all kinds of repeatable things, never mind how complicated, will tend to exhibit normal distributions if you repeat them often enough. And, including as it does two of the most important numbers in the world, π and e, the normal distribution is clearly something rather special.

But the first pause is for the word repeat. Generally speaking, if you invert an egg timer, the sand will flow steadily from the top bulb, through the throat to the bottom bulb until the top bulb is empty. The number of grains per second will be very steady for most of the time and, more important, the flow will not stop. But sometimes, even if we assume that the sand is clean and dry, it will stop. The grains of sand at the bottom of the top bulb will interlock in some tricky way and make an arch over the throat, an arch which can take the weight of all the grains above. The equilibrium will be unstable, but it will be an equilibrium. The arch might persist for a long time, perhaps until some external shock disturbs it. In practise this does not happen very often, perhaps another manifestation of the law of large numbers.

We ignore the likelihood that a small number of grains of sand will stay stuck to the sides of the top blub, or perhaps around the throat, even when all the rest of the sand has fallen through to the bottom bulb.

While the relative size of the throat and the grains of sand is important, too small and the sand will arch. Maybe the throat being a magic seven times the diameter of that of the grains of sand is enough for stoppages to be very unlikely indeed. But is there actually any upper limit to the diameter of throat that can be bridged by grains of sand of any given size?

The second pause if for the word large. How many grains of sand are there in an egg timer? I guess my teeth brushing egg timer to contain about 2cc of sand. If we suppose the grains of sand to be cubes with 0.2mm sides and the fill level to be 100% we get to a quarter of a million grains, which strikes me as rather too many. So we raise the side to 0.33mm and drop the fill to 50% (devising a configuration of cubes which will give this fill is left as an exercise for the reader) we get to 27,000, not much more than a tenth of the earlier figure. So all we know so far is that we do not have much idea about how many grains of sand there are.

In practise, the grains are not going to be cubes, but sticking with the sort of sand one might get by crushing rock, how complicated are they going to be? How many complications do we need to allow in order to be able to model the behaviour of the sand in the egg timer?

Cubes and spheres are easy to describe, but neither is likely to result, not in large numbers anyway, from crushing rock. But we might suppose that the grains are convex polyhedra – that is to say ‘solids in three dimensions with flat polygonal faces, straight edges and sharp corners or vertices’. We might further restrict them by saying that the polyhedra cannot have more than so many vertices, that the minimum diameter must be more than some amount and that the maximum diameter must be less than some other, larger amount. The grains must be at least vaguely spherical, rather like, in shape at least, the stones which make up the ballast on which railway lines are laid. Bearing in mind that the sieves usually used to grade such materials can enforce minimum diameters but not maximum diameters.

We can then make piles of such polyhedra and calculate the forces at the points, lines & surfaces of contact. A bit long winded but straightforward enough, provided always that we can assume that the pile is not moving about. A problem in statics rather than dyanmics.

For present purposes we can perhaps neglect the possibility that over time, over many uses, the grains of sand in the egg timer will abrade. The grains will get smaller and more rounded, like the pebbles on the beach, and a much finer dust will start to accumulate around them. A dust which might, in principle, start to get in the way of the clean and simple workings of the egg timer.

However, when we move to dynamics, things still get rather difficult. I suspect that the problem of solving the equations of motion of numbers of polyehedra falling down through a glass tube while tumbling over each other, sliding & scraping across each other and bouncing off each other is computationally intractable. I seem to remember that solving the equations of motion of three idealised spheres moving around each under the force of gravity was bad enough – and that sounds almost trivial compared to the present problem.

But there is hope. We can change scale, we can move up a layer and rather than try and model things at the grain level, we can model them at the millimetre level, rather in the way that weather forecasters model at the kilometre level. Another trick is to chop time into lots of very small intervals and to move one’s system forward, one step at a time. A wheeze which might work, for example, with brains where, with a small enough interval one could proceed with the assumption that in any one such interval, each neuron is either firing or not. One can think about preservation of energy and of the various kinds of momentum. One can look at pretty pictures of currents and storms moving through the space in question. The authors of the paper at reference 1 do this with a version of the egg timer by means of watching the way that layers of coloured sand distort over time. Coloured sand of the sort which one can buy at Alum Bay. See reference 2.

In this way, I dare say that one can come up with equations which describe the gross behaviour of the egg timer with a reasonable degree of accuracy. Which is where I will let the matter rest on this occasion.

In the next episode we will move from the law of large numbers to the law of conservation of information, the IT version of the first law of thermodynamics, the one about the conservation of energy.

Reference 1: mechanics of the sandglass - A A Mills, S Day and S Parkes – 1996. This short and accessible paper contains some scientific background. Google will find it if you stick in the first sentence as a search term.

Reference 2: http://www.theneedles.co.uk/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=egg+timer.

Carex

One of the carex pendula noticed previously.

Group search key: ywa.

Box

The entrance to the box walk noticed previously. Probably seen better days.

Group search key: ywa.

Moss

The moss noticed in the last post. The sort of thing I associate with the far north of Scotland more than with chalk downland.

Group search key: ywa.

Lovelace

On Sunday, it being a fine day, we thought we ought to mark the google 'go' coup noticed at reference 1 in some way. After poring over the maps for a while, we lighted upon the notion of a picnic at Effingham Forest. once part of the estate belonging to the Earl of Lovelace, the husband of the first computer programmer in the world, also the only legitimate daughter of Lord Byron (the chap who died for liberty in Greece), Ada Lovelace.

We found the right car park, roughly at gmaps 51.247029, -0.438276, but from there headed north into Sheepleas, being sure about the direction as for once we had thought to take our Montreal compass out - on what has turned out to be a rare outing. See reference 4.

Inspected the yew walk and found the box walk, the first time I have ever come across one of these last. Given that the big house, now the Horsley Park Hotel, was a few miles to the north and the area which included the two walks had been a famous old beech wood until most of the beeches were taken down in the hurricane of 1987, we were a bit puzzled why the walks were there - the sort of thing that was more usually an adjunct to the big house, rather than tucked away in the woods.

There were still some fine stands of old beech trees, but most of the ground was new growth. A lot of self seeded ash, with some planted oak, beech and wild cherry mixed in. It all looked rather well in the bright sunlight.

There was a lot of moss, rather odd considering we were on chalk downs, signs of bluebells to come and a reasonable showing of my favourite carex pendula. One notice of same being found at reference 3.

After our picnic we returned to the car, dumped the picnic gear and crossed the road to take a look at Effingham Forest proper, where we came across lots of handsome pine trees - at least we supposed they were pines. Tall evergreen trees with slender trunks which did not look at all like leylandii. Lots of rhododendrons growing among them. Some coppiced sweet chestnut. Plus a small bush with striking yellow flowers smelling of coconuts - aka gorse.

The famous bridges that Lovelace built, both so that he could ride around in greater comfort and so that he could better extract timber, will have to wait until the next occasion.

PS: on checking the record, I find that the last visit to this area was nearly six years ago, noticed at reference 2. Somewhat pulled up to see how much busier I was then than I feel like being now!

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/high-finance_9.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=feet+bathing.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/carex-pendula.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-quest-for-new-compass.html.

Group search key: ywa.

New lodger

The kitchen aloe had rather outgrown its bit of shelf in the kitchen and has been promoted to the study, where there is a window where it does fit because the curtains there are not used because of the contraption on which the laptop sits when it is in residence.

There was some palaver about repotting and we settled for a new pot which was more deep rather than more wide. Oddly few roots visible in the ball we took out of the old pot; perhaps these arid climate plants are more airlings than earthlings.

Watered as part of the operation which we subsequently read was all wrong, so we shall see how it gets on. But I think that the three suckers (to the left in the illustration) will do alright, even if the main plant does not - given that the whole thing was pretty vigorous in the kitchen, even if it did fall over. And it might even be that the better light upstairs will pull it back up again.

PS: I had thought that aerians was the proper word for beings that lived off air, there even being a few humans about a couple of years ago who claimed to pull this one off, but that is not the story at reference 1.

Reference 1: http://www.aerian.com/.

Catastrophe!

Something of a catastrophe with the 353rd batch of bread yesterday.

Mixing and first rise went along as normal. Knocking back and second rise went along as normal, with the shaped loaves placed in their dishes (one of which is on the left in the illustration) and lidded (one of the lids is upper right in the illustration).

For convenience of carrying and rising, the loaves are arranged one above the other, the flat bottoms of the lids making this possible - which it would not be with the expensive bread domes sold by the likes of John Lewis and Lakeland.

Unfortunately, on this occasion, the first time ever, something happened as I was taking the loaves out of the airing cupboard at the end of their second rise, and the top loaf - plate, loaf, lid and all - fell to the floor, up-side down.

With the result that the lid was badly dented and the loaf ended up in the lid rather than on the plate. Rise vanished, all the wind out of its sails. The last time that I lost rise, because I had allowed the second rise to go on for far too long, the bread refused to rise again, so I thought that I had lost this loaf. However, while the loaf which had not been dropped went into the oven, the loaf which had been was reshaped and put back in the airing cupboard - and rather to my surprise it started to rise again. After repeating the normal time of 90 minutes we had something not far short of a normal rise. Baked it and we had something not far short of a normal loaf, as illustrated. Even a touch of crackle as it cooled, just about visible when the illustration is enlarged.

I did not get to eat it fresh, but it was OK this morning. Catastrophe averted.

PS: in the margins I attempted a bit of panel beating on the bowl, the one illustrated, using a ball peen hammer with a bit of cloth for a pad. Not a bad job, and one could easily miss the damage now. Almost as good as new. Another first.

Reviews

Having lain low since reference 1, Napoléon Ier has surfaced again in a surprising way.

In the March 24th edition of the NYRB, Steven Englund reviews three new biographies of Napoleon: one written by a military historian, one by an Oxford don and one by a Frenchman. Now what most reviewers these days would do is to write an essay about Napoleon in the way of the chap noticed at reference 2, an essay which, for all I know about it, might easily have been lifted from wikipedia and given a wash & brush up. Tack a mention of the ostensible subject of the essay in somewhere along the way for decencies sake. Such an essay might well be interesting, which is why they get away with it, but it would not be a review. While, and this is the surprising bit, Englund actually takes each of these three books in turn and tells us something about each one. Something about the author, his approach, his strengths and weaknesses, and so on. Plus a bit of compare and contrast. Proper book review stuff.

So at the end of the article we are in a reasonable position to know which, if any of these books is going to be of interest. Whether to reach for the amazon button or not.

I wonder if there is any relevance in the fact that Englund's wikipedia entry is French rather than English, reflecting the fact that he is an American living in Paris and an expert on Napoleon in his own right. Do the French and the crypto-French do reviews in some special French way? See reference 3.

PS: will the reviews spark correspondence from the authors in a forthcoming issue?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/napoleons-new-years-party.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/migration.html.

Reference 3: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Englund.