Ideas for Christmas decorations

Stourhead House decorated for Christmas. Click on pictures to make larger.

Revolutionary Christmas Cards

Buy me!

In this year of insurrectionary turbulence I determined to eschew the traditional Christmas card.

"No!" to Father Christmas, reindeer, snow, holly and angels!

But what's the alternative? If our future is right-wing oligarchic authoritarianism, you won't find me sending out Trump-, Le Pen- or UKIP-themed Christmas greetings.

Better to return to the soft-headed but so-romantic leftism of my youth.

It turns out that left-wing Christmas cards are hard to find. There's nothing useful on Amazon, and Google isn't much better. I draw the line at those incompetent authoritarians Stalin and Mao, and have little time for the Fidelistas.

I looked, but the Fourth International (which increasingly espouses only trendy identity politics) isn't doing cards this (or any) year.

Help finally from The Radical Tea Towel Company ("You wash, I'll try ... to change the world!").

A Mixed Pack

I ordered the mixed pack.

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Update: they arrived.

It's lunchtime for Italy ...

From The Spectator blog today:

"Being a politician in Rome these days is a bit like sitting in a nice Trattoria, surrounded by a large group of office colleagues.  You’ve just finished a long lunch but no one wants to ask for the bill because it is obvious from the carnage on the table that its going to be a whopper, and it is equally obvious that no one has any money to pay for it all.

"In such circumstances there is zero upside in being the person who asks for the bill, or tries to get people to empty their pockets.  The only sensible thing to do is to continue to order bottles of limoncello and wait for the German restaurant owner to chuck everyone out.

"Italy is unable to reform.  No one can afford to expend the political capital necessary to take on the many and varied vested interests.  In the old days, the Pope would have called for a jubilee, a once in a generation carnival of debt write-offs. Nowadays, the equivalent might be a currency devaluation.

"The problem is, of course, that right now, the Italians are using someone else’s currency."

Nothing bad will ever happen to Italy ...

Why isn't Bakker super-famous?

Amazon Link

"Disciple Manning is able to recall every conversation, meeting and feeling he has ever had, making him an extremely dangerous private investigator. When a young woman disappears from a religious cult, her parents turn to Manning for help. Manning accepts, but with a chilling sense of foreboding.

"Heading into the heart of the cult, he encounters its beguiling leader, obsessed with the idea that the world is a fantastical theatre, in which we merely act out our roles, ignorant of our true existence beyond; a belief he is intent on protecting, at any cost. Manning's investigation soon leads to clashes with the cult's unsettling belief systems and leaves him fighting for survival and elusive answers. "

Scott Bakker's PI tale is another vehicle for his unsettling worldview. Intelligence, energy and conviction crackle through every inventive sentence. I turn to Bakker with relief after reciting yet another chapter of Lee Child's "Killing Floor" (read to Clare). In comparison, Lee Child is pedestrian, leaden, formulaic, clunky and cheap.

Amazon link

On Amazon, a one-star review of genius - from Deckard:

"I'm Jack Reacher," I said

"Really?" he said

"Yes," I said looking in the mirror at my brown hair, blue eyes, and rough rugged looking face.

"Jack Reacher?" he said, "The man who had an American father and French mother that married in Korea and moved around a lot so he mostly grew up in american airbases, and naturally entered into the force himself, became a major then was made redundant with severance pay and is now struggling to ingratiate himself back into society?" he said again.

"Yes," I said.

He steepled his fingers for the fourth time. I noted his hands. They were good hands. They were Textbook hands. They knew their way around a gun. But he wasn't here to shoot guns, he was here to ask me lots of questions about plot and characterisation.

"So," he said. "you know what happens now right?" He said.

"Yes," I said, "We have to have a massively wooden conversation involving as many 'saids' as possible."

"Yes," he said, "all the saids." he said, "One said after another said until there's so many saids, that this reads like an eight year old's English assignment."

"Oh," I said noticing his hair. It had a textbook parting. It was hair that had seen a lot of action, and not all of it good. This was hair that had endured all the hardships of growing up as a young black male in a predominantly white neighbourhood, the struggle for promotion through the ranks, and a difficult relationship with his mother.

I stood up, walked to the table, grabbed a cup from the pile of cups, put the cup down on the table surface, took a spoon, put it into the coffee, dropped the coffee into the cup, took the hot kettle, poured some water onto the coffee, picked up the milk jug, poured a small amount of milk into the coffee, grabbed the spoon, put it into the cup, stirred it several times, then put the spoon down, picked up the cup and walked back to the desk and sat back down in the seat.

"You want one?" I asked.

"No thanks," he said, "I don't want to die of boredom before we get to the end of this scene," he said. He looked angry. He clenched his fist. It was the kind of fist that could hit someone really hard in the face.

I had to think quick. Had to think about exactly what else I needed the readers to know through my limited first person perspective. Then it came to me. I wrote a short note on a piece of paper and passed it under the table where none of you idiots could see.

"Oh yes," he exclaimed reading it quickly, "that reminds me," he said, "tell me all about why you walked fourteen miles down a road," he said," in the rain," he said, "with no money, credit cards, ID, or pants." he said

But it was too late. The reader had thrown my book off a ferry. On fire.

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"Killing Floor" has 2,598 reviews on Amazon.co.uk.

"Disciple of the Dog" has 4.

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Diogenes of Sinope (fourth century BC)

"It was this determination to follow his own dictates and not adhere to the conventions of society that he was given the epithet "dog," from which the name "cynic" is derived. As to why he was called a dog, Diogenes replied, "Because I fawn upon those who give me anything, and bark at those who give me nothing, and bite the rogues."

The quote with which Bakker starts his book. His protagonist is thus named and the book titled.

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I have now completed "A Dance With Dragons: Part 2 After The Feast (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 5)".

Now in the (very long) queue for "The Winds of Winter".

The Moon and Venus

Pictured a moment ago from our garden here in Wells, Somerset.

What's that word? Aphasia?

Clare keeps complaining her brain is going to mush. She can't remember words, forgets where she's put stuff. I explain that it's not Alzheimer's, it's not dementia, it's .. normal. And here's the proof.

From "Variations in cognitive abilities across the life course"

Just for the record: a quarter of your capabilities get blown away by age 60. Then you fall off a cliff.

Diary: Christmas Bazaar + Clare's weights

#inconsequentialtrivia

We missed a frost last night. Just damp and cold for the Church Bazaar in the Town Hall. We do a fast flyby. Buy marmalade, bread, some cakes. Inspect the books and buy a few novels. Finish with hot drinks and a mince pie. This year Clare did not directly engage with Santa. Then Waitrose.

Father Christmas at Wells Town Hall - the RC Church Bazaar

Clare inspects one of the stalls

Back in 2015, Clare and Santa got on famously (above). This year: quieter.

A misty morning showing the weed mats - work-in-progress in our front garden

Clare has augmented her 'beauty bells' with a 2 kg pair

It's a joy to watch her flap.

The Tao of Weights: function follows form

Dear A. J,

I have been reflecting on your recent performance on my weight training programme. You warmed-up on the bike and then did the sixteen exercises. In every case you were dismissive, repeatedly advocating "More resistance!", "Heavier weights!".

I observed, though, that you focused solely on hitting your performance target, usually 15 repetitions, despite in many cases only achieving this through the most intricate contortions in which you threw every part of your body at the exercise to achieve 'success'.

This relentless goal-centric performance is even stranger as I know you have studied martial arts, where the philosophy - the Tao if you will - is Wu Wei:

"Wu Wei (chinese, literally “non-doing”) is an important concept of Taoism and means natural action, or in other words, action that does not involve struggle or excessive effort. Wu wei is the cultivation of a mental state in which our actions are quite effortlessly in alignment with the flow of life."

The point of 'pushing iron', as with all other exercises, is to develop specific muscles, tendons and joints. The form is all-important. Without it, random muscles and parts of the body engage in an unbalanced and uncontrolled manner. The body does not develop harmoniously and there is a risk of injury.

Let me say it again. In the first instance, neither the weights you are lifting nor the number of reps you achieve is the goal. The goal is to perfect the form. With dumbbells, where many muscle groups coordinate to achieve the exercise form, this takes a while. Use manageably small weights until the form is good, then slowly increase weights and reps.

In general you should do reps only until you lose the form, not up to the point where you cannot continue despite arbitrary contortions.

My final point. It's a mistake to approach an exercise session with external achievement goals in mind. Your objective is to do each exercise in a calm and measured way, taking care to observe the form, and focussing on your body's feeling to fine-tune technique.

Concentrate on your proprioceptive sense and you will discover whether the exercise is working the right muscles.

Next time, I urge you to be calm and unhurried - emphasise optimal process - and desired outcomes will follow.

Best regards,

Nigel.

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PS. Bruce Lee quotes to ponder 😔.

Now they come for the blue-collar jobs

From The Economist this week (my emphasis):

"Every day more than 8,000 containers flow through the Port of Rotterdam. But only a fraction are selected to pass through a giant x-ray machine to check for illicit contents. The machine, made by Rapiscan, an American firm, can capture images as the containers move along a track at 15kph (9.3mph).

"But it takes time for a human to inspect each scan for anything suspicious—and in particular for small metallic objects that might be weapons. (Imagine searching an image of a room three metres by 14 metres crammed to the ceiling with goods.) To increase this inspection rate would require a small army of people.

"A group of computer scientists at University College London (UCL), led by Lewis Griffin, may soon speed up the process by employing artificial intelligence. Dr Griffin is being sponsored by Rapiscan to create software that uses machine-learning techniques to scan the x-ray images. Thomas Rogers, a member of the UCL team, estimates that it takes a human operator about ten minutes to examine each X-ray.

"The UCL system can do it in 3.5 seconds."

...

"A paper the group presented at the Imaging for Crime Detection and Prevention conference in Madrid last week showed that in tests, the system spotted nine out of ten hidden metallic objects.

"Only six in every hundred readings flagged a weapon when there was nothing. Dr Griffin says this false positive rate has been reduced to one in every 200 since the paper was written in August. The group’s software has also been trained to detect concealed cars.

The UCL team hopes to test its software shortly on real containers, some with small weapons deliberately hidden inside. Assuming that works, Dr Griffin plans to integrate the artificial-intelligence system into Rapiscan’s scanning systems over the next few months.

"The team is also aiming to train the system to detect “anomalies”—the machine-learning equivalent of a human hunch that something is not quite right about a scan. That could, for instance, be something unusual in the way things are positioned inside the container."

Scanning images is a tedious task, whether at container ports or at airports. Most likely the security staff will be delighted to see this part of their job automated away. There are unlikely to be directly-attributable redundancies. As The Economist pointed out, they still need customs staff to search the containers.

But it's the thin end of the wedge.

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From the book, "Deep Learning", section 1.2.4

Number of neurons in various AI systems vs biology

System 20 is GoogLeNet, brought to you by Google for image analysis.

Your take home message is that these wonderful AI learning systems which so impress us have, at best, the neural power of a frog. A human-level neural capacity is predicted for 2056 (which seems conservative).

Change of layout here

Belatedly I've added a blogroll (to the right, scroll down) and taken the opportunity to re-arrange the sidebar. Hopefully this adds some value.

Razib Khan (Gene Expression) is setting up a new blog which won't be live for a couple of weeks.

Recall Neuropath from my post on transgressive science-fiction?

The blogroll now features Scott Bakker's blog, 'Three Pound Brain'. Always good to read a philosopher who rants. Philosophers have a very special way of writing: they take pride in marshalling a vast army of esoteric concepts to surround, envelope, besiege, frame and demarcate some concept of interest.

Scientists and mathematicians just figure out the relevant terms and get modeling.

This from his inordinately lengthy review of Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus.

"Science is steadily revealing the very sources intentional cognition evolved to neglect. Technology is exploiting these revelations, busily engineering emulators to pander to our desires, allowing us to shelter more and more skin from the risk and toil of natural and social reality. Designer experience is designer meaning. Thus the likely irony: the end of meaning will appear to be its greatest blooming, the consumer curled in the womb of institutional matrons, dreaming endless fantasies, living lives of spellbound delight, exploring worlds designed to indulge ancestral inclinations."

Translation: 'With AI and VR coming along apace, we'll all soon have the option of wasting our lives in virtual realities which super-stimulate our drives and emotions."

My version may be lacking Bakker's poetry, but it might get me a job at Google 😎.