Odds and ends

Got home yesterday evening to light upon a battered brown book called 'The Marquis de Bolibar'. I thought probably something from the Raynes Park platform library, but otherwise I could remember nothing about it. Had probably not even read it. Then this morning, digging a bit deeper, I turned up reference 1, from which I learn that I had read the book as recently as September last year. It is now starting to ring distant bells. It will be interesting, when I attempt to re-read it, to see whether much of it comes back to me. In the way of an episode of Midsomer Murders which one only realises that one has seen before when when is half way through. In the meantime, slightly perturbed that the memory had slipped away so quickly.

A bit later, at the start of the morning's spin, I noticed that the clutch of caravans which starting turning up on Fair Green, on West Hill, on Monday, was still there, although there were signs of imminent departure. All the usual paraphernalia of milk churns, chairs, dogs, chickens, children and litter. BH thought that maybe that had an agreement with the police whereby they could go to a wedding or a funeral and then move on.

Now yesterday morning, going down Jubilee Way I spotted a plant in the nearside verge which looked very like the seedling of reference 2. But I didn't think to stop and inspect it more closely until a bit later, when I decided that it was too late. But I did wonder how it had got there. Tried again this morning and failed to find anything which answers the description. I can only suppose that the brain locked onto something, decided it was a triffid (otherwise Ohio Buckeye) and supplied the appropriate conscious image in place of what was actually there.

The sort of thing which happens to me quite often, with, for example, a bit of crumpled paper being computed as a bird. Correction follows more or less immediately, perhaps not possible in this case because I was on the move.

There was also at least one clump of Japanese knotweed. Has it infested the rough ground to the east of Jubilee Way?

Pedalled on to the roundabout at which I turn left for Chessington North and the Hook Road Arena, to find this stretch of road was unusually busy, with vehicles strung out, more or less nose to tail, all the way along it. No reason that I could see for the bunching, but one of the vehicles was a six axle, articulated, empty flat bed wagon, complete with substantial wooden floor, very much the sort of thing that used to rule the roads when I was young, before containers and pallets were invented. Not so many of them about these days. A vehicular tweet.

Then back home, I was prompted to take a look at reference 3. Where the story seems to be first that humans are very fond of arranging things in some kind of rank order. And second that some sort of law of large numbers seems to be in operation whereby the dynamics in time of all sorts of big ranked lists are all much the same, give or take a few qualifying parameters. Zipf's law gets into the story too, for which see reference 6. And talk of emergent properties, a phrase sometimes used by students of consciousness. All driven by a coalition of physicists and statistically minded social scientists and we are referred to references 4 for the physicists and reference 5 for the social scientists.

Which all looks very interesting, if rather mathematical. But for the moment, no. Too many irons already in the fire.

But I have learned that chickens really are a bit dim. Their pecking orders are not pecking orders at all, as illustrated by the snap from reference 3 above. Maybe chimpanzees with their bigger brains do better.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-marquis-of-bolibar.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/week-five-plus.html.

Reference 3: Universality out of order - Petter Holme - 2022. 

Reference 4: Dynamics of Ranking Processes in Complex Systems - Gourab Ghoshal, Nicholas Blumm, Zalan Forro, Maximilian Schich, Ginestra Bianconi, Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, Albert-László Barabási - 2012.

Reference 5: Dynamics of ranking - Gerardo Iñiguez, Carlos Pineda, Carlos Gershenson, Albert-László Barabási - 2022.

Reference 6: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/11/on-saying-cat.html.