Birthday treat

My birthday treat having been an expedition to Ryde, we were taking a coup de blanc on the balcony of the 'Three Buoys', when we were rewarded by the sight of no fewer than two floating care homes, also known as cruise ships, the FCH Faith and the FCH Hope, pulling east out of Southampton on the evening tide. Maybe FCH Charity today if we are really lucky.

Both ships were flashy and large. They each carried thirteen of the large bottles used as life boats on each side, the sort of thing to be found at reference 2 or through reference 1. I don't suppose trying life in one of them is part of the experience on offer, as one imagines that it would be pretty grim.

Six decks of sea-view cubicles above the life boats, no doubt huge numbers of lesser cubicles elsewhere. Such a lot of people swapping suburban bliss for life in a cubicle.

We speculated about the numbers of parsons, doctors, dentists and so forth carried. They must get deaths quite regularly, so perhaps the odd mortician. Not to mention all those eager young dancers trying to make it to the west end, working the cruise ships until the right opportunity comes up.

We also speculated about the dynamics within towns which host visits from such ships. There must be lots of interesting local politics going on here, with lots of passions for and passions against.

PS 1: I have anonymised the names to protect the privacy of the owners. But privacy which could no doubt be breached by getting google to take a gander at the records maintained by the Southampton Harbour Master.

PS 2: for the avoidance of doubt, the 'Three Buoy's is a rather natty, near vegetarian restaurant on Ryde Esplanade which we may sample properly in due course. Not a public house.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/fch-celebrity-constellation.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/zanussi-or-bust.html.

Reference 3: http://www.threebuoys.co.uk/.

Not yet checked

I last noticed the unexplained shooting by police at Huddersfield at reference 1. Hopefully I will remember to check again at the end of the year, by which time the complaints people may have come up with something.

In the meantime, I read about another shooting on the M25 near Bristol. I dare say involving another career criminal well known to the authorities. But once again, I do need to be reassured that shoot to kill, without giving the victim the surrender option, was a reasonable response in the circumstances.

I might add that I have no problem with shoot to kill, without giving the victim the surrender option, in the case of people who are, or who appear to be, terrorists. In which connection I hope that, given the presently difficult times, not many people are stupid enough to dress up as terrorists. I associate to an anecdote about someone stupid enough to make a joke at a bad time about carrying a bomb while checking in at Heathrow. He was given the full treatment. And then to a similarly bad time, many years ago now, at Edinburgh airport, when I had (unthinkingly, I hasten to add) put a large cold haggis in my hand luggage, which rather startled the security person checking its insides by hand, without being able to see them. He was somewhat mollified when I explained that it was a first class haggis, bought from a famous butcher, somewhere at the western end of the town centre.

PS: according to gmaps streetview, the western end of town centre is far too leafy and residential for butchers. Maybe Queensferry Street? More careful check needed.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/no-progress.html.

Twigs

A couple of weeks ago I worried, at reference 1, about the state of the oak tree in the back garden, a tree which has been shedding twigs and leaves since mid summer.

It continues to shed now we are into the Autumn, with the only difference seeming to be that the shed leaves are now brown and yellow rather than green. And that lots of leaf buds for next year coming down with the leaves of this year. And that quite a lot of dead wood is starting to be visible through the thinning foliage.

I may prune the dead wood that I can reach - with the German wolf pole reaching maybe fifteen feet with the steps - when the leaves are down, perhaps sometime in November.

But I will continue to worry about what will happen next year, having lost so many leaf buds this year. Is the tree really sick, or is it just a lack of water through the hot part of the summer just past?Will it spring back into life? Will the branches develop a leafy fur, after the fashion of some of the sickly (foreign) oaks down Horton Lane?

Shall I trouble the plant gurus at Wisley?

PS: I notice from google this morning that I can buy the wolf pole (of reference 2) over the internet for around £60, when I paid Chessington Garden Centre more than £80. For which mark up they offered a choice of actual tools which one could heft and handle. Which, as a very occasional buyer of such things, was worth it.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/wind.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/autumn-cutlery-1.html.

Box recovery

The stop at Raynes Park mentioned in the previous post solved the apple storage problem for us, it being the time of year when people are very free with their cooking apples. There had been talk of going down to the market for some banana boxes, rather good for this sort of thing as they stack well.

However, we now have five croissant boxes chucked out of the Starbucks hard by the bus stop at Raynes Park, probably enough for present purposes, and a more convenient size to lift up and down to their shelf in the garage when full.

They were a bit awkward on the stairs, particularly coming down, but the bus driver refrained from comment.

Widmann and others

Sunday past saw the third outing to the Wigmore Hall of the season to hear the Heath Quartet with Hannes Minnaar. The first of these last heard last year and noticed at reference 1 while the second was a new sighting.

A little nervous about the trains, given the recent upheaval at Waterloo, but the journey in to Victoria was uneventful, apart from a young gentleman who appeared unable to stand still and a not particularly young lady wearing a rather expensive but rather clinging dress. Not very English at all. And as it turned out there was another lady of the same sort just in front of us in the audience, probably German, this time wearing a rather expensive but rather short skirt.

At Clapham Junction we did a double take on a digger a couple of platforms away, moving south, but with wheels which suggested moving north. We decided that the answer was that it was a regular digger mounted on some kind of rail trolley, the wheels of which were turned forwards by the wheels of the digger turning backwards. All very confusing.

The flowers in the hall were very good, mainly red anthuriums with a lot of green to back them up. But the effect was rather spoiled by the hall having decided to use a projector up on the balcony to project messages about phones and such like onto the back wall of the stage, rather in the way of the people at the south bank. We much preferred the arrangement involving a person. Furthermore, either the projector or some other light source meant that one could see the shadow of the hanging microphone cluster on said back wall for the duration. Perhaps they will get better as the season progresses.

Haydn Op.33 No.1 very good.

Widmann String Quartet No.1 not without interest, but appropriately short. Introduced by reading the preface to the score from the composer, which explained how difficult it was to follow on from the greats. How can one do something which has not been done before?

The Shostakovich Op.57 piano quintet does not always work for me, perhaps because it is such a favourite. See reference 2, which seems to be the work's last outing. But it did work on this occasion, although I lost concentration just as it was petering quietly out, which was a pity.

We did not like the bit of Fauré played by way of an encore. It did not sit well with what went before - and, we think, meant that we just missed a train at Victoria.

The second violin had an engaging, self effacing way about her while waiting for her turn. She managed to appear to be taking an interest in the music, without chafing at the bit. A good team player. While the piano seemed to be very young.

Having missed the train at Victoria, it was clear that the trains were in a bit of a state, so we tried Clapham Junction, to be reminded of the different class of passenger on the Victoria side. Including on this occasion some very cheerful drunks sitting down by the doors while they did their burgers and chips. Very philosophical about our climbing over them. From Clapham Junction we got a train to Raynes Park, from where we were able to get a replacement bus service, a service which was surprisingly quick on the quiet roads. Helped along by entertainment from a cheerful English gentleman who worked and mostly lived in Munich, a town which he recommended to us very warmly. I certainly remember being very impressed with its description when I happened to look the place up a few years ago. Lots to see and do, including mountains in day tripping distance. Maybe we will make it one day.

PS: the gentleman's German was good enough that he could put an English accent into his German when he wanted to impress the Germans. Otherwise he was mistaken for a German and got no credit for his fluency.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/last-dorking.html.

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

Removals

The spider noticed at reference 1 has been entertaining us for a fortnight now, during which time he has made up and consumed at least three parcels of prey.

But today was the day of the window cleaner, so the spider had to be moved yesterday and I thought that the wisteria, just beyond the extension doors would be the place. So I collected him up and deposited him on the wisteria, where he hung underneath a leaf for a bit. Then he climbed on top of the leaf and sat there for a bit longer. Then he vanished. Then, a bit later he moved into action, working on a new web. And by this morning he has a new friend, that is to say another spider of roughly the same size and appearance building a web next door. Not visible in this snap.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/wildlife-1.html.

Scoring for music

Introduction

In posts about LWS to date there has been a bias towards vision and it might be thought that being built on vision, LWS will not be much use at other modalities, such as taste, touch, smell and sound.

Here we try to tip the balance the other way a bit, to do something with sound. With the big difference that sound is expressed in time while vision is expressed in (more or less two dimensional) space.

Furthermore, our frames of consciousness have hitherto been rather static, rather like the frames of a cinema film, and assembled by the compiler for host consumption one after the other. But if we have it that a frame lasts for the order of a second, we are going to have to update frames as we go along, as we do not think that our subjective experience of sound can be more than a few tens of milliseconds behind the real action, if for no other reason than it would be very hard for musicians in a chamber group, who do not have the advantage of visual cues from a conductor, to keep time with each other otherwise. We shall be saying something about this frame update below.

We notice three sorts of sound: western classical music, speech and other. In what follows we are mainly concerned with the first of these.

In the past, for example at reference 1, we have talked of threads, sometimes corresponding to the staves of a musical score. But threads have been rather lost of late, vaguely subsumed into layers.

We talked at reference 5 of doing colour using three texture nets string across the one region, corresponding roughly to the RGB setup in Microsoft Office on computers, which gives colour as the weighted sum of red, green and blue, with the weights taking integer values in the range [0, 255].

While sound has a frequency distribution, with any particular frequency having frequency and amplitude, both non negative reals, which is a rather different problem.

We believe in mapping data, the data content of consciousness, to LWS in a way which preserves spatial and frequency appearances, rather in the way that somatopic organisation has been demonstrated in some areas of the brain proper. But with audible sound lying in the range 10Hz to 4,000Hz, some sort of scaling is going to be needed to capture this in a direct way in the firing rates of neurons, or in the activation of our neural nets.

In what follows we try out a scheme for the expression of western classical music in the world of LWS-N. Perhaps the sort of thing illustrated by the page of score included below.

Four lines of music for each of the four instruments of a string quartet: first violin, second violin, viola and cello, with the lines being known to musicians as staves, not to be confused with the staves of a barrel. The lines are broken down in time into bars, indicated by the vertical lines, with each bar containing the same number of beats, being of the same duration in time. Each bar is made up of a sequence of notes and rests of various denominations, adding up to the appropriate number of beats, with the pitch of the notes indicated by their vertical position on the stave and with their volume often indicated by various signs and marks below the stave in question, for example an ‘f’ for forte or loud or a ‘p’ for piano or quiet. All this, somehow, needs to be mapped to, coded by LWS-N. That is not to say that the subjective experience is the same as the score, but we are suggesting that LWS-N is organised in much the same way.

Figure 1

Our wheeze is to say that a line of music is a linear layer object, with each region representing the sort of note which might appear in a score, a crochet, a quaver or whatever, with the density in space of the texture net nodes coding for frequency. Perhaps not a one-to-one map between notes & rests and regions, but something along those lines. See references 2 and 3 for earlier takes on linear objects.

Activation washes across the region in real time, then moves onto to the next, never to return.

Whereas activation of a visual scene washes around the region, or perhaps around the layer as a whole, for the duration of the frame. Put another way, the frame of sound grows through its duration, whereas the frame of sight is much more static – although we have described elsewhere wheezes to deal with movement in the visual field.

In the case of our quartet, the duration of the frame might well be some small number of bars; perhaps just one, while the content of the frame might well be some larger number, including a few of history before and a few of prediction after.

Tone

At reference 5 we talked about coding for colour using texture nets. Here we propose using texture nets to code for the tone of a note. Where by tone we mean something a bit broader than frequency or pitch. A tone is rarely pure, it is rarely just a single frequency of sound, much more a blended object with overtones, undertones and noise. Something of this can be seen in the post about bells at reference 6.

Therefore, just as with colour, we allow more than one texture net to the region, where the note in question has more than one component, which it usually will, and where it makes sense to separate out components.

The first idea was that we would code for pitch using the density of the vertices of texture nets, perhaps high densities for high tones, low densities for low tones. With the density sometimes varying across the region, in time or otherwise, with the result that a region can be a lot more complicated than one of the notes of Figure 1.

But there are other possibilities, some of which we will mention below.

The linear layer object

We introduced shape nets in reference 7, nets which defined the shape of layer objects, but did not go on to define linear layer objects. In the illustration below we show a modified version of the shape net shown there as Figure 11.

Figure 2

Figure 2 is the shape net of a linear layer object, a linear layer object with six regions or parts.

Rule one: a linear layer object is connected.

Rule two: a linear layer object has at least two regions.

Rule three: two of the regions have just one neighbour, any other regions there may be have exactly two. The first two are the object’s terminal regions, the remainder are its interior regions.

We might add a rule four which gives the object a direction, with a beginning and an end. This has been expressed in Figure 2 by having a source top left and a sink upper middle, at the other end of the object.

The line of music

Our basic construct in the line of music, expressed as a linear layer object, in which the regions express the notes. This is illustrated in the figure which follows.

Figure 3

So we do sound in two dimensions; volume on the Y axis and time on the X axis.
We have shown this linear layer object as a series of rectangles. The height of the rectangles, the regions, expresses the volume, while their width expresses the duration, which is fine when we have rectangles, unlikely in neural practise. So we will need to define some proxy for height and width in the more general case.

Activation moves from left to right, with the current activation, the current time marked by the vertical red line, here called the time line.

Figure 4

Tone is expressed by the texture nets of the regions, here marked by colour. So in this line we have both the tone and the volume changing from left to right through time. And, as noted above, while any one region may have more than one texture net, expressing more than one note at a time, we have not yet devised a neat way to show this on the page.

We also have gaps, marked by uncoloured rectangles, but which serve to maintain the connection between the regions of the linear object which codes for this line of the music.

We might have the convention that a narrow uncoloured rectangle, here called a gap region, separates two notes which are played one after the other with no scored interval. No gap region is where the notes are run together and a big gap region expresses a scored rest, of the sort taken from Wikipedia (reference 4) in Figure 5 below.

Figure 5

Several lines of music

Figure 6

Here we have three linear layer objects, the blue, the green and the pink, with the regions running across the page. And while it does not have to be rectangles, it does make it easier if the linear objects are parallel, with their times lining up.

Figure 7

So in Figure 7 we have a few bars of each of two lines of music, with the idea that the supporting neurons handle the synchronisation of activation along the two lines – but Figure 6 certainly looks simpler.

We allow a degree of prediction, thus accounting for the presence of data to the right of the red time line in Figure 6.

There is a certain amount of activation to the left of the time line, representing the current phrase being held in working memory, rather less to the right, representing expectations. With the detail here depending on person, time and occasion. A knowledgeable musician or someone who knew the piece of music concerned well might have stronger expectations than others.

On this account, listening to music could easily give much the same result as reading a score, with both being organised in roughly the same way, at least as far as Figure 6 is concerned. But while there might be one layer object for each instrument or voice, things may be expressed at a higher level. We may have a tenor line standing for all ten tenors in the choir. Or a string line standing for all the strings in an orchestra, without distinguishing violins from double basses.

Observations

There is plenty of coding space to spare here. We have made little use of the shape of our regions, which does not seem quite right.

There is an arbitrariness about using up for volume and across for time which is unappealing. But perhaps we are stuck with something of the sort if we stick with mapping stuff onto our patch of neurons in a more or less pictorial fashion.

We have not said much about why the texture nets coding for colour give rise to a different subjective experience to those for coding for sound. There are, no doubt, various possibilities:

• The density of the vertices of the texture net spanning the part, or neighbourhood within the part. Maybe different density bands for the different modes
• The mean number of edges to the vertex in the texture net. The mean number of edges to the region.
• The regularity of the texture net. With the highest score for a regular net of triangles, low scores for very mixed nets.

We have disturbed the organisation of consciousness into frames. The talk here is of activation sweeping across the growing page, rather than swirling around the static page.
We might have activation sweeping across the frame. But in a visual frame it is all set up at the outset, and possibly because density of vertices is low, it can sweep across again and again during the duration of a frame. While in an aural frame the frame is being built up, from left to right, for the duration, with a frame only being stopped and a new one started when the music comes to some sort of a period. Or the space allocated to the frame fills up. In this case the activation doesn’t get to the end and so it just carries on.

Conclusions

We have sketched a way of expressing western classical music in the world of LWS-N, following reasonably closely the way in which it is written down on paper.

Plenty of details to be filled in, but the direction seems promising.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/describing-consciousness.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/lines.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/rules-supplemental.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rest_(music).

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/coding-for-colour.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/virtual-pitch.html.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/geometry-and-activation-in-world-of.html.

Group search key: srd.

More apples

Following the apples noticed at reference 1, a further round of fresh English, a surprise from somewhere down Manor Green Road.

Quite different, drifting towards a Russet in texture and taste, although not in appearance, but very good just the same.

However, appearances deceive, as google turns up some Egremont Russets from the nursery at reference 2, which look very like these ones and nothing like the dingy yellow apples sold as Russets in the shops. Perhaps they turn that colour in store.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/apples.html.

Reference 2: https://www.marshalls-seeds.co.uk/.

Fake 15

I read in yesterday's Guardian that the new artistic director of the Young Vic (see reference 1), is not from Ghana at all, despite being called Kwame Kwei-Armah. He was brought up as Ian Roberts in Southall, changing his name as a young man, after doing a roots job.

Fake in that his new name leads one to think that he or his family came from West Africa quite recently. But, to be fair, lots of luvvies have stage names chosen because they look or sound so much better than their real names.

While reference 2 leaves me with nothing but admiration for the drive with which his parents must have addressed their new lives in England, after arriving here from Grenada in the early 1960's.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/wings.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwame_Kwei-Armah.

Pollen not

A pine tree in full flower in the church yard at Wisley. Tap the branch and out comes a great cloud of yellow pollen.

The only catch being that the whole point of pine trees being that they are not angiosperms and do not have flowers, let alone clouds of pollen. So what this pine tree is up to is beyond me.

Group search key: wsf.

Begonias

This snap gives something of the begonia display in the big hothouse at Wisley. A display laid out in pots on the concrete floor, maybe something in the region of twelve feet by six, with a small pond in the middle.

A subsequent attempt to capture the extraordinary texture of the leaves on the right by close-up did not come off, so I have not bothered to include it here. So interested readers will have to make their way to Wisley - to where I dare say Shearings, or some similar operation, offer day trips from Victoria Coach Station. There are usually plenty of coaches in the car park.

Reference 1: http://www.shearings.com/.

Group search key: wsf.

Beans

A new to me technique for growing runner beans, with the sloping frame making for easy picking. Not that these had been picked, being only good for drying or seed now.

The training allotment gardens at the back of the pinetum. Further evidence that the people at Wisley are maximising their shop floor space, squeezing out all odd areas round the periphery of the estate which did not used to be available to the public. Just like M&S in Epsom.

Group search key: wsf.

Water boatmen

The scene of much activity from water boatmen on the Wey.

Most visible as specks jerking about on the sunny portion of the water, so barely visible in this still, even if you click to enlarge. Clearly an opportunity to try out the movie clip capability of my telephone which I missed out on.

Group search key: wsf.

Architects

One of the builders who used to work TB held architects in very poor regard, being quite convinced that none of them had a clue about the basics of building. About how, for example, you kept water out of a building. Then yesterday, unusually turning west out of Earlsfield Station, rather than east, I came across some evidence for his point of view.

In the form of some very shoddy detailing on a row of houses which looked as if they dated from the seventies of the last century.

The use of large tiles in this context was both ugly and unsound, unsound because, being in reach of the pavement, a fair proportion of them had been bashed, broken or chipped. And a fair proportion of the timber fascias were badly rotted. Shoddy detailing indeed.

But an interesting stretch of road, a reminder that inner London suburbs used to be home to all kinds of light industry before estate agents and financial services took over.

Fake 14

Not wanting to be left out of the current fad for eating food out of scruffy looking vans and caravans on the street, also known as street food, Wisley have got themselves one of the vans, although they did not run to a pre-stressed one, with theirs looking brand spanking new. I don't suppose they have bothered to find themselves any Vietnamese to staff it up with either.

Was it their idea or do we have their catering concessionaire to thank? And what is the commercial arrangement?

Fake street food has arrived at Wisley.

Group search key: wsf.

Library

Back to Wisley last week, to return Hageneder on yew. Then, having ascertained that one can return any book to any library, in particular the one at Vincent Square, I took out Pavord on tulip, a book I nearly bought when it came out in 1999 and have nearly bought subsequently when it started to turn up in charity shops. A rather fatter and more substantial book than the yew book, although very much the same sort of thing, full of all kinds of interesting facts and factlets. But nothing on the botany or the gardening of tulips, more a history of our fascination with them. For example, the Dublin Florists' Society was founded by three Huguenot officers who had fought for King William at the Battle of the Boyne. With a florist being an amateur of flowers rather than a shopkeeper. Sadly, this club appears to have closed, and the best that google can do is reference 1, illustrated above.

On into the gardens where we found lots of ornamental grasses and some nice old roses, the ones with flowers more like those of dog roses than the modern floribundas.

Strolled down to the river walk with the swing seats. We decided that despite their clearly being expensive seats, they would be much improved by the addition of a foot rest below the seat and a pull with which to swing the seat. We pondered about whether what appeared to be dowels really were dowels, rather than little caps to cover screw heads, and settled for dowels on the grounds that little caps would not long very long out in the weather. See reference 2 for a picture.

Round into the pinetum which was very quiet and peaceful. Right through to the end where we came across a training allotment garden, used by those taking courses of one kind or another at Wisley. There were some interesting plants and vegetables, also a basket of marrows from which we were invited to help ourselves. So we now had a middle sized marrow as well as a middle sized book to carry about the gardens.

Tour around the big glass house, mainly to inspect the aloes and such like, but also to find an impressive display of leafy begonias, leafy in the sense that the leaves were much more interesting that the flowers. Probably begonia rex.

Snack lunch in the nearby cafe, usually full of noisy young families, but not on this occasion. I took a variety of chicken Caesar salad in a clear plastic box. Good, but dear, and supplemented with a respectable rock cake. We admired the small trees in tubs outside, trained to the shape of sunshades, which perhaps, in due course, is what they would be.

On exit, greeted by a huge Occado lorry whizzing down the A3 to London, looking from the back like a rather tall furniture lorry. Split level affair, as attested by google. From whom I learn that Alamy seemed to have cornered the market in images of same. Although oddly, going to the horse' mouth, that is to say reference 3, searching for them doesn't seem to work at all. Maybe google really are best at searching.

Reference 1: The Dublin Florists' Club in the Mid Eighteenth Century - E. Charles Nelson - 1982.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/made-in-lyme-regis.html.

Reference 3: http://www.alamy.com/.

Group search key: wsf.

Fake 13

In the margins of a recent visit to Wisley garden centre we came across Wisley village, a village which appears to consist mainly of Wisley church (dedication unknown), Church Farm (with large & fancy red brick barn) and various dependent cottages.

The church is old, having been built in 12th century and not much altered since, apart from a Victorian restoration. Presumably the village was one of those which, for one reason or another neither died nor prospered and just hung on. Views across what might once have been water meadows to the Wey.

Once in the gift of the Black Prince who had a hunting lodge somewhere in the area, and for a long time in the gift of the Onslow family (of Clandon House (see reference 1) and Onslow Square), then into the clutches of the Guinness family and now back in the bosom of the church, that is to say with the Bishop of Guildford.

Scored as a fake because of the fake Norman west windows added by the Victorians, described by Pevsner in his characteristically snooty way as 'bad neo-Norman'. With the paragraph following describing the main buildings at the garden centre as a 'weakened and sweetened version of Lutyens Tudor'.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/clandon-redux.html.

Group search key: wsf.

Wings

Last week to the Young Vic to see 'Wings', a play already noticed as stroke 1 at reference 1.

Started off badly with four out of five of the new ticket machines from Southern not working. Things got better when one of them sprang into life as I watched, presumably, these days, having remote software repair capability. The catch being that I was so surprised that I bought Travelcards rather simple returns to Waterloo. Several pounds donated to Southern.

On the platform we had two flashy black girls, fully kitted out in Epsom College sports gear. They said they were on their way home, wherever that might have been. Then another flashy black girl working the bar at the Young Vic, sufficiently flashy that we suspected her of being a wannabee luvvie, content to work the bar at a theatre until some proper work turned up.

In between, we had taken our picnic in the little park opposite the Old Vic, not busy but with its usual mixture of indigents, bright young things and normals.

Good atmosphere in the Young Vic with plenty of people of working age for once and plenty of people who looked a bit arty. House fairly full for this evening performance.

Open stage, with banks of not very comfortable seats on both the long sides. A large sliding, muslin tent sometimes containing the action and sometimes used to support change of personnel. But the action was dominated by a trapeze, to which Juliet Stevenson spent most of the hour and a half or so attached, attached by a harness a bit like a gent's swimming costume, and gliding about the stage with great aplomb. Lots of somersaults.

The play was a portrait of the recovery of a lady struck down by a stroke, seen mainly from her point of view. All the problems, frustrations and worries along the way, in which, not being a complete stranger to hospitals, I found the rather bossy, patronising & aggressively cheery behaviour of the young staff helping her along the way rather fun.

But while swinging around on the trapeze might have given us some feel for how she felt, having been an aviatrix and wing walker in her youth, it did rather dominate the proceedings, although one had to admire Stevenson, around 60 herself, for putting on the gymnastics night after night. I wondered how she held her body flat and straight for what seemed like quite long periods, when suspended by not much more than a belt. I don't think my back would have stood for it. There was also the feeling that it was not terribly dignified for an older lady to be doing such stuff. I dare say the Young Vic would say that that was part of the point. Having a stroke is not very dignified. But as I have said before, reference 1 being, as it happens, a recent example, in a play one does not have to be undignified to portray indignity. Or to be more precise, one does not have to be unpleasant in order to portray unpleasant. That is part of the skill set expected.

Quite a while ago now we saw her in 'Death and the Maiden' and the programme claims her for 'Happy Days', which we have seen twice over the last twenty years. Once Fiona Shaw but, annoyingly, I cannot find out who the other one was.

The programme mostly consists of the text of the play, written by one Arthur Kopit about 40 years ago. Hopefully I will get around to reading it.

With thanks to the exeunt magazine for the picture.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/ruminations.html.

Trolley 93

Another trolley captured on the path between the back of Sainbury's and the West Street bridge over the Epsom-Waterloo railway line, this one with the front wheel lock dropped.

A bit of experiment suggested the best way to do it was to fit one trolley inside the other, that is to say trolley 92, tip the pair of them well back so that they could run on the rearmost pair of back wheels. Slightly awkward in that one had to bend slightly to hold them in position and push, but it worked well enough on a good surface, which the path back to the front of Sainsbury's mainly was.

Along the way I wondered whether it would not have been easier to put the locked trolley in the basket of the other trolley. These smaller trolleys are not too heavy for such a lift and one would fit inside the basket of another, albeit taking up a fair bit of path. Perhaps something to be tried on the next occasion.

Outside Sainsbury's front entrance, I found that trolley 91 had yet to be attended to. Wheel lock still dropped.

Looking as it we are on target to make the century this year and our minds our turning to the appropriate form of celebration. Perhaps also something to be marked by an advertisement in the local free Guardian? Or by a letter to 'Borough Insight', this last being the council freebie?

Trolley 92

Captured on the path between the back of Sainbury's and the West Street bridge over the Epsom-Waterloo railway line.

Trolley 91

I was unsure about whether it was OK to score this trolley, given that it was in front of the Sainsbury's petrol station, not far from the entrance to the car park, so I had a chat session with the duty officer of the rules committee.

His ruling was that the combination of not being visible from the trolley jockeys' regular beat and the front wheel lock having dropped made it legitimate salvage, roughly in the sense of the  International Convention on Salvage (1989).

But he did complain about the poor quality of picture streaming from my telephone, which meant that he had to give more weight to my testimony in the matter than he would have liked.

Photographic version two

Interestingly, if when I enlarge the picture of the previous post on the large screen of the desktop, I got a much sharper image of the text than I expected, so the underlying file has plenty of detail, which might or might not see the light of day, depending.

Much the same thing with scanned version posted earlier, but not as sharp as this.

Group search key: wgb.

Photographic version one

Photographic version of the document scanned in an earlier post in this group. Contrary to expectation, not much different.

Taken by an east facing window on a dull day, no flash as this resulted in a white blob of reflection and no increase in legibility.

Group search key: wgb.

Shop down

The block opposite the Cock and Lion, about to enter a new life. It seems that part of the change is that Mr. Alexander was caught out in various monetary misdemeanours, possibly involving Swiss bank accounts.

Will it be yet another kitchen shop for the nouveaux riches of the home counties? All those people that work magic with footballs or with other peoples' money.

Group search key: wgb.

Bar counts

The bar counts on the back of the programme referred to earlier. Possibly legible if you click to enlarge. I should perhaps have taken a photograph, higher resolution than the very cheap scanner, practically given away with some now retired desktop computer.

Not altogether convinced, but I think the fact that Bach - and others of his times - played games with numbers is well attested

Group search key: wgb.

Herbin

Not the picture by Herbin that I saw and liked at the Opera gallery in New Bond Street.

Slightly surprised that I have never heard of him before. Wikipedia certainly has and bing turns up plenty of images - with the only public one in these islands seemingly in Edinburgh, in their National Gallery. Long way to go and on the computer I like the one shown left much better.

But where is it? What is it called? Bing not much help, but google image search does rather better, telling me that the painting passed through the hands of the people at reference 2 at some point. Described as 'Auguste Herbin. Composition, 1931. Oil on canvas. Sold: € 46,360'. So probably in private hands somewhere and a bit out of my price range.

I also remember talking to the young gallery man, from France, in the basement of the gallery - where they seemed to keep their good stuff - about La Villette, but I forget now how I managed to bring the conversation around to the subject - with the young man being much keener on talking to the young lady at the desk than talking to me. How did I bring him around to Maigret?

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Herbin.

Reference 2: http://www.kettererkunst.com/.

Group search key: wgb.

Wigmore two

Last week to the Wigmore to hear Fretwork do most of the art of fugue. With five of them playing music mostly written in four parts, with most music theorists now going for the theory that the four parts were written for two hands on one keyboard. With some of it written in two parts and rather less in three, just to keep us on our toes.

It was cold in the house when I started off which perhaps accounted for forgetting Cortana. Knowing I would feel quite bereft travelling without her, I legged it back to the house, from half way to the station, and back again to catch the train intended, with the result that I was warm in the train. Involving a spot of 25-25 well known to Boy Scouts of my generation, with the usual small prize to readers who know - or who can guess - what that is.

Very nearly scored a three at the aeroplane game, from the train coming into Waterloo, a personal best for that location.

Had to go more than half way down the ramp to pull a Bullingdon, but a Bullingdon which was nice and new and had well tuned transmission. No slipping, uncertain feels or unpleasant noises. Up Drury Lane to go past a long queue of young people whom I learned afterwards were queuing up for the opportunity to dance in the chorus of a new round of '42nd Street'. Quite possibly including some graduates of our own school of theatrical and dramatic arts, back at Epsom.

Got a bit lost getting from Drury Lane into Oxford Street, but got there in the end and parked up outside the Portuguese Consulate General. No queue there on this occasion.

Thought to try the new public house which the Langham Hotel has carved out of the south east corner of their building, rather than their regular bar inside. Very grand for a pub, with a very high ceiling, painted in a deep green. Rather fancy parquet on the floor, made up of patterns repeating in two feet squares, reminding me of the rather less grand Antelope in Tooting, noticed, for example, at reference 4. Which reminds me that maybe I really should take a look at the book taken out of the Wetherspoons library on that occasion. Been sitting on a book shelf ever since.

The grand pub included genuine pre-owned warm beer pulls (which I did not try) and a rather good Picpoul (which I did try). At least five staff for a near empty, middle sized pub. A pub which looks as if it is really more into eating than drinking, being laid out for lunch rather than for boozers. Cheaper than their regular bar. Maybe we should try it for lunch at the next suitable occasion.

Excellent concert, this despite a fair amount of snoozing to be seen from the generally older audience and one chap had to be helped out looking very ill indeed. Reminded once again how different the different ways of doing this piece are, with on this occasion, the viols bringing out the harmonies much more clearly than, for example, the organ. Quite a lot of the time one or more of the viols was resting, but I am fairly sure that there was also plenty of time when they were all playing.

We did not get our usual lady as mistress of ceremonies, she having called in sick, with our getting a more senior gentleman in her place, which occasioned some comment behind me about directors of music at Radio Three. From where there was also a learned discussion of the different ways to complete this incomplete masterpiece that I [that is to say, one of the learned discussants] have heard. With Fretwork offering a new completion, based, in part, on analysing the number of bars given to the various subjects.

Out to the Cock and Lion to take a little wine while sitting outside and watching the world go by. They could also manage a ham sandwich on white, without any crisps, cress or any of the other stuff that such places usually pile in. Ham good, but factory white a little elderly.

Next stage was the braces hunt down Saville Row, with first stop being a visit to the Opera Gallery in New Bond Street, what turns out to be a branch of a rather swish, international organisation. Swish enough not to mind me, whom they surely knew not to have the kind of money needed to shop in such a place, the people staffing them up usually having a very good nose for such matters. They also had some interesting stuff. A work by Jeff Koons, whom I think I first came across in a prize winning book by Houellebecq. A small brass piece of a Mickey Mouse or some such, seemingly worth a great deal of money, but not my thing at all. Nor were any of the other of his pieces which the young lady turned up for me on her laptop. There were also a couple of nude young ladies, hollow shells made out of the links of bicycle chains, new and polished, neatly spot welded together from the inside. Rather better stuff downstairs, including a Chagal, a Picasso and a fine picture by the new to me Herbin. Plus a young man from Paris who agreed with me that La Villette had somehow got left behind by the wave of gentrification which had swept over most of inner Paris. See reference 7.

Second stop Crombies at the top of Saville Row, to find that they had nearly run out of braces, and could not manage the one's that I wanted at all. Were they running down their stock for some sinister reason? Tried various other places down Saville Row without success, the nifty attachments from Crombies, which I combine with outsize keyrings, not being available from other stores. While Abercrombie & Fitch, despite size and appearances, did not do braces at all. A problem. Maybe amazon is going to work better on this occasion too, despite my not liking to buy such things without being able to handle them first.

Time for home, and it seemed a long walk to Waterloo, so I picked up another Bullingdon. Giving me a record for the day of Waterloo Station 2 to Broadcasting House, Marylebone at 19m 12s and Sackville Street, Mayfair to Waterloo Station 3 at 15m 12s. Total charge, £2 for the day.

Back at Waterloo, I inquired of its police minders about the giant bicycle rack at the top of the ramp. The answer being that it was free and always busy. Some bother with thieves.

With reference 1 being the last outing to the Wigmore Hall to hear viols earlier this year, reference 2 being the last outing to hear Fretwork, at St. Luke's two year's ago, and reference 3 being the last outing to 'Die Kunst der Fuge' at the King's Place earlier this year.

PS: somewhere along the way I was moved to look up cadence at reference 5. Which mainly served to remind me of my regret at never having done much music theory at school. Probably too late now. And in the margins I learned that there are music theorists who go in for the music theory of popular music. Chord progressions and that sort of thing.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/viols.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/a-touch-of-pepys.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/kings-place.html.

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=Pandith+Ganapathy.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_(music).

Reference 6: http://www.operagallery.com/.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/not-much-chopin.html.

Group search key: wgb.

Maigret chez le Ministre (suite)

Having first noticed this story at the end of August, I can now report that the story is finished. That is to say, first reading, first viewing of the Gambon version ('Maigret and the Minister'), second reading, second viewing of the Gambon version.

A story built around the collapse of a prestigious sanatorium for children, built in the mountains, the construction of which was the subject of a special report, a report which condemned the plans, was suppressed at the time and which has now gone missing altogether. Clearly lots of dirty deeds and backhanders in high places. Dodgy contractors. The sort of story which the French much prefer to the sort of smut that we like over here.

Quite a lot of the story is about the interaction of Maigret and his team with people from Sûreté nationale, which at the time Simenon was writing appeared to include some of the functions of our Special Branch and our Security Service. The people who looked after tricky investigations involving politics and politicians. One of the touches which would be recognised by a connoisseur was the reference in the Gambon version to the 'Big House', lifted from the Simenon version and presumably slang of the day (the mid 1950's) for the Sûreté, rather as some thriller writers write about the 'River House', as if that were the slang used by those in the know for the Secret Service headquarters on the river at Vauxhall. While I have always regarded dragging one or other species of secret squirrel into a crime series a sure sign of a script writer who has run out of ideas.

Another touch of the same sort is the glass in which the Minister serves Maigret his drink, the sort of small tumbler, still used in some working class French cafés for wine the last time I was there, rather than a glass with a stem. Used by Simenon as part of marking the Minister as being a boy from the country, like Maigret, rather than some Tory boy from a posh background. A tumbler which is retained but not highlighted in the Gambon version. Obscure glass apart, the boy from the country part of the Minister was rather lost in the Gambon version, apart from the sense that he was too decent and too old for the rough and tumble of national politics. I don't suppose anyone other than a connoisseur would notice the glass at all.

One gets the impression that Simenon has a rather jaundiced view of politicians, with this Minister being something of an honourable exception. With the other politician, Mascoulin, being a thoroughly unpleasant person, always making trouble from the sidelines, up for all kinds of dirty work, but never seeking any responsibility for himself. Never putting himself in the firing line.

Then we have a chap called Piquemal, who works at the same university - l'École des Ponts et Chaussées - as the famous professor who wrote the report, a chap who works as a surveillant. This word has been causing me some trouble as it is the same root as our surveillance and usually seems to be used for people like invigilators, nurses at mental hospitals and warders at prisons. I think that here it is a white collar teaching, rather than a blue collar position, but I have yet to settle on a satisfactory English equivalent.

I had more success with expressions built around 'en vouloir à quelqu'un', which I had more or less guessed after a while, with Simenon being quite fond of them, and which the dictionary confirms as meaning something like 'to be angry with someone'. So we might have 'il m'en veut d'avoir menti' for 'he's mad at me for lying'. Confused by 'il en veut à notre argent' for 'he's after our money'. But usually clear enough on the page.

Moving onto organisation, in the Gambon version it is rather as if Maigret works for his bête noire, the examining magistrate Coméliau, but the following story - 'Maigret et le Corps sans Tête', already mentioned for the second time at reference 2 - explains that there is actually a bunch of investigating officers and a bunch of examining magistrates, each with their own hierarchy, working in next-door buildings on the Quai des Orfèvres on the Île de la Cité in Paris, and there is an element of luck about how they get paired up for any particular investigation. Own hierarchies which are altogether missing from the Gambon version. And, I notice in passing, largely missing from 'Midsomer Murders'.

Furthermore, in the Gambon version, it is left that the bad guy, Mascoulin admits in committee to having taken a copy of the report. While in the original, he never admits to having it, while managing to give the impression that he might have. A sword of Damocles hanging over the bad guys, which he could use at any time - and in the meantime a useful lever. Now while Simenon is generally good on the ways of ministries, the goings on between permanent staff and their ministers and the goings on between ministers and journalists, I find this whole business of the missing report a bit improbable. Why would it have been suppressed? How could all trace of it have vanished from the relevant ministry? Why would Maigret not care about all the bad guys who had the report suppressed? But still a good story, even after several outings.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/maigret-chez-le-ministre.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/maigret-et-le-corps-sans-tete-suite.html.

Disillusioned of Epsom

All of my life I have been attached to a flower known to me as the Michaelmas daisy, partly because I like it, partly because of my association with Michaelmas Day, otherwise once an important day, a quarter day, in the rural calendar. Thomas Hardy knew all about it.

However, today I learn that the Michaelmas daisy is also known as the aster, is usually blue of some kind and grows in our front garden, as illustrated. There are also lots of them at Wisley.

What I thought was the Michaelmas daisy is actually the dog daisy, a large white daisy with yellow centre, also known as the oxeye daisy and properly as leucanthemum vulgare, with this last name being oddly similar to chrysanthemum, some of the bing images for which look very like dog daisies. There must be some link somewhere, although the best that bing can do is the flower shop at reference 1. Also known as a boutique floral studio and for 75$US I could 'join us for drinks, hors d'oeuvres, and candid flower time, where you'll learn how to make the perfect centrepiece for your thanksgiving feast'.

I got my name from my mother, a Canadian, so I wondered whether Canadians do things differently. But all I have managed to find out so far that the dog daisy is native to the Old World, is considered to be an agricultural pest in many parts of the New World, and in Canada is, or was (hard to make much sense of the legal documents turned up by bing on this point) a secondary noxious weed.

PS: further investigation reveals that the 'anthemum' bit is nothing more than a version of the ancient Greek word for flower, used by lots of botanists when naming their finds. How boring.

Reference 1: http://www.anthemum.com/.

Eggs

This morning it so happened that I had some rather splendid scrambled eggs for breakfast, leading to the thought that this was yet another of those things that the sort of hotels and restaurants we can afford to visit cannot manage anything like as well as we can manage at home. This despite scrambled eggs not being a difficult dish - although I suppose I ought to admit to having been making them for around 60 years now. I do have track record.

In this case, with part of perfection being the right blend of egg, for the perfect result, take one egg from Sainsbury's and one egg from Costcutter.

Pound some black pepper corns, preferably from a newly opened bag of same. Pound in the pestle and mortar originating from some endangered tropical rain forest and sourced by me at some car boot sale at Hook Road Arena. Maybe some of the aroma of the wood seeps into the pepper, rather as it does with oak matured Bourbon. Or at least that is what they say in the advertisement hoardings on the platforms at Oxford Circus southbound.

Add a little semi-skimmed milk to the eggs.

Sprinkle the pepper on top, taking care not to drop dollops, which are apt to clump.

Stir gently with a fork, to the point where the mixture is smooth, but not to the point of homogeneity.

Meanwhile, some butter has been heating gently in a saucepan. Add the mixture to the saucepan, replace lid. Cook slowly, stirring occasionally. Again, not to the point of homogeneity.

Turn onto a couple of slices of my own brown bread, cut about half an inch thick.

Perfection indeed.

And with breakfast finished off with an orange from Sainsbury's, also perfection. Unlike those from last week which, although from the same part of the shop and at the same price, were not very good at all. We find it very hard to tell from the outside and there seems to be a lot of variation from week to week. Not like the blending of eggs or the blending of flour at all. Never mind that of whisky.

PS: on this occasion I got a much better result with the flash on than with it off - when the pestle and mortar became a rather uniform slab of dark brown. Note also the Beryl Ware on the window sill. Still going strong here at home, although not turning up at car boot sales and charity shops quite as much as it used to.

Ruminations

Reference 1 tells us about an experiment along the following lines.

We have a patient in what is called a persistent vegetative state, that is to say more or less completely paralysed. Such a patient would have more or less normal wake-sleep cycles.

But how do we know if such a person is more than awake, whether he is conscious or not?

A group of scanner scientists have found a way to talk, after a fashion, with some such people. The idea is that you put the patient in the scanner. The instruction to the patient is that he answers yes to a question by thinking about playing tennis and that he answers no by thinking about walking around his house.

Sometimes the signals picked up by the fMRI scanner from these thoughts can be reliably decoded into ‘yes’ and ‘no’, thus enabling a conversation of sorts. And, following the jargon of IT security consultants, there is talk from these consciousness consultants of covert channels of communications, with the trick with the fMRI scanner being very much the sort of thing which makes up the stock in trade of the security boys. Another group has extended the repertoire to thinking in 27 different ways, 27 different ways which can sometimes be decoded by the scanner as the 26 letters of the alphabet plus space. A bit laborious and nothing like as reliable as tennis versus house, but maybe a technique with a future. And yet another group has achieved similar results using bedside EEG equipment, far cheaper and more convenient than moving patients into fMRI scanners.

This particular patient, when awake, can hear if not see what is going on around him. He has subjective experience and he can direct his thoughts. He has choice in that he can, for example, choose whether to think about tennis rather than football. He also has memory. Enough working memory to process inbound language. Enough to remember and obey instructions. The authors of reference 1 also devised experiments to demonstrate the formation of longer term memories and the understanding of concepts like pain.

The authors argue that being able to communicate in this way is good evidence, to the point of no-contest, of more or less normal consciousness.  While to my mind, what has been done is suggestive of consciousness, but not conclusive. Certainly not no-contest.

I start my ruminations by observing a moment of respect.

This patient is, or at least was, a person and the deconstruction of his mind is a tearing aside of the veil, is a public sign of disrespect. One might object, in rather the same way as one does not care for the autopsies of one’s loved ones, necessary or useful though they may be. But at least autopsies take place more or less in private and are carried out by people who are a caste apart. I associate to the thought that the much-derided  caste system does have its points.

Some generalities

I start by running past various aspects of the twin issues of conscious or not and the nature or quality of this consciousness.

One. My starting point is the well attested fact that we often do complicated things of which we are not conscious. One might, for example, drive to work in the morning while thinking about the meeting to come and arrive at work with no memory whatsoever of the journey – but with the conduct of the meeting all sorted out. In which case, one might argue that the driving had been unconscious. And there are plenty of sports people who talk about the need to empty the mind and let the body take over: consciousness gets in way of world class performance. And a champion rock climber who talked about how it all flowed when things were going well: an intense experience of a world reduced to and fused from the self, the rock and the climb.

Two. I then turn to the question of whether consciousness is for anything, or whether it is just a bit of froth on the surface of things which does not have any bearing on what is going on inside, on behaviour. A product of behaviour rather than a cause. With epiphenomenon being the proper word for froth. And if consciousness is one of these, an epiphenomenon, then there is the possibility, in brain damaged circumstances, that consciousness and behaviour could become detached in a way in which they do not in normal life.

Lesson: we need to be careful about inferring consciousness from complex behaviour.

Three. Next up is brain death, which a quick peek at Wikipedia tells me is something which is sometimes held to exclude the brain stem machinery which is needed to keep things ticking over – ticking over which includes breathing. Machinery which in the present case is clearly still working. Furthermore, this brain is clearly exhibiting plenty of activity, in response to instructions, activity which correlates well with that of the rest of us. Lots of life, certainly not dead.

Lesson: remember that the trick with the scanner only works with some of those in a vegetative state. Brain life is not the same as even rudimentary consciousness.

Four. When we are asleep, my understanding is that most of the motor machinery in the brain is disconnected from the corresponding motor machinery in the body, certainly the arms and legs, which means we do not flail about when we are asleep – although there must be enough left so that we can turn over from time to time and so avoid bed sores. I wonder whether, when we are asleep and dreaming about playing tennis, an fMRI scan would reveal the same patterns as are discussed in reference 1? In the case of our patient, given that the damage was done to his head rather than his body, I suppose that some part of the motor machinery in the brain has been damaged, to the point of disconnecting the brain from the arms and legs, but not to the point of suppressing the motor flavoured patterns.

Lesson: there is plenty of work that could be done at the margins, patients and funding permitting.

Five. Then there is the rise of the robots, which are getting so clever now that some people (quite rightly) worry about what sort of beings we are bringing into life. Are these robots alive in any sense of the word? Are they conscious? Do they have rights? However, at the moment, I do not think that any such machines have the sort of inner life that might be detected by a scanner. Scanners are designed to detect electrical activity of a different order from that in a computer, even supposing we could get at that of a computer, from the outside. On the other hand, it does not seem so far fetched that we have a robot in a heap on the floor, to all in purposes finished. But then we plug into its USB port, peer at the innards of our robot and work out what parts of its motor machinery were working and what parts needed to be fixed, work some magic with our laptop and, lo and behold, the robot springs back into life, with its memory of its past life intact. It just picks up where it left off. And noting here that there is nothing tricky about giving a robot memory: one just logs what it sees and what it does. Maybe build a few indexes. So at one level, our robot in a heap shares features and behaviour with someone in a coma. But at another, no-one yet is claiming any sort of consciousness, any sort of subjective experience for it. It does not have any rights.

Lesson: I think emerging definitions of conscious, emerging tests for consciousness of humans, should be applied to machines: does such application give us the result we want or expect? Not because we are interested (here anyway) in the condition of the machines, rather because it helps to refine out tests.

Six. Tools like the Glasgow Coma Scale are widely used in the assessment of the critically ill, particularly those who have had strokes and those who have had other head injuries. A multivariate score built on three variables: eye opening, verbal response and motor response –  but see reference 4 for more details. My guess is that this particular patient would have had very low scores on this scale – which low scores have a strong association to a poor outcome. While a concern that patients with low scores may have a richer inner life than this might suggest is very much part of the rationale for doing work of the present sort.

Lesson: a low score on the GCS is not the whole story.

Some particulars

Our man in a scanner can only report of his state of mind in a very rudimentary way. I now move onto various more easily reported disturbances of consciousness, with the idea of putting the foregoing into a wider context.

Stroke one

Stroke one is prompted by going to a performance of ‘Wings’, a play about recovering from a stroke by Arthur Kopit and starring, on this occasion, Juliet Stevenson. I leave aside the business of recovering speech and other motor skills.

A play which left me with the idea that in the wake of a stroke, what one knows in life as an integrated and continuous consciousness of oneself, one’s actions and one’s surroundings, can become fragmented.

One can hear oneself saying stuff when one is not talking out loud, so that other people do not get to hear what one is saying at all.

One can say stuff to other people which one does not hear oneself.

One’s hand can start to do stuff which one has not told it to do. The hand is then seen, as it were, as something alien to oneself. From where I associate to the famous experiments with the pink rubber hand, introduced at reference 7.

In rather a similar way, one can hear stuff going on in one’s head for which one feels no sense of ownership or responsibility. Or one can hear oneself saying stuff for which one feels no sense of ownership or responsibility. I associate to a story of a epileptic fit, which the subject both was conscious of and remembered (noting in passing that being conscious of something that you do not remember is a tricky business) and during which he lost all control of the activities of his arms and legs, which were flailing about without any reference to higher command.

There was also the idea that one could have the concept of something, say the ceiling, without being able to put a word to it. The indexing functions are still working, all the right bits of the brain have been activated and nearly all the right stuff is coming up. It is just the word bit which we cannot bring to mind, cannot articulate. One might go so far as to argue that it is not the word that one has lost, just the instructions on how to say it. Something which sometimes happens without the benefit of a stroke.

The lady in question had been to do with small aeroplanes and wing walking as a young person and there was lots of rather acrobatic floating. I suppose that this was all about having the sensation of floating around, while actually lying in bed. There was also an out of body experience, looking down on her own body. Experiences which I believe are fairly well attested. After all, a computer would have no trouble presenting to its screen an unusual view of an object that it knew about, such as itself.

Stroke two

Stroke two comes from Simenon’s novel about recovering from a stroke, first noticed at reference 3 and illustrated above.

A novel which starts with the narrator coming round after a stroke, a coming round which is not that different from waking up. But after a while he finds that he cannot move or talk, or even open his eyes. Which is frightening, but there was also a sense that he could just lie back and let it all flow. Just lie quiet and be content with his inner world.

There is also a reference back to the ceiling of stroke one, in that the narrator, some days later, heard a distinctive, a familiar sound – in fact the creaking of a wooden chair – but cannot put a name to it. Contrariwise, unlike the victim of stroke one, he cannot be bothered to try a bit harder.

As he comes round a bit more, he is fortunate to have people around him making reassuring noises, telling him reassuring things. And, indeed, as it turns out, he recovers fairly quickly, the steady progression of which must go a long way towards dissipating fear and anxiety. Something which is not going to be available to someone locked in. There will be no progression, even if there is no thought that there will be none either.

The business of not being bothered persists, and he continues to wonder why everybody is rushing around so much, why he was rushing around in just the same way until just a very few days previous. He was quite content just to lie quietly in his more or less private world, doing nothing and troubling about nothing. Again, not the same story at all as the victim of stroke one.

But as he got better, from a serene indifference to the silly affairs of the world, he gradually moved to being irritated by them. And shortly after that he resumed his participation in it.

In any event, on this telling, and I believe that Simenon did do his homework, albeit more than fifty years ago, apart from there being a gap in the narrator’s memory between having the stroke and it taking a while before all the various services one expects from one’s brain came back online, the narrator got more or less better within a few weeks. All quite upbeat – but then the narrator had the best, as no doubt Simenon would have had, had need ever arisen.

However, while one does get better, things are not the same as they were. One has been to a place where one sees things from a different perspective and, at the risk of sounding pious or social worker, I think one is a better person for it.

Substances

Mind altering substances. Drink changes mood and it may change the shape of things to come, but, in moderation, does not change the fabric of consciousness. While morphine at pain killing doses does. At least, in the two cases that I can remember, things did not get psychedelic after the fashion of posters and such like in the 1970’s, but they did get rather jumbled up. And irritating, unlike in my dreams where the jumbling up is barely perceived and in any case tolerated. Nothing like the states portrayed in stroke one.

While Huxley famously reports on greater length with his experiences of mescaline – as I recall, an experience he attempted to repeat as he died of lung cancer, at the moment of his death. The story was that he was very impressed by how vivid the visual experience was, untainted, he thought, by all the manipulations of the ego and super-ego. For once you saw things how they were in the raw. Not like drink at all, with my own experience of being drunk being that one’s emotions become all of vivid, fleeting and fragile; labile even. While one’s images of people and things are apt to be built on the basis of those emotions, good or bad. The good will be very good, and the bad very bad, but in any event very much a construct of the mind, be that id, ego or superego, as much as that of the eyes. I settle for UCS.

Fevers

Having recently had half a day of slight fever, I can report that my state of mind was somewhere between morphine induced day-dreaming and the altered consciousness as reported by Huxley.

Things that I try to visualise while lying in bed with eyes shut were much more vivid than they are normally. So playing the triangle game mentioned at the end of reference 5 is much more lively.

I also experienced, in a small way, the withdrawal from the world of stroke two. For a while I was quite content to burrow in the bedclothes, think my own thoughts and let the rest of the world go hang. The idea of getting out to eat was most unattractive.

On the other hand, thinking in words was sometimes very muddled, rather as it was with morphine induced day-dreaming. But again, not so muddled that one did not know it was muddled and with the muddled thinking being apt to vanish when one tried to approach it more closely.

Trauma

It so happens that I have been taking another look at ‘Façades’, first noticed at reference 8, and on page 477 in the chapter headed ‘Something macabre out of Proust’, there is a short description of the effect that a bad, head smashing fall had on Osbert Sitwell’s friend David:

‘But David did survive … gradually the coma lifted … his battered brain reversed the meanings of words so that he spoke in contraries, saying ‘yes’ when he meant ‘no’ … painfully beginning to walk again – and learning to write left handed … before the accident he had been virtually bilingual in French and English. Now he could not speak a word of French…’

Nicely encapsulating the various effects on the workings of the brain which might result from trauma.

One would only have liked a little more on the business of contraries. Did David know it was the wrong word, with just his speech apparatus getting in a muddle, or did he think it was the right word?

Waking thoughts

And lastly, while waking one recent morning, my thoughts turned to being locked in while waking up, this while lying in bed, in the dark, with my eyes shut.

Plenty of action in the brain, some action in the body and some sensations from the body. Some sounds from the house and the world outside. Some choices in that I could, for example, choose whether to wriggle my toes or not, giving rise to the thought that it would be rather odd, not to say frightening, if there was no possibility of motor action at all.

Although such paralysis does not usually extend to the chest, one is still breathing. Why do the muscles that do that get let off? A thought which resulted in a later excursion to Bing and Wikipedia.

Other choices in that I could, to some extent, choose what to think about. At least, the unconscious could offer various possibilities, from which I would, successfully, pick one. Giving rise to the thought that it would be rather odd, not to say frightening, if thoughts were coming into mind, unbidden, as it were. And when one can move about, one can usually put such unwanted thoughts out of mind, one can create effective diversions, which might be more difficult if one could not move about.

But all that aside, no doubt at all in my mind that I was more or less fully conscious.

That said, I also believe in degrees of consciousness. Being conscious or not may seem, to a normal, healthy person not much concerned with these matters, to be, more or less, an on-off thing, and certainly that is my own (limited) experience of general anaesthetics. But sometimes one is aware of a transition when going to sleep and more often when waking up. The closing down and booting up of all the various services mentioned above.

From where, for some reason, I associate to the idea the bodily equipment which is not used is apt to wither away. So muscles fade to the point where one has to start over with walking. While the alimentary tract might fade past the point of no return. So waking up, after some months or years out of the game, might not be so hot.

And then at little later, I read in today’s Guardian that here in the UK, while we remain stuck on not allowing assisted dying (while a large chunk of the rest of the western world has moved on), we do allow tube feeding and watering to be withdrawn from a person who is deemed to be minimally conscious but otherwise beyond cure. We will get there in the end.

Further thoughts

It is very clear that one can be conscious while lying quiet and still in a state of sensory deprivation. It is very clear that one can be conscious, in the everyday sense of the word, even when one is badly damaged.

But it also seems to be the case that consciousness comes in many varieties, with not all that variation being down to what it is that one is conscious of or to the context. Some of the variation will be accounted for by variation from person to person and some of it will be accounted for by changes to people over time, changes which include growth, development, abuse, damage, disease and decay. Noting that after abuse, damage or disease, one cannot be sure that either the mind or the body will make a full recovery.

That said, on the LWS-N hypothesis on the generation of consciousness from the activation of a small patch of cortex, it seems likely that one could devise a measure, a single non-negative real number, which would tell one whether or not this state of LWS-N was a conscious state. A measure which depends on just the LWS-N itself and nothing else, nothing else from the wider brain in which it is to be found. Generally speaking, its value would tend to be near zero (for unconscious) or to be near one (for conscious), but we do admit other values and our choice of boundaries is going to be a little arbitrary – this last being one of the criticisms of the GCS, although it is hard to see how such choice are going to be avoided.

On the other hand, the compiler, the compiled data and the activation processes are all complex objects, complex processes. It seems quite plausible that odd things could go wrong with its parts which do not destroy the whole, but which do make the resulting subjective experience odd or troubling. Or perhaps it is rather like genes: most random damage, most random changes result in a non-viable genome; it is only the chosen few that make it to birth.

Conclusions

We are still some way from having a good, measurable definition of consciousness. We are not helped in this by consciousness usually including, involving or just coming with all kinds of cerebral services which, in times of trouble or stress, can be modified, degraded or which can come and go on an individual basis. It is not all or nothing and there are plenty of shades of grey. We are even further from having a good, measurable definition which can be used on the front line, for example, in A&E units or by ambulancemen.

Nevertheless, having chewed around for a bit, I come to agree with the authors of reference 1. While one might argue about the quality or extent of the consciousness involved, a person who can talk to an fMRI scanner in the way described should be deemed to be conscious and should be accorded the same courtesies as any other conscious person, certainly in so far as this is practical or reasonable. But courtesies which might extend to letting them die in peace.

PS: the use of the phrase ‘coming with’ in the first paragraph of this section was significant, deliberate. With LWS-N, I am mostly concerned with the business of projecting content into consciousness, as can be seen at reference 5. In which, all these aforementioned services might go towards providing content, but they do not go towards actually making that content conscious.

References

Reference 1: Detecting awareness after severe brain injury - Davinia Fernández-Espejo and Adrian M. Owen – 2013.

Reference 2: How science found a way to help coma patients communicate – Owen – Guardian – 5th September 2017. The article which led me to reference 1.

Reference 3: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=passouline.

Reference 4: http://www.glasgowcomascale.org/.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/geometry-and-activation-in-world-of.html.

Reference 6: The Doors of Perception - Aldous Huxley – 1954.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_transfer_illusion.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/facades.html.