Here is recent confirmation of the map app effect, i.e. the replacement of paper maps by electric maps. 

The pictures below were all taken on June 4th of this year.  Soon after that date I picked out these nine snaps of digital photographers doing their things, with a view to showing them here, but I never got around to doing that.  I made my selections without any particular thought of maps.  So far as I can tell, I picked my winners on a variety of grounds, three of them, it would appear, because of interesting backgrounds, in particular the one (2.1) with the word VISIONS to be seen in the background, on the side of what looks like a TV van.  My selection is also biased towards facial non-recognisability.

Here are eight of the nine I picked.

No maps:

And here is the ninth.

A map:

Was that ratio a fair reflection of the ratio for the entire lot of photos I took that day?  No.  It was not.  I took about 350 snaps, of which about third to a half were of digital photographers. That’s a lot.  Number of maps being flaunted by photographers: one.  That one.  Otherwise, no maps to be seen.  This does not of course mean that no other maps were being carried.  But it is telling, I think.

Four of these snaps, by my calculation, feature pictures being taken with smartphones.  I think I was a bit biased towards that also, but the fact that I had so many examples of that to pick out is likewise telling.

Goddaughter Two is in town.  She was already spontaneously talking about this map thing, before she knew I had any interest in it.  She and a friend are now being London tourists.  They are seeing a few maps, but only a few.

Change is not just the new stuff.  It’s the old stuff that you don’t see any more.

JUST BEFORE POSTING THIS: Goddaughter One’s dad dropped by.  He was recently wondering about maps, his question being: How do I best tell fellow engineers, visiting London for a footbridge conference, where London’s best footbridges are to be found?  Give them a paper map and mark the bridges on that map?  No.  Paper maps don’t sell any more.  At all. Ergo, they are rapidly ceasing to make them.  Answer: Given them electric map references.  They get you to within ten yards of each bridge, no worries.

I notice that in this posting, about Maggie Thatcher telling Botha to get rid of Apartheid in 1984, Guido uses the phrase “Comrade Blimp”.

I like to think I may have put this meme into his head, with this, which was published in 1984.  (If I don’t link to my ancient writings, nobody will.) But then again, maybe in 1984, the phrase was already doing the rounds, and I merely plucked it out of the breeze myself.  Or maybe he said it first, and I stole it from him.

Either way, it’s good, I think.

When the England cricket team does well, I celebrate.  Now?  It’s only a game.

See also this, about Kevin Pietersen.  And this now reads horribly well:

And what happens when this current winning England side starts to seriously fall apart, as it soon will, when players like Anderson and Swann (Swann in particular) have stopped playing?  How consistent will selection then be?  Something tells me I may be doing one of those I told you so link backs that we bloggers are so fond of.  When we actually did tell you so, I mean.

The first bit there, about England falling apart, now reads especially well, although I did not think that they would fall apart so soon.  Swann and Anderson are still playing, but Swann in particular is not what he was.  Trott is broken and gone.  Cook and Pietersen are runless.  Root looks good, until he gets out.  Tremlett was a prayer, not a selection.  Stokes?  Expect a period of England selection inconsistency.

It’s not quite over yet.  If England could scrape a draw in this game, it would feel like a huge win, and that is not totally impossible, especially if Cook hangs around for a day and a half.  But, nobody is betting on any of that happening, and certainly not me.

What I said about Stuart Broad seems now to apply far better to Mitchell Johnson.  I said the Aussies might regret having a go at Broad.  I wonder how the Barmy Army now feels about all the grief it has piled upon Johnson in former times?

One of the jobs of random blogs like this one is recommend such things as restaurants.  This is one of those postings.  If you read no further, just know that I recently dined at La Porte des Indes, and I liked it.  It’s just a short walk away from Selfridges in Oxford Street, where a friend had been working.  Address: 32 Bryanston Street.

So, to the details of why I liked it.  One: the food was very tasty.  Always a good start.  And while we were waiting, they gave us little plastic cups of soup, also very tasty.

However, although I like the way tasty food tastes, I now unable to consume very much food all at once.  Perhaps I am lucky, because being unable to eat too much, I am not becoming as fat as I might otherwise become, what with so much of the food I do eat being junk.

But there is a way in which I am often unlucky, which is when I am dining out.  Often, I just can’t manage to eat all that I am paying for.

So it is that a service I especially value is when I am allowed to take my leftovers away with me.  A restaurant willing to package up all my delicious but indigestible leftovers will now have a special place in my heart, and stomach.

La Portes Des Indes was not cheap, when I and a friend dined there about a fortnight ago.  But I still remember the delicious taste of the chicken, the pain of realising that my stomach would not be able to do it justice, and the small translucent plastic carton they used to put my spare chicken in, so that I could eat it later.  I’ve had bags made available in such circumstances before, but never a plastic carton.

I paid about twice what I usually want to pay when dining out, but I also dined twice over, once in the restaurant, and then again back home, the next day.

The place looks great as well.  The outside is unprepossessing, like a fast food joint at the bottom of an office block.  But when you step inside, it’s like you’ve entered the restaurant equivalent of the Tardis.  It’s really big.  It used to be a dance hall, so they said.  And the décor has been preserved from that era and added to, rather than stripped out and replaced with modernistic dreariness.  Plus, the ambient noise was not too loud and we could hear each other talk without any shouting.  Crucial, for me.  I often leave things early for this one reason.

Recommended.

And not just any old telly.  BBC1, The One Show, no less, watched by millions. I was and I am impressed.  Watch Elena Procopiu in action 25m30s into it, here, while it’s still there.  (For future reference, this was on Tuesday December 3rd.)

Elena was born in Romania and did a piece to camera about Romania and about Romanians in England, entirely in a Romanian accent until right at the end, when she said in her regular English voice that lots of Romanians have been here for years.  Many Romanians have already seen this performance, on the www.  Some, who missed the bit at the end, were surprised that someone who has been in England for so long still has such a strong Romanian accent.  None said that the Romanian accent was not a proper Romanian accent, which is not that easy to get exactly right, if you no longer have such an accent.

Quota photos, I’m afraid, but I like them:

Taken by me at St James’s Park Tube, yesterday.  Not really sculpture, of course.  But I like the colours that my camera has automatically selected for these images.  And I like how the one on the left has the dirt highlighting the shapes, rather like make-up.

I’ve recently been doing a lot of trawling through old picture archives, and in the course of this I found a directory devoted to Digital Photographers Holding On To Their Maps.

So here is an enormous clutch of such photos, with the little squares below all homing in on the maps.  Click to see the photographers in action, if you wish.

The photos you get by clicking are exactly as taken, but the little squares involved quite a lot of enhancement - brightening, contrasting, sharpening, etc. - the better to reveal their mapitude.

If you don’t wish to click on any of these map squares, fine, but at least reflect with me on how the age of maps, on paper, like this, is now drawing to a close.  The above snaps were snapped between 2005 and 2007.  I wonder how many such photographs I’d be able to take now.  Next time I go out snapping snappers, I’ll make a point of trying to see if paper maps are still being carried by photographers.

My guess would be, yes, just a few.  This would be because the keener you are on photography, the more likely you were to have had a nice camera before the smartphone thing kicked in, and the less likely you might be to get a brand new smartphone, to replace your regular, mapless old phone.  So maps being held by people with regular cameras are still, I am guessing, around.

But, nobody taking photos with a smartphone will now be simultaneously waving a paper map.  Such a person already has a map.

It’s surely worth me adding that I got my smartphone entirely for its map app.  It’s lighter than an A-Z and much lighter than all the A-Zs you’d need if you travelled much, and also much nicer than google maps printouts from my computer, because my smartphone, crucially, tells me where I am.  For me, a smartphone is a book of magic maps which also does occasional phone calls and textings, not the other way around.

Going back to the pictures above, it’s not just the map-flaunting that is now looking quaint.  So do a lot of the cameras.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  A picture collection is like a well stocked wine cellar.  It gets better with age.

More photos of things past

More because I have already done a posting entitled Photos of things past, as I discovered when trying to save the text file I wrote prior to posting this.

I must say, I do find myself missing this Thing.  If they hadn’t smashed it to bits, I would definitely be thinking that they should, but now that they have, this kind of Thing is on the defensive, and you find yourself siding with the architectural underdog.  I’d certainly not be happy if all traces of New Brutalism were brutally expunged.  We need a bit of it to hang around, if only as a warning of how mad architects can get, when they get mad.

This Thing was situated in the roundabout on the far side of Westminster Bridge, now occupied by the big hotel featured in picture 1.3 below.  Someone told me a few days back, when I was talking about having posted an earlier picture of it here, that it was a G(reater) L(ondon) C(council) office annex, reached by a tunnel under the road from the main building.  So, now that London’s local politicians have moved downstream, to The Testicle, this Thing became superfluous to requirements.

It was destroyed in October 2006, as these photos, taken on October 13th of that year, prove:

On that same day, October 13th 2006, I took other photos, of other things that have moved on, or which soon might.

The first two of these next snaps are of cranes, temporary by their nature.  Who knows what that crane cluster (1.1) was building?  I could probably work it out, but that isn’t the point.  The point is: what an excellent crane cluster!  And I think I found another picture I took of it, this time looking along The Strand.

What that blue crane was doing, floating on the river, posing in front of The Wheel, I also can’t remember.

1.3 is another shot of the Eurostar trains at Waterloo, which in 2007, as reported here, moved on, to St Pancras.

I include the bus (2.1), with its entertaining reflections, because the London Double Decker Bus has now been redesigned, and all other London Double Deckers could soon be Things of the past.

Those wind propellers, on the top of Palestra House, the Big Thing just across the road from Southwark Tube Station, are long gone.

And the final snap there (2.3) reminds us of another kind of temporariness, which is that sooner or later, we all must move on.  That snap is of flowers and pictures, placed outside Westminster Abbey, in memory of the then recently murdered (it’s still unsolved) Anna Politkovskaya.

Indeed:

Photoed by me, just under a week ago, in one of the windows of Selfridges.

I am starting to have a real problem with remembering the names of people.  (And yes, this is another posting about the process of getting old, of the sort predicted in this earlier posting.) I see him.  I know him. Or rather, I know that I should know him, and I do know him.  But, I do not know him, as in: I do not know his name, despite have been told that name half a dozen times and more.  Nothing is more disrespectful than forgetting someone’s name, yet I keep doing it, to people whom I really want to treat with respect.

The worst recent example of this syndrome concerns a guy who has attended several of my Last Friday meetings.  He attended again last night, and once again I got his name wrong.  My only defence is that I ask attenders to email me if they are coming.  But this is not a condition of attendance, and he never does.  So whenever he does show up, as he did last night, it’s a bit of a surprise.  But that is a pretty feeble excuse.  He’s on the email list.

He is a Spaniard, which I think makes it worse.  I ought to be especially pleased when non-Brits show up to my evenings, and I am.  So, why can I not do this man the elementary courtesy of remembering who he is?

So anyway, his name is: Victor.  Victor, Victor, Victor.

It is my hope that the two pictures below (reproduced here with Victor’s permission) will finally nail Victor’s name (Victor) into my head:

On the left Victor, photoed last night in my kitchen.  On the right: Victor.

What’s the betting that next time I meet Victor, I call him Vulcan?

This posting is a test, which will involve great confusion to anyone trying to read this blog now, as I do this.  And actually, quite a lot of confusion in perpetuity.

I am trying to work out whether these four squares will fit in the allotted sideways space (500 pixels).  Once I’ve got them fitting properly, I’ll tell you what they are, and what that picture at the bottom is.

And right away, we have a problem.  The square on the right has shoved itself under the first one, rather than where I was hoping it would be.  This requires all the squares to stop being 123x123 (pixels), and must instead be resized to become 122x122.  This could take a while.

Okay, all done now.  And it didn’t take long at all:

Let me explain.  I am planning one of my big photo collections with lots of squares, and before doing that I needed to know how big the little squares needed to be, to fit properly into 500 pixels.  Just as well I did this test.

As to what the four squares above are, well, there’s a clue below.  They were taken on December 16th 2006, the same day as I took all these photos.

The one on the left, as it turns out, is also in the original mega collection linked to above.  I guess there’s just something about a canoe man falling over forewards.

The second … well, how could I have missed this first time around?  Two geese eating what is clearly a whole pizza!

Number three is a particularly vivid example of the Things Reflected genre, and I like it a lot.

And I picked out the one on the right, because it is the exact same bridge, and the exact same view of it, as is featured in this posting, except that in 2006 there was no graffiti.  So right there, the decline of Western Civilisation, happening in front of our eyes.

And this final picture is what happened on my screen when I was processing that last picture. 

Moiré patterns.  Because these patterns were the result of the photo and my screen colliding, I don’t know what you will see on all your screens.  Maybe nothing, and you don’t have the faintest idea what I am talking about.

Anyway, job done.  122x122 it is.

In that 2006 postings, as with many of my large photo-collections here, there is a horizontal gap between horizontal lines of photos, but no vertical gaps between each photo.  I prefer the latter arrangement.  If there are gaps, they should be everywhere.  Hence this test, beause I have never done a collection which is four little photos wide.  Three wide, yes, but not four.

I knew you’d be excited.

This week, I have been in a particularly egotistical and silly mood here.  (Which is allowed, because I say what is allowed.) This is because I worked extremely hard (by my pathetic standards of what hard work is) on this posting at Samizdata, and am now relaxing.

Is this book … :

… the same book as this book?:

It turns out that they are the same book.  Hannan:

I set out to answer these questions in my book, published in North America as Inventing Freedom and in the rest of the Anglosphere as How we Invented Freedom.

But, are they precisely the same?  I mean: same intro?  Same preface?  Any other small tinkerings?  If the Yanks (maybe the Brits?) changed the damn title, what the hell else did they change?

I find this kind of thing intensely annoying.  The whole point of reading something like a book, or watching something like a movie, is that you read (or watch) precisely the same object as everybody else.  (This being one reason why I so particularly resent censorship.  It prevents me, again and again, from seeing what others elsewhere are seeing.)

The best you can say about this muddle is that at least this/these book/books seem to be coming out at approximately the same time.

How we invented Freedom is nevertheless in the post.

Anyone interested in new public sculpture should try googling for news about: Falkirk, Kelpies, sculpture, and such things.  And be sure to include images in your searchings.

My favourite photos of these newly completed Kelpies are, I think, these ones, which were taken while they were still being constructed, and in particular, I like this one:

Horses heads, and also cranes.

I also like the one with the road sign in the foreground.

STV (Scottish TV presumably) news report today:

Work complete on pair of giant Kelpie statues on banks of canal:

The Kelpies, by sculptor Andy Scott, are a monument to Central Scotland’s horse-powered heritage.

Each stands at a towering 30m and weighs over 300 tonnes. At a cost of £5m, the project is intended to be a symbol of regeneration in the Forth Valley.

They are part of the £43m Helix redevelopment of around 350 hectares of land between Falkirk and Grangemouth, including new parkland and pathways. It is hoped the site will attract thousands more tourists to the region and boost the local economy.

The statues were inspired by the supernatural water horses of Celtic mythology as well as the powerful heavy horses that were used in the early days of the industrial revolution.

Mr Scott, who also created the Heavy Horse sculpture on the M8 near Glasgow, said: “During the conceptual stages, I visualised the Kelpies as monuments to the horse and a paean to the lost industries of the Falkirk area and of Scotland.

I just caught the fag end of a TV news report on this, and google did the rest.

This evening I hope to be attending an Event.  And now, having performed all my obligatory duties for the day, I am turning my attention to this blog.  I am very pleased that for the last however many days it is, I have managed at least one blog posting here every day, and I want today to be no different.

It is now, as I write this, just after 1pm, and the Event is not until the evening.  Yet, I find blogging even under such relaxed circumstances as these extraordinarily difficult.  I do not mean truly difficult.  I merely mean extraordinarily more difficult than it surely ought to be.  Even a window of several hours, yet a window which has a definite end when I have to stop the blogging and start to do whatever it is, seems, maybe, too small.  What if my writing catches fire?  What if what began merely as a small quota thought ignites into a long essay?  What if I suddenly decide that I want to add photographs, know the photographs I want to add, but do not know where they are on my hard disc?

Luckily for me, nothing clever is now occurring to me of the sort that will make ending this blog posting difficult.  No added photo seems needed.  So, I will just end it.

There.  Easy.  I reckon that took about ten minutes.

I will even have time to take some shirts to the laundrette, and have a clean one ready to wear, at the Event.

My attention has been drawn to some excellent photos by Michal Nuniewicz.

I, of course, particularly like this one:

That being a horizontal slice (I like horizontal slicing) of this one.

A classic, in the genre recently referred to here.

Sub-genre: group selfie.  An important sub-classification, I think.