September 2018 – Page 3 – Brian Micklethwait's New Blog

Imperfectly hidden scaffolding

If you step outside Sloane Square tube station, and immediately look to your left, you see this:

This is one of those phenomena which doesn’t photo very informatively. By which I mean that if you are there, it is far easier to see what is going on. So let me now tell you what is going on. This is the inside of a new building, but covered up, while they’re completing the building, with a sheet. This sheet has another building painted on it. And there is light coming at the sheet from behind. When what is behind the sheet completely blocks out light, we see the picture on the surface of the sheet. But when light comes at us from beyond the sheet, the picture on the sheet is overwhelmed, and we observe either light, or any shapes (in this case steel structure and scaffolding) in silhouette.

What I like about this effect is both its temporariness, and the fact that it ends up looking so much more interesting that it was intended to look. The idea was that we would only see the picture on the sheet. What we actually see is a whole lot more diverting.

Here is another photo I took of the same thing, this time including a bit more context:

It’s a little more clear, in that photo, that there is a picture on a surface as well as all kinds of excitements behind it, on account of the sheet consisting of surfaces at an angle to one another.

Best of all, you can now see that one of the excitements behind the sheet – to be more exact, one of the structures behind the sheet – is a crane.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Battersea rollerblader

If someone is doing this …:

… is it okay to photo them and stick the photo up on the internet, somewhere like here? I feel that it is okay, because, albeit in a very good way, the guy is making something of a spectacle of himself. He is doing something very individual, in public, in a way that people are bound to notice. Therefore, he doesn’t mind them noticing, or he wouldn’t do it. Therefore, he won’t mind me noticing it.

Behind our self-transporter, we can just about make out the towers of Battersea Power Station. Well, I can, because I know that’s what it is, because that’s where I took the above photo, this afternoon. At the time, I was busy photoing the road, because in my opinion it is a very interesting road. For reasons which I may, or may not, explain, here, some other time.

Meanwhile, I miss Transport Blog.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

This actually did get my attention

Photoed by me, this afternoon, just outside Acton Central London Overground station:

Time was when I would have completely trusted a blog posting like this one, which says good things about this enterprise. Now I merely trust this blog posting enough to link to it, and enough to hope that what it says is true. I’ve no reason to think that it isn’t, apart from the fact it’s on the internet.

I know what you’re thinking. How can you be sure that I am for real? I am, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

“Attention” that isn’t

This morning, I was half attending to the Test Match. And I was switching back and forth between the Cricinfo page that showed the latest few deliveries with written ball-by-ball commentary (“live”), and the version that showed the complete England scorecard (“scorecard”). I was doing this because I was trying to track how the England stand in progress, being accomplished by Jos Buttler and Stuart Broad, compared to other stands in the innings, and also how Buttler’s personal score compared to other personal scores in the England innings. In the end, the Buttler/Broad stand was the biggest in the England innings, and Buttler was the top individual England scorer. Following a terrible evening yesterday, England had a very good morning this morning.

But this is not a posting only about cricket, it is mostly a posting about internet advertising, and about what I suspect is deliberate deception in the matter of how effective internet advertising actually is.

I know, I know, if I’m not paying, I’m not watching the product; I am the product. But I suspect that I, the product, am being lied about.

Every time I performed one of the above switches, from the “live” version of the Cricinfo test match page to the “scorecard” version, a noisy video advert cranked itself up at my new destination. Silencing such video adverts can be difficult. You tell them to shut up but they just ignore you and carry on shouting, like they own the site, which they sort of do. However, I have discovered a way to silence these adverts. Click on them, and immediately close the window that this click opens. The advert feels that its job is done, and it stops shouting. Its job is to get “clicks” to whatever the hell it was advertising.

But what were my clicks? Were they attempts to learn more about the product in question. No. They were simply me getting the advert to shut the hell up. I paid no attention to the adverts.

How many others have discovered this trick? I can’t be the only one. So, you stick your annoying advert on a popular website. People click on the advert, close the window as soon as it opens, but the people who placed this advert assure the purveyor of the product that the advert got “attention”, from me and all the others who clicked purely to shut the advert up. Because, look how many people clicked on the noisy bloody advert! I did it half a dozen times for several different adverts, every time I switched from one version of that Cricinfo page to the other, which I did a lot. That’s a lot of attention!

No it isn’t. It is a small amount of contempt, for bad-mannered tradesmen shouting at me in my kitchen.

What’s that you say? I’m a libertarian? Yes I am. So, why am I complaining about capitalism?

Try reading my piece for Samizdata entitled “The overheating Samsung S24F356 – and thoughts about why there are so many complaints about capitalism“.

That link there hasn’t been shouting at you all the time you’ve been reading this posting. This is a link with manners. You can follow this link, in silence. Or you can ignore it, in silence. You are welcome.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A concrete pump?

Earlier in the week, on my way to St James’s Park tube, and again on my way back home from St James’s Park tube, I photoed what I described to Google as a “concrete pump”.

This concrete pump was helping to build a clutch of apartment blocks where the old New Scotland Yard used to be, before New Scotland Yard moved to a new New Scotland Yard, back where the original Scotland Yard used once to be.

I got enough images to suggest that a “concrete pump” is indeed what this extraordinary contraption is, but not enough to suggest that I had named the contraption correctly, using the preferred words of those who deploy it.

Nevertheless, enjoy. I did, especially the close-ups of the joints.

All this, just to be able to squirt concrete from a lorry into a hole. (I’m guessing, from the invisibility of building action behind all the solid fences, that his concrete was for the foundations. This being where concrete, as opposed to steel on its own, still seems to be essential.) And with a big long arm like that one, with all its joints, I’m guessing it can reach all sorts of complicated and out-of-the-way spots. (If you guess that I do a lot of guessing when I see something like this, then you guess right.)

There must be a reason why they don’t use a flexible tube, but have to make do with a rigid tube, but with the occasional rotating joint. So elaborate are those joints that they end up looking biological rather than merely mechanical. So, as with the previous posting, also about technology rather than biology, I have categorised this posting as, among other things, “other creatures”. (I’ve also added “sculpture” to the category list. Does regular sculpture come any better than this? Sometimes maybe, but not very often.)

The concrete itself must be a marvel of blending and general wonderfulness. Able to travel as a near-liquid along this elaborate pipe, under (guess) great pressure (another guess: that’s why the pipe has to be made of metal rather than of something bendier), but then able, at exactly the right time, to solidify in the deep cylindrical holes into which it is squirted. At which point it has to stay solid for ever. (Is something added, at the critical moment, to make it solidify?)

There is much that is very wrong with the world. This sort of stuff is what is very right with the world.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Driverless vehicles with faces and driverless vehicles to sleep on

Driverless cars will happen, eventually. But when they do, who knows what they will be like, or look like, what they will do or not do, what other changes they will precipitate? When this finally happens, it will surely be the railways, or the internet, in the sense that it will be big, and that nobody now knows how big or what the details will consist of.

Two driverless vehicle articles came to my attention today, both of which illustrate how very different driverless vehicles could end up being to the vehicles we are now familiar with.

This Dezeen report reports on a scheme by Land Rover to put eyes on the front of driverless vehicles, to communicate with pedestrians, the way pedestrians now look at the faces of drivers to negotiate who goes where, when. Makes sense. With no driver, and the vehicle driving itself, it could use a face, or else how will the vehicle be able to participate in after-you-no-after-you-no-after-you-no-I-insist-so-do-I sessions?

So, does a robot with a working face (in due course robot faces will be a lot better than that one) count as: “Other creatures”? I say: yes (see below).

Will the Thomas the Tank Engine books prove to be a prophetic glimpse into the future of transport? Eat your hearts out, SF movies. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

And here is a posting about how people might choose to sleep in driverless vehicles on long journeys, instead of going by air. The problem with going by air being that you have to go by airport, and that sleeping in the typical airplane is for many impossibly uncomfortable. But, if we do sleep on long distance driverless vehicles, what will we do about going to the toilet? Stop at a toilet sounds like an answer. But what will the toilet be like? Might it also be a vehicle?

The point is: nobody knows how driverless vehicles will play out. Except to say that if they look like cars and vans and lorries look now, that would be an insanely improbable coincidence.

LATER: More about those eyes here.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

A Brunel bridge seat and the Brunel museum

So I went looking for interesting new bridges, as I do from time to time, but found nothing interesting that I didn’t know about. Like I say, the bridge news these days is when they collapse.

So I gave up on bridges, and instead thought about doing a posting about the Brunel Museum, which I visited on Saturday. There is, of course, a website. But there is also a Wikipedia entry. And look what I found there. That’s right, it’s the Royal Albert Bridge, Saltash, made smaller and sittable upon, with a train:

I’m pretty sure that, while waiting to be told about the nearby Brunel tunnel under the Thames (set in motion by Brunel’s dad Marc), I and my two pals were sitting sipping our drinks within a few feet of this bridge-bench. But it was dark, and I only found out about it just now.

Here are two things I did see:

On the left, a bust of Marc Brunel, in the little museum. On the right, a photo of son Isambard Kingdom Brunel, the famous photo with the huge chains behind him, projected onto the extremely grubby and deranged wall of the place where we listened to a lecture about the tunnel. The guy is saying: “Well, you just can’t get the walls these days.”

No, he wasn’t. He was saying something I didn’t catch because I wasn’t concentrating hard enough to make it out. That being because the acoustics of this strange vertical cylinder in the ground were about as reverberationally bad as acoustics are able to be, and I could only make out about one in three of the words spoken by the guy, despite him being an actor who enunciated very clearly, and despite him standing about four yards from where we were sitting.

But despite all of the above, it was a fun evening. Basically (a) because of the company, and (b) because now, when people ask me if I know anything about the Brunel Museum in Bermondsey, I can now say: Yes. I’ve been there. And because I had fun photoing.