Plums

After blackberries and damsons from the roadside, English plums from the shop. The queue in the market stall a few days previously had been a bit fierce, so these ones came from Waitrose. Very good they were too, and we are now well into the second batch.

So warm that they ripen fast, with new plums ready by the time the old ones have sunk in far enough to make room for more.

On the way, a second crane over Wetherspoons, the first having been noticed at reference 1. One of the attendants told me it was there to lift air conditioning units onto the roof which seemed fair enough. 

The builder at reference 2 does not look cheap, so let us suppose 20 men for 25 days at £1,000 each, which comes to £500,000. Let's say £1,000,000 in round numbers. Which seems to me to be a lot to spend on a pub which was not in bad nick to start with. The place must be quite an earner to pay for it - or rather for us to pay for it.

PS 1: thinking of the speed with which our plums are ripening, I remembered about the business of bread and biological clocks mentioned at reference 3. Matters which are still on the go, both because I had trouble with dough again yesterday and because I am trying to read reference 6 again. Is it really the case that the metabolic rate doubles for every 10°C rise in temperature? Whereupon my laptop turns up reference 4 and my telephone turns up reference 5. Both rather too complicated for me, a regular menagerie of thermal performance curves (TPCs), although someone did point out at some point that the doubling can't go on for long anyway as proteins can't stand high temperatures - but maybe that is not an issue at the temperatures we are talking about, say 20°C to 50°C. And there this matter is going to have to rest: in the round, biological things speed up when it gets warmer. And slow down when we put them in the refrigerator.

PS 2: a modest amount of Powerpoint-like capability has turned up in Microsoft's Snipping Tool, resulting in the green splodge above. Which may reduce the need to import screenshots into Powerpoint for annotation there. An upside to the drip-feed of amendments to Windows and the Office suite.

PS 3: feeding Google Image Search the snap above, the first hit is reference 5, from whence it came, before amendment. Which is all very clever, but did it have the advantage of remembering that it had turned up this very same paper for me in the recent past? Maybe I will see if it can do the same trick on a Library computer, which should not come with any history.

PS 4: moved by the arrival of an email from Google, to ask gmaps about their headquarters, snapped above. Southern extremity of San Fransisco Bay a little to the north. Looks even bigger than what I remember of the corresponding Microsoft operation in Seattle from twenty years ago. And much much bigger than their shiny new building in Kings Cross, noticed, for example, at reference 7. Big Tech really is big. But depressed to read in the FT that a lot of them are backing Trump because he promising not to make them look after all the user content they are holding. No holds barred free speech for all! All that expense not good for the bottom line. Nor is stopping people clicking on rubbish and worse; people like rubbish. Think Tit-Bits, that once well-known staple of gentlemen's hairdressers.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/08/circulo-populare.html.

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

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/07/more-no-score.html.

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

Reference 5: The effects of temperature on aerobic metabolism: towards a mechanistic understanding of the responses of ectotherms to a changing environment - Patricia M. Schulte - 2015.

Reference 6: Rhythms of Life: the Biological Clocks that Control the Daily Lives of Every Living Thing - Foster RG & Kreitzman L - 2004.

Reference 7: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/08/trolley-578.html.