Bard two

Continuing to play with Bard this morning, I was asking it about the salt and vinegar flavour combination. To which it gave quite reasonable answers, but I got irritated by its spelling 'flavour' the American way. Not unreasonable but irritating - and my version of Microsoft Word doesn't stand for it.

So 'why do you spell flavour without a 'u'' elicited a helpful reply, but one which ended 'it is important to note that there are many exceptions to these rules, and there are some words that are spelled differently in both American English and British English. For example, the word "aluminum" is spelled with a "u" in the United States, but without a "u" in Britain'.

So your apparently thoughtful conversation is punctuated with crude errors, which is not good for trust. I wonder what is going on here?

PS: Google's Bard seems to have rather taken over the bard landscape and to get to the original bard I had to qualify my search with 'wales'. Then reading the Wikipedia entry at reference 2, I thought that perhaps some management type at Google actually had a sense of humour.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/bard-one.html.

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

Say cheese

Towards the end of May, back to St. Luke's for what I think will be the last concert of this season: violin sonatas from Christian Tetzlaff (violin) and Kiveli Dörken (piano). Beethoven No.4 in A minor followed by the one and only such sonata Franck in A major.

I have heard Tetzlaff several times before, most recently at Wigmore Hall in 2018, noticed at reference 1. But Dörken does not appear in the archive at all, with or without the umlaut - never having quite got it clear in my mind when this matters. Nor does Franck, a French composer of the 19th century, originally from what became Belgium, more precisely from the same city as Simenon. Nor does he have a place with my vinyl. So all new.

As it turned out, a bright, clear day with a cooling easterly breeze. The bearded indigent was in declamatory mode.

Girlie chatter was non-stop to Waterloo, where I was greeted by a north-east breeze, which slowed me down a fair bit, particularly on the uphill stretch across Blackfriars Bridge and up to Clerkenwell Road. But I find that just over ten years ago, I logged 20 minutes at reference 2, so 25 minutes on this occasion not too bad.

Market Restaurant quiet. Some staff whom I recognised. One old lady reading away over her late breakfast whom I recognised. Bacon sandwich as good as ever.

St. Luke's pretty full. Perhaps it being the last proper concert of the season made a difference. The lady next to me, I thought probably a flat dweller, possibly in the Barbican, could trump my warfarin waffle with her steroid book, a smaller version of my warfarin book. Apparently steroid users, at least sometimes, carry warning cards in the way of warfarin users. She was also familiar with London's chamber music venues - with tastes a lot broader than mine, so she knew all about Franck.

Perhaps her encouragement was why I liked the Franck as much as the Beethoven, which I did know, with at least one prior outing, for example that noticed near ten years ago at reference 3. A plus was the restrained introduction from the BBC 3 lady; not as gushing as it sometimes is. Set off by the bright red trouser suit worn by the pianist: arms free which must have made for more comfortable playing than a penguin suit - a point made by Rosen in one of his books, probably that at reference 6. With a slow movement from Brahms by way of an encore. All very good.

Then down to Borough, which was busy. Lots of people eating oysters, which I still don't like the look of. Cheese shop busy too. I stayed with Poacher on this occasion, and being slightly overweight on that front, I thought better of getting a piece of the Doddington (of reference 4), which I had rather liked, as well.

And round the corner, the natty little extension noticed at reference 5 was coming on well. If the sign is anything to go by, someone must be spending a lot of money: we don't that sort of sign on our extensions here at Epsom; usually something far more suburban, not to say provincial.

By way of lunch, a cheese and tomato baguette from Upper Crust. Bread better than average, cheese worse than average. But it did the job. For some reason, not in the mood for something flashier.

Stopped off at Raynes Park where all the platform library had on offer was a Tom Clancy novel and a whole lot of rugby magazines. No good at all. But at least they had a Metro at Epsom Station, so I did get my fix of junk news. A reminder of how the rest of the world lives.

A spot of refreshment at home, and then some quality time with the Android manual. Where I learned how to put accents on letters on my Samsung phone, something I had never managed with my Microsoft phone. I failed with something called glide, but I did manage some elementary dictation - which I found more bother than it was worth. I used variations on the sentence 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog' - and I am pleased to be able to say this evening that Bard knows all about this sentence. As does both Bing and Google. But Google also corrected the sentence, and so I have to mark Bard down for missing that bit. It should have read: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog'. Which I now know is just one example of something called a pangram.

From the new possibilities, beyond the keyboard and the mouse, offered by the touch screen of a telephone, I associated to the new possibilities for expression offered by sign, say BSL or ASL, the languages of a lot of the deaf. While sign may not be great at the nuances of the conjugations of verbs - perhaps of older languages like Basque with lots of possibilities - it can do some things with great ease. For example, suggesting repetition or talking to someone on the other side of a room.

The day closed with my worrying about the lack of an email receipt for my second ride of the day, marked in the snap above as 'ended at invalid date'. Possibly something to do with the stand being rebooted when I turned up there for my third ride. I couldn't find the contact number on the TFL website, so I sent them a message instead - having declined the offer of expert chat about it all for a fee - an offer which I found a little irritating. However, the receipt turned up fairly soon after that and I got a courteous and helpful reply to my message not long after that. Including the contact number for next time. The system does work!

PS 1: 'Rosen' turns out to be one of the search keys which causes the search feature of File Explorer to hiccup. One has to close it down and reopen to get the results from the archive, in this case about a dozen of them, the first being reference 7 from 2007.

PS 2: on my second attempt, Bard admits to knowing about Doddington the cheese, as opposed to Doddington the garden centre. It also claims to turn up three blogs about cheese, with rather curious results when you click on the images provided. For a previous outing for Bard, see reference 8.

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/helmchen-two.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/03/st-lukes.html.

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/07/eberle-wosner-kreutzer.html.

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/let-them-eat-cake.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/04/tate-trimmed-cheese.html.

Reference 6: Piano Notes: the hidden world of the pianist - Charles Rosen - 2002.

Reference 7: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2007/02/pc-or-not.html.

Reference 8: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/bard-one.html.

Wilt

Following Bainbridge at reference 1, I was moved to procure Wilt by Tom Sharpe, a comic novel said to be based on his time at what was then called the Tech at Cambridge, now the Anglia Ruskin University, to be found at reference 3. A grandeur which, it seems, was being dreamed of even back in Sharpe's day. A place where, as it happens, my younger brother used to teach, so I do have a bit of inside knowledge.

A book which was to be found in our branch of Waterstone's, so no need to scour the Oxfam shop across the road, let alone flash my plastic with Amazon. An easy enough read of something over 300 pages.

A book which, for me, started well, then got deep into smut, which I found a bit tiresome. Eventually, the story resumed and it was, indeed, very funny. So funny in fact that I had to stop reading from time to time unless I did myself an injury - something that has not happened to me for a very long time. Not least because I am not usually attracted to books described as funny or comic. Never mind the sort of smut I associate with the stand up comics one sometimes comes across in seedy pubs, rather than with respectable writers.

The principal targets of all this are the Tech and its staff, particularly the senior staff, and the local plod. I don't suppose that either staff or plod were very pleased with their portrayal - but at least Sharpe had the good sense not to write the book while he was still there. Various swipes at various others, including a dodgy bachelor parson fond of a drop, somewhere out in the fens. And I should add, in defence of the smut, that it is the various reactions of all concerned to what became rather public smut which drives the novel along. No smut, no novel. No doubt the television version found some workable compromise - but I may never know, as it has not made its way into the world of ITVX, from whom we presently buy our television.

I don't think I will be revealing too much by saying that foundation piling has a part to play in all this. Something which I could relate to, having had experience, in the late 1960's, of testing the low grade concrete that got poured into the holes in the ground drilled by machines something like that snapped above. I remember particularly getting a bit of double bubble by doing this in the middle of the night - and coming close to tumbling down an unprotected hole in the dark. 

I forget what I did between packing up at the end of the afternoon and turning out for the midnight shift. Presumably not sitting in some pub, as I am still here to tell the tale. Split shifts always a bit of a problem in that way.

PS 1: I find now that there is a whole series of these Wilt books, of which I imagine this one is the first. But I doubt whether I shall be investigating.

PS 2: Friday: this morning I associate to slash and burn. A successful writer makes a home in one milieu, writes a few stories about it, and then, having burnt his or her boats, has to move onto a new milieu. And so it goes on. I think I first came across this model in a biography of a once-famous writer of the inter-war years, one Elinor Glyn. A writer I first came across in the margins of a life-boat station on the Isle of Wight.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/trolley-572.html.

Reference 2: Wilt - Tom Sharpe - 1976.

Reference 3: https://www.aru.ac.uk/. 

Reference 4: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0097891/. The LWT version.

Bard one

Back in February, I took a peek at ChatGPT, noticed at reference 1. Then towards the end of March, Google turned up with Bard. I kept the email, but did not do anything with it; it just never seemed to make it to the top of the to-do list. Then a few days ago, a correspondent tried it with an astronomical question – How many stars are there in the universe? – and I thought it did quite well. A handy summary of how you might go about answering such a question, together with a stab at the answer. Not stuff you should be trusting, but certainly stuff you could check with some combination of Google search, Bing search and Wikipedia - and from which you would probably learn. So clearly time for me to have a go, which I got around to a couple of days ago.

It so happens that I have been taking an interest in the sense of taste over the past few days, sweet, savoury (umami), bitter, salty, sour and all that sort of thing, so I thought I would start with that.

And Bard was quite good at giving me nicely written little summaries about various tasty matters. It responded quite well to probes. Sometimes it could say where it got its information from – an improvement on the expert systems of old which were, I believe, notoriously bad at explaining in plain language why they gave you the results that they did. Bard does rather better, giving you stuff that you can check.

There was some continuity in that you could refer to previous questions and answers and it would know what you were on about – although I dare say this only works within session.

It also responded to leading questions. So, for example, I asked if there were taste receptors for fat, to which it gave a clear answer of ‘no’, along with some useful tutorial material about what the body does know about fat. But when I probed a bit using ‘CF36’ as a clue, it seemed to dig around a bit more and, after a couple of goes, come up with a much more nuanced answer, much closer to the facts on the ground as I understand them. The catch there being that one had to know the clue first. 

With another possibility being that it worked out the answer that I wanted and, wanting to please, steered that way. Not so good.

It was quite good at general knowledge. It did rather well with the ‘pense-bête’ of a few days ago, for which see reference 4.

And sometimes it said no. I am only a language model and can’t handle that one.

But it did make some mistakes. And sometimes it invented stuff. Worse, sometimes you were not sure whether it had or not. Although, to be fair, there was a good supply of health warnings.

I think it did some inventing when, picking up on reference 1, I asked it about the Toller giant of references 5 and 6. Curiously, while it got the place – Eynesbury – right, it appeared to have made the rest of it up, despite enumerating various plausible looking local history sources. And it did not seem to be interested in taking on new information about the giant from me. Maybe one of the many strengths of Wikipedia is that it is very open in that way.

All in all, I was rather impressed. Many of the same strengths and weaknesses as ChatGPT, but I liked the way it had been packaged up and I thought it might well prove a useful tool. A useful supplement to search engines and Wikipedia.

In which connection it was interesting to read at reference 3 that Google senior management took the threat that ChatGPT posed to their search revenues very seriously indeed – ramping up their efforts with immediate effect. Action-this-day red flags all over the shop.

Other matters

Meanwhile, another correspondent had been playing with ChatGPT. He found it good at general knowledge and good on questions inviting waffle rather than answers. But useless when he asked it genuinely difficult questions, with one example being ‘what is the probability of their being a service denying outage at Amazon UK lasting more than 12 hours’. Apparently it did not even go as far as to enumerate the sort of supplementary questions that one would need to ask to tackle this one. Suggesting to me that, while ChatGPT might have hoovered up an awful lot of knowledge, it needs that knowledge to be organised, or at least to be organisable, in much the same way that knowledge is organised in a good text book. Such organised knowledge is not always going to be available for active, real world problems to which there is, as yet, no answer. From where I associated to Google’s success with protein folding: a computationally challenging business, but the rules of this game are known. And the game is closed away in its own little world.

Such matters no doubt occupy lots of powerful brains, real ones that is. Brains which worry about the two green boxes in the snap above, green boxes which reflect my own IT background in which there was a clear separation between data and process. A separation which I worry about from time to time: is it so clear, does it work at all, in the world of neural networks? And what about a separation of knowledge from language?

But at least I think that it is a rule of this particular game, that these systems built on large language models do not have specialist sub-systems, specialist add-ons. You can’t buy an add-on to do the history of science or the science of taste. Perhaps that will come.

A good by-product of all this was that I have learned that I can move text messages from my newish Samsung telephone to my oldish Microsoft flavoured laptop. The catch being that I can’t now do what I did then: I can still share a message with my gmail account but I can’t now work out how I converted a message to a pdf file and shared that. I should have been writing down what I was doing as I went. Another by-product was that I have been reminded that a text message is a much more primitive beast than an email message. Quick and easy, but with very little of the machinery that comes with an Outlook or gmail.

Conclusions

We shall see whether I get into the habit of using Bard.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/02/chatter.html.

Reference 2: https://bard.google.com/. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bard_(chatbot).

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/06/its-snowing.html. 

Reference 5: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/02/claim-to-fame.html. 

Reference 6: No tall story: just a giant's tale - Carol Moon – 1997.

Piano 72

Piano 72 was captured yesterday afternoon in Drury Lane, a piano that I must have cycled past many times on my way to the cheese shop in Shorts Gardens, just up the road from the Bullingdon stand by the Grand Temple.

No makers name available, at least not without closer inspection than I had time for.

But then again, perhaps not, as there is a quite different piano, an elaborate brown wood affair, in a slightly different position, to be seen in Street View. In any event, probably something to do with the colourful Sarastro restaurant to the left. 

The website suggests that the whole place is as loud as the outside decoration would suggest. Is it a place which I ought to sample?

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/piano-71.html.

Reference 2: https://www.sarastro-restaurant.com/. 'Sarastro offers a diverse range of seating accommodation; much of which is partially enclosed to offer partial privacy for diners of a more discreet nature'.

Group search key: pianosk.

A stroll in Chippenham

More specifically, an evening stroll, one fine Sunday evening, from the Angel Hotel in the market place at Chippenham, mostly along the road called the Causeway. A road which, in due course, turned into London Road, eventually becoming the A4.

This part of Chippenham was very quiet on this occasion. Not much action for the youngsters. And the overall impression was of a once prosperous provincial town which has yet to adjust to the new millennium. Lots of buildings, both commercial and residential, which no longer suited either purpose. One of what must be a large number of such towns scattered across Europe, the United States and Canada. And no doubt elsewhere, but I don't know about them.

What appears to be an old house, with a good line in both wisteria and front hedge. Street right.

It was not clear whether this building started life as a workshop or a church, but investigation this evening reveals a Grade II listed building which started life in the mid 19th century Methodist chapel which found new life as a printing works.

A very old format butcher. I thought long gone, but BH, although she only had my telephone to go on, was not so sure. No website, but according to Yell: 'We are a family run and owned butcher's shop, founded by Mr. John Iles in 1883. We stock traditional cuts of meat that you would probably remember your Grandmother buying when you went to her local butcher! Also we try our best to accommodate modern cuts. We source all of our products locally, with the majority of our commodities sourced within a 10 mile radius of our business...', so if gone, not that long gone. Digging a bit deeper I get to a piece in a local paper from 2017: '... Richard Iles and his son John decided to call it a day on their business John Iles and Son, which has been in the family since 1886, after Richard's wife fell ill...'. So my guess would be, not doing terribly well, but closure precipitated by illness rather than insolvency.

Heading back into town, a substantial church which looks as if it would have been well-worth a visit during the day. Reasonably likely to have been home to a decent piano.

A relic of the days when every town had one. And most of them offered billiards or snooker on the first floor. 

The river. Which has been noticed before, at reference 2. Kept full and good looking by a strategically placed weir. Possibly not so good in its natural state.

One end of the once proud Chippenham Cooperative Society. A movement which has known better days. Perhaps someone has produced a lavishly illustrated book of such past glories.

It would be interesting to be able to fast-forward to what the town will be like in say ten years time. But I should be surprised, assuming we are still around, if we were able to muster the energy for a tour.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/05/balanced-score-card.html. The public houses were noticed here.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-church-of-st-andrew.html. The church has been visited and the piano scored. It was, indeed, a respectable instrument.

Line ahead

I don't think we usually get mice in the garage at this time of year, more something for the winter. But mice there are, gnawing away at our potatoes.

So out with the traps, baited with bits of dry bread which seems to work better than the cheese suggested in some children's stories. On the last occasion we caught four or five on more or less successive nights.

PS 01: yet another memory error. It seems that the last time was the end of March 2020; not winter at all. And I ended up cleaning the garage out. Hopefully that will not be necessary on this occasion. But at least I was right about the four or five. See references 1 and 2.

PS 02: Wednesday morning: from the bottom: nothing, disturbed, sprung. This last one containing a small mouse. It looked like a clean kill, by the blow across the muzzle, just in front of the eyes.

PS 03: Thursday morning. Nil return: nothing on the trap front and no gnawing of potatoes.

PS 04: Friday morning. Nil return. Traps stood down.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/03/rodent-action.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/housekeeping.html.