Sir Hans Sloane

Being the chap who invented Hans Crescent (behind Harrods) and Sloane Square, amongst other places. Also the chap whose will turned up in the DPLA, noticed at reference 3.

But this being the proper notice of reference 2, a handsomely produced book from Belknap, first noticed at reference 1. A handsomely produced hardback which almost stays open at your page. A much better standard of book production than one is likely to get these days from a UK publisher.

A book which is fairly described by its title, being the story of a doctor from Ulster, who spent some serious time in Jamaica both doctoring and collecting, who came home, married well (money from Jamaica plantations), became a successful society doctor, became a successful collector (mainly by correspondence), and who died very old, rich and famous, leaving his collections to the nation. The nation eventually accepted them and built what became the British Museum to house them.

His success did make him some enemies, and some of his contemporaries sneered at his relatively humble origins and his lack of a proper university education (his medical qualification came from the south of France) - but he must have had considerable gifts of the gab, for friends and for society. He managed, for example, to succeed Sir Isaac Newton as President of the Royal Society.

I offer a few more snippets.

He was also, for a time, President of the Royal Society of Physicians. He was closely associated with Society of Apothecaries, ensuring the continuing existence of the Physic Garden at Chelsea by buying the land on which it stood and leasing it back to the Society for a nominal rent. He was also  mixed up with the promotion of inoculation against smallpox, promotion which included experiment upon six condemned criminals. Slavers were early adopters, being keen to reduce slave mortality in transit. With Jenner (to whom BH has a family connection) coming along a bit later and moving on to inoculation with cowpox, rather safer than inoculation with smallpox. Closer to my own interests, Sloane was also an early adopter of political arithmetic for public medical purposes, an arithmetic which subsequently became known as statistics (in which the 'stat' bit stands for state).

It seems that many of the botanical specimens in the collections, while carefully & expensively prepared & packaged at the time of collection, have sat in cabinets & cupboards ever since, not attracting the attentions of serious botanists. But I suppose that is going to be the fate of any large scale collecting activity - at least until computers made it possible to use such collections without having to go to the bother of actually looking at them.

Collecting plants might not have resulted in grand global theories, like that of the roughly contemporary theory of gravity, at least not until Darwin came along more than a century later, but the theory of gravity did require collecting of a different sort, with many mariners & others being commissioned to collect astronomical data to feed the theoretical inquiries. And I dare say there were plenty of gentleman amateurs collecting astronomical facts which they carefully recorded in ledgers, since unread. Just as the cabinets of the gentlemen botanists.

While Sloane left his collections to the Nation, he did not leave enough money to endow both his two daughters and the new Museum. The necessary funds - £95,194 8s 2d - were raised by means of a lottery, a lottery which caused some scandal at the time.

When the British Museum was eventually opened, there was a presumption that it was open to all decent people, and there was some tension between the gentlemen scientists who expected to have the place to themselves and the common people who wanted to gawp at curiosities. Royals, nobles and rich people who wanted to gawp were presumably OK, being respectable sources of patronage and funds. Delbourgo turns up  a snippet about one of the Museum's maids (whatever their proper functions might have been) trying to stop one Mrs. Ambrose Hankin from picking a pear from the Museum garden, with a rather forthright exchange following. There was a footnote purporting to tell one where this snippet came from, which I did not follow it up. But it did strike me that someone had had to do a lot of work in libraries to turn such things up. Perhaps Delbourgo made use of secondary - or even tertiary - sources rather than do this sort of work himself. With a link to reference 3 being that Robert Darnton, famous for diving into all kinds of libraries of this sort, whom I first came across as the author of 'The Great Cat Massacre', was a founding member of the DPLA council.

All in all, a good read.

PS: not to be confused with Sir John Soane, another collector, who was born the year that Sir Hans died.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/an-interesting-person.html.

Reference 2: Collecting the world: Hans Sloane and the origins of the British Museum - James Delbourgo - 2017.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/music-identification.html.

Reference 4: A voyage to the islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica : with the natural history of the herbs and trees, four-footed beasts, fishes, birds, insects, reptiles, &c. of the last of those islands; to which is prefix'd, an introduction, wherein is an account of the inhabitants, air, waters, diseases, trade, &c. of that place, with some relations concerning the neighbouring continent, and islands of America. Illustrated with figures of the things described, which have not been heretofore engraved. In large copper-plates as big as the life - Sir Hans Sloane - 1707-1725. His magnum opus. With thanks to the DPLA and Universidad Complutense de Madrid for the picture of the cover.

Bon Dieu de bois

This being an expression which turned up in a translation into French of the Agatha Christie story 'Towards Zero', one of those stories into which the English television people have injected the otherwise absent Miss. Marple.

As far as I can make out, it is no more than a mild expletive of surprise, much the same as our own rather dated 'Good Lord' or 'Good God'. Or, according to the Spaniards: 'es una interyección que expresa admiración o sorpresa', which looks like much the same thing.

There is a variant 'bon Dieu de bois de saperlotte'. Littré does not allow this last word at all, although Larousse goes so far as to say that 'saperlipopette' is a working class expletive, without further explanation. Maybe a bigger Larousse would go the distance.

But while there are lots of such expressions combining the ideas of God, Christ, and blood, where one can see a connection, thoroughly documented in Frazer's 'Golden Bough', I am not seeing any connection here.

Bing turns up an association with the base wood of the cross to which the Christ was nailed. But this does not seem to fit.

Then there is the Bois du Grand Bon Dieu, just south of Thuin, on the Sambre in Belgium. A nature preserve well known to walkers and such like. Gmaps 50.333171, 4.291933. But again, this does not seem to fit.

Any thoughts welcome.

Festive menu

Last Saturday we thought for a change to visit the Shy Horse on Leatherhead Road, a change from the sort of place we usually go to, and last visited just about two years ago, a visit noticed at reference 1. And then again two years before that. So although our meals there have been generally fine, not a place we seem to go to all that often. Perhaps because it is something of a seniors' place, with not much in the way of bright young things. On the other hand, the staff is mostly English sounding.

Having been caught out in Epsom a few times now, thought to book online, which involved saying whether we wanted the festive or the regular menu. We elected for festive, with part of it illustrated left. BH was concerned that maybe we should we going as far as selecting our festive meal but I held firm, holding to the line that a pub could hardly be said to be offering fine dining if it could not cope with a party of two making their selection on the spot.

Got there to choose a wine which turned out to be unavailable. But the sauvignon blanc from Oyster Bay which we did get was very reasonable and entirely drinkable. The very same bottle that can be obtained from Majestic Wine. Probably has been from time to time, before Wetherspoon's convinced us of the merits of Villa Maria.

For me, a mushroom in sauce starter. Highly flavoured and probably fresh out of a freezer via a microwave. It came with some better than average white bread. Satisfactory, although one would not want too much of it.

Short rib main course, with the short rib consisting of a thoroughly cooked block of beef, maybe a bit more than two inches by one inch by one inch, still attached to a rather larger bit of rib bone. Served as if it was sausages, on a bed of flavoured mash potatoes and highly flavoured red-tinged gravy. I had forgotten to ask for gravy on the side. Unusually generous about topping up the bread supplies. I suspected that the meat was also fresh out of a freezer via a microwave. Satisfactory.

Dessert was described as a relative of the Bakewell Tart and turned out to be a rather soft, sweet, spongy version of same. But at least I remembered to ask for the custard on the side, in the way of Wetherspoon's - with BH being rather a fan of neat catering custard. The waitress was quick enough to think that this remark about Wetherspoon's was the height of wit.

So food entirely pub grub, but the occasion was entirely satisfactory. The atmosphere, while a little old, was fine. We are, after all, rather old ourselves. The place was comfortably busy. The service was friendly and efficient. There was plenty of car parking and it was only five minutes in the car from where we live. We shall, no doubt, be back.

A member of the vintage inns family.

PS: I would not want to give the impression that I object to microwaves. They are essential ingredients of a modern commercial kitchen - and we even have one at home which we use occasionally, usually for warming up left-overs. But when eating out, we do make something of a sport of trying to spot the dish which has been delivered to the establishment in question as a ready meal, either of the boil in the bag or the pop in the microwave variety.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/part-one-of-three.html.

Reference 2: https://www.vintageinn.co.uk/.

Bretchel

Last Friday to the RI to hear an engaging lady engineer (electrical) who had scrambled her way out of her small town in the Lebanon, through the American University in Beirut and onto the Bretchel team working on Farringdon Station part of the Crossrail project, on which Bretchel appear to be in the lead on management and delivery.

Out at Green Park just as the scare at Oxford Circus was winding down. Great crowds milling about in the ticket hall, exits and entrances.

To the Goat for our usual aperitif, unusually taken upstairs on this occasion. Lots of bright young things chattering away. But polite at the bar, taking their fair turn. Also a bar which brings on the troops for the evening rush hour, so waiting is rarely a problem.

She was not really a tunnel person, which disappointed some of the engineers in the audience, but it seems that tunnelling accounts for a good chunk of the budget and that the tunnels at Farringdon pioneered a new way to slip form the concrete inner linings - spray-on concrete being the wheeze before that - to the point where they were able to slip form up the tunnels which were to house the escalators. While I remember an innovative slip formed central boiler chimney going up more than fifty years ago at Addenbrookes Hospital. But I am sure she was right that slip-form was innovative in this context. I associated to my stint at the concrete yard next to the young offenders institution at Feltham, at a time when they were making the pre-cast concrete segments used to line the Victoria Line tunnel. At a time when the operatives were lined up by the old-style boss, from time to time, for decimation - he thought it kept everyone on their toes. Luckily I was working for the materials engineers, who were working for the customer, so was beyond his reach.

She was just back from maternity leave and so perhaps had been lumbered with soft issues rather than cutting edge ones - so she knew all about health and safety, quality control, innovation and community relations. She told us that Farringdon was very fierce about the first of these, enforcing a rule for lorries that said no H&S certificate, no entry - however important the load might be. With much surprise all round when the lorry people caved in and complied when they realised that the Farringdon people meant it. Some talk of managing the thousands and thousands of lorry movements needed.

She also managed to convey something of the buzz of working on a large project, a trick which 'Ink' had managed a few weeks earlier, noticed at reference 2. I associated to being told about the buzz at the Microsoft HQ, by the river at Reading, when they were bringing a project for the Home Office to the boil, also (as it happens) showcasing their then new .NET technology. It also showcased their screen design skills, with that part of this particular project being top-notch.

But she rather spoiled things at the end by going on for too long about women in engineering and such like matters. No doubt important, but of no great interest to me. I was reduced, once again, to counting people in the bay far left. A sort of counting, which I am pleased to report, I seem to be getting better at.

I also took time out to wonder about the amount of lobbying that contractors for these big ticket items could afford. How many fancy clubs and restaurants in and around Westminster would a Bechtel be prepared to bankroll if there was a chance of a multi-billion pound tunnel at the end of it? Does it mean that sellers of big ticket items have an edge on the sellers of little ticket items that they should not have? A tilting of the public spending playing field? But I do not see what can easily be done about it. You might bear down on important fact finding missions to the south of France, but it is hard to bear down on lobbying generally. Not least because, it is, up to a point, useful.

Out proper to stop at Raynes Park, to find that the platform library had both vinyl and print media, with my haul being illustrated above. The Melodiya (aka Μелодия) record, mint condition from 1988, is rather bouncy folksy crooning, the work of two quartets, but I don't think it is as simple as one side for each. Plus a arty guide book to Ravenna, interesting for its pictures of churches which were very old by our standards and of stunning mosaics, which I don't think I had seen in colour before. Will we ever get there? Maybe a better idea that the Venice noticed at reference 5. Maybe not so overrun with cruise ships and tourists. In which connection I wonder about lagoons, mosquitos and malaria. We used to have this last in our own fens, so why not in the rather warmer marshes of northern Italy? Or does salt water do for the mosquitos?

Back to the Rifleman for our usual afters, having noticed on the way that the photo booth at Epsom station did indeed come from the Photo Me people noticed at reference 3.

PS: a corner of the volume 21 (properly, according to the collection convention, volume XXI), mentioned in the post before last, is visible at the top of the illustration.

Reference 1: http://www.bechtel.com/. A very large, private company.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/ink.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/new-kid-on-block_23.html.

Reference 4: http://melody.su/en/. The dates don't seem right for the 'su' bit to stand for the Soviet Union, so I admit, once again, to being puzzled.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/stone.html.

More oxtail

Following the meal noticed at reference 1, we thought to have another go yesterday. More or less identical meal, less the date slice, ruled calories too far.

Rather more oxtail on this occasion, around 3lbs and costing a little over £17 - so not a cheap dish at all when you take into account the low proportion of meat to the pound. Started at 0645 and eaten from 1335. Failed to turn on this occasion but rested for 10 minutes.

The cabbage and boiled rice worked well. The oxtail was good, but I think another hour or so would have been better: firm and succulent but soft, rather than firm and chewy. Maybe the extra time was needed for the extra meat.

The onions served as a base to lift the tail out of the liquor, but were not good eating. Now in the compost dustbin on the back patio, along with sundry bits of roast fat, awaiting transfer to the brick bin at the bottom of the garden.

The bones have now been hung up at the back of the garden, out of reach of any fox, to see what happens to them. Last time I hung anything, it took a long time for the bones to be cleaned, so not a food of choice for the sort of birds able to perch on hanging bones.

The fat and jelly (visible in its hot condition top right in the illustration above) was dumped on the back lawn this morning. The fat black cat was on the case in short order. Say for about five minutes, with it spending the next ten cleaning its whiskers. We will see what is left by lunchtime - with my bet being on the crows doing the business.

The nearest we come to roast beef these days.

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

Reference 2: http://www.tiamarialondon.com/. Once the Wheatsheaf, a traditional boozer which did beer and sandwiches, but, in this newer guise, the place where I first tried roast oxtail.

Changing the guard

Things are always changing.

Yesterday, I learned that, for the first time, the Royal Navy has taken its turn at mounting guard at Buckingham Palace, choosing to include in this guard a seaman who was also a young lady, complete with some sort of machine gun, complete with fixed bayonet. Is this lady another first? Are ladies allowed in the Coldstream Guards?

Then this morning, I read of Maigret, nearing retirement, having a run-in with a new breed of examining magistrate, his old enemy Coméliau having retired. A new examining magistrate who was fresh out of law school and wanted both to do away with the rough old ways of Maigret & Co. and to go one better in terms of results and reputation. All part of the creative tension between the Police and the Parquet, mirrored in this country in that between the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service. See reference 2.

In between times, I read at reference 1 (here mentioned for the third time, perhaps yet another first), that old people have been complaining about the bad new ways of young people for a long time, with archaeologists having turned up such complaints from the time of both the Ancient Greeks and the Aztecs. Bargh adds this nice thought from the late Judge Bork: '... No doubt the elders of prehistoric tribes thought that the younger generation's cave paintings were not up to the standard that they had set...'.

For myself, I would only say that bread is not what it used to be when I was young, despite the plague of foodies. It has become very difficult to buy proper English white bread, the large bloomer or split tin of old. I have failed to make the stuff myself and have had to content myself with brown, which I can make.

The illustration, taken from Google's Street View, is of the building which used to house the last English baker which I recall using in a regular way, back in the seventies of the last century. In East Street in Hambledon in Hampshire. Can't speak for their Hovis, but their split tins were first class.

Reference 1: Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do - John Bargh – 2017.

Reference 2: Maigret et les Témoins récalcitrants - Simenon - 1958. Volume 21 of the collected works.

Trolley 109b

The fished out trolley, decorated with the new grappling hook, first deployed for the trolley noticed at reference 1.

As it happened, there was a handy tree to which to attach a tether. I am getting a bit old to be falling into ditches, drunk or sober, so better safe than sorry.

On the way to Sainsbury's, I noticed that the opening in the fence at the back the new housing estate at the bottom of Winter Close, on what used to be the grounds of the Linton Centre (and before that a secondary modern school for those old enough to know what one of those was), had been closed up with a fence panel. A fence panel in which one plank had already been snapped off. Presumably the residents of the estate had decided that convenience of access to Screwfix was not worth all the undesirables using the path and tunnel at night - a tunnel which I suspect may also be a trysting ground for small time drug dealers.

PS: Winter Close has not yet made it to Google's Street View, but can be seen from above at gmaps 51.339212, -0.262811. Bing Maps is rather more out of date, with its bird's eye view still showing playing field and the Linton Centre.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/trolley-107.html.

Trolley 109a

I passed this trolley standing next to the bridge parapet at the start of Blenheim Road yesterday morning, but it was clearly too much for a passing schoolboy from the nearby Blenheim School.

Fishing gear visible top left.

Hagen

Last week to the Wigmore Hall, mainly to hear the Hagen Quartet give us Beethoven Op.18 No.4, a favourite early quartet which we must now have heard many times. Once, by a bunch of students in a lunchtime church recital in Cambridge. Whereas we only seem to have heard the Hagens twice before, once in 2010 and again in 2013. Interestingly, on the first occasion we had the very Schumann played in this third concert and on the second we had the very Beethoven. Which all goes to show that it is not just pop bands which trot out the same stuff, gig after gig.

And with this band not running to a website, appearing to make do with Facebook. Unusual these days.

Got to Green Park and thought that the tube train we were on might be about to do a go-slow so jumped off - to find that Green Park was about twice as far from the Wigmore Hall as Oxford Circus, while I had thought it was about the same. Odd that I had not checked before. But we did learn that the substantial tree in Berkeley Square had been rather badly decorated.

Got to the hall to find it about two thirds full, so a lot less full than it usually is, at least for the mainstream concerts that we go to. Unusual flower arrangements, rather good, dominated by white anthuriums. That on the right seemed rather better than that on the left, but I was not convinced that the difference was not a product of our sitting on the left, rather than anything else. A couple of older gents. at the front were clearly interested in such things and were taking a close look.

All went very well. The Beethoven was on good form and the other two pieces, new to us, were good too - although we thought that 10 minutes was about right for the Webern. Irritatingly enthusiastic holiday makers took pictures of the quartet taking their bow.

We liked the Oxford Street lights. And we admired the elaborate, monster themed displays in the windows of John Lewis who had clearly spent a good deal of time, trouble and expense on them. According to the DT: 'For many, the release of the John Lewis Christmas advert heralds the start of the festive season, and 2017's eagerly-anticipated commercial features a monster hiding under a bed. Rumours of a cuddly, gruffalo-style monster appearing in this year's John Lewis advert circulated earlier this week when a mysterious ... Twitter account shared a four-second clip ... This imaginary monster, called Moz, has today been revealed as the official star of the £7m advert...'. So the punters are not the only ones to be spending lots of money at Christmas.

No aeroplanes to be seen at Wimbledon.

PS 1: later, I got to thinking about how Germans felt about being named for the villain of the Nibelungenlied. But then went back to reference 1 to be reminded that 'villain' is a bit oversimplifying things and that Siegfried's behaviour is tricky, not above reproach. There was also the (I think) new thought that if Hagen wanted to kill someone who has been dipped in magic potion (rather like Achilles before him), he is going to have to resort to wheezes which he might have managed without in more normal circumstances.

PS 2: all this has served to remind me of the weakness of the template used at reference 3, in that early posts get lost from regular view but remain accessible to search. So November 2010, for example, starts at the end of that month and comes to an end on the 8th of the month rather than the 1st. With the result that the blog archive is deficient to that extent. Annoying, and I shall be surprised if I ever turn up a solution that works for me. Did I know at the time or was I just sloppy, did not check as I went along, as I should have? See reference 4.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=german+lighting.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/hagenned.html.

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

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/.

Trolley 108

Only just off the car park at Kiln Lane, but scored as the wheel lock was deployed and it was cunningly tucked out of sight, behind the street food caravan outside Wickes. Proper street food, I might add: burgers, bacon rolls and that sort of thing.

I might also add that I am getting quite good at pushing a locked trolley. Tipped right up on its back wheels seems to work best, with their seeming to work best when in the forward position shown. Don't understand, as I would have thought the backward position would be the position of choice. Must be something to do with the unusual angle messing up the dynamics.

Trolley returned to the special needs alcove outside Sainsbury's, where a couple of people on a fag break from the next door Timpson's chalet thought that the trolley jockeys did indeed carry keys to unlock the locks. Or perhaps just the jockey supervisors, but there were keys about.

PS: I have a soft spot for Timpson as I believe this snip from their web site is for real: 'Timpson really are an equal opportunities employer. We consider anyone for our vacancies as long as they are able to do the job. This includes ex-offenders and other marginalised groups. We recruit exclusively on personality and expect all of colleagues to be happy, confident and chatty individuals'.

Reference 1: https://www.timpson.co.uk/.

A dog's life, reprised

A couple of years ago I posted a diagram about a dog’s life (reference 1), updating it earlier this year (reference 2) with a diagram about a chip’s life, with this last tying in better with the thinking behind LWS-W (local or layered work space, Excel worksheet variety) and now LWS-N (local or layered work space, neural variety). The main purpose of these posts was to propose a location and a context for consciousness, somewhere in the tricky region between the brain stem and the cerebral cortex. A region which is old in evolutionary terms and, on the somewhat discredited hypothesis that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, perhaps early in developmental terms.

Prompted by reference 3, already mentioned at reference 4, we now put a time dimension on those two diagrams.

This new diagram is organised in roughly the same way as its predecessors, tail left and head right. The lower triangle is intended to suggest the increasing processing times associated with the move to the right, the higher triangle the increasing degree of consciousness. With the idea being that words and higher levels of consciousness go together.

With the further idea being that as one moves further up the food chain, up into the realms of higher thought, one needs more time. So when reacting to something or other, perhaps some stimulus from the outside world, perhaps from a grizzly hiding in the bushes by the side of the path, the animal, usually a human, a very fast reflex action might be appropriate, an action which does not involve the brain at all. At other times there might be a bit more time available and an emotional reaction may be appropriate, an emotional reaction which codes that stimulus in a single dimension, stuff like: like/dislike, trust/distrust, fight/flight. Such a reaction might or might not include physiological change or a consciously felt emotion. But  while the reaction, the gut reaction or the intuition, might have been quick, it might also have been wrong. Not much better than a guess. So while there is a good deal of variety in the quality of intuitions, important, complex decisions are usually better made in other ways, in slower time. So when there is a bit more time still, one might stop and think, be aware of having so stopped, but with the thinking itself, the thoughts themselves not making it to consciousness; perhaps Hurlburt’s unstructured thought, for which, for example, see reference 5.

More time still and we have inner thought, in words, in consciousness. LWS-N, the chip of reference 2 has been fully deployed.

And lastly, on the far right, we have what I have called outer thought. This is where our human resorts to talking out loud, to external props like paper and pencil (or a Powerpoint) or to sharing thoughts with others. Perhaps a structured decision, with points for and against, with scoring, maybe the sort of thing described at reference 6, the sort of thing that I do not think inner thought is going to be at all good at. And heights which gut reactions are unlikely to scale. All of which props might result in a really good decision, about, for example, whether to build a bridge to Skye or where to put the new London airport, both matters which have or which are attracting much debate, but which is apt to take a little time. But a decision which will be taken with the full support of consciousness, a decision which will be written to memory, which we can hold to and on which we will not wobble.

The middle of the diagram is about right for skilled manual tasks such as making furniture, playing golf or making lace. One wants to be good enough at it that one can just let it flow, without the need for distracting  and brain-cycle consuming conscious thought. In other contexts, there may be a simple trade-off between decision speed and decision quality. With the complication that there has to be some fast process, or at least some fast something, making this trade-off and if necessary blocking or aborting some reflexive, instinctive or intuitive response. A process which can result in a pause; the look before the leap. One possibility is scoring against a threshold: if the action score is above the action threshold, then the action goes ahead, otherwise the brain keeps on looking. With the idea being that, by training, one can either lower the action score of emotional responses or raise the corresponding action threshold.

From where I associate to the related business of training children to control their impulses, to work to rules, for example to ask for a second chocolate biscuit rather than just grabbing one, or perhaps to forego something now on the grounds that there will be something better later. Also known as delayed gratification.

Turning briefly to LWS-N, it may be that it is deployed all the time, that something is going on there all the time. But we only get a subjective experience, we only get consciousness  when there is enough activation and when things have slowed down enough for LWS-N to generate a stable, coherent activation signal for long enough for it to be experienced.

And for it to have evolved at all, LWS-N must have or have had some network function. There must be some good reason why so much stuff is channelled through this one small patch of cortex. Is it enough to say that in order for a signal to get from one place to another on the surface of the brain, it is generally quickest to go via the central hub, rather as if, when travelling from Wichita Falls to Dorking, you are apt to pass through the hubs of Forth Worth and Heathrow? Or is it more to do with the fact that all traffic between the periphery and the centre has to pass through the brain stem? Damasio, for example, does diagrams, more complicated than that above, of its goings on. See, for example, Figure 8.3 in reference 7.

PS: regarding delayed gratification, Wikipedia has reminded me that Freud talks of the (pleasure seeking) forces of the id being balanced by the morality of the super-ego. Rather to may surprise however, a search of the pdf of the collected works turned up very few uses of the words ‘gratification’ and ‘delay’, none of them relevant here.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/its-dogs-life.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/its-chips-life.html.

Reference 3: Before You Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do - John Bargh – 2017.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/mistake.html.

Reference 5: Unsymbolized thinking - Russell T. Hurlburt, Sarah A. Akhter – 2008.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/the-choice-model.html.

Reference 7: Self comes to mind – Antonio Damasio – 2010.

Group search key: srd.

Die Kunst der Fuge

Last week to the Royal Festival Hall to hear Anne Page give us the art of fugue on the organ there, the third time I have been to hear this organ since it was refurbished. The third time that I have been to hear the art of fugue this year, with the other two occasions being noticed at reference 2 (consort of viols) and reference 3 (harpsicord). I think the occasion before that was, when the work was played on a small organ which had been moved onto the stage of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, getting on for ten years ago now. I think the chap next to me mentioned at reference 4 also knew all about the machines used for making spectacle lenses.

Mild evening, but off to a slightly bad start with a young man coming through the West Hull tunnel under the railway a good deal faster than he should have - particularly since cyclists are invited to dismount at this point.

A good programme, which included helpful diagrams of both the organ console and the organ pipes and a musical glossary. Plus notes on the concert itself.

Next move was to sit in row 'G' rather than in row 'J', an interesting slip between two similar sounds. The (right) seat in front of me was sponsored by Clifford Chance, which I noticed because I think I know someone who used to work for them, with the catch that the person sitting in a sponsored seat only gets to know about the sponsor of the seat in front, which does not seem quite right. Hall not full, but the stalls were probably two thirds full, which I thought quite respectable for an off-piste work of this sort. Which the programme told me was probably never intended for performance as a whole. It also reminded me that Bach died before he completed the last fugue, with his son marking up the end of the incomplete manuscript to this effect. On this occasion, we got a new completion from P. Binski. I don't think this was the one offered by Fretwork in September, not that I would have known.

The organist turned up in trousers and a smart looking cream brocade frock coat, open at the front. Not a style which I have seen before.

For the first time I heard the point of having such a big organ, with the different lines of music being highlighted both by their timbre and by their position - with the organ being perhaps as much as 90 degrees wide from where I sat. The drill seemed to be that the organist - or someone - had set up stop settings for each of the twenty or so sections - settings which could each be activated by pulling a single piston (I think this is organ speak for the control in question). Apart from a couple of spots where I thought it was too loud and another spot where I seemed to be getting an odd echo from the right hand boxes, it was so successful that I could no longer see why one would want to play the work on anything other than an organ! No doubt I will change my mind again when I next hear it on something else.

There did not seem to be anything like as much foot work as was noticed at reference 4. I would not have thought there was much doubt about which lines are to be played by the feet, so I can't see why this should be. On the other hand there is, presumably, plenty of scope for the organist doing his or her thing with the many stops - which could make a lot of difference. A lot more difference that one usually gets from scored music.

I was not sure about the wisdom of an encore, but she gave us the chorale, 'Voor Deinen Thron tret ich hiermit' - 'Before Thy throne I now appear', probably the last thing that Bach wrote (or rather dictated), and which was bound with the first edition of  'Der Kunst der Fuge'. It worked rather well. Appendix A of the Tovey version at reference 1. Of which I have read a little more this time around.

Just about two hours, including the interval. Out to catch the 2139, on which I learned some of the mysteries of train timetables on telephones. With the ones that I was using not appearing to come from any train company that I recognised.

PS 1: Anne Page comes from Perth in Western Australia, but is now based in Cambridge. I did not catch an accent in the little she said to us, but there was something a little foreign about her manner. But she has a properly Cantabrian bicycle with wicker basket in the picture at reference 5. She also did rather well at the slightly tricky business of walking across the wide, empty stage of the RFH to take her bow, and then climbing up to the organ loft in full view. Neat little jump over the bench to take her seat on it.

PS 2: regarding feet, it came to me overnight that maybe it is to do with the number of  manuals available. The RFH organ had four, while the much smaller QEH organ may have only had three. This for music which comes in up to four parts. I notice in the Tovey that there are instructions about manuals & pedals for the Appendix A chorale, which there are not in the work proper.

Reference 1: Die Kunst der Fugue, edited by D. F. Tovey, 1931. Score plus three appendices and a separately bound companion.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/09/wigmore-two.html.

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

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=fccla.

Reference 5: http://www.theladyorganist.com/five-questions-for-anne-page/.

Reference 6: http://www.pjb.com.au/mus/arr/a4/thron_kbd.pdf. To whom I am grateful for the illustration used above.

Doctors gone mad

There has been some discussion in the press recently of the proposals of some doctor to perform a head transplant. I thought that the discussion was for real, not someone's idea of a joke. I share a few thoughts.

It is just about plausible that you could connect a head to a new power supply and to a new waste disposal system, in particular to a new blood supply.

But it is not plausible at all that you could connect a head to a new peripheral nervous system in a new body, that is to say to a new spinal cord and to new cranial nerves, at least those ones which serve the body rather than the head itself. And even supposing some magic was worked and all the millions of connections were re-established, what about the rather abrupt change in the signals going across all those connections? Won't the brain in this head just go into some kind of terminal melt-down? Followed shortly afterwards by terminal melt-down of its new body?

Organ rejection is no doubt another problem. Last but not least there are ethics.

A thought experiment about keeping a brain alive in a vat has been going the academic rounds for some time and I dare say that if you could do the one thing you would be quite a long way towards doing the other. So for a discussion of what might be involved in doing a vat, see reference 1.

In the meantime, I wonder about the medical governance of a country which allows one if its doctors to talk in a serious way about such a thing.

Reference 1: Embodiment or envatment: Reflections on the bodily basis of consciousness - Diego Cosmelli and Evan Thompson - 2010.

Markets gone mad

I have just completed my regular survey from YouGov, a miscellaneous survey which, inter alia and once again, asked me about my experiences with domestic coffee machines. Clearly the YouGov machinery does not extend to remembering that I do not do coffee at home, with a machine or otherwise.

But the point of this post is energy. There was one question which asked which of fifty or so suppliers - most of which I had never heard of - we bought gas from and a similar question about electricity.

Given that there is only one delivery network for gas, only one delivery network for electricity and only a very modest number of companies actually in the business of making gas or electricity (if I can put it like that), having such a large number of companies in the middle strikes me as a bit of a nonsense. All that wasted effort, all those replicated costs arising from maintaining all those separate billing and accounting systems. All those replicated costs of paying all those expensive senior management types in all those companies. Not to mention all the oligarchs, tax havens and fat-cats hiding therein. Bring back public ownership!

I allow that all the electricity being generated in a small way, that is to say otherwise than in large power stations, nuclear or otherwise conventional, confuses the picture a bit. But I don't think it disturbs the aforesaid nonsense.

I also allow that public ownership had its downsides too. But those downsides are better understood now than they were in the bad old days and I am sure that we could do much better now than we did then.

New kid on the block

There is a new tenant in one of the pair of shiny buildings down Blenheim Road, not far from where we had a rather squalid looking caravan for many months, noticed, for example, at reference 1.

I had never heard of the company before, but it turns out to be an outfit which manufactures photo booths, the sort of thing one still uses for passport photograph purposes. We have one in Epsom Station and I must now check whether it is one of theirs.

According to reference 2 they are a substantial operation and '...We currently have 47,946 vending units in operation and our technological innovation is focused on three principal areas: IDENTIFICATION: photo-booths and integrated biometric identification solutions; LAUNDRY: unattended laundry services; and, KIOSKS: high-quality digital printing...'. CEO one Serge Crasnianski and now HQ'd on the Longmead industrial estate.

It looks as if Brexit has fuelled a surge of Irish business, but I wonder how they view Brexit in the round. Does the increase in the demand for identification services arising from hard borders balance the day-to-day inconvenience for a company doing business all over Europe? The share price looks to have climbed steadily since 2013.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/progress-report.html.

Reference 2: http://photo-me.com/.

Vespers

Last Saturday to the fine church at Weston Green to hear the Ripieno Choir and others give us a version of Monteverdi's Vespers.

New to both of us but rather splendid, with the more or less full church making a fine setting for the music. With a lot of variety, it rather reminded me of a Christmas festival of nine lessons and carols. Also that, at the time of writing, the divide between sacred and secular music was not what it became at the time that Anglican sacred music flourished in the nineteenth century. Blurred again now with the extensive use of electric guitars, tambourines and Powerpoints in churches - all practises which, as an atheist with no voting rights in the matter - I deplore.

One of the things noticed on this occasion was the interesting sight of the open mouths of some of the singers. In the right conditions, when the lighting is right and nothing of the interior can be seen - tongue, teeth or whatever - I find the effect very odd, as if one is peering into some kind of a cave. There is a rather ugly picture in the National Gallery in which the early Italian renaissance painter (I think) tries to capture this effect and earlier today I tried to find the picture, trying various search terms in both Bing and Google. I even resorted to browsing by date on the National Gallery website. The picture at reference 1 and illustrated left turned up quite quickly, but I remain unconvinced that it is the picture in question. The right sort of thing, but I remember four or more singers and a rather cruder painting. I think a visit to check is indicated. Otherwise, Bing and Google were both rather haphazard in what they turned up, this, I suppose, being the consequence of the haphazard way in which their images have been labelled - as I don't suppose that either of them is into content search quite yet.

I had continued to muddle up cornets and sackbuts, wrongly thinking the former to be a sort of early trumpet (looking rather like a trombone with narrow gauge pipework) and the latter a sort of early oboe (a tapered black instrument with holes like a recorder rather than keys like an oboe), when actually it was the other way around. Maybe if I attach cornet to corne to horn - the cornet being rather like a long, slightly curved horn in shape - I will get it right next time.

But we did get theorbo right, being a sort of very long necked lute flanked with sounding strings, last seen at the concert noticed at reference 2. But a different lutenist, Lynda Sayce, on this occasion. And unlike the rest of the small orchestra, she was kept busy, in action most of the time.

Inspecting the vinyl earlier today (Thursday), I find that the one and only recording in my possession of music by Monteverdi is this very same Vespers, offered in 1976 or so by King's College Choir and others. A recording which has a rather different flavour to the rapidly receding performance from last Saturday. Re-reading the old (David Hansell) notes and reading the new (David Arnold) notes made me realise how much I had missed and so I asked Bachtrack if there was anything else in the offing, and it turned up a performance in Birmingham Town Hall, Sunday week. The fact that Epsom station is up the spout that day is a bit of a downer, so I don't suppose I am going to make it, which is a pity as it would also have been an opportunity to take a first peek at the Birmingham Art Gallery, which I believe to be strong on the Pre-Raphaelites, on whom I am keen.

Perhaps the fact that Monteverdi leaves much to the discretion of the music master is part of the attraction of the work. To a larger extent than is usual with music that has been written down, one can make what one will of it. To the point that one has to work the align the Ripieno batting order with that given in Wikipedia.

Reference 1: Lorenzo Costa - A Concert - 1490. With thanks to the National Gallery for the illustration.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/viols.html.

Fake 19

Continuing the occasional series of striking fakes.

On the front page of today's business section of the DT, we had a picture of the Chancellor looking very studious in his study, with an impressive array of red bound volumes in the book case behind him.

I can't get the DT to cough up that particular picture, but Bing does turn up this one, taken in the very same study, with the very same, but not so impressive looking, bookcase left.

Fake, because I don't suppose anyone has looked at any of these books for years and years. They might just as well be the fakes you get in lots of stately homes. They are just so much eye candy, designed to impress the credulous. But so important is this eye candy, that our very important Chancellor can give up cubic metres of his very important office space to it.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/fake-18.html, being the last fake.

Mistake?

I forget what drew my attention to reference 1, but I was intrigued by talk of simple experiments which uncovered interesting interactions between unconscious and conscious processing.

An accessible book, written in a chatty, friendly style which becomes a little irritating after a while, despite the interest of the subject matter. I associated to the strong tradition of self-help manuals in the US.

Along the way I learn (BH already knew) about Ötzi the iceman, murdered 5,000 years ago in the Ötztal Alps, on the border between what is now Austria and Italy, frozen in ice and turned up, more or less intact, just a few years ago. The subject of documentaries on the BBC. Bargh makes the point, in the context of the important drivers of ancient human activity, that the iceman had had children. He was an illustration both of the difficulty of surviving at all in a dangerous world and of the power of the drive to reproduce.

He makes this point on the grounds that 19 people, from a large sample of Austrians, share a rare gene (the sub-haplogroup G-L91 or SNP L91) with the iceman. And makes the deduction that they are his distant progeny.

I do a bit of poking around and from the extensive coverage in the regular media, I unearth reference 2. A technical for me, including a lot of stuff about population sampling and gene technology which is not relevant here, but it does seem to me that Bargh has got it quite wrong. Two people sharing a rare gene might mean that they are related, but does not mean that there is a line of descent from one to the other. We cannot say that the iceman had a family, probable though that might be for other reasons.

Furthermore, he talks of 19 people, the 12 plus 7 in the bottom line of the illustration. The catch with this being that the right hand group of figures is about a subsample of the sample from which the left hand group of figures is drawn. The two numbers should not be added together. Or has someone slipped up to the L32 line, where there is a 19, albeit in the wrong column?

Not a mistake which much disturbs his line of argument, but not a good start either. Hopefully Bargh is on firmer ground in his own subject.

Reference 1: Before you know it - John Bargh - 2017.

Reference 2: High resolution mapping of Y haplogroup G in Tyrol (Austria) - Burkhard Berger, Harald Niederstätter, Daniel Erhart, Christoph Gassner, Harald Schennach, Walther Parson - 2013. Open access if you poke around a bit. The source of the illustration.

St. Augustine's

The golden altar of St. Augustine's. Lady Chapel, off camera to the left. Not very Anglican at all.

Group search key: tcb.

Ponsonby

One of the memorial tablets in St. Mary Abbots.

I seem to recall that I once bumped into a Ponsonby in the main lift by what was then the front door of the Treasury. A salesman for something or other. Or perhaps a consultant. I think he owned to being a member of the same family.

He also appears in the fine film about Waterloo made by Sergei Fedorovich Bondarchuk. With his death, and those of many of his men, appearing to have resulted from his having charged too far. That apart, it was a fine charge.

He gets a much grander, and rather florid, memorial in St. Paul's Cathedral down the road.

Group search key: tcb.

Fig shop

The 'Jenny' brand figs turned out to be fine, if a little chewy. Rather better, if rather dearer then those from the Epsom branch of Grape Tree, which last could do with a bit more quality control.

Group search key: tcb.

Church muddle

Last week, my thoughts turned to what I thought was a fine example of gothic revival somewhere in Kensington. I turned to Bing, as one does, and turned up what seemed to be a group of three churches in Kensington, all managed under the one website, which I can no longer find. Eventually, I resort to Edge history and track the three (actually four) churches down to the HTB organisation, to be found at reference 1. HTB for Holy Trinity Brompton, the Anglican church tucked behind the rather larger Catholic Oratory, but which manages the three other churches and which describes itself as the centre of the church planting movement, which seems to mean parachuting teams into splendid but decaying churches in an attempt to revive them. One of these plants is St. Augustine's in Queen's Gate and (I quote), 'unusually, given that HTB is a charismatic evangelical Anglican church, St Augustine's has kept its Sung Eucharist, vestments and incense. It stands within the Modern Catholic tradition of the Church of England'. All very complicated, but I shall return to this church later.

Started off well, finding an entire Daily Telegraph on the train for that very same day, my perusal of which was slightly marred by the loud and self-important conversation of a couple of young men a couple of seats away. Off at Clapham Junction, to pull a Bullingdon at Grant Road, the first time I have been there for a while, but where the eastern stand seemed to have got somewhat shorter. Made my way north to Kensington Church Street, which I learn this afternoon broke the 30 minute barrier, again the first time for a while. Most irritating.

On into the rather grand church of St. Mary Abbots, a presence and engagement parish (a designation which recognises the presence in the area of many infidels), which was built in 1872 under the supervision of Sir Gilbert Scott, on a site which has seen worship for 800 years or more, and being named in connection with the Abbey of St. Mary at Abingdon. A handsome church, not particularly ornate. Also famous for having hosted the marriage of Beatrix Potter, for the occasional appearance of David Cameron and his lady and the baptism of the children of Michael Jagger. Home most Friday lunchtimes to concerts given by the students of the nearby Royal College of Music. On this day there was to be a trio, but I had to give my excuses.

Pulled a second Bullingdon from the stand that I had not long left and pedalled off to South Kensington, discovering on the way that I did not know the area anything like as well as I had thought, and managed to get off at the wrong stop, as it were, Gloucester Road (North). At least there was no problem with the 30 minute barrier.

And so to lunch at the legendary Daquise, a place I had visited once or twice before - and today, rather to my surprise, I learn that the last time was probably the visit noticed at reference 3, in the margins of a visit to a rather different kind of church, a little over two years ago. For me, mixed pierogi. Then pork tenderloin with Silesian gnocchi with a yellow sauce, from which I associated to fish. It looked rather odd to me, and the gnocchi were nothing like their Italian cousins (from the Neapolitan Kitchen in Ewell), but it was all rather good just the same. Apple fritter, also rather good once I had removed the warfarin hating cranberry jam. A glass of house Chardonney. A glass of Armagnac. Altogether an excellent lunch. Good atmosphere and pleasantly busy, including some regular trade as well as tourists.

Next stop, the French colony at Bute Street to investigate the possibility of a new, bigger and probably expensive Littré dictionary, but it seems that the colony has collapsed and Bute Street is only a shadow of its former self. Nothing suitable in the dictionary line at all.

Next stop, the church of St. Augustine's with which I started this post. A quite extraordinary place, with some very unusual decorations, including stations of the cross and very florid, golden altar. Suggestions of their doing something for the homeless although I did not see any such on this occasion. But I must go back for a more serious visit.

Pulled the third and last Bullingdon from Queen's Gate and pedalled off back to Clapham Junction. I would not say that I got lost, but I did arrive on the north bank of the Thames unexpectedly. Luckily I chose the right bridge and I even managed the one way system leading from the south western corner of Battersea Park, to get me back to Clapham Junction without any trouble.

Into Battersea Food & Wine for my usual figs from Bodrum. Neither of the people there understood what I meant by figs, trying all sorts of possibilities until I found some dates and pointed at them while saying figs some more. Then one of the chaps remembered me and got very cheerful, explaining to me how I used to visit about once a year to buy these particular figs from Bodrum, in little shrink wrapped wooden boxes, forgetting that I also, occasionally, bought some of his fine flatbread and Turkish Delight (lots of varieties, quite cheap and which BH had been very happy with). Sadly, no figs from Bodrum and I had to settle for another variety, on which I shall report in due course.

Onto the platform to get a quick three at the aeroplane game before my train came in. The sky was good and I had managed, in the short time available, to find just the right spot to stand, towards the town end of the platform.

PS: I am not very keen on Michael Jagger at the best of times, but I thought even less of him for getting his children baptised, which struck me as hypocritical and wrong.

Reference 1: https://www.htb.org/.

Reference 2: http://daquise.co.uk/.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/kensington-1.html.

Group search key: tcb.

Barrel

Still down Longmead Road this morning, I came across this half barrel sitting on top of what might have been what was left of the midden left behind by the people noticed at reference 1.

Was it ever a real barrel, an entire barrel, or was it something just sold as such by a garden centre, but actually ready made from China? My guess, for what it is worth, is that without any giveaway plywood or chipboard, it was once a real barrel.

And if it did once belong to a traveller family, what did they use it for? A basket for one of their dogs? A crib for one of their children? A planter for geraniums outside their caravan?

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-travellers-are-coming.html.

Trolley 107

Not the challenge trolley noticed but not scored at reference 1, rather another one nearer Hook Road.

But it was in the stream and the bank in the foreground was (oddly) very wet, so full equipment was indicated. Pole to lean on. Various lengths of rope to provide a tether to the nearest convenient tree. Brush to clean recovered trolley. And last but not least, the brand new grappling hook fashioned from an ancient poker, possibly from FIL's house in Devon.

Tied onto a short length of rope, the grappling hook worked very well, far better than climbing down into the stream or fishing about with a bit of rope and the litter picker, which last being what I did on the last occasion. Now contemplating the trolley challenge after all.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/a-challenge.html.

To those that have shall be given

The scandal of senior staff pay in our universities rolls on.

I was saddened to read in today's Guardian of the treatment afforded by my own university, the University of London, to its support staff, in particular its cleaners, seemingly hired through a shifting maze of intermediaries.

Despite plenty of stuff on the web about the subject in general, I failed to get a number for the salary of the vice chancellor, Sir Adrian Smith, an eminent mathematician and statistician, who, as it happens, went to the same grammar school as BH. Let us suppose that he gets something in the region of the average for such people, £333,333.33p.

The only information that I could find about other salaries at the university was an Excel spreadsheet from the HR department which showed a 53 point scale running from around £20,000 to around £70,000. Presumably neither cleaners nor senior management are on this scale. And one wonders what proportion of their teaching staff are on zero hours contracts and obliged to moonlight elsewhere to make ends meet.

I would have more sympathy for the financial plight of the university, which one can only assume is dire to be treating its staff thus, if those at the top took a substantial pay cut, which I am sure they could, at their time of life, well afford. Saddened that such people, whom one might suppose to be the brightest and best in the land, do not see fit to set a better example.

And I wonder what would happen if the senior management team at the university took the bull by the horns and took drastic action to preserve the working conditions of their staff? Would the government sack said team and drop in some private sector accountants to do their dirty work for them? Get the managing director of Uber to lend a hand?

Jelly lichen

Brought out again by the mild, damp weather. A spring and autumn thing, to judge by the posts turned up at reference 1.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=jelly+lichen.

Music identification

Contents

• The problem
• Some similarities and differences
• An ornithologist’s digression
• A librarian’s digression
• The big difference
• Some comments and conclusions
• References

The problem

The core problem here appears to be a variation of the image classification problem, as discussed at reference 1.

We have a lot of labelled items of music, also known as songs, tracks or works. Where label includes classifications, descriptors, names and identifiers. Certainly in the past, a lot of this labelling had to be done by humans.

We have digitised versions of one or more performances of each work. These digitisations might all use the same format, or might use a variety. One such might be the Opus format described at reference 2.

We then suppose that we have a clip taken from one of those performances, perhaps just  few seconds, perhaps captured on a mobile phone. The task is to find the work and, preferably the performance. Put another way, the task is to classify a signal to performance. So not so very different from being given an image and being asked what sort of animal is being portrayed, to classify a signal to animal. Or to classify a signal to person – where there might be a lot more persons to look through than animals, so to that extent more like the performance task.

Being full of image processing from Google, I assumed that the answer, once again, would lie in neural networks.

Some similarities and differences

Both sight and sound are pervasive, they are everywhere. But sound can be projected into space and on into people in a way that sight cannot. And people can consume sound while doing something else in a way that they cannot usually consume sight. We can listen to music, at least after a fashion, while baking a cake. Or to an episode of the ‘Archers’. And many jobbing builders do not seem to be able to function at all without music in the background. But watching an episode of ‘Coronation Street’ is more disruptive – although not so disruptive as to stop many housewives having televisions in their kitchens.

One form that sight takes is pictures. A picture is a unit of sight in much the same way that a song or a track is a unit of sound. But songs have become pervasive in a way that pictures have not. Particular songs become popular and earn revenue. People learn them and hum them; maybe even sing them out loud. For all these reasons, songs are a big business, reaching right into the mobile telephones which most of us now own. Granted, pictures are a big business too, but a quite different kind of business, and only very few of us are aware of buying pictures, while lots of us are aware of buying songs, buying services associated with songs or at least looking at the advertisements which have paid for the songs.

All this may have something to do with the fact that Google and Bing find far fewer technical papers about classifying clips than they do about classifying pictures. The people making song technology want to keep in to themselves, to retain their commercial advantage. That said, either Google or Bing did turn up reference 6, which turned out to be something of a revelation. Of which more in due course.

An ornithologist’s digression

People do pay for information about songs, if only by looking at the advertisements which come with the information, but they don’t pay for information about pictures. While we see a niche market for information about birds.

There are plenty of people out there who spot birds, birds in their gardens, birds on their bird tables and birds when they are out and about. Some of these people have the collecting bug, are tweeters who like to name the birds that they see and to make lists, possibly on paper, possibly in albums and possibly on spreadsheets. Some of these people are called ornithologists, perhaps even appear on television or in episodes of ‘Midsomer Murders’.

But they have a problem in that all too often they do not know what the bird in question is and such a bird cannot be put on a list, does not count as a tweet. Bird identifiers such as that offered by the (very rich) RSPB are rarely of much help. So it seems likely that a commercially viable proportion of these people would be happy to pay a modest sum if they could get their mobile phone to tell them what the bird was. Even though getting their phone to take the load would take some of the fun out of the business of tweeting.

Such a gadget would need various components. First, something to take over the camera part of the phone so as to get a better picture of the bird than you get by just snapping it – which is apt to result in a very small bird against a very large field. Second, a large database of labelled bird pictures. Third, some whizzy software, quite possibly of the neural network variety, to match the inbound picture with those on the database. Fourth, something to return the answer to the customer and to collect a modest fee.

There is clearly an opportunity here for an entrepreneurially minded student of computer science to team up with an ornithologist.

A librarian’s digression

For various reasons, with various uses and applications in mind, librarians of the old fashioned sort have put a lot of effort into building catalogues of both pictures and songs. Such catalogues had to be searchable and so, if on filing cards, had to be in some useful order. They also had to tell you something about the things so catalogued; one might be into the catalogues raisonnés of the art world, typically offline. And they had to tell you where you might find the thing catalogued: the catalogue entry is not usually enough, the user wants to get at the real thing, the original, a distinction which is now blurring with digital copies of both sight and sound artefacts embedded in catalogues now getting very close to the original. For example, if one goes to the Digital Public Library of America, one can very quickly, via the Hathi Trust Digital Library and the Getty Research Institute, be viewing an impressive facsimile of an ‘authentic copy of the codicils belonging to the last will and testament of Sir Hans Sloane, Bart. deceased, which relate to his collection of books and curiosities’. With said Sir Hans Sloane writing his codicils in the middle of the eighteenth century.

Figure 1: a facsimile, including the print showing through from the back

Computer catalogues clearly admit much more flexible searching than card catalogues, and a music computer catalogue might be organised along the lines suggested in Figure 2 below.

Figure 2: an old-style catalogue

In this context, the score of a work might well be important, be expensive to set up in print and be subject to copyright, so the owner of the copyright is important too. Alternatively, the score may not exist at all and one performance of what is nominally the same work may differ significantly from another.

All that aside, given a query, involving one or more classifications, possibly in some Boolean combination, the computer simply has to return the records which meet that query. Or perhaps to count them, or to analyse them in some other way.

Such catalogues are fine for telling you the name of a work or a song which you know something about. And telling you where you might get a score or a recording, perhaps offering to sell one or the other, if not both. But they might well not contain digital versions of works catalogued and they will not do query by clip.

The big difference

But newer catalogues do contain digital version of the works catalogued and will do query by clip.

Which brings us to the big difference. Where at reference 1 we talked of complicated shenanigans with neural networks, it turns out that at least one version of the sound classification problem is built with relatively simple algorithms of the conventional variety.

The idea is to generate a key for every song. You then generate, in much the same way, a key for the clip you want to identify. Match the key from the clip to the keys in your database of songs and job done. So what is this key? – and this is where reference 6 helps.

First, you turn your song into a spectrogram, a two dimensional plot of volume by frequency and time. You identify the bright spots in the spectrogram and drop the rest, giving one what Wang calls the constellation map, by analogy with the sort of photograph included at Figure 3 below.

Next you take a subset of the bright stars and a subset of their neighbours. For each selected star-neighbour pair we extract a pair of values, the ratio of the frequencies – the interval in music-speak - and the distance in time. Notice that while we have used amplitude, the loudness of the note in question, in our selection of bright stars to tag, we have discarded amplitude in forming these these tags. String together these tags – which occur at a rate of several a second – and we have the key for the song or for the clip in question.

We than match song A to clip B if they share a sufficient, time matched sequence of such tags. And when clip B is taken from the same recording of song A, we usually do get a match, a match which is not greatly disturbed by the inevitable noise in the clip. Nor is it dependant on use of western musical conventions in matters of tone and time – although for this particular algorithm to work, intervals of tone and intervals of time more generally must be central to music the world over.

Figure 3: the stars at night

All in all, a slightly more cunning and rather more successful version of the n-grams of sound that Downie and his colleagues had worked on a few years earlier and reported on at reference 7. N-grams of sound which were rather like the n-grams of words which were, in many ways, the precursors of the neural networks now widely used in the language processing noticed at reference 10.

But in this case, it seems we can manage without neural networks – with more or less conventional matching which can be done at high speed against databases containing millions of songs.

We can also manage without most of the human effort needed to classify all the songs in the database in the ordinary, librarians’ way, effort which might otherwise have had to be sourced from the Amazon Mechanical Turk of reference 9.

Which is a winner for the likes of Shazam (reference 5) and Soundhound (reference 8). I have not yet quite worked out where Gracenote (reference 4) fits into the story, but these last have a big footprint out on the net, floating to the top of a lot of queries about this sort of thing and, according to the press release which came with their joining the Neilson family, they are ‘the industry’s leading media and entertainment metadata provider’. Noting in this the ‘meta’ bit. They also appear to have something to do with the provision of in-car entertainment, probably important when driving across the wide open spaces of the US. In any event, a substantial operation, built in part, at least, on music identification.

Figure 4: a new style catalogue

There is a lot of information out there about the distribution of queries from consumers and consumer devices (like mobile phones) about clips and works and it may well be that the query engine is helped along by its knowledge of all these queries and all the answers that were given – and to whom.

All in all, as already noted above, compared with image classification systems, there seems to be a lot of money in this sort of query. It is worth spending a lot of money on systems that get it right – and then patenting them. Which may have something to do why neither Google nor Bing have been very good at turning up technical material on identifying music.

Some comments and conclusions

The device described above depends on the same clip not cropping up in more than one than one work. Which seems slightly awkward as we had thought that lots of works of music quote or copy from other works.

It also depends on time, and is unlikely to work well with live performances, the times in which are unlikely to be a good enough match to any recording, although reference 6 does report some success in this area.

But why does this simple algorithm work for music, while something much more complicated seems to be needed for pictures?

Maybe the answer here is that we are not doing the animal task. We are not analysing the image, we are not looking for heads, ears, trunks or whatever, we are just matching a derivative of the clip against the same derivative of all the works in the library.

It seems quite likely that one could match a clip from an image against a database of images without invoking neural networks. Least squares might be plenty good enough. What is not so easy is saying that this picture, which does not occur in the database, is an elephant, based on the pictures which are labelled elephant and which are in the database. It is possible, at least in principle, to make a database of all the music that has ever been recorded. But it is not possible to make a database of all the possible images of elephants. The best we can hope for is enough images of elephants to capture their essential essence, essential essence which we hope the magic of our neural network can bite on.

So the two problems are not so similar after all. And the difference is not to do with the number of dimensions, say two for the spectrogram of music and three for that of a picture.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/more-google.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format).

Reference 3: https://en.schott-music.com/.

Reference 4: http://www.gracenote.com/.

Reference 5: https://www.shazam.com/gb.

Reference 6: An Industrial-Strength Audio Search Algorithm - Avery Li-Chun Wang – 2003. Available at http://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/papers/Wang03-shazam.pdf.

Reference 7: Evaluation of a Simple and Effective Music Information Retrieval Method - Stephen Downie, Michael Nelson – 2000. Available at http://people.ischool.illinois.edu/~jdownie/mir_papers/sigir2000paper.pdf.

Reference 8: https://www.soundhound.com/.

Reference 9: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome.

Reference 10: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/11/reading-brain.html.