Maigret chez le Ministre

In the course of reading this story, I bothered to look up the word 'chipie', which seems to be a term of abuse used of ladies by ladies.

According to Larousse, a woman of any age who is disagreeable, pretentious or 'grincheuse'. A word which it flags as 'familier', approximating to our 'slang'. I thought 'grincheuse' rather a good word, derived from 'grincher', to grind, as in grind one's teeth. With the adjective meaning someone who is disagreeable, always moaning or always in a bad temper.

While according to Littré, a woman of any age who is disagreeable or disdainful. A word which it flags as 'populaire', another approximation to our 'slang'. While the verb 'chiper', also slang, means to steal or to 'dérober'. Which last one might think is all about taking the coat off someone's back, but is actually derived from 'rober', as our rob or robber. My shorter Littré does not explain how robbing someone also came to mean coat, originally the sort of thing worn by people from the Middle East, the Roman province of Asia. Perhaps the long one would do better. Would it refer one to the English verb to disrobe, usually used reflexively, but admitting, I think, transitive usage.

Usage which does not follow the English at all well. But perhaps the English 'that cow next door has been poking her nose into my business again' gives a clue. I have been overdoing the etymology of the French, not known to many of the users of slang words such as 'chipie' - which does not in fact convey any more information than the English 'cow', no more, in fact, than that the speaker does not care for the person so referred to.

PS: this is one of the stories included in the Gambon version which we have on DVD and we shall view it again when I have finished reading it. Always interesting to see how stories get adapted for the screen. What gets left out, what gets added.

Fake 11

Arundel Castle being a representative fake, standing in for all those buildings faking up old buildings built by rich people. Quite a lot of them in the Californian picture business.

While there are some very old bits in this castle, including a real shell keep from the times of the Normans, everything in this picture is new. In the absence of a decent plan, I think the great hall mentioned in the last post may be middle right and the dining room is middle left. At least, the group of three pointed windows of this last look right for the dining room.

Group search key: fka.

Bognor three

Our third day started with a perfectly respectable sausage sandwich. Intriguing how it has become quite OK for quite fancy restaurants to serve bacon or sausage sandwiches these days, sometimes rather spoiled by their affecting to call them butties. Not to mention the rather good bacon and egg sandwich I had and noticed at the wine bar on the balcony at Waterloo station - a notice which I cannot now find, all the words involved popping up all over the place. It would probably have been easier had I not taken so many bacon sandwiches at Whitecross Street, having got their via Waterloo Station.

Breakfast completed, we settled on a trip with Southern to Arundel, starting off at the once busy station at Bognor. Trains fine, ticket collection feeble. Almost on a par with that on the Island Line on the Isle of Wight. But perhaps the new franchise holder there - Stagecoach having just lost it, in the middle of the major refurbishment at Waterloo just completed - will take things in hand - provided that is, that they do not just close the irritating little line down.

First stop at Arundel was Belinda's a very proper sort of tea shop for a tourist honey trap like Arundel, complete with lots of dark beams and dark wood furniture, possibly old. Rock cake unusual but good. Entertainment provided by members of the Arundel chapter of the red hat society at their fortnightly gathering for tea, coffee and cake. We learned that their most recent annual convention had involved a parade in Liverpool and the mayor. Furthermore, ladies who were young at heart not only wore red hats but also carried red small clothes in their handbags to wave at passing gents. See references 1 and 2.

On into the castle where we settled for a pair of gold tickets, rather than paying the extra for gold star tickets which would have entitled us to see the ducal bedrooms, the ones said to be actually used by the duke and his family. Presumably on an occasional basis. Not too sure that I would want the great unwashed creeping around our bedroom here in Epsom, taking a close look at all our books and bottles.

Started improperly with birds of prey, which you were allowed to touch for a fiver, and chaps dressed up as knights in armour taking swipes at each other with swords. Much clanging. Must have been hard work if you had to keep it up for hours.

Started properly with the Fitzalan chapel, already noticed for its fake at reference 5. There was also a notable tomb, with a knight in full-dress armour on the upper level and with the same knight in shrunk and decayed condition on the lower level, it being thought wise in those days to stay on top of eventualities, not to lose sight of the end game.

Moved onto the Earl's Garden, also already noticed for its fakes at reference 4. It also included a small scale version of the beech walk in the privy garden at Hampton Court. A walk which we learned the hard way was not very waterproof.

But in among the whimsy, there were some interesting plants, for example the first lupin that I recall seeing this year. In among all the upended trees roots, a feature of this part of the garden.

Into the house, which, inter alia, housed a notable collection of paintings, arms, armour and old brown wood furniture. Not terribly well displayed; they would have done a better job at the V&A. The house also sported a huge great hall and a big dining room. We wondered whether either had ever been used for real. Perhaps you can hire them for weddings, although the expense of moving all the art out on a temporary basis would be considerable. Overall, the place rather reminded us of Castle Drogo, another cod castle which takes in visitors to top up the coffers. We asked a trusty where all the Arundel money came from and she thought that the answer lay in one of the Arundel people marrying a Sheffield heiress, presumably rich on steel or coal or both, after the manner of the Sitwells of nearby Renishaw. While Castle Drogo was built by a 19th century grocer, relatively speaking, new money.

The castle chapel, where, we are told, his grace occasionally pays his respects to his lord. Or maybe he had one of those little sitting rooms built into the side of the chapel so that he could pay his respects in comfort. We were not allowed in, so I was not able to check. According to the BBC, Louis XIV certainly had such a thing at Versailles, as did the people (bankers rather than knights in armour) in the big house at Stourhead. See reference 8.

We took a light lunch in the café, where we were entertained by an older gent. from Paington who was happy to chat, rather than to march around the castle. He and BH were able to swap stories about Devon. He knew all about both Teignmouth Grammar School (now a community school) and the mansion built by the Singer family with sewing machine money, noticed at and around reference 7.

Penultimate stop was the Catholic cathedral, a rather grand place inside but which looks rather truncated outside, as if the Duke pulled in the purse strings half way through. Had an expensive problem with the central heating in the main castle, or something of that sort. In any event, the occasion for reference 3.

Last stop was back at Belinda's for more tea and rock cake.

A young carex pendula spotted on the way back to the railway station. The first of the day.

A view of Arundel Station. Presumably built for the crowds in the days when Bognor Regis was riding high and motor cars had not been invented. 

Back at Bognor, we did what we have never done before and took our dinner at the Lobster Pot Café, for the second day running, with the same choice of food and drink as on the day previous. We even earned a word with the lady proprietor, who wanted to know where we were staying and what was wrong with their food. Which left us with the thought that it is very hard for a hotel restaurant to compete with the likes of this café, with its cheerful ambience and good food. I suppose the hotels had a better time of it when there was very little competition and they got enough trade to put on a decent show.  Whereas on both Friday and Saturday, our hotel dining room was very quiet in the evening, despite the food being perfectly respectable and the hotel being fullish if not full.

PS: the bacon and egg sandwich mentioned above has now been run to ground at reference 9. I though I had it cracked when bing told me that the place used to be owned by Corney & Barrow, whoever they might be, which did turn up a couple of references to the right place, but the wrong references. Persisting, a Windows Explorer search with 'cabin bacon egg sandwich waterloo' on the blog archive turned up rather a lot of hits but I got lucky on the second one that I investigated.

Reference 1: https://www.redhatsociety.com/.

Reference 2: http://belindastearooms.com/.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/rubbish.html.

Reference 4: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/fake-7.html.

Reference 5: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/fake-8.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/drogo-4.html.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/two-follies.html.

Reference 8: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/pew.html.

Reference 9: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/02/master-builder.html.

Veils of secrecy

This morning, having been puzzled the night before by the BBC version of the reign of Louis XIV at Versailles, I was moved to take a look at a short history of the Bourbon dynasty by one J. H. Shennan, picked up from Epsom Library, also the author of what appears to be the standard work on the Parlement of Paris.

I was struck by the observation, attributed in reference 1 to reference 2 to Cardinal de Retz, to the effect that you should not tear aside the veil which shielded the mystery of state, thereby exposing the kingdom to anarchy. This at a time when the young king, having emerged from his minority, was trying to assert his authority.

An observation which I think remains relevant today. We might all have to worship at the altar of openness and transparency, but I think there is still plenty of room for mystery. All kinds of relationships are apt to break down if one drags their inner workings out into the open. Honesty is not always the best policy. Sometimes, for example, preserving face is a better one.

PS: being the proud owner of some at least of the good Cardinal's extensive memoirs, maybe I shall try to track the observation down to the horse's mouth.

PPS: I failed to put my hand on any memoirs, their possibly having fallen victim to one of the periodic culls. But I could put my hand on reference 3, where I think I have turned up the passage in question, page 89, illustrated above. Perhaps it is so well known that I need not have bothered with horses' mouths and could simply have turned to a book of quotations - supposing that is, that I have such a thing, which I do not think is the case.

Reference 1: The Bourbons: the history of a dynasty - J. H. Shennan - 2007.

Reference 2: The Parlement of Paris - J. H. Shennan - 1968.

Reference 3: Cardinal de Retz: the anatomy of a conspirator - J. H. M. Salmon - 1969.

Made in Lyme Regis

A sturdy swing chair in the new riverside garden which has opened up at Wisley, on the banks of the Wey. Somewhat spoiled on this occasion by no fewer than two sit-and-ride lawn mowers, noisy variety.

A sturdy swing chair which the trustees found it necessary to import from the West Country, in fact from Lyme Regis. But what about all the craftsmen in wood we have scattered through the length and breath of the Weald? Let's keep to the spirit of Brexit and look after our own!

Perhaps the key is in the trading name of the makers, websited at reference 1. Perhaps the trustees are of an age to have been into flower power and bubbles back in the sixties (not to mention the odd recreational, not to say spiritual, substance) and are, in consequence, attracted by the spiritual gloss that has been put on the product.

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

Group search key: wse.

Fake 10b

An angled close-up of the wall of the previous post. A wall which turns out to be made up of eight by four sheets of some kind of plasticised fabric with wall printed onto it, probably fixed to a chipboard hoarding of the ordinary sort.

I was surprised at how convincing it was from a distance, even though I was fairly sure that it was a fake.

Perhaps the faker was helped along by the light conditions on this particular occasion, it being well short of full summer sun, slightly overcast even.

Group search keys: fka, wse.

Fake10a

The building works needed to bring Wisley into the premier league of visitor attractions, on a par with places like Chessington World of Adventures and Hampton Court Palace, are now well under way, some of them going on behind a long yellow brick wall.

A wall which is very convincing from about fifty yards away, the only catch being that return visitors don't always remember it being there on their last visit.

Group search keys: fka, wse.

Stop press

The pince monseigneur of reference 1 has cropped up again, this time in the French translation of an Agatha story called 'Towards Zero', a story into which Geraldine McEwen was intruded as Miss. Marple in the television version.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/more-bananas.html.

Bognor two

The meal at the first night at the Beachcroft hotel started with a fish soup, good but rather rich, rather a lot of cream. Also unusual in that it contained half a dozen or more prawns in their shells, which needed to be extracted from the soup and shelled in order to eat them - my not getting on very well with the shells. Too crunchy for me. Bread took the form of miniature brown loaves, warm, either plain or cheese flavoured. Followed by baked cod on top of a mound of mashed potato, as seems to be de rigueur these days. Baked cod was good, certainly by the standards of restaurants, but the mashed potato was distinctly stale, clearly warmed up from some previous life. Washed down with a bottle of Petit Chablis 2014 from Laroche, an outfit which reference 1 claims has been at it for 1,000 years. Chablis was OK in any event.

The miniature brown loaves made a second appearance for breakfast, by this time a little tired, but no other bread was on offer. I made the mistake of thinking that 'fresh Scottish kippers' might be something like that, but turned out to be the usual shrink wrapped fillets, warmed up and doused in butter. Not my sort of thing at all, but BH rather liked them and wound up having them two or three times in the course of our stay.

Being bright and fresh, it was clearly a day for a walk west along the esplanade day, as far as the café on Marine Drive West, a stretch with beach huts, roughly at gmaps 50.779372, -0.693194. Tide was going out and we were able to walk on the sand below the stones for most of the way. Beach attractive in the bright sun. Some breeze, with the seagulls seeming to prefer to sit in small flocks, head to wind.

Along the way, intrigued by the advertisement above. How did Ogwen Mountain Rescue get in on the act?  Was there some jobbing gardener in the neighbourhood, scratching enough of a living out of the people who had retired to the fancy thatched cottages to the east and west of Bognor, to fund scrambling up rock faces in North Wales? See references 2 and 3.

Also on the way, took in the gardens at the Steyne (presumably named in honour of the one at Brighton), illustrated in the snap above. Someone, presumably the council, are doing a good job on the gardens, but the square itself is a bit seedy, ripe for gentrification. Plenty of foreigners about, including one obstreperous & noisy drunk, this being before noon. Luckily he had a someone with him, leading him home.

The pub, centre right, did not look as smart as I remember it. I feel sure we took afternoon refreshment there on some previous occasion, with the interior involving quite a lot of brown polished wood, fifties style. Rather a clubby feel to the place. Can't trace the visit now.

Rather an inferior bacon sandwich at the café, bread OK but bacon both rubbery and salty.

Mysterious structure in the sea to the west of the beachside café. Maybe the remnant of a second world war jetty?

Strolled back to the hotel for a siesta, meeting a couple who had retired to Walberton from Uxbridge a few years ago. A couple who looked to be quite similar to ourselves in wealth, habit and outlook . He knew all about the drug smugglers being processed through the Uxbridge courts there and might well have been a retired civil servant. Aeroplane noise not an issue, with the flight path maybe five miles away. But no longer the market town on the outskirts of London, not unlike Epsom, that it used to be. That said, I got a whiff of their missing the bright lights. Countryside all very well, but Chichester not quite the same thing as the West End.

Later, we repaired to the nearby Lobster Pot Café for a fine crab salad: dressed crab packed into the shell, green salad and small new potatoes in their skins, half boiled half fried. Touch of New Zealand sauvignon blanc to wash it down with and some kind of cake for dessert. All very good. Clearly a place which is doing well with lots of cheerful young waitresses.

The slip-way below the Lobster Pot, with the concrete much worn by the pebbles thrown about in winter storms.

The off-shore wind farm continued inactive, with none of the propellers turning, despite the fresh breeze from the west. There was some kind of small rig in attendance, so perhaps the farm was not yet finished, with the drill being that you don't turn anything on until you can turn them all on.

PS: current view is that gmaps is better for most of my purposes than bing maps. I think this is more than just being more familiar with it. Maybe MS is not matching the Google spend.

Reference 1: http://www.larochewines.com/fr.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/yaverland-three.html.

Reference 3: http://www.ogwen-rescue.org.uk/. From which I learn the interesting new word 'cragfast'.

Bognor one

A leisurely drive down to Bognor last week, with the first stop at Billingshurst. Not spotting a tea shop until it was too late, we turned in the 'King's Head', an old country-town pub with a big front bar, nicely renovated at some point. Seemed to be functioning mainly as a club for older gents., retired or semi-retired. And they were able to do perfectly respectable teas and coffees.

Out to investigate the church, which was shut, but which did kick off the shingles hare. See reference 1. We also passed lots of healthy looking pubs, perhaps kept afloat by all the housing estates which seemed to be clustered around the old town. Old enough for a chunk of the high street to be called 'Stane Street', from the days of the Romans.

But forward thinking enough to have erected a women's hall, well before women's liberation kicked off in London.

Next stop was to have been Greatham Bridge over the Arun, said to double as a fine picnic spot, but the road seemed to be closed for repairs, so we pushed onto Bury. Turn off the main road and find ourselves in a narrow lane lined with palatial thatched cottages, presumably catering to the better-off retired. The church was both old and open, old which must have been tastefully restored at some point. Restoration which did not include chucking out the coffin trolley (aka bier) tucked into the store under the tower. But not as grand as those we found in Norfolk, some years ago now, and noticed at reference 2.

Coffin trolley centre, between the post and the bell pull.

Incumbents were listed from 1296, although one suspects that there was a church on the site before that. The list also showed that, having started out as a branch of Fécamp Abbey, the living then moved around a bit, and at some point (1930 or so) fell into the clutches of Pembroke College, Oxford, where it remains.

Back out in the church yard. we met an older lady who first came to Bury, complete with label, as an évacuée from Croydon during the second world war, getting on so well in her second billet, that she wound up coming back for good, as it happened to be married in this very church. As it also happened her father, like FIL, had bad eyesight and was not thought fit for the front line, in his case winding up as a fireman rather than a nurse. I think she said he was a painter and decorator in civil life.

An early flicker of the yew chase, noticed at reference 3. Then, after picnicking in the church yard, we wandered down to the Arun.

First view of the Arun.

Second view of the Arun, not many seconds later. Maybe the sun had come out.

From Bury, the idea was to go to inspect the castle at Amberley, perhaps to find out why they needed two castles so close together, to guard the lower reaches of the Arun. We got near enough to find that it was something of a tourist hot-spot with lots of eager looking older walkers about, no doubt doing the south downs way. There were also what looked like river cliffs in the chalk behind the railway station, but this may have been no more than the scars left by digging out what was needed for the railway embankment, quite high at this point.

And so to Bognor Regis, or at least to Felpham, just beyond the Butlins.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/shingles.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=coffin+norfolk+walsingham.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/yew-trees.html.

Fake 9

An office building in East Street which irritates me every time I go past it.

Which it perhaps should not, as the architect did try. He did work out that a brick wall with three lines of windows was a bit bleak and needed to be broken up a bit, to be given some surface texture to break up the office block beneath. Surface texture of the kind that architects of places like County Hall and the government offices in Great George Street were quite good at. Or all the banks and such like in the city built around the same time. Probably also true that they had quite good budgets to work with.

But here the architect tried but failed, with these fake dormers being particularly naff, with it being very clear from the road, even to the casual passer-by, that the triangular pediments are just stuck on top of their windows and serve no functional purpose at all. Failed at the all-important trick of making trim look like it belongs, that it is fully part of the structure which it is trimming.

Group search key: fka.

Maigret et la Jeune Morte

I share three snippets from this story, from volume XVIII of the collected works.

First, we have the word 'embobeliner', which I thought a wonderfully evocative word for the process by which a young woman might ensnare an older man. With the 'bobe' bit bringing to mind a bobbin. So we have the woman spinning her cajoling, flattering thread around the man, or perhaps winding the thread, standing for the man, onto her bobbin. This is very much the sense of the word in Littré, while the various online dictionaries reduce the word to the rather cold, rather less evocative cheat or snare.

Second, we have the word 'tisonnier'. The tool with which one 'tisonner' the 'tisons' of the fire. With the tisons being the glowing coals, the glowing, half burnt bits of wood. Also the tool, according to Littré again, which a blacksmith might uses to fish the bits of clinker and dross out of his fire. So from the one word root we have, in French, a noun for the thing, verb for the action and a noun for the tool. But while we might poke the fire with a poker, we don't poke the pokes. The chain of association has been broken.

I associate to the way one gets 'pommier' from 'pomme', and so on for the other fruits of the orchard. We must do this sort of thing in English, but the only example I can think of at the moment is adding an 'er' suffix for someone who makes or does something, so 'hatter' from 'hat' and 'manager' from 'manage'.

Third, we have an anecdote about the old ladies of Nice who take the bus to Monte Carlo every morning so that they can work their martingales on the roulette at the casino there. That is to say, suppose you need X francs a day to live. So you make a roughly even bet with a stake of X, say you bet on red on the roulette. If you win, you have made your X and so stop. If you lose, you bet 2X on the next spine. If you win, once again you have made your X, 2X less the X you lost first time around, and so stop. For this to work, you have to double every time, so if you lose again, you have to bet 4X. And so on. The idea being that, if you have enough capital, you can just carry on betting until you win. A sure fire thing. You can't lose.

The Simenon story was that there were lots of older people, mainly old ladies, who did this, making a modest but steady income. Presumably more than their capital would have earned them in a bond or in a bank. Such people mostly became obsessed with the spins of the wheel, with their whole life revolving around it, not to say with it. And sometimes, when the casino was busy and didn't want their tables cluttered up with old people, they would pay them what they might otherwise have won to go away.

While the Wikipedia story is that this is not right. From time to time our old lady will have a run of bad luck and will not have the money to make the next bet. In fact not from time to time at all, it only has to happen once and she will have been cleaned out, she will have lost all her capital. Given that the casino takes a percentage, the expected value of this strategy will always be negative and the mathematics says that there is no way to cheat the numbers. With mathematics being a lot more reliable than statistics.

So, unusually, we seem to have caught Simenon out on one of his spots of local colour. Which I have always thought trustworthy enough to use retail in conversation.

PS: in connection with statistics, I was interested to read in the Financial Times about the difficulties of counting up all the millions of foreign students alleged by the Daily Mail to stay on after their course here (if there ever was one) has ended. With one of the main ways of counting being the International Passenger Survey, with which, back in the seventies of the last century I had a close a fulfilling relationship, based on their premises in Leather Lane, or perhaps Hatton Garden. Somewhere around there. From where I associate to the occasion when I accidentally knocked out the drug sniffing dogs of Folkestone Harbour for the day by letting them smell the newspaper wrapped parcel of fish which I had bought down on the dockside. (I feel sure that I have mentioned this before, but cannot now find the post. Search fails me).

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martingale_%28betting_system%29.

The Miss. Marple companion

Happening to be in the shop run by the Tadworth Children's Trust this morning, I chanced upon what turned out to be an essential guide to the changing life of villages at the time that Miss. Marple was active, just after the second world war.

Written and illustrated by one Ruth Cobb, who turns out to have been a well known illustrator of children's books in her day. And, entirely appropriately, published in 1945 by John Crowther of Bognor Regis. See reference 2.

I suppose at that time, small towns were quite apt to have a small stationer cum publisher, just as they were apt to have a baker and a brewer. All swept away.

So far an easy read giving a useful aperçu into villages of the time.

My only beef is that the people at the trust were rather too enthusiastic about pressing the price sticker down, nominally non-stick, which resulted in some damage to the front of the dust cover.

Reference 1: https://www.thechildrenstrust.org.uk/.

Reference 2: http://marchhousebookscom.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/ruth-cobb-guest-post-by-david-redd.html.

Big brains

A little while ago now, I read some adverse comment about one Dr Markram, about his claims for his team’s work on the European big brain project, websited at reference 3. I think the comments came from someone who thought that these claims were a bit overdone and who resented the amount of funding that the good doctor had managed to tuck under his belt. See, for example, reference 1.

I now read at reference 2, in much greater, if not altogether comprehensible detail, of the some of the work that Dr Markram and his large team of neurologists and others have done on the brains of rats. Assuming that I have read it right, this includes building a bit – maybe a third of a cubic millimetre – of rat brain on a computer. This bit of brain is called a microcircuit and I think the story is that it includes all the right sorts of neurons, getting on for 150,000 of them, depending which experiment you are looking at, of the right sort of size and shape, in the right sort of places and with the right sort of connections between them, but which has not yet been actively programmed to actually do anything in particular.

The bit of brain so defined was simulated using the NEURON simulation package of reference 8, augmented for execution on a supercomputer, together with additional tools to handle this particular model, this microcircuit.

All in all, a feat of big science which required a computer which at the time, a couple of years ago now, rated around 100 in the worldwide league of big computers. I quote: ‘… The systems used included an IBM Blue Gene/L (until 2009), a CADMOS 4-rack IBM Blue Gene/P (until 2013), a CADMOS 1-rack IBM Blue Gene/Q (until 2014), and the Blue Brain IV operated by the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS)…’.

It struck me that it was all rather bizarre that we should we spending so much time and treasure on something so little. Maybe more than a touch of hubris about it all. But then, maybe it will all come good. But then also, what about that other endeavour of big science, the quest for the quark at the large hadron collider at CERN and other such places? They are looking for a theory of everything which will explain the physical world, while here we are looking for a theory of everything which will explain the spiritual. Two big branches on the tree of knowledge, two sides of two not so very different coins, at least from a spiritual point of view. I don’t think that the God of the Garden of Eden would approve of either.

I then thought about the matter some more, the matter of one computer inside another, but with the one inside without a program. A formulation which is not entirely fair, as the model, the one inside, does exhibit interesting behaviour when it is poked. For example, if you twiddle with calcium levels, one of the parameters of the model, sometimes the neurons all jump up and down in a synchronised way, sometimes they just jump up and down.

So what we have is a chunk of rat brain, built on the basis of very general information, on the basis of vital statistics, but which manages to exhibit interesting behaviour.

This includes a lot of information about biological neurons, very complicated objects, objects which come in more than 57 varieties. They might all share the property of being electrically active and being able to generate electrical spikes, but they come in all different shapes and sizes, this being the morphological variation. And then there are all the different ways of responding to electrical stimulation, this being the electrical variation. And then some more.

Then there is a lot of statistical information out there about the numbers of all these different varieties and their distribution in space, through the six layers of a column through a small patch of cortex (the aforementioned deity having just missed the magic seven on this occasion). About the densities of the synapses of various sorts on those neurons.

A modified version of the Nobel prize winning equations which describe the behaviour of just one such neuron is illustrated (and which was taken from reference 4). By comparison, the neurons which computer people have been using for years to build neural network applications are very simple indeed, even those used to beat the Chinese at ‘Go’. So computer modelling of the joint behaviour of lots of these more realistic ones is a very considerable achievement.

All this has been done and the resultant model exhibits interesting behaviour when you poke it – but without the team having had to say anything about what the model is supposed to do. Rather as if we had built a general purpose computer, and then given it a poke to see what happens – and finding to our surprise that it does indeed do something of interest.

Maybe it not that big a step to using such a model to make predictions about how the real thing might respond if we give it a poke? About how, in certain circumstances, the real thing might go wrong in various kinds of way?

One catch is that according to the work of Dr Herculano-Houzel at reference 5, a  rat brain might contain some 10 billion neurons altogether, compared with the hundred thousand or so on show here. And a human brain might contain about 100 billion. So getting from a fraction of a cubic millimetre of a rat brain to the whole of a human brain might need an improbably large computer.

Another catch is that the model appears to have a large but fixed population of neurons and synapses. The synapses do not come and go, they do not wax and wane. To use the jargon, there is no synaptic plasticity. The model is not adapting, is not attempting to include learning, which goes on in a real brain all the time, from time scales of tens of milliseconds upwards. That said, the model does appear to be fully for up adaption, it has all the information needed.

On the plus side, the more recent work reported at reference 8 suggests that the behaviour of this model is correlated with its structure, from the point of view of algebraic topology, the topologies derived from the various directed graphs that can be derived from its chemical synapses. That some topological/statistical measure varies in time in a significant way as the model responds to stimulation. Another step forward.

This linking of neurons to topologies and measures reminds me of the IIT theory, being driven forward by Messrs. Tononi and Koch, from which they too extract a mathematically defined measure, called PHI, first noticed by me at reference 12, with the idea being that this measure is, in effect, a measure of consciousness. See reference 10 for a more useful introduction.

In the meantime, my own very modest efforts at brain science are from the top down rather than from the bottom up, involve neither fancy science nor fancy computers and with my LWS describing the data and process content of a small, conscious sheet of cortex at a level of abstraction in which the all-important neurons are barely visible. Never mind synaptic plasticity, supposed not to be an issue for the duration of what I am calling a frame of consciousness, although it certainly is for the compilation of that frame. See, for example, references 6 and 7. Very small science by comparison, barely science at all. But I do think that there is a place for it, just as there is room in the world for both experimental and theoretical physicists. 

Furthermore, it so happens that I once took an interest in algebra and topology separately and, as a result, someone had the bright idea that I might take an interest in them taken together, that is to say the algebraic topology mentioned above. This did not work out, with my failing to get properly started, but leaving me with a souvenir in the form of the well known book on the subject written by Eilenberg and Steenrod back in 1952. But now, forty years later, prompted by the topological appendix of the paper at reference 8, I am now motivated to try again. Eilenberg and Steenrod is still difficult and Wikipedia is a tool for reference rather than a textbook for the student, but somewhere along the line I came across the book by Hatcher (at reference 11) which has the advantages of being fifty years newer, open-access as a pdf and available secondhand for £20 or so. The case has been reopened, rather late in the day.

Maybe I will morph LWS from something like a large Excel workbook to something that an algebraic topologist would recognise. Maybe I too will find a use for mathematical measures, something which, in effect tests whether an instance of LWS contains enough for it to amount to consciousness, to a subjective experience. Or whether it is incoherent, the subjective equivalent of white noise.

References

Reference 1: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-human-brain-project-went-wrong-and-how-to-fix-it/.

Reference 2: Reconstruction and Simulation of Neocortical Microcircuitry - Henry Markram, Eilif Muller, Srikanth Ramaswamy and others – 2015.

Reference 3: https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/en/.

Reference 4: Mixed-mode dynamics and the canard phenomenon: towards a classification – N Popović – 2008.

Reference 5: The human brain in numbers: a linearly scaled-up primate brain – Suzana Herculano-Houzel – 2009.

Reference 6: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/restatement-of-hypothesis.html.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/05/in-praise-of-homunculus.html.

Reference 8: http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/.

Reference 9: Cliques of Neurons Bound into Cavities Provide a Missing Link between Structure and Function – Michael W. Reimann, Henry Markram and others – 2017.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_information_theory.

Reference 11: Algebraic topology – Allen Hatcher – 2001.

Reference 12: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/phi.html.

Massive extension

There was a large house on the corner of Epsom Road and The Kingsway as one goes into Ewell Village from East Street. A large house which has now been massively extended to make an even larger house, no doubt worth a lot more than a million. No doubt chunks of what used to be pitched roof are now flat roofs.

Work appears to be more or less finished, and the builders have tidied up and walked away. But they have left half of one of the walls unfinished.

What is going on? Is it yet another development which has collapsed in some messy row with the builder or in some little local difficulty over overdraft facilities with the bank?

BH suggests that the final solution will be some sort of timber (or fake timber) cladding to provide a bit of visual relief from all the white rendering.

We await developments.

Hole in the wall

An unusually scruffy hole in the wall, belonging to the branch of Lloyd's Bank in Tooting Broadway.

Despite appearances, it took my card, processed my request for £100 and returned my card, all as it should be. But then the hatch through which money should have appeared remained firmly shut.

I was running a little late, so did not care to queue up to tell them what they probably already knew.

But their system was clever enough to know that it had not dished out the notes and there is no sign of the transaction on my account, as viewed through my own computer today. While the subsequent, successful withdrawal from a much smarter hole in the wall, belonging to the branch of Halifax in Tooting High Street, does appear. So all is well.

All this despite yesterday's Guardian billing Tooting as the latest smart address in London.

Yew trees

The tree noticed at reference 1 has started a regular hare off, and I am now busily researching matters yew. With one mission being to find out why they live so long compared with most other trees and another being to find out why they do not usually form woods. The most important, of course, being to visit the wood at Kingley Vale.

First stop, Chamber's, where we get less than a column, slightly more than the nearby 'yoga'. But it did confirm that the tree was widely but sparingly distributed in the British Isles, forming woods in just Hampshire and West Sussex.

Second stop, reference 3, where the yew gets a chapter to itself, without, as far as I could see, illustration. An interesting compilation about the yew. It shares longevity with the olive. The best wood for the long bow came from the mountains of mainland Europe and no self-respecting English longbowman - at Agincourt for example - would be caught with a long bow grown at home. Various differing opinions about the toxicity of the leaves and the berries. The chapter closes with an ode to the yew, probably taken from reference 4, not available for inspection.

Third stop, reference 5. Not yet read, but it did point me to the web site reference 6. There are clearly plenty of yew nuts out there. I am not alone! It was also the source for the illustration, a yew in the church yard of St. Ffwyst in Monmouthshire, grid reference SO 28631322 (which neither bing nor google maps seem to understand), photograph Geoff Garlick, 2005. Sadly, blown down in a storm in 2012.

Once I have processed reference 5, the next stop will be Wisley to see if the library there (they are busily selling off a lot of their old stock to passers by) still has a copy of reference 7, which seems to be the standard work on the subject. Amazon has lots of ebooks and on-demand reprints, but that is unlikely to be the same as the original.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/old-tree.html.

Reference 2: Chamber's Encyclopaedia - George Newnes - 1959. Dedicated, by gracious permission, to HER MAJESTY THE QUEEN.

Reference 3: Among the Trees - Richard St.Barbe Baker - 1935.

Reference 4: The Poetry Of Gardens: In Water-Colour And Verse - Aumonier, M. - 1944.

Reference 5: The exceptional yew trees of England, Scotland and Wales - Andy Moir, Toby Hindson, Tim Hills and Richard Haddlesey - 2013.

Reference 6: http://www.ancient-yew.org/.

Reference 7: The yew trees of Great Britain and Ireland - John Lowe - 1896.

Trolley 84

An away day. Captured on the A24 between Tooting Bec and Tooting Broadway tube stations. A first, in that it was my first Boots trolley, a small one like the Co-op trolley at reference 1. An unusual, in that I do not often interact with trolleys away from home.

Walking from Balham tube station, I had not passed a Boots, so I decided that it, most probably, had come from Tooting, at least originally. It looked as if it had been outside for a while: you will get the idea if you click to enlarge and peer between the bars.

Pressed on to Tooting, through the crowds of late afternoon shoppers, and called in Boots the Optician, just by the Castle pub. The young lady I spoke to was quite amused by the whole business, the more so as it was none of her business. She didn't have to do anything, but she did direct me to the Boot the Chemist down Tooting Broadway, maybe a hundred yards away.

Wheeled it through the nice clean shop and pulled up at the pharmacy counter, where the young pharmacists looked a bit bemused. I think they hoped that I would just take it away again. But I persisted. It says Boots on the handle so it is your problem - even if you haven't used trolleys here for years. At which point a young lady management person turned up and wheeled it briskly out back. The young pharmacists looked very relieved, smiled nicely and hoped that I was going to enjoy the rest of my day.

I should have suggested that spending an hour on the trolley with a brush and hot soapy water might be a fitting punishment for the next person to be more than 20 minutes late for their shift, but did not think of that at the time, and so it will probably wind up in their skip out back. Shame.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/trolley-82.html.

Donkeys

Three smartly turned out donkeys in the otherwise unoccupied bandstand on the esplanade at Bognor Regis.

In the charge of a small team of friendly and knowledgeable people from the Hayling Island donkey sanctuary. See reference 1. We learned some stuff about donkeys.

Donkeys, like humans and dogs, have friends. In a place like the sanctuary, donkey A may get on with donkey B, spend quality time with donkey B, but not with donkey C. Donkey A is apt to grieve if donkey B goes missing.

Donkeys get a bit tetchy if they don't get out and about a bit. So these ones seem to like their outings to Bognor. They also like and need a bit of serious exercise.

Donkeys are very hardy and very strong for their size, although regulations limit the weight they are allowed to carry to 8 stone - so most children but not many adults. For his famous ride into Jerusalem, Jesus probably got some kind of exemption from the sanhedrin, an early version of the Health & Safety Executive (aka HSE, which once used to include AI, the alkali inspectorate, rather than artificial intelligence, not then invented, in those far off days when we had both intelligence of our own and alkalis to inspect). In the case of children, stirrups are more bother than they are worth, so the saddles are provided with steel hoops at the pommel which the child can grab hold of. I thought that this might be an idea with horses, but the team said that this would make bending forward uncomfortable, something one does quite a lot of on a horse.

Reference 1: http://www.haylingislanddonkeys.co.uk/.

Bats

Two sightings this evening of what might have been bats flying in or out of our southern hedge, just beyond our back extension. Between 1930 and 2000.

Interestingly, almost exactly a year since confirmed sightings were noticed at reference 1. Is it a time of year thing. We are often in the extension around 2000 of an evening, and in late August that means it is just about dusk, when the bats come out to play?

It also means that, being warm, we will not have rushed to draw the curtains, with drawn curtains certainly making it seem warmer in the winter. So we get to see stuff that might be outside, against the darkening, but still pale blue sky to the west.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/evening-nature.html.

Heygates

Before we got to the Poppins Café noticed in the previous post, we were pleased to find that Heygates Books was still up and running at No.67. See reference 1 for our first visit. Of the two books I bought on that occasion, the history of everything was rapidly recycled, while the dictionary of Esperanto has been retained to impress susceptible visitors.

A bookshop which is part a sort of lending library for holiday paperbacks and part a second hand book shop - with more interesting stock than the front of the shop might suggest. On this occasion BH spent more than I did, picking up a nice selection of ladies' fiction. I fell for a retread of an old guide to Venice and a fat, undergraduate physics text, total £5.

I don't suppose that I shall ever visit Venice, but this small format guide appealed to me. About the size and shape of a Pevsner, written by one Giulio Lorenzetti in 1926, published by Lint of Trieste and described as a historical-artistic guide to Venice and its lagoon. Complete with a nice set of fold-out sketch maps at the back. A hundred pages of history to start, then into Pevsner-style coverage of the buildings and paintings of Venice. With the index of artists alone running to more than fifty pages. Practically without illustration by today's standards, but there is a selection of half tones. We shall see what value I get out of it.

While 'University Physics' by Harris Benson will hopefully serve to prop up my fading knowledge of physics. Intended as an introductory course for science and engineering students, my first impression is that it should serve my purposes well. A well produced, well illustrated modern text with plenty of overlap with my ancient A-level physics. Maybe I will once again get to know the difference between an electric and a magnetic field.

£20 for Venice and £7 for physics at amazon respectively, so I think I paid a fair price. Oddly, the £20 was for the hardback that I think I now now have, but amazon also offer a paperback version for more than £150. Maybe that has higher grade pictures. Or maybe it is just one of the many quirks of the amazon marketplace system.

PS: the proprietor told me that next year will be his 50th anniversary of business and he has every intention of being there. Hopefully we will make it too.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/bognor-books.html.

Small chains

It being rather a wet day, we spent part of Monday in the High Street of Bognor Regis. A town which is rich in charity shops and Polish groceries, and which also sports a Wimpy Bar, a chain which was important when I was young, but which has more or less vanished from view. While reference 1 suggests that it is not just in Bognor where it is hanging on. I also learn that Wimpy Bar was invented by Lyon's Corner House.

We declined the Wimpy, but a bit further along the street, came across the Poppins Café, which we accepted, which turns out to be one of a chain of such scattered across the towns of southern England - but new to us.

I opted for cheese omelette with salad, which turned up looking very bright and fresh, with the omelette being very neat and round. On investigation it turned out to have been cooked in a pan, in the ordinary way, but inside a special contraption, about the size of a microwave, which heated the bottom of the pan and grilled the top of the omelette at the same time. Not quite the same as an omelette which had been slowly & lovingly turned by hand over a slow heat, but as I have already said, bright and fresh - and entirely eatable.

An establishment which was run by two men and two women, all four foreign and middle aged, possibly two couples. With manners and presentation which suited the business well. I expect they did a good trade with young families and with pensioners such as ourselves.

Reference 1: http://www.wimpy.uk.com/.

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

Big picture

A larger version of the grave stone in question, for inspection by any readers who have doubts. Maybe what is really called for is archaeologically proper, slanting light.

Group search key: ewb.

Old tree

There was talk about a very old yew tree at the church at  Sidlesham, perhaps dating back to before the Christian era - which seemed a touch improbable, even if we suppose that the Christian era in question started in 500AD or so.

The only yew tree that I found is snapped left, and while tall was not particularly fat, which I expect in an old yew. See, for example, those at references 1 and 2.

However, checking with google, I find that there are indeed some very old yew trees in the area, at a place called Kingley Vale, on the other side of Chichester. According to wikipedia: 'Kingley Vale has one of Europe's most impressive yew forests. The forest contains yews as much as 2,000 years old, which are some of the oldest living organisms in Great Britain. Their survival is remarkable because most ancient yew trees across Europe were felled after the 14th century, being the preferred material for the staves of English longbows'.

Something to be checked more carefully when we next visit.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/12/dartington-snaps.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/tweetree-2.html.

Group search key: ewb.

New furniture

The church of St. Mary our Lady at  Sidlesham was very old, with the present buildings dating back to the early 13th century. And the parish going back more than 500 years before that. What appeared to be a very old font and some old pillars can be seen in the snap left.

Quite a large church for an old, but not very large village. So it was odd to find a lot of relatively modern woodwork: pews, doors, pulpit, altar rails and so on. Perhaps dating from the 1950's. How did such a church find the money and energy to do this at that time? Scarcely remembered as a time of evangelical revival.

Group search key: ewb.

New earwigs

The Earwickers who arrived after Joyce's visit.

BH was very taken with the wheel barrow, which she thought a very handy thing in which to put the flowers. Make them up at home, then wheel them into the grave yard. Wheel them out again when it was time for a refresh. While I was not so sure that I wanted my grave marked by a wheel barrow.

Group search key: ewb.

Earwig redux

I am pleased to able to report that the second part of the mission noticed yesterday at reference 1, was satisfactorily completed this morning.

We set off for Sidlesham bright and early, fortified in may case by the quite respectable bacon sandwich turned out by our hotel, to drive through a lot of glass houses, the contents of which presumably accounting for all the Poles in and around Bognor Regis - to the extent of the Sainsbury's there running to a small Polish deli section from where I bought some adequate if not particularly good kabanosi. At least there was no trace of cheese in them. The glass houses also meant that at one point we were driving behind a large lorry from Spalding, so presumably there is some connection between the vegetable growers of Spalding and those of Sidlesham, despite the hundred and more miles between them. Or perhaps between the gang-masters.

Nearly missed the discrete brown sign advertising '13th century church' by the Anchor, but clocked it in time to turn into the lane, to find that the church itself was even more discrete and we had to pass the church gate three times before we clocked that. But there were lots of expensive thatched cottages down the lane, the sort of thing that might attract the comfortably off pensioner, or perhaps even the comfortably off commuter to nearby Chichester. Professionals and business people. A posh enclave among all the agriculture and agricultural cottages - and, I dare say, caravans, although we did not actually notice any of those.

So into the church yard where we inquired of a helpful lady who did not know of the Earwickers but did know someone who might and she went off to consult her.

Thinking that Joyce was not likely to have searched the large grave yard that carefully, we went on to think that the grave in question was probably quite near the church. BH went off to look there, while I was discouraged by the faded lettering on many of the grave stones. Being able to find the Earwicker was going to take a good stroke of luck. At which point a shout from BH announced her hitting the bulls eye, illustrated above. Late eighteenth century and just about legible.

Very pleased with ourselves. And even more pleased when the helpful lady came back and told us of more Earwickers on the other side of the grave yard. Modern Earwickers, quite possibly in direct male line of descent from our Earwicker.

We then got to thinking about how Joyce might have got there, settling for walking, with most people of his time thinking nothing of the ten mile round walk from his boarding house in Bognor Regis.

Back home, I checked in my Ellmann, which does indeed report the holiday in Bognor, but is silent on the question of the all important name, the name of the hero of this famous book.

I then checked my copy of  'Finnegans Wake' and failed to find either Earwicker,  HCE or H.C.E (for Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker). Thinking this a little odd I then turned up a searchable copy of the book at reference 2, to find that there are very few occurrences of 'Earwicker', less than ten, and even fewer of H.C.E. Odder and odder.

I then took a look at the wikipedia entry, which confirms that Earwicker is indeed the hero of the book, a married man with three children. It also explains that he goes under a considerable variety of pseudonyms, which goes some way to explaining why I could find so few Earwickers. But I worry about the quality of the text. Where does it come from? Where was the quality control? The website at reference 3 was most unhelpful. Searching for 'Maud Chartrain et Denise Leneveut' produces nothing useful. So I let the matter drop. A slightly unsatisfactory ending to an otherwise satisfactory mission. We have tracked down the birth of H.C.E. to a grave stone; redux indeed.

PS: the search key 'hce' has already been used in connection with a visit to Hampton Court Palace, so is not available for use here. From where I wonder whether Joyce ever went in for visiting stately homes and such like. It seems a little unlikely.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/08/joyce-at-clarence.html.

Reference 2: http://www.chartrain.org/PDF/Finnegans.pdf.

Reference 3: http://www.chartrain.org/.

Group search key: ewb.

No score trolley

A sturdy trolley snapped outside our hotel this morning, probably a luggage trolley from a railway station, a bus station or an air terminal.

A trolley which, judging by its appearance, may have been taken for sea bathing down the nearby slipway, a slipway clearly marked 'for council use only'.

But a trolley which I did not score for two reasons.

First, there was nothing to say to whom the trolley belonged, so I was unable to return it.

Second, it was probably not a shopping trolley, not even the sort of trolley you might use at a builders' merchant, so it was out of scope.

Morning musings

Waking up this morning, I got to thinking about one of the minor irritations on this blog.

Attentive readers will have noticed that I use unlikely three letter strings to group like or related posts together. So a group of posts about jelly lichen, perhaps posted over several weeks, might be grouped together by the inclusion of a line 'Group search key: jlb' at the end of each. Or 'hcf' might collect posts about a recent visit to Hampton Court Palace.

If one then keys 'hcf' into the search box (to the left of the sherlock holmes search icon, just above the top right of the blue square, bottom left in the illustration), blogger will return all the posts which contain that string. Elementary testing suggests that it will only find an 'hcf' which is properly separated out, delimited for example by spaces, and that it does not do startswith or contains, a good thing in this context. Don't know about wild cards. In any event, the idea is for the blog writer to use a search string which is unlikely to pop up by chance.

Now this works fine when one is reading the blog in the way intended. You see the search key at the bottom of the post and wanting to see the related posts, you put the key into the search box.

The irritation is that if I were to refer to all the posts with the key 'hcf' from some other post, that post would then itself become part of the group, by virtue of its inclusion of the key. Free text search is just that, it does not distinguish between attaching a key to a post and referring to that first post by use of that key from some second post.

One wheeze would be to refer to the first post by something like '#hcf', which works, in blogger blog search at least, provided that the reader knows, if he or she wanted to check up what '#hcf' was all about, that the idea is to strip off the leading hash mark before popping it in the search box. Not so good for the casual reader; it is bad enough having to know how to do search for a group search key.

In many academic publications, the convention or custom is that one avoids this problem by the inclusion of a keywords clause somewhere in one's paper, usually somewhere near the beginning, perhaps just after the abstract, assuming, that is, that one is the sort of academic that does abstracts. One then does a keyword search rather than a free text search, a search in which inclusion of the keyword(s) in the body of the paper would no longer count, in the way that it does here.

And a keyword search could then be included in a free text search, if what looked like free text search terms were actually embedded in some full-on query language, which just defaulted to a simple, free text search. So one would have something like 'key:HCP', where 'HCP' was the keyword for Hampton Court Palace. I suspect that this is not the case in Google blogger search. So what about Microsoft?

Asking google about Microsoft query languages turns up various offerings:

• The heavy-lifting SQL query language, the mainstay of programming against databases, often SQL databases. For many years now the subject of an international standard, a standard originally driven forward, ironically, by IBM, just before the explosion of Microsoft onto the scene
• Microsoft Power Query for Excel. Nothing yet known about this one, but I did find a specification
• Windows Search Service. This is getting a bit warmer with a talk both of an instant search box and of a searchable catalog of documents
• Windows Explorer search. Free text content search plus some property stuff, 'file type is Powerpoint' sort of thing, this last via the search tab which pops up if you click in the search box. Looks as if you can only do an implicit 'and', with no actual 'and', 'not' or 'or' and no brackets. But it looks as if you can do quotes enclosed text strings
• Word search. A search within a document rather than for a document, with rather different rules
• Start search. Bottom left on a Windows screen. Not yet worked out what this one is for.

But I found very little help about the last three of these, the three which are intended for use by end users like myself, and certainly no specification of the query languages involved. There must be such a thing somewhere, if only for the people coding these search features to work from.

I have also failed to find any help about the blog search feature that I started with, although there is plenty of stuff out there about searching blogs generally. Some moaning about Google's withdrawal of some blog search tool or other.

I didn't look for any help or support for google search generally. Something they are clearly very good at and which no doubt comes in at least 57 varieties.

So after all this, I have not come up with a very neat solution to my irritation. I guess I will have to settle for '#hcf' and hope for the best.

PS: I could digress on the important role that search now has in computing generally. About how in the olden days everything was given an identifier, something like a postcode or a telephone number, and one organised both one's data and its processing around that identifier. Sorting the records of a big file by identifier was important, and much treasure was spent on getting good at it. Whereas now search rules. Search is to computing what sulfuric acid is to chemical engineering or paint is to painting. You don't ask for me by national insurance number any more, you ask for me by some search term like 'Epsom blogger nerd trolley' - not that we have yet got to the point where that does anything for either Google or Bing. But I leave all these interesting speculations for another day.

Fake 8

This fake is the roof of the Fitzalan Chapel in the grounds of Arundel Castle, with this chapel being the Catholic eastern end of the otherwise proper & Anglican St. Nicolas Church, the greater part of which is on the town side of the castle wall. The main purpose of this eastern end being to house the tombs of members of the family in the big house, that is to say the Fitzalan-Norfolks, the temporal if not spiritual lords of the townsfolk. The head of the house also being the hereditary earl marshal of England - oddly, despite their being Catholics. But I digress.

The faking lies in the fact that the fancy fan vaulted roof, in brown wood, is a false roof, false ceiling if you will. It is real to the extent that it holds itself up, but false to the extent that the real roof, the roof which actually keeps the weather out, is an entirely separate structure, built on much the same lines as the roof of a suburban house, a few feet above what you see and enjoy here.

The brain takes pleasure in the sleight of hand which gives the impression of an integral structure, organised, held together and held up by the cunning arrangement of wooden ribs. Ribs which are decorated, but not so much as to hide their lines. A closed and comfortable space, with us inside and with the existence of the roof above the ceiling having usually vanished from consciousness - if it had ever got there in the first place.

As we will be talking about elsewhere, and have talked about at, for example, reference 1, this involves the brain building an elaborate data structure in which this picture is held, with the subjective experience, including the pleasure, arising from activation, in the form of high frequency oscillations, running around that structure, itself expressed in the form of low frequency oscillations.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/04/a-ship-of-line.html.

Group search key: fka.