Trolley 434

This trolley was picked up in what used to be the Ashmore passage, running from the High Street through to Station Approach, a passage which has been productive of trolleys over the years.

Apart from the water bottles, with the full serving to help along the planting in the horse trough across the road, someone had thought to ram this trolley hard enough against something hard to snap two or three of the basket wires - their two or three millimetres notwithstanding. Plus the handle lock was probably broken.

But I thought that it was still serviceable and so returned it to the Waitrose stack in the Ashley Centre. Pausing only to wonder what will happen to the now empty Ashley Centre Surgery next to Wetherspoons, now that the surgery has relocated to Ashley Road, on the other side of the shopping centre. Which road name neatly avoids having to change the surgery name.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/trolley-433.html.

The new clock

Sunday saw my second visit to TB in two days, on this second occasion to admire my new clock. Also to admire the art work snapped above, lurking in the interior of the plague tent, the tent in which we have taken lunch before now.

The new-to-me clock was retrieved from the top of a litter bin, one of those enclosed ones that is, in Ewell Village, in the course of my Sunday Ewell Village anti-clockwise. A substantial affair, weighing in at 3lbs 6.5oz, I should think from the 1950's. The body is wooden, and the action plastic, so the weight must come from the metal trim. Maybe even real metal, rather than cunningly plated plastic.

There was no battery and it looks from the way that a layer of the wood has been cut away that a cover to the movement has been lost. But at least the clock was made in England by Metamec, even if the movement is foreign. Quite nicely made, I might say, with all the metalwork properly finished off.

An Energiser battery did not bring it to life, but a Duracell battery followed by a good shake did, and it now seems to be keeping time. There is also a faint tick.

The clock has now been given pride of place on top of the new-to-me bookcase in the study, as noticed at reference 1, where it looks rather well. The only down side being that it does not have luminous hands and there needs quite good lighting if one is to tell the time.

PS: funny how one's tastes change with time. If I had come across this clock forty years ago, it would have been thrown away as so much tiresome rubbish from the fifties.

References

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

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/02/new-to-me-bookcase.html.

Reference 3: https://www.ebay.co.uk/b/Metamec-Collectable-Clocks/261602/bn_59498058. Ebay clearly has lots of them, although I did not spot this particular one.

Fake 129

The occasion being my first visit to TB since our return from Devon. A visit to take a glass of Yellowtail, as advertised on ITV3 and other proper channels. The fake being the strange finish to the concrete cones holding the umbrellas. A finish made of small stones, presumably carefully graded for size, presumably to give the illusion of beach life. Perhaps intended to be used near water, perhaps a swimming pool, in some beach resort.

I found out afterwards that they charged about double, pro rata, for a glass what the stuff would have costed, had I driven over to Burgh Heath and bought it from ASDA. Rather better than the mark up of between four and five times which some restaurants in town manage. Albeit on somewhat more expensive wine.

A correspondent takes a keen interest in VW camper vans, so I thought I should include a snap of this one, not seen before but passed on the way home. Presumably bought from the people at reference 2.

Not sure what the logo, bottom right in the first snap, is all about. It doesn't seem to spell Volkswagen properly so is unlikely to be from the VW people. Some semi-literate long hair being arty?

The Campervan Culture people live in West Sussex and their site includes the snap above. A van which has, we are told, been to Africa and back, amongst other places.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/fake-128.html.

Reference 2: https://campervanculture.com/.

Trolley 433

The trolley in question being that on the right. The nest being outside the new hall of residence for our students of art, the people who keep Epsom's hospitality sector up and running. Fitted into Trolley 432 for the trip along the new pavement to Kiln Lane.

Plenty of cars in the car park that Sunday morning and plenty of trolleys in the stacks outside the main entrance. Perhaps the trolley men had got up early that morning.

Worked my way around to the north eastern exit onto Fairview Road, past all the recycling bins and so forth, to come across this supplementary stack, including one trolley from Tesco's and one trolley full of wheels. Suggesting that some repairs at least are attended to on site. By higher grade trolley men or a specialised travelling van from regional HQ?

More foreign trolleys. I associated to having read once about how most architectural practises carry someone who specialises in back doors. All big buildings have them and all kinds of odds and ends seem to accumulate around them.

Will I hit 500 by Christmas? Treat myself to a bacon sandwich from their 'Fresh Kitchen' operation upstairs? Maybe taken with a spot of something that warms, discretely wrapped in a brown paper bag?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/trolley-432.html.  

Birthday choc

Birthday confectionary from the Polish aisle in the Sainsbury's store at Kiln Lane.

Plenty of calories all round. The ones on the left are thin tubes - perhaps wafer rolls is the proper name - filled with a thick chocolate sauce, possibly some confection of cocoa powder, palm oil and sugar. As it turned out the very same rolls came with our ice cream a few days later in the Oak Room at the Royal Lion in Lyme Regis. Less the chocolate sauce.

Back to demonology

More than two years ago now, I was reading the book by the physicist Paul Davies (reference 2), with one result being the post at reference 1. Then for some reason, I was looking at it again the other week and got interested in heat pumps, pumps which seem to become fashionable from time to time – although when I took a look a year or so ago – our splendid ‘Ideal Mexico’ gas boiler is not going to last for ever, although it has served us very well – the story seemed to be that they were expensive – and it would take a while to get your money back. Then having chased the heat pump hare for a while, I came back to re-read the rest of the Davies book.

A reasonably careful reading of the first half and a reasonably careless reading of what struck me as the much more speculative second half.

Restricting ourselves to multi-cellular life, I was reminded that one of the distinguishing features of life is that all cells carry a large amount of information in their chromosomes, written out as very long strings of characters drawn from a character set with just four members – known as A, C, G and T – a lot fewer than the 256 characters used by a lot of computers. Chromosomes which in large part orchestrate the growth of a plant or an animal containing thousands of billions of cells from a single cell and which, again in large part, are carried into every cell of that plant or animal and into any children there may be, give or take a contribution from a partner.

And where the information content of chromosomes is independent of the physical substrate: that substrate will support whatever the chromosome wants to write, just as the keyboard I am typing in will support whatever it is that I want to write – be that the works of Charles Dickens or just rubbish.

Nothing that is dead, be it ever so big and complicated, can do this. Nothing that is dead can do information, can make use of information to achieve, inter alia, action at a distance. Although nothing is putting it a bit strongly: there may be some curiosities out there on the margins which I don’t know about. And modern computers, manufactured objects which might be said to have been created in our own image, certainly do do information.

One might argue that the pattern of the electrons whirling around the nucleus of some element contains information. Which it does, but that information is not independent of the physical substrate, rather it is a consequence of that physical substrate and there is no room for variation.

So one of the problems that the origin of life people have to crack, is to work out how cells came to contain chromosomes, using much the same code as they do now, perhaps as much as a billion years ago.

Davies goes on to explain that cracking the chromosomes, reading the human genome, has not turned out to be the magic bullet that some of us were expecting. Yes, we now have those very long strings of characters, and we now know a lot about the detail of how they work, say how a string of those characters is used to build a protein, but we are still a long way from understanding how it all works together to produce a adult plant or animal from an egg.

He suggests that one way into this might be to consider things at the level of information flows. Get away from the messy nuts and bolts of the chemistry of protein construction (and destruction) and things might get a bit less messy.

He starts with the cellular automata, mentioned here from time to time, for example at reference 3, and then generalises to a network. A network of nodes and edges which can be stepped forward in time in the much same way as a cellular automaton. Such a network had been used, for example, to model the regular cycling of the cells of a certain sort of yeast; a single celled organism, but a reasonably complicated one.

In this model, the nodes stand for proteins (or the genes which encode them), and nodes can be on or off. The edges stand for chemical pathways, and edges can promote or inhibit. One protein can promote or inhibit the production of another protein – or, slightly tricky, itself. Add in some voting rules which aggregate the edges coming into a node and one can step the whole network forward in time. Behaviour which might or might not settle down to a regular cycle, which might just shut down, usually depending on the starting conditions.

Davies also talks of modularity, and despite the large numbers of people working away on these very networks, I will offer a spot of modularity in a post to come.

So these networks are offered as a way of modelling aspects of life, of bringing a bit of order to an otherwise messy and chaotic world. Of modelling at a level which is low enough to capture the behaviour of interest, high enough to be comprehensible. A trick which is often difficult to pull off. But a trick which is helped along here by the fact that models with very simple rules – like those of a cellular automaton – can generate very complex behaviour. Maybe the complexity of life will turn out to have been generated with a surprisingly small tool box. Which would be good news from the evolutionary point of view; good new in the sense that a small toolbox springing out of the welter and waste (from the start of the Book of Genesis) is a lot more plausible than a large toolbox.

Contrariwise, Davies also tells us about the activities of people who look for quantum features of biology. People who do not believe in the natural order whereby physics is used to describe things on a very small scale, chemistry on the next scale up, biology on the next and various dubious disciplines like psychology and sociology after that. Generally speaking any phenomenon can be adequately described at just one of these scales. A natural order which Christoff Koch appealed to when he wrote that we had enough to do to explain the electrical behaviour of large numbers of neurons, without looking for quantum trouble. So the people in question here do exactly that, they look for quantum trouble in biology and it seems that there is quite a lot of it. So, for example, quantum physics can be invoked to better explain the detail of ATP energy transport in cells and to better explain the conversion of light energy to chemical energy during photosynthesis – both matters which are central to life as we know it.

More or less by way of an aside, Davies also suggests that if quantum computers ever make it to industrial strength, the present generation of encryption technology will be outflanked by those who can afford a quantum computer – typically government security outfits. One more example of scientists beavering away on something that is both interesting and with a whiff of money about it – without too much regard for the consequences. Although in this particular case, I would not mind if government security outfits were able to break into encrypted traffic, a nasty proportion of which is probably up to no good.

I close with the curious case of the antler of the deer. Antlers are interesting because they are large and reasonably complicated structures which grow from scratch each year, each year slightly bigger and more complicated than last year. Growth which, in many other ways, is quite like that of a human arm or leg. The present point of interest being that it seems that, given the right sort of deer, you can cut a notch on an antler one year, then next year a new antler will appear containing a tine at the very same place. Evidence that genes are not the only place where blueprints are stored. 

However, while turning Bing and Google loose turns up references 4 thru 10, a small sample from what seems to be a very busy field, with lots of people being interested in exactly how antlers grow, how they grow so fast, not least the people who like to shoot the deer carrying them, the only bit that seemed to come close to the Davies story was a paragraph on page 61 of reference 8, snipped above. But that is all not that close and I have not been able to get at the rather elderly reference 11 to which we are referred. Nevertheless, I have seen enough to see why people might be interested.

Some confusion caused by the talk of cutting notches, which resulted in my getting lots of hits about notch genes, which appear to be important in matters growth and which are named for notches in the wings of the much studied fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. But not obviously relevant to matters antler, even though antlers do do a lot of growing.

All in all, a book which was well worth the second look. 

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/03/maxwells-demon-revisited.html. 

Reference 2: The demon in the machine – Paul Davies – 2019.

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

Reference 4: https://www.msudeer.msstate.edu/growth-cycle.php. 

Reference 5: https://westernwildlifeecology.org/antlers/. From which I learn that geneticists, like software engineers, are apt to go in for whimsical names. So here we have an important bunch of genes named for the Sonic Hedgehog.

Reference 6: Deer antler – a novel model for studying organ regeneration in mammals - Chunyi Li, Haiping Zhao, Zhen Liu, ChrisMcMahon – 2015.

Reference 7: New physiological insights into the phenomena of deer antler: a unique model for skeletal tissue regeneration – Mesalie Feleke, Samuel Bennett, Jiazhi Chen, Xiaoyong Hu, Desmond Williams and Jiake Xu – 2020/2021.

Reference 8: Deer Antlers – A Model of Mammalian Appendage Regeneration: An Extensive Review -  Uwe Kierdorf, Horst Kierdor – 2010.

Reference 9: Common themes in tetrapod appendage regeneration: a cellular perspective – Bess M. Miller, Kimberly Johnson and Jessica L. Whited – 2019.

Reference 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notch_signaling_pathway. 

Reference 11: The role of the nervous system in the growth of antlers – Bubenik G A – 1990.

Wilmer Hale report

There is a lot of talk in the FT and elsewhere about the position of one Kristalina Georgieva, a Bulgarian economist, as head of the IMF following a report by a law company called Wilmer Hale into alleged wrong doing while head of the World Bank. In particular, that she instructed staff to tweak data to do with rankings of some sort, in order to push China and a number of other countries up the rankings. It seems that US and Japan are out to get her, while others, particularly us here in Europe, are more supportive.

If it was me, and she is close to my age, having done postgraduate time at LSE at about the time that I was an undergraduate there, I think I would just pack it all up and retire to my cottage in the country. Sod them. She, however, is clearly made of different metal and looks to be fighting it out. Perhaps in the (television adaptation) words of the minister in a Maigret story (reference 4), she wants to be able to retire with honour, untainted by scandal. Against that, there is the observation made by the UK politician some years ago now, that political careers always end in failure. In the end, politicians never go quietly, some disaster or other always pushes them out, kicking and screaming. Against that, one can point to the advantages of fixed term appointments, or limited appointments, like those of the POTUS.

But I digress. The present point if interest is the invisibility of the report itself. There is plenty of chatter about the report in the media, but neither Google nor Bing are offering me sight of the report itself. Not even an executive summary or a press release from the World Bank.

Wilmer Hale are no better, and searching for her at reference 1 gets exactly nothing. Which is perhaps fair enough: they have no business releasing reports made to their clients to the public, whatever the public interest. That is a matter for those clients.

Finally, I go to the World Bank, where perhaps I should have started, and search there for Wilmer Hale turns up what I take to be the report as the second of fourteen results. Sixteen pages of it, with the top half of the first page of text snapped above. Hopefully, later today, I will be able to make my own mind up about whether this is a hatchet job by the US, some obscure part of their (and our) stand-off with China.

But not too hopeful. I doubt whether I will give the matter enough time to be able to part the clouds of obscurity from a standing start.

PS: maybe I will give more time to speculating what the bill for this investigation was. They collected 5,000,000 documents and looked properly at 80,000 of them. And all I have to go on is the bill presented recently by an Epsom law firm for looking at just one document of form of around twenty pages. Where by document of form, I mean a document organised on well known lines for a well known purpose; we are not talking very original text. No wonder Wilmer Hale have a very smooth looking web site.

References

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

Reference 2: https://www.worldbank.org/en/home.

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

Reference 4: Maigret chez le ministre - Georges Simenon - 1954. I knew my master list would come in useful one day.