The last stew

We took our last sausage stew of the old year, the day before New Year's Eve. Preparation started around 11:00, forks down around 13:30.

Started with butter, garlic, bashed black pepper, onions, tomatoes, red pepper and green pepper, bringing the ingredients on one at a time. Let the whole simmer for an hour or more.

Getting towards 13:30, lid half off and heat up to get some of the water off. Then lid back on for some celery, 200g of Bastides and lastly some mushrooms. Chopped stalks first, then the peeled caps. Not in their first flush of freshness, so peeling was indicated.

In parallel, 7oz of tubes and an entire chou pointu. This last cooked for perhaps 3 minutes. No added salt! I dare say that there was quite enough of that in the sausage.

Did about three quarters of it at the first sitting. Taken with some lemon squash: just lemons, sugar and water. Couldn't be bothered with the barley on this occasion, although I do rather like lemon barley water.

The left overs served as Palermo Pie later that same day. That is to say, the remains of the stew topped with the remains of the tubes and warmed up, in this case in the microwave. A dish invented by the Sicilians during the landings during the second world war, a variation of the cottage pie popular with the troops from the UK. Dished up by their field kitchens using tinned mince but real potatoes.

PS: I remember that adding salt to the water used to clean and cook vegetables was normal when I was young. But then it was also normal for most green vegetables to be infested with all kinds of animal life, and the salt helped get rid of it.

A story for New Year's Eve

I woke up this Sunday morning, perhaps for the second time, around 04:45. At first, there was nothing, then after what may have been a few seconds, a whole lot of dream became available again.

A dream which, when I try to write it down, becomes a jumble of facts and images which do not connect up into a very coherent whole. Integration is poor and there is no narrative thread – although, on occasion, such a jumble may resolve into a short sequence of scenes, sometimes connected, sometimes not. On the other hand, I know from experience that if I do not write it down then and there, the dream will likely vanish altogether, never to be recognisably recovered again. Likely vanish, but not always vanish: sometimes it will pop back again, perhaps some minutes – or even hours – later. Not sure about hours.

It is as if the dream were blocks of memory which could be online or offline. And when it is online it is in read-write mode, not just read mode. As I poke around the block of memory, as I try to make some sense of it, the block of memory is being updated. Maybe chunks are being deleted. The original dream is being overwritten with a new version. And I suspect that what I get to write down is as much a product of waking organisation, of waking imagination, as a left-over from sleeping imagination. It is difficult, if not impossible, to write down the dream as it really was – if indeed, there ever was such a thing. So I also suspect that whatever it was that goes on when one was asleep, does not usually map onto words, onto serial, linear text in a neat and tidy way.

I associate to the practise I once had of telling my two young sons stories which I made up as I went along. They were hung off a permanent framework – a chap called Nogbog the Bad who lived in the wild and woolly fens of north Cambridgeshire – loosely based on someone called Noggin the Nog of references 1 and 2 – a permanent framework very much in the way of a television soap – of domestic or police variety – sometimes both at once – but the story of the day was made up as I went along. For which purpose, it helped if I was lying down on the floor, with my eyes lightly shut. It sometimes happened that I went to sleep before they did, which was not the idea at all. It also sometimes happened that the narrative thread broke; there was a more or less long pause, after which I was usually able to restart.

So, this morning, although I was more or less awake, I seemed to be fully inside the dream again, creating new content. A process which was made easier by the dream being a rather fanciful elaboration of a real-life situation, that is to say managing the stocks and supplies of all the various pills I am now on.

All of which seems to tally rather well with the theory that I read recently – I can’t presently think where – that memory is dynamic in exactly this sort of way. Every time you access a memory you are, potentially at least, rewriting it in the light of what is going on at the time of access. Perhaps in the light of what you might be wanting at the time of access.

Perhaps also, as a young adult, you can keep all this under control. You can rely on your memories of important stuff not being dynamic in this way. But for the young and the old, it is all a much more uncertain business. Or is it not a matter of age, rather that there is a difference here between short-term memory and long-term memory? The one fragile and malleable, the other more substantial and permanent? Perhaps not a binary difference, more a matter of degree.

Another angle is the way that the large language models which have been so much in the news this year – the likes of Google’s Bard – generate plausible (but often untrue) text from some foundation or other. Is there a connection here?

Yet another is a theory of my own, that some children have a near adult capability to generate consequences from premises, which makes them capable of saying things which are true, but of which they have no emotional experience, of which they have, as it were, no real understanding. It would perhaps be better if they did not.

Time to take another look at the dreams reported by Hobson in the short book at reference 3. Dreams which seem to include a lot more action than mine: I have plenty of complicated situations but not many complicated stories.

PS 1: I think we must have had one or more of the Noggin books. I do not remember ever seeing the television version – or even knowing that there was one.

PS 2: I have failed to find a full-size version of the snap, just this rather small one from Wikipedia. Maybe BH will be able to put her hand on the book itself.

PS 3: it comes back to me now, that Hobson suggests that important parts of the brain are turned off when you are dreaming. Parts which are turned on again when you wake up. To that extent, you are never going to recover what you dream when you wake. Something else to take another look at.

References

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

Reference 2: The Sagas of Noggin the Nog – Oliver Postgate, Peter Firmin – 1992.

Reference 3: Dreaming: An introduction to the science of sleep – J. Allan Hobson – 2002.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/dream-diary-first-report.html. A previous product of reference 3. I might add that dream reports have run along at a fairly steady 100 rows (of Excel worksheet) or so a quarter since then.

Trolley 609

What is almost certainly going to be the last trolley of the old year was captured in Station Approach. A small trolley from the M&S food hall.

A trolley which hardened my choice of Epsom Library, rather than returning home. The point being another engagement in town a couple of hours later. Do something in the library or walk home for a short snooze? In the event, doing something in the library proved to be well worth while. Of which more in due course.

The record suggests that the year's tally will be 56 trolleys, a rather piffling average of just over one a week - but having not elected to keep the record in the form of a spreadsheet, further analysis would be tiresome. Perhaps I could commission a grandchild to produce such a spreadsheet, a commission which would be lucrative and instructive for him or her, useful for me? How thorough would I be about checking? Would there be financial penalties for errors? To be thought about.

Digging deeper in the meanwhile, I find that trolley No.1, to be found unnumbered at reference 3, was captured back in July 2014. So the long term average is pretty much the same as that for this year. 608 / (52×9 + 20) = 1.03. Give or take, in that I have not bothered to ask that fine DateDiff function in Excel the exact number of days or weeks involved.

PS: in the course of finding reference 3, I find that I had the idea of commissioning a grandchild back in 2015. No further action at that time.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/trolley-608.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/trolley-553.html. To which I might add that I won what will almost certainly be the last game of Scrabble this year. Helped along by my nicely judged return of the 'Q' tile to the pool, which ended up costing BH 20 penalty points.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/07/civics-2.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolley 608

I had passed a small trolley jammed in behind a bus stop on my way to Kiln Lane with trolley 607, so on consideration, returned to collect it, rather than pushing on over the footbridge to the gas depot in Blenheim Road. Snapped above, after extraction.

The owner's mark or brand was missing from the centre of the handle, but it was clearly not a Sainsbury's trolley, so I was able to mull over the problem on my way back to town. I decided that, despite the green livery it was not a Waitrose trolley, as the Epsom Waitrose does not use trolleys of this size. And so, by a process of elimination, it was a sport from the M&S food hall, where the trolley handles usually have their branding on a white background, but did once, a few years ago now, have green backgrounds.

In the event, there were a number of near identical, small trolleys in the M&S stack and one of them did have the green branding. Reasonably clear that this was what my trolley had once had. Mission accomplished.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/trolley-607.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolley 607

The first Sainsbury's trolley for a while and the first trolley for a while from the creationists' pad in East Street. With this snap being taken in front of their rather basic smoking den, from which the seats appear to have been removed for the duration of the holidays.

I picked up a second trolley on the way to the Kiln Lane store, not scored as the 'phone a friend' rule is quite clear, saying something like 'a trolley of the same size and belonging to the same store as that to which one is already en-route to may not be scored as additional'.

Both snapped up by eager small shoppers on arrival at the stands in front of the store, the regular supply of small trolleys having been exhausted. Just topping up, I suppose, after the festivities which were not then long past.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/trolley-606.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Spoofing voices

A post prompted by advertisement of reference 1 in the EAORC bulletin of reference 2.

In the beginning, automatic speech verification (ASV) systems were all about checking that a person on the telephone to a bank or a person talking to Alexa (to take just two examples) was who he said he was or who he was supposed to be. Then, as computers got cleverer and started to get rather good at spoofing voices, counter measures (CM) were needed which could distinguish real human voices from fake human voices. Resulting in the system structure sketched above, with the sketch being lifted from the beginning of reference 6.

In what follows, we are concerned with spoofing the spoken word. There is also plenty of interest both in spoofing face and voice at the same time and in spoofing the appearance of a VIP or celebrity of one sort or another in pornographic films, but neither of these latter interests is addressed in what follows, although it may well be that similar considerations are applicable.

In the sketch above, target is the voice of the right person. Non target is the voice of someone else. Spoof is a computer-generated voice, in this context usually spoofing a particular person.

One might recognise just two outputs, accept or reject. Or one might prefer to work with three: CM reject; CM accept and ASV reject; and, CM accept and ASV accept.

Either way, such a system can err in one of two ways: either by rejecting a voice signal that it should not or by accepting a voice signal that it should not. The type I and type II errors of statisticians, often linked to the testing of the null hypothesis, for which see reference 7. With the idea being to come up with a score for the system’s performance in terms of those errors – and then to tune the system to optimise that score. And there are lots of people, lots of teams out there doing just that. Reference 6 introduces this scoring.

ASV systems might work using any text, provided it is sufficiently long to generate enough person identification features. Or they might work using a particular word, phrase or sentence.

There seem to be four varieties of attack, four approaches to spoofing:

Impersonation. Use an actor or other such person to impersonate, to spoof the target person.

Replay. Harvest recorded speech from the target person for the bits needed to assemble the required text.

Voice conversion (VC). Manipulate a real voice saying the required text to spoof the target person saying the required text.

Text to speech synthesis (TTS). Generate the signal of the target person saying the required text using low-level features of the target person’s voice to qualify that generation.

An impersonator might be able to spoof the high-level features of the target’s speech, but low-level features are more difficult, if not impossible. Although it presumably helps if the impersonator has a similar voice to the target, with similar low-level features. 

Replay involves splicing together bits of recorded speech. I don’t yet know whether this can work with syllables as well as with whole words. With both recording and splicing leaving detectable traces.

It has all got quite competitive with the bad guys building spoofing machines and the good guys building spoof detection machines. A competition which will go on for a while? Some of this competition, some of what might be called the ASV industry, is reflected at reference 3, snapped above, host to competitions between some of the teams building spoof detectors. A competition presently divided into three zones:

Logical access. A mixture of real and spoofed speech data (signal) – spoofed using either TTS or VC algorithms – which undergoes coding, compression and transmission across a variety of telephony channels. The challenge is to design spoofing counter measures which generalise well to transmission channel variation.

Physical access. A mixture of real and spoofed speech data (sound) – spoofed using replay algorithms – undergoes acoustic propagation from a variety of real physical spaces. The challenge is to design spoofing counter measures which generalise well to physical space variation.

Speech deepfake. Testing spoofing detection solutions which detect the spoofing of compressed speech data posted online. For example, spoofing the social media posts of a VIP or celebrity of one sort or another.

While the rather more accessible reference 1 goes back to the very beginning. Can humans detect fakes?

Back to basics

 

The research questions addressed by this paper were as follows:

How well can humans detect speech deepfakes?

Are there differences in detection capabilities depending on the language?

Does detection performance improve with a modest amount of training?

There were 529 subjects, mean age just under 30, half men, slightly more than half fluent English speakers, slightly under half fluent Mandarin speakers. This sample was divided into two sub-samples, unary and binary. In the first sub-sample the idea was to say whether the sound clip presented was faked or not, with about half being fake. In the second the idea was to say which of the two sound clips presented is the fake. No feedback was given.

There were 100 sound clips in all, that is to say 50 pairs of fake/non-fake, with the fake being generated from the text of the non-fake. The raw material was drawn from an English dataset (LJSpeech) and a rather more elaborate looking Chinese dataset (CSMSC). 

Each subject was presented with 20 tests, randomly drawn from the pool of 50 pairs. The pool of 50 pairs appears to cover both English and Chinese, so this drawing must have taken language into account. The English version of the computer screens used is snapped above: unary left, binary right.

The answers to the first question was that people get it right about 70% of the time. To the second, that the performance of English speakers was much the same as that of Chinese speakers. To the third, that training did improve performance, but not by much.

The discussion suggests that while the quality of faking will no doubt go up, so will the quality of fake detection. So who knows how it will all turn out? But it is clearly a matter of some concern that humans are not very good at fake detection. They might, for example, be tricked into doing something unfortunate by someone on the telephone who sounded like their boss. How many of us bother – like nurses and soldiers – to ask for written copies of orders?

It also points out that these results are likely to have been disturbed by the subjects knowing that the tests were about faking and by the high prevalence – around 50% – of fakes.

Other matters

In the course of all this, the word ‘codecs’ cropped up from time to time. Eventually I learned that voice over internet protocol (VoIP) communication is facilitated by a technology called codecs, short for code-decode, which first compress a speaker’s audio sounds into data for transmission in packets across the internet and then unpacks them again. A substantial, well-documented technology in its own right.

From type I and type II errors, I associate to the well-publicised problems of the Post Office Horizon system, the product of a massive project to computerise the accounts of the sub-post-office network, cut down from an even more massive project linking in the benefits system. The problems being the false identification by the system of instances of fraud and the aggressive prosecution of the supposed perpetrators. With the main contractor being the same ICL with which my career in government IT started, and with ICL morphing into the Fujitsu with which it ended. I have turned up the massive, long running inquiry we have come to expect when this sort of thing happens at reference 8, but I have not been able to turn up anything about the computer system itself – beyond it accounting for the first 50 or so of the 218 issues to be looked at by the inquiry. In all this, I assume that one of the advertised benefits of the Horizon system was bearing down on fraud in said sub-post-office network.

Then only this morning, I was reminded of another fraud detection system, the national identity card, with various schemes for having one of these having been promoted over the years; schemes which have so far always been rejected, despite the employment of management consultants with a financial stake in their acceptance. The paradox whereby we don’t mind about companies like Google and Amazon knowing all about us (and our more or less unique email addresses), companies which exist to extract money out of us, while we do mind about government knowing all about us, a government which exists to serve us, to look after us. Maybe the Tory answer would be that extracting money from people is relatively benign compared with the lust for power for it own sake.

And I remember that I could once play the gambling game called spoof, having been taught to play one Sunday lunchtime in a public house, now demolished in favour of a block of flats, in East Street, here in Epsom. A simple but entertaining game, but one which can result in the rapid loss of money.

Conclusions

The problem has been neatly structured in the opening sketch. But I worry whether this is to only way to look at the problem. 

That apart, the story seems to be that, collectively, we are not very good at detecting fake voices. A problem compounded by over confidence.

To my mind, all this is one more line of evidence that the capabilities of computers are outstripping our capability to keep them under control. People are right to worry.

PS: the brain’s ability to detect fakes is clearly limited. It is always possible to fool the brain with a cleverly done fake. Which leads to the thought, given that we are, to some large extent, our memories, that we are fakes to the extent that our memories are fakes. Our innermost, most private thoughts, are just the echoes of some fake from the past. Which more or less empties the word of meaning.

References

Reference 1: Warning: Humans cannot reliably detect speech deepfakes – Kimberly T. Mai, Sergi Bray, Toby Davies, Lewis D. Griffin – 2023. Downloads\journal.pone.0285333.

Reference 2: http://martinedwardes.me.uk/eaorc/. 

Reference 3: https://www.asvspoof.org/.

Reference 4: ASVspoof 2021: Towards Spoofed and Deepfake Speech Detection in the Wild – Xuechen Liu, Xin Wang, Md Sahidullah, Jose Patino, Héctor Delgado, Tomi Kinnunen, Massimiliano Todisco, Junichi Yamagishi, Nicholas Evans, Andreas Nautsch, Kong Aik Lee – 2023. 

Reference 5: Voice conversion versus speaker verification: an overview – Zhizheng Wu, Haizhou Li – 2014. 

Reference 6: Tandem assessment of spoofing countermeasures and automatic speaker verification: Fundamentals – T. Kinnunen, H. Delgado, N. Evans, and others – 2020. 

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

Reference 8: https://www.postofficehorizoninquiry.org.uk/.

Fake 170

I gave up using nail scissors on my nails some years ago, having moved across to clippers which look like wire cutters.

I thought to get the ones snapped above from the fancy pharmacist in Wigmore Street, Bell & Croyden, the place that used to sell doctors' tools and still sells sequined wheel chairs for those with use of money but not legs.

A pharmacy dating from the end of the eighteenth century, once a proud independent, the holder of the late Queen's warrant until 2022, for some time part of the Lloyd's family of pharmacies, now part of the Bestway Group. A group which appears to have started in cement in Pakistan some fifty years ago and which moved into UK retail in 2010, and in which it is now a major player. Owning, inter alia, the Costcutter chain - which includes the fine convenience store in Manor Green Road. Maybe 'own' is too strong a word here; perhaps it is a franchise, with a strong element of local ownership and management.

Presumably the Bell & Croyden move to Bestway was part of the same shakeout which saw the Lloyd's pharmacy in our High Street move to Pearl.

The present complaint is about the nail clippers, expensive and German. Quite good looking in the shop, with a nice sheen and feel to the metal. But metal which turns out to be plate rather than solid. Plate, moreover, which is peeling off the business edge of the blades. And furthermore, while they handle well enough and I can cut both my toe nails and the nails of my right hand with them - this last being a particular challenge - they have not kept their edge terribly well. German manufacturing not always the best!

PS: two more bits of tricky news from today's Guardian. First, we are still deporting people who were born in this country, have lived all their life in this country, but who have committed some crime. A crime which is deemed sufficiently serious that we send the people concerned back to the country from which their parents came. To my tidy mind the rule should be that if you are born here you are British and that we should take responsibility for our own, law abiding or otherwise. Second, you can have a life threatening disease, enter a trial for a new drug to cure or mitigate that disease and then have that trial abruptly terminated for commercial reasons, even when it seems to be going well. I dare say that is what the participants in such trials sign up to, but it does not seem like a good way to run things. Surely the drug companies could produce enough of the new drug so that someone on the trial can continue with it, should they so desire? Without regard to the commercial fate of that new drug. Perhaps the catch is that drugs have a shelf life, and keeping a production line open for a potentially long time might well be an expensive business. One more thing to add to the already considerable costs of developing new drugs.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/fake169.html.

Reference 2: https://johnbellcroyden.co.uk/.

Reference 3: https://www.bestwaygroup.co.uk/.

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

Group search key: fakesk.

Waterloo Wigmore

On this occasion, despite it being a Sunday, we were able to get to the Wigmore Hall via Vauxhall. No need to catch buses or to drive to Sutton. The occasion being provided by the Elias String Quartet with help from Jonathan Biss, both of whom we have heard from time to time over the years. Getting on for ten years or more for the latter, for whom, for example, see reference 1.

Schubert string quartet D703 and Elgar piano quintet Op.84. The second of these being new to us, but being given a bit of extra spice by the half read book noticed at the end of reference 2.

A bright, cold morning. Lots of high cloud heading east. The town platform at Epsom was quiet, with no figs and just one wagtail to be seen. Plus some striking balls of mistletoe to the north and some small children on festive outings.

While on the train we had a young family with four children. The children spent most of the journey bounding noisily around the space between the doors, between us and their parents. The mother gazed on adoringly while the father gazed at his telephone. In the end, I stood up, didn't say anything, but was rather an unfriendly presence, which damped them down a bit. I thought about moving to the centre pole which would probably have damped them down even more.

A cheerful, distant band at Oxford Circus. While we did better at All Bar One than on the previous occasion, actually getting served in time on this occasion. New floral saucers for at least some of the beverages and cheerful staff. In generally better shape.

Puzzled by this throw-away at the Cavendish Square dustbins, but Google Image reveals it this morning to be a golf buggy, which I don't think I was ever going to think of.

He was very sure about it, offering a dozen or more images of them.

Very pale green anthuriums in the full hall, made up with red carnations and silver twigs. Possibly dead or dried hydrangea heads. All very striking. With the bonus that the director had turned out for the occasion.

Before the off, I tried out relaxing the tongue. Which sounded rather silly when I first read of it a few weeks ago, in the margins of reference 3 (see reference 4 therein), but does seem to work. I think, at least in part, by blocking any articulation of same prompted by near-speech verbal thoughts. Whatever the case, it was an excellent concert and we both enjoyed the Elgar rather more than we were expecting.

Some male groupies behind us, quietly chatting about their life and times following Biss on his travels. One of the absent wives went to even greater lengths, catching intercity trains and possibly even aeroplanes. I did not get to find out why she was absent on this occasion.

And behind them, someone was rattling a plastic bag quietly during the first half. But he (or she) must have noticed what he was doing at some point and stopped. Or perhaps a neighbour poked him.

Out to visit the pizza place associated with the now reopened Treehouse Hotel, noticed from time to time but probably last visited during the summer of last year, that is to say 2022, a visit which was noticed at reference 4. With reference 5 reminding me of a continuing confusion between 'treetops' and 'treehouse'.

BH played safe with olives to start, while I branched out to 'roasted romanesco cauliflower with chive crème fraîche and pistacchio crumble', which turned out to be based on a small, but entire & exotic cauliflower. A sort of cauliflower we first came across in Spalding (retail) Market, many years ago now, so many years ago that the archive knows nothing about it. But this one was really very good, and there was quite enough of it to share between two of us.

Taken with a very satisfactory white from north Italy, a Fórra Manzoni Bianco 2018 from the house of Alois Lageder in the Dolomites, made from a grape variety which was created in the 1930s by Professor Luigi Manzoni, then director of the Conegliano Research Centre. See reference 6.

We both followed up with pizza, also good. Fired with real logs rather than with gas. Mine being unusual in that it did not involve tomatoes, while the meat element reminded me of the Sicilian sausages to be bought near Borough tube station from the people at reference 7.

We were amused by their take on Italian flavoured desserts - seen, I suppose, through the Los Angeles lenses of Nancy Silverton whose name was, at least once upon a time, used in the branding of the place. But not so amused that we actually took one.

So passed on dessert, took a grappa, which came in a proper grappa glass, BH took a tea and for once in a while I took a coffee - which also came in a glass. Served by a very bouncy, cheerful young waitress. Bags of personality. Too late, we noticed the rather flashy looking ice creams on offer.

Out to inspect the new bird, promoted to the canopy over the front door from the front hall inside the front door.

Church adjacent firmly shut, despite it being the Lord's Day and there probably being carols later on. Treehouse visible behind.

It took us a while at Vauxhall to work out that the small indicator boards on platforms were selective. So this one only did trains heading for Waterloo, rather than the ones from Waterloo.

The haul from the window sill at Raynes Park platform library, the bookcase having been tidied away. I read of Father Willie Doyle SJ, a first world war army chaplain, killed near Ypres in 1917, now up for canonisation. A chap who had a serious breakdown as a young man but who went on to have a rather heroic career in the war. BH has the left hand book, but I have yet to inspect the other two.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/05/lunchtime-bliss.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/10/cheese.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/silent-consciousness.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/06/treetops.html.

Reference 5: https://www.treehousehotels.com/london/eat-drink/pizzeria-mozza.

Reference 6: https://aloislageder.eu/wines/compositions/forra-bianco. A house we have used before when visiting this establishment.

Reference 7: https://www.prezzemoloevitale.co.uk/.

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

Representing the people

It seems that Top Hat Mogg is still fretting about perches, poles, pounds and ounces. He still believes that we need to assert our national identity, pride and power by means of same. Which makes one wonder how he came to be so short of identity, pride and power as to need assertion of this sort.

This despite the clear view of an overwhelming majority of those responding to a consultation.

I associate to our local MP, another Tory, who when he had trouble explaining his opposition to assisted dying, resorted to the line that his constituents did not have a clear view and that he was reduced to following his own conscience. Or perhaps it was a gut feeling. This despite all the evidence being that 75% or more of his constituents favoured a change in our antiquated law about the matter. 

PS: not to mention all the other antiquated nonsense in our political and national life. Like elderly aristos wearing head-pieces heavy enough to make them drop.

References

Reference 1: UK quietly drops Brexit law to return to imperial measurements: Jacob Rees-Mogg attacks decision despite public consultation that revealed little appetite for move away from metric system - George Parker, Financial Times - 2023.

Reference 2: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/.

Festive tree

This year's Brussels sprouts tree was rather different to last year's, mainly because of the thicker, drooping foliage. Perhaps I would have done better with a little pruning? More care in choosing the tree at market? More white balls? This without knowing whether there are any more.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/trolleys-601-and-602.html. Early warning.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/12/festive-sprout.html. Last year's effort.

Milankovitch cycles

[Lisiecki and Raymo (2005) used measurements of δ18O in benthic foraminifera from 57 globally distributed deep sea sediment cores, taken as a proxy for the total global mass of glacial ice sheets, to reconstruct the climate for the past five million years]

I read yesterday of a much grander cycle of climate change into which the current global warming episode can be inserted: a cycle which until about a million years ago oscillated at 40 thousand years and since then at 100 thousand years. A grander cycle about which we appear to know a great deal, plenty enough to run climate models. Data which is mostly derived from analysis of subtle changes in composition – in terms of chemicals or of remains of life – taken from cores of ice or cores of sediment. The point of these last two being that they give you a record over long periods of time.

The argument of the present paper (reference 1) is that there was a run of very cold glacial periods around a million years ago, cold enough to push hominins back from their foothold in Portugal. Hominins did not just arrive there from Turkey (or thereabouts) and stay, they had to have several goes at it.

Plus a certain amount of AMOC flip-flopping, the present possibility of which exercises global warming people.

[Part of Figure 1 from the present paper. Age estimates of European and SW Asian early hominin sites and paleoclimate context. 0.7mya left to 2.2mya right. a, Obliquity variations. b, benthic oxygen isotope record from Eastern Equatorial Pacific Site ODP677]

[Location of Site ODP 677]

Glossary

Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). It is characterized by a northward flow of warm, salty water in the upper layers of the Atlantic, and a southward flow of colder, deep waters. The AMOC is an important component of the Earth's climate system, and is a result of both atmospheric and oceanic (thermohaline) drivers.

Benthic oxygen isotope records are commonly used as a proxy for global mean surface temperatures during the Late Cretaceous and Cenozoic, and the resulting estimates have been extensively used in characterizing major trends and transitions in the climate system and for analysing past climate sensitivity.

Marine isotope stages (MIS), marine oxygen-isotope stages, or oxygen isotope stages (OIS), are alternating warm and cool periods in the Earth's paleoclimate, deduced from oxygen isotope data derived from deep sea core samples. Working backwards from the present, which is MIS 1 in the scale, over 100 stages have been identified so far, going back some 6 million years.

Mid-Pleistocene transition (MPT). From 1–3 million years ago, climate cycles matched the 41,000-year cycle in the earth’s obliquity. Around one million years ago, there was a switch to the matching the 100,000-year cycle in eccentricity. The transition problem refers to the need to explain what changed one million years ago

Milankovitch cycles. The collective effects of changes in the Earth's movements on its climate over thousands of years. The Earth's rotation around its axis, and orbit around the Sun, evolve over time due to gravitational interactions with other bodies in the solar system. The variations are complex, but a few cycles are dominant. See reference 2.

Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) Site 677 provided excellent material for high resolution stable isotope analysis of both benthonic and planktonic foraminifera through the entire Pleistocene and upper Pliocene. Site 677 was cored using the Advance Piston Corer (ADC) at 1°12'N, 83°44'W in 3461m depth of water

Stadials and interstadials are phases dividing the Quaternary period, or the last 2.6 million years. Stadials are periods of colder climate, and interstadials are periods of warmer climate. Each Quaternary climate phase is associated with a Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) number, which describes the alternation between warmer and cooler temperatures, as measured by oxygen isotope data. Stadials have even MIS numbers, and interstadials have odd MIS numbers.

Vostok. Ice cores have been studied since the early 20th century and depths of over 400m were reached in the 1950s, a record which was extended in the 1960s to 2164m at Byrd Station in Antarctica. Soviet ice drilling projects in Antarctica included decades of work at the Vostok Station, with the deepest core reaching 3769m. Numerous other deep cores in the Antarctic have been completed over the years.

Other matters

I have also come across two more new-to-me words: cosplay and marplot. With cosplay being what people who like to dress up as characters – for example Batman or Mickey Mouse – in popular culture or in computer games. And with marplot being a person who mars someone else’s plot. Someone who interferes unhelpfully in other people’s business. See references 3 and 4. I think the first turned up in the Economist and the second in Henry James.

Conclusions

Once again I have been impressed both by the amount that we know about the past and by the amount of knowledge that is more or less freely available from the comfort of one’s armchair.

References

Reference 1: Extreme glacial cooling likely led to hominin depopulation of Europe in the Early Pleistocene – Vasiliki Margari, David A. Hodell, Simon A. Parfitt, Nick M. Ashton, Joan O. Grimalt, Hyuna Kim, Kyung-Sook Yun, Philip L. Gibbard, Chris B. Stringer, Axel Timmermann, Polychronis C. Tzedakis – 2023. My copy being an author manuscript rather than the finished paper.

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

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

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

Trolley 606

There were still some remnants of the herd mentioned at reference 1 yesterday, or perhaps they were replacements. But this trolley was a stray, taken a little nearer the High Street, just by the front entrance of T.K. Maxx.

Then, off around the Sainsbury's circuit, not finding any of their trolleys on the way. Not even at the once reliable accommodation block for the creationists on East Street.

And cholesterol was off at Sainsbury's. The Fresh Kitchen cafeteria had been given over to storage and access was closed off, albeit in a rather half hearted way, and even the cholesterol caravan was shut. The shop itself looked busy enough though.

Plenty of litter and leaves in the alley to the side of the store, the one leading to the footbridge over the railway. No doubt they will get around to it in the lull after the holiday.

Might have been tempted by a festive beverage at TB, except that, around noon, they were shut too - and we did not get around to it later in the day.

PS: curiously, while I can find various pages on the Internet about Sainsbury's pulling the Fresh Kitchen operation a decade ago, I can find nothing about the much more recent closure at Kiln Lane. Perhaps this last had a left-over Fresh Kitchen sticker on the window, but was no longer a proper Fresh Kitchen, just a common or garden cafeteria. I then wonder what the staff do now - apart from pulling refreshments off the shelves that is: there must be 100 or more of them on site when the place is busy and one might have thought there ought to be something for them.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/trolleys-604-and-605.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Trolleys 604 and 605

A regular herd of trolleys at the junction between the Kokoro passage and the ramp up to Station Approach. Three trolleys and two trips to the back of the M&S food hall, so scored as two trolleys. The rest left for any other collectors who might have been prowling about.

We celebrated by taking a few beverages in Wetherspoons, pleasantly busy and cheerful, late afternoon on Saturday. Mainly older people like ourselves, with just some younger people moving into festive gear. Apart from the staff that is, who were mostly pretty young. Quite likely students clocking up a bit of money during the holiday.

Only one bad note, two ladies squabbling over seats. One at fault, the other excitable. The young pot-man did not have a clue how to deal with it, but after a while the manageress came over and sorted it out. A manageress who knew her stuff, mixed with the customers and mixed in with the work, helping to clear tables. A credit to the organisation. Sporting a discrete head set to keep in touch - presumably an open channel job.

By the time we left, the excitable lady had calmed down to cheerful and jolly and a couple of rather amateur looking security people had arrived at the front entrance, perhaps more serious security people would be coming on a bit later.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/bit-of-stretch-to-score-this-trolley.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Dulwich

I have been taking an interest in Rubens lately, so as noticed at the end of reference 1, I got myself to Dulwich Picture Gallery, which I now know was in business before the National Gallery, in the early nineteenth century. A place which we have been to before, but a long time ago now; I would not to hazard a guess as to exactly when.

A cold, dull morning. Plenty of spaces left in the NCP car park at the foot of Station Approach. The best way appeared to be to get to West Dulwich via Victoria, so train to Victoria it was.

Some probable Wellingtonia on the way, as previously noticed at reference 3. Probably not to be checked up on now until the New Year.

Then there were some festive tents between Battersea Power Station and the river. Not clear how temporary they were. Somewhere else to be checked up on.

Then, pulling into Victoria station, a proper diesel electric locomotive, number not visible, class not known. Then, on arrival at Victoria station, it went one better with a full-on puffing Poirot. One of the chaps minding the fence thought that the circular rides on offer were very expensive. £20 a head? £30 a head? It looks from the web site as if excursions are done for this year and prices, never mind excursions, are no longer available.

No.45231 and Wikipedia knows all about it at reference 4. One of a class of 842 locomotives - which makes one wonder how many steam locomotives there were altogether. Not the sort of thing that one supposes were exported in large numbers, despite Ireland shipping its locos in from the US after independence.

Fine tender full of air-polluting, global warming coal. Could you do them for trade descriptions if they had converted to gas - or even hydrogen - without letting on?

Full size figure sculptures to be seen at Brixton Station.

Out at West Dulwich, with what I took to be a large red-brick school visible right and with Gallery Road more or less straight across. Gallery maybe ten minutes away. Turning out to be off-snap to the right in the snap above. I didn't find out what the chapel like building left was, let alone get in it. Perhaps I should have bought the gallery book which was no doubt available from the shop.

The exhibition turned out to be of modest dimensions, two or three not very big rooms connected by a corridor. Lots of sketches and some lesser works. I wondered whether some artists were touchy about their sketches surviving to be pawed over by arty academics - rather in the way that some writers are touchy about their letters surviving them to be pawed over in the same sort of way. I believe that Henry James, for example, burnt most of his large holding of letters.

An interesting early Adam & Eve, part of which is snapped above.

I think it usually lives in the Rubens House in Antwerp, where they offer the commentary above. I was interested in his treatment of the landscape behind, with his treatment of trees reminding me of the way that 20th century wood engravers did their trees. Also in the curiously pterodactyl-like creature flying over the water. Perhaps it is really a cormorant or a heron.

I rather liked this sketch, which seemed to have a bit more life than some of the more finished paintings. With a composition which seems to pop up in one form or another all over the place - for example in Poussin's 'Dance to the music of time' to be found in the Wallace Collection. As it happens, this gallery ran to a few (what I thought to be) inferior Poussin's too. In one or two of which Poussin only seemed to be really interested in painting the intricate folds and colours of the cloaks, with the other stuff getting rather summary treatment.

Also in the gallery proper, there were some rather striking work by one Sara Shamma, to be found at reference 6. And I had forgotten that Canaletto did time in London: I wondered on this occasion how often somebody bothers to check the large number of churches towers and steeples to be seen in the view of London snapped above. Had he counted or was he just doing an impression of lots? There was also a view of a curious bridge at Walton, which reminded me of the mathematical bridge at Cambridge, snapped below.

The point of this one, as I recall, was that it did not, when built, require any bolts, but then someone took it to pieces and couldn't put it back together again. A recollection which does not tally at all with the explanation to be found in Wikipedia.

But maybe I did better with the association to the bridge at Walton. Presumably the upon Thames one.

A painting by Antony van Dyck of Venetia Stanley, Lady Digby, on her deathbed. One wonders how much time he had to spend with the corpse to make the necessary sketches. Not the sort of thing one can see happening in the UK now - although I believe some parts of the world still support what we would regard as pretty fantastic funerary customs. Not happening in the UK at the behest of the surviving partner that is - but not so far removed from the goings on of the scene-of-crime people if television dramas are to be believed.

I din't find out what this was place at the time, but Google images identifies it fast enough as the College of God's Gift, possibly the original site of the big school already mentioned above, possibly now a supported living operation, all sketchily described at reference 7.

Came out to the east of the gallery, which confused me as I had gone in by the west. But a helpful passer-by got his phone out and all was revealed. Back on the right road.

This building was advertised outside as a bar and restaurant and I had hopes of taking refreshment, but it was very firmly shut. An event operation rather than a walk-in. Belair House of reference 8 - which today suggests that it was open all along. Perhaps I had to try a bit harder.

Passed a special parking space marked out in the road for electric bicycles, scooters and so forth. Regularised to that extent, and I have noticed similar spaces here and there since.

An approximation to a bacon roll from a stall opposite the station, heated up in two halves in one of those fold-over toasting contraptions. A lot of salt and a lot of calories. Tea rather better, despite being in a paper cup.

Very full litter bins in and around the station. Which made one think: Dulwich might be an expensive suburb, but not an expense which runs to looking after their litter bins. Then having been sensitised to litter in this way, on the train I noticed a young man stuffing a banana skin down the side of this seat while talking to his telephone about talking to a friend of his out on license. I was all ready to think the worse of him, but, as it turned out, he took his banana skin with him when he left.

I thought about getting out at Brixton, but didn't. I thought about getting out at Clapham, but the train didn't stop there. Out at Victoria where I failed to find a litter bin for my litter at all, but eventually found a cleaning lady with a trolley to which she invited me to contribute. I think she also said something about security seeing off the regular bins.

Upstairs Wetherspoon's shut, a place I used to enjoy from time to time on the way home. Fine view of the goings on on the concourse.

Settled on going to Tooting Broadway via Balham. There was a chap near me sharing his telephonic noise aka musical art on the train, a chap whom I thought was challenging me to challenge him. But I didn't and I got off that hook by his getting off at Clapham Junction.

We pass over the puffing Poirot, somewhere near Battersea.

By tube to Tooting. Pleased to find that the self winding clocks from New York are still to be found at Balham. A type of clock possibly first noticed at Tooting Broadway at reference 9.

Wetherspoon's at Tooting Broadway had not changed much, with some of the original artwork still present, from what must be near thirty years ago, when Wetherspoon's was not long started and a far cry from what it is now. Pleasantly busy with a buzz of conversation not helped along by musak or television. Quite a lot of solitaties who appeared to be watching films on their telephones, propped up in front of them. The bookshelves had been thinned out, but I still managed a paperback from Bloodaxe featuring poems and photographs from one Ahren Warner: 'Hello, your promise has been extracted'. Of passing interest. A well-made paperback with four sewn signatures.

Onto the Half Way House at Earlsfield, my first visit for a while. No sensible snacks, but they could offer pork scratchings, freshly scratched, as it were, on the premises. I was a bit nervous about my fillings, but eventually I worked my way through them, cheating with a certain amount of breaking by hand rather than by tooth. Fresh, tough when thick and not of tasting of much.

Back onto the platform for a shot at the aeroplane game. Low cloud, but nearly dark and the lights of the aeroplane's showed up well. I heard more planes than I saw, but in 15 minutes I did manage two two's and two two minuses. Whereby a two minus, I mean a two where the first aeroplane disappeared to the west only a few seconds before the second appeared in the east.

Remaining leg of the journey occupied by a young working mum, perhaps in her mid twenties, on her telephone, trying to convince her young child, with a minder for the day, that she was just about to pick him or her up. 'Just start to do something dear and I'll be there before you know it'. At least half an hour in my estimation and it did not sound like the child was convinced either.

PS: Warner has been reprieved. Maybe more to it than I gave it credit for on the day.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/cheese.html.

Reference 2: https://www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/wellingtonia-108.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LMS_Stanier_Class_5_4-6-0_5231.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Paul_Rubens. 1577-1640. Painter and diplomat. Presumably his workshop was more or less a factory, along the same lines as that operated some years previously by the Breughels.

Reference 6: https://sarashamma.art/.

Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_of_God%27s_Gift.

Reference 8: https://belairhouse.co.uk/.

Reference 9: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2017/01/cheese.html.

Fake 169

The new timber false ceiling going into the Ashley Centre here at Epsom, to replace most or all of the existing false ceiling, suspended white foam tile variety.

Presumably some made to measure chipboard or fibreboard, cunningly coated with brown wood grain effect. I did have a moment of doubt, was the timber for real after all? But I think I am convinced by the zoom above that it is not.

Still no firm news about who is going to take the slot vacated by the House of Fraser. Beyond it seeming unlikely that it will be a store of that sort: Epsom is no longer big enough to carry such a place. Or, it seems, to carry a proper gents outfitter, like the Lester Bowden of old, which survives in name only, this despite Epsom being a serious commuter town. A proper gents outfitter where a German suit might cost you two or three times what you might otherwise pay in M&S. I still have a fine racing jacket from them, in candy-stripe seersucker. A jacket which still gets the occasional outing. As it happens, cheap too.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/fake-168.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashley_Centre. Opened by no less a personality than our late Queen, back in 1984. In October, so she did not wrap the opening into her annual visit to the Derby up on the Downs.

Group search key: fakesk.

Trolley 603

Bit of a stretch to score this trolley which was inside the Ashley Centre. But it was an M&S trolley parked right outside Waitrose, so I decided that it fell within the rules. Probably to be the last trolley before the festive break.

Handle locks (top right) seem to have come back into use, after a period of absence, perhaps older trolleys pulled out of retirement for the festive rush. So I must resume carrying either pound coins or tokens again.

PS: this being another post with an improper file name. But a simple clerical error rather than one of the senior moments which made their appearance in the last post.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/trolleys-601-and-602.html.

Group search key: trolleysk.

Senior moments

Batch No.704 started off well enough. There was a little wholemeal left in the bag (some weeks past its best-before date), so I added that to the mix, topping up the white flour, water and yeast proportionately. This last also taking into account the age of the yeast suggesting that a little more power was needed. All this took the weight of dough up from the normal 5lbs 13oz to all of 6lbs 6oz.

It took its two rises in the usual way, then was popped into the oven at around 15:50. A little later, I thought it looked a bit dark. Then a bit later still, I thought it looked very dark. At which point I realised that I had set the oven to 250°C rather than 200°C, rather a big difference. Much brain work about how to adjust the temperature and cooking time in consequence. With the first move being to cut the temperature to 175°C while I thought about it.

In the end, in the knowledge that bread seems to be quite tolerant of overcooking, I cut the cooking time from 50 minutes to 40 minutes, with half the result snapped above.

Cooled, it tasted fine. No hint of charcoal about the crust either - which, to be fair, was about the colour of the crust of the rustic I buy from Olivier. Perhaps real bakers cook at a higher temperature than I do. Just a hint of settlement at the bottom of the loaf visible right. 

Part of this lower temperature being that I am a bit uncomfortable about cranking our domestic fan oven up to 250°C, right at the top of its range. The oven elements are quite dear to replace, what with call out charges and one thing and another. For which see reference 1 for the last time.

In any event, the first time I have had this particular lapse.

However, it was compounded by the game of Scrabble which took place in the margins, during which I was very conscious of various lapses of word arithmetic. I kept thinking I could place such and such a word in such and such a place, but having made some elementary mistake. Like thinking I had two 'a's when I only had one. Or shifting a consonant to one of its relatives. Or converting the desire to have some particular letter to actually having it. Or focusing on one of the words involved to the exclusion of another. With the word that I was thinking of turning out on inspection, when the tiles were half down, not quite to work. Very much the sort of thing turned up by Warren and others a long time ago and mentioned quite recently at reference 2.

All stuff which is grist to the brain's mill, but stuff which is supposed to be sorted out under the covers, without reaching consciousness or otherwise attracting attention.

Hopefully things will not get worse too quickly.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/03/zanussi-rules-again.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/12/silent-consciousness.html.