Wellingtonia 64

An avenue of young Wellingtonias at the National Pinetum at Bedgebury, to be reported on properly in due course. We wondered whether this was a result of replanting after the great storm of 1987. With reference 1 this morning being suggestive rather than confirmation.

While the shot above, probably taken at Bedgebury in October 1987, suggests that the native deciduous trees took more damage than the conifers.

While in the first of the two shots above, note the lightening of the sky, immediately above the trees. A lightening which is much more prominent in some of its other versions. A feature of sunlit images which was previously noticed at reference 2. The product of the eye or of the computer?

Applying the proximity rule which scores adjacent trees as one, this avenue is scored as just one Wellingtonia. With one definition of adjacent being that the trees are closer than their height, although I don't think that was the one suggested at the outset, which I think was expressed absolutely, in metres, rather than relatively. Something else to be looked up.

References

Reference 1: https://www.forestryengland.uk/article/history-bedgebury-pinetum.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/07/wellingtonia-13.html.

Group search keys: bbe, wgc

Another brasserie

A couple of weeks ago was my last visit to London. I must be slowing down as, even allowing for the plague, such visits are becoming rarer, with just the one Bullingdon hired during January. A hiring which came close to incurring an excess for running over 30 minutes, but I can blame that on my first choice for dropping-off stand being full up. Something which seems to be happening more often, so perhaps the vans that busy themselves keeping the stands at half-full have been thinned out a bit.

The builders' huts outside Epsom Station, first noticed in early December at reference 2, were still there on this occasion, firmly shut up and with no-one in sight. So I still don't know what is going on there.

Southern trains visible again. As was a goods locomotive at Raynes Park. Pulled a Bullingdon from the ramp at Waterloo and made my way via Drury Lane and Portland Place to New Cavendish Street, where the target stand was full. Luckily, there were a couple of spots left on the stand at nearby Hinde Street. 

I did not attempt the rather grand Methodist church at the corner, which I had penetrated in 2016 and noticed at reference 3 and instead, my first stop was an interesting house called the 'Angel in the Fields'. Quiet at around 12:30, with just a few customers, but a large open bar space, with a few chairs around the edges and a genuine coal fire making the place pleasantly warm. Lots of brown wood and stained glass. One of the customers was a twenty year resident, probably an Italian in the catering business, complaining to the landlady about all the bother he was having with the Home Office about residence. He was confident that it would all get sorted out, but was annoyed at the bother. He was also rather cross with Google for charging him for some hosting service or other. Not to deflected by my soothing remarks about the wonders of Street View - wonders which had to be paid for somehow. Altogether, a splendid place. To be visited at the next opportunity - although it might well get uncomfortably busy early evening.

Making my rendezvous, we found ourselves a bit spoiled for choice, but eventually settled for one of Côte's brasseries, where what they are pleased to call 'beef cheek bourguignon' went down well enough, although I did not think to ask for the gravy in a jug to the side, which would have been even better. A variation on the pork belly, now widely served in places that fancy themselves, but well known to the impoverished as a usefully cheap cut of pork when we were young. A bonus was that their bread was very good and their Chardonnay entirely satisfactory.

As it happens, there is talk that Côte are coming to Epsom, taking the premises once occupied by a fancy gents outfitter, one Lester Bowden, more recently by Lakeland. Lester Bowden was the sort of shop which once carried a fine selection of rather expensive jackets and suits, these last mainly from Germany, this in the days when some people still spent serious money on their work clothes. I think I still own a couple of their jackets, one of them actually rather cheap, say around £100, made of a rather flashily striped crimplene, which I wear when attending races and other events of that sort. And after you made your purchase it was logged in one of those little steel bound notebooks, complete with carbon paper. Notebooks which were pervasive, normal even, in the clothes shops of yesteryear.

Suitably freighted, I passed on both the Wallace Collection and the handsome Catholic Church of Spanish Place. Very properly, decided against another Bullingdon. Waterloo was a little too far away for that to be a good idea. But I did take a comfort break at the Langham Hotel, the bar appearing to be shut. Where in the lounge area provided with the cloakrooms and so forth, there was a large format book of arty black and white photographs, pages possibly A2 in size. Placed on its own little table and opened at a page of porn; gent to the left, lady to the right. While most of the photographs were rather good portrait heads.

If it was the book offered above, quite an expensive item to leave lying around a hotel, even a good class hotel. I wonder when we will get back there for lunch? Our last having been in the autumnal plague interval, noticed at reference 5.

Eventually got back to Vauxhall where I entrained, passing on the Half Way House at Earlsfield, but pausing at Raynes Park for long enough to pick something up for BH from the platform library. Something which she was, as it turned out, well pleased with. Now read. 

I noticed that the Guildford Diocesan Office seems to have shut down, visible in the past as the country bound train pulls into the Epsom branch line. Perhaps the office has been mothballed for the duration of the plague.

A fine selection of on-train announcements, despite a recent story in one of the free newspapers that a massive cull was in progress. About time too: I don't really need to be told that I can change at Clapham Junction for Willesden Junction - not least because in the unlikely event of my ever wanting to go to such a place, I would check with Cortana before setting off.

Closed the day by collecting the post already noticed at reference 6. At least I remembered.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/to-palace.html. The last outing featured a visit to a brasserie too. I remember than in the late 1970's, a brasserie in Luxembourg was still, sometimes, attached to a brewery, this being the literal meaning of the word. Properly speaking, brasseries are about beer, not wine.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/art-from-more-than-one-country.html.

Reference 3a: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/06/the-interior-of-church-at-hinde-street.html. The picture. A post named for its first sentence, as I had initially failed to supply a title. And once named, one is stuck with the name, not an amendable property in the way of a file name under Windows.

Reference 3b: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/06/vivaldi.html. The visit.

Reference 4: https://www.cote.co.uk/. The brasseries.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/wigging.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/beam-one.html.

More water works

Last time it was dams on the Volga at reference 3. This time it is drinking water in Singapore.

Which has prompted me to learn that Singapore is an interesting place. One degree of latitude or 100 miles north of the equator, a clutch of islands, one large, sandwiched between the southern tip of Malaya and some outlying islands of Sumatra, that is to say Indonesia. At getting on for 300 square miles, twice the size of the Isle of Wight, but with 5.5m people, something like 30 times the population. So a good deal denser, although the Singaporeans have taken care to retain substantial chunks of green space, including a fine botanic garden (reference 6), a new part of which may have been noticed at reference 2. Most people live in tower blocks. Most of the people are ethnic Chinese but there are substantial minorities of Malays and Indians. While it seems that for practical purposes, English is the language of choice: perhaps linguists have made studies of how their English has drifted away from the mother lode.

Very low birth rate and lots of helpers drawn in from foreign parts.

I should not perhaps have been surprised to learn that they spend a lot on their military. In which connection they get a lot of help and buy a lot of kit from Israel. There is conscription. They also seem to have a number of air facilities overseas - Australia, the US and (for some reason) France.

Not yet worked out how they make a living, because while there is a good chunk of space given to an airport on the eastern tip of the main island, there does not seem to be much space left for manufacturing. Perhaps, like London, they live on a bubble of financial and legal services.

But the issue of the day is water, as introduced at reference 1, and while they have plenty of rain they are short of places to put it. With net consumption running at 500 million gallons a day, or 100 gallons a head - or three English baths. Here at Epsom, my water bill tells me that we use around 10 cubic metres or 2,000 gallons a month, say 50 gallons per head per day. Which does not include our share of consumption outside the home. Slightly puzzled. Sums need to be revisited.

Presently, the Singaporeans have an agreement with the Malays to use a reservoir on the mainland, which meets about half the need, but they are keen to be as independent as they can. Which involves a lot of desalination (presently energy expensive), lots of recycling (perhaps they beat the eleven trips through humans that Thames water is said to make before it makes it to the sea) and careful consumption, encouraged by water charges. Major facilities include the Keppel Marina East Desalination Plant (reference 4) and the Changi Water Reclamation Plant (largely underground, otherwise somewhere in reference 5). And no doubt, as in the Netherlands, O-I-C Water has a seat in the Cabinet, at the top table.

They have set themselves the challenge of water independence by 2060, while at the same time accommodating a doubling in usage. And rising sea levels? Some challenge.

PS: more puzzlement while I was reading about Singapore, in that, in the margins, I read that the partners at KPMG have awarded themselves record remuneration at a time when they are being given record fines for failures in their core audit business.

References.

Reference 1: Singapore pushes for water independence as temperatures rise: The tiny city-state, which imports water from Malaysia, has set its eyes on self-sufficiency. Climate change has added new urgency to the situation - Megan Tatum, MIT Technology Review - 2021.

Reference  2: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/two-new-places.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/watery-projects.html.

Reference 4: http://www.kepinfra.com/kmedp/.

Reference 5: https://www.pub.gov.sg/. Singapore's national water agency. No nonsense about market forces here.

Reference 6: https://www.nparks.gov.sg/sbg.

Steam rising

It was time for another stew from the Bastides people yesterday, something over a month from the last, noticed at reference 1. More or less the now traditional recipe, including on this occasion an orange pepper and ready-cut celery, this last from the Co-op by Epsom Station. And rather less potato than on the last occasion, when there had been too much of a good thing. In this case, left over potato which had already been reheated once, but you would not have known that from the stew. Probably would have done if you had taken them neat, when the stale taste is usually quite distinctive.

We did about two thirds on this first occasion, leaving more or less enough for tonight's evening meal, probably to be supplemented by a spot of cold hand of pork, yet to be properly noticed hot.

Interested to find that the recipe for the sausage was shoulder and hand of pork, salt, pepper and a few other spices. Perhaps they don't use saltpetre in the way explained at reference 4, stuff which is widely available online. Perhaps they conflate it with regular salt. Perhaps they include it under the rubric spice, which seems to be pushing things a bit. And, what about the water that we use to pad out our English sausages?

On a more positive note, we make more use shoulder of pork than leg of pork. Seems to us to have more flavour.

PS: reminded this evening of a feature of the tubular pasta which we take with sausage stew, which BH buys ready cut in packets from Sainsbury's. One assumes that the stuff is cut by machine - but the length of the pieces varies - say around two inches, plus or minus a centimetre. It seems unlikely that this is down to wobbling cutters, much more likely that variable length is deemed to make the product more 'artisanale' in the language of the people who job it is to promote the sale of food in France. From where I associate to the yarn about manufacturers of cutlery getting their machines to include imperfections in the product so that they could pass it off as having been hand made in Sheffield. From the far-off days when we still made stuff in Sheffield.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/another-sort-of-feeding.html.

Reference 2: http://bastides-salaisons.com/. For the sausages.

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/07/bastides.html. See the end of this post for the company.

Reference 4: https://www.primalsurvivor.net/salt-curing/. A website which is informative about curing meat, but which also contains a particularly irritating amount of advertising. Advertising which has, as is normal these days, been tuned to my email and viewing habits. I associate to a correspondent who was pleasantly surprised that I don't do it. With a downside being that one gets pushed well down the hit lists...

A new dream

Or to be more precise, a nearly new dream. I think I had a trailer for last night's dream at some point last week. No idea what might have brought it on.

The star of the dream was a brig on which it was intended that I should make a trip across to Ireland. The dream was very clear that the vessel in question was a brig, even though I never got a good look at it. I probably knew that a brig was a small, mainly square rigged sailing ship with two masts, the foremast being just slightly shorter than the mainmast. Which means, in some sense, that the brig in the dream was driven by the word rather than by the image.

Somehow, the brig was tied up just outside my childhood home in Cambridge, some way from punt navigable water, never mind brig navigable - although I believe quite substantial boats - or perhaps ships - used to make it up the Nene to Wisbech, a little way to the north.

At some point I was invited to buy a new bag for one of the foresails, which turned out to be substantial and expensive affairs. Received rather casually and there was no question of reimbursement. I don't think such things exist in real life.

At another point I took a closer look at the brig. Coming away with the impression that the gentleman running the trip - a real person, lately a regular at the Wetherspoon's in Tooting - was taking things much too casually. No clipboards and no checklists. While the Irish Sea could get very rough and was not a place to be taken casually. I might add that real people getting into my dreams - either people that I know in the flesh or people that I know about from the media - is fairly unusual. Real places yes, real people no.

I wondered whether he knew that I had no head for heights, and although I had some theoretical knowledge of such boats - largely derived from reading a lot of the Hornblower books when I was a child - and some practical knowledge of spars, ropes and knots, I was going to be no use at all aloft. Never mind in a storm at night.

I associate this morning to a chap in TB who, as an adult, went on a young person's cruise to the Bay of Biscay, I think on a substantial schooner. On his telling anyway, he was about the only person on board who could get aloft when the wind got up one night and sail needed to be shortened. The rest were too sick or too scared.

PS: all the brigs turned up by Bing seemed to be foreign, a lot of them from the US, this one from the Netherlands. This despite our own distinguished maritime history.

Not out of the woods yet

Covid deaths might have been going down three weeks ago, but they are not going down any more, and daily deaths are well above the first peak, getting on for two years ago now. With the growth appearing to be in the US and to a lesser extent Brazil, Central America and the Caribbean. Europe, including the UK, looks to be steady.

The good news, in a report from Medscape, is that while the new variant, BA.2, looks to be more transmissible than BA.1, and more dangerous to that extent, it does not look to be more dangerous otherwise. But time will tell.

Here in Epsom, we shall continue to absent ourselves from the Wigmore Hall for the time being. Too many people about while one is getting there, too many people about when one has got there - too many of whom do not wear masks, despite the medical flavour of the area, with both Harley Street and Wimpole Street just to hand. Not to mention the Cock & Lion in the interval. Which is a pity, as programming is starting to return to something like normal.

PS: they haven't fiddled with the scale along the bottom of the graphic. It's just that the year 2020 doesn't start until April.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/going-down.html.

Group search key: FT, graphic.

A cyber project

[Apparently a slide in the presentation in the pitch mentioned below]

Corsight of reference 1 appear to be a leading company in the facial recognition business. Based in Israel. They can do things like telling a casino that the chap in a flashy blazer on the big roulette table is on their black list. Even, on a good day, if he is wearing a COVID face mask.

They have apparently been pitching to a conference put on by the Los Angeles investment bankers at reference 2 about how they think they can build systems to put a face to a DNA sample. So you get a DNA sample from a crime scene, they turn that into a face, you run that through you database of criminal faces and you get your criminal. The front cover of the brochure put out by the helpful bankers is snapped above. They do not, however, put out the pitch: the snap at the top of this post just leaked.

While Corsight just happen to have a couple of very senior US security types (presumably retired) on their advisory board.

They also seem to be mixed up with the Japanese company at reference 3, but I have not been able to work that one out. But whatever it is, it includes the handy presentation about Corsight at reference 4.

It seems that lots of people don’t believe that this can be done. Sex, colour of skin and colour of eyes, yes. Appearance of nose, no. At least, not yet.

It also seems that lots of people worry about privacy and human rights issues. Inter alia, they point to the difficulty that facial recognition systems have with very dark skins.

The security industry seems to be what pushes facial recognition along. While both the security industry and the ancestry industries are players in the world of genes. And it seems that, given the amount of DNA out there for medical research purposes linked to basic demographics like age and region of residence and the amount of DNA out there for ancestry purposes linked to family names, aka surnames, that it is now possible to break the anonymity of the first of these using data from the second. See, for example, reference 5. Not that this would particularly worry me. So some bad person got hold of the computer version of my DNA. So what? It is not as if they can use it to break into my bank account, at least not yet. But perhaps I ought to worry.

While I do worry about using DNA for criminal justice purposes. It is all very well talking about something based on tricky science that a non-specialist can’t hope to understand being more or less probable, but it is quite another matter saying that it meets the beyond reasonable doubt test of the public part of most criminal justice systems. At least you can see fingerprints and more or less understand what a fingerprint expert is saying; but with DNA and DNA experts this does not fly at all.

I have learned about things called short tandem repeats. It seems that the non-coding part of human DNA contains lots of these repeats, things like ‘TATATATATA’ and ‘GTCGTCGTCGTCGTCGTCGTCGTCGTCGTC’, with, in the usual way, A being Adenine, G Guanine, C Cytosine, and T Thymine. The number of these repeats is inherited, but also varies a good deal from person to unrelated person. Which makes them useful for identification purposes. What they are useful for otherwise is not clear at all, at least not to me.

And about the glossy but curiously uninformative website at reference 6. But which looks like a virtual health club for the rich, one which has succeeded in sucking in a lot of money.

This complicated yarn being kicked off by the article in the MIT technology review detailed at reference 7.

References

Reference 1: https://www.corsight.ai/. 

Reference 2: https://www.imperialcapital.com/. 

Reference 3: https://ist-security.com/.

Reference 4: https://ist-security.com/ist-wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Corsight-Deck-2020Rev1.pdf.

Reference 5: Identifying Personal Genomes by Surname Inference – Melissa Gymrek, Amy L. McGuire, David Golan, Eran Halperin, Yaniv Erlich – 2013.

Reference 6: https://humanlongevity.com/. 

Reference 7: This company says it’s developing a system that can recognize your face from just your DNA: Though it almost certainly won’t work, it is a telling sign of where the field is heading – Tate Ryan-Mosley, MIT Technology Review – 2022.