Observations from a Hill

There's design and then there's design: some design is timeless in its purity, some is just of its time and will go through the cycle of good v.s bad, fashionable v.s unfashionable, liked v.s vilified as bad taste. Some things last, others simply are in the moment until their revival at a later date. I'm motivated in this thought by a repeat of a Grand Designs episode tonight of a Thames-side build that caused a lot of ruffled feathers amongst the neighbours of the designers/builders of their new home there. I've no particular beef against the final outcome of the build, but will it endure as design? Probably not, but then again, the 'traditional buildings' surrounding their home are to be fair a motley lot themselves, some even exhibiting between-the-wars mock-Tudor half-timbering, not exactly authentic in itself, and which I can imagine Pevsner or Betjeman in their day coruscating the very existence of in both prose and poetry. What I would criticise about the...

What a news week for shock, horror! stories. And I'm not talking about proper news such as the Middle East or Ukraine, either. On the one hand you've got Reform's £72,000,000 windfall, courtesy of two people with more money than sense, who are both in the business of making even more money out of non-money: ain't Crypto wonderful? And Haaland's wrongly-allowed goal by the VAR in the Manchester derby this weekend. Whilst neither are now undo-able retrospectively, there are to be frank, quite simple solutions available to prevent either from occurring again. On the political donation front, just cap donations and electoral spending for parties across the board: level the playing field, and secondly ensure the rigorous nationality/residency rules to cut out stupid loopholes. As to the footie; fit GPS trackers to all players, officials and the ball, and track the lot in real time; use the data to assess automatically the validity or otherwise of decisions made under thi...

  We've had a very full day here today. We went over to Nantlle Vale to have a look at the old quarries there and walked miles through the ruins and jungle-like tramways and tunnels. To paraphrase our visiting friend Sarah: an Angkor Wat for the Industrial Era; nature reclaiming its own from the spoils and spoil-heaps of the decades of mineral extraction that enriched the land-owning classes in this, our country of Cymru: Tir Ni [Our Land]. The place is at once magical and a tad intimidating: danger lurks everywhere in the precarious slate tips and derelict buildings, and as I've mentioned before, no more so than in the flooded quarry hole of Twll Balast, a toxic waste dump simply waiting to become a major environmental issue, and already a suspect in issues affecting bodies of water adjacent to it. Anyway, that's another subject which demands closer scrutiny and another day on which to address it. We went from there to the Cwellyn Arms at Rhud Ddu for a drink and drove Num...

This has got to be a diary post tonight as I'm totally fashed [reference: A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess] and frankly beyond it all. We've had an old friend staying in the cottage and tonight's meal was underscored by conversation comprised of the collective memory of at least three generations of the family, anchored in the presence of my mother-in-law, now ninety-nine years of age. The existence of so many people hinged on the chance meeting of said mother-in-law and her to be beau on the craggy excrescence of Crib Goch, so very many years ago in the 1940s. That she survives to this day, as do her offspring and subsequent generations, is a testament to the human spirit. Long may we prosper...

Number One Son and I were talking earlier about AI forms of English, and how the tropes that A.I uses in its use of the language are detectable, given that one knows something less than trivial about the stylistics of normal human usages. There is a piece in the Weekend FT of 29/30th August by Elaine Moore on this very subject. NOS pointed out that such odd stylistic traits are possibly now re-entering human speech through a process of normalisation through exposure - errant feedback loops, anyone? [cf. blog posts passim] - which in turn will be further internalised by the LLMs that are feeding off our own usages of the English - or any other language, for that matter - regurgitating and amplifying said tropes on the way. All well and good whilst there are still those of us around who know differently; those of us born and raised before the A.I era. But: What about those who are being born into this era of mutant and mutated knowledge, who will have no other context in which to frame w...

  OK - pictured, one of the images of dry-aged beef that I intended to use for last night's post, but was thwarted from using because of whatever weird server anomaly obtained with Blogger, which was preventing me from uploading locally-stored images from my computer. I still don't know what is causing the issue, but for a brief window, and using a different browser, having cleared all the caches, blah, blah, blah, &etc., I managed to insert the above in this page. However, I'm not holding my breath that the underlying cause of this glitch is actually being addressed. We shall see; but in the interim I'll continue to post as best I can, whilst setting up a parallel site on my own server space with Gandi.net; whose services, based in France, I've been using for ten years now, with no real hiccups or stress. Once I get the ghost site working I'll parallel the two up for a while before finally migrating to the new one and possibly maintaining this one as a back...