On rubbish

In the course of my DIY descriptive experience sampling, noticed at reference 1, I am quite often struck by the rubbish that I think, most often when I am on my morning walk, perhaps on the well-trodden paths of the Horton Clockwise. Not complete rubbish, but not really fit for public consumption in its raw state; the material need to be worked up, quite possibly twisting its whole sense around in the process. Moved from an opening position of ‘Daily Mail’ to a closing position of ‘Guardian’.

Not that the thoughts which I capture in this way are very often crude or distasteful in a nasty way. Nor are they nonsense: these thoughts are well formed and do respect the real world, at least up to a point. They could have been right – but it is just that they are not. At least this is the lesser evil, at least at the personal level. Being wrong is, of course, more important in a public figure: I don’t really care what she does in private, just so long as she gets it right in public.

It may well be that the sampling drags thoughts out into the open which would never, unaided, have made it into consciousness. The censor, whom I like to call the super-ego, usually blocks inappropriate content; insists on it going through due process before it is allowed out. Psycho-analysts try for something of the same sort with their analysands, try to arrange things so that their super-egos are turned down, if not off, during free association – remembering here that part of what one is paying the analyst for is discretion: what might be said on their sofa, stays on their sofa. In any case, he is not interested in all the surface rubbish, rather he is interested in the deep meaning which comes to him, cloaked by your rubbish, deep meaning which, to use a theological term, more or less amounts to your soul.

This may fit in with the rubbish that one thinks when one is dreaming, when the super-ego has gone off duty, or the rubbish that I remember thinking once when I was on a morphine pump for pain. Not that I can remember what I was thinking about on that occasion, although I am reasonably sure, once again, that it was not anything particularly crude or distasteful, but I can remember thinking, presumably when the pain was no longer the main issue, that I was thinking dreadful rubbish. Some part of me could watch the other part pumping out all kinds of junk.

With my having a slightly odd experience of much the same sort only last week, one which did not involve morphine, but waking up in the middle of the night, to find all kinds of (visual) images whizzing through my mind, too fast to make any sense of them, but rather disturbing nonetheless. Perhaps some subconscious process was able to generate feelings of anxiety and such like, even though the images were not there long enough for the consciousness to catch hold of them – just the feelings – the result of the chemically flavoured emotional system working to a different time scale to the neuronally flavoured consciousness system. Luckily, a whizzing which stopped once I had woken up properly.

Another sort of odd experience, an experience which I have both when out sampling and when not, is that one has a very clear thought, then a moment later when one tries to grab it, it is gone. All one is left with is the strong feeling, the conviction that there had been an interesting thought there. Maybe all that is left is a faint emotional trace. So some times, the bleeper slips under the thought and manages to land it, other times, the bleeper misses and the thought floats back down into the murky depths. From which it can be deduced that I have associated, once again, to fish, fishing and landing nets. There is also the thought, once caught, is not the same thought as it was. The act of catching does something to it – rather as, perhaps, that a fish in a landing net has lost most of the grace of a fish in the water.

But then I think of the times when people, sometimes even me, are able to speak well, to talk well, to lecture about arcane matters, extempore, without notes. Where is the super-ego then? One is not aware of a five second lag while it does its business, in the way that live broadcasts are sometimes protected. Perhaps the fact that one has probably worked the material up beforehand, perhaps spoken about it before, means that most of the work of the super-ego has already been done. As if the material has a proper manifest coming along with it and does not, in consequence, need to be checked too thoroughly at the point of delivery.

Next I think of the top down and bottom up processes which figure quite largely in the literature these days, with the idea being, I think, that most of what can be seen from the outside of people is a blended product of bottom up and top down processes: what I experience when I look at a cow in a field is driven, in part by in-bound photons, in part by my deciding that there is a cow out there. Decide first, see afterwards. Think of all those times when you thought you saw something important in the bushes, something which turned out to be no more than a piece of litter, but which, for a second or so looked very like the head of a polecat. Or a badger, or whatever. Sometimes bottom up might dominate, sometimes top down might dominate, but generally they just get along. Maybe the super ego is just another name for some of those top down processes.

To close, I invite readers to remember that rubbish is not the same as detritus at all. See, for example. reference 2.

PS: the law, on this point at least, is sensible. It does not criminalise thought (although it strikes me as coming close with some sexual offences), while it does sometimes criminalise speech, and, rather more often, action.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/08/descriptive-experience-sampled.html.

Reference 2: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=couper+crafts.

Aladdin fires

Pinterest brought this picture to my attention this morning, of what seems to be two Aladdin paraffin fires somewhere in Iraq.

Identical to the two such fires which we owned when we were first married and used to fire up our bedsitter near Harringay West railway station, now known as plain Harringay. Then home to a fine foreign butcher who sold Baby Belling ready joints of beef. And a public library from which we took our Trollope. Identical that is up to the fuel guage, at the front of the tank of the right hand fire, which came in two, slightly different, varieties.

We hung onto the fires for many years, and they only made it to the tip after we arrived in Epsom, by which time they had not been used for perhaps 20 years. Although not too sure on that point as I do remember that one could still buy pink paraffin in the hardware store then in Pound Lane, when we first arrived, and may well have done so. Now long gone.

The other people whom I knew to have such fires were the Census people, who had a large stock of them standing ready to fire up their offices in Segensworth Road in Titchfield, against the possibility of heating oil failure during the winter of discontent, back in the 1970's.

Rather a low resolution picture, so I tried google image search, which came up with half a dozen more or less identical copies of the same picture. It guessed Baghdad as the origin of this particular one. So not that smart as it did not come up with any other pictures of the same fires, of which one supposes that there must be plenty, floating about somewhere or other out there. It presumably does not get as far as working out that there are two fires, detaching them from their background and poking around for something similar. Rather, it works at a whole picture level.

PS: I also remember being rather sorry when we got rid of ours. They were very well made things and it seemed a pity for them to go for scrap metal. Rather in the same way as I am sorry when I see one of those fine electric typewriters which used to be made by IBM sitting all forlorn in a car boot sale. But what on earth could one do with such a thing? Where would one put it?

PPS: the last time I noticed stoves or the paraffin that went in them seems to have around ten years ago at reference 1, with the older of the two posts there recording a failure to visit the tip with them. With the story there much the same as that here, which is a relief, with the only down point being that I had been expecting something rather more recent. Perhaps my searching is not up to much.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=paraffin.

Artificial intelligence

This post by way of being a report of a discourse at the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street, given on Friday, 28th October.

Professor Christopher M. Bishop started life as a physicist but, overwhelmed by the data generated by big physics experiments, moved across to computing and is now described by wikipedia as majoring on machine learning, neural networks, pattern recognition and natural language processing. He is also the author of ‘Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning’ a fat, but rather good textbook from Springer which sits, somewhat read, on the bookshelf behind me. Good coverage of all the basics, basics on which I, for one, am rather rusty. I first came across him giving lectures on the internet – and I thought that they were very good; maybe distance learning will catch on.

He is now Laboratory Director at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Not very clear what that might be, but he wore a smart suit and gave a very polished talk – with more than a touch of Microsoft flavouring. More suit than beard these days.

We started with a quick canter through the computer programs which play world class chess, Jeopardy! (a quiz show, see reference 1) and go. The program from the DeepMind people which learned how to play a bunch of arcade games with little more to go on than screen shots. Plus a neat definition of artificial intelligence as the sort of intelligence that computers do not yet have.

Another interesting problem was the classification of images by computer.

And another was trying to work out what films you are likely to like, based on a few hints from yourself and a large database – or more precisely, a large but sparse matrix – of the likes and dislikes of other people, with it being almost certain that your likes and dislikes are going to be enough like those of those other people, at some level or other, for the computer to get a grip on. With this one being the subject of a rather neat video demonstration with a screen full of film posters jumping about, a demonstration which I think I have seen before, or at least read about before, but cannot now track down – although the people at references 2 and 3 may well be doing something of the same sort. And I now know that picking out movies for you without you having to take much trouble about it is big business; there are lots of sites out there offering to do it for you.

A big teaching point for me was learning what the deep in deep learning was. So we started with the perceptron, which were used to make the sort of neural network which has just one hidden layer. We saw pictures of one made in the 1950’s with lots of wires and lots of very chunky looking components, about the size of jam jars, in racks. Such networks were very good at a certain class of problems. Then someone worked out how to make a network with two hidden layers work, how to train them, and these networks could tackle a rather larger class of problem. Deep learning is where you have lots of layers, and can tackle really serious problems. From where I associate now to the combination of bottom up and top down processing, much talked of by neurologists.

He talked of one demonstration which was new to me, which was an executive from the US going to give a talk to an audience of thousands in Beijing, a talk which was given in English and translated by a computer, in real time, into spoken Mandarin Chinese. A quick google does not turn up this particular talk, but it does turn up something which looks similar, a talk by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook. It may all be to do with a chap called Yang Liu, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Tsinghua University.

Part of this was powered by a switch from tricky logic to dumb data. There were huge amounts of data about now and huge amounts of computer power. One did not need to attack problems head on anymore, trying to encode their logic; just hit them with training on the data and statistics on the data. For the moment, it still helped to throw in a bit of subject matter expertise, like suggestions about good ways to structure a visual image – but even that may not be necessary for all that much longer.

We then moved into probability and statistics, into the war of the Bayesians with the Frequentists. Enlivened by a neat but simple demonstration of the non-transitivity of loaded dice. Dice A would beat B, B would beat C and, this being the bit that is not supposed to happen in well behaved systems, C would beat A. The point being that tricky things could happen in the world of probability. Google got this one in one – see reference 4.

It was pointed out that one of the pluses of neural networks was that they could soak up a lot of damage. You could cut a lot of the connections or kill off a lot of the neurons, but they would still work after a fashion. Which is more than you could say of a computer program written along more traditional lines.

A puff for a monster computer being built by Microsoft, powered by chips which can reconfigure themselves on the fly, to the task at hand.

But I was sorry at the way the talk ended, with Bishop describing himself as an optimist who thought that computers and computing were a force for the good. That the march of the robots was a force for the good. While I felt that he was dismissive about the social problems that were likely to come too. It was not enough to say that surely it is a good thing that a clever computer program can speed up the work of a busy radiologist by a factor of ten. All a bit too glib – and, well, someone from somewhere like Microsoft would say something like that, wouldn’t they?

I also feel that we make quite enough of a mess of running the world the way things are now and I have little confidence that we will be able to manage the robots. Some of us may accumulate vast wealth, rather more may well get cheap ice cream and a long life – but what else are we going to get with them?

Putting considerations of impending doom aside, we finished the evening at the Halfway House at Earlsfield, sufficiently quiet by the end of this Friday evening for the cheerful young barmaid (from somewhere foreign, of course) to spend quality time with us. Maybe she mistook us for munificent geriatrics.

No aeroplanes on the platform.

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

Reference 2: https://www.tastekid.com/.

Reference 3: http://www.strong.io/blog/deep-neural-networks-go-to-the-movies.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_dice.

Duty chef

With the regular chef diverted to Abbeyfield (reference 1), I was duty chef today, and, as it turned out, the first bit of proper cooking that I have done for a while.

Buy a pound of shank beef, looking good and full of sinew and flavour, from our local butcher (reference 2). Good dark colour. Potatoes and mushrooms from the Costcutter next door.

Cut the beef, across the grain, into small slices about 5mm thick. There must have been plenty of sinew as I had to sharpen the knife a couple of times as I went along.

Brown in a couple of tablespoons of virgin rape seed oil - from Essex I think - and then add a couple of onions finely chopped. Add a little water, enough to almost cover, and simmer with lid on for 90 minutes. Add a couple of sticks of celery, finely sliced across the grain. Simmer for a further 10  minutes. Add the chopped stalks of 8 button mushrooms. Add a heaped tablespoon of cold mashed potato as a thickener. 5 minutes before the off add the mushroom caps, quartered.

In parallel, prepare and boil appropriate amounts of rice and crinkly cabbage. Leave potatoes for another day.

Good gear. My only comment would be that the cabbage would have been better cooked 3 minutes, perhaps even 150 seconds, rather than 4 minutes.

Rounded off with the pineapple upside down cake left over from yesterday. Which when entire, looked something like the one at reference 3, with the most visible difference being that BH omitted the (glacé) cherries which were not held in place by being in the centre of a pinapple ring, a concession to wobbly senior hands.

Snooze with Guardian draped tastefully over one. Monkey Life on low in the background.

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

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

Reference 3: https://www.nigella.com/recipes/pineapple-upside-down-cake.

Weather

First frost of the season, overnight 1st-2nd November. Presently a bright, sunny morning, but frost not yet off that part of the extension roof which the sun has got to. Sun not yet got to any of the garage roof, round to the right from my vantage point at the study window. No frost on the grass, can't now remember whether there was any.

Maybe we will get to see some small birds in the garden again, possibly present but certainly invisible during the summer.

Jewish Autonomous Oblast

From time to time I air the idea that it might have been a good idea to have given the Jews what was until fairly recently the GDR (aka East Germany) as their homeland after the second world war. This would have enabled survivors to stay rather nearer their original homes than going off to an uncertain welcome in the Middle East.

Of no help now, but at the time, had Stalin been willing, which seems rather unlikely, it could have been a runner. All the people living there at the time who were not Jews would have been invited to leave - and given that, at that time, there were some very large population movements going on, this would have just been one more.

I had known about a couple of colonial schemes that really had been promoted over the years - Uganda and Madagascar - but I had forgotten, if I ever knew, about the Soviet venture in the far east, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast on the Amur River. For a short while in the 1920's, the idea was kill various birds with one stone, one bird being a homeland for the Jews and another bird being the need to populate, to beef up this thinly populated border land with China against the threat of incursions or land grabs by either the Chinese or the Japanese.

One problem was the rather harsh climate: cold in the winter, hot in the summer and lots of mosquitoes. All of which sounds a bit like Winnipeg in Canada.

More serious were the unpleasant, not to say savage, twists and turns of Soviet policy, with the result that while the place still exists - at least according to wikipedia at reference 1 - very few Jews now live there, although the monument included above continues to dominate the main square in the capital, Birobidzhan.

All this being brought to my attention by the NYRB.

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

Viola times

Thursday past off to St. Luke's again, for a programme which I was not too sure about and which, for me, did not work out too well in the event. Maybe there is a reason why the repertoire for the solo viola is a bit thin.

Off to a bad start, being irritated by a poster at Epsom Station containing a nature lovers' snap of a cuddly urban fox. They don't seem to understand that urban foxes are vermin and are not cuddly. Perhaps the people responsible are also the sort of people that feed them.

Then the screen on the telephone froze, needing a reboot to get it back into life again. Interestingly, the alarm clock survived the reboot to dish out an alarm at the intended time.

Things got better at Waterloo where I was able to pull a working Bullingdon from the second stand on the ramp, to pedal off to the Finsbury Leisure Centre, next to St. Luke's.

Close encounter with a Hanson cement tanker in Stamford Street while admiring a large mobile crane, I thought from Ainscough, but not now sure, as I remember a red crane, while the Ainscough livery featured at reference 1 is yellow. The encounter was not in the least threatening, but it did serve to show how easy it would be to wobble under such a thing at a junction. It went on ahead, but I was able to catch it on Blackfriars Bridge, where the lights were against him, but for me, zooming along the Cycle Superhighway - still unused to oncoming cycles, the Superhighways being two way streets. What about dual carriageways next? I also wondered about the transience of fame. Hanson was a very big cheese twenty or thirty years ago, but who has heard of him now?

At the church, our Radio 3 presenter, Fiona Talkington, put on her usual act, a little toned down from her usual exuberance, introducing us to Lawrence Power, who turned out to be a fine musician, let down to my mind by his music. I had been pinning my hopes on the Bach, the sonata for viola da gamba and harpsicord No. 3, given on this occasion with a viola and a grand piano and interleaved with the Turnage piece. Which, while there were some moments, did not work for me. The Bowen sonata likewise: it had its moments but did not really work for me.

Second leg. back from the Leisure Centre to St. Martin's Street, behind the National Gallery. With St. Martin's being a rather grander church than St. Luke's, but from a roughly similar period.

Quick tuna sandwich behind the gallery to keep me going. £2,50 for a couple of thin slices of factory white wrapping up what seemed like a huge quantity of tuna fish, albeit whipped well beyond its intended volume with something or other wet. Followed by a visit to Gaby's, a famous place in Charing Cross Road, often passed but, I think, never before visited. Where they were able to do me the best salt beef that I have had for a long time, not as good as the stuff you used to be able to get, many years ago, in Great Windmill Street, but a lot better than the stuff usually dished out. They also seemed to think that I needed a huge quantity of mustard but, luckily, that came in a separate bowl. Latke not so good, having been made quite a long time previously and warmed up for me. But an excellent place, to which I shall return.

Wikipedia knows all about Great Windmill Street. I never knew that the place used to be called the nosh bar, but I am reminded of the excellent chicken soup which was to be had there. See reference 2.

Wound up the proceedings by a touch of Vinho Verde from Terroirs, where we were served by a very cheerful young lady from Warsaw who assured us that Poland ran to both McDonald's and Broadband; not completely backward. But Terroirs could not do vin de bouleau, despite their otherwise fine collection of wine. While our waitress had never heard of the stuff, alleging that Poles did not do wine, preferring beer and vodka - and, to be fair to her, Poland was not one of the places earning a mention at reference 3.

One aeroplane at Clapham (from the train), one at Earlfield and two two's over the Wimbledon Traincare Depot. Lots of cloud, but high up. Maybe I could have done a four from a platform? Then an oddly large aeroplane at Wimbledon, perhaps joining the flight path late after swinging west into it from the south.

PS: Ms. Talkington is said by wikipedia to have an MA is in Literature and the Visual Arts from 1840 to 1940. Why would one stop at 1940? Is 1940 a 1066 in the history of same? A watershed where history is rebooted and restarted? She specialised in Kenneth Clark, that late but well known expert on nudity.

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

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nosh_Bar.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/04/twittering.html.