Observations from a Hill

I've just been down a very interesting if mind-boggling rabbit-hole, courtesy of the podcast ' The Rest is Science ',  which is co-presented by Professor Hannah Fry and Micheal Stevens ; talking about very large finite numbers . Discounting the various flavours of infinity that theoretically exist, albeit mostly conceptually, very large finite numbers are numbers that, given enough time, could actually be counted, but are in any remotely practical sense infinite to the human mind's conception. Even one of the 'smaller numbers they discussed during the podcast - Fifty-Two Factorial , or 52!, 1x2x3x4x5 ... x52 - is pretty much inconceivable to most people, even given that it 'only' represents the total number of possible orderings in a deck of cards: approximately 8.0658 x 10⁶⁷, or 8-ish followed by 67 zeroes. The method of mentally imaging the scale of this number that was used in the podcast by Stevens ran roughly along these lines: Set a timer to count dow...

Pictured, my latest book acquisition, which arrived this afternoon. Although, like most people, I have long known about the original Dewey Decimal System for the classification of written work: my school library was thus organised, as was the Spring Hill Public Lending Library in Birmingham, where I first got my love of books as a child. But until this last week, when I found a piece in the weekly paper ' New World '  titled ' The Man Who Invented The Internet Too Soon ', which introduced me to the subject of the above book: Paul Otlet . Otlet [1868-1944], who was a Belgian author, lawyer and peace activist with far-reaching ideas on information collation, cataloguing and retrieval; I was completely unaware of the man whose system now catalogues most of the world's books. In association with Henri La Fontaine [1854-1943], he extended Dewey's Classification, under licence, and to be in French only, as the basis of a proposed system of Universal Classification ...

Whilst I don't think Jean-Paul Sartre had kitchen utensils exactly in mind when writing the third volume to his "Roads to Freedom" trilogy, I think there is indeed 'soul' in a carefully tended piece of ironware in the kitchen. It wears all the food it has ever cooked  in its patina: the above pictured pan was rescued from a cowshed thirty years ago, and has since served me well over the years since. It is a small, eight or nine inch diameter pan of pressed mild steel of good quality, with a well-rivetted handle of like metal. A good quality piece of professional kitchen equipment that took me a good twenty years to season and bring up to its present state of grace. All that it requires after use is a good rinse and a wipe over with kitchen paper before hanging it back on its hook. Every time I clean this thing after use, I'm minded of a wonderful cast iron skillet that I used to own, which I bought back in the very early 1980s from Bangor market as one of a se...

I read a short essay today - a student piece, I imagine - by one Julius Zimmer of the Ludwig Maximilians Universität, submitted for a course on American photography, entitled "On The Change of Photography in The Age of Smartphone Cameras". It voices in part the now familiar idea - trope - even, that the ubiquity of the smartphone and its by now remarkable [by any standards] photographic capability and image storage capacity, is making the profession of photographer redundant. To a degree, one might argue that this was indeed the case: so few people require or even want their personal lives recording by a professional third party photographer these days as their and their friend's phones are always there, making the best of them via some very clever software. So yes, the jobbing (portrait) photographer as a species is indeed on the  endangered list; but as for true professional portrait photographic artists - those who not only command the highest prices but produce works...

I was reading with sardonic interest about Dominic Cummings 'comeback tour'. He reckons that he still has the key to unlock whatever the problem is with society as we currently know it. Really? I somehow doubt it based on what we've seen hitherto. The problem with being bright and a bit chippy about your background - lower middle class in Cumming's case - is that you can get a little beyond in your thinking, imagining that your wish list of objectives is, in fact, a plan. Of course, most often this is simply not the case. Most of us have had some scheme or other crushed into the sand, despite our absolute belief in its truth of purpose. And most of us will simply turn and face another pressing issue to solve, leaving our grand scheme for someone else to worrit over. We all go through an 'omnipotent' era in our lives - the 'invincible' years of youth. The mark of of a grown-up is recognising the limitations of one's capabilities and talents, and voici...

We've all heard of Photoshop , right? Even those who have never seen, let alone used the software recognise the name as the now common verbal usage of the name: to 'Photoshop' an image, meaning to edit and alter a digital photographic image to some end. Far fewer people would know just how long this raster image editing software - at first a standalone application, then a suite of software, now a full-blown subscription megalith of related media apps, available online, has been around. It's interesting to note, however, that its origins lie in the late 1980s , the brainchild of Thomas and John Knoll . Pictured are the two 1.44 MB floppy disks that contain the first version of Photoshop we ever owned, back in 1989/90. It is the LE edition and was probably bundled with a scanner of some kind. Significantly, the application software in its entirety comes on Disc One, with Disc Two holding all the support stuff: tutorial material, documentation and manuals and such. Th...