Month: May 2020

The ups and downs of cricket (and of the City of London)

Ten years ago today, England beat Australia in the Final of the ICC World Twenty20, in Bridgetown Barbados. It seems that Australia batted first, lost early wickets and never recovered.

I watched the final dozen or so overs of this game at the home of Michael Jennings:

Happy memories. What could be better than watching England beat Australia at cricket, at the home of a friend, who is an Australian cricket nut?

My hard disc has a much better memory than I do. I had no recollection of this until I just looked up May 16 2010 in the photo-archives. And up came all these photos of a screen, telling of England’s triumph.

The Man of the Match was … Craig Kieswetter. Whatever happened to him?

It wasn’t good:

Craig Kieswetter, the England ODI and T20 wicketkeeper who was Man of the Match in the 2010 World T20 final, has announced his retirement following the eye injury he sustained last year.

Kieswetter was struck in the face when a ball went between his helmet and grille when playing against Northamptonshire, breaking his nose and damaging his eye socket. He returned for two matches at the end of the 2015 season, then went to play T20 in South Africa, but struggled with the effects of the injuries.

It could have been far worse. That I had definitely not forgotten about.

LATER: Here’s how the City of London was looking that evening, photoed from Michael’s local railway station:

No Cheesegrater. No Scalpel. And no Big Lump, the latest biggest one that has no silly name because it’s too boring. Not, in other words, yet, this, which is how Things are now, give or take a few cranes.

No shininess at Eltz

Nudged, I’m guessing, by this posting of mine, Michael Jennings earlier this month Facebooked this closer-up photo he had photoed of Eltz Castle:

A classic of ancient adhocistical anarchy, I think you’ll agree. The very definition of picturesque.

But I also show this photo of Michael’s because I think it illustrates the opinion I expressed in this earlier shininess of architectural modernity posting. There is no shininess in the above photo, not even in the windows on show. (The things I like best are always the things that tell me how right I was, I find.)

An obvious reason for that is that the windows seem all to be recessed from the surfaces of buildings. But there seems to be another reason. Take a look at this Eltz Castle photo, this time an interior shot (one of those here):

Very lavish, but that’s not my point. Which is: Look again at those windows, the ones with all the circles. They look like Ancientist fakes to me, but Ancientist or genuinely ancient, what those windows illustrate is that glass existed for a long time before they worked out how to make its surface smooth and flat. Above all, they took a long time to work out how to make big sheets of glass, such as we moderns now take for granted. And it’s that total absence of large and smooth and shiny surfaces that does so much to explain the different atmosphere radiated by ancient architecture.

At Eltz, you might get occasional flashes of light, little splinters. And you can see great stuff in old windows, from the inside, as the above photo also illustrates lavishly. But you’re never going to see anything reflected in glass like that, outside. Not any Thing, that you can recognise.

When the only choice is between different risks

Alice Smith:

The opposite of risk isn’t safety.

The opposite of risk is another type of risk.

I don’t think “opposite” is quite the right word here. The truth is more that sometimes there’s a choice between risk and possible reward on the one hand, and not risk and not reward. However, there is often, as now, a choice between risks, as above. The reward of taking the right risk is that you get to avoid an even bigger disaster, and maybe also get rewarded, but maybe no disaster or not such bad disaster is your only reward.

(Think 1940. For Britain then, there was no safe or painless alternative. Both alternatives, war or surrender, were horrifying.)

But I know exactly what Alice Smith means. People often speak about health risks as if skill in avoiding a list of only the more obvious ones will confer immortality.

To talk, during a crisis, such as the one now winding down, as if the choice is between big risk and no risk is, as Alice Smith is surely saying, foolishness. If that was the choice, there would be no crisis. The definition of crisis is that there are no risk-free alternatives. Whatever gets done will have been a big risk.

I now favour the risk of ending Lockdown. But, it is a risk. I just think that keeping it going is a bigger risk.

To put it in Twitter speak, the argument is not about whether to kill your granny, but how.

When you write two trilogies and only realise it afterwards

Matt Ridley:

Without planning to, I realise I’ve written two trilogies.

The first trilogy was my three books on genetics: Genome, Nature via Nurture and Francis Crick.

The second was my three books on innovation: The Rational Optimist, The Evolution of Everything and How Innovation Works

He found the time to write them all, but I’ll be lucky if I even find the time to read them all. But, hope to.

I can certainly recommend the one about How Innovation Works. One word summary: incrementally.

Expanded summary: Innovations happen when they’re ready, at which point they switch from impossible to inevitable with amazing suddenness, when everything all comes together. Individual inventors are over-rated; innovation is a team game. I think that’s about right.

Tiger T-shirt

June 2013, Parliament Square:

Cropped. So you can’t recognise the wearer.

But if you ever saw it again, you’d recognise the tiger!

Just learned about the existence of …

DRACULA PARROTS. Me to. But how did he learn this? Doesn’t say. Hate that. Scroll down, scroll down. Here we go:

Despite it’s name and vulture-like visage, the Dracula Parrot is actually not bloodthirsty at all. It feeds almost exclusively on just a few species of figs, …

Could’ve googled this but I thought he made up the name “Dracula Parrot” himself and that I’d only get back to the original tweet.

Now, if you are looking to see a bird that is truly vampiric, look no further than the vampire finch, …

Pass. Had enough vampire birds for now.

Martin Cook photographs creatures

I follow Martin Cook on Twitter. His day job is medical, which must be interesting just now. But he’s also a Real Photographer. Here we see him lining up a swan with Salisbury Cathedral:

Also, that tree on the left looks like it’s had a big old dose of pollarding done to it, a process that has long intrigued me.

See also: a deer; a rabbit; another deer; a monochrome deer; the same deer (?) in colour; a bee; … You get the pictures.

Robot insects on the march

3D printed flexoskeletons. In English, that would be “a cheap army of robot insects”:

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new method that doesn’t require any special equipment and works in just minutes to create soft, flexible, 3D-printed robots.

The innovation comes from rethinking the way soft robots are built: instead of figuring out how to add soft materials to a rigid robot body, the UC San Diego researchers started with a soft body and added rigid features to key components. The structures were inspired by insect exoskeletons, which have both soft and rigid parts—the researchers called their creations “flexoskeletons.” The new method allows for the construction of soft components for robots in a small fraction of the time previously needed and for a small fraction of the cost. …

But what could an army of such robots actually do? The most obvious immediate applications would appear to be military. They could be what I’ve already said: an army. Of miniature kamikaze bugs, or some such horror movie type thing.

I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of a hive of these little thingies.

Another fun thought: See the second category in the category list below.

BabelColour

Simon Evans, whom I follow, did a tweet asking what is the greatest photo ever. Many excellent photos followed.

The Chosen One joined in the discussion:

May I humbly suggest @StuartHumphryes for your delectation? An amazing collection of superb photos

It certainly is. Cue more excellent photos, and excellent photographic restorations and history lessons. This is Twitter being brilliant. Twitter can be horrible. So, ignore the horrible and go with the brilliant.

Simon Evans was already a fan of Humphryes, who calls his Twitter feed “BabelColour” (see above). But I’d never encountered the discoveries and recreations of Humphryes until now.

Following.

Ever Better Dressed?

Recent taxi with advert sighting:

I think it refers to this enterprise, but in my photo I see no N at the start. Also, I see no graphics at that site that resemble what I see on the taxi. I hope that all will become clearer, in due course.

Now, The Internet is going to bombard me with adverts for women’s clothes, and oh dear I just made it worse.

This morning I did a long-winded posting about something or other, and I ended with a reference to my rule that blog postings should keep it simple and short. I think you get my point.