A Modern and Mathematical Issue.

Because I live in a rented house I had to submit to a four hour check on the whole electrical system recently. The electrician found one issue: my bathroom had a standard pendant light fitting on the ceiling – you know, the simple sort into which you screw a new bulb when the old one blows. Apparently, this is now frowned upon and deemed to be unsafe, so today I had to have a new light fitting mounted in its place.

I went to have a look at it after the electrician had finished because it was completely unfamiliar in design and I wanted to know how to change the bulb.

‘It doesn’t use a bulb,’ said the expert. ‘It has an LCD panel permanently fitted.’

‘So how do I change the panel when the old one blows?’

‘You don’t. You have to have a complete new unit.’

‘Sounds expensive.’

‘It is.’

‘In that case, how long should the LCD panel last?’

‘I believe it’s about 10,000 hours.’ he replied confidently.

Right, so now let’s do the sums:

I estimated that the light in the bathroom is on, year round, for about 20 minutes a day – less in the long days of summer and more in the short, dark days of winter. So 20 mins a day equals an hour every three days. That’s step #1. Now for the calculation.

How many periods of three days are there in a year? Let’s call it 120 for simplicity. So the light is on for 120 hours per year. Is that correct? (I think so. I used to find that kind of thing very easy but my brain is older than it used to be.) Now for the big one. Let’s get the calculator so my brain doesn’t melt.

10,000 ÷ 120 = 83 years.

That seems an awfully long time to me, but if it’s correct I needn’t worry too much because it will see me out by a long way. Then again, the electrician might have been guessing. And if my logic is faulty, please, please, somebody tell me.

But now for the real problem. All the bulbs in my house are Warm White in colour temperature. The one in the new fitting is Daylight and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. And what it means is this. Since my eyes are accustomed to Warm White, when I go into the bathroom and switch on the light, every white surface – and there are a lot of them – appears pale blue. To an ex-photographer who is very sensitive to colour, that’s irritating.

Wilding the Shire With Yellow.

We have a re-wilding programme in the UK through which farmers are paid a subsidy to give part of their cornfields over to the sowing of wild plants. Two of the fields in Church Lane, at the dip below the landlord's mansion, have been so treated. (That's where the huge Copper Beech tree stands, the one under which I've requested that my ashes be scattered when I'm gone. There's a very fond memory attached to that spot, you see, and it will be a pleasant place for my ghost to say 'boo' to unsuspecting passers by. I might even whisper their names if I happen to know them.) 

 

In previous years the predominant colour of the flowers growing there has been blue, and blue is beginning to show itself again this year. But this year we have a treat. Rising above the wild plants are a number of golden yellow sunflowers. I assume certain insects and birds must be partial to sunflower seeds, but to us mere mortals they simply provide a feast for the eyes.

A Brief Note on Defining Value.

I was thinking again this morning about the fact that money doesn't actually exist; it's just a theoretical exchange mechanism which relies solely on consensus and trust to establish its apparent validity. And then it occurred to me that a far more 'concrete' form of currency is gold because gold is at least solid. People covet gold because it's so valuable, but gold is only valuable because people covet it. An ingot of gold is actually just a lump of metal. Don't we humans have some very silly ways of doing things? (And then it occurred to me that the most valuable commodity on earth is clean water which falls freely from the sky. And some people accumulate monetary wealth by being in the business of supplying it. Capitalism disappearing up its own fundament?)

Adding to the Knowledge Base.

As a result of discovering a spider trapped in my kitchen sink this morning -- and being subsequently rescued by me, of course -- I discovered something interesting. Spider silk is remarkably resistant to water pressure.

Fancy getting to my age without discovering that little gem, so many thanks to the arachnid in my kitchen. (And does this go some way to vindicating the old maxim that your enemy is your greatest teacher?)

The Problem With Imagination.

I went into my bathroom tonight and was suddenly beset by a vivid flash of imagination. Something was in my house and approaching me – something which the most extremely speculative reasoning couldn’t possibly account for; something which clearly had no right to be there. It was surprisingly scary, especially since it allowed the possibility of a repeat encounter.

I considered whether I should write it down as a piece of fiction since it had a commendable hint of Murakami about it. But you see, all the scary stuff I wrote during my period of writing scary stuff never scared me. Why would it? My imagination was, after all, just having fun. This wasn’t fun, so I probably won’t.

Serving the Cruelty Gene.

My YouTube’s recommendations have suddenly started to include videos of people being ‘eaten alive’ by predatory animals. Needless to say I haven’t watched any of them, but it raises certain questions:

1. What kind of human being wants to watch a video of anything, especially a fellow human, undergoing the horror of being eaten alive?

2. Are these videos real or AI-generated? If they’re real, who is filming them and how? I think AI generation is most likely.

3. Why is YouTube recommending these travesties of decency to me? The only animal videos I watch are the occasional animal rescue ones if they look genuine, and that doesn’t amount to very many. And I never watch videos of people being forced to suffer in any way, so what is going on with YouTube’s algorithms?

4. Have we reached the point at which a public and highly profitable platform is allowing the production of fake and extremely nasty material clearly aimed at perverted minds, and claiming that it’s real? If these things can be allowed to exist, shouldn’t they be restricted to the dark web which, apparently, thrives on the darkest side of human nature?

I suppose the opportunity to watch this kind of thing is the modern alternative for those who used to shake with excitement at the prospect of watching some poor soul being burned alive at the stake. Will the human race ever aspire to its potential, I wonder?

Re-Posting to Fill a Gap.

Yesterday I thought of two blog posts which I intended to write up on the morrow. But now the morrow is here I can’t remember what they were about, so I can’t.

Nil desperandum, however. Something I was musing on earlier reminded me of an old ditty I posted to this blog many years ago. Though short, it’s one of the very few I might almost grace with term ‘poem’ (but only just.) The muse, incidentally, centred around growing up in an industrial area surrounded by a hundred thousand chimneys belching soot into the air (day and night during the winter.) The ditty (almost poem) never had a title, so I’ll give it one now. It’s called On Seeing a Chinese Lady Looking Wan in February.

Should I compare thee to a smoggy day in old Beijing

Where ne’er a merry roundelay is heard

 

For not a bird will deign to sing

To woo his mate with lovelorn din

 

But coughs instead

(In Mandarin)

And now I’m in the mood I think I’ll re-post the other ditty-which-comes-close-to-being-called-a-poem. This one doesn’t have a title either because I was never able to think of one. I still can’t.

Is there something afoot Mistress Bella la Belle

Are you going away in the morning

Will you leave the home shore without saying farewell

While the dew is still sweet at the dawning

 

As I’m settled in sleep and the sun tolls a knell

Will I heed not the want of a warning

And whene’er you return will the spectre re-tell

Of the day you set sail in the morning

If I said that this is about Egypt you’d call me puddled, wouldn’t you? (At least you would if you came from my bit of industrial England.) In that case I won’t bother.

And it might be considered notable that the last time I made thirty or more posts in one month was 2½ half years ago. Make of it what you will.

More Post Truth Blues.

For some time now I’ve been meaning to make a series of posts on YouTube Tasters I Refuse to Click On. You know, things like: ‘She died and went to heaven. She met Jesus there who told her…’ Nobody would click on something as absurdly fake and manipulative as that, would they? Apparently they do, in their tens or even hundreds of thousands, and my faith in my fellow humans sinks a little lower every time. Anyway, I never seem to get around to making a list to compile in a blog post, so I thought I’d pick out one to make a general point.

This evening I came across a taster about the mysterious circumstances around the death of Edgar Allen Poe. I’ve heard the story from several sources, but a quick glance at the thumbnail told me something was off. It has a picture of a dark sky over an American-style, high rise cityscape, but the most prominent feature is a picture of an ageing Nikola Tesla. Why Tesla? Where’s the connection? As far as history recalls, there’s no connection whatsoever between the two. They weren’t even contemporary, Poe having died five years before Tesla was born.

So was the uploader so ignorant that he didn’t know the difference between a famous writer of gothic stories and a ground-breaking scientist? Or was he simply using a well known image to encourage other ignorant people to click on the video, which is fraudulent? This happens with images of Carl Jung a lot. ‘What Carl Jung said about…’ Rubbish. And there was a trend at one time for uploading songs credited to Enya, when nothing about the writing or performance had anything to do with Enya. People pointed it out in the comments, but the fake credit stayed.

So here’s the real question:

If Google wants to own and run YouTube for the purpose of making huge amounts of money, why do they abdicate the responsibility to exercise some control over the veracity of the information?  We all know the answer to that one, of course. Truth doesn’t matter any longer, only money does. You can tell as many lies as you want to invent, and peddle as much garbage as you can find, and it’s wholly acceptable as long as it’s making money.

There is no such thing as quality literature. There are books that sell and books that don’t. ~ Margaret Thatcher.

So what do we do about this lamentable trend? Decline to watch any more YouTube? I think I might, but that would be a shame because there are genuine people out there making a living out of it at a time when the jobs market is faltering. And it’s obvious from the production values that most of them put a lot of effort into it. And some of them are genuinely informative and/or entertaining. (Try Hilary Layne’s channel for a good example.) Besides which, the protest of one little man like me wouldn’t amount to a hill o’ beans in this crazy and dishonest world. We would have to do it in our hundreds of thousands. And what about the rest of the media world? They’re all becoming just as bad.

I’m sorry to say this – truly I am – but I think America largely took us down this road. ‘Thou shalt have no other Gods before me,’ said the Great God Money. And so they don’t. (Hilary Lane is American, by the way. At least I think she is. I suppose she could be Canadian. We Europeans get easily confused by North American accents.)

Opposite Poles.

I was engaged in my regular people watch outside Sainsbury’s today when I saw a young man and woman – around mid to late twenties – walking briskly towards the car park. The woman had jet black hair (a rarity in the UK) cut neatly in a bob style at collar length, but what most caught my eye was lower down. Beneath her midi length skirt she was wearing flat formal shoes and ankle socks. The usual attire for women that age is either shorts or jeans with trainers, and so I decided she was either from another time, another place, or was maybe a little odd. I wanted to make her acquaintance because I like people who are a little odd, but her male companion was thin and wishy-washy with fine, pale blond hair, so I didn’t bother. And she might not have spoken English anyway.

What was even odder, however, was the pair of men standing outside the doors. One was tall, thin, and around thirty. He had very long and heavily permed hair, and was wearing the oddest two piece suit in a random mixture of retrained colours. The top garment was tight and clung to his overly slight frame, and the trousers were heavily flared with tassels up the back. His face carried an overly enthusiastic grin and he was being equally enthusiastically interviewed by a fat, slobbish, middle aged man holding one of those little furry microphones which some YouTubers use. I decided that their brand of oddness was one with which I’m wholly and gratefully unacquainted, and so I gave them a wide berth. Heat and sunshine does bring the strangest of creatures out into public view, doesn’t it?

Recovery: The Garden Diary.

The bats are back. Anyone reading this blog in the old days might remember me waxing eloquent about the bats at twilight. It was the delight of the day to stand among them during their feeding frenzy, but then the long, cold winter of 2012/13 (or whenever it was) decimated their numbers and they’ve never recovered since.

This year they have, and once again I’m able to stand outside on a warm evening being thrilled by a veritable tribe of the little creatures flying rapidly around the house and pirouetting at mesmeric speed. And some of them are bigger than others, so I’m hoping they’re a family and the kids will survive next winter to carry on the tradition. They might even multiply.

There are also very many more butterflies in the garden than there have been in recent years, and even two species I haven’t seen here before. The bees are still a cause for concern, though. There are plenty of bumble bees, but still very few honey bees. I assume it’s why my apple tree has failed to crop for about five years now. And there’s also a dearth of wasps, maybe because the apple tree is failing and wasps seem to be particularly attracted to fruit. Maybe they’ll appear in numbers once the plums begin ripening. It seems odd to most people that I like wasps, and yet I do. They’re good looking and I don’t find them at all threatening as long as I accept their presence with equanimity.