Observations from a Hill

Pictured, the underside view of the chess table top, with the boss that mates with the pedestal via the threaded hole in the centre, alongside my first-past-the-post idea for making a hinge piece to convert the thing into a tilt-top table. I've fixed a length of 15mm dowel to a mule made of an off-cut of old melamine-faced chipboard [seen resting in the crosscut sled to be rebated on the table-saw]. I just need to fix some runners to the sides of the mule so I can safely cut a half diameter flat rebate in the dowel to later screw it to the face of the boss nearest in the picture. I figured that boring a hole through the boss to take the dowel would be a ball-ache, so I came up with the idea of offsetting the hinge to the edge. I know I could cut the rebate by hand with saw and chisel, but I just, as usual, want to try something different. If it works, it works; if it don't, it don't. I'll keep you posted on progress...

How does a modestly-funded scientific climate study turn into a conspiracy narrative, joining the 'theory' that governments across the world have been seeding the skies with various chemicals toward nefarious ends, via so-called 'chemtrails'? How is it that those of a certain mindset are promulgating the absurdity that the UK government, at the Prime minister's direct behest, is '...trying to block out the sun...' via the use of these fictitious agents [clue: aircraft have been leaving contrails in their wake since the start of the jet age, in the form of water vapour] in some apparently evil scientist attempt to forestall the effects of climate change that these self-same 'theorists' deny exists, and that itself is a government conspiracy? [ source : "The 'Secret Plan' to Dim the Sun", by James Ball in this week's The New European] The answer, of course, is that complex macro-organism: the online 'community'. Social me...

Pictured, the old and rather beautifully battered chess table top undergoing its transformation from toffee-apple confection to honest patination. You can see the weird 'varnish' someone rather stupidly chose to slather the thing with [to what end?] at the top of the image. It appeared to me to have been given a coat of shellac in some misbegotten fever-dream of a restoration idea. Wrong on so many fronts, let alone the aesthetic one. As you can see, the removal of this crud reveals a perfectly honest table that wears its history on its sleeve. It's never going to look like it did when the original maker constructed it, but I really don't care about that: it is what it is, and the wear and tear of its use over the decades, along with its weathering and damage, just gives it character in my book: there's something rather endearingly Gormenghast about it. After finishing peeling the orange muck off it, I gave it a rub down with wire wool and an initial coat of beeswax...

Geological time exceeds human time by several orders of magnitude: cosmological time exceeds that by several more. The expectation - from a human perspective, based on our intuited knowledge of the Cosmos - is that time and space itself - will simply cease to exist at some point. Which begs the question 'what next?'. Following on from last night's ruminations, this would also seem to be a quandary of somewhat profound proportions: does anything follow from nothing? Did everything arise from nothing in the first place? Which, after all is the accepted theory of the origin of everything. Who knows? This is my point: these 'certainties' are all of our own creation; the human intellect has synthesised them from the internal logic of our brain's need and ability to seek out and find patterns outside of ourselves in order to cope with the world in which we are perforce required to operate and survive. All else follows naturally: art, music, literature, science and te...

I just want to offer some random ruminations tonight, issuing from a few things I've encountered in various places, regarding consciousness, language, mathematics, philosophy, AI and other such stuff, over the last few days/months/years: mathematics is the continuing process of our unearthing ineluctable truths and abstractions about existence: an inner archaeology of the mind that can explain the enormously large, cosmological, phenomena; the manageably macroscopic 'classical' world and the inner workings of matter itself at the quantum level: but which came first, the mind or mathematical truth? we posit theories about the nature of existence and our place within it, based on the mathematics our own minds have 'unearthed' from those, again humanly posited, ineluctable truths. the concept of 'mind' itself has troubled us since time immemorial, and still takes us to task in the twenty-first century. What is certainty? is our accumulated knowledge of the Univ...

  Got the capital back on the clock case today: made it removable as there is so much much work needed to replace all the missing bits of decorative woodwork and veneer. There's actually probably too much to completely replace, and I feel that much of it can be left as patina through sheer age. As you know I like things to wear their history on their sleeves, so to speak; so I think the restoration will be partial, taking that philosophy on board. However, there are some things that have to be addressed for purely structural reasons, so a degree of bullet-biting will come into play. I'll need to source some appropriate wood and veneer, so a bit of trawling around the internet will be in order. It will of necessity take time, but in the interim, at least the beast has its hat on, you might say, and at least looks vaguely complete. Keep you posted...