Cherries

Our first English cherries of the season. The man on the stall in Epsom market said that these particular ones had been bought on Saturday, about a week after English cherries had first appeared - it having taken that week for the price to come down to something with which he could do business in Epsom.

£6.40 for the kilo, so the dearest yet this year.

Much brighter looking than the imports from Spain, reflecting their much shorter journey to Epsom. So far very good, firm and sweet. No duds.

Will they still be around when we get to the Isle of Wight for our annual visit? I think that last year we missed them. A pity as the journey would have been even shorter there - and for my money, the shorter the better, except for the speciality apples and pears which ripen in storage for use in the autumn and early winter. Cherries not in that department.

Will they still be around at all if and when we lose all the cheap labour from the mainland which is used to pick our flowers, fruit and vegetables?

PS: which reminds me that we have not had a gangmaster scandal for a while and even the blog can only manage a mention en-passant at reference 1. But I have learned that while a windows search for 'gangmaster' will find 'gang-master' in a word document, a word search will not. I would guess an oversight on the part of MS quality control rather than design on the part of MS product masters. I suppose I might tempt some fellow geeks out of their burrows if I were to post something on one of the many product forums - and I might even find the answer - but it is certainly too hot to bother with anything of the sort this afternoon.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/orgo.html.

An excursion through hearing aids

FIL suffered from severe hearing loss in his later years. Now he was a chap who had always been careful with his money, so it took a little effort to persuade him to throw some of it at a fancy hearing aid. And in my innocence, I had assumed that if you threw a bit of money at a fancy bit of computerisation and miniaturisation, you would get a result. In the event, there was improvement, but no miracle. I felt a bit bad about this, but to give him his due, he never complained.

So when ResearchGate thought I might be interested in some work (reference 1) done in Australia on tuning hearing aids for music, rather than for speech, which is the regular drill, I thought I would indeed take a look. Which turned out to include a quick swing through references 2 and 3 along the way. I should say that I have not read any of this material properly, but I have turned most of the pages.

Along the way I took an online hearing test – from the people a reference 8 – a gadget which gets you to play sounds of increasing volumes on your laptop for a range of frequencies – from which, if I can trust the calibration of this test on my laptop, I learned that my own hearing loss is in the range mild to moderate. While the lady from Boots a few years back settled for mild. And while reference 1 talks about a lot more men having hearing loss than ladies, say around half of us at age 50 and more or less all of us at age 100. Although he does not say how much loss there has to be to count at loss, as it were.

I also learned that most of this loss is of a fairly simple form. You just don’t hear quiet sounds. With the frequency spectrum sometimes being flat, sometimes not. Some people lose the low sounds, some the high - and some both, just leaving the central portion of the normal range more or less intact.

And a lot of hearing aids are rather simple too. They just amplify the inbound signal by some fixed amount, some fixed multiplier, with a cut-off at the top end so that you don’t get a pain in the ear. I think this is called linear. Noting that multiplying a small amount of loudness by a multiplier might still give a loudness below your threshold; stuff is still going to be missing. More cunning ones divide the loudness scale into a small number of segments and apply different amplification to the different segments. More cunning ones still do all this by a small number of frequency bands. And then there are dynamic considerations about how quickly the amplification responds to changes in input loudness. With all this stuff being managed by your audiologist - although I should add that, just to be on the safe side, the hearing aid will have a volume control, to give you back a bit of control. It may also have dial that you use to say what you are doing and what you want it to do; whether you are in the pub or in the concert hall.

Whereas I had just thought you could just map the input range of real sound to the output range of what the subject could hear, in some nice continuous and instantaneous way, without any trouble at all. Without being limited to simple multiplication. A thought which had quite overlooked the various distortions that are going to creep in – of, for example, the linear crescendos and diminuendos which are so important in western classical music. Or, if you vary things by frequency, of the relations between the various elements of a chord or the various over and under tones of a fundamental. What about the missing fundamental of reference 7? What about the distinctive timbre of a favourite violin or a of a favourite voice?

There is also the problem that most of us do not get around to seeing our audiologist until we have had quite a lot of hearing loss for quite a long time. Our brains have forgotten how to deal with all the background clutter, all the noise, and getting it all back again, all that background drivel from the next table in the pub, can be a problem. From which a whole new hare starts off: could we get the hearing aid to know what it was we were trying to listen to and to filter all the rubbish which we did not want to hear, out? So I am sitting in the Globe Theatre and it knows to cut out the sound of the helicopter hovering overhead. See, for example, reference 6.

I associate to reports of people who have been blind for a long time having trouble if their sight is restored, a miracle which is pulled off occasionally. But which is not always the miracle hoped for and I have read of at least one person who turned the miracle off: she had got used to things the way they were and did not like or could not get used to the change.

Then there is the complication that our perception of sound is very context sensitive, just in the way that our perception of colour is. It seems quite likely that hearing aids are disturbing that context, possibly in quite crude ways.

And as far as recorded music is concerned, there may well be interaction between what the audio engineers do to the raw input, perhaps in the way of sampling, clipping or filtering, to get what they give to you and what the hearing aid gets up to.

Unfortunately, I still have no idea how much hearing aid design (and result) is driven by the need for miniaturisation and whether one could do a significantly better job if, for example, one was allowed bulky equipment, wires and a few seconds delay to let the computers do their stuff, rather than having to try to do the job in real time, on the back of a postage stamp, on the hoof.

But all in all, an interesting diversion for a couple of days. Another tricky excursion into trying to get hold of the subjective experience.

With thanks to reference 1 for the abbreviations.

Reference 1: Hearing aids and music: experimental tests for better algorithm selection and design - Marcus Wigan, Peter Blamey and others – 2017.

Reference 2: Perceived Quality of Recorded Music Processed through Compression Hearing Aids - Naomi B.H. Croghan – 2013.

Reference 3: The compression handbook: Third Edition: An overview of the characteristics and applications of compression amplification – Banerjee – 2011. A handy introduction to hearing aid technology, in particular compression techniques.

Reference 4: http://www.starkey.com/about-starkey-hearing. The people who sponsored reference 3.

Reference 5: https://www.researchgate.net/.

Reference 6: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/antony-cleopatra.html.

Reference 7: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/01/virtual-pitch.html.

Reference 8: http://www.audiocheck.net/testtones_hearingtestaudiogram.php.

Bears

Last week to eat and drink at the Bear of Oxshott, recently refurbished by Youngs and said by the likes of TripAdvisor to be the haunt of footballers and their trainers. Presumably in the area on account of the Chelsea training centre, a place which I am told is also home to squads of physiotherapists and psychotherapists as well as footballers. Not to mention the odd oligarch, an oligarch who spread a bit of money about the area to soothe householders who were not sure about wags and flashy cars taking over their expensive suburb.

That aside, the Bear turned out to be a perfectly respectable establishment, well up to the usual high standard of Youngs pub eating, only let down by their bread basket, which turned out to be made of some sort of quilting rather than wicker and which contained hot toasted bread which was probably not long out of the freezer. Not in the same league as Terroirs in that department at all. See reference 2. On the other hand they did manage to deliver wine which was not in a bucket without fuss. Then let down again by having no Calvados. Not in the same league as Terroirs in that department either. But I carp: I imagine the proportion of pubs serving Calvados is very small and the blog can only manage, apart from Terroirs, a restaurant in Kingston called Frère Jacques, which we used to like and which has now gone under. The Epsom branch of Oddbins, also gone under. And the Taillevent restaurant in Cavendish Square if I get tired of Terroirs. See reference 3.

On the way out of the Bear, we were struck by what appeared to be a between the wars building, not unlike a regular suburban house, but now well wrapped in various sheds and extensions. With the back garden largely given over to cars, but still containing some quite large trees. So I got to wondering about the history of the place - and, for once, google was unable to deliver many of the goods. The place barely existed at all as history, although there were plenty of tripadvisors and footballers.

The postcard snipped above being the best it could do. But we have now established that the pub existed in 1905, looking nothing like it does now.

Next stop Ordnance Survey, via Bing, which established where the place was; the squarish plot (visible if you click to enlarge) just to the right of the beer mug handle. I then wondered about old maps.

Bing turned up the National Library of Scotland as the place for old Ordnance Survey maps of England, which it certainly was, offering online access to what it described as 'Surrey XVIII (includes: Cobham; Fetcham; Great Bookham; Leatherhead; Stoke d'Abernon.) 1871'. With money only changing hands if I want a paper copy. And so we get to the snip above, suggesting that the pub was a smithy in 1871.

Digressing, bing quite failed to turn up Oak Shade House, the park of which is visible top right, complete with ornamental lake just off-snip. The best he could offer was houses for sale in what he was pleased to call Oakshade Road. More luck with B.M.208, which the Library suggests is benchmark, which I assume is like the modern trig point, and which seems to agree roughly with the metres of the modern Ordnance Survey map. With thanks to Dr. Richard Oliver.

Next thought was the population census, with the census record no doubt telling us what the site was used for at ten year intervals. There, however, money does start to change hands, with online access to census records looking to have been offloaded to companies offering family history services. So that day's hunt was called off.

But not before I discovered that the google camera team last visited the place before the present round of refurbishment. Perhaps Youngs had only just moved in. The present appearance of the place is rather different, although one can still see the older building peeping out at the top - with it looking as if the building in the postcard with which we started had been knocked down to make way for the new.

Then a few days later, happening to be passing Bourne Hall library on one of my morning perambulations, I thought I would try their local history department, which included two older lady volunteers who were fully up for the hunt, if ultimately unsuccessful. Plenty of stuff about Epsom and Ewell and quite a selection of books about Surrey in general. But none of it very strong on pubs, and certainly not on pubs in Oxshott.

Next stop Esher library, next to the other Bear, which might do better than Bourne Hall library.

PS: presumably all the talk of footballers is to make us think that we might spot a celebrity while we tuck into our grub. Nothing to do with their taste - or not - for fine dining.

Reference 1: http://www.footballtraininggrounds.com/chelsea.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/07/cheese-hunt.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/wigmore-two.html.

Soduku

For some reason, this morning over breakfast, I was moved to have a go at the Soduku in the Guardian, the first time noticed since 2009, getting on for ten years ago. See reference 1.

Perhaps I have overdosed on Guardian and need a dose of the DT to get me back on the level, if not on the square. This last being a locution picked up in TB, with the usual small prize for readers who know its meaning.

In any event, after about 15 minutes at, ground to a halt with a fatal error involving the row 6 '8'. At least fatal in the sense that unpicking would be more bother than it was worth. I seem to remember that in my keener days I used to work on a photocopy, which made unpicking rather easier.

PS: I have always been prone to silly mistakes and blunders in exercises of this sort. Far too keen on speed and not enough keen on looking before I leap. Or checking before I press the green button. Or whatever.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=simulataneity+penrose.

Spring cleaning

From time to time I notice the ants' nest in the new daffodil bed, most recently at reference 1 and presently graced with the stand of common knapweed.

I don't think that I have mentioned before that BH has her own ants' nest underneath one of the steps leading up to her washing line. I suppose that ants like to nest under paths and steps as they offer good protection from predators, at least the over-ground sort.

This morning, this particular nest was on the move. Lots of ants to be seen, lot of earth excavated from the lower regions and lots of what I took to be ants' eggs, mainly bottom right in the snap. But why on earth were the ants chucking out all the eggs? Some kind of ongoing eco-disaster?

Closer inspection showed that what I had taken to be eggs were actually empty egg cases. All that seemed to be happening was that the worker ants were clearing all the rubbish out of the nest, perhaps in preparation for the next wave of eggs. A spot of spring cleaning.

Entirely fitting & proper that BH's nest should be going in for such a thing.

My nest continues quiet during the day. There is clearly plenty going on, with plenty of excavation, but never when I am around. Can they feel the vibrations in the hard summer ground as large biped approaches, possibly an ant eating biped? Which explanation would require them to be a different sort of ant than those noticed above. Or should I rush out with a torch when it is dark?

PS: Wednesday: there are now quite a lot of what appear to be large, winged, black ants in and around the back lawn, in the hot afternoon sun. Most of them appear to be struggling, perhaps expiring in the short grass. Is the season for chucking out the drones (named for the gentlemen's club favoured by Bertie Wooster and his chums)?

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/not-lots-of-ants.html.

Filofax affairs

Having used Filofax pocket books for around fifty years, I bought my last one in March 2010, a purchase noticed at reference 1. A leather affair, which I never used enough for its stiffness to wear off, for it to lie open without being held open.

Five years later, having in the meantime acquired a modern telephone, I was making the new year's resolution, noticed at reference 2, to move from the Filofax to an electric calendar.

In parallel, I had been learning to love the OneNote application from Microsoft, with one notable advantage being that it synchronised, more or less, across all my various devices.

So what with one thing and another, the Filofax fell out of use. I stopped carrying it about, even stopped taking it on holiday.

But now, a couple of years later, I find that it is staging a comeback, in the form of the red pocket book illustrated, a good deal older and cheaper than the leather affair, but a smaller book that lies open. Almost small enough to fit in a pocket. And which is now being used for occasional scribbles, doodles and taking of notes. Even the odd tearing out of page with message on it for someone else.

We shall see how we get on.

In the meantime, in the snap above, note the corner of the kindle to the left and the bottle of Villa Maria, as sold in all good Wetherspoons, top right. The brown wood lump, middle right, is what I used to hold books (and pocket books) open, books which do not stay open otherwise. Bring back the days when books were properly bound and used properly thin paper, books which stayed open where you left them.

New supply of plain white paper from Rymans - who, interestingly enough, do not seem to sell ordinary notebooks or notepads with plain white paper. You either have to have lined, accounting paper or thick white art paper. None of which is much use to me these days.

Reference 1: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=filofax+headquarters.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/lumia-630.html.

Blackberries

The first ripe looking blackberries of the season, snapped down Blenheim Road, in the Longmead Industrial Estate. I did not think to try them, although I suspect that, while they might have looked ripe, they might well have been a few days yet off tasting ripe.

Wondering why these particular blackberries should have ripened so early, I took a look behind to find an Abird Power Solutions generator from HSS, humming away. No idea why anyone would want to have a generator up and running in such a place - I think a plumbing flavoured builders' merchants - but maybe it was generating its own little micro climate which was bringing along the blackberries?

I then got curious about who Abird were, and did not at first get much further than that they belonged to the HSS hire people, which did not seem to be the right answer. But closer inspection turned up a logo for 'Bruno' which clearly was the right answer. Manufacturers of the finest Italian generators. So not only do the Italians make pasta all over the place, ice cream at Florence and locomotives at Pistoia, they also do generators at Grottaminarda, not far, as it happens, from the badlands of Naples.

PS: to be fair, the factory at Pistoia is now owned by Hitachi of Japan.

Reference 1: https://www.hss.com/abird-apex/.

Reference 2: http://www.brunogenerators.it/index.php/en/.