That mobile phones have cameras means that even regular people now always have a camera with them.  Already, mobile phone cameras are quite good.  Soon, they will be as good as all but the best cameras, to the point where ever more people will be satisfied with their mobile phone cameras, and accordingly won’t want to be bothering with dedicated cameras at all.  This transition is already under way, a fact which I regularly track whenever I roam about London snapping (among other delights) my fellow snappers and their snapping machines. 

This photographer, for instance, looks like he’s using a “phone”, the inverted commas there being because these things are so much more than phones, to the point where the phoning is almost an afterthought.  As Michael Jennings said last night, it really is something of an accident that we just happen to call these things “phones”.

Here is a photo I took with my Google Nexus 4, very soon after I got it, of Randy Barnett (already featured here in this earlier posting - bottom right of the first lot of pictures there), speaking at Freedom Forum 2013:

As you can see, the quality is okay, but only okay.  Compare with the zoomed photo (at the link above) of Barnett, and you can easily see the difference that a better camera makes.  If the Google Nexus 4 camera has a zoom feature, I have yet to discover it.

As the picture above shows, I (of course) had my regular camera with me at FF2013.  But last night I was out and about for a short while, without that camera, only the Google Nexus 4.  I was dining at Chateau Samizdata, and collecting Amazon stuff that I have delivered there rather than at my own front door, because at my own front door there have been robberies.  So anyway, a recent arrive at CS was a keyboard, for use with the GN4, but although pre-warned that this keyboard would require two AAA batteries to make it go, I had forgotten to bring these with me.  So, I nipped out to buy some.  Without my regular camera.

Sod’s Law decrees that whenever you are out and about without your camera, interesting things will immediately present themselves to you.  And one such interesting thing did, in the form of a sign making use of the double meaning of the word Pole.  But, Sod’s Law was held at bay by my GN4, which I did have with me, in my jacket pocket, because keeping the GN4 in my jacket pocket at all times except when I am using it is The Rule.  Snap snap, which fortunately I had more or less learned how to do:

The GN4 may not be much good for distance Big Things, and the like, but it is fine for a sign.

And since the sign was the point, even though I do like scaffolding, here is the bit of the picture with the sign:

No computerised trickery there, apart from the cropping.  More than somewhat blurry, but entirely legible, the whole point of letters being that they hack their way through exactly such communicational barriers.

I know I keep going on about it, but now I will go on about it some more.  Signs make great photos.  Signs are extraordinarily evocative of the places where they are displayed.  Signs tell you what goes on in a place, or what people want to do or are liable to do by mistake, but/and must not.  Wherever the public goes, there are signs, especially nowadays, when you are legally responsible for whatever idiotic thing the public does on your patch, unless you can point at a sign saying don’t do that.  So, on that wedding day, I photoed signs.

It was, after all, a sign that told me I was in the right place to start with, see 1.1 below.  My favourite is 3.2, the one about swan rescue.

No, forget the swans.  My even more favourite one is the one that says: this parking space is only for Registrars, 2.2.  This told me that there are a lot of weddings here, and that they are accordingly quite good at doing weddings.  So it proved.

British Summer Time began last Sunday, and I surely wasn’t the only Brit taken by surprise.  According to our excellent and invariably accurate short range weather forecasters (the long range climate guessers are something else entirely), the current (bitterly) cold spell that we are enduring will only end around the middle of this month.

On April 20th, two friends of mine are to be married, hopefully in the warm outdoors, and I hope to be taking photos of it, in the warm outdoors.  They hope, as do I, that the cold will soon abate.  Fingers crossed.  The weather is getting sunnier now, but is still amazingly cold.  Coldest March Britain has had for over half a century, they are saying.  It was several years ago now that they (i.e. the long range climate guessers) changed Global Warming to Climate Chaos.  Wise move.  Wiser would have been to shut the fuck up and let Western Civilisation (a) proceed without them fucking with it, and (b) deal with any climate dramas if and when.

Meanwhile, the cold has kept me from roaming London taking snaps during the last week or two.  Instead I roam through my recent archives, looking for interesting snaps taken on warmer days.

Days like March 5th.  I have already displayed here a number of snaps taken that day.

Here are some more:

This time there are more of those commonplace things that look better in good photos, as I hope you think these somewhat are, than they do when you actually see them.  That’s if you even do see them, as in notice them.

Besides which, a double decker bus advert may be pretty obvious stuff to a fellow Londoner.  But what if you are one of those lost souls who lives outside London?  Or worse, who has never even been to London?  Or perhaps never even set eyes on a double decker bus? A double decker bus advert must seem, to such a person, almost unbearably exotic and glamorous.

Note, in the first picture, top left, reflections of these buildings.

While I was on that Waterloo Station upper deck, I espied a couple of adverts next to each other, put out by this organisation.

Here they are together:

And here they each are separately, for you to click on to get them well and truly readable:

Okay, I accept these challenges, and will respond.

The left hand one is a variant on the theme of “a billion people can’t be wrong”.  Yes they can.  Why has the Qur’an remained unchanged?  There are any number of reasons why that would happen, other than what they are trying to say, which is that it is all true.  Because it is an object of unthinking worship, rather than of serious study?  (Remember that the memorising of it is often done by people who have no idea what they are saying, merely reproducing sounds.) Because people have been too scared to challenge it?  Because Islam remains stuck in the seventh century, and unthinking bigotry is built into it?

Science, which the second advert seeks to argue was pre-echoed by the Qur’an, has changed over and over again.  And this is a sign of science’s intellectual seriousness and intellectual vitality.  Lack of change, century after century, signifies the opposite.

As for the claim of the Qur’an to be science before science, the real theory of the big bang is but the conceptual tip of an intellectual iceberg consisting of a ton of evidence and interpretation, and it is the latter that gives science its force. Science is not merely true.  It explains why it is true.  It argues about whether it is true.  And consequently it gets ever more true.  Islam is no truer now than it was thirteen centuries ago.

The good news here is that the claim that the Qur’an is as scientific as real science is a huge concession to the acknowledged intellectual superiority of science.  “We have been right all along, and science proves it!” But if they really thought that the Qur’an was the last word on everything, they wouldn’t be dragging science in to back the claim up.  Science would be ignored.

But they know that they cannot now ignore science.  Science is a challenge they know they have to respond to.  On account of it being so much truer and so much better at getting at more truth than the unchanging and unchangeable incantations that they are stuck with.

I have recently acquired a new cleaning lady.  She’s been twice now, and she seems good.  I am paying her £20 for two hours, which is a bit more than she expects, but I need her services rather less regularly than many people might, and at irregular times, so a bit more seems fair.

She is keen to get further cleaning and housekeeping work in the London area, so if anyone in London would like me to put them in touch, get in touch with me.

Yes, she is Eastern European.  I have yet to ask if she is a trained concert pianist.  She definitely sings in a church choir.

So how about another Feline Friday:

Photoed by me this afternoon, next to Westminster Abbey.

In the forecourt of the Channel 4 headquarters in Horseferry Road is a big 4, which gets variably decorated from time to time.  This is the latest variant, photoed by me this afternoon:

That must be a guy in a wheel chair, there to flag up the Paralympics coverage on C4.

And yes indeed, perfect summer weather.

Last Tuesday, at 10pm, I met somebody at Piccadilly Circus.  I seem to recall it being on QI that actually the Eros Statue isn’t really an Eros Statue, but despite that, we met next to the Eros Statue.  It sounds more exciting than it was.

While waiting for this person to arrive, I of course, took photos of people taking photos:

And on the way home, I photographed some Modern Art:

That’s in a tube station.  Green Park, I think.