Bacon etc

A week or so ago off to London for one of the fine bacon sandwiches to be had at the Market Restaurant in Whitecross Street, a place I used to visit more regularly when I was a bigger user of the St. Luke's lunch time concerts than I am now.

A visit involving pulling three Bullingdons - but do not be misled by all the '£0.00's. You have to pay a £1.65 hire charge for each trip but what is recorded here is only the charge for excess journey time, which I do not incur very often. The first 30 minutes is included in the hire charge.

Started off in Meadway, where they might have fixed the leaking ground, but they are clearly about to get cracking on something else, the something else that resulted in the pump post at reference 1.

Changed onto the tube at Balham, a tube in which the in-train indicators said Morden while the on-platform indicators said High Barnet via Bank. All very confusing but I stuck with it and by the time we got to Stockwell, the in-train indicators had settled for High Barnet too.

Out at Old Street to spot a cyclist doing a hands free. All in all, it proved a bad day for cyclist manners.

Parked up at Roscoe Street to pass the mural above. Which I must have passed many times before, but I did not remember it at all. Not the work of a beginner, so OK. But I think there all to be a rule that once it starts to get flaky, it is painted out. Let someone else have a go. A vague feeling today that I have in fact noticed it before, but search fails to turn anything up. Maybe try again later.

Restaurant pretty full when I arrived, mainly blue collars, but they had more or less all gone by the time that I left. They must start early and take their lunch break 12:00 to 12:30. My bacon sandwich was up to its usual high standard.

At this point, the plan had been to go to the butcher in Clerkenwell (noticed at reference 2) and then onto Seven Dials for cheese, but I had forgotten to pack my bicycle lock and I did not care to be leaving a Bullingdon unlocked, which would be expensive if someone pinched it. So headed down to London Bridge instead.

Paid my first ever visit to the inside of Ginger Pig and fell for a shoulder of lamb. The bones were in but the shape seemed a little unusual. I shall report in due course.

Not much in the way of green vegetables in the market, dominated by exotics, but I did run down a bag with some spring greens. A bit young and tender but they would probably do.

Lincolnshire Poacher cheese, from Neal's Yard Dairy, all present and correct.

Thought about a second snack but the market was all rather busy - I suspect with tourists rather than with shoppers - and I decided against, heading back to Waterloo instead. The new bag of reference 3 being fairly heavy by this point. Quite awkward to get it on and off, but safe enough on the cycle once it was on. A lot better than struggling with several smaller bags.

Took a Guardian at Smith's where I managed the self-service machine. To puzzle, yet again, about why Smith's shops are so badly laid out. 

Good haul at the restocked Raynes Park platform library: Thubron (already reported on at reference 4), the Wittgensteins and the Thames & Hudson (mainly pictorial) take on dreams. So anti-clockwise from the red cyclamen: spring greens, sheep shoulder, cheese, Thubron, dreams, Guardian, Metro and Wittgensteins. Crash hat right and new bag bringing up the rear.

There was a Sainsbury's trolley at the junction of Temple Road and Chase Road which I marked down for another day. But, in the event, what with one thing and another, I never got around to it.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/03/new-pump.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/modigliani.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/new-bag.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/03/in-siberia.html.

Packaging

The hunt for the lost kabanosi of my youth continues, reaching up this week to Leeds, via eBay and EVRI, these last being the people who used to be called Hermes, rebranded following bad publicity. In the news recently when a whole lot of their parcels were found in a tip.

But on this occasion there was no problem and the well made parcel turned up within a couple of days of my hitting the green button in eBay. And the kabanosi from Krakus were not bad at all. Chock full of smoke and preservatives. Krakus having last been noticed at reference 2, for a rather different, much milder form of sausage.

Although I did think this morning that it was no wonder that eating this kind of stuff promoted cancer of the stomach. You fill your meat full of chemicals to stop bacteria eating it and to stop fungi growing on it - so is it any wonder that these chemicals do bad things to human stomachs, at much the same game?

[The ‘Helix’ was set to be the centrepiece of the new office hub in Arlington, Virginia, Amazon’s biggest outside of its hometown, Seattle © Amazon handout]

Following which grisly thought, I was amused by this picture in the FT of the proposed Amazon HQ2 in Arlington, Virginia, presently on hold. They might cut costs to the bone at the coal face, that is to say at their warehouses, but they can't resist showing off a bit when it comes to their headquarters buildings. 

One can read something of the rather tawdry bidding process that kicked in when Amazon were deciding where to put it at reference 3. 

PS 1: a little later, for some reason, I was curious about whether there was a day-of-the-week bias with my brick carrying activities. The pivot table above - covering just about the three years since March 2020 and with Sunday being day 1 - reveals all. Or rather, perhaps nothing, with no favourite days. But maybe a reader who can do significance tests will advise. Maybe there is something about Mondays and/or Wednesdays, but I can't think what. Apart from Wednesday generally being a day when I prepare my own lunch.

PS 2: given the good time that Starmer has been having poking at all the Tory errors of judgement and worse over the past few years, is it wise of him to be trying to take on a very senior civil servant as his chief of staff? Should not such a person be in quarantine for a few years?

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermes_(company).

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/01/boiling-ring-not.html.

Reference 3: Amazon pauses construction on its second headquarters in Virginia: Ecommerce company is looking to cut costs after years of heavy investment - Dave Lee, Financial Times - 2023.

Solidarity

A couple of weeks ago now, to the Wigmore Hall for a display of Uko-Russian solidarity, in the form of a concert given by Alena Baeva (from Russia, on the violin) and Vadym Kholdenko (from the Ukraine, on the piano). Although, what got us there was the promise of a Beethoven Sonata, Op.96, and a Schubert fantasy, D934. 

With what we took to be a stocking filler from one Valentin Silvestrov, a pianist and composer from Kiev, with a long list of compositions to his credit. To be found at reference 3.

A bright cool start to the day, to find that the leak in the land that the new frame house was sitting on appeared to have been plugged, leaving behind a long smear of light brown mud down the hill. It has taken them some years to get around to it.

Spotted a tall tree to the west at Worcester Park. A Wellingtonia which we had hitherto failed to score? Reference 4 suggests not, rather prompted by a sighting in the course of a similar outing to the present, but maybe we should double check, it not being as if we get to Worcester Park very often.

No proper stopping at Vauxhall, so we pushed onto Waterloo and picked up the Bakerloo Line. Coming across various left overs from the night before along the way.

Pit-stop at All Bar One for the regulation coffee and tea. Still thinking about taking lunch there, but we still have not made it. Maybe next time!

In the Hall, to be greeted by red and green floral displays topped off with something like the top of an overgrown foxglove, in green and white. Failed to find anything convincing, despite several searches, but yesterday, quite by chance, came across the tuberose in a book promoting a brand of perfume. A flower which has a strong smell, but perhaps one would not notice in this context.

I liked the stage presence of the violinist and I liked the Beethoven. But I was not so keen on the next piece, during a good part of which I nodded, hopefully not annoying the person behind me too much. Furthermore, I think we got the whole deal, which pushed Schubert off the menu, leaving us with a short encore. I was not best pleased, but rest of the audience seemed very enthusiastic. Maybe there were a lot of ex-pats there. One curiosity was the page tuner turning out for the score on the pianist's computer. Not something that I had realised could be necessary.

To John Lewis where I took cous-cous, a slice of (rather sweet) lemon meringue pie and a glass of red. I forget what BH had, but we were both quite happy with what we got. The Place to Eat is certainly a handy place for a light lunch on a Sunday.

A quick peek at the computers next door, the laptop on which I am typing getting a bit old a tired now, but all the ones on offer had rather small screens. Whereas I want something which is quite big and only fairly portable. I don't need to be carrying it about, working it while standing up or riding on the tube. But prices seems to have shot up since I last looked, looking to be of the order of £1,000 for what I want. Maybe it will be back to Tier1 to see what they can do again.

BH declined ladies' fashions, so down the hole again and off to Waterloo, where we just caught a slightly delayed train to Dorking. A much better outcome than just missing it and having to wait half an hour, which can sometimes seem like a long time.

PS 1: on the way to Waterloo, a young lady was very quick to offer me her seat. The sort of offer I no longer decline.

PS 2: we shall see what state a disc containing the Schubert from eBay, from Germany, arrives in in due course. Not dear, in any event. For some reason the brain confused the gramophone, where there is CD player, with the television, where there is no longer a DVD player, and bought a disc rather than a CD. A combination of natal carelessness with senior moment.

References

Reference 1: https://alena-baeva.com/.

Reference 2: https://vadymkholodenko.com/.

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

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/03/wellingtonia-70.html.

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

Reference 6: https://tier1online.com/.

Incentives

From time to time I worry about the way that management by performance indicator can push those managed into playing the performance indicators, can result in the indicators being more important than the performance that they are trying to capture. A matter last touched on at the end of reference 1.

Which led to reference 2, which led to reference 3, with some background coming from references 4 and 5. A dark tale of the impact of performance indicators on university research, with one result being that fossil hunters can go too far in their hunts. With particular reference to the fossils to be found in Kachin amber from the Hukawng Valley in northern Myanmar. All of this material, while not exactly open access, is to be found on the Internet.

The short version seems to be that the citation statistics all too often used to measure research performance are not up to the job and lead to an unhealthy preoccupation with getting published in a small number of prestige journals such as Nature and Science. That these prestige journals are too keen on flashy and newsworthy results, leading on the one hand to the neglect of work which is worthy but neither flashy nor newsworthy and on the other to behaviour unbecoming to a university research department. Including the theft of fossils from their countries of origin, most of which have strict rules about such matters.

The long version

The first part of reference 2 is about the use of rather crude indicators to measure the performance of academics. Indicators which were easy to calculate and which save hard pressed adjudicators for academic plums much of the bother of actually looking at the work of those they were adjudicating. Life is too short. Must get on.

One of these indicators is the journal impact factor (JIF) which counts up the mean number of times that things published in the subject journal get cited. With Nature and Science being way out in front, as can be seen by the left hand side of the figure above. You then use this factor to weight recent publications of the person being adjudicated - effectively subcontracting that adjudication to the editors of the prestige academic journals. 

Another indicator is the h-index of reference 6, computed for an individual rather than a publication, which attempts to reward quantity as well as quality. A bold statistician might attempt to map h-score onto academic rank, membership of the Royal Society or even Nobel prizes.

It is alleged that high prestige journals have to retract more papers given the temptation to cheat to get to the top of the heap.

There is also the problem of journals citing themselves, prompting allegations of gaming the JIF system, certainly an issue with the journal at the top of the table snipped above. Also with the taxonomic journal 'Zootaxa' to be found at reference 8.

As far as palaeontology is concerned it is dinosaurs which are sexy, that is to say publishable in high prestige journals, and bits of small dinosaurs preserved in Burmese amber particularly so. This kind of stuff even leaks out into the Twittersphere, or at least it did before Musk got his paws on it.

Burmese amber is a particularly tricky one given the unpleasant military regime presently in power, busily commercialising the amber mines in Kachin State, with some paleontologists going so far as to want to ban the publication of work on Burmese amber acquired after the middle of 2017. Another complication being the value of jade as an antique or a gemstone: most fossils are just fossils. While the authorities in Mexico, Brazil, Mongolia and China are getting much stricter about the export of fossils and are likely to insist on local participation in the work.

The paper with a plea to tone down the culture of publish or perish which pervades academia. A culture which some young academics choose to put aside in favour of more informal channels of communication - but quite possibly putting their career progression on hold thereby. In which connection I might also point to the tendency of management of some tertiary institutions - of which I can claim some secondhand knowledge - to ignore other contributions to academic life, such as a commitment to teaching, to the support of societies and activities related to one's discipline and pastoral care. Or even just a commitment to the collegiate life.

A digression

A related phenomenon is the way in which it is easy to get seduced by the trappings of something, rather than the substance. T. E. Lawrence, for example, wrote of all the comforting paraphernalia of a brigade headquarters, very soothing to a middle ranking general. Or the full Treasury trappings of a minute or memorandum, possibly now swept away in the tidal wave of email. Or the suburban hostess of a hundred years ago caught up in a welter of elaborate (dining) table furniture and furnishings.

From which it is but a short jump to ritual in general. With another example from last summer to be found at reference 9.

Conclusions

I suppose that it is this sort of thing that drives the monster lists of references which one gets at the end of today's academic papers. You scratch my back, and I'll scratch yours. While I recall, on several occasions, being surprised by old papers by eminences from the past which manage with footnotes and just a few references at the end. With the paper at reference 7, read before the great and the good of the Royal Society, having few footnotes and no references at all.

Glad I am not a middle ranking academic! Not the comfortable life it was until, say, the mid 1970's. And it was not well paid, even then, with, job-for-job, academics getting significantly less than civil servants. Although, I speak as someone once in the statistical service which was aligned with the administrators and which did rather better for itself than the often more highly qualified scientists. Lots of whom were to be found, for example, in what was then the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (Ag & Fish or MAFF to its friends) or the Ministry of Defence.

PS: I thought it perhaps time to take another peek at the film about academic life noticed at reference 10. But I doubt whether ITVX will plug the hole left by the absence of both DVD and DVD player.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/in-praise-of-classifications.html.

Reference 2: Pressure to publish is ‘fuelling illegal practices in palaeontology’: More safeguards and stronger journal policies are needed to curb the problem, say authors of analysis on publication trends - Clare Watson, Nature - 2022.

Reference 3: Publication pressure threatens the integrity of palaeontological research - Raja, Nussaïbah B., Dunne, Emma M. - 2022.

Reference 4: A simple proposal for the publication of journal citation distributions - Vincent Larivière, Véronique Kiermer, Catriona J. MacCallum, Marcia McNutt, Mark Patterson, Bernd Pulverer, Sowmya Swaminathan, Stuart Taylor, Stephen Curry - 2016. 6 pages of paper, 16 pages of stuff at the end. A bonus being the new-to-me word 'bibliometrician'.

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

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index.

Reference 7: On governors - J. Clark Maxwell - 1867.

Reference 8: https://www.biotaxa.org/Zootaxa/index.

Reference 9: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/mourning-form-and-content.html.

Reference 10: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/01/film-week.html.

Tweet

[the entrance to the short and rather tatty bit of the Hogsmill in question. Next left, the town hall. Next left, the bridge from which one can usually see a shoal of quite large fish, keeping their place, head into the current, without much apparent effort at all]. 

On the way back to the Rose car park at Kingston this afternoon, on the bit of Hogsmill behind the Police Station, we tweeted the very first grey wagtail of the year. The first such noticed since October 2021, as it happens at the very same place. See reference 1.

I thought grey wagtail to distinguish it from the common wagtail, but it now seems that the grey wagtail is a relative of the yellow wagtail and what I think of as the common wagtail, a common enough black and white bird here in Epsom, aka the pied wagtail, is a variety of the white wagtail. The taxonomy of the wagtails seems to be rather confused: maybe they are given to interbreeding.

Not as many wagtails noticed as I had thought at references 3 and 4. Although, as I recall, first noticed under the bridge over the River Tavy in Tavistock, the one by the Bedford Hotel - named for the Duke of Bedford who owns or used to own lots of land in the area. He also gave his name to Tavistock Square and a second cousin or something gave his to Russell Square. See reference 5.

PS 1: another senior moment in that until I happened to check with gmaps, I had thought the bridge in question was a bridge over the River Dart, name of the town notwithstanding. Brain clearly not what I once thought it was.

PS 2: we once stayed in the Bedford Hotel. I remember that I had one of my occasional back tooth aches while there and was reduced to buying some salt from a nearby convenience store. Which did the trick.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/kingston-one.html.

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

Reference 3: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/search?q=wagtail.

Reference 4: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=wagtail.

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

In Siberia

Picked up another book by Colin Thubron at the restocked Raynes Park platform library a few days ago, this one about his trip to Siberia, otherwise reference 1. A paperback with no photographs, but a serviceable map of Siberia at the front and just under 280 easy read pages of text arranged in nine chapters. Nothing by way of preface or introduction. Very much the same sort of book as the same author’s later book about a trip along the Amur and covering some of the same ground. Noticed at reference 2.

Roughly speaking, the northern coast of Siberia follows the 70th parallel. With the British Isles running, by way of comparison from the 50th to the 60th. But we are helped along by the warming Gulf Stream, at least for the present – so we are temperate rather than continental. With Siberia having several very big rivers, all flowing north, and a lot of mountains. And while some of it is very cold all the year round, some of it is very hot in the summer.

I was reminded of the takeovers of other large spaces – Canada, the US and Australia – where mainly European settlers pushed over the land, pushing the first peoples to the margins or to their deaths. And like Canada, with the population concentrated on the southern border. Just mines, miners and first peoples out in the often freezing conditions of the far north. This is reflected in this journey, mainly along this southern border, with three incursions into the far north – Vorkuta, Dudinka and Magadan.

I read of the Indo-European Scythians of reference 3, with their wide realm and the barbaric funeral arrangements for their leaders. Pushed out, in their turn by the Mongols, not Indo-Europeans at all. With my prior acquaintance being limited to references 4 and 5.

We have the same squalid remnants of the Soviet Union that we came across in the earlier book. Dead mines, factories and farms. Dead prison camps. Near dead villages and towns. Moribund museums and libraries. But lots of churches, with lots of old women – and some younger people – turning back to the church, which the communists in their 70 odd year rule had not managed to exterminate.

Lots of mining over the years, a lot of it done by convicts, a lot of it closed down now. The death rate among convicts, particularly in Stalin’s time, particularly in the grim conditions around Magadan in the far north east, were appalling, with their guards not faring that much better. And lot of attendant pollution – including acid rain killing off the forests and the sparse vegetation of the tundra beyond.

At the time of writing, much unemployment, poverty, crime and drunkenness. Things have probably got better during Putin’s reign. Maybe one of Putin’s achievements has been to use some of the money from gas and oil to do something about the grinding poverty of the life of so many of the people that Thubron comes across.

Old Believers of reference 7; people who used to die for the right to make the sign of the cross with two fingers, rather two fingers and the thumb. Some pagans, mostly revivals of a recently lost past, so a bit more authentic than our druids.

Old fashioned nationalists, nostalgic for the days when the Soviets, the Tsars or the Slavs were on top. From where I associate to a correspondent who went to the bicentenary celebrations of the Battle of Borodino outside Moscow in 2012, the battle which, in fable if not fact, marked the beginning of the end for the French. Celebrations which were full of crudely nationalistic young men who reminded him of the supporters of the National Front in this country in the 1970’s.

And then there are the mainly older people who are nostalgic about a golden era when all the nationalities of the Soviet Union pulled along together in peace and harmony, the Great Patriotic War and the horrors of Stalin’s reign notwithstanding.

Thubron clearly has a knack for getting to know people, a lot of them on the fringes of society. But he remains rather coy about the timetable and the nuts & bolts of his travels. He tells us nothing of any seriously unpleasant encounters which one might have thought must have come his way from time to time as an older traveller, travelling light and off-piste. But he does tell us of hiding dollar bills in innocent looking bottles in his luggage. One also suspects that he has done his homework: he seems to know a lot about the first peoples he encounters on his way. He seems to know a lot about the history of Siberia.

A good read, and I dare say that I would read another of Thubron’s books if it were to fall into my lap. But I shall not be going off to Amazon.

PS: during the read, I came across the article at reference 8, about the tension between one of Norway’s first peoples and wind farms, with the former regarding the latter as desecration. Perhaps the Russians have enough space to avoid problems of this sort – not that they are moving very quickly into wind. Not least because they lack our natural advantages in this department and they have plenty of fossil fuel.

References

Reference 1: In Siberia – Colin Thubron – 1999.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/a-trip-along-amur.html.

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

Reference 4: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/09/helmet.html.

Reference 5: http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2010/10/falling-out-of-thieves.html. 

Reference 6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Borodino. 

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

Reference 8: Greta Thunberg accuses Norway of ‘green colonialism’ over wind farm: Climate activist and members of Sami community stage protest after Oslo ignores court ruling – Richard Milne, Financial Times – 2023.

New pump

Following the more or less conventional pump lorry noticed yesterday towards the end of reference 1, out on the Screwfix tunnel circuit to find an entirely new sort of pump lorry blocking Meadway, just below the new frame house. For which, for example, see reference 2. With more holes in the road a bit further up the hill.

Inquiring at this second set of holes, it turned out that the two sets of holes were quite different. The ones more or less opposite the frame house were to do with installation of the gas supply, in the form of a yellow plastic pipe maybe 3cm in diameter. The ones down the hill were to do with a gas leak and featured a vacuum excavation lorry from Pier (UK) of reference 3. The idea is that you just suck up the soil to make one's hole, possibly using compressed air or water to loosen it up a bit in the first place. Very good for digging holes in awkward places, say full of service pipework which you don't want to disturb, let alone damage. The snap above, of a quite different brand of lorry, gives the idea. An idea which, it seems, is popular in Canada and which is now making headway over here.

Reference 3 offers various videos, including the one at reference 4. Cut the black top off. Stick your pipe down the hole.

Power up the pump and off you go. Yet to work out what the two compartments left are about, but it looks to be some sort of sorting by size. No doubt an expensive contraption, but one which is going to save a lot of manual work and avoid a lot of damage.

Perhaps we have the computer games industry to thank for making the construction of animations like this cheap enough to be worth their while for companies like Pier.

Carried on round the circuit to Ebbisham Square, outside the library, where the street food sheds installed a year or so ago are not thriving. I think one of the three remaining survives to service the large gang of food delivery drivers who hang out in and around the nearby McDonald's. 

It all goes to show that when you make something which starts rather informally formal, you take some of the gloss off. People want it to be a touch anarchic, authentic ethnic food from the grass roots, and certainly not smelling of council bureaucrats, however well meaning. Some enterprising type from East London renting out sheds to foreigners, maybe.

One supposes that the coffee chain at reference 5 took the lease - from the council? - and now want to sublet. Open to offers. But I thought throwing services into the rent was taking a bit of a chance. Depending on the nature of the food and the weather, one of these sheds could burn up a lot of gas. Wifi and all?

One of their better shops, up a notch from a shed.

No trolleys to be seen or collected in town centre, although I did not check station approach. While the East Street creationists seem to have been bashed into line by their janitor, with this once quality source of trolleys now run dry.

And so on around to the passage which leads to the Netflix tunnel, where I was treated to a very pretty display of periwinkles. Spring really is coming.

A fence to the setting for the horselet mini-series to be found at reference 6. Land perhaps now coveted by Failin' Graylin' and his developer friends, possibly for the provision of affordable homes, well out of the way of all the good people who are likely to vote for him.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/new-bag.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/11/a-proper-programme.html.

Reference 3: https://www.pier-uk.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NYU_46yaSXo.

Reference 5: https://esquirescoffee.co.uk/.

Reference 6: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=horselet&max-results=20&by-date=true.