Treed

Picture by Alex

RSPB Ham Wall

Clare and Alex in the canal-side hide

The wetland

Path looking back from the Noah hide to the canal

The path in the southerly direction towards the hide

The reed beds

The Noah hide

Wind-driven waves and foam

Highland cattle (on the fenced off opposite side)

For late March it was astonishingly cold, with a brisk and chilly west wind. No booming bitterns.

This scarce antiquarian book ...

Amazon link

"This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work."

Alex reading this book from one of his ancestors (on his mother's side).

"Manuscript autobiography, 265 pp, 1938, regarding his life as an English fisherman and his rise to prominence. George Youell (1868-1943) was the father of John Youell and an English fisherman."

So we were in Brittany the summer of 1982

... or was it 1983?

In any event, Alex looks around three and I look like Peter Sarstedt.

...As the wheels churned uselessly ...

It was a last resort - Adrian calling me - to report that his car was irretrievably stuck in mud off the A350 just north of Warminster. Sometimes the satnav demands a U-turn, and sometimes you have to pull off the main road to effect the manoeuvre. And sometimes that side road in the dark is, unbeknownst to you, the entrance to a sodden ploughed field.

Adrian's stranded car

Alex and I arrived about 45 minutes later laden with planks, spades and chocolate bars. After watching them work for a while from the warmth and dryness of my own car, I was persuaded to transfer to the stuck one to reverse out (on those newly-laid planks). At this point a large white van pulled in; the livery said 'Garden Centre' and the guy and girl offered use of their winch.

We compromised: I reversed enough to show in principle we could have gotten out, and then they winched the car to the concrete entrance way. Nice people.

Adrian finally retrieved

Here's Alex's impression of Adrian safely back at ours, checking stuff out on his laptop.

Oh Mighty One - thank you for helping us!

And here's Alex's impression of ...? A Greek God? A Roman Emperor? It's hard to be sure.

News today: robot cat; ultrasociety; yum-yum

Marginal Revolution highlights Hasbro's new 'companion for the elderly', the 'Joy for All' pet.

The linked Yahoo tech article continues:

“Joy for All” pets are robotic cats that “look, feel, and sound like real cats,” Hasbro claims on its website, which allows customers to choose from one of three varietals — orange tabby, silver, and creamy white. Noting that these pretend pets are “so much more than soft fur, soothing purrs, and pleasant meows,” the toy company claims that the robots “respond to petting, hugging, and motion much like the cats you know and love. This two-way give-and-take helps create a personally rich experience that can bring fun, joy, and friendship to you and your loved ones ages 5 to 105.”

Here's a gruesome YouTube video of the US$99 toy ...

... but it doesn't seem to do much more than Cindy and Daisy.

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In other news I bought "Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth" by Peter Turchin (h/t Razib Khan).

Peter Turchin writes:

"We organize ourselves into communities of hundreds of millions of individuals, inhabit every continent, and send people into space. Human beings are nature’s greatest team players. And the truly astounding thing is, we only started our steep climb to the top of the rankings–overtaking wasps, bees, termites and ants–in the last 10,000 years. Genetic evolution can’t explain this anomaly. Something else is going on. How did we become the ultrasocial animal?

In his latest book, the evolutionary scientist Peter Turchin (War and Peace and War) solves the puzzle using some astonishing results in the new science of Cultural Evolution. The story of humanity, from the first scattered bands of Homo Sapiens right through to the greatest empires in history, turns out to be driven by a remorseless logic. Our apparently miraculous powers of cooperation were forged in the fires of war. Only conflict, escalating in scale and severity, can explain the extraordinary shifts in human society–and society is the greatest military technology of all."

You've got to have a soft spot for such refreshing enthusiasm for unremitting combat.

Peter has self-published this on Kindle and pleads for reviews to help it sell (rather as Linda Nagata did for her 'Red' Trilogy). I intend to help him along once I've finished the Great Collider book (about the Chinese proposal to build a successor to the LHC).

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PS. Zena Skinner's Christmas Cake recipe has now been accessed 141 times.

... (update: Tuesday Nov 24th - 160 times).

Castle Hill/Maesbury Castle on a cold Sunday afternoon

We first visited Maesbury Castle (Castle Hill) - just outside Wells on the Old Frome Road - in October, (I wrote about it here). On a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon Alex, Clare and myself visited again.

Clare and Alex on the Neolithic camp ramparts

The author in a chill wind

Glastonbury Tor in the far distance

Afterwards in the Crown, Wells market square

I was waiting for someone to review "Hive Mind" by Garett Jones, and finally Greg Cochran has done so here (comments are worth reading, too).

I don't think I will be buying it.

Slow news day

It's a wet Sunday - what can I tell you? The gym was pretty deserted this morning but, fuelled by massive over-indulgence in trifle last night, I did pretty well, especially on the resistance machines.

Later I started Lecture 2 on General Relativity by acclaimed Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind. Once of the best teachers in the world talking about one of the most tedious subjects (covariant and contravariant tensors, and transformations of the metric tensor): I literally fell asleep after 25 minutes.

And then this video. The setting is Marissal Road, Henbury, Bristol. Alex and Adrian, together with my sister Elaine, are visiting my mother (this was some years ago). I am my usual bumptious, overbearing self with a camera; my mother (with her robot cat, Cindy) is inveigled into the role of camera-person.

Despite everything, it's quite amusing.