Dining west

This being a record of our public dining during our recent tour of the west country, not elsewhere noticed.

First, back to the Burrator Inn of Dousland of reference 1, a place we have been using occasionally for some years now, and which, in various ways, has served well. And started well with this fine Carex pendula, bigger than any of those in our garden. I dare say it likes the extra water. Captured at Ravenscroft of Yelverton.

While the Burrator Inn sported this fine table. I don't suppose either bench came with it originally - but where from? What sort of establishment would want such a thing? A high table from a college dining hall, ecclesiastical or otherwise.

They served us well, only being let down in my case by the quality of the fish which came with my fish and chips, usually much better in public houses these days. I wondered whether the Bidfood in question had grades of fried fish on offer, with every day, taste the difference and all that sort of thing.

The handsome Monterey pine in front of Buckfast Abbey, where the handsome cafeteria was the next stop. It was looking better than it has looked in the recent past, and the ticket explained that this was an old tree which needed plenty of TLC. Also hard to know what to do about handsome specimens such as this when they reach their sell-by date.

The Araucaria araucana was looking well, although the lower branches had been taken off. Maybe I should have told the telephone to lengthen the exposure. Worth noting that the frame below has just two small wheels on the front two legs, and served a lot better than my four wheeled trolley would have done, which would have proved hard to manage and would have provided less support. The only downside being that BH found the scraping of the back legs on certain surfaces rather irritating.

I did not get to take a look at the famous Barbarossaleuchter on this occasion. Or, more accurately, the Corona lucis. As can be seen from reference 5, I have been wondering for some time about why the abbey comes to have such a splendid thing. Since that post I have been presented with a copy of the picture book mentioned there and I now know. It seems that the second Abbott, Anscar Vonier, a man of many talents, worked hard on the decoration of the abbey in the 1930s. This came to include a good deal of elaborate metalwork, mostly in a medieval style, mostly the work of the Witte workshop of Aachen, almost hereditary goldsmiths to Aachen Cathedral, home to one of the three models for the Corona, the Barbarossaleuchter. The corona was the gift of one Miss. Sass of Shyrehall, Buckfast in memory of her mother.

Google knows nothing of the donor Miss. Sass, which I found a little surprising, but does turn up a planning applicant of 2019: 'Mrs Christine Cottle, Shyrehall, Grange Road, Buckfast, TQ11 0EH', with one end of Grange Road providing access to part of the Buckfast Abbey estate.

Gmaps provides a map of the postcode in question.

And StreetView comes up with the snap above. Not quite the right name (Shyrehill rather than Shyrehall) and not quite the right age, but maybe the site if not the building once occupied by Miss. Sass. While Mrs. Cottle clearly has enough about her to be thinking of developing land in Salcombe (3010/18/FUL), a very desirable spot in south Devon. Lots of Range Rovers.

Google does better with Witte, turning up the informative reference 6, which includes a mention of Buckfast.

Back with the cafeteria, I took the chicken dinner option, which was adequate rather than good, but that did not really matter. The place served our purpose well.

Made up for the chicken dinner later in the day, with a fine lentil soup, flavoured with saucisson sec and cauliflower florets.

But before that, an interesting bit of walling up on the moor, above our cottage. Big blocks below, small blocks above, the whole topped off with a layer of turf. Must have been an expensive business.

On our last day, we thought a second outing to the Church House Inn was in order, that is to say a day not involving the car. The first outing having been noticed at reference 4. This second outing started well with a fine mushroom soup, even if the salad garnish was unnecessary. Soup bowl on table and bread on small side plate might have been better.

But I was a bit disappointed with the turkey pie, topped rather than pie proper, and most of the vegetables were a bit tired. The roast potatoes were good though, and plentiful enough that, unusually, I was unable to finish them.

Not very busy this Friday lunchtime. It was end of season, but it was also a retirement area and the house was only open four days a week. Was it going to be enough? No doubt we shall find out next year. 

A curious bit of carpentry on the way out. They quite liked these sorts of curves in the 1920s and 1930s - but on the other hand it is only pine, rather than some grander timber. Have to ask them next time.

Last stop, the Royal Lion of Lyme Regis, now a member of the Hall & Woodhouse family. The once famous Oak Room restaurant may be more or less closed, but they have been allowed to keep a lot of the old furniture and fittings and they have been allowed to keep their own website (at reference 7). In the picture of the front of the hotel there, the present dining room is to the right of the front door, while the building further to the right, once a different hotel has been, at least partially, colonised by the present hotel.

Maybe the serious flat arch is where the two hotels were punched together?

At dinner, the bruschetta was adequate, with the mix of vegetables being a bit much for my palate.

Medallions of lamb were good, although, as so often, they were let down by their vegetables. Luckily I still had bread left with which to make sandwiches. And having not finished my potatoes the day before, we did not finish our second bottle of wine on this occasion, with this second bottle only getting knocked off a couple of days later, back at Epsom.

While all this was going on, BH spotted a family connection on the wall, connection in that someone on her father's side used to be a tenant farmer of Morris somewhere near his Oxfordshire home, Kelmscott Manor. One of her grandfathers may have been photographed as a baby sitting on the great man's knee in the latter's old age.

PS 1: memory being difficult today, and while I got to Monterey pine, I was not sure that it wasn't really a Ponderosa pine. Fortunately, Bing turned up reference 2 which cut through the problem.

PS 2: further investigation of the Morris connection reveals error. The story now is that BH's father (usually FIL in these pages) was the baby sitting on a knee, the knee belonging to a lady in the Morris entourage with modelling connections. FIL's grandfather was the tenant farmer, while FIL's father went for a sailor. References 8 and 9 suggest that this was probably Mary, the younger daughter of the original Morris, who lived at the Manor after her mother's death in 1914 and died herself in 1938. Which fits well enough with FIL being born in 1920. The farm was probably, in the beginning, farmed by the occupant of the Manor, but at some point a farmhouse was carved out of the Manor buildings, with both it and the farm being let out. Leaving the occupants of the rest of the Manor free to enjoy the country life. Maybe they kept the odd cow and chicken. We probably still have the photograph somewhere. 

In the margins, I have been reminded that the private lives of Morris and his circle were rather complicated. And that there is a strong connection between Morris and the textile factories which were once Merton Mills. Better known to me, quite a long time ago now, as home to several interesting second hand book shops. It was possibly one of them which sold me my fine Polish atlas.

PS 3: I think the nearest I got to Kelmscott Manor, was a visit to Lechlade in 2014, as reported at reference 10. BH says that I declined a visit to the Manor on that occasion.

References

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

Reference 2: https://www.buckfast.org.uk/some-tlc-for-our-fabulous-monterey-pine/.

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

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-church-house.html.

Reference 5: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/buckfast.html.

Reference 6: https://second.wiki/wiki/bernhard_witte_goldschmied.

Reference 7: https://www.royallionhotel.com/.

Reference 8: William Morris: Decor and design - Elizabeth Wilhide - 1991.

Reference 9: https://kelmscottmanor.org.uk/explore/william-morris-family/.

Reference 10: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/03/thames-valley.html. 

Configurations from a woodcut

It so happened that the day after I posted reference 1, I happened to look at a woodcut of foxgloves by the late Monica Poole, one of a number of her studies using foxgloves as a starting point. Snapped above using my telephone: not bad, but a little dark.

It struck me that that sort of coincidences needed for some of the configurations of reference 1 were commoner here than they are in real life, so I thought a closer look was called for. With the results that follow. With the catalogue of configurations included above, for convenience. For present purposes we are interested in 02 (L) thru 09 (asterisk), the configurations involving just the one junction. I have tried to centre the marking circles on the junction in question in the snaps which follow.

A 06 (K), formed by the hatching coming to a point at a leaf.

Ignoring the hatching to the leaves above, another 06 (K) right, formed by the hatching coming to a point at a flower.

And if we use the hatching, we have another middle, formed by the hatching coming to a point at the sepals to that same flower.

But what about left? Do we score 02 (L) without the hatching or 05 (Y) with? Do we disregard hatching altogether, in much the same way as one might (try to) disregard shadows on a photograph?

In all three cases, we have the hatching aligned with the edges and junctions of the foreground picture – the sort of thing that would be improbable in a photograph.

A 04 (X) formed by the cross of area of hatching.

Left, another 04 (X) of the same sort. While right, an alignment of the hatching gives us a 05 (Y).

A 04 (X) involving a flower foreground line and a hatching background line.

A 06 (K), formed by the crossing of two seed cases coinciding with a stem.

Another 06 (K), this one formed by break in a flower tube coinciding with the edge of a leaf.

A 07 (Ψ), formed by the meeting of two sepals coinciding with the flower tube.

Another 07 (Ψ), formed in much the same way, but rather more ragged.

With this 07 (Ψ) left being clear enough, but depending on the alignment of the background hatching.

While right, the alignment of the background hatching, the leaf and the stem giving us a 05 (Y), arrowhead variety.

Another 04 (Y) formed by a stigma. One of a number of such on this woodcut, some clearer than others.

Two 03 (T)’s formed by splits in the flower tube, aka corolla. One might argue for a 04 (Y) for the upper one. In any event, there are lots of 03 (T)’s elsewhere.

A selection of 03 (T)’s.

A bit of a stretch, but if we regard the leaf and the stalk as edges, taken with the edge of the hatching we get a 09 (asterisk).

Again a bit of a stretch, but one could argue here for a 08 (man), more prominent than the alternative interpretation of 09 (asterisk).

And lastly, if we treat the white shoot as an edge, another 08 (man). 

Curiously, it has taken all this for me to properly notice that the central, flowering shoots are black, while the blank shoots to the sides are white.

A snap of some real foxgloves, turned up by Google. I don’t think that they have blank shoots at all and all the serious leaves are at the base of the flower shoots. A bit of artistic creation here?

Conclusions

The conversion of a more or less natural scene to a woodcut produces plenty of well-formed configurations. Particularly a woodcut in this style, with lots of straight edges and lots of geometric hatching.

It also seems to produce a larger number of the more complicated configurations, some of them depending on the way that the hatching has been ‘snapped to grid’, producing lots of alignments which would be rarer in a natural scene, in a photograph. There seem, for example, to be lots of 06 (K)’s. At a stretch one finds a couple of 08 (man)’s and a 09 (asterisk), neither of which turned up in natural scenes.

An affinity of both artist and viewer for these configurations? Evidence of their being agreeable, in some sense, to the human brain?

There is also a sense that one might do better here to analyse shapes rather than junctions, that the various small shapes are visually more interesting and more prominent than the junctions.

So right in the snap, we have a simple triangle, with another, smaller, triangle to its right, across the stem. Centre, we have a black seed case, repeated through the woodcut with variations. And left we have the rather more complicated flower, also repeated through the woodcut with variations.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/09/configurations-from-nature.html. 

Reference 2: The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes - Mark A. Changizi, Qiong Zhang, Hao Ye, Shinsuke Shimojo – 2006. The source of the catalogue snapped near the top.

Rural enterprise

A couple of weeks ago, we made our way from Holne to Lyme Regis, with the last stretch being the A3052 from Exeter. First up was the Cat & Fiddle Inn, fifty years ago an important venue for young people. A venue which I think involved both music and dancing, this being a few years before discos took over; one still had rural bands. Rich young people got there in their minis and such like, other people perhaps caught the bus or walked - but I never made it in the course of my stay in Exeter at that time. The place is still up and running, seemingly morphed into a fine dining destination, for which see reference 1.

Just past there, and thinking that it was time for a pit-stop, we came across the Greendale Farm Shop, which we thought would do our business. Most of these places are little more than an excuse for a large cafeteria. This place did have one of those, one which took reservations, but there was also a very large farm shop selling all manner of stuff to eat. This included a large butchery department, offering a decent range of meat, and a fish department. It all looked rather busier and healthier than many places of its kind.

The cafeteria was busy too - lots of young people and lots of young families out for breakfast - this being mid morning - but they could fit us in provided we were quick as the table was reserved. Tea and bun - perhaps a croissant - for me. One of those ungainly cups which you get offered all too often these days, but I did devise a neat way to deal with my tea bag - other than using the saucer. Lots of young table staff running about with breakfast type food which look decent and substantial.

I also puzzled about the table. Was it all fake? If it was, they had bothered to fake up the end grain, which fakers don't usually bother with. The place was a bit too busy and my back was a bit too dodgy to be turning the table over, which might have revealed all, but in the end, I opted for fake as the rounded edge looked decidedly plastic and the end grain did not match the surface grain, at least not to my eye. Clever bit of faking though for all that.

Outside to stretch our legs a bit and to see the sights. Including a plume which looked rather like a fire.

The top of the car park where the offer beyond the maize was a mammoth slip and slide. Something, one supposes, for the children.

And beyond that, gmaps reveals a full-on industrial estate. All kinds of more or less respectable people, including the Royal Mail, DHL and FedEx. Anybody's guess where any farm might be.

Zooming out a bit more, there is more. You would not know it from the road, but the area, not many miles east of Exeter proper, is clearly a hive of rural enterprise. More money, no doubt, in enterprise than there is in farming.

Some sort of recycling operation? Except that the shed (in faint) says BabiesR'Us, which appears to be part of the ToysR'Us operation of reference 3, despite the shed not looking much like a superstore for baby gear. We should have taken a closer look at the time.

From there onto Lyme Regis to try our hand at the car parks there. Our first attempt was on the car park which straggles along the beach at the western end of town. Probably fine if you get there at the crack of dawn, not so clever in the middle of the day. Our second attempt was on the car park at the top of town, the one we had intended to try for in the first place, but missed the turning. This one turned out to have plenty of space and lots of facilities. Including what appeared to be a heritage hut for a car park attendant, left standing between the car park machine and the electric charging points.

The telephone parking option was the JustPark people of reference 4. I was not going to get connected to them then and there - if ever -  I am already signed up with four or five such outfits - but the machine turned out to be quite friendly and I managed to wave my credit card it. Followed by a few circuits of the car park to loosen up after the drive.

PS: sea visible just to the left of the pink building. Proper seaside colour.

References

Reference 1: http://www.catandfiddleexeter.co.uk/.

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

Reference 3: https://toysrus.co.uk/.

Reference 4: https://www.justpark.com/.

Configurations from nature

Some months ago now, I was prompted by Microsoft Start to read the piece at reference 1. By some route or other this led me to one of Oliver Sacks’ books, which led me in turn to a paper about the configuration of strokes used to make the letters of alphabets. Some of this was noticed at reference 2. I then turned to reference 3, which takes a look at the sort of configurations that can be made from a small number of straight-line strokes.

Reference 3 contains a catalogue of the connected configurations which can be made from up to three such strokes, organised by the number of junctions. This is snapped in the figure above. Part of the argument there is that the distribution of these configurations in the letters of alphabets – or perhaps in written texts – is similar to that to be found in nature. To this end, configurations were sampled from suitable photographs. I was not terribly convinced, but I was intrigued, I thought I would try some of this for myself.

But before getting onto that, I consider how such strokes might come to be found in digital images.

Edges and strokes

In the analysis of digital images, a key concept is that of the edge. Identifying the edges is a way into the digital muddle of a raw image, a large rectangular array of pixels. And by extension, the array of pixels somehow coded onto the human retina. In both cases, two dimensional representations of a three dimensional world – allowing that, sometimes, the important part of that three dimensional world might, in effect, be two dimensional, perhaps the page of a printed book.

There are some hints as to how this might be done at reference 4, more than thirty years old now, but they still seem entirely plausible.

We suppose first that each pixel is coded for colour in some way. The we have an edge when we have a linear, one dimensional discontinuity in that colour in our two dimensional array. Where by linear, we do not necessarily mean a straight line, but we do mean something reasonably smooth and well behaved.

We suppose second that each pixel is coded for depth in some way, a supposition made plausible by our binocular vision. Then we also have an edge when we have a linear discontinuity in that depth. 

Some edges will be the result of colour discontinuity, some of depth discontinuity, some of both. Reference 4 is all about how edges might be labelled and how this facilitates reconstruction of the three dimensional world from the two dimensional image, but for present purposes all edges are the same and they are all called strokes, bounded by a suitable circle, often but not always drawn around a junction of edges.

Two such are shown in the snap above, one of each kind. Colour alone, above and left; colour and depth below and right. In both cases the edge, the boundary between the two zones, is very clean, very like a Euclidean line, with length but without area. There is no boundary zone, at least not at this level of magnification.

I associate to the boundary zones of reference 5, snapped above. Any line that the experimenter might see here is a confection of his eyes and brain. One might also add that these eyes and brain can detect remarkably small differences when samples are placed side by side in this way. Much harder when they are a little way apart, not to say impossible when there is visual noise in between.

Here things are not so clear. The brain knows that there is an edge, at least very probably, but the eye cannot see it. What to do?

Here, however, in the snap of ivy leaves above, we do have boundary zones. Boundary zones which are not just an artefact of the camera and computer, they can be seen, at least at times, with the naked eye, out in the field. 

Most leaves do not have edges. But they can be seen in other thick, flat leaves, such as holly, laurel and some ornamental magnolias, and no doubt other leaves of this sort. Most deciduous leaves are not of this sort; flat but not thick.

I suspect such leaves as being of fairly unform thickness, not tapering to thin margins and of having fairly blunt margins, rounded but blunt – broad enough to catch some light and with some trick of that light then giving us the white lines. F in the left hand panel of the snap above rather than C – this snap of sections of blades of grasses being lifted from reference 6. The scale bars are 200μm, a fifth of a millimetre.

While the more uniformly rounded margins in the right hand panel come from reference 7 and the large tropical hardwood trees of the genus Parashorea. The scale bars here are also 200μm.

In what follows, I shall treat such boundary zones as edges or strokes.

Perhaps more tricky, do we treat the bars circled left as the two stroke configuration 03 (T)? Or do we treat it as something more complicated, a confection of four narrow rectangles, two light and two dark. I suppose, as ever, the answer is that it all depends. In what follows, I shall score it as 03 (T). And the crossing to its left as 04 (X).

Strokes and configurations

Using these strokes, bounding circles and the catalogue of configurations we opened with, we now look at three more or less natural scenes. Are there configurations to be found? 

To keep things simple, we restrict ourselves configurations involving just the one junction and three or fewer strokes. This keeps the number of configurations we are looking for down and means that every junction defines a configuration – which means in turn that we do not have to bother with selecting suitable junction pairs or junction triples. Or configurations which are part of other configurations – a statistical complication if nothing else, and one which does occur in the real world.

The tulip tree flower

A 07 (Ψ) configuration formed by the veins of a leaf.

A 03 (T) configuration formed by a petal occluding the leaf behind. An easy way to make a T.

Two 02 (L) configurations, one formed by a corner in a petal, the other by a corner in a leaf. We overlook the rounding of the junction: one has to allow a certain amount of ‘snap to grid’ in these matters. We note that the three-dimensional reality underlying the yellow L might well be quite complicated. That underlying the leaf L probably not.

A rather ‘impure’ 04 (X) configuration formed by the petiole of one leaf crossing the edge of another.

A 06 (K) configuration formed by a chance alignment of petals. An artefact of the point of view as much as of the flower itself, of the subject as much as of the object.

 A rather faint 05 (Y) configuration formed by a twig in the background.

The logs

A rather ‘impure’ 04 (X) configuration left and a rather ‘impure’ 03 (T) right.

Another not very clean 03 (T) configuration lower left, a rather better one upper right. This last, the edge of one object partially occluding the edge of another. Complicated in this case by the bright edge being between one face and the invisible but shadowed and adjacent face of the same object, rather than between the object and background.

Another not very clean 02 (L) configuration upper right. Two 02 (L)’s which are arguably 03 (T)’s middle right and lower left. But L is what strikes one in the first instance.

Bottom right we have a 05 (Y) formed by the chance alignment of a corner with an edge. While the other three are the much commoner view of a corner of a vaguely brick like object.

The one on the left could easily have been a four stroke X, excluded on our rules. My impression is that this sort of X is commoner than the two stroke sort, 04 (X).

A 06 (K) configuration. Which might arguably be a four stroke version, which would be excluded.

 Another rather weak 06 (K) configuration.

The ivy leaves

A rather weak 05 (Y) configuration.

Lots of 02 (L) configurations formed by the points of leaves. 

A 05 (Y) configuration formed by a chance alignment.

A 03 (T) configuration formed by the branching of a flower part. A T which is not formed by two distinct objects, as are most of the others here.

A 04 (X) configuration formed by the crossing of two flower stalks.

And I close this section with a junction which is excluded on any likely limit on the number of strokes. A three dimensional feature of the natural world which is not readily captured by one of our configurations.

Comments and conclusions

We have kept things simple, restricting ourselves to configurations involving just the one junction and three or fewer strokes. Configurations defined by the way that their strokes interact with each other, rather than by their details. Generalising from the facts on the ground to the topology, as it were.

Only a proportion of the configurations that we have identified are what might be called clean and we have allowed a fair amount of ‘snap to grid’, tidying up the raw image, to get our configurations. There are also a good number of cases where more than one interpretation is possible. We are doing rather more than a straightforward feed-forward contrast edge detecting algorithm might do, bringing some top-down intelligence into play.

That said, one can extract these configurations from natural scenes, as is claimed at reference 3, although I found just the one example of 07 (Ψ) and I did not find examples of 08 (man) or 09 (asterisk). 

And then there are the configurations with more than three stokes or more than one junction, which do seem to crop up too. I suspect, for example, that asterisks made up of six (or more) strokes are more common than those made of three.

But it all seems a bit forced. That this is not a particularly productive way to get into, to parse natural scenes. That said, it would be curious if the distribution of configurations so found did turn out to be similar to that found in writing, as is argued at reference 3. A matter to which I shall return.

It is probably not relevant that I am not usually conscious of these configurations when I look about me: I would expect the parsing of scenes on the retina to be taken care of by the unconscious, certainly most of the time, when there is no problem or ambiguity with the scene in question. One might then, for example, consciously use 03 (T) junctions to sort out foreground and background objects. Probably not 15 (TL) or 28 (drum).

One might add that the lead author, while still busy and active at reference 7, does not appear to have pursued this particular line of inquiry, despite this paper appearing second on the citation list at reference 8.

PS: in the margins I have learned about general flowering, a feature of the Dipterocarpaceae family, of which the Parashorea are part. General flowering being synchronised flowering which happens from time to time, as opposed to year after year. Apparently, a spectacular business when it happens. Plus, some panda important bamboos do it, which is bad for the pandas. The mallows, mentioned recently at reference 12, are a sibling family.

References

Reference 1: Optical illusion reveals key brain rule that governs consciousness – Emily Cooke, Live Science, Microsoft Start – 2024. 

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/08/building-letters.html. 

Reference 3: The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes - Mark A. Changizi, Qiong Zhang, Hao Ye, Shinsuke Shimojo – 2006.

Reference 4: Interpreting Line Drawings of Curved Objects – Jitendra Malik – 1987.

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/10/an-instrument.html. 

Reference 6: Variation in leaf anatomy within the Elytrigia intermedia – E. ×mucronata – E. repens (Poaceae) hybrid complex – Ladislava Paštová – 2017.

Reference 7: Leaf anatomical and micromorphological characters of some Malaysian parashorea (dipterocarpaceae) – T Noraini, DF Cutler – 2012.

Reference 8: https://www.changizi.com/. 

Reference 9: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XPXdsFkAAAAJ. 

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

Reference 11: https://swartzcenter.caltech.edu/. His one-time home.

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/08/back-to-library.html.