1921 Census

[my father being highlighted]

Various people have been telling me about the 1921 Census, recently made available online.

It seems that the Census Office, now I think part of the Office for National Statistics, have outsourced access to the 1921 Census to the National Archives, who, in turn, have outsourced it to an outfit called Findmypast. Opening gambit is that it is all free, but very soon they are asking me to stump up a modest £2.50.

For which I learn that my father's father had already died by 1921, leaving his wife, who had borne him ten or more children, a widow - but one who must have been quite tough as she lived on into the early 1950's. There may even be photographs of me sitting on her knee. I had already known that he was a farmer and fruit grower, also that what had been one of his orchards was now a desirable housing estate in easy commuting reach of Cambridge, for which see reference 3. In my father's young day, the commute in question being somewhere between a farm track and a highway - along which the first born sister used, on occasion, to drive cart loads of fruit to market.

Also that the three elder daughters had all left home by 1921 - despite being of the First World War generation, that is to say girls for whom boys were in short supply.

Mostly fields when I was a child. The Thorpe, seemingly dating from Saxon times, running roughly north south, middle left, being the road in question. 

PS 1: I should declare an interest in that my first white-collar job was with what was then called OPCS, the organisation which conduced population censuses in the UK in the 1970's. My first boss's boss got his promotion from outstanding service on the 1971 Census. My first boss was not too pleased about this, but there, there is nothing new.

PS 2: a correspondent points out first that this Census has been copied by hand into the computer, with, at least on previous occasions, the first language of copiers not always being English. Given the quality of the source material, it is likely that there are plenty of copying errors - not that I noticed any. And second, that the Findmypast price structure is not well suited to the serious amateur genealogist.

References

Reference 1: https://www.ons.gov.uk/.

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

Reference 3: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2012/12/memory-lane.html.

Vocabulary

Looking up 'loupe' and 'campagnol' in Littré yesterday evening, and then turning a few pages, I came across a some snippets worth sharing.

First, 'loupe' was being used by Simenon in Maigret in a sense which suggested mole, as in circular, brown growth on or in the skin. Littré has about a column inch for the word, first about 'lazy tumours under the skin', quite possibly moles, then rather more about some comparable growths in trees. Then something about oysters, then uncut precious stones, as in rough diamonds. Penultimately, a lentil shaped disc of glass used for magnification. Lastly, a term in metallurgy which I did not work through. While all this is reduced online to magnifying glass. While mole as in animal is a 'taupe'. All of which leaves me in rather a muddle.

Second, 'un lovelace' has made its way into French from Clarissa, much noticed last summer, for example at reference 1. Starting as a posh seducer, but then shading into something more louche, less pleasant.

Third, 'loup-cervier', which one comes across in Balzac's world of big business, which turns out to be nothing to do with wolves, rather a big cat. That is to say a lynx. While having got the general idea in the world of big business, I had never bothered to look it up before.

All that Littre says which is relevant is that 'cervier' come from the Latin 'cervarius', which was an adjective meaning being to do with deer. The sort of thing that wolves might well have hunted. So perhaps a loup-cervier is a big person who hunts little people, to use the language favoured by the very rich in the US when called to account for non-payment of taxes or whatever. Inappropriate use of livestock.

And fourth, our word 'campaign' in its military sense is a straight crib from the French 'campagne', mostly used to mean country, in the sense of rural rather than urban. Lots of fields and trees. Presumably from the time when the leisurely summer manoeuvres of armies were conducted in the country.

PS: 'campagnol' seems to be a slightly vague word, used in the French countryside for anything in the way of a small rat. Perhaps a vole.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2021/08/clarissa-concluded.html.

Reference 2: Les Scrupules de Maigret - Simenon - 1957.

Low life

The remnants of a fine arboreal fungus in Longmead Road, just behind the orange caravan serving burgers, bacon sandwiches and such like. Stream to the left, road to the right. Seems odd now that I had not noticed it before, but a quick inspection failed to turn any such notice up.

A bit further up, that is a bit further towards the school at Pound Lane, a small flock of redwings grazing on the more or less bare ground underneath a tree. They used to visit our back garden to feed on the firethorn in the autumn, but they missed last year. See reference 1.

Much later, I thought to take a look at the healthy people at reference 2, recently noticed at reference 3. People who it turns out, deliver health over, as it were, Facebook enabled wires. The customers pay for remote access to doctors, who get some of the take - with the balance going to Maya for providing the service, for providing the introductions. Not such a bad idea in a country - in this case Bangladesh - where I imagine there are a lot of people living in small villages with not much in the way of health services immediately to hand. Perhaps there is also the issue of Muslim ladies preferring or requiring lady doctors.

So I thought I would take a peek at their headquarters in Street View, the address given being 'Level 9, Plot 96, Bay's Bella Vista, Road 11, Block #C, Banani, Dhaka 1213 '. Street knew all about a Bay's Bella Vista and a Banani in Dhaka 1213, but I still failed to parse the address and run it to ground. But I have learned that a lot of streets in Dhaka are called things like 'Road N', where N is quite a small number. You have to know what sector your Road N is in if you want to run it to ground. Unlike over here where road and street names are generally used just the once in any given area. So there is just the one Manor Green Road in Epsom. And furthermore, it was quite interesting to see what the back streets of Dhaka were like.

But, unfortunately, somewhere along the line, something called bestfaustcaptcha had managed to get inside my laptop and the following morning, that is to say this morning, started sending all kinds of threatening messages to me, via the notification facility bottom right on my screen. I have complained before about Microsoft making this facility available to all and sundry, and now the complaints are even more justified.

Threatening messages, dressed up as coming from respectable corporations like Microsoft and McAfee, telling me that I was badly infected with something or other and ought to do something about it. Presumably pay them some money. Bing knew all about these people and offered all  kinds of ways to get rid of them, most of these ways looking complicated and some of them involving me paying someone else some money.

Not keen on that, so time for a bit of (time consuming) DIY. Bring back the late lamented BT Tech Experts! First step, put the important files onto a data stick. Good job that they are as big and fast as they now are. Then fire up a quick virus scan in Defender. Nothing. Then something called an offline scan, supposedly able to fix some things that a quick scan can't. This probably worked, but gave me no feedback at all. Then a full scan, which took about four hours and found nothing. At least I was able to use the laptop while this last was going on, albeit a bit bumpily, with odd pauses from time to time. Bad notifications still coming through.

Given that the notifications had an Edge flavour, maybe the answer was to uninstall Edge and reinstall a clean copy. Except that somehow I managed to uninstall Office, and Edge did not seem to want to be uninstalled at all. But at least that meant that it was still there and that I could use it to reinstall Office. Bad notifications still coming through.

Eventually, more or less by chance, I found my way to Edge settings where I found that there were settings which could be applied to individual web sites, including one called block pop-ups. Set the setting and some hours later the bad notifications have still vanished.

Quite apart from the loss of time involved, depressing to think of all those geeks out there trying to make a living by stealing from the rest of us. One might think that someone clever enough to do this kind of stuff would want to do something better with their time.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/tweet.html.

Reference 2: https://mayadigitalhealth.com/.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/for-record.html.

First oxtail of the year

Two purchases from the Manor Green Road butcher on this occasion. Stewing steak and oxtail. The stewing steak went first, taken with dumplings. While here I report on the oxtail which followed.

But the day started with continuing to test for the search visibility of the registration plate 'G08 FOO', first noticed at reference 2. Results a bit better this time, with Google giving car registration plate as an option, even if it did not turn one up. Both Google and Bing found lots of obscure part numbers which included 'G08' and lots of Chinese, mainly Hong Kong, websites involving 'FOO'. Some hits involving both parts of the search clue, but none finding both parts in the same place. I remembered about a search engine salesman years ago explaining that we should test candidates in exactly this way. Load up some obscure text string and make sure that the candidate search could find it some days later. A search which, I should add, was restricted to some large chunk of our corporate database and a very small chunk of what was then a much smaller Internet.

Prepared the oxtail and into the oven at 100°C at 07:50. Interestingly, the telephone did a much worse job at accommodating the black spots on the oven window than the human eye. The spots, seemingly on the outside of the outer of the two glass panels in the door, appear to be a matter of appearances rather than function, the idea being that this part of the front of the oven should appear to be a reasonably uniform black, which it does unless you look straight it from a reasonably short distance.

At this point I received by email the first of what has become a series of pdf files containing popular undergraduate textbooks, albeit a few editions old or a few years old, which does not matter for my purposes. And mostly proper copies, rather than a scanned version. In this case, a proper copy of the second edition of Mesulam's 'Principles of Behavioral and Cognitive Neurology' from 2000. Perhaps the copyright holders do not fuss about this too much so long as sales hold up, with most serious readers wanting the latest edition, despite their often coming in at well over £100. 

Then off around Jubilee way, to find lots of activity outside the new Lidl HQ. Gardens and car parks - these last in addition to the multi-storey behind.

Next item was Digital Realty, a block I have passed many times and given the fancy fence, often wondered what it was about. But today I got around to checking and it turns out to be a serious data centre operation, offering what appears to be the full works. Whole halls, cages, uninterrupted power supplies, serious connectivity, including being hooked into something called the London Internet Exchange. See references 3 and 4. And on subsequent passes, I could see that it was quite a big operation, with serious physical security and with power equipment visible just inside the main gate. Who knows what vital operations are hosted there.

More mundane, this striking weed at the junction between Jubilee Way and Cox Lane.

Drained off most of the fat & water and added the mushrooms at 16:15.

Served at 17:00, with white rice, white beans and green salad - a version we have not tried before, but what I had been given when I was first introduced to this way of cooking oxtail, back in what had once been the Wheatsheaf in South Lambeth Road. With some more of the golden anniversary wine first noticed at reference 1. We thought the oxtail was spot on; succulent and with just the right amount of chewiness.

Not quite all done at the first sitting, with their being enough left for a snack at some point the following day.

For dessert we had semi-wholemeal mincemeat and apple pie, semi in the sense that BH ran out of white flour and didn't care to use my bread flour, of which there was an ample supply. In any event, all very satisfactory, taken with hot yellow custard. The existence of other sorts being something by way of a rather feeble standing joke.

Lost at Scrabble by a modest 20 points, despite going out.

Oddly the fat did not set overnight, although the jelly underneath did. BH took most of it on toast. I tried it, but did not much care for it, beyond noting a resemblance to the flavour of pig's brawn. Same sort of boiling up I suppose.

As it happened, I went on to read in 'Ulysses' later on that, according to Bloom at least, in early twentieth century Dublin, dripping was what people who could not afford butter put on their toast. While I remember that FIL was quite nostalgic about the stuff, from his fairly pinched childhood in Portsmouth's old town - not that we ever gave him any. Maybe the odd bit of marrow.

Winding back, the day of the oxtail closed with another go at searching for 'G08 FOO'. More Chinese restaurants, this time including a noticeable number from Australia and New Zealand. My impression is that these search results are very dynamic, varying every time according to the circumstances of the moment. Not replicable at all. Tried adding 'car' and then 'jaguar' to the search term, but neither addition succeeded in recovering the original post.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/11/second-oxtail-of-2021-2022-season.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/an-odd-block.html.

Reference 3: https://www.digitalrealty.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://www.linx.net/.

Tainted victory

A win by the substantial margin of more than 100, around 300 to 200 this afternoon, powerfully fuelled by 'erotica' scoring 87 on the bottom line, including the bonus of 50 for using all seven of one's tiles.

A tainted victory though, as although BH did not challenge and so the word stands, it is not, as it turns out when I checked later, in our first edition OED. It is in Webster's, about a hundred years younger, so the word must have come into regular use relatively recently. And it is not as if, on our house rules anyway, there is any penalty for a failed challenge. As a child, I think we played that a challenger had to be the player to left of the challenged player and that he or she lost their go if their challenge failed. Perhaps we took the game more seriously then than we do now, and needed to push back against vexatious challenging.

On the other hand, BH took great pleasure in challenging my subsequent attempt at 'zoa' top left. My thinking was that one had protozoa and metazoa so there ought to be zoa. OED - with the last volume top right in the snap above - ruled otherwise, only including 'zoea' but marking it as not naturalised and so not allowed (double vertical bar). While according to Webster's online a zoea is 'a free-swimming planktonic larval form of many decapod crustaceans and especially crabs that has a relatively large cephalothorax, conspicuous eyes, and fringed antennae and mouthparts'. I forfeited my go.

Webster's print also allows 'zoa' as the plural of 'zoon', which seems to be a fancy word in Zoology for an egg. There is probably something special about this sort of egg, but I couldn't make out what that was.

PS 1: only slightly tainted as I won by more than the tainted 87.

PS 2: for the avoidance of doubt, using all one's tiles at the end of the game, when one has less than seven tiles, does not qualify for the bonus.

Trolley 463

Having been spotted a couple of days previously, this trolley was picked up from the passage leading to the underpass which takes one to Screwfix and from there to the Longmead Road. A passage from where I have picked blackberries in the past. U-turned and returned to Sainsbury's, returning via the footbridge on the town side of the underpass.

And after the footbridge we had the gas depot, where I noticed hire plant from Sunbelt, people first noticed outside the new Lidl HQ a few weeks previous. Perhaps they have appointed a dynamic new manager for the UK who is pushing hard for market share. See reference 2. The telephone did not do too badly considering that that gaps between the strands of thick, black coated wire were probably less than a centimetre.

Then at the Blenheim we had the full moon rising to the north east. Well to the north of the traditional, eastern rising place.

With the Blenheim presently reduced to five evening shifts and two lunchtime/afternoon shifts - which reduces the chances of my visiting to close to zero - with recent visits being at lunchtime or in the afternoon. Hopefully things will pick up as the plague recedes.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/01/trolley-462.html. 

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/12/triumphal-arch.html.

For the record

[image building from Meta]

From time to time I have a pop at the evil doings of Facebook, so I thought that in fairness I should notice another aspect of those doings.

Doings which might well be primarily intended to build their presence in poorer parts of the world, but which are also providing a service.

With the report at reference 1 which prompted this post being prompted by a six hour shutdown of the Facebook operation last October, a shutdown reported at reference 2. In brief: ‘… configuration changes on the backbone routers that coordinate network traffic between our data centres caused issues that interrupted this communication. This disruption to network traffic had a cascading effect on the way our data centres communicate, bringing our services to a halt…’.

The story seems to be that there is no regular Internet access in many parts of the world, say rural parts of India or Afghanistan, but there are mobile phones and mobile phone networks. These telephone networks can be leveraged to provide Internet access of a sort and this is what Facebook is doing.

I was puzzled by the numbers part of the story where we are told that: ‘… more than 3.5 billion people around the world use Facebook’s suite of social networks and apps, including Facebook.com, Messenger app, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among others. The country with the largest population of Facebook users is India, with an estimated 340 million users. (The United States, by contrast, has an estimated 200 million users.)…’. So where are the other 3 billion? It seems like an awful lot.

But the trick seems to be to provide Internet-lite on a mobile phone without that phone incurring data charges – data charges which many of the intended users could not afford. With the Facebook umbrella under which this is done being called Free Basics. See references 3, 4, 5 and 6. Mostly quite easy going. But not reference 7, turned up by Bing, but which looks to be about something else altogether.

In order to work mobile phone operators and website providers need to sign up and get on board – and what these last are buying for their bother is reaching many more people – perhaps potential customers – than they otherwise would. Facebook clearly wants to be seen to be promoting good works, so we are told about the healthcare people at reference 8 who are using Free Basics to massively increase their reach.

A quick look at refence 8 did not tell me what there business model was. Maybe they provide some basic, free health support and you buy stuff from their shop. I don’t think that they are a charity.

While reference 6 is geek-stuff about how Free Basics works – and how it does not support JavaScript or high volume content. Presumably older mobile phones don’t do JavaScript and high volume does not sit well with free.

So as well as all the bad stuff, it seems that Facebook are doing some good stuff. Good in the sense that they help people in the short term and by so doing help themselves in the long term. Much the same deal as Google: suck in lots of people with lots of free service – then sit back and collect the advertising revenue that comes with them.

Whereas you pay Microsoft for their services and it is only recently that they have started loading them up with advertisements. And while the advertisements are irritating, I imagine that people paying for their services still accounts for most of their revenues. The tail is not yet wagging the dog.

References

Reference 1: Millions of people rely on Facebook to get online. The outage left them stranded: For huge parts of the world, Facebook is synonymous with the internet - Eileen Guo, Patrick Howell O'Neill, MIT Technology Review – 2021.

Reference 2: https://engineering.fb.com/2021/10/04/networking-traffic/outage/. The outage story from Meta (aka Facebook).

Reference 3: https://www.facebook.com/connectivity/solutions/free-basics/. Introduction to Free Basics.

Reference 4: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org. More on Free Basics.

Reference 5: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/platform-technical-guidelines. What doesn’t work on Free Basics. A click from reference 4.

Reference 6: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/internet-org/how-to-submit. More do’s and don’ts for wannabee participants. A click from reference 4.

Reference 7: https://freebasic.net/. But I think that this is something else altogether.

Reference 8: https://mayadigitalhealth.com/. The healthy people.