Observations from a Hill

My interest was piqued this afternoon by a post on Medium regarding the number nine. Now the content on Medium varies from the rigorous to the fantastical, depending on how the algorithm interprets the direction in which you want to go based on your reading habits. The stuff I get back I try and filter before actually reading a post, to at least partially game the system as much in my favour as possible, and avoiding the more hysterical crap that can appear in your inbox if you're not careful. What interested me was not the old arithmetical party game of multiplying any number by nine and adding the digits of the product together sequentially until the number is reduced to a single digit and - ta-da! - revealing the number nine; intriguing though that particular numerical phenomenon happens to be. Rather, the author of the post relates that her birth year similarly reduced by addition of individual digits similarly results in a result of nine, both in the Gregorian calendar we use ...

I referenced my dad [yet again] in last night's post, and something turned up today that made think of the old man with psychological reference to myself. Anyone who knows me knows that I ain't the tidiest person when it comes to most things, despite my reverence for, for instance, library catalogues and the Dewey Decimal System, to name but one small area of interest to me. When it comes to my own personal spaces; my desks, workshop, etc., I tend to accumulate stuff until it becomes uncomfortable to work in the space: at which time I will clear up, re-organise and move on, probably to frustratingly lose track of some momentarily important thing or another. With other things, though, I am somewhat OCD. Anyway, I drove up to the Stretton Fox to pick Jane up today on return from her visiting family in Carnforth; a trip I do many times a year at the moment. The Fox is conveniently halfway for a rendezvous and is a pleasant watering hole for an hour's break and a welcome pint o...

  When I was growing up, dad used to spend occasional time perusing his rather old - even then - Chamber's Etymological Dictionary, originally his sister Margaret's; and which I inherited after he died in 2012. I've since passed the book to my son, as seems appropriate, given that he, like his grandfather and me, is himself a wordsmith fascinated by the eccentricities of language, given to twisting words and sentences at will. I remember fondly my father's love of wordplay for comic effect; a characteristic affectation of his, like so many other, that I have absorbed, along with a growing physical resemblance to the old man, into my being. As a teenager, I started to take on board the desire for and acquisition of books: marshalling words, concepts and ideas into serried rows of paperbacks and the occasional hardback on shelf after shelf, in house after house. None are fancy tomes worthy of bibliophile attention, but all are collected for their content: the true purpose...

A lazy food post tonight, as I'm rather chuffed with the results of my culinary efforts this evening. Pictured, my lamb shish kebab gyros. I'll admit the presentation verges somewhat on the chaotic, but the flatbread simply wouldn't play ball and split neatly: not really an issue as it did its job of holding the filling from the first until the last mouthful. To sum up, I bought a pack of Lidl's kebabs this afternoon with the intention of lighting the barbecue and just eating them with bread and salad; but as the weather was gloomily overcast, it seemed appropriate to cook indoors instead, so a decision was made to air-fry the little buggers instead. I'd already got the makings of a salad in the fridge, so I duly made one of gem lettuce, tomato, spring onion, feta and chorizo, dressed with olive oil and lemon juice, salt and black pepper. I flavoured some Greek yoghurt with sumac and spread that on the inside of the flatbread, before adding the sliced kebab and sala...

The cost of our tech will be rising, that much is for sure: stuff gets more expensive with time. But this year's rises may be disproportionately higher and the trend will probably continue as we move forward. The reason? Chips. And more specifically, memory and data storage chips. Ironically, aside from the geopolitical factors currently mashing up the markets with trade wars, actual wars and the inevitable knock-ons in the stock market, the principal factor is the thirst of big tech itself, specifically, A.I., which requires not only huge amounts of processing and co-processing power; it also consumes vast amounts of memory in the process of doing what it does. This 'ever-upwards' trend is not unique in the history of computer and communications device development, but the scale and rate of growth at which it's happening is. Cost inflation is being driven by configuration inflation, and dear old Moore's Law and the manufacturing base that supports the industry are ...

  Just a very brief note tonight as I'm just about to watch the England v Panama game. Pictured was tonight's repast of a do-it-yourself pizza based on the featured Crosta Mollica pizza base [less than four quid from Waitrose]. I bought a mozzarella for the cheese, but didn't realise until I got it home that it was reduced fat, which I consider to be a cardinal sin where cheese is concerned - should have taken my reading glasses into the store me, but there you go. The only things I added to what was essentially became a classic Margherita was home-grown basil, seasoning and olive oil. Not bad, really, and a good deal less faff than cooking one from absolute scratch, although there ain't no substitute for the real deal, and I do have a vague plan for building an outdoor, wood-fired pizza oven, ticking over in the back of my mind. As to the football; as anyone who knows me knows well, I'm not these days given to any particular enthusiasm for the game; but in one or t...