Pork belly

A week or so ago, another go at pork belly, on this occasion from Ben the Butcher of Upper High Street, as noticed at reference 1. A cut we have eaten a lot of over the years, but not so much recently. Not least because decent looking pork belly slices are not as readily available as they used to be. Sainsbury's does do them, but they are not very attractive looking; about on a par with their bacon.

With the gold standard in such matters perhaps being the pork belly we bought a couple of years ago at Lyme Regis, noticed at reference 2. Sadly, the butcher's shop concerned has been displaced by some foodie operation, but I think that the butcher survives in nearby Colyton, as at reference 3.

So five slices, cut from a slab as I watched. 1.178 kilos, 2.597lbs or 2lbs 9½oz. Three thin and even, two fat and not so even. First thought was to tie it back up and roast it as a slab, but having consulted recent precedents, settled on slice mode. But I did salt the skins. Then into the oven at 150°C at 11:45, aiming for 13:30.

Turned at 12:45 and turned the oven up to 175°C for the last lap. Plated at 13:25, then back in the oven which I turned off shortly after it had got back to heat.

Washed the roasting tin and trivet with the potato water. Made the gravy with a dollop of the fat from the roasting tin and the enhanced potato water. Mash, carrots and greens. These last from a bag from Sainsbury's and much better than I expected: mature leaves with a bit of texture and taste.

Served a bit late at 13:45 and we did the pork in one sitting, albeit with a fair amount of waste what with the fat, the skin and the bone. But very good; as good as the remembered the stuff from Lyme Regis snapped above.

Carving irons superfluous on this occasion.

Date slice for dessert.

The note does not say, but the balance of the gravy probably went on bread for a teatime snack the following day.

PS 1: the loaf noticed in the last post, reference 4, is now nearly finished. Not bad at all, mostly taken by itself or with a little butter. A strong enough flavour not to need cheese.

PS 2: this afternoon, for the first time for a while, we came close to a combined score of 600 at Scrabble. BH was unlucky not to win, having kicked off with a seven letter word which netted her 72 points. Having had a pretty good run, I was unlucky to pick up the 'Q' very close to the end, which I was unable to place, despite holding a blank. On the upside, BH was not able to go out either, so the penalty was only 10 points rather than the 20 points it would have been otherwise. The only word I was not sure about was 'nacre', which I associated with both mica and mother of pearl, without really knowing what it was. Mother of pearl, according to Bing.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/trolley-595.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/holne-one.html.

Reference 3: https://colyfordbutchers.co.uk/.

Batch No.702

At the start of the first lockdown, when shopping was tricky and people were stockpiling staples, I moved from Waitrose white bread flour to Wright's white bread flour, more or less by chance, as noticed at reference 2. Starting with their Alto flour, said to be good for both pizza and bread. And continuing with Waitrose's wholemeal flour as part of the mix.

My method involves two rises, and the timing of the second rise was becoming tricky: too little and you got rather flat bread, too much and you either got big surface bubbles, or big surface bubbles and collapse, this last resulting in even flatter bread. The trickiness being that the window for getting it right was narrow and needed more careful watching than it was getting.

Then for some reason, at the end of last year, I moved from Wright's Alto flour to their Royalty flour. Same price, but different bag. This seemed to solve the problem. Bubbles were largely a phenomenon of the past.

Then with batch No.702 they were back. With the cold weather and our central heating not on that high, the second rise was taking too long and I moved the proving bin from the front room - which is supposed to be sunny and warm in the morning - to the window sill on top of the radiator in the dining room, turned on for the purpose. Which did the trick. The wooden proving bin was big and solid enough to provide a buffer against the rising heat.

Until this week, when it didn't. With it being even colder, the radiator was even hotter, and the second rise speeded up, catching me unawares, and the lower loaf in the bin was showing signs of bubble when the two loaves were moved into the oven. With the lower loaf turning out as snapped above. It the first snap, it can be seen how the bubble has sucked the rise out of the right hand side of the loaf.

It looks worse than it in fact is, with there being quite a reasonable rise and the crumb has a good flavour. Nevertheless, there is a hint of the taste and chewiness I associate with bread made with rye flour. The way it cuts is a bit like that too. We shall see how it stands in the days to come.

Bit more care with the timing next time around.

Better news on the back garden front, where the Autumn leaf clearance is progressing well and with about a dozen barrow loads dumped on the big compost heap behind the copper beech trees in the last couple of days. One more day should see the first pass completed. For equipment, I used an 'original garden broom' bought from some people called QVC, on the back of an advert from the RHS, back in 2021, a builder's shovel and the wheelbarrow. A combination which seems to suit.

The only catch being that this broom, which does not damage the lawn as much as a rake and which was, as I recall, vaguely tropical in origin, is no longer on the QVC catalogue. But there is hope yet. The business end looks very like that of the corn broom snapped above, and there seem to be plenty of those about.

So we should not be stuck next time around.

In the margins of dumping leaves, I also buried a few more books, after the fashion noticed at reference 4, albeit a rather shallower burial. With the spots chosen having been undisturbed for long enough for what looked like fibrous roots from the neighbouring beech trees to have grown up into them, slightly impeding the digging of graves. Books dating from my excursion with the psycho-analysts, maybe thirty years ago now. I might say that I have retained something of a soft spot for the way in which they try to describe the goings on inside brains, even if I do not try to read their books any more, and continue to believe that their descriptions of those goings on, the entities, structures and processes that they use to build those descriptions with, are pitched at a useful level, even if some of those descriptions have not stood the test of time. The recent success of large language models with their seeming absence of accessible intermediate entities and so forth notwithstanding.

PS: the frost did not clear from the corner of the extension roof under the shelter of the leylandii hedge today. The first time this year. While the frost on the back part of the back lawn was pretty much all gone by 11:00.

References

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

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/the-wonders-of-ebay.html.

Reference 3: https://www.qvcuk.com/.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/huxley.html.

The places in between

Having read a recent memoir by Rory Stewart, noticed at reference 5, I accepted an email offer from Amazon for a Kindle version of his book about his walk from Herat to Kabul in January 2002 for 99p. An offer I couldn’t refuse.

January 2002 being not long after the defeat of the Taliban at the start of the Afghanistan War, started in the wake of the September 2001 attack on the Twin Towers.

A solo walk taking around 35 days, across the mountains from Herat to Kabul, 400 miles as the cross flies, rather than the longer, softer route to the south, via Kandahar. The high road through the snow, across the watershed of the Harirud, Helmund and Kabul rivers and reaching maybe 10,000 feet, rather than the low road used by sensible people. 

He was accompanied at times and he did acquire a large dog along the way, but a considerable feat of endurance and courage nonetheless. It seems to have been all too likely at the time for him to have to come to grief along the way, a victim of the cold, of illness, of robbery or a casual shooting. Of which last there seems to have been a good deal about. 

He was not armed but he did carry a wooden staff, widely used in the region: about five feet long and tipped with iron at both ends. Useful both as a walking stick and something with which to see off dogs, wolves and on occasion people. I associate to the quarter staff used by the Saxons of England after the Conquest when they were not allowed edged weapons.

The route was once a caravan route, the silk road to China or the spice road to India, which meant that there were stopping places at a day’s walk apart along most of the way. Some quite substantial structures, if only offering very basic facilities. One slept on the mud floor.

He spoke Dari pretty well, an Iranian language, which worked well enough in most of Afghanistan, certainly northern Afghanistan where he mostly was. Pashtun, another Iranian language, to the south. His interactions were more or less exclusively with men.

Most of the country he walked was very poor and the concerns of most of the people did not extend much beyond their own and neighbouring villages. They cared a lot about Islam and were interested to hear about the strange treatment of women and wives in other countries. A mixture of Sunni and Shia. Over the years a great deal of violence, quite apart from that occasioned by the arrival of waves of foreigners with axes to grind: Russians, Arabs and Americans. But their understanding of or interest in the nation building talk of well-meaning but often ignorant Westerners was pretty much zero.

Stewart had both the energy and interest to take in plenty of historical interest on the way, including some vary large structures, something very few of the soldiers or civilians from international agencies bothered with. Or, indeed, many Afghanis. His walk took in what had been one of the sources from which the 16th century Moghul invasion of India by Babur sprang. A chap who, like Caesar, got the history straight by writing it himself, in the form of an autobiography which is still available from Amazon today. A chap who also made the same march as that made by Stewart.

Stewart came away from all this strongly opposed to ramping up the Western intervention, interference in the country, a mission he was sure would end in failure, as indeed it eventually did. This was a large, poor, conservative people who had their way of doing things, and a sprinkling of half-baked Western institutions from on-high – plus a rather thicker sprinkling of money and weapons – was not going to work. Unfortunately, he made no headway before the event.

We hear something, but not a great deal, about the drugs business. Some recreational use of cannabis by the villagers.

I suppose one might say that Stewart is taking a small government, conservative view of things. That the Russian attempt to drag the country into today’s world, to build schools and hospitals, to emancipate women, was doomed to failure, even before the US armed the tribesmen and guerillas.

Notwithstanding a fascinating read.

Some oddments

Iran to the west, central Asian republics (once part of the Russian/Soviet empire) to the north and Pakistan to the south and east. Linked by a tongue of land to China in the northeast. No idea how that came to be.

Afghanistan is a very diverse place, home to lots of different ethnic groups and lots of different languages, these last mostly of an Iranian flavour. In the olden days, more or less endemic, low-level warfare. Central government weak, especially in the mountains. From which I associate to the endemic tribal warfare of the Bedouin described by Lawrence of Arabia.

The Taliban did not approve of playing chess or of keeping pigeons for amusement. Nor of the lax ways of some of the Shias with their women. Nor of Buddhist statues.

Stewart took in the wrecked statues of Bamiyan along the way. Above: ‘Panorama of the northern cliff of the Valley of Bamyan, with the Western and Eastern Buddhas at each end (before destruction), surrounded by a multitude of Buddhist caves’. But he was able to explore some of the caves.

The villages elders might have been very religious and some of them could recite the Koran. But recite it in Arabic of which they actually knew little or nothing. Apparently, to a true believer, anything other than the revealed word in classical Arabic does not count. Plenty of illiteracy too.

The heavy bride price was a burden for young men who wanted to get married. But a burden which they seemed to put up with, at least in the country villages.

Most of the villagers seemed to have done stints working to save money in either Iran or Pakistan.

Donkeys and dogs were treated rather badly by our standards. Furthermore, dogs were unclean and not suitable as house pets in our way. But they were useful for hunting and as guard dogs, and these Afghanis were very keen on dog fighting and on betting on same.

For someone doing serious exercise, Stewart seems to have survived on what sound like very short rations: dry bread (nan), rice, sweet tea and the occasional small bit of meat. He also manages to get through dysentery.

And he still had the energy to write up his diary most nights.

References

Reference 1: The places in between – Rory Stewart – 2004.

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

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_Afghanistan_(2001%E2%80%932021). ‘… Overall, the war killed an estimated 176,000–212,000+ people, including 46,319 civilians. While more than 5.7 million former refugees returned to Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion, by the time the Taliban returned to power in 2021, 2.6 million Afghans remained refugees, while another 4 million were internally displaced…’. The population of (the Islamic Emirate of) Afghanistan is around 40m.

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

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Afghanistan. 

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/politics-on-edge.html. 

Another warm spot

Prompted by reference 1 to have a poke around.

The Punjab was was a mixed area - I have not run down what sort of area; region, county, district or whatever - in British India and there was presumably some historical or geographical unity; the area made sense of a sort. Whatever the case, the Western half was mainly Muslim and is now in Pakistan, the eastern half was mainly Sikh or Hindu and is now in India. As far as I can make out a mixture of districts run by the British - red or dark green on the map above - and princely states where there were princes. At the time of partition a lot of the Sikhs and Hindus in the western half moved to the eastern half. I believe there was a great deal of communal violence.

The eastern half is now made up of three small states: Punjab (west), Haryana (south east) and Himachal Pradesh (north east). There is a lot of agriculture in the Punjab and there are disputes with neighbours over water rights. Traditionally, lots of Sikhs have served in the armed forces, perhaps also in the police.

There are around 22m Sikhs in the world, say 2m of which are overseas, with around 0.75 million in Canada and 0.25 million in the UK. About 75% of the balance are in today's state of Punjab, where they make up around half the population.

And there is lots of tangled history, including a separatist movement with a violent wing, a movement whose popularity and support among Sikhs in India appears to be declining. But it does not help that the present union government is aggressively Hindu and majoritarian - a far cry from the the inclusive, civilised secularism of the Congress leaders at the time of independence.

All of which puts the hosts of large diaspora communities in an awkward position - particular the US and Canada.

PS: I am reminded now of the Kurds, another people with a tangled history, and the Turkish irritation with the Swedes.

References

Reference 1: Alleged plot to assassinate Sikh separatist complicates US-India ties: Concerns of New Delhi involvement in attempted killing on US soil come as Washington has been seeking closer relations - John Reed, John Paul Rathbonn, Demetri Sevastopulo, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 2: http://pakgeotagging.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-last-assembly-punjab-provincial.html. The source of the snap above, derived from the 1941 census, the last before partition.

Reference 3: https://www.punjabdata.com/. More facts and figures.

Reference 4: http://www.ipcs.org/issue_briefs/issue_brief_pdf/1787132181IPCS-ResearchPaper12-SimratDhillon.pdf. An alternative to the story at Wikipedia.

Sex on a bridge

This being another spin-off from reading the book by Anil Seth at reference 1, which I am now getting through. More than half way round on the first lap.

The spin-off being an experiment, described at reference 2 and conducted near fifty years ago, was designed to test whether people were more likely to become sexually aroused when they were emotionally aroused, in this case frightened, for some other reason. A positive result would suggest that there is more to sexual arousal than basic instinct. The technical term for this seems to be ‘misattribution of arousal’, as explained at reference 4.

The paper describes three related experiments rather than just one. These are summarised in the figure below. For all the experiments, the subjects, the people being aroused, were young men. The interviewers were a mix of men and (attractive) women. The collaborators were a mix of men and women. All the experiments appeared to depend, at least to some extent, on the subjects not knowing what the experiments were really about. There was a degree of dishonesty involved – which may not be permitted these days, even if it is still thought to work.

The first experiment involved two bridges over the Capilano Gorge near Vancouver, for which see reference 3. One, snapped above, was long, high, unsteady and scary, the other (the control) was a much more sober and solid timber affair. As far as I can make out, the interviews were carried out on the bridges – which in the case of the scary bridge seems a bit much. Maybe I have read it wrong. Half the interviewers were women, half were men. Arousal was tested in two ways: first by means of a single picture version of the Thematic Apperception Test (see below) and second by inviting subjects to phone the interviewer afterwards if they had any queries. With phoning being taken as a proxy for arousal in the case of the female interviewers.

The two bridges may well have attracted rather different kinds of visitors, different in ways that were relevant, and the second experiment, intended to correct for this, used just the scary bridge and just female interviewers. One set of subjects was interviewed on the bridge, the other after they had got off the bridge and cooled off. Otherwise as experiment 1.

The problem here was to be sure that the interviewers behaved in exactly the same way to the two groups of subjects and that the subjects responded in the same way. Was there, for example, a positive response to a ‘lady in distress’?

So the third experiment was carried out in more controlled conditions of the laboratory and tested the anxiety response of subjects to the prospect of an electric shock. A collaborator, most of these being attractive women, was to be shocked at the same time.

The wording used suggests that the experiment was all about anticipation and that no shocks were actually administered – which would make secrecy important – and possibly a bit implausible.

Thematic Apperception Test

I had some trouble with this test. Wikipedia is on the case at reference 5 and there is plenty of material out on the Internet, but the test itself remains expensive and does not appear to have leaked out in its near century of existence.

I can buy the book – reference 6 – from Abebooks or eBay for £50 or more. I can subscribe to Scribd and get an electronic copy that way. Scribd being a respectable looking archive from California offering a thirty-day free trial, after which it is $10 a month or so. Various other sites offer pdfs, but they all have rather odd-looking addresses and I don’t care to use them. Plenty of papers about the test available for free, but not the test itself. Which, in any event, if still used has probably moved on a bit in the course of the intervening years.

What is clear enough, is that the test is based on offering the subject a sequence of picture cards and asking them to write a short story about each. The pictures are deliberately ambiguous, leaving subjects plenty of room to interpret them in their own fashion, after their own tastes and predilections. Different sets of pictures – perhaps ten pictures each - were used for children and for adults, for men and women.

The experimenter then derives scores from the stories. I suppose it might be thought of as a more elaborate version of the Rorschach ink blot test. In the present case, just one card is used, probably quite enough if you are perched rather high up, on a bridge which is moving about with the wind.

Bing turns up a selection of the pictures used for the test on the key ‘TAT Item 3GF’, with a likely one included above. I can’t get proper corroboration, but it fits the description offered in the paper and any sexual content is fairly muted.

And a bit after that, I turned up what appears to be a complete set of pictures, albeit unlabelled, via Pinterest, at reference 8. A couple of these are included below.

Don’t know what I would have found to say about this one. Can’t make it out at all.

The results

Statistical arguments aside, the first experiment was clear enough. The subjects were more sexually aroused on the scary bridge with female interviewers than otherwise.

The second experiment confirmed the results of the first, thus dealing with the different subject populations objection.

The third experiment confirmed the results of the first when using the anxiety about a shock to come rather than fear arising from actually being on a scary bridge.

Other work on feelings and emotions

A subject which has occupied many people over many years, with its modern treatment perhaps being kicked off by Darwin’s 1872 book on the expression of emotion in man and animals. A subject which takes in rather physical feelings like pain, through the more or less universal disgust – thought by many to have originated with learning to avoid eating bad things - through to the rather social emotions like shame.

As explained below, to be revisited.

Conclusions

I am no expert on this sort of thing, but this experiment, interesting though the results are, strikes me as being rather weak by the standards of today. However, for the present purposes, let us suppose that emotions aroused for some other reason can be transformed into sexual arousal, sexual attraction. So what?

One story, which sounds rather hydraulic and Freudian, would be that a store of negative arousal energy is only too happy to be diverted to positive sexual arousal.

But then I remember seeing a film, many years ago now, in which it was claimed that all the arousal consequent on going on a busy political demonstration could easily be diverted in the same way. In which case, the stored-up arousal does not need to be negative.

I also remember going for a ride on a tethered balloon which was set up in what gmaps calls Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, not far from the railway station. Being a sufferer from vertigo I got a bit uncomfortable, discomfort which transformed into a fit of talking as we started going down. Something of the same sort happened when I had to chicken out of walk which traversed a long steep slope above a burn, quite possibly on the path which leads south and east from the Glen Nevis Inn, a little to the south east of Fort William and to the north west of Ben Nevis. The start of which path is snapped above. In both cases, I was perfectly safe – but in both cases I also felt very unsafe and uncomfortable. Perhaps if I been single and travelling with an unattached and attractive young lady things might have turned out differently.

From where I associated to an anecdote from a politician, a good public speaker, who explained that a bit of stage fright was good, it got the adrenalin going, made for a better performance. He might have been the same chap who made a habit of eating a green apple, while he waited in the wings, to get his mouth and jaws warmed up for action. And then to one about ladies’ college basketball in the US, where the ladies go in for various forms of group shouts and hugs to get themselves hyped up for the next round. Which rather takes me back to the hydraulics I started with.

That sort of thing aside, the Seth take was that: ‘This study, conducted more than forty years ago, shows inevitable methodological weaknesses when compared to today’s more rigorous though still imperfect standards. Not to mention the dubious ethics. But it still vividly illustrates the view that emotional experiences depend on how physiological changes are evaluated by higher level cognitive processes’. Very much of a piece with his line that (the contents of) subjective experience is a marriage of stuff – in the case of emotions and feelings, mostly interoceptive stuff – coming in at the bottom married to predictions coming down from the top. That emotions are not that different, as far as that is concerned, as seeing a red bench seat in a restaurant. Both are confections of the brains’ generative processes, and neither just pops off an assembly line of feed forward processes. A line which he contrasts with the appraisal theory introduced at reference 9.

I am rather taken with the Seth line, but I don’t yet quite see my way to blending it in with the hydraulics, or with the widely used two-dimensional view of emotions, with valence running from minus one to plus one and arousal running from zero to one. Nor do I see why his line is so very different from appraisal, at least as described at reference 9. 

Perhaps time to take another look at reference 10, for another view. A view which supposes feelings and emotions to be old, not to say ancient, in evolutionary terms, largely sub-cortical and shared to some considerable extent with other mammals.

With the snap above having been put together about the time of the first look, back in the summer of this year.

Work in progress.

PS: I thought at the time that it was a pity to have missed the view I thought there might have been from the top. A view of the lochan which might well have been quite something, to judge from the snap above. The pin marks the chicken.

References

Reference 1: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness – Anil Seth – 2021.

Reference 2: Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety – Dutton, D.G.; Aaron, A. P. – 1974.

Reference 3: https://www.capbridge.com/. One of the bridges in question, also snapped at the head of the post. Looks like the handrails are now rather higher than Dutton & Aaron suggested back in 1974.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_arousal. The story according to Wikipedia.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_apperception_test. 

Reference 6: Thematic apperception test – Murray, H. A. – 1943.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribd. 

Reference 8: http://www.cssforum.com.pk/css-interview-psychological-tests/psychological-tests/59211-thematic-apperception-test-whole-set-images.html. 

Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appraisal_theory. 

Reference 10: Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions – Panksepp, J – 1998.

A new venture?

A little to the south east of the important cross roads at Malden Rushett, we have the 220 acre arable farm once known as Rushett Farm. I don't think that 220 acres is much for a family to make a living on these days and I do think that they have been pushing to diversify for years. I think they do helicopters and small aeroplanes and I think they wanted to do a diving tower, but that got turned down, despite the generally permissive attitude taken to developing farms. I dare say they are hanging on, hoping one day to turn the farm into a housing estate. Epsom Cluster Hospitals first, one of which is visible top right in the snap above, then farms. We do, after all, need the houses and they have to go somewhere, green belt or no green belt.

In the meantime, I have just learned that they are running an operation called the Barn, as described at reference 1, offering various activities, some outdoor some indoor. But parking only for those who are going to spend a bit of money; not for those who just want to take chai and chatter. Were the council difficult about lopping off a slice of field for a car park? Only the National Trust are allowed to do that sort of thing?

And for Christmas, they are adding a sprinkling of festive fun to the mix. Including, for example, a luxurious Christmas wreath class. And no doubt involving mulled wine - which I have never cared for - and mince pies.

PS 1: while for nearby competition, they have Chessington Garden Centre, Chessington World of Adventures, Go-ape Chessington, Dragon's Fury and Hobbledown. And for those who prefer not to have to pay there is Horton Country Park with its coffee caravan.

PS 2: for some reason, I associate to the rather grander operation at Arreton Barns on the Isle of Wight, which may never have been a farm, despite the name. See reference 3.

References

Reference 1: https://www.thebarnkt9.com/.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/trivia.html. Previous notice of Dragon's Fury.

Reference 3: https://arretonbarns.co.uk/.

Trio Gaspard

The pull here being Dvořák's Dumky trio, with the additional items being perfectly acceptable. And with the Gaspard Trio of reference 1 being new to us, at least absent from the archive.

As it turned out, a cold, damp morning - something of a change from the day previous which had been bright and cheerful enough. Also a change in that we opted for Ewell West by car, rather than walking to Epsom Station. It was also a first outing for my new jacket, noticed at reference 2. BH queried my calling it a jacket, thinking it was too big and grand for that. Perhaps a car coat or a parka? The former term being much bandied about when we were young.

Another adventure with the RingGo parking application. Which was fine, but my bank is still checking each transaction and I have not yet learned how to get the 6 digit authorisation code from one part of my telephone to another without memorising it or writing it down. I am sure that some form of copy and paste must be available, but I have not yet taken the time to find out where it is. Yet another job loitering on my busy to-do list.

Past a real person in the booking office on our way to the platform, where we had around 5 minutes to wait. Spot on. Until we heard that our train had been cancelled and there was a half hour wait. A down side of Ewell West being that one is committed to the Waterloo line, no chance of help from the Victoria line. At which point I was glad to be snug in my new jacket. Furthermore, we had a bus shelter to sit in and the train, when it arrived, was an eight coacher, not an overcrowded four coacher.

Major works at Motspur Park continue, presumably to do with the new footbridge and lifts. Access to the Earl Beatty still rather restricted.

Instant offer of a seat on the tube at Vauxhall. I must have been looking a bit tired and ancient - something I had first noticed a couple of weeks previously in a mirror at T K Maxx. Must be careful about the cut and colour of my outer clothes!

Arrived at Oxford Circus a bit short of time, certainly no time for our usual pit-stop at All-Bar-One, but we made it to the more or less full hall with a couple of minutes to spare. I even found time to snap a flashy car. This morning Google Images tells me that it is a Lamborghini Huracán LP 640-4 Performante, with the make at least confirmed by zoom. Autotrader tells me that I can have a second hand one for prices ranging up to something over £200,000. So a lot of car to leave on a street, scratchable by any passing drunk. Not that this is ever going to be a problem for me.

In the hall, lots of microphones and other signs of recording activity, so perhaps there was some live streaming going on. The trio used electrical scores, apart from the piano who used real music some of the time. I noticed that he kept his page turner to press the page button on his computer at other times. Maybe he did not care for the DIY options on offer, with foot not being very convenient.

All very good, with the Dumky as good as ever. It wears well after what must be quite a few hearings now.

Opted for lunch at the Place to Eat, near the top of John Lewis. A better than average cafeteria for a big store. We took fish and chips, a bit bland, but fresh and decent. Fake mushy peas, as is usual these days, blended from frozen. Staff as pleasant as ever. A good place if one does not want a full-on lunch with all the trimmings.

And I learned that you can now buy second hand clothes and Selfridges. Also about a good cause which John Lewis is involved in which helps young people leaving care to get a decent start as adults.

For some reason this struck a chord at the time, possibly because children in care had been in a recent police drama on television. In any event, it all looks very worthy, so this morning they got my winter fuel allowance, via some new-to-me donation operation called Givestar, to be found at reference 4. Where I did not mind being asked about Gift Aid, but I did mind being asked if I wanted to top up my donation. Which I didn't.

And so back onto the train, the only sign of remembrance activity being a couple of older chaps at Wimbledon station with their medals up. No sign of any demonstrators. Several aeroplanes, in and out of the clouds. We decided to sit it out at Wimbledon, rather than change at Raynes Park for the platform library, mainly because Ewell West meant that we were at the wrong end of the platform.

Home to various messages and emails from RingGo which suggested that our parking experience had worked out OK.

PS 1: following notice in a footnote to the post at reference 3, I have just been reading in the Guardian about how Palantir have won a big contract to sort out our NHS data. A company which is owned by somebody with obnoxious views and which sells some of its products for some rather unsavoury purposes. Thinking also here of the amount of money that the US government spend with Mr. Musk (of Tesla fame and Twitter ill-fame), I wonder how practical it is for governments to avoid doing business with unpleasant people who have good products? A luxury that private citizens can sometimes afford, but maybe it is not so easy for governments. There was certainly no provision in the sort of modest procurements that I was involved in for marking down candidates whom one did not like - and I am fairly sure that the procurement police would not have let me do such a thing - although that said, one could usually bend the rules a bit without them sparking off. A government might strike a company off the list, but a humble servant was not given discretion to tamper with the scales. Any bending was on his own head if he got caught.

PS 2: senior living in Maryland, brought to me by the NYT. 'Carminetta Verner, 88, has become the go-to source for cannabis information at her retirement community, the sprawling Leisure World complex in Montgomery County, Md., which houses about 8,000 older adults'. Makes our Abbeyfield look a bit provincial! And by way of comparison, the hospital snapped in the previous post, reference 7, housed just 750 patients. Say 1,000 souls with resident staff - and it would be interesting to know about the space per person. In the meantime, see references 5 and 6.

References

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

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/shopping.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/bells-on-hand.html.

Reference 4: https://givestar.io/.

Reference 5: https://leisureworldmaryland.com/.

Reference 6: https://missiondispensaries.com/getting-started/.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/better-here.html.

Better here?

This prompted by the article at reference 1. A long article about what happened when most of the mental hospitals in New York were closed down in favour of care in the community, starting in the 1960s - as they were here. A change prompted, in part, by the poor state and bad reputation of some of these hospitals. A change made possible, in part, by the arrival of medicines which could control the symptoms at least of mental disorder. Provided, that is, that they were taken.

In the article there are several references to the right not to take medicine, the right not to be admitted to a shelter or a hospital and to the data privacy/data protection barriers to sharing patient data across the various agencies and organisations involved. With one result of this last being that care, such as it is, is not as joined up as it might be.

One complaint one often hears here is that care in the community was never properly funded. In New York we are told: '... Before deinstitutionalization, New York spent about $400 million a year on its psychiatric institutions, according to one estimate cited in congressional testimony in 1963 - the equivalent of about $4 billion today. The assertive community treatment teams, by comparison, have received, on average, about $120 million a year in state and federal funding in recent years...'.

But then there are 600 homeless shelters, said to cost another $250 million a year, with a total of around 80,000 places, including 37 specialising in supporting those with mental disorders. A lot of the homeless have mental disorders and a lot of the homeless are either black or Hispanic. The story seems to be that these shelters are run by contractors and there is pressure to keep costs down - with the result that, as here, there are not enough front line staff and they are not very well paid. And, all too often, vulnerable people are directed to the wrong sort of shelter. '... Some teams spent just 15 minutes per visit with patients - the minimum amount of time required to bill Medicaid for services...'.

I assume that the article refers to New York City, with a population of something under 9 million, about the same as London and something under half the population of the state as a whole. While I learn that 40% of the population of London were born overseas - including here a modest contingent from Ireland. And according to the BBC at reference 6, there are around 150,000 homeless people in London, with around 6,000 of them sleeping rough. Does homeless here mean the same as homeless there?

And then there is the network of 11 municipal, general hospitals, which treat, as well as their general patients, near 50,000 psychiatric patients a year, and costing of the order of $11 billion a year. The private hospitals are not too keen on such patients, partly because they get a much better return on medical patients. Perhaps these last get through more operations, more interventions and more medicines.

So it would take a while to work out what the comparable spend now to the $400 million then was. Similarly, it would take a while to work out where the responsibilities lie, given that there are at least three outfits with a finger in the pie. See references 3, 4 and 5. It would also take a while to produce some decent statistics, never mind a proper comparison between New York and London.

So while the individual cases cited by the article are bad, it is hard to put them in context. And as regards the 94 cases turned up by the NYT investigation, just how bad is 94 cases in 10 years? What if the real figures is nearer 500? How many drug deaths were there over the same period? How many murders? How many road traffic deaths?

References

Reference 1: Behind 94 Acts of Shocking Violence, Years of Glaring Mistakes: New York officials have escaped scrutiny for repeated failures to help homeless mentally ill people, a New York Times investigation has found - Amy Julia Harris, Jan Ransom, José A. Alvarado Jr (photographs), New York Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitchurch_Hospital. The Cardiff hospital snapped above, finally closed in 2016. The hospitals of the Epsom cluster also sported water towers, one of which became home, at least for a while, to a peregrine falcon.

Reference 3: https://omh.ny.gov/. The responsible public body for New York State.

Reference 4: https://www.nyc.gov/site/doh/about/about-doh.page. NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene

Reference 5: https://mentalhealth.cityofnewyork.us/. 'The Mayor’s Office of Community Mental Health promotes mental health for all New Yorkers'.

Reference 6: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-64224529.

Trolley 595

A bit of a slow-down on the trolley front, with this one being the first for getting on for a month. Must do better! With this one, from the M&S food hall captured in the passage running up from Kokoro to Station Approach.

The outing had started with Ben the Butcher in Upper High Street, of which more in due course. From there to Pearl the Chemist where I found out, for the second time running, that my prescription had failed to arrive. Possibly a glitch associated with the move on the part of the surgery (now inhabited by people called clinicians) to a central, NHS flavoured prescription application from a more locally flavoured one. Sorted that out, acquired a Guardian and thought to take a morning break, for once in a while, in Wetherspoon's.

Which was busy and cheerful, mainly but not exclusively with pensioners, quite a few of whom were taking tea, coffee, breakfast or an early lunch. The odd face from my days at TB. It was rather as if Wetherspoon's was stepping into the gap made by the closure of a lot of the day centres for pensioners which used to be run by our local authorities.

From there to the Kokoro passage which started off empty enough, apart from the serious trench being dug in the not very old pavement, but which delivered on the last lap. M&S food hall busy enough, as usual, with plenty of Christmas goodies on offer, it now being within five weeks of the big day. Clearly time to start stockpiling chocolates, biscuits and booze.

And so home to study the mail shot from the Liberty Association (of reference 3) which had arrived in the mean time, an organisation I first came across on Westminster Bridge, in the person of an older gentleman, a Christian refugee from Iran, where, it seems, savage persecution of Christians continues. And while I had much sympathy for his cause, I have not yet made it to any of the various functions which they organise in and around London. They look quite fun with various foods and entertainments on offer - so perhaps it would be different if we had a more tangible connection.

BH reminds me that we once had a neighbour, an Iranian lady married to someone who used to work for BP in a non-oil capacity, someone who, according to BH, thought that mosques were evil - while being quite decent and ordinary on other matters. So it is quite possible that she was a Christian. As far as I know, she never visited her home country and now, widowed, she has moved away to be nearer her children. A tangible connection which did not quite make it.

PS: I wonder if the Earls Court Ibis goes in for the fake classical trim on view in the snap from the Liberty Association? A large new-build in what looks as if it was a regular residential street in Earls Court until not that long ago. Or was the fake classical trim from last year's venue? IBEC for Ibis, London, Earls Court?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/trolley-594.html.

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

Reference 3: https://iliberty.org.uk/.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Wimbledon Park

Slightly bemused to read today in the September number of the 'Wimbledon time & leisure' magazine that the residents of Wimbledon are getting into a lather about plans for Wimbledon Park. That is to say, the large green space with a lake in the middle, half way between Centre Court and Wimbledon Mosque in the snap above.

What they seem to forget is that Merton Council sold this park to the next door All England Lawn Tennis Club back in 1993. Now the Club appear to want to develop that part of the site to the south and west of the lake to provide lots of tennis courts and  associated buildings, destroying a lot of mature parkland in the process. Public access to these new facilities will be minimal. But what did the good residents expect? The Club no doubt paid good money for the land, money which no doubt went to staunch some hole in Merton finances, and now they want to cash in. They want something for their money. Not their fault that central government has starved local government of resources.

I get similarly irritated when people moan about all the money that water companies are extracting out of the system. Well OK, maybe they are being a bit greedy, but if you sell an important asset off for lots of money, it is not unreasonable for the buyers to seek to make decent returns on their investments. You can't have you cake and eat it, whatever yarn our late fat leader might have spun for us.

The story according to the Ordnance Survey.

PS: the back page of the same magazine also carries an advertisement for a modest, two storey terrace house a little to the south, on a road sandwiched between the railway line and Dundonald Recreation Ground. A snip at just over £1m. One supposes that a similar house in the residential quarter to the north east of Wimbledon Park would cost a lot more. One also supposes that all the carers needed by all the older residents are invited to live somewhere else and to make use of the excellent transport facilities. They probably run all night, so early starts and late finishes will not be a problem.

References

Reference 1: https://www.timeandleisure.co.uk/. 'The No.1 luxury lifestyle magazine for residents of SW London and Surrey'.

Reference 2: https://www.savewimbledonpark.org/. For the residents. I notice that Wimbledon goes in for residents' associations - but I don't suppose that they rule the roost in the way that they do here in Epsom.

Veggie day

Veggie Wednesdays continue, having been invented just about a year ago, as noticed at reference 1.

There being some left over vegetables - potatoes, leeks and carrots as I recall - I decided to go for a new lunchtime snack, a change from orange lentils. Cook up three and a half ounces of pearl barley. Liquidise the left over vegetables. Retrieve Knorr vegetable stock cube from the cupboard - a sort of flat, dark brown version of the Oxo cube of old. Mix all together, taking care with the stock cube which does not seem to dissolve under its own steam. Which all added up to a very acceptable broth, taken with a little dry, brown bread.

Having taken care to stir it from time to time, as the barley is quite apt to stick.

BH was also in an experimental mood having bought a packet of the soya bean mince snapped above from Sainsbury's. Detailed below at reference 2.

Padded out with quite a lot of chopped vegetables and tomatoes, it made a very acceptable sauce to go with spaghetti. I don't suppose it would have occurred to me that it wasn't meat if BH had not come clean. On the other hand, I am not sure that it would work so well as plain mince, just cooked up with a little chopped onion. My take is that it needed the camouflage of lots of veg. Maybe one day we will get to find out.

Enough sauce left over to make a very respectable lasagne the following day. Two day's veggie for the price of one. And again, I don't suppose it would have occurred to me that it was not meat had I not known already.

On the other hand, I had cheated at breakfast, spicing up what was left of the vegetable broth with a few rashers of bacon.

PS 1: along the way, Suella Braverman suffered the indignity of being doused with some household cleaning product which had leaked out on the way home from Sainsbury's. Just one of the perils of choosing to be in the public eye. I had to commandeer the clothes horse and spread the pages of the Guardian out on it to dry out in the front room. At least they dried dry, rather than sticky, as I had feared. By way of restitution, I was moved to look her up in Wikipedia: not exactly a posh girl but clearly an able one, even if not one who finds much favour in our part of Epsom. And I was pleased to read at reference 4, that after the Portuguese refused to return their Goan enclave to India after independence, the Indians eventually just took it back.

Most of what was the enclave is now the state of Goa, far and away the smallest state in the Indian Union. But not that small, maybe both ten times the area and ten times the population of the Isle of Wight.

PS 2: maybe one day we will get around to returning the Malvinas to Argentina and Gibraltar to Spain. I am sure that with a bit of time and good will, something could be worked out. Maybe this is something that the maverick new leader of Argentina will try for. Places like St. Helena a bit more awkward: far too small to be independent but not having any natural owner.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/embassy.html.

Reference 2: https://this.co/products/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suella_Braverman.

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

Another instrument

A bit more than a year ago I noticed at reference 1 an optical instrument dating from the 1940s. Today it is the turn of the 1960s with something called a Model GB three-channel tachistoscope from the Scientific Prototyping Corporation of New York, an instrument widely used for vision experiments in the 1960s. A large contraption, weighing in at over 350lbs. Not the one snapped above, but very much along the same sort of lines, at least from the outside.

The core idea is to present a visual stimulus, prepared on something like a white index card, for some carefully specified time, for some number of milliseconds, perhaps 50, but ranging up to some seconds. In the present case the idea is to make the stimulus duration short enough that the subjects have trouble working out what it was.

This was all kicked off by reading about something called word superiority in Seth at reference 2. Word superiority seemingly being a well-attested phenomenon whereby people find it easier to recognise letters when they are embedded in a word than otherwise. Very much grist to the mill of whether this part of the brain works in a feed-forward, bottom-up mode or whether top-down also has a role to play, a matter which had already cropped up at reference 6. From there to reference 3 which I did not understand, possibly not helped by English not being the authors’ first language, from there to reference 4 which I did understand and from there to what Dehaene referred to as a classic experiment on the subject, reported on at reference 5, the paper of present interest. This turned out to be quite an old paper, from 1969, not quite in typescript but almost, and not coming with much in the way of helpful diagrams. On the other hand, I was not assaulted by pages of tricky statistics and tricky science in the way of reference 3 – and, as it happened, there were only six pages altogether.

The upshot was that it still took a while to get going and I thought that it might be an idea to fall back on the doctorial dissertation on which the paper was based. A dissertation which I found fast enough in something called the Deep Blue repository at the University of Michigan – but where it was not open access. Members only. Which was curious as I thought that most people who write such dissertations are only to pleased when someone want to read them, and similar repositories which I have come across in the past have been open access. Whatever the case, this one was not and the dissertation did not appear to have leaked out to anywhere else. So I pushed on with the original paper.

I did not attempt the arguments about vision processing structures which were active at the time, but concentrated on the experiment.

 

Where I rather missed the sort of flow diagram with pictures that you get in a paper today, would certainly get in a decent text book, and was reduced to Powerpoint, rather as I am sometimes reduced when whodunnits on television get too complicated for me. With the result snapped above.

The core of the experiment was a list of ‘216 four-letter words chosen such that each of the words could be changed by one letter to make up a new word. The letter which could be replaced (called the critical letter hereafter) to form a new word, as well as the letter substituted to form that new word, were the two response alternatives in the forced-choice procedure. For example, D and K were the alternatives for the word WORD, with D being the critical letter’. One could then present ‘WORD’ in a bad light – that is to say for a short duration – and ask the subject whether the terminal ‘D’ was a ‘D’ or a ‘K’. That was the type called ‘1W’ second from the right in the top row in the snap above. These responses could be compared with doing much the same thing with one letter  (1L), two letters (2L), two words (2W), one quadrigram (1Q) and, finally, two quadrigrams (2Q), where a quadigram (here anyway) is the nonsense word arrived at by rearranging the three non-critical letters in one of the real words.

As well as systematically varying the position of the critical letter in the four across and two down display used for the stimuli, this was also done for two conditions and three durations. In condition one cued the subject with the forced-choice to come for each observation, in the other one did not.

The results were summarised in the one and only figure, Figure 1, snapped above. Which with the help of the Powerpoint, now started to make sense. There were indeed a total of 36 data points. I had worked out that ‘2Q’ was not ‘2O’ and what it meant. I decided that ‘mean errors per s’ meant mean errors per subject, abbreviations of this sort counting for something in the days when scientists typed on typewriters with two fingers. I did not worry that I had not worked out what how this mean had been calculated. Nor about the p-values, also the subject of much argument these days, nor about the confidence with which the subjects made their decisions – beyond thinking that asking about this last must have made the experimental sessions last rather longer than they might otherwise have been.

Curiously, cueing clearly made things worse. But that apart, the subjects clearly did best when the letter to be identified appeared in a real four letter word (perhaps Mr. Reicher had a sense of humour) which appeared by itself, giving us the 1W lines at the bottom of both charts. The word superiority effect appeared to be real enough. What was not so clear, and what appears to remain unclear, is what the implication is for the brain’s processing arrangements. Bottom-up, top-down or both? Notwithstanding, present opinion seems to be firmly in favour of both – but I do not suppose that everyone is yet on-message.

A debate which Reicher expressed, more than half a century ago, in terms of serial processing versus parallel processing. And of letters versus chunks versus words.

In sum, an ingenious experiment which apart from corroborating the existence of word superiority has also served to highlight the difficulty of extrapolating from such an experiment to the arrangements of the visual processing pathways in the brain. And as a reminder that long lists of references at the end of papers are not just there to impress! With their value being much enhanced by the ease with which one can get hold of such stuff over the Internet these days; the need for well-stocked, specialist, bricks-and-mortar libraries is much reduced.

PS 1: along the way, trying to make more sense of reference 3 from its supplementary information, I got lost inside another data repository, this one belonging to the University of Radboud at Nijmegen in the Netherlands. I did manage to acquire access rights, but there was just too much information! See reference 7.

PS 2: while on exit, I was brought this snap by the Daily Express: 'A massive skyscraper, double the size of The Shard, stands abandoned in China after construction was halted by authorities in Beijing. In 2015, the construction of Goldin Finance 117 peaked at a height of 1,957 ft with a total of 128 floors. Building work began in 2008 during a period of frantic competition between Chinese cities to build the most impressive mega project'. What will the end game be? A hostel for migrant workers - thinking here of the chequered history of our own Centrepoint at Tottenham Court Road?

PS 3: from reference 8 it would appear the 'Goldin' is not a misprint. But also that the item is not really news at all. Which is normal for this sort of news from Microsoft.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/an-instrument.html.

Reference 2: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness – Anil Seth – 2021.

Reference 3: Word contexts enhance the neural representation of individual letters in early visual cortex – Heilbron M, Richter D, Ekman M and others – 2020.

Reference 4: Reading in the brain – Stanislas Dehaene – 2009. 

Reference 5: Perceptual recognition as a function of meaningfulness of stimulus material – Gerald M Reicher – 1969.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/partial-sight.html. 

Reference 7: https://data.ru.nl/?1. 

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldin_Finance_117.