Here.

I heard about this soon after it happened, because I had been semi-following the game, on account of it being at the Oval and involving Surrey.  When it said “play stopped by crowd trouble” or some such thing, here, I at once tuned into the internet radio commentary, and replayed the strange moment when they saw this arrow stuck in the pitch and the players all either walked off or ran off.  Later, they reckoned the arrow must have come from outside the ground, not from one of the stands.  So, not crowd trouble after all.  Good.

Usually, when there’s an act of obvious terrorism by an obvious terrorist, the BBC makes a big thing of not jumping to the obvious conclusion about why it happened.  But this time, it really wasn’t obvious, and so far as I know, it’s still a mystery.  I mean, why fire just one small arrow at a four day county cricket game, which was already heading for a draw, watched by a largely empty stadium?  A small shower of arrows, into the crowd, and preferably a dense crowd, well, that might have caused some real grief and real panic.  As it was, it felt more like some bizarre accident rather than anything very malevolent.  A kid maybe?  Or just someone really, really stupid.

Mind you, I’d not be nearly so relaxed about all this had Surrey been chasing down a target of about a hundred, which earlier in the day it looked like they might contrive to be doing, despite all of yesterday having been rained off.  Had this mysterious incoming arrow turned a probable Surrey win into a draw, then clearly Middlesexist terrorism would be an obvious motive to be looking at.  But Middlesex had already batted themselves out of trouble, and a game that was already dead on its feet managed to get put out of its misery in a way that was really rather interesting, entertaining even, given that nobody got hurt.

Surrey have made a point of drawing games this year.  They have scored just one win so far, but are sitting pretty safe in mid-table.  Yorkshire have two more wins than Surrey, but fewer points, on account of Surrey having only lost one game, with their other eight all drawn.  Yorkshire have won three but lost four.

Meanwhile, test cricket has also been pretty lively, but in a good way:

So, Test cricket is in danger, is it? Ha! Test cricket laughs in the face of danger. Twice in the space of 14 hours, the game’s world order has been thoroughly rattled, with two of the most memorable results in recent years. The first jolt came at Headingley, where West Indies upset England for their first victory in the country since 2000; the next day in Mirpur, Shakib Al Hasan bowled Bangladesh to a thrilling, historic maiden win over Australia.

The danger, that test cricket just laughed at, being the danger of tedium and of insignificance.  Not arrows.

I love the trappings of London’s tourist industry, and I love that I can enjoy these trappings by photoing them rather than by spending any of my own money on them.  This applies to small stuff in shops, and to bigger stuff out in the streets.  There are exceptions, but they are very few.

I don’t, for instance, buy even miniature vehicles, let alone drive around in my own life-sized vehicle.  But I love to photo idiosyncratic life-sized vehicles owned and maintained by others.  Vehicles like this one:

This is the Ghostbustours bus, the “London Necrobus”, as it says on the side.

Below left we see punning respellings of London sights and streets and squares:

Rather disappointingly, on the right there is a sign, towards the back of the Ghostbustours bus, featuring no such respellings, so that people know where they can get on and off the Ghostbus.  I understand that this is necessary, but it rather spoils the fun.

It greatly helps that the bus in question is a classic Routemaster, still the favourite of many, including me, of all the different versions that there have been of the London double decker.  When tourists buy miniature London buses, this is the one they mostly buy.,

By blogging “Routemaster”, I just learned (a) that the word Routemaster also, supposedly (i.e., in reality: not), applies to Boris buses.  (The actual name for the Boris bus is: “Boris bus”.) And I learned (b) that, for quite a while now, there has been no more buying of Boris buses.  Blog and learn.

Roofs?  Rooves? Apologies if roofs sounds wrong to you, but it now sounds a bit better to me.  English eh?  What can you do?

Anyway, yes, the roofs(ves?) … of London Bridge Station, newly erected, as photographed from on high (from a helicopter) by on high specialist Real Photographer Jason Hawkes:

That being another of the Real Photographs in this collection, featured here already, a few days ago.

To get that bigger, you’ll have to follow the first link above.  I’m guessing that Jason Hawkes might not be bothered at me showing a smaller version of one of his Real Photographs, but that he might be miffed if I appropriated a far bigger version.

What I, and I am sure many others, find entertaining about these roofs is how they look more like a work of Mother Nature than of Man.  No straight lines anywhere, and no two curvey lines exactly the same.

When I was up at the top of the Shard with GodDaughter 2, way back when we were, I also photoed these roofs, which makes sense because they are right next to and at the bottom of the Shard:

That one, after I had done lots of post-production on it with my Photoshop clone, came out looking okay, although before all that it was looking very iffy.  Amazing how much “sharpen”, for instance, sharpens.

This next one, on the other hand, although a fine view, is ruined as any sort of attempt at Real Photography by that great slab of reflection, bottom left.  No Real Photographer would dream of standing behind shiny sheets of plate glass of this kind:

With a lot of rotating and some sharpening, I rescued, from the original above, the revised version below:

But you miss out on the big picture with that, I think.

Somehow, you need to be able get rid of those damn reflections.  Hire a helicopter?  Get a drone?  Helicopters are all fine and dandy for the likes of Jason Hawkes, but the complications of all that would be way beyond me.  Besides which, it’s the cheap shots that we can all take that interest me the most.  For me, throwing money at photography removes a major slice of it’s deeper meaning.  Which is: We can all now do this!

So, how about doing what this guy was doing?:

This was my first visit to the top of the Shard, but I’m guessing he was not having his first visit.  He did what I did, first time around.  On his first visit, just like me, he took a lot of photos with lots of reflections in them.  But then, he returned, with a possible answer that he had made a point of bringing with him.

What this guy did looks promising, but I reckon I could maybe improve on this.  The problem this guy still has is that he still has his camera and worse, his bright and lightly coloured fingers, all out there in front of his big black rectangle.  What is needed is a big black rectangle with a hole in it, through which to poke the camera.  That would surely defeat the reflections much more completely.  And, unlike with his arrangement, you’d still be able to see what your picture was consisting of, because you’d still be able to see it on the screen or through a viewfinder (if you are viewfinder inclined, which I am not).

Unless of course you don’t want to defeat the reflections.

But, assuming you do, how big would such a rectangle have to be?  Would a rectangle small enough to fit easily into my bag be big enough?  I must do some experiments with a nearby shop window.

I like to photo buses with adverts all over them.  I consider the elaborate graphics involved to be of aesthetic interest.

Buses like this one, photoed in Tottenham Court Road on the same afternoon, just over a year ago, that I photoed the dfs Union Jack door that I just added to the posting below:

Okay very pretty, but do what I did.  Take a closer look:

What intrigues me about that is how it points up the contrasting reputations of the Gherkin and the Walkie Talkie.  The Gherkin is clearly visible there.  But the Walkie Talkie is deranged by that clutch of ventilation holes, or whatever they are.  The advertising classes don’t do things like this by accident.  They like Lord Foster of Gherkin, but they do not like Rafael Vinoly of Walkie Talkie, and the same probably applies to most other people who know both of these Starchitects.  (I like both of them.) My sense is that Vinoly is reckoned to be too much the entrepreneur, too much the profit maximising businessman, too bothered with making buildings that make money, the way (so I hear it) the Walkie Talkie does and the Gherkin does not.  Vinoly, I surmise, is the Richart Seifert of our time, but on a global scale.

This is not the kind of thing you can prove very easily, and maybe I’m reading too much into a meaningless piece of graphics.

Well, I’m tired, I’ve had a complicated day attempting other things, unsuccessfully, and this is what you are getting.  Also, there’s a really good test match going on.

The first I photoed in Victoria Station, while waiting for a train, to go to visit some friends in south London and partake of a barbecue, which is why I have so little time to be doing a posting here:

I like the contrast between the sun-drenched colours of the flag with the mostly monochromatic background.

And here is a Union Jack I photoed earlier, about a fortnight ago, in a shop window near where I live:

In that box, designer spectacles.  Although, I didn’t find many Union Jacks at the William Morris London bit of the William Morris website.

I really like how Union Jacks now come in lots of different colours.

Are you supposed to put Union Jacks with capital letters?  I do this because it feels right to me, but maybe that’s wrong.

Google, however, now tells me that the rest of the world does this too.

LATER, another Union Jack, Tottenham Court Road, June 2016:

I remember when dfs stood for dashed fine show.  Except that no, I don’t, because it didn’t.  But, it could have.  And should have.

Jason Hawkes seems to have carved out a niche for himself as an aerial Real Photographer.  His latest clutch of aerial photos of London is headlined by the Daily Mail, with characteristic reticence and brevity:

London as you’ve never seen it before! Stunning aerial photos zoom in on top spots including the BBC Television Centre and Justin Bieber singing in Hyde Park

I like them all, but this is one of my particular favourites:

I’ve occasionally tried to photo this very place, but I never got anything nearly as good as that.

My last construction industry question here got very well answered.  (The question was: what is this?)

So, are those yellow tubes are going to be replaced, by the building?  Or are they going to be part of the building?  Their yellowness makes them look, like the cranes, temporary.  But the way they are fixed to the side of the hole suggests something more permanent.  But then again, they don’t look like they are exactly straight (I’m looking especially at the ones on the left), the way they would (presumably) be if permanent.  My guess: temporary.

Just the one photo here today, today being a busy day for me.  I have a meeting this evening to prepare for, in my living room.  And because today is a Friday, which is the day of the week when I often feature animals of various kinds, this photo is a good choice, featuring as it does, two lions:

Although this memorial is much photoed, that’s an angle on it that you don’t see quite so much.  This is the sort of photo that it is easy to take only if your camera has a twiddly screen, to enable you to hold your camera very low, but still know what you are photoing.  This was amongst the last photos I took with my old Lumix FZ200, the zoom process of which was already misbehaving.

More about this Crimean and Indian Mutiny Memorial here:

Opposite the west entrance of Westminster Abbey is a tall marble and stone column, erected in 1861 and designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, which remembers former pupils of Westminster School who died in the Crimean War 1854-56 and the Indian Mutiny 1857-58. At the top is a figure of St George slaying the dragon, carved by J.R.Clayton, with statues of St Edward the Confessor, Henry III, Elizabeth I and Queen Victoria, carved by J.Birnie Philip. Four lions flank the base ...

It’s interesting that monarchs feature so prominently on a war memorial.  By the time of WW2, the statuary either commemorates commanders, or their dead commandees.  You don’t get pictures or sculptures of the former on memorials devoted to the sacrifices of the latter.

And, given that monarchs are involved, it’s an interesting selection of monarchs.  I wonder who would have come fifth.  Henry of that number?  I further wonder, did the worship of Henry V only get into its stride rather later?  With that Olivier film, made during WW2?  Meanwhile, Henry III has faded in public esteem.

By the time of later British military dramas involving Napoleonic France, which would still have been personally remembered at the time this memorial was erected, the recognition all went to the likes of Nelson and Wellington, and the King’s brother, with the mere King himself getting very little public credit.  The statues reflect this.

My meeting tonight will be Nico Metten talking about libertarian foreign policy, i.e. about decidedly different foreign policies to the ones alluded to in this War Memorial.

For quite a while now, I have had links open to two short stories that I wrote in the nineties.  These were my attempts at “Libertarian Fictions”.  I was prodded into reading them again by the experience of writing a summary of a Marc Sidwell talk, in favour of us creating more libertarian fictions.

I called my two stories Those Who Can Do, and The Lion’s Share.

These were, I now realise, very bad titles, especially in the age of the internet, then still in the future of course.  Google either of those titles, without my name, and those stories will be totally buried under a ton of other irrelevance, including, I dare say, quite a few other short stories with identical titles, chosen by other equally inexperienced short story writers.

In contrast, last night I went to a show written and acted by a friend of mine.  This was called Madam Bovary’s Communist After-Party.  Never mind if this was a good show.  It was and is, very, but that’s not my point here.  Nor is it relevant to the point of this posting that if you follow that link, you will get to an amazingly good photo of my friend, done by a young Real Photographer lady who is on the up-and-uo, which I may have sold quite a few extra tickets.  No, my point here is: that’s a very good title.  Google “Madam Bovary’s Communist After-Party”, with those exact words in that exact order, and all hits will be relevant.

So, my stories needed – and now need – to be called things more like The Public Goodness of a Struggling Writer, and How Starshine McKane Tried to Kill Everyone.

This afternoon, I took this photo, or what looks like a miniature excavator being craned into the demolition-stroke-building site where New Scotland Yard is being dismantled, to make way for expensive SW1 apartments:

And here is a full size bit cropped out of the above photo:

The good news is that my new camera, even on this rather dull day, was getting details looking reasonably clear.  It looks like I have finally managed to press some of the right buttons.

The bad news is that I don’t know what that blackened-blue bit there actually is.  Is it the end of the arm of an excavator, but without the excavating attachment?  Or is it something quite different?  I’m guessing: the former.  I could find no trace of anything looking like this black-and-blue excavator appendage at this Kobelco website.

But, I did find this:

That being a hammer attachment for, I presume, an excavator.  And if there can be a hammer attachment, there can be other attachments.  So, what I photoed was an excavator that could become whatever the choice of possible attachments makes possible.

I will probably never know what this excavator, or whatever it is, now is, no matter how often I pass by this site, because this excavator, or whatever it is, is now hiding behind a big old fence.

Oh well, no worries.  It was the camera that had been really bothering me.  This excavator, or whatever it is, was just a photo op.  There is something rather endearing about small machines being lifted hither and thither by a large machine.  Once it lands on the ground, my interest, not that strong to start with, ends.  Whether my new camera is taking decent photos, on the other hand, is a permanently concern.

About a week ago or less, I found myself in the vicinity of The Wheel.  The light was very good, with lots of sunshine and lots of lurid looking clouds.  So, I took photos.

Below are a clutch of The Wheel related photos.  My opinion of how to photo The Wheel is that you should combine The Wheel with other things.  Like graphic designs featuring The Wheel which are in the vicinity of The Wheel.  It’s the old modified cliché routine.

In this photo clutch, however, I do include one very old school photo of The Wheel.  It’s the photo I took of a postcard (1.2), which features The Wheel.  And look what the postcard calls The Wheel.  It calls it The Wheel: “The Wheel”.  None of this “London Eye” nonsense.  Do large numbers of people in other parts of the world call The Wheel The Wheel?  I do hope so.  And I hope that this habit conquers London.

The next four photos, after the postcard (1.3, 2.1, 2.2, 2.3) are all of The Wheel reflected in a tourist crap shop.  And then 3.1 is of The Wheel reflected in a place, next door, that sells sandwiches.

I like how I totally lined up the circular blue logo with The Wheel reflection, in 2.3.  Could I also have done something similar with the circular things in 2.1 and 2.2, in the latter case an actual picture of The Wheel.  I rather think that I tried, but couldn’t do that.  But, memo to self, return to this enticing spot, on a nice day, and see what I can do.

This is what I like about taking photos in London, rather than in some foreign spot that I am only going to be in once.  If, upon reflection back home, I suspect that I might have been able to do some of the photos better, I can, in London, go back to try to do this.

If you think this game was a mismatch, try this game.  Myanmar 45 all out off 22 overs in what was supposed to be a 50 overs each way game.  Malaysia 46-0 in 4 overs.  Ouch.

But what interests me is the names of the Myanmar side: KK Lin Thu, Lwin Maw, Zarni Thein (c), Min Wai, Paing Danu, Y Naing Tun †, H Lin Aung, Thuya Aung, YK Ko Aung, Y Naing Kyaw, S Htet Wai.

These guys are not just a bunch of expat Pakistanis who do construction work during the week and play cricket at the weekend, not that there’s anything wrong with that.  These are real Myanmarians.  Humiliating though this must have been for these guys, the scorecard alone tells us that the game seems to be spreading.

I hope they manage to learn, from this drubbing, that cricket is tough, rather than that it’s a waste of their time.

Yes, another link that’s been cluttering up my RAM, but which I absolutely don’t want to forget about.

I’m reading this, but I’m a really slow reader, and am also reading other things, like: books.  But, like I say, don’t want to forget about this.

Here.

This feels like one of those seminal ideas, to rank alongside the seminal idea that it contests the truth of.

I am hoping (he hasn’t confirmed it by email but we have spoken about it) that Rob Waller will be giving a talk chez moi, last Friday of November (24th), along the lines of: Will The Robots Take Our Jobs?  He doesn’t reckon so either.

For a cricket obsessive like me, the best thing about that game in which eleven boys (the Marlborough College cricket team) played Rugby (it works better when you say it) at Lord’s was the stellar hitting at the end of the Marlborough innings by Max Read.  His best score ever, apparently.  Nothing like doing that at Lord’s, eh?  From now on, kid, life is all downhill, unless you do something else really well.  Or, I suppose, do even better at cricket.

But for the less cricket-crazy observer, the big story of that game, the one picked up by the regular newspapers, was this:

Maia becomes first girl in a boys’ team to play at Lord’s

A teenage cricketer from London has made history by becoming the first woman to play at Lord’s in a school’s first XI.

The Rugby team took on Marlborough College’s first XI at Lord’s on Saturday, making Maia the first schoolgirl to play in an “all male” school match at the home of cricket.

What the newspapers did not emphasise was the Ms Bouchier, batting at number six, got out for just one run, with her dismissal marking the low point in the day of Rugby’s fortunes.  That disappointment meant that Rugby had sunk to a calamitous 30 for 5, chasing Marlborough’s 270.  (Rugby then had a big stand and got amazingly close.)

So, I did not have much chance to take any photos of Ms Bouchier batting.  This one, making it clear that this is mixed cricket rather than an all-ladies game, was probably my best one:

Does Ms Bouchier’s appearance at Lord’s signal the gradual emergence of cricket from men only to mixed?  Sadly, not.  The now 18-year-old Ms Bouchier is already an England Under-19 International, in other words one of the few dozen best lady players of her generation.  That she made it into the first team of a mere boys’ school is an achievement, but not that remarkable an achievement, for femaledom as a whole.  That she played with her male team-mates at Lord’s will be a nice memory (once she forgets her low score), but she’ll be doing that again, especially when you discover that she plays for Middlesex.  Something like this was bound to happen, just as soon as formerly all-boys schools started including girls.  (Marlborough, by the way, have had girls attending for nearly fifty years now.) Top flight men’s cricket does contain men of very varied shapes and types, and in particular some very short men.  But they are all pretty strong physically, even the spin bowlers.  For the foreseeable future, the top ladies and the top gents will each play their gender-segregated games.

It perhaps says something that Ms Bouchier is an England hopeful because of her bowling, but that she did not bowl for Rugby at all in their game against Marlborough.

Meanwhile, around England today, the lady cricketers were out in force.  My team, the Surrey Stars, captained by Ms Natmeg herself (already mentioned here in this posting), just managed to defeat the Southern Vipers.

The individual performance of the day came from New Zealandress Rachel Priest, whose not out century propelled her team, (the?) Western Storm, to victory against the Yorkshire Diamonds by ten wickets, which is the most wickets you can win by.

No men’s cricket in England today, England having crushed the West Indians in England’s first ever day-night pink ball test match inside three days.  Let’s hope the Windies can do better next time.  (It’s always a terrible sign when the opposition fans want you to do better.  I wanted the Windies to bat better at Edgbaston.  (I also wanted Rugby to recover from 30-5.  (Be careful what you wish for.)))

Win some lose some.  Women’s cricket on the up-and-up.  West Indian test cricket on the down-and-down.

I can remember listening to cricket on the radio, at a time when no New Zealand men could bat half as well as Rachel Priest bats now.

Contrasting reportage, imagery and opinions about the age of Concrete Monstrosities:

The notorious work of Richard Seifert

I like a lot of it.

Speculative Surrealism

(Includes drivel about “late capitalism”.  “Late socialism” (e.g. Venezuela) makes much more sense.)

How Brutalism Scarred London

Beautiful Examples Of Brutalist Architecture In London

“Stunning" car park will be demolished to make way for Eric Parry-designed hotel

This particular Concrete Monstrosity might have proved more likeable had it been painted lots of different colours.

At the end of that walk along the river with GodDaughter 2, the one when I took this photo, and these photos, I also took these photos:

This was Surrey Docks Farm.  As you can see in a couple of the above photos (most clearly in 4.3), Surrey Docks Farm has (of course (this is the twenty first century)) its own website.

We were on the path beside the river, getting a bit bored with the sameness of it all, getting a bit tired, knowing that we would soon be done, and then suddenly we found ourselves wandering around in a farm.  There were no humans to be seen, just farm animals.  The sheep in particular seemed really glad to see us, and stayed to have their heads scratched even after it had become clear that we had brought no food with us.

My favourite moment was when one of the sheep at the far end of the enclosure, eating with a bunch of other sheep from a straw feeder, decided to stop doing that and instead to come over and see what the fuss around us was all about.  The determined and confident way in which it did this (see 4.1) reminded me of this cat, as shown in the middle photo of those nine.

I don’t know what they keep in the cow sculpture (4.2).

London is full of weird things like this.  The only way to find them is to get out there, and find them.  “Searching” on the internet doesn’t do it.  What are you supposed to search for, given that you have no idea what it is until you have found it.

Eventually a human showed up, and showed us how to get out.  We’d forgotten how we got in.  Like his animals, he didn’t seem in any way bothered.

World’s first autonomous cargo ship to set sail in 2018

This kind of echoes my guess, several years ago now, that robot lorries are a better immediate bet than robot cars, because lorries do lots of quantifiable work to which only slight improvements will make a big difference, and because motorways are highly controlled places.  Ships do lots of quantifiable work, and the sea is also, nowadays (after centuries of it being the ultimate arena of anarchy), a highly controlled place.

And maybe they could make such a ship out of:

Unsinkable aluminum foam

Then there’s this:

NASA’s Next Great X-Plane Will Try to Revolutionize Electric Flight

Although you just know, from that “try to”, that (although you never know (and I actually don’t know at all)) they won’t.  But, they’ll learn lots of little stuff.  Most tech seems to be the gradual accumulation of relatively small improvements, which, when they add them up, as they do from time to time, over time, add up to one of those revolutions.

Such as all the revolutions which are now happening or which are about to happen because: 

Oil and Gas Innovation Goes Well Beyond Fracking

This is an article which quotes gobs from another article which is behind a paywall, which is helpful and frustrating at the same time.  I have no problem with people charging for internet stuff, but there is not a lot of point in linking to it from a blog.

But the basic message is that the plunge in the price of energy that the Americans have recently contrived didn’t just happen because of the Big Thing that is fracking.  It also consisted, and continues to consist, of lots of smaller innovations, of the sort that those electric airplane guys will be finding out while failing to revolutionise electric airplanes, and then passing on to their fellow techies.

Quote:

There are three trends driving the new energy revolution: smarter management of complex systems, more sophisticated data analytics, and automation. The first trend has allowed companies to become much more efficient while drilling for oil and gas in ever more complex geological environments … Simpler, standardized designs make drilling and production platforms easier to replicate, less expensive, and less likely to suffer costly delays and over-runs in construction. […]

Oil companies … have begun to use complex algorithms to analyze massive amounts of data, making it easier for them to find oil and gas and to manage production … The industry has also begun to use data analytics for “predictive maintenance,” reducing unplanned downtime by analyzing historical data to predict equipment failures before they happen. […]

Soon, intelligent automated systems will enable remote drilling, controlled almost entirely by a handful of high-tech workers in onshore data rooms hundreds of miles away … In the future, automation, along with better data analytics, will make it easier to manage the variation in supplies that comes from using renewable sources such as wind and solar energy and more complex, decentralized grids. It can also make the grid more reliable.

That being from the stuff behind the paywall, quoted at the other end of the above link.

Several years ago now, I had a Last Friday talk saying pretty much exactly this.  This talk happened just after the price of energy had halved, but before most of the rest of the world had realised.

There are, as always, a lot or things wrong with the world just now.  But stagnant technology is not one of these things.

Time for another from the I Just Like It directory, although actually I just found it in a regular directory:

Photo taken in January of this year.

I know what you’re thinking.  What was I doing driving a train?

I wasn’t driving it.  It’s the DLR.  It was driving itself.

The idea of these O(ld) S(chool) B(logging) posts has been to rid my desktop of open windows, and I have been doing that.  But, perhaps because I have inevitably been opening more windows, my computer is still unpredictably pausing whenever it is asked to switch from one window to another.  So, my technology is letting me down.

But never mind, technology generally is leaping ahead, and here are a few links to stuff about 3D printing.

To start with, a link to an article about how 3D printing really is, now, finally, at last, going to find a use for itself, repetitively-but-with-variations, in the home.  Making toys.  But do kids these days go for Old School toys, that you keep in an Old School toy cupboard?  Surely all the action these days is on computer screens, screens that don’t, like my one at the moment, ever get stuck.  I say: 3D printers won’t make toys in the home, or not in any normal or sane homes.  There was only ever going to be one domestic toy associated with 3D printing, and that toy is the 3D printer itself.  That’s the toy.  For some crazy kid who is so fascinated by 3D printing that he wants to start doing it, and crucially, to start learning about it, now.  But, how much can you really learn about real 3D printing, by mucking about with a piece-of-crap “domestic” 3D printer?  Not a lot, I surmise.

The true impact of 3D printing is not turning out to be disruptive to Old School manufacturing.

The future of 3D Printing for the Supply Chain

3D printing is Quietly Thriving Without Mainstream Adoption

“Mainstream” adoption being people doing their own 3D printing at home.

Manufacturing continues to be done by Old School salaried boffins, working in well-funded projects for Old School manufacturing companies.  Each application is highly specialised, and has to be rigorously checked out to make sure that it works and is economical enough to roll out for real.  3D printing does not disrupt traditional supply chains and sales networks.  It makes use of these things and improves on them, additively, bit by bit, project by project, highly specialised printer by highly specialised printer.  It is additive manufacturing, in other words, in more ways than one.  It adds stuff together to make stuff, instead of sculpting stuff.  And it is itself adding to existing manufacturing arrangements.

All of which is pretty much what I said (or nearly said) in a Samizdata posting entitled 3D printing won’t be domesticated any time soon (but then again how it might), all of five years ago now.

The titles of these things were getting to be too long-winded.

So yes, the Camden Highline.

Bid to turn disused railway between Camden Town and King’s Cross into elevated ‘Highline’ park

Sadiq Khan throws weight behind Camden highline project

The official website.

Where they hope it will be, just north of the Regent’s Canal:

Click on that to get it twice as big, and consequently (if your eyesight is anything like mine) legible.

Those little green circles are cameras.  Presumably this means good places for photography.  If and when they contrive this, I will definitely be checking it out.

Long moderately high platforms, even ones that are not very high, often supply great views, because you can walk along them until the great views appear.

I have not yet read and probably never will read James Damore’s internal memo that went external, about diversity policies within Google, the one that got him fired.  But just in case I do want to read it, here is the full text.

And here is a conversation between James Darmore and Jordan Peterson.  I haven’t watched all this either, but so far Peterson has been doing a lot of the talking.  But the fact that Damore doesn’t mouth off a lot actually reinforces the feeling that he’s a good guy, if somewhat naïve.

Samizdata has also had a lot of Google/Damore posts recently, here, here (lots of good stuff and links to good stuff in that one), here, here, and here.

Damore was naive, in particular, about what will get you fired.  Most people know that if you criticise your bosses and it gets out, they do not like it.  The better you do it and the more it gets out, the more they do not like it.  Damore did it pretty well and it got out a lot.

Normally, I’d say that Google wanting only employees with “googliness”, of whom Damore proved himself not to be one, would be reasonable.  But the trouble is, Google is in the business of making judgements about what opinions should and should not be allowed on the internet, encouraged, discouraged, and so on.  For that job, they need political diversity.  Unless, of course, they’ve decided to ignore the other half of America.

Which might make sense.  That other half of America is, in global terms, a rather unusual bunch of people.  As are the “other halfs” of all other countries.  The “cosmopolitans” of the world, insofar as they really are a single group, are the biggest and, crucially, the richest group of people in the world.  But what if actually, the two halves of America, and the two halves of everywhere else, each have more in common with one another than they do with all the other cosmopolitans?  Stay, as the saying goes, tuned.

My own hunch is that Google ignoring half of America will be bad for business.  I mean, even the cosmopolitan Americans will want, from time to time, to actually pay attention to the other half, to find out about how, for instance, the other half votes and might be persuaded to vote differently.  If Google’s googliness gradually stops helping them do that …?

DuckDuckGo.  I found that here, via here.

For a while now I’ve had the Cricinfo Test Match Records page open, and also the particular page that deals with which test match batsmen have scored the most test match centuries.  But this page also contains some other information which I find even more interesting.  It includes, for instance how many mere fifties (i.e. scores between 50 and 100) each batsman has scored.  It also notes how many test matches each of these century-amassing batsman played in. 

Both of which additional numbers highlight how exceptional Don Bradman was.

About the only unexceptional thing about Bradman is how many test match centuries he scored, compared to all the other great batsmen on the list of top century makers.  The list contains, by my count, 75 names.  Tendulkar is top with 51 centuries.  Bradman comes in at 14th, with 29 centuries.  The bottom 9 on the list all got 15 centuries each.

But Bradman scored far fewer fifties, without getting to a hundred, than did any of his close rivals. The ratios for the top 10 century makers, starting with Tendulkar are: 51 hundreds/68 fifties, 45/58, 41/62, 38/52, 36/63, 34/33 (this is Younis Kahn of Pakistan – the only top century maker in the top 25 other than Bradman to score more centuries than fifties), 34/45, 34/48, 32/50.  The equivalent ratio for Bradman is … 29/13!  That’s right.  Bradman got past fifty 42 times, but on only 13 of these occasions did he then fail to get to a hundred.  You had to stop Bradman early, or the chances were that you weren’t going to stop him at all.

And he wasn’t easy to stop early either, as his hundreds-scored-to-test-matches-played-in ratio reveals.  Bradman played in just 52 tests, so he scored a century in more than half the tests he played in.  52 is the lowest number of tests played by anyone in this entire list of 75 test match greats, with all the other guys towards the top of the list having mostly played well over 100 tests.  Tendulkar, while scoring fewer than twice as many centuries as Bradman, played in 200 tests, almost four times as many tests as Bradman played in.

More Bradmania here.  But, not everyone loved Bradman.  As my Aussie friend Michael Jennings is fond of telling me, Bradman was and remains a rather divisive figure within Australian cricket, as I have been reading in a book called Bradman’s War.  The point being that, unlike many of his cricketing contemporaries, Bradman, who took no part in the real war, treated cricket as war.

In 1997.

Luxury ‘thin house’ being built in three-metre gap between London buildings

And here is the picture under that headline:

What this story illustrates is that cities are not going to go away, merely because electronic communication is becoming ever easier.  People still crave physical proximity to wherever the action is that they most like.  Given the choice between living in a spacious home in the wrong place to a poky little box cupboard like the above, in the right place, then a lot of people choose the latter.

Besides which, why do I want “a spacious home”?  Then I’d have to look after the bloody thing.  I have a specious home.  It’s called London, and lots of other people look after it for me.

This Old School blogging is turning out a lot like regular blogging.

Although: I promise nothing.

The Plan began in my head as an exercise in cleansing my desktop of open windows, of the sort that are causing my computer to run out of memory, and to go back to behaving like a bad tempered human assistant rather than a new school computer, which is what it is when not overburdened with open windows.  “I thought you wanted me to do X.  Now you want me to focus on Y.  Give me time to change focus.  Or better still, stop doing this.  Grumble grumble.” That is what my computer would be saying, if it was the sort that ever said things.

What I will be doing is plonking down links to things , and then maybe, or maybe not, explaining a single figure percentage of the reason why these links interest me.  I will not say everything I have in mind to say about the things linked to, or indeed anything very substantial, merely something, or nothing.  Then, I will close the windows devoted to these links, and the idea is that the links from here will serve as substitutes for the open windows.  They probably won’t.  When I compile lists, I immediately forget everything on them, and when I do blog postings I immediately move on to something quite different.  So perhaps there will be no August 2017 Old School Blogging (2): This Interesting Little Subject.  But maybe there will.

I have already created another Word(clone) file entitled “August 2017 Old School Blogging (2)”, and have put those very words at the top of it, so as of now, it all looks quite promising.

Yesterday, GodDaughter 1’s Dad rang up and said would I like to come with him to see a cricket match between our old school, Marlborough, and its ancient and deadly rival, Rugby, at Lord’s.  It was today.  I said yes.  Here’s a poster I photoed outside the ground that plugged the event: 

This fixture used once upon a time to happen every year at Lord’s, but this was a one-off, to celebrate Rugby’s 450th birthday.

It was a great game.  Here, photoed from the electronic scoreboarda, are the scores that each side made:

From these two photos alone, your dedicated cricket fan would be able to deduce that this was a fifty overs each way game of embarrassing collapses and big stands, which swung back and forth all day.

I don’t know if they had a Man of the Match award, but if they did, then the two contenders would have been Read and West.  Marlborough were 8 for 3, and then, after a stand, they faltered again, to 110 for 6.  But then Read and West got stuck in and batted right through.  Read’s hitting at the end of the Marlborough innings was amazing.  West also batted superbly, and then his bowling destroyed the Rugby top order, It was Rugby’s turn to look like they were going to be crushed embarrassingly.  But they too then had a big stand, This wasn’t quite enough because just when it needed to carry on to the end, Marlborough managed to put a stop to it.  But it made a great game of it.

This graphic was probably prepared before the game for the scoreboard to show at the end of the game, but it was well deserved:

If only I had taken any photos of the action that were half as informative as all this verbal and numerical information.  But when it came to choosing which photos would sum it all up, these seemed the best.  I did take a few photos that weren’t of signage.  I even saw a few Big Things from afar.  So, more about that later, maybe, I promise nothing.

Indeed:

I took all these statue photos yesterday, in a walk with GodDaughter 2 that I have already referred to, which started at the Shard (see below), Tower Bridge, and nearby places, and ended … well, quite a way downstream.

As often happens, my favourite photo of this subject was the first one I took.  But I also liked this next one, which neglects what seems to be the usual Big Things of The City background and adds only wall and water:

The explanation of the rather odd title of this posting is that what we have here is not so much a group of statues as a drama acted out by a group of statues.  Dr Salter (see below) is looking on at his small daughter, and at her cat.  But it is all taking place in his imagination, because the small daughter died tragically young.  It is all very well explained, with more pictures, here.  Follow that link, and you’ll even find a map of exactly where this all is.

The drama gets an extra layer of drama, because the original statue of Dr Salter was stolen, for its value as scrap metal.  I think I preferred the stolen one, but here is the replacement, with the addition of a young man with tattoos:

The tattoos on the front of that guy were remarkable, and I regret now not asking him to let me photo them.  I know, I know, creepy.  But if he had said yes, I would have been delighted, and if he had said no that’s creepy, I’d have got over it.

Mrs (Ada) Salter also looks on, and these two headshots of her came out quite well too:

While taking these photos, or maybe it was a bit later, I found myself musing aloud to GD2 (with her agreeing) that people seem greatly to prefer statues that are very clearly statues, made out of some sort of monochrome material such as stone or metal, rather than something more realistically coloured, a fact which has, from time to time, puzzled me.  Were the latter procedure to be followed, people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between statues and actual people, and this would freak them out.

A “realistic” painting or photo of a person is actually not realistic at all.  People are complicated in shape.  Paintings and photos are flat.  So, if you encounter a photo or a painting of a person, even if it’s life size, there is no possibility that you will be duped into introducing yourself to it or asking it for directions.  But if you encounter a genuinely realistic 3D statue of a person, only its deeply unnatural stillness would eventually tell you that this is not a real person.  And this would be awkward to be dealing with on a regular basis.

A giant statue of someone, realistically coloured, might be okay.  After all, miniature statues (go into any toy shop or gift shop to see what I mean) already are okay. Just as with a tiny but realistically coloured person statue, you could tell at once that a giant realistically coloured person statue was only a statue rather than a real person.

A giant cat statue, on the other hand, probably wouldn’t be a good idea.  People might think: Woooaaarrrrgggghhh!!!  A giant cat!!!  Get me out of here now!

This afternoon, I was wandering about in the vicinity of the Shard, in the company of GodDaughter 2.  At a moment when I could not see the Shard, I nevertheless could see this reflected version of it:  Or maybe that should be versions.  It looks vagule like Barcelona Cathedral, with its multiple spires.

Unhelpful reflections have been on my mind lately, having tried to take photos from inside the Shard, with its very reflective windows.  This is a reminder that reflections can be fun.

Later GD2 and I walked along the river downstream, on the south side.  And walked, and walked, and walked.  By the time I was home I was exhausted and yet again I am in quota photo mode.

The weather forecast for tomorrow is good, so something similar may happen tomorrow, but I will try to do better.

This evening I attended the 70th birthday party of a school friend, aka GodDaughter 1’s dad. Yes, I am (see below) getting old.  As is he.

The journey from Vauxhall to Surbiton was a horrible, wet mess.  This about sums it up, but also portrays the journey’s one redeeming feature, apart from the fact that I did manage to get there on time:

At Vauxhall, from which I can usually go direct to Surbiton, they told me instead to go to Waterloo.  Above, we look through the window of my sopping wet train into the newly active what-used-to-be Euroterminal, now back in business.  But the very fact that this terminal is now back in business is all part of the confusion I suffered from, for they are now engaged in lengthening all the other Waterloo platforms, to enable the commuter trains to get longer, so that more people may commute while walking ever longer distances.  But eventually I got a train from Waterloo to Surbiton, and it almost certainly rains harder in India, during the monsoon, than it did while I walked from Surbiton Station to the party.

When at the party I was forbidden from taking photos, and instead had to socialise with all the other people who were there.  Which, to be fair, I did enjoy.  The party had all the good aspects of a funeral, in the form of learning lots of fun things about the centre of all our attention, without said centre being dead.  So, it all turned out rather well.

But I am now very tired and still rather tipsy, and am going to bed.

Earlier this evening I went to the Two Chairmen to hear my friend Tom Burroughes speak, to Libertarian Home, about the idea of a Universal Basic Income.

I took this photo of Tom in action:

It troubles me how much Photoshop(clone)ping I had to do to make this photo look good, taken as it was with my new camera.  But I think it now does look okay.  I particularly like how I used a nearby beer glass to smudge out most of the head of the man in the foreground.

At Samizdata, Tom goes by the name of Johnathan Pearce.  Here is a recent piece he did there, about the very subject he was speaking about this evening.  And Tom will give this subject another airing at my home, on September 29th.  It’s an important subject, I think.

On the same day that I took these photos of a spiral shopping trolley sculpture, I also took this photo:

One of many other nice photos I took that day.  I chose this one partly because the Shard is the big Big Thing here, just now.

The reason for a quota photo is that I have spent most of my discretionary time today solving ridiculous problems.  But I did actually solve both of them, so I am now ridiculously happy.

Problem one was that my bedside radio had suddenly taken to breaking off its playing of mp2 files on the 2GB SD card I had inserted into it, after about twenty minutes, every time.  Was this the 2GB SD card?  Or (the horror) the radio?  Turned out it was the 2GB SD card.  My guess: the 2GB SD card, obtained because very ancient and hence ancient enough to fit into my ancient radio and be used both to make and to play recordings, was nevertheless insufficiently ancient.  It had the word “Integral” on it.  This suggests excessive speed to me.  At the very least, an air of impatience.  Anyway, my radio couldn’t be doing with it.  So, I tried a different and more ancient-looking 2GB SD card, and that worked.  Hurrah.

Problem two was that my debit card had stopped working, and I had a vague - but only vague - recollection of having received a letter from my bank with a new debit card in it.  But where was it?  There followed two hours of searching, but in a manner which made things more tidy rather than less tidy, which is not always the way when you are searching for something.  Key fact: I was not in too much of a hurry.  It is searching for something in a hurry that really makes chaos.  Anyway, I eventually found the new debit card, in the last place I looked.  Hurrah times two, making three hurrahs in all.

A good day.  And, I hope you agree, a good quota photo.

Yesterday’s posting featured photoers whom I photoed at the top of the Shard, last Friday.  But I saved the most striking looking photoer whom I photoed that day in that place for a separate posting in celebration of him, this being that that posting.  If this guy did not want strangers to photo him and celebrate him on the internet, then he made a big mistake when he made himself look like this:

Next is a photo which shows the man’s hands and arms in a little more detail:

And finally, this photo, which I include because it was the least bad photo that I took featuring the tattooed photoer, from the point of view of what we can see out in the big world of London beyond the Shard:

In the top of these three photos, we can just about make out the Wheel, on the left.  In the second, we can just about discern the NatWest Tower (as was – now “Tower 42"), and also the top of the Walkie Talkie.  But this last photo is a lot easier to scrutinise for recognisable buildings.

Not that it’s a good photo of the scene.  In particular, that smudge of red in the middle would trouble a Real Photographer far more than it troubles me.  That would be the reflection of the tattooed photoer’s own shirt.

Yes, there were quite a few photoers up there yesterday.  But not as many as I think I was expecting.  Amazing to relate, most of the people there seemed just to be experiencing the view while they were looking at it.  And talking to one another.  And having drinks.  I know, weird.

But there were a few normal people there, concentrating on taking photos, and here are some of the ones I photoed:

In last night’s posting about this expedition, I mentioned the reflections I was getting from the windows.  I kind of think that this doesn’t matter with these particular photos, which is why I am showing them here so soon.  In the foreground there are photoers, and in the background there is what there was in the background, including reflections, and sometimes even some rather pretty reflections, and also a lot of architectural detail, top of the Shard style.  These photos therefore require no elaborate thought, or cropping, or preemptive cringe commentary saying: this is interesting because of what you can see out there or down there, despite the damn reflections which I’m really sorry about.

I chose the above photos because I thought they were nice photos.  I wasn’t bothered about what cameras were involved.  So, it is significant that eight out of nine of the photos feature mobile phones rather than old school, dedicated, specialised, digital cameras.  The only exception is 3.2.

I hear it everywhere I go.  The cameras on mobile phones get better and better.

Will my next camera also be a mobile phone?

Today, GodDaughter 2 and I went to the top of the Shard.  I took many photos, and I will now show you one of these.  It will be first one of the many that I took that I consider worthy to be shown to you.  Then I will go to bed, and I expect to sleep very well.

So, here we go.  What have we got?  Usually I am disappointed when I first look at one of these huge clutches of photos as soon as I get home, because I still remember what I was trying for.  Let’s hope looking at these photos now doesn’t depress me too much in this way.

Well, I ended up looking at all of them, and I am now rather depressed, mainly by the shininess of the windows through which I was photoing, and hence the many unwanted reflections from them in my photos.  The above photo, of Southwark Cathedral and surrounding things, was rather better than most, in this melancholy respect.  Normally I like reflections, but not today.

I actually promise nothing, but it is overwhelmingly likely that more photos from today will follow here.

Goodnight.

It’s no great surprise that, at the website of the hotel that now calls itself Park Tower Knightsbridge, they are keener to show you pictures of the hotel’s interiors and of the views to be seen from the hotel, than they are to show you what the hotel itself looks like to the outside world.

That being this:

That’s a photo of this building that I took five years ago, from Hyde Park, which is not a place I visit very often.  Personally, I am rather fond of this building.  But I am not the sort of person who would ever stay there.  I’m guessing that those who do stay there are not that fond of how it looks from the outside.

Park Tower Knightsbridge was designed by my favourite architect from the Concrete Monstrosity era.  Favourite in the sense that when it comes to your typical Concrete Monstrosity architect, I hate almost all of what they did.  With Richard Seifert, I just hate some of it, and rather like quite a lot of it.

Especially now that this style is in headlong retreat, and all the arguments about it concern whether this or that relic of the Concrete Monstrosity era should or should not be dismantled.  When this style was on the march, smashing everything in its path to rubble, I would gladly have said goodbye to Park Tower Knightsbridge (or whatever it started out being called), if that was what it would have taken to stop the Concrete Monstrosity style in its tracks.  But now, I favour the preservation of a decent proportion of London’s Concrete Monstrosities.  I suspect that they may turn out, in the longer run, like the medieval castles of old (definitely feared and hated when first built), in eventually being regarded as charmingly picturesque.

And, I especially like the Park Tower Knightsbridge, because of its striking concrete window surrounds, and its non-rectangularity.  See also No. 1 Croydon, which I think may be my absolute favourite Seifert.

Striking concrete window surrounds and non-rectangularity might also be why I like this next building, One Kemble Street, also designed by Richard Seifert, and already featured here in this posting, which includes a photo of how it looks when viewed from the upstairs bar of the Royal Opera House Covent Garden.

I took these photos, within a few seconds of each other, minutes before taking this rather blurry photo of the ROH.

In addition to being a posting about how I am rather fond of these two Seifert buildings, it is also a rumination upon roof clutter.

Note how both these buildings have an abundance of roof clutter perched on their tops.  But note also how that clutter is so arranged as to be largely invisible to anyone standing anywhere at all near to the building.

If you image google either One Kemble Street or Park Tower Knightsbridge, what you mostly get are these close-up views, with all the roof clutter out of sight.  It’s like those who own these buildings care very much about the impression the buildings give to passers-by, and most especially to those who actually go into the building, but do not care about how the buildings look to the rest of London.  They probably figure that nobody really sees these buildings, except from nearby where you can’t miss them.  But from a distance, and now that the architectural fashion that gave birth to them has been replaced by other fashions, they just, to most eyes, fade into the general background architectural clutter which is London itself.  If there is clutter on top of them, well, that’s London for you.  London, like all big cities these days, abounds in roof clutter.

I don’t know.  I’m still trying to get my head around these thoughts.  Maybe it’s just convention.  On stage appearances matter, and offstage appearances do not.  When it comes to how things look, the side walls of these buildings count.  They’re on stage.  Their roofs do not count.  They’re off stage.

So I was trawling through the archives, looking for a suitable quota photo, and chanced upon this, from July 2007:

That’s a view looking out across the river, from the top of the Monument.  It’s nice, but it’s not of anything very interesting.  When I took this photo, it was nothing very special.  It’s Guy’s Hospital, which is, as they say, no oil painting.

But here is another photo I took from the same spot, of the same spot, looking out across the river in the same direction, five years later.  I’ve cropped it to make it easier to compare with the earlier photo.  By then, my naming of my photo-archives had become more disciplined, and I had no difficulty tracking it down.  And it isn’t only the light that had changed, is it?

This is why, when I am photoing a view, it’s a good idea to take a lot of photos, of everything.  You never know what will later turn out to be of interest.

More fundamentally, I don’t just like to photo London.  I like to photo how it is changing and how it has changed.  And it is precisely the dullest bits and the dullest views which are most likely to be transformed.  I mean, the Shard is not likely to be replaced in five years time by something different, is it?  But some no-name clutch of concrete slabs is just the kind of place that is about to be ripped to pieces and replaced by something far more eye-catching.

Or take the Gherkin.  They aren’t going to surround that with lots of even bigger towers, blocking most of the views of it.  Oh no, as the Americans say, wait ...

Today, my priority is not blogging well.  It is blogging early, so that I don’t have to bother with blogging for the rest of today.  I do not want to bother about blogging for the rest of the day because I am now sleep deprived.

One of the many symptoms of advancing age is the inability of the body to control temperature like it used to.  Younger people experience this inability as the notorious oldie habit of having the heating turned up too high.  But this inability also takes the form of the body allowing itself to become too hot.  I often get up in the middle of the night not just to piss, but also to cool down.  Throw in the tendency to keep on doing what you get into the habit of doing, and a night’s sleep becomes something that regularly happens in two chunks, rather than one.

Recently, I have been staying up too late and getting up too late.  And I decided to break this pattern this morning by simply not having the second chunk of last night’s sleep.  I got up half way through my night’s sleep at what was actually a pretty good time to be getting up for real.  So I did.

But this means I will be sleepy all of today, and if you are sleepy but don’t want to sleep, you cannot be sitting down.  You have to be walking about, preferably in places where you can’t sleep without catastrophe.  Like: outside.  So, outside is where I will shortly be going, and I plan not to return until quite late, thereby being able to get to sleep at the new and improved earlier time, because so very sleep deprived.